• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Intel Still MeeGos, Apple Loses Again, Yahoo Presents ‘The Charlie Sheen Show’

Applications, Riding High on Linux

Whether it is a big enterprise company in manufacturing sector or a company in the utilities or power sector, Linux has surely moved inside various systems and has become more than a cult. Over the past few years, Linux adoption rates in the enterprise have increased considerably.

Why I Ubuntu

When I think of empowering, I don’t tend to dwell on the modern first world. They don’t especially need empowerment. I’m thinking of the less-franchised or even our own sci-fi future, when our relationship with technology becomes even more important. Do you think Geordi would run code on the Enterprise for which he doesn’t have source access?

Also note that this is not a moral argument; I don’t especially consider Open Source a moral directive for these purposes. Users won’t flock to us because Ubuntu is open source, but rather because Ubuntu delights them.

I understand why people work on splinter efforts or other projects, but for me, I think the work that Canonical does with pre-installs, enterprise support, for-purchase apps, Ubuntu One, and user testing is an invaluable addition to the main Ubuntu project. These are how we reach new users.

Kernel Space

• Kernel comment: The obstacle course of cooperation

  Broadcom has spent a year working on its open source driver for WLAN/Wi-Fi hardware to fulfill the quality demands of the kernel developers, but now they may not even want it any more.

  When it presented Brcm80211 a year ago, Broadcom became the last major manufacturer of WLAN chips for notebooks to get into developing open source drivers for its own WLAN components. The company was praised for this step, and Brcm80211 became a part of the kernel after only a few weeks. But the code landed in the staging area because it did not fulfil the quality demands of kernel developers. The firm then spent part of the past 12 months fulfilling these requirements; now, we have the Brcmsmac and Brcmfmac drivers.

• Graphics Stack

  • GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap In Software

    Last week I mentioned that Chrome/Chromium OS developers at Google implemented GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support for software drivers. This is the GLX extension commonly needed by Compiz and other compositing window managers. This work has been merged into Git, so is there new “desktop bling” chewing up your CPU?

Applications

• Sencha Animator

• Aliaser take control of your alias on Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Blog on Linux.com

  • Upgrade/Migrate VMware ESX / ESXi 4.* To ESXi 5.0

• Games

  • Cardinal Quest released!

    Tametick has release Cardinal Quest an arcade style dungeon crawler for Linux on Gameolith!

Devices/Embedded

• Chumby preps IPTV set-top that uses Android devices as remote

  Chumby is readying a Linux-based IPTV set-top-box that can be remotely controlled by a Wi-Fi connected Android device. Soon to be offered as an open development platform, NeTV is equipped with an 800MHz Marvell processor, and it will include both a Webkit browser that can overlay content on video and a personalized news crawler.

• Intel Not Selling MeeGo, Says Manager

  Responding to this week’s rumors that Samsung might be looking to acquire MeeGo, the Linux-based mobile operating system introduced by Intel and Nokia, Intel’s Systems Software Division manager Doug Fisher stated that the company remains “committed” to the OS, though he followed that by saying that he could “only comment on what’s happening today.”

• Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve for Linux Price Reduction

• Phones

  • Android

    • New Android App Smozzy Lets You Surf The Web Without A Data Plan

      Smozzy is a new Android application that lets you search the Web on your mobile phone without a data plan. The app works only in the U.S., only on T-Mobile phones and requires that you have a messaging plan (unless you want to be charged). Despite these restrictions, the app itself is pure genius – it cleverly uses SMS and MMS to send requests and receive the content. And to the end user, the app appears to work just like your own Android phone’s browser, only a bit slower.

    • Huawei and Kyocera Android phones break pricing barrier

      Huawei is launching a 3.8-inch Impulse 4G smartphone on AT&T, offering Android 2.2, 4G service, and a five-megapixel camera for a record-breaking $30 plus contract. Meanwhile, Kyocera teamed with Sprint to announce a three-inch, Kyocera Milano smartphone with Android 2.3 and a 3.2-inch camera for $50 plus contract.

    • Samsung Beats Apple In Europe, Android Leads The Market

      Samsung has beaten Apple in the West European market. The company now holds 22% market share as compared to 21% market share of Apple. The company shipped 4.8 million units in second quarter of 2011, as compared of 4.6 million smartphones shipped by Apple. HTC stands tall at #3 spot with 3.1 million units shipped. HTC now holds 14% market share in the market.

      According to a report by IDC,”All European countries are seeing increasing smartphone adoption, as consumers go for Android-based devices and the iPhone from Apple.”

    • Netflix Updated, Now Runs On All Android Tablets And Smartphones

Lightworks Open Source Initiative Adds New Features, Membership Program

The Open Source initiative surrounding the Lightworks nonlinear editing system—which was used to cut such recent films as The King’s Speech, edited by Tariq Anwar; and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, edited by Jill Bilcock–has continued to progress.

Lightworks Open Source Editing Evolves, for a Fee

Sacrificing gratis for libre

That’s where libre comes in. Everyone has the right to use, modify and redistribute the software. If you are a developer, you can fix bugs that the manufacturer doesn’t have time for, add new features and more. If you aren’t, you can reap the rewards of other people’s changes or hire a developer to make the changes for you.

Events

• “Informatica la Castel” Free Software Summer School, 2011 edition, Romania

  At the end of August, I was pleased to participate at “Informatica la Castel” (“Informatics at the Castle”) Free Software Summer School, 2011 edition.

  This annual event – already a tradition among Romanian computer geeks – is kindly hosted by Universitatea de Vest “Vasile Goldiș” (“Vasile Goldiș” West University) and ARLUG, the Arad Linux User Group. It’s like a pleasant summer camp, at the 1724 Cernovici Castle (position), in the beautiful landscape of Macea village – about 20 km away from the city of Arad, Romania and near the Hungarian border.

• GandhiCon 4.x

  Searches for the word “linux” have been trending downward since early 2004, according to Google. Searches in mid-2011 are about a quarter of what they were in early 2004. On the other hand, searches for “android” more than doubled those for “linux” by mid-2011. So, what should we make of that?

• OLPC Community Summit 2011 in San Francisco Oct 21-23

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla asks all CAs to carry out security audits

    Following the attack on Dutch certification authority (CA) DigiNotar, Mozilla has sent a warning email to all CAs with root certificates in Firefox and Thunderbird. Kathleen Wilson, responsible for certificate management at Mozilla, is asking CAs to undertake a security audit of their public key infrastructure (PKI) and to forward the results to Mozilla by 16 September.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Draw — my new favorite application

  I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO’s PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle’s fingerprints all over it, by the way).

  Call it counter-intuitive (or less than intuitive), but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Chess release 6.0.1

Licensing

• FSF’s Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 4

  “Strike while the iron is hot” — and the usual suspects have made Android licensing a hot issue. However, the title of the FSF article, “Android GPLv2 termination worries — one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3,” gives the game away. This is about politics, not licensing. About pushing a specific agenda. About promoting the GPLv3 license at the expense of the GPLv2, Linux, Android and reality.

  It’s natural that there will be people and organizations engaging in bit of opportunistic profile-raising when they see an opportunity. Sometimes, as with the FSF GPLv2 FUD, they overreach and need to be called on it. And sometimes they really put their foot in it, as the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin did when he recently labeled businesses that don’t contribute back code as “idiots.”

Openness/Sharing

• Open Season on Dutch Cultural Innovation

  In a memorandum titled “More than Quality” the Dutch Arts Minister Halbe Zijlstra has announced savage cuts to the country’s arts budget. Among media arts & technology organizations to lose their structural funding are such long-term friends and partners of ours as STEIM, Waag Society, V2, Submarine Channel, and Mediamatic.

  This means that pretty much the entire field of internationally focused and future-oriented innovation, education, and development, which has distinguished the Netherlands for many decades, is to be demolished practically overnight.

Programming

• Google brings out new programming language

  Google has built a brand-new programming language for “structured web programming”, one that appears to be suited to browser-based apps.

Netflix’s Webkit-based UI for TV devices

Science

• Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science

  As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto’s genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.

  While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA’s rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.

Security

• Apple finally purges Mac OS of disgraced DigiNotar certs

  Apple has finally purged the imprimatur of disgraced web authentication authority DigiNotar from its Mac operating system.

• First There Were Zero-day Vulnerabilities. Now They are Five Days.

  I suggest using Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you not the bad guys. I remember when my employer used that other OS and I had to update systems currently in use all over the building… Of course M$ announced the vulnerabilities in the middle of our work day so I had to wait hours until folks had gone home for dinner to unleash the hounds,

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Panel upholds Al Qaida filmmaker’s life sentence

  A military appeals court ruled Friday that Osama bin Laden’s media secretary was properly convicted of being a propagandist for al-Qaida and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks cable: US lobbied vs breastfeeding in the Philippines

  The US embassy lobbied against a breastfeeding campaign in the Philippines and blocked revisions in the Philippine Milk Code’s Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRRs), according to a US diplomatic cable released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

• AP review finds no threatened WikiLeaks sources

  Federica Ferrari Bravo’s story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

  So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

• WikiLeaks US Cables Point to BIN Role in Munir Murder

  Recently leaked US diplomatic cables about the murder of human rights campaigner Munir Said Thalib could help authorities uncover the truth and implicate the real perpetrators, activists said on Friday.

  “The cables convinced us further that top-level officials of the State Intelligence Agency [BIN] were involved in the murder,” said Al Araf, program director of human rights group Imparsial.

  “Then-Chief of National Police Sutanto allegedly knew about the BIN involvement but he was lacking evidence to implicate its officials. Now, after the cables were made public, we encourage Sutanto to testify in the court.”

• CableGate 2 and the Records Continuum

  The records continuum model was developed by Monash University’s Frank Upward in the mid 1990s as a way of expressing the many recordkeeping processes that occur in society and the contingencies inherent in them. It explains the way in which records are made, organised, shared and used in a variety of times, places and contexts under the influence of changing legal, political and practical constraints. It has been written on extensively, and there are some references included below, so I do not propose to expand on it in detail here.

• The Julian Assange affect echoes in the Valley

  When the Australian national Julian Assange took upon himself to make public a barrage of the US diplomatic cables—he never probably thought what an upturn it will make in a far off place like Kashmir – a tinderbox zone, bitterly contested between India and Pakistan.

• Wikileaks:How Kutigi Rejected Obasanjo’s Bribe

  In yet another bombshell in what appears to be an inexhaustible arsenal of dark secrets, internet whistleblower WikiLeaks has disclosed how former President Olusegun Obasanjo offered Justice Ibrahim Kutigi $1.6m bribe to compromise the judiciary and drop a suit by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.

• Wikileaks – France Armed Cameroon to Fight Over Bakassi

  he then Minister of Defence, Lt.-Gen Theophilus Y. Danjuma told the former American Ambassador to Nigeria, Howard Franklin Jeter that the Nigeria’s acquisition of military hardware at the heat of its dispute with Cameron over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula were in response to the arming of Cameroon by France, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cables posted by Wikileaks.

• Activists call on AGO to use Wikileaks cables as new evidence

  Activists from various human rights NGOs urged Attorney General Basrief Arief to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that acquitted the alleged mastermind of the murder of rights activist Munir Said Thalib by using US diplomatic cables recently leaked by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.

  The cables, which linked the murder to the National Intelligence Agency (BIN), should have been presented as new evidence to prosecute former BIN deputy chairman Muchdi Purwoprandjono, Choirul Anam from the Solidarity Action Committee for Munir (Kasum) told a press conference on Friday.

• Wikileaks: Gray Companies Enabled Sudan Atrocities

  In 2003, the Government of Sudan summoned Sudanese business leaders and solicited financial assistance from them for its violent campaigns in Darfur, according to a cable published by Wikileaks. At the meeting, officials from Khartoum acknowledged that its operations against rebels in Darfur “would lead to civilian deaths,” and that its response to the Darfur uprising “may require some bombing[,] and civilians would be killed.” From 2003 through 2008, Khartoum regularly sought support from the Sudanese business community for its Darfur operations.

• Makoni party funded by UK: WikiLeaks

  SIMBA Makoni’s 2008 presidential bid was in part funded by the UK government, leaked United States diplomatic cables reveal.

  The former Finance Minister quit Zanu PF to run as an independent, the result of growing disenchantment within the party over President Robert Mugabe’s reluctance to give up power.

• Grifters of ‘Al Saud, Inc.’: How Saudi royals get their wealth

  A secret, 1996 cable — sent from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and released by Wikileaks — offers a detailed account of the mechanisms of wealth distribution and waste within Saudi Arabia’s royal family. Despite the considerable riches doled out to “thousands” of Saudi princes and princesses, the cable observes that Saudi royals “seem more adept at squandering than accumulating wealth.” (The embassy notes that the country has more commoner billionaires than royal billionaires.) As reported in the cable, corruption also abounds largely unchecked.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Natural Gas Bombshell: Switching From Coal to Gas Increases Warming for Decades, Has Minimal Benefit Even in 2100

  The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was first shown by the International Energy Agency in its big June report on gas — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels.

Civil Rights

• 9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

  Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell reflects how 9/11 has torpedoed resistance to intrusion and undermined privacy rights born of earlier struggles. It may, irreversibility, have changed the way we think.

  9/11 was a savage nightmare that took too long to happen for some in the West.

  For 12 fallow years, from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the Towers, there was a brief golden period in which no great common enemy menaced all unseen beyond the distant horizon. There was no simple spectre of fear on which to construct, fund and operate surveillance platforms, or reason to tap data funnels into society’s communications and transport arteries.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Enlightening your Dell Duo with Linux

  I recently set out to get a new tablet/netbook combo. After reading many reviews about different models I settled on a Dell Inspiron Duo. One thing you will find most all of the Inspiron reviews have in common is that they mention the touch software layer running on Windows 7 is slow. If I said this surprised me it would be a lie. With this in mind I set out to get the Enlightenment desktop running on this device in a cool way. Below is a video of the Enlightenment desktop via Bodhi Linux 1.2.0 running on my Dell Duo:

Kernel Space

• Shaping the Future of Linux: Karim Allah Ahmed

Applications

• Scribes: A Lightweight Yet Powerful Text Editor For Linux

  Being a developer, one of the tool that I use on a day-to-day basis is a text editor (or you can call it IDE). I used to love Dreamweaver, but I find that it is too heavy and doesn’t work well on Linux. Then I switched to Aptana (it was very resource intensive as well), followed by gEdit, and lastly Geany. In my opinion, Geany is one of the best lightweight text editor (for Linux) out there. Then Scribes comes along.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Get Spotify on Linux

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.0 x86_64)

  • Podcasting from WordPress

• Games

  • Official NASA Futuristic Space MMO May Come to Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Best New Feature of Ubuntu Oneric – GNOME Shell

    I know many of you cringe at the mere mention of GNOME Shell or Unity. I don’t have any reservations like that. As a matter of fact, I really like Unity a lot. But what about GNOME foundation’s official GNOME Shell? I have never really used it except for once when I reviewed an early release of GNOME Shell in Fedora 15. But not with Ubuntu yet, not until now.

Distributions

• One Mark of a Good Distro

  Everyone has their favorite distro. I try to remain neutral, but in Linux it’s hard to hide your true feelings sometimes. Of course, all rivalries are supposed to be in good humor. Needless to say, I’ve tried a lot of distros. Some I’ve used a lot longer. I’ve found there are a few basic characteristics that make some distros better than others.

• New Releases

  • Parsix 3.7 (Core)

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • A Quick Look at Mandriva 2011

    We’re in the off-season for big distro releases, but that hasn’t stopped Mandriva from releasing one of its most interesting variants to date. In a bold move to an exclusive KDE desktop, Mandriva 2011 looks to simplify its development and give people a straight-forward and highly polished offering. Let’s check it out.

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Enrico Zini, member of the New Maintainer Frontdesk

    Enrico: Hi, I’m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I’m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and recently I gained a Front Desk hat, and then a DAM hat.

Devices/Embedded

• Intel denies giving up on MeeGo, but that doesn’t mean much

• Samsung: We’re not buying MeeGo

• Amazon Should Buy WebOS

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google will launch Android Ice Cream Sandwich in October or November

      JACK OF ALL TRADES Google is set to release the next version of its Android mobile operating system in October or November, according to executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla’s Do Not Track Guide Positions Privacy as Key Tech Differentiator

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Google’s Expert Report and a Jury Issue

  In our article from September 2nd on the Oracle/Google copyright issues, we included a number of declarations, including that of Prof. Owen Astrachan of Duke University. There were two exhibits identified in the Astrachan declaration, but neither of the exhibits were available at that time. Now Exhibit 3, Astrachan’s Rebuttal Expert Report 391 [PDF] is available in redacted form, and we have reproduced it below.

• How Open is Oracle?

  Oracle’s history with Sun’s open source projects is one that did not start out well. The openSolaris project was killed off, Apache has left the executive committee of the Java Community Process and multiple projects have been forked including OpenOffice (with LibreOffice), Hudson (with Jenkins) and MySQL (with MariaDB). Oracle has also launched legal action against Google over Java in Android.

BSD

• The New Installer Of FreeBSD 9.0

  FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 2 was officially released yesterday, about one month’s late, but it comes with several new features. One of the new features to FreeBSD 9.0 is a new installer (pc-sysinstall) for this BSD operating system, which the developers have requested that it be put through its paces.

Openness/Sharing

• UniPro: Open Source Bioinformatics Business with UGENE

  Unipro: Unipro is a small company with about 60-70 software engineers. The company expertise is focused on the following areas: compilers and low-level optimizations development, virtual machines development, quality testing, parallel and cloud-based computing.

Standards/Consortia

• Google adds offline support to Docs

  Google Docs is a popular tool for collaboration and web-based document creation: boasting compatibility with common file types including Microsoft Office and the Open Document Format, a generous helping of free storage space, and easy to use web-based tools, it’s proving a tempting move for those unwilling to shell out for the latest iteration of Microsoft’s offering.

Cablegate

• Julian Assange Agrees to Pose for Playgirl

  Notorious ladies’ man and truth-pusher Julian Assange remains on mansion-arrest, stemming from allegations of consensual sex. Reporters are camped outside the Ellingham Hall estate he’s been confined to, hoping to catch a glimpse of what a real journalist looks like.

• 2011-09-09 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks

Finance

• “Fraud As a Business Model”

  There were many factors that contributed to our recent financial bubble: deregulation, cheap money from the Fed, failure to enforce remaining regulations, crony capitalism, hubris, speculation, leverage, and fraud among other problems. While fraud wasn’t the only issue, it was and is a significant contributor to the credit bubble. Restraining fraud is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sound financial system. Congressional investigations in recent years have put ample evidence of fraud in the public domain.

• Goldman Sachs: More Than A Travesty Of A Mockery Of A Sham

  Goldman Sachs isn’t the only bank to rip-off its clients and America. But because it is the best at what it does it is the most profitable bank in the world, for now.

  Regular, old everyday trading is the key to Goldman’s success.What does that mean? I’m not talking about Goldman’s “big short” and how it bet massively against the subprime mortgage market while simultaneously selling huge quantities of designed-to-fail mortgage securities to its own customers.

Privacy

• No, technology is not going to destroy your privacy in the future

• Hurt Locker File Sharing Suits Come North: Federal Court Orders ISPs to Disclose Subscriber Info

  File sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker have been big news in the United States for months as tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed. It now appears that the lawsuits are coming to Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has paved the way for the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who are alleged to have copied the movie. Late last month the court ordered the three ISPs to disclose the names and addresses of subscribers linked to IP addresses alleged to have copied the movie. The ISPs were given two weeks to respond and are entitled to be reimbursed for their expenses. In reaching its decision, the court cited the BMG Canada v. Doe case, the last major Canadian case involving peer-to-peer file sharing lawsuits. That case opened the door to further lawsuits, though it established some privacy safeguards. In this instance, the court cited PIPEDA as evidence that the personal information can be disclosed as well as federal court rules for the legitimacy of the claim and the necessity of acquiring the information for the lawsuit to proceed. There is no indication that the ISPs challenged the order or that there was an opportunity for a public interest intervention as was the case in the earlier CRIA lawsuits.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Canada to U.S.: please blacklist us!

    Hyper-vigilant Internet Law Prof Michael Geist seems to be the first to have combed through the latest batch of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, searching for any document containing the words “Canada” and “copyright.”

  • Long-awaited copyright bill returns, but top court to wade in too

    Heritage Minister James Moore says he’s hoping for long-languishing amendments to the Copyright Act to pass by Christmas, but the Supreme Court of Canada could wind up forcing more tinkering with the law.

    Canada’s top court said Thursday it will rule on five separate intellectual property cases together as a bundle, and what it decides could directly impact the Act or at least its interpretation.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Longene: The Linux Kernel With Windows Support

This morning after providing benchmarks of FreeBSD with Linux binary compatibility for gaming, which allows unaltered 32-bit Linux binaries to be executed seamlessly with the FreeBSD kernel (and in a rather fast manner), I was reminded on Twitter about another interesting project: Longene. Longene is a “Linux Unified Kernel” that attempts to implement Microsoft Windows APIs within the Linux kernel. In other words, Windows binary compatibility for the Linux kernel, including for Windows device drivers.

Desktop

• Can Linux Kill Your Hardware – A Warning to Asus T101MT Owners

  My brain is screaming at me that software should be able to kill hardware like this, but I am running out of debugging options.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 419

• Libcloud

  We take a closer look at Libcloud, a standard Python library that abstracts away differences among multiple cloud provider APIs.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Two More Developers Join The Chicago Linux Panel

    Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren’t yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

  • X.Org Smooth Scrolling Prepped For Merging

    One of the features part of the new X Input extension to be included in X.Org Server 1.12 is smooth scrolling support.

Applications

• Oscar-Winning Video Editor ‘Lightworks’ To Land On Linux In December

  Editshare, the company behind Lightworks, have today announced that a stable release of the professional-grade non-linear video editor will be launched on November 29th 2011, with Beta releases for Linux and Mac OS X to follow on December 19th.

• Lightworks Hopes To Ship In November

• Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand Officially Released

• Linux Hacking Tools for administrators

• Instructionals/Technical

  • If you have a mysterious problem with a Linux box, try bashing your system with sys_basher

  • The Joy of Programming—How Debugging Can Result In Bugs!

  • Ubuntu Screen Cast with RecordMyDesktop

  • Bible verses in Mint fortunes

  • How to write bash FOR-loops

  • For Faster Text Editing Use Vi

  • Troubleshooting common Xen problems

  • Make your Linux desktop send alerts that you can’t miss

  • Test Websites In Internet Explorer 9, 8 and 7 Under Linux / Mac OSX

  • nVIDIA Driver issue on ALT Linux Sisyphus latest upgrades

  • Faience: One Of The Best Gnome Shell Themes Yet

  • Setting Up Salt

  • Activating tildes and accents for a USA keyboard layout in Ubuntu

  • Simple security by evaluating open ports

  • Toggle KWin compositing on and off easily from your Desktop

  • How to fix Broadcom 43xx

  • Oresme, plotting for GNUstep

  • Death of the command line revisited

  • Minbar and the Islamic Tools and Libraries

  • Tracking Server Uptimes

  • Running Drupal 7.7 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

  • how to add Debian Squeeze to your Debian Lenny FAI install server

  • How to install MongoDB on ubuntu server

  • Ten Tweetable Scripts

• Games

  • Fun and Mayhem with the Blender Game Engine

    I’ve been working with Blender 3-D for several years now, but I started playing with the game engine only recently. I’ve had a lot of fun with it, and I’m sure you will as well. With the Blender Game Engine (BGE), you can create 3-D games using the keyboard or mouse as controllers. Your game can trigger events when objects collide with each other or when they get within a certain distance from each other. There is a built-in state engine, so that objects in your game can change their behavior as required. Although there is a powerful and well-documented Python API, we won’t be using it today. In fact, we won’t be writing a single line of code!

  • Game Drift Linux review

    The GNU/Linux platform as an alternative to Windows is gaining ground, but there’s one area in which the open-source operating system trails its proprietary equivalent: gaming. One new distribution, Game Drift Linux, looks to change all that, equipping the user with everything they need to play the latest games without having to pay the ‘Microsoft tax’ normally associated with a PC purchase.

  • Xonotic, The Successor To Nexuiz, Is Primed

    It was a year and a half ago that Nexuiz was forked into Xonotic following some changes by core Nexuiz developers that effectively sold off the Nexuiz brand in order for an Xbox 360 re-make. In time for Christmas of 2010 they then did a v0.1 preview release of Xonotic and then came their first birthday without a new release. However, the Xonotic developers are now out with a major new release. Xonotic v0.5 is this new version and it boasts some radical changes as it becomes primed for a stable release.

Desktop Environments

• Eight Complaints About the Linux Desktop

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • King of KDistros

    Well, done at last! After some time gathering opinions from readers and quite some more time testing each one of the contenders, I have finished my comparison of the best of the best in KDE distros.

  • Phonon-Xine is dead. Long live Phonon-GStreamer.

  • Moving on

    So amid the upheaval of desktop environments, we have a precedent to look at with KDE having gone through this before. Fortunately for GNOME, KDE’s experience serves as a cautionary tale. KDE seems to have ridden out the rough spots after their release of version 4, though there are some that are just not going to be happy with anything other than their KDE 3.x, and they aren’t shy about saying so.

Distributions

• Which Linux Distro Leads the Pack?

  “Debian is No. 1? Why am I not surprised,” said Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor. “Sometimes I really feel like the Linux community, which used to be about innovation and building the best next thing, has lost touch with society and are in danger of becoming irrelevant.” The real No. 1 distro is Ubuntu, Lim asserted: “It is the only one with a shot at becoming more than a niche in a niche market.”

• New Releases

  • Bodhi Linux 1.2.0

  • VortexBox 1.10 released

    It’s been a while since we released a new version of VortexBox and there are a lot of small fixes and tweaks in this new version. There is the usually updates such as a new Kernel and SqueezeBox server 7.6.1. There are also a lot of small updates such as increased UPnP player support. VortexBox now supports the latest Samsung TVs and the BeoSound 5 from Bang & Olufsen.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia Needs Artists

    Let’s face it. Mageia’s default look for version 1 wasn’t bad. The Ia Ora windec is attractive enough and the backgrounds and splash screens weren’t bad. But “not bad” isn’t beautiful. Attractive isn’t gorgeous. We users want gorgeous.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat starts marketing Centennial Campus space

    Red Hat Red Hat Latest from The Business Journals TBJ unveils 2011 Best Places to Work in the Triangle Red Hat to move HQ to Progress Energy building Triangle stocks drop along with market Follow this company ’s sublease arrangement at Progress Energy Progress Energy Latest from The Business Journals Duke Energy listed in Dow Jones Sustainability World IndexS.C. advocate supports Duke, Progress mergerDuke Energy, Progress Energy reach merger deal with S.C. advocate Follow this company ’s Two Progress Plaza tower in downtown Raleigh isn’t even official yet, but the technology company is wasting no time trying to find a new tenant for the space it’ll be vacating on N.C. State University N.C. State University Latest from The Business Journals Suddenly, Centennial Campus has space to rentVa. Tech football is top money maker in ACCTBJ Flash: Barkley, Shaq shine at Jimmy V gala Follow this company ’s Centennial Campus.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • _____[fill in the blank]: “Want me to wipe for you too?”

      • How Useful Is Ubuntu Menu?

      • How Ubuntu One Saved Me In The US

        I had the data sitting right next to me but I couldn’t access it. Lesson learned, if you don’t bring the right key you won’t be able to open the right door. So all my stories that I was working on were locked inside that shiny rectangular box made by Seagate with its cable sitting across the ocean in Belgium.

        Was there a solution late at night when I was stuck in Williamsburg with no option to go out and find a Best Buy when dark clouds were looming overhead, throwing thunderbolts at us and rain was pouring? There was. The solution was in the cloud itself.

        I recalled that before starting off for the trip I had dragged the story folder to my Ubuntu One folder, just in case. My Ubuntu One account is always synced. So there was a possibility that I may be able to access those files.

        I turned on my tablet, logged into my Ubuntu One account and there it was – the folder with all those files. I tried to open the file I was working on. Damn, QuickOffice doesn’t support ISO approved .odt format. I had an inferior (.doc) version of the same file and started working on it. The story was ready in less than half an hour.

      • How To Upgrade From Ubuntu 11.04 To Ubuntu 11.10 Beta

      • Unity Linux | You did not die !

        I wrote a post about Unity Linux ” Why Should I use Unity Linux ? ” back in April 2010 when this distribution was in its prime trying to stand upon its feet . I will not go into the history of the inception of this project because everybody knows about it .

        Things were exciting and promising and the Unity team was in high spirits willing to contribute as much as they could to this new distribution .This project was backed up by good team members pouring in from various former PCLinuxOS derived sister distributions . Many good projects came to surface with remasters based upon Unity Linux core . Two well known were HUMANity (e17) and Synergy (KDE4).

      • Ubuntu Development Update

      • Some Great Alternatives to the Ubuntu Unity Launcher

        We’ve already ranted about the little annoyances of Ubuntu Unity in our earlier article. Though there are many things that are just plain wrong about Unity at this moment, one bad feature that sticks out like a sore thumb is the elusive launcher.

      • A new release process for Ubuntu?

        The Ubuntu release process is well known, and its developers talk regularly about the cadence of it. A new release of Ubuntu comes out every six months, and each release follows a predictable pattern. I’ve stolen the following image from OMG! Ubuntu’s recent series about Ubuntu Development.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Try Bodhi Linux for Beauty and Customizability

          Scarcely a day goes by without an update being released for one Linux distribution or another, but today saw the launch of one I think is worth some attention.

        • Bodhi Linux 1.2.0 Released

          20,000 forum posts and over 100,000 downloads later the Bodhi team and I are proud to announce our second point release – Bodhi 1.2.0 Current Bodhi users can easily update their system to this latest release.

Devices/Embedded

• Samsung Setting up to Go with MeeGo OS

  Samsung is seemingly intending to purchase Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo operating system after the news arrived that Samsung decided that it was not purchasing Hewlett Packard’s webOS.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Amazon Renews Call for Android Developers

      Just weeks before their much-anticipated Android-based tablet, Amazon has renewed their call for developers. To sweeten the pot a bit, the online retail behemoth is giving a one-time $50 promo code, good for use on specific Amazon Web Service. AWS offers Android developers a number of helpful tools in the form of data storage, mobile-to-mobile communication, and flexible database options.

    • A Google Android and Java history lesson

      Recently, some people were shocked-shocked I tell you-to discover that Google had looked at Java to help create Android’s Dalvik and that Google kept its Android source code to itself and its closest partners until the final product was released to the public. Oh please. There’s nothing new here. It’s always been that way and everyone who knows anything about Android’s history already knew that.

      First, there’s the accusation that Android used Java code in creating its Dalvik virtual machine (VM). This is news? When Android first came out, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Java’s owner, greeted the news of Android’s birth with “heartfelt congratulations.”

    • Android port for HP TouchPad making progress

      After the recent fire sale of the HP TouchPad tablet, hackers and modders quickly began work on porting Google’s open source Android mobile operating system to the device and they are making progress. The developers at Team-Touchdroid have already succeeded in replacing WebOS, which is the tablet’s default OS, with version 2.3.5 of Android.

    • Motorola Announces Android Powered DROID BIONIC

      Motorola has announced DROID BIONIC, the first Verizon Wireless smartphone to combine 4G LTE with the power of dual-core 1 GHz processors, 1 GB of RAM and a stunning 4.3-inch qHD display – all in a sleek form factor that makes it the thinnest 4G LTE smartphone from Verizon Wireless.

      Customers can expect to fly across the Web on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network with download speeds of 5 to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2 to 5 Mbps in 4G LTE mobile broadband coverage areas.

    • Sony Ericsson Nozomi Rumored to Come with Ice Cream Sandwich, 720p Display, Dual-core Processor

      Earlier reports told of an upcoming Sony Ericsson Nozomi, said to come with a 1.5-GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and to be released before yearend. Recent buzz at the IT68 forums, however, reveal rumors of more powerful specs than initially reported for the Sony Ericsson Nozomi and a release date slated for first quarter of next year.

    • Amazon Cloud SDKs for Android, IOS Exit Beta Testing

      The company wants make it easier for developers to build mobile applications that take advantage of its cloud-based services. Previously, developers had to do more of the work themselves, according to Amazon.

      Using the SDKs developers can make API (application programming interface) requests directly from a mobile application to Amazon’s Web Services. Developers can integrate their applications with a long list of services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), the SimpleDB database and send messages using Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Simple Queue Service (SQS).

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • NVIDIA CEO: quad-core tablets to launch this year

    NVIDIA’s chief executive officer and president Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that the company’s quad-core processor, currently codenamed “Kal-El,” will be available in tablets by the end of this year. “We’re the only people seriously on the dance floor with Qualcomm,” Huang told Forbes in a recent interview. “We’re really the only two active players.” Earlier this year, NVIDIA said it expected to ship quad-core tablets and smartphones in 2011, but Huang suggested to Forbes that smartphones may not hit the market until 2012. Read on for more.

    [...]

    Huang also noted that NVIDIA currently has 50% of the Android smartphone market and 70% of the Android tablet market.

Bossie Awards for best open source software in 2011

InfoWorld has presented its 2011 Bossie (Best Open Software Source) Awards. Prizes were awarded in the four categories of enterprise open source applications, desktop and mobile software, data centre and cloud solutions, and developer tools.

BT software engineer tells how the telco is using open source

“One reason why culturally eventually open source will be an excellent fit for BT is that old-school engineering idea that ‘I’ll stake my life on this project because I understand the risks myself because I have the necessary professional background to do so’,” he says. BT is, after all, a company that for many years built everything itself.

Open source software – Competitiveness through collaboration

On the 5th of September 2011, the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) hosted the third Government of Malta Open Source End User Group (MOSEUG) meeting. The theme, was ‘OSS – Competitiveness through Collaboration’ and the meeting focused on:

Morality and Legality of Open Source Code Forking

How to build a sustainable nonprofit the open source way

BSA secret agenda: open source saves the world

Assuming that everything the BSA says is right, then it’s as plausible to blame unbearable temptation as it is ignorance. If you could obtain something that was worth a year’s wages at the click of a mouse, and you knew you’d not cost anyone a penny, what would you do?

Quite. So while it’s perfectly in order for the BSA to wish for more money for its members, and good luck to them all in that, it’s highly unlikely that its proposed solution will in fact liberate that $59 billion — the GDP of Croatia.

With perfect holiness and inescapable enforcement, in a world with no illicit copying at all, what would happen is that most of the world wouldn’t have most of those copies of the BSA membership’s products.

Would that bar them from the benefits of IT, and all the necessary economic and social tools needed to be a productive, happy part of the global digital community? Fortunately not.

A logical conclusion of the BSA’s arguments is that the free and open source software (Foss) model would step in to provide legal alternatives. Of course, for some software such as Adobe’s top-end creative products there is no Foss equivalent; the paid-for market is small enough and the lock-in so significant that there’s not been much point.

Once the world cannot get what it cannot pay for, though, the motivation to make top-notch Foss products will be much higher, and we can reasonably expect them to appear. Indeed, we can expect the new wave of software to become so good that it will be functionally competitive with the full-price Western option – and competition, as we all know, promotes a healthy, honest market. Something we know the BSA is entirely in favour of.

Thus, the real message of the BSA’s survey is to actively, even aggressively, promote the development of Foss within the developing world, to create far more competition that will help reduce prices worldwide, and to encourage a truly diverse and equitable digital world for everyone.

4 More Things You Didn’t Know VLC Could Do

Three Top Open Source Bug Tracking Apps

Web Browsers

• Which browser will win? A mathematical Analysis!

• 5 Less know Browser for Linux

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Issues Do-not-track Guide for Advertisers

  • New Firefox download manager appears in UX build

  • 5 Mozilla Labs add-ons worth trying out

  • THIS IS A CRISIS: Firefox 6.0 Removes the ‘View Page Source’ Button

    This is unacceptable, intolerable, an outrage. It is a betrayal of the open source culture to which Firefox and Mozilla owes its very existence.

    It is not enough that “any web developer” can use the shortcut key “Ctrl-U” (which will still work for how long?). New users need to have a “view source” option discoverable. It is imperative.

Databases

• Oracle Expands MySQL for Windows

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Will Oracle and Google Come to terms on Java before JavaOne?

BSD

• FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 2 Released; Needs Installer Testing

• FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2 Available…

Licensing

• Contributor hunt begins as libVLC goes LGPL

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Michael Hart (1947 – 2011): Prophet of Abundance

    What makes his death particularly tragic is that his name is probably only vaguely known, even to people familiar with the areas he devoted his life to: free etexts and the public domain. In part, that was because he modest, content with only the barest recognition of his huge achievements. It was also because he was so far ahead of his times that there was an unfortunate disconnect between him and the later generation that built on his trailblazing early work.

Programming

• Book Review: HTML5 Media

  I understand that O’Reilly is publishing a series of hardcopy and ebooks that sport a rather modest page count in order to get the material to market very quickly. Shelley Powers’ HTML5 Media is one of them. Please keep in mind this book isn’t intended to teach you everything you want to know about HTML5 but rather, to show web developers how to insert HTML5 media elements into web pages using the new video and audio elements.

Health/Nutrition

• Dining on Deceit: PR Stunt Backfires for ConAgra

  Hidden cameras captured what was supposed to be the bloggers’ delighted reaction to the meal and dessert of Razzleberry Pie (another frozen Marie Callender’s specialty). But the stunt backfired after bloggers found out the truth. One wrote, “Our entire meal was a SHAM! … We were unwilling participants in a bait-and-switch for Marie Callender’s new frozen three cheese lasagna and there were cameras watching our reactions.”

Cablegate

• Zimbabwe: A Deluge of Online Reactions to Latest WikiLeaks

  Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks cables are raising an online storm among Zimbabwe’s netizens with the latest public release of diplomatic cables from the United States Embassy in Harare upping the political temperatures among the ruling elite amid denials and rebuttals. Dubbed Cablegate, the cables show how fragile political loyalties can be as allies are quoted disparing one another.

• Sandal queen Mayawati wants Julian Assange committed

  INDIA’S Dalit queen Mayawati has demanded the Australian government commit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to a “mental asylum” after leaked US cables revealed the politician sent an empty jet to Mumbai to pick up a pair of sandals.

• 2011-09-08 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks

• Twilight finale director watched undead soap

  But his next two projects, on the controversial Wikileaks and on cycling legend Lance Armstrong are both pretty much finished except for the shouting.

  “The Wikileaks movie I’m doing for Universal. We’re editing and hoping to put it out sometime next year,” Gibney says. “But obviously there are some things that still have to play out in that story.” (Including sex charges in Sweden against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and an attempt to extradite him from the UK.)
  As for Lance Armstrong, he says, “Um, that’s on hold at the moment. There’s a cut that’s very good that’s pretty complete. But it’s fair to say we’re waiting to see how some of this legal stuff plays out.” (At least three former teammates have allegedly recently testified to federal investigators about Armstrong’s use of performance enhancing drugs).

• US says King Abdullah older than previously assumed, was still using Viagra at age 92

• Expecting Civilian Deaths, US Embassy Approved of Deadly Attack on Crowded Haitian Slum

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Wealthy Wisconsin Heir Speaks at Koch Brothers Meeting

  Leaked audio from the Koch brothers’ donor meeting in Vail, Colorado, in June reveals, among other things, the connections between the Kochs and a wealthy Wisconsin funder who spent hundreds of thousands that helped elect Ron Johnson as well as Scott Walker and support various right-wing causes.

  An anonymous source released the tapes to blogger Brad Friedman, who published the audio and transcript at Mother Jones and BradBlog. Fred Young, the heir of the Young Radiator fortune in Racine, Wisconsin, addressed the crowd of Koch invitees and introduced Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano.

• Cantor Introduces ALEC’s Agenda to the House

  Among the regulations targeted by Cantor are the new maximum achievable control technology “MACT” standards, known as the “boiler MACT rules” for utility plants. Analysts at the Center for Progressive Reform estimated that these rules “would annually prevent up to nearly 6,600 premature deaths, more than 4,000 non-fatal heart attacks, more than 1,600 cases of acute bronchitis, and more than 313,000 missed work and school days.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Yet Another Pro-Keystone XL Pipeline Front Group Set Up In Nebraska

  Last week, lobbyists in Washington, DC announced the creation of yet another front group in Nebraska to support the approval of the controversial Keystone XL, a pipeline running through the Midwest from tar sands mining sites in Canada to refineries in Texas. Given its central location underneath the proposed expansion route for the Keystone XL, Nebraska has become a flash point in the debate over approval of the plan.

  To counteract the broad opposition to the pipeline, oil lobbyists have paid special attention to Nebraska.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • BC Court Rules Rogers’ Zoocasa Real Estate Site Infringed Copyright, Breached Terms of Use

    The B.C. Supreme Court has issued a lengthy ruling against Rogers Communications and its real estate search site, Zoocasa. The case originates from Century 21′s objections to Zoocasa’s scraping of its real estate listings and incorporating them into its own site. Zoocasa scraped the full listings for several months starting in August 2008, but in November 2008 switched to “truncated” descriptions that provide only basic information. In August 2009, Zoocasa began “framing” other sites, but it stopped that practice in December 2009. Zoocasa stopped indexing Century 21 listings in 2010.

  • EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright

    As was unfortunately expected, despite no evidence that this made any economic sense at all, the member states of the EU have agreed to retroactively extend copyright another 20 years, at which point you can expect it to be extended again (thanks to jtdeboe for sending this over). This is nothing short of governments and the entertainment industry seizing works from the public domain. As we’ve said before, the purpose of copyright law is to incent the creation of new works. If existing copyright law was enough to incentivize the creation at the time, then there’s simply no reason to retroactively extend the law.

  • Don’t Try To Create An Illustrated Version Of A David Bowie Song… Or The Copyright Police Will Come After You

    Except, as that started to get attention, Kolb was threatened with an infringement claim. Of course, the Star fails Jouranlism 101, in that it never actually names the party who holds the copyright or who threatened the illustrator. One might come away from the article believing it’s David Bowie, but I’m guessing it was someone else. In fact, I reached out to Kolb to find out who sent the takedown, and he said that

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Great Linux Migration: who’s made the move, why, and what’s in store for the future growth of Linux?

Munich Migration From The User’s Viewpoint

So the FUD about the Munich Migration being a disaster of some kind is not real. They are doing much more than migrating to another OS at the same time by rationalizing IT in other ways (CMS and web-applications) and they are not in any hurry crunching 50-100 per week and likely doing some hand-holding at the same time. It works for them.

Server

• Mainframe Ubuntu Linux?

  When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

• An Open Source Platform for Virtual Supercomputing

  Erlang Solutions and Massive Solutions will soon launch a new cloud platform for high performance computing. Last month they announced their intent to bring a virtual supercomputer (VSC) product to market, the idea being to enable customers to share their HPC resources either externally or internally, in a cloud-like manner, all under the banner of open source software.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.1 (Part 2) – Storage and filesystems

  The software RAID code now supports bad block management and dm-crypt can notify SSDs about freed storage areas. The iSCSI target framework LIO has been updated to Version 4.1 and the default Ext3 settings make the filesystem more robust, but a bit slower.

• Graphics Stack

  • Two More Developers Join The Chicago Linux Panel

    Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren’t yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

  • A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

    It was four years ago, on the 6th of September 2007, that I exclusively broke the news on AMD’s open-source strategy that would end up greatly changing the open-source Linux graphics driver landscape.

    While the news was delivered on the 6th of September, XDS Cambridge was going on at that point, and it wasn’t until the 17th of September that the RadeonHD Linux driver was published, so it’s hard to call a precise birth-date for this strategy. It could also be considered the point at which SUSE wrote a letter to AMD with this open-source idea.

Applications

• Top 50 best Linux apps 2011

  For everyone at Linux Format magazine and most of its readers, computers and Linux are a passion.

  Linux is perfect: its open source nature and excellent shell make it the ultimate hobbyist’s operating system. Fortunately, there’s a huge number of top-class applications available as well: market leading packages for professional and consumer level media creation, tools for developers, systems administrators and students – as well as great games to help you procrastinate on a Friday.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 15

  • Using Vim with the System Clipboard on Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Ships September Updates

    September 7, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.7.1 Info Page. The changelog and Bugzilla list more, but not all improvements since 4.7.0. Note that these changelogs are incomplete. For a complete list of changes that went into 4.7.1, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.7.1 also ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To find out more about the KDE Workspace and Applications 4.7, please refer to the 4.7.0 release notes and its earlier versions.

  • KDE Ships September Updates

Distributions

• Unity Linux 2011 to use Arch-Linux-Like Approach

  In other news another favorite of mine, at least in the rpm universe, has released an Alpha build of what will be Unity Linux 2011. I reviewed Unity Linux last year on this blog and images were 276MB and 277 MB per architecture, and the subsequent update 2010.2 brought it to well over 300 MB. This time the size is only a 100 odd megabyte and the team is making some significant changes.

• ArchBang 2011.09 Includes the Linux 3.0.4-1 Kernel

• Archbang 2011.09 Released

  Keeping up the schedule of a new release roughly every six months, a new and updated Archbang live/install image with the 3.0 kernel is out, 2011.09. Read the release announcement and see a screenshot here. As always it is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures. The images are a handy download size of 526 MB and 531 MB respectively. If you already have it installed there’s no need to get this as of course Arch is rolling, but good for if you want to update a copy on your USB stick for newer hardware.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • September 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: Java now on firm path for the cloud

    Open source raconteur and Red Hat senior director of middleware engineering Mark Little has laid down some defining comments as to the current state of Java EE7 Enterprise Edition.

    Speaking to a US-based software developer web site, Little has hinted that Java EE7 is a real “milestone release” and that its current status marks the point at which Java truly heads towards the cloud computing of IT delivery.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Graphics Test Week, Again

      The Fedora Project is having another Graphics Test Week. This time around it’s for testing the Intel, Nouveau, and Radeon drivers for the forthcoming Fedora 16 release.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Convoluted Rebuttals – Unity: The War Without End?
        

        I would assume that Unity is developed to appeal to the mainstream masses. It’s easy for us that are tech interested to believe that Linux and its associated packages are written to cater for and pander to us. The vast majority of users on this planet have no interest in tech other than it’s a medium in which they wish to get tasks done. They don’t care about open source, they don’t care about patents they merely want to use a PC to get a job done. Conversely though, they are happy to learn a new way of working if the benefits are presented to them, it’s a natural progression that any product will undergo change which will require a small investment of time on behalf of the consumer. Compare a smart phone to that of one from the early 90′s. A company’s vision of a product with many competitors is something to be encouraged, not scorned because you think that people can’t or won’t be interested in something new.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Beta

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Samsung to acquire MeeGo, report claims

  • Samsung interested in Meego, report says

  • Android

    • Top Free Android Calculators

    • Droid Bionic unveiled with 4G, dual-core CPU, and a $300 price

      Verizon Wireless will start selling Motorola Mobility’s Droid Bionic for its 4G LTE network on Sept. 8, featuring heavyweight features and a matching $300 price. The Droid Bionic offers a dual-core 1GHz processor running Android 2.3.4, 16GB each of internal and microSD storage, a 4.3-inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, eight-megapixel and VGA cameras, and accessories including a Lapdock and an HD Station.

    • Eric Schmidt: Ice Cream Sandwich coming out in October or November

    • HP TouchPad screen can now support Android

      Hard at work porting Android over to HP’s discontinued but much-in-demand tablet, the TouchDroid techs were able to create the necessary drivers to coax Android 2.3.5 to run on the TouchPad and let people tap into the touch screen.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Velocity Micro Unveils 8-inch and 10-inch Tablets, Both Under $300

    Velocity Micro announced a pair of new Android-powered tablets today, the 8-inch Cruz T408 and 10-inch Cruz T410. Due in late September the two feature 1GHz Cortex A8 processors, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, and front-facing cameras. Android enthusiasts might not dig the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but average consumer types will like the $239 and $299 price tags. Additional specs for both tablets include Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), Adobe Flash Player 10.3, and preloaded apps in Amazon Kindle, Amazon Appstore, Angry Birds Rio, and QuickOffice.

  • Velocity Micro Introduces Two Sub-$300 Android Slates

    Two new little Android tablets have joined the ever-growing tablet race, this time from Velocity Micro. Both the 8-inch Cruz T408 and the 10-inch Cruz T410 are nice enough, but what’ll really catch your eye are the pricetags. The Cruz T408 and T410 are priced at $239.99 and $299.99 respectively — a comfortable price point for anyone looking to get a starter slate.

Bossie Awards 2011: The best open source software of the year

One of the best ways to see the success of the open source philosophy is to pick up a cellphone. If you happen to grab an Android phone — the most popular in the smartphone class — you’ll have a device running a package built by Google and sitting on top of Linux. Almost all of the source code in the stack is released under a generous open source license.

Editing Community Offers Input

Events

• Meteorite Consulting to host UK Open Source BI User Group

  On 8 September 2011, Meteorite Consulting are hosting the inaugural UK Open Source BI User Group Event. The UK OSBI User Group aims to provide information to help organisations select and implement innovative commercial and open source business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration solutions.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Thunderbird 6.0.2, 7.0 beta and 3.1.14 security updates now available

  • Firefox 6.0.2 and 3.6.22 security updates now available

SaaS

• Why the cloud is accelerating open-source adoption

  In general, open-source projects typically require two components to get community uptake. First, the nature of the project itself has to be technologically challenging. Successful open-source projects are largely about solving a set of complex technological tasks vs. just writing a lot of code to support complex business processes, such as the case with building enterprise software. Linux, MySQL and BitTorrent are all good examples here.

Databases

• NSA open sources Google database mimic

  The US National Security Agency is open sourcing a distributed “NoSQL” database based on Google’s proprietary BigTable platform.

  Known as Accumulo, the platform has been in development at the NSA for over three years, and it’s built atop Hadoop, the open source distributed file system and distributed number-crunching platform that mimics Google’s internal infrastructure.

• NSA’s open-source project aims for secure, large-scale storage

  The National Security Agency is looking for help from the developer community in contributing to a label-based storage software that could be enable secure, granular access to data in large storage systems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart

  Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will “inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice”. “Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing,” added Meeks.

CMS

• Switch to Moodle ongoing this academic year

  The university has since decided to use Moodle Rooms, which provides an enhanced version of the free and open source Moodle.

• Are you really investing in your real estate website?

  There is one solution which is cost effective and will provide you with freedom and choice. That is to use an open source CMS which is free to use on a General Public License. These open source CMS are usually owned by a not for profit organization of web developers and designers, who’s goal is to share code amongst a worldwide community of developers in an effort to provide a free and powerful CMS for websites. PHP is an open source language and a few CMS build upon PHP include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, CakePHP and Codeigniter.

• Diaspora still trying to reinvent social networks with open source

  Most people won’t have even heard of it. Diaspora is an up and coming social network which is getting a lot more attention in some circles in the wake of Google+’s ‘real names’ policy.

  Users are climbing on board after being tipped off that there’s a network just like Google+, only without having anything to do with Google, where you can be who you want to be, how you want to be, and still retain full ownership of everything you put there.

Healthcare

• CONNECT issues latest iteration of open source HIE software

  Health information exchanges running the CONNECT platform take note: The CONNECT team has issued a new version, 3.2.1, which fixes a number of bugs and known issues.

  The open source software taps National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and protocols to enable the creation of an HIE and the exchanging of healthcare information, both regionally and on a national level.

• VA Launches Online Open-Source Agent for VistA EHR System

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Review: Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition

    But the suite’s open source codebase also enables it to support third-party commercial and open source BI tools, which gives it its broad range of capabilities. These components include Talend’s open source extract, transform and load (ETL) tool and activity monitoring console; R, an advanced analytics development environment; and JasperAnalysis, an OLAP tool based on the open source Mondrian engine.

BSD

• FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?

  FreeBSD provides a Linux binary compatibility layer that allows 32-bit Linux binaries to be natively executed on this BSD operating system. Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD allows Linux-only applications to be executed in a near seamless manner on this alternative platform, even for games. New tests have revealed that the modern FreeBSD operating system (via PC-BSD 8.2) can actually outperform Linux when it comes to running OpenGL Linux game binaries.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fall internship positions are still open—apply today!

Licensing

• MPL 2.0, copyleft, and license compatibility

  In part one of my Mozilla Public License piece, I mentioned license compatibility as a major feature of MPL 2.0. In fact, it’s such a major – and complicated – issue that it warrants its own explanation.

Programming

• Revisiting the Dataists Programming Language Rankings

Security

• Simple security by evaluating open ports

• Velocity Micro Introduces Two Sub-$300 Android Slates

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Mall of America visitors unknowingly end up in counterterrorism reports

  As he shopped for a children’s watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

  The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because they believed he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

Cablegate

• Dick Marty rendition report condemns ‘cult of secrecy’

  A report for Europe’s human rights watchdog has called for greater scrutiny of secret services and support for whistleblowers.

  The Council of Europe investigated how countries like Britain, Germany, Romania and Lithuania assisted the US with the rendition of terror suspects.

Finance

• Occupy Wall Street will lay siege to U.S. greed

  On Sept. 17, the Arab Spring becomes the new American Fall, with 20,000 revolutionaries in a tent city. Plus “solidarity” occupations in major financial centers worldwide, all ready for a long siege, vowing not to leave till they get their “one simple demand.”

Civil Rights

• ‘UID project is full of ambiguity, confusion and suspicions’

• The Spy Who Tweeted Me: Intelligence Community Wants to Monitor Social Media

  A research arm of the intelligence community wants to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux for me, Linux for you.

In essence all Linux systems are the same. They all have the same tools, they all pretty much have the same desktops and they all can be configured, adjusted, tweeked or modified to look and operate in just about any manner. The only real difference is the ease of which this can be done.

Linux turns 20: Progress report on world domination

It was circa 1999 (and we were partying like it was). I was new to the whole tech-reporting gig, but not so new to Linux. I, along with every early adopter, thought, nay KNEW, Linux was bound for world domination. It wasn’t a matter of if it was a matter of when. Even though, in the early days, the fledgling operating system struggled with hardware support and couldn’t seem to keep pace with the competition. Even with its faults, we all still knew it was destined for greatness on a level no proprietary system could ever dream of.

Three Reasons To Use Linux For Home Use

Here are three reasons to use Linux for your home use:

Oddly enough, I miss the Linux desktop

Arch Linux is great. I can run Ubuntu but I rather keep that in my Macbook Pro where I can run it inside of VirtualBox.

The Great Linux Migration: who’s made the move, why, and what’s in store for the future growth of Linux?

GCS Recruitment Specialists Accelerate Performance With Linux and 2LS

Leading recruitment specialists, GCS, have moved their GRIP Recruitment Software infrastructure from a Microsoft Windows Server to a Linux Server platform to enable greater performance, flexibility and cost savings.

Server

• China Taps IBM Mainframe for Online Services

• IBM to build cloud computing platform for Chinese firm Yi Lian Zhong

• NSA Extends Label-based Security to Big Data Stores

  NSA’s label-based approach to security resembles another open source project NSA developed and released in 2000, called Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux). With SE Linux, administrators can create policies that dictate, in fine-grained detail, what actions each program on a computer can execute. Red Hat has integrated SE Linux into its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 227 – Competitively Priced

• Going Linux Sep 05: #149 Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• Feedback Requested: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Released

• Linus Stresses GitHub

• Linux should move to github, permanently

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org XDC2011 Chicago Preview

    There is less than one week to go until the 2011 X.Org Developers’ Conference begins in Chicago, United States. The tentative schedule has been published on the X.Org Wiki. Among the topics to be discussed are the Nouveau driver, GPGPU computing, OpenGL 3.0 support, the Low-Level Virtual Machine within Mesa, and much more.

  • TimeGraph: A Linux GPU Command Scheduler

    In preparing for XDC2011 Chicago, the X.Org developers’ summit that begins in just ten days that I have organized, the schedule is being worked out at the moment. One of the items that is set to be talked about at XDC2011 during the Nouveau driver discussion is TimeGraph. This is an open-source GPU command scheduler that sounds fairly interesting.

  • A Q&A Panel About Contributing To X.Org & Open-Source

    Next week at XDC2011 Chicago there will be a rather unique discussion taking place that’s quite different from what normally goes on at this annual X.Org Developers’ Conference. There is going to be a moderated panel discussion (tentatively titled “Contributing to X.Org and Open-Source”) about contributing to X.Org, the Linux kernel, Mesa, and open-source software in general. For those not residents of the Chicago area, this session will be broadcast on the Internet.

Applications

• PlexyDesk – A Widget Filled Desktop For Linux

  There was a time when I, like many, covered my Linux desktop in all manner of Screenlets, gDesklets and widgets. I grew out of this, but ‘PlexyDesk‘ – a new widget-toting project, may just light those creative fires on my desktop once more…

• Powerful Firewall Manager built on top of Iptables – Vuurmuur

• Deus Ex Human Revolution Terminal Theme

• My favourite Empathy feature no-one knows about

• GIMP Plugin Registry 3.5.4 Brings 4 Updated Plugins

• The most versatile IDE for development in Ubuntu | Geany IDE

  One popular question many new programmers such as myself, and old programmers a-like have, is what IDE should I use? The result is of course a different recommendation from different people as you would expect. You often will hear some of the following: “Netbeans, Eclipse etc…”

• BleachBit Leaves Your File System Sparkling and Grime-Free

  Different Linux distros build in favorite cleaning products. For instance, Ubuntu has Computer Janitor. CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Linux use Yum Clean to remove cached package data. But BleachBit goes beyond such distro-specific cleaning services to accomplish a more complete spit-and-polish session to Linux’s file structure in any distro.

• More Cowbell with Hydrogen Drum Machine on Linux

  Linux is a superior audio production platform, and one of its shining stars is the Hydrogen Drum Machine. Hydrogen is an advanced software drum synthesizer that is easy to learn, and yet packed full of great features.

• 5 Free Apps for Eye-Popping Graphics

  The worlds of open source and freeware both include many outstanding applications for working with graphics and photos. These include standard fare such as image editors, but it’s also worth looking into more unusual graphics tools that you can work with for free. Whether you want to produce splashy graphical documents, enhance graphics on a blog or web site, create eye-catching logos, or more, check out this collection of five great, free graphics apps.

• Minbar and the Islamic Tools and Libraries

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make XFCE4 look like Windows

  • Make XFCE4 Bottom Dock act like Docky/AWN

  • Make XFCE4 look a bit like Unity

  • HOWTO : SSH Tunneling with Dynamic Port Forwarding

  • HOWTO : SSH Tunneling – Remote Port Forwarding

  • Install and configure Nginx with PHP and MySQL on Fedora

  • talking makefile

  • How To Quickly Find Out Which Linux Distribution Is Running

  • How to get over frozen Debian Squeeze Login Screen

  • “Warning: Could not find package list for PPA: ppa:some/ppa” while trying to use ppa-purge in Ubuntu

  • How to smartly manage Scientific Linux repositories

  • Use Your SSH Client To Help Prevent Stupid Mistakes

  • Debian / Ubuntu Linux: Configure Network Bonding ( Teaming / Aggregating NIC )

  • How to Auto Mount Partitions at Linux Startup the Easy Way

  • How to Secure Your Apache Web Server

  • Hiding backup files in Thunar

  • Debian Wheezy Post Install Customization

  • Guide to regular expressions with examples

  • Gentoo in a chroot (step-by-step instructions)

  • Series: Introduction to Ubuntu Development – Part 2

  • Hello World in Python

  • Guide to bug submitting and bug tracking in Linux

  • How To Change LightDM (Login Screen) Background [Quick Tip]

  • Removing an user from login list.

  • How to customize your Fedora packages

  • jailbash

  • Apache2: How To Redirect Users To Mobile Or Normal Web Site Based On Device Using mod_rewrite

  • PGP tutorial

  • Basics of Linux system administration: Working at the console

  • How to setup a FAI Install server on debian squeeze

• Wine/Windows/OnLive

  • andLinux: Seamlessly Run Linux Applications on Windows

  • Bridging Linux and Windows: Top Apps

    Nearly every day I hear about people who express interest in taking the leap into the Linux space. What would-be Linux users fail to realize is that there’s software that makes switching between the Linux and Windows worlds almost effortless.

    So in the interest of sharing this knowledge, I’ve put together this article to share different applications and technologies that can be helpful to blur the lines between the two platforms.

  • Countdown to Ubuntu 11.10: The First Beta Version Arrives

  • Unofficial Patch Brings OnLive to Linux

  • Community Hack Allows Linux/Wine users to experience OnLive

    We’ve been sitting on this a few days, and have put its author through extensive testing and re-writes in order to bring this to you. We’re fairly certain that the following instructions brought to you by OnLiveInformer community member: Dephyre will really excite those of you who have an affection for penguins.

• Games

  • If You Build It, They Will Come…..(Ignite for Linux)

  • Bitfighter multi-player Indie game, needs you.

  • Nemesys Is Porting Their Games To Linux

    Nemesys, a game studio run out of Budapest, is porting their game titles to Linux. The studio’s current titles include Fortix 2, A.C.S, and Ignite. Nemesys Ignite, in particular, is a very promising racing game that will surely roar things up for Linux.

    Nemesys is not to be confused with Namesys, the former company of Hans Reiser that developed the ReiserFS and Reiser4 file-systems.

Desktop Environments

• Exclusive: The Koch Brothers’ Million-Dollar Donor Club

  Twice a year, the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch host secretive retreats for an exclusive list of corporate America’s rich and powerful to strategize and raise money for their right-wing political agenda. Mother Jones has obtained exclusive audio recordings that shed some light on the brothers’ latest retreat, held at a resort near Vail, Colorado, in late June.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • A wish a day 12: Should KDE become the Apache Software Foundation of the Qt world?

    When the Apache Software Foundation was born back in 1999, its sole purpose was to support the development of the Apache HTTP server. One foundation, one project, more or less like the KDE eV and KDE until very recently.

  • Qt Is Likely To Use The V8 JavaScript Engine

    It looks like with Qt 5.0, V8 will become the JavaScript Engine for the Qt tool-kit as well as for Qt Script and Qt Quick.

Distributions

• Parted Magic 6.6 review

  If you’re a regular Linux User reader – and if you’re not, you should correct that forthwith – you’ll be familiar with Parted Magic as one of the utilities we include on our cover disc each month. The chances are good that you’ve never actually tried it, however – and if that’s the case, you’re missing a real treat.

• New Releases

  • Thanks God ArchBang 2011.09 is out!!!

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 231

      • Nice themes for ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) users

        We have already posted some time ago about Nice Ubuntu themes for Maverick Users and this is updated for Natty users now.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Beta 1 Review And Screenshots Tour

        In case you are still not aware, Canonical (the team behind Ubuntu) has released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. There are several new additions to the family, notably the revamp of the Ubuntu Software Center and the replacement of the Evolution with Thunderbird. Follow us for the full review and screenshots tour of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Beta 1.

      • No pain, some gain: Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot examined

        While the first beta of 11.10, called Oneiric Ocelot, is also a little rough at the edges and features some curious design decisions, the version of Unity here is more stable and it is faster than the version that shipped with 11.04. In other words, Unity is making progress, albeit slower than many would like.

      • Countdown to Ubuntu 11.10: The First Beta Version Arrives

      • Bacon Justifies Ubuntu Decisions

        Seems Jono Bacon just can’t understand why users are still complaining about the drastic changes that came with Ubuntu 11.04 and the Unity desktop. He begins by stating emphatically that he’s no interface designer, but the problem isn’t the overall design so much. The issue for The Distro for Human Beings is that it actually doesn’t understand human beings.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Distro Hoppin`: A Quick Look at Lubuntu 11.10 Beta 1

          While Mandriva decided to simplify their offering by keeping only the KDE version alive in the latest release, the Ubuntu family has officialy grown yet again. LXDE – Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment – is here to rescue old computers through Lubuntu. My aging Evo n800c Compaq laptop was craving for some attention and what better way to make its wish come true other than starring it in a Distro Hoppin` episode?

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Report: Samsung Eyeing Intel’s MeeGo Platform

    Rumor has it that Samsung is planning to buy Nokia’s MeeGo operating system, a week after Intel reportedly said it would back off development of the platform.

    Citing anonymous sources, German blog NetbookNews reported that Samsung was looking to buy the Linux-based, open source OS, which Nokia and Intel co-launched in February 2010.

  • Android

    • Baidu announces Android fork and teams up with Dell

      At Baidu World 2011, Baidu, the company behind China’s largest search engine, has announced that it will produce its own fork of the Android 2.x open source mobile operating system. The new Baidu Yi (Chinese language) mobile application system is expected as early as November on a range of mobile phones and tablets that Baidu will develop with hardware vendor Dell, according to a report from Reuters.

    • No Android forks here

      Yes, Android has a forking problem. Google forked its mobile, open-source operating system into two versions: Android 2.x for smartphones and Android 3.x for tablets earlier this year. It also doesn’t help Android any that there are so many different supported versions out in the market. But, what Amazon and Baidu are doing with their forthcoming tablets has nothing to do with forking Android.

    • Seven-inch Amazon Android tablet said to offer Kindle UI, $250 price

      Amazon’s Android tablet is a seven-inch, Kindle-branded device that will feature a customized operating system and sell for $250, according to a TechCrunch reporter who claims to have spent an hour with the device. In other Android tablet news, Samsung pulled its freshly announced Galaxy Tab 7.7 from the IFA show in Berlin after Apple won a preliminary injunction against the tablet from a German court.

    • Gateway, Vodafone, and Medion unveil Honeycomb tablets

      Acer subsidiary Gateway has begun shipping a rebranded “A60″ version of Acer’s 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 Honeycomb tablet. Meanwhile Vodafone announced Smart Tab 7 and Smart Tab 10 Android 3.2 tablets, and Medion unveiled both a Lifetab P9514 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet and an unnamed 4.3-inch Android smartphone.

    • Sony Taking Pre-Orders for Tablet S, Shipping Starts September 16

    • HTC Holiday running on AT&T’s 4G LTE network photographed

      BGR has obtained photographs of the still-unannounced HTC Holiday Android phone, which may be AT&T’s first 4G LTE-enabled smartphone.

    • VIZIO Announces Update for 8-inch Tablet

      VIZIO has announced a software update for their 8-inch VTAB1008 tablet today which includes improvements to battery life, overall speed, and universal remote compatibility. According to the press release, the update enables faster scrolling and UI gestures and improved graphics performance and comes quickly on the heels of the Hulu Plus announcement.

    • team-touchdroid presents…

Project of the Month September 2011 – GCompris

New on the site: Open source resources

We’re happy to announce a new open source resources section. To kick things off, we’ve added pages that highlight open source conferences and events, organizations, and projects and applications. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We have lots of ideas, and want to make this more robust and improve functionality. But for now, let’s see if this idea catches on.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox and Thunderbird updates

    New versions of Firefox (6.0.2 and 3.6.22) and Thunderbird (6.0.2, 7.0 beta, and 3.1.14) are out. These releases remove trust exceptions for certificates issued by Staat der Nederlanden.

  • Firefox 6.0.2 and 3.6.22 security updates now available

SaaS

• A Way off the Ranch

  In February 2011, Eben Moglen gave a landmark speech to the Internet Society titled “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which he unpacked the problem. In the beginning, he said, the Internet was designed as “a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control, and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it”.

Databases

• NoSQL Benchmarking

  NoSQL is the talk of the town. And we have already covered what it is for in one of our previous blogs. Today I would like to share the NoSQL benchmark test results we have recently conducted. It will help you to understand if the soon to develop system is compatible to NoSQL, and which NoSQL product to select.

  In this article we will reveal the characteristics of Cassandra, HBase and MongoDB identified through multiple workloads.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Board Elections: Nominations Open

• Developing LibreOffice

  Not being stopped by that knowledge, LibreOffice developers take a strong bite deep in the code base for improvements now and even better future LibreOffice development. I’m not only impressed, but also get more and more confident in the future of this project.

CMS

• Octopress: Create Static Sites with a Full-Featured Framework

  Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

  Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff’s excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF’s Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 2

  The people and companies … who disregard the Internet “don’t be a dick” rule … need more incentive to comply. However, even they don’t lose the right to use the code permanently unless they decide to “be a dick” permanently. In those cases, it doesn’t matter how many copies of the code they get — each new license for each new copy would be terminated as soon as they attempted distribution outside the terms of the license.

Public Services/Government

• Federal Court may share its DMS as open source, parliament says

  The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia, a document management system developed in-house by the court. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon.

• NSA Extends Label-based Security to Big Data Stores

  “There is a need for a flexible, high performance distributed key/value store that provides expressive, fine-grained access labels,” the developers stated on the proposal page submitted to Apache. “We have made much progress in developing this project over the past [three] years and believe both the project and the interested communities would benefit from this work being openly available and having open development.”

• Open government policy developments in Australasia

  Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The Declaration has been approved by Cabinet, and directs all Public Service departments, the New Zealand Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service; encourages other State Services agencies; and invites State Sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. More information on this statement can be found at the CC Aotearoa New Zealand blog.

• Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government by Dr. David A. Wheeler

  This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

  This article was previously published in the Journal of Software Technology (aka Software Tech News), Vol.14, No.1, February 2011. It is part of “Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software”, and thus is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) License. A one-page summary of this paper is available from MIL-OSS, and the MIL-OSS 2011 conference had a presentation on releasing OSS.

Programming

• Report: Ruby Creator Sets Sights on Mobile App Development

• Book Review: Learning Perl, Sixth Edition

• About git rebase part II

Standards/Consortia

• WS-Calendar 1.0 adopted by OASIS Committee

• The Next Internet: What’s Holding Us Back?

  Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work – the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols – was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

Security

• Mitigating risks, part 1

• Tor: confidential, anonymous and secure Internet

Cablegate

• Wikileaks Provides Proof that UK is Eradicating Turks and Caicos Islanders Since Early 2000s

• Talks over Egypt-Israel gas deal took 10 years, says Wikileaks

  Negotiations over the natural gas deal between Egypt and Israel dragged out over 10 years because of “political concerns in Egypt,” a recently revealed Wikileaks cable said.

  A partial extract from cable number 05CAIRO4972 of a confidential document prepared by the US embassy in Cairo one day before the deal was signed said the US described the deal as “the most lucrative ever.”

  On July 1, 2005, then Egyptian Petroleum Minister Sameh Fahmy and Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure Benjamin Ben-Eliezer signed the agreement to supply 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) starting October 2006.

• Addressing confusion about PFC Bradley Manning’s case

  In online discussions attributed to PFC Bradley Manning, he says that he hopes his actions will spur “discussion, debates, and reforms” and that he “want[s] people to know the truth, no matter who they are, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” This is the classic definition of a whistle-blower (a person who tells the public about alleged dishonest or illegal activities/misconduct occurring in a government department).

  Unfortunately, the government is charging PFC Bradley Manning with “knowingly [giving] intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means,” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — an allegation of treason and a capital offense. By this rational, scores of service-person-posted blogs, photos, and videos, would now be punishable by death—simply because they are accessible on the Internet. The charge against Bradley Manning appears to be about sending a message to other would-be whistle-blowers.

• 2011-09-06 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Wikileaks has shown us a world we need to know

  Wik­ileaks has its share of crit­ics – the or­gan­i­sa­tion is too cen­tred around Ju­lian As­sange and a per­son­al­ity-type cult ex­ists – but surely the vast bulk of in­for­ma­tion the group has re­leased since 2006 makes it a major force for good (not least be­cause it’s forced gov­ern­ments and many jour­nal­ists on the de­fen­sive about their in­sider tac­tics)…

• Dolphins call each other by name

  Dave the dolphin whistles, and his friend Alan whistles back. We can’t yet decipher their calls, but some of the time Dave may be calling: “Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!”

  Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.

• Girl’s sex spy saga shocks staid Swiss

  Even by Romanian standards, the plot beggars belief. A hot-blooded young seductress masquerading as a journalist is order- ed by her masters in the Romanian Intelligence Service to lure the Swiss ambassador into bed.

  Once there, her task is to find out anything and everything she can about “Ceausescu’s Gold” – the millions of dollars Romania’s late dictator is believed to have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts just before his fall.

  Afternoons of passion in the Bucharest penthouse she would persuade him to buy her were to be followed by gentle probing as to the real intentions of ex-King Michael, the former Romanian monarch now exiled in the ambassador’s Swiss homeland.

  And far from keeping the affair discreet, the agent is to make sure that she and her consort – a married man with two children – are frequently seen together wining and dining in public and at diplomatic functions. Just for good measure, the exercise will be called “Operation William Tell”.

Finance

• NY Approves Goldman Sachs’ Sale of Litton with Stipulations

  The New York Department of Financial Services and Banking Department is including several stipulations with its approval of Goldman Sachs’ sale of its Litton Loan Servicing, LP, to special servicer Ocwen Financial Corp.

• All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup

  ON A BRIGHT SPRING DAY in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled “on the side.” It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.

Copyrights

• Universities flee Access Copyright

  In the wake of a proposed fee increase, universities across Canada have opted to leave contracts with once-popular copyright licenser Access Copyright.
  Many schools, including York University, the University of British Columbia and almost every school in the prairie region have abandoned their contracts with Access Copyright in favour of steering the waters of copyright legislation on their own.

• MPAA Unsurprisingly Behind Australia iiNet Case

  Hid Behind Scenes to Avoid Impression of Being a Bully

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Linux development temporarily moves to GitHub

  Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.

• Linus Torvalds puts Linux 3.1-RC5 on Github after kernel.org breach

• LinuxCon: x86 platform drivers

  With his characteristically dry British humor, Matthew Garrett outlined the current situation with x86 platform drivers at LinuxCon. These drivers are needed to handle various “extra” hardware devices, like special keys, backlight control, extended battery information, fans, and so on. There are a wide range of control mechanisms that hardware vendors use for these devices, and, even when the controller hardware is the same, different vendors will choose different mechanisms to talk to the devices. It is a complicated situation that seems to require humor—and perhaps alcohol—to master.

• Roccat Linux Support Keeps Coming

  Last year I talked about how there were open-source Linux drivers for Roccat gaming mice. Not only was there open-source support available, but it was living in the mainline Linux kernel. This great Linux support comes from an experienced developer working with Roccat to improve their Linux support. This developer, Stefan Achatz, has written the kernel drivers plus open-source user-space utilities.

  [...]

  Linux drivers (open or closed-source) for gaming peripherals like these mice and keyboards with various extra functionality is rather rare.

• Linux 3.1-rc5

• Panasonic’s Full HD LCD Home Theater Projector For Linux Users

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Trigger keyboard and mouse actions with your voice and xdotool

  • Restricting Users To SFTP Plus Setting Up Chrooted SSH/SFTP (Debian Squeeze)

  • Here’s a couple of scripts for saving Youtube Flash Videos to your had drive

• Games

  • Unofficial Patch Brings OnLive to Linux

    Penguin Tribe rejoice! A Linux version of OnLive is apparently on the way but while the clock ticks on that, one of your own has figured out a way to make it work on your OS of choice right freakin’ now. With no small about of dicking around, of course, but if you’re such a diehard Linux nut that you’d rather do without OnLive than tolerate Windows on your PC, that’s probably second nature for you anyway.

  • Bitfighter multi-player Indie game, needs you.

    Bitfighter is a free multi-player 2-D space combat game with Robotron-like controls. It’s a team-based strategy game featuring retro vector graphics and customizable ships. It’s fast, fun, and frenetic.

Desktop Environments

• Chronicles of Desktop Deaths Foretold

  Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack has a desktop, a laptop, an HTC Desire Z cellphone and a work-provided Galaxy Tab. “Care to guess which one I use the most?” he asked. “It’s the desktop. My desktop has more power than the rest of my devices put together, the keyboard is at the proper typing height, and the monitors are on an ergonomic stand to keep my neck from being

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Reminder: Ubuntu App Developer Week Starts Today

      • Menu Discoverability In Ubuntu 11.10

        OK, with that out of the way I just wanted to talk about menus a little. Recently we released Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 and there was the requisite review on OMG! Ubuntu! and the conversation rather unsurprisingly descended into a debate about the menus and window controls in Ubuntu 11.10.

      • Online with Oneiric

        WHEN I read that the first beta version of the new Ubuntu release (11.10 a.k.a. Oneiric Ocelot) was available for downloading, I knew it was time to break out my trusty Acer AspireOne netbook again. For the last couple of Ubuntu releases, this notebook—with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB memory, 40GB hard drive—has been my test machine for some of the radical changes that my favorite Linux distribution was introducing.

        Mostly, I’m referring to the Unity interface that Ubuntu introduced in 11.04, which I felt clearly lacked some of the easy customization that the Gnome 2.x desktop afforded. I also felt the first version of Unity was still too rough around the edges, and wouldn’t let me do what I needed to do quickly. So, on my production machine (a desktop PC), I run 11.04—but still use the classic Gnome shell in place of Unity.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • 15 Must Have Android Games

      Android is growing at a stupendous rate and so is Android Market. Number is applications in Android Market is nearing 300,000 now and the rate of growth is only increasing. Trying to pick the very best of Android games from that enormous list is tough. I will try to give it my best shot anyway. Here are the games I enjoy playing in my Android 2.3.3 powered Galaxy S2.

    • Versatile Android device, the KT SpiderPad

      One of the most interesting devices showcased on the IFA this year is the KT SpiderPad. The main device is an Android smartphone. What makes this smartphone desirable are the accessories, which transforms it into a very powerfull setup.

    • Android Market Share Soars, Grabs Apple iOS Market Share in UK

    • Android: Another fork in the code by Baidu

      Critics of Google’s Android mobile OS have always been vocal about the f-word– fragmentation. From its inception Android has fallen victim to Google’s soft stance to Android versions and it has been common to see at least three or four versions in the market at any given time.

      Last week details emerged about Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Tablet that will run a totally different OS using the Android kernel but little else. Then China’s Baidu announced it will produce its own mobile OS using at its core, you guessed it, Android. There will soon be more versions and derivatives of Android than you can shake a smartphone at.

    • Google: nearly one third of Android devices running Gingerbread

      The latest figures released by Google show that version 2.3.x of Android, known as “Gingerbread”, is now being actively used on nearly one third of all devices running the open source mobile operating system. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, Android 2.3.x accounts for 31.3 per cent of the total number of devices in use, an increase of 7 percentage points compared to just one month ago.

Gluster Founder Details Data Management Strategy

It’s one thing to build a scalable filesystem. It’s quite another to build a scalable company. Gluster founder and CTO AB Periasamy has the challenge of trying to do both.

What is Nginx?

Nginx was first developed by a Russian guy called Igor Sysoev in 2002. After two years in 2004 it made its debut in the forms of HTTP server and reverse proxy/IMAP/POP3 server. To respond to C10k problem, Nginx adopted event-driven (asynchronous) structure which is not a conventional way (as in Apache) of processing single client in a single thread. Other than Nginx, various newly developed web servers such as Lightpad, Tornado, Magnum and Aleph have adopted Event-driven structure too.

Open Source ‘Quest’ Project Aims to Reinvent Text Adventures for the Modern Web

Startups, pride and open source

We have benefited so much from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that for every project we’ve implemented using an open source package the “Proudly Powered by NameOfProject” credit is left visible somewhere. This way, a bit is contributed to spreading word about the project.

Events

• Meteorite Consulting to Host UK Open Source BI User Group

• What is the killer evolutionary force impacting open source?

  According to the Open World Forum press function, “In the past, the histories of the Internet and of open software/open source have been so closely interwoven that it’s now hard to imagine one without the other. But changes both in the way they are being used and in legislation could affect the future of the Internet and open source.”

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Status Update-Thunderbird 7 reaches Beta

    Mozilla, the developers of popular open source software have moved the release of their email product,

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• James Gosling Leaves Google – Can He Come to JavaOne Now?

• Oracle v. Google – Reexamination – Patent 6125447

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF’s Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 1

Project Releases

• Help Fix Bugs… By Exploiting Software Vulnerabilities Automatically

  Security startup Toucan System released today the tool they presented earlier this month at the Blackhat US conference as Open Source.

Public Services/Government

• Government Commitment To Open Source Flounders

  The government continues to spend billions on proprietary software, despite promising earlier this year that it would create a level playing field for open source software and impose compulsory open standards.

  A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the BBC has revealed that most government departments still spend the lion’s share of their IT budgets on software from big-name vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, rather than seeking cheaper open source alternatives.

• UK Government Breaks Open Source Promises

• Open source makes inroads into government IT

  Open-source products still have a way to go before they are adopted widely in government IT infrastructure, new data has shown.

• Voultepsis touts ‘government open source software’

  Government agencies need not make their code available to the public in order to enjoy the benefits of the open source model, said a senior intelligence community technology official.

• Emphasize cost savings of open source in DoD business cases, says advocate

  The DoD, in fact, already relies extensively on open source, said Kane McLean, a developer at BRTRC, a Fairfax, Va.-based information technology firm–but it does so in an informal, barely acknowledged manner. That means that significant hurdles to open source remain in place at the DoD, despite there being no real procurement-law- or technology-related reason for them to exist.

Openness/Sharing

• Interview with Adam Green amd Jonathan Gray, founders of The Public Domain Review

Programming

• InfoWorld interview: Ruby creator sets sights on mobile

The VAR Guy: Does Sold Mean Sold Out?

een sold. More specifically, The VAR Guy’s publisher, Nine Lives Media, which also publishes the web sites MSPmentor and Talkin’ Cloud, has been sold to Penton Media, a huge business-to-business media company. At last count, according to Wikipedia, Penton “publishes and produces 113 magazines, 96 trade shows, 145 websites and has over six million subscribers across 17 different market segments.” Their target markets run the alphabetic gamut from Agriculture to Wealth Management. Nine Lives will become part of Penton’s “Technology Group.”

If you’re thinking this won’t be good for FOSS, you’re probably right.

Obviously, this “VAR Guy” is a house writer, like some of the in-house hacks that churned out serial novels for U.S. publishers like Grosset & Dunlap back in the 30s and 40s. He has no name. He has no face. He exists as a person only in the way that corporations, according to the Supreme Court, are people. This means that if the new bosses don’t like the content of the blogs churned out by the present “VAR Guy,” they can replace him with “VAR Guy” number two, and if that doesn’t work out with number three….

I’m sure you get my drift.

Surviving Fixed-Everything IT Projects

Using fixed-price contracts for a contract may seem to limit risk, but it mostly costs more and produces less satisfactory results.

Security

• DNS hack attack mutilates multiple Web sites

Cablegate

• Bollywood got funds from gangsters, politicians: WikiLeaks

  A leaked US diplomatic cable has said that Bollywood welcomed funding from gangsters and politicians, known in India as “black money.”

  While there is no direct reference of Dawood Ibrahim which allegedly financed a number of movies, the cable said that in recent decades, the Bollywood film industry has been associated with the notorious Mumbai underworld, at the nexus of gangsters, money, and politics.

• Julian Assange Statement on Chief Minister Mayawati

  Mayawati has betrayed rational thought. The question is, has she also betrayed the Dalit?

  There is no question that the documents are official papers from the US embassy. These papers have been proven the world over–including by the aggressive persecution of our people by Washington. The allegations within them are made by US diplomats in their private communications back to Hillary Clinton. If Chief Minister Mayawati has a problem with the contents of these communications she needs to take it up with Hillary.

  I ask that Mayawati admit her error and apologise.

• Send me jet, I’ll bring you sandals: Assange to Mayawati

  This morning, at a press conference, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said that the WikiLeaks cables that refer to her appear to be inauthentic. The fact that Mr Assange posted them on his website, she said, shows that he is either mentally ill or is being used by her political opponents. “He has gone mad,” she said. “If there is no room to treat him elsewhere, let him come to Agra…we will find him some space at the mental asylum there.”

• Fallouts of wikileaks: Gabby, Ephson banter over bribery

• $/etc/init.d/globaleaks start; We have Lift Off!

  We are very excited to announce the innaugural release of Globaleaks. Accompanying the release is a hands on demonstration of Globaleaks showcasing both the technical aspects and our methodology. While functional, at this time the demo is a working development version, or alpha version and not yet ready for deployment.

• Wikileaks says Kenya trained Somalia fighters

• Only eight Iraqi Jews in Baghdad in 2009: cable

  Baghdad’s Jewish community numbered just eight people in late 2009, having fallen from 20 in 2003 due to deaths from old age and sectarian violence, and emigration, a leaked US diplomatic cable says.

Civil Rights

• Google’s “real name policy” — or, why you are the product

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • New Wikileaks Docs Show Ex-Minister Bernier Offered To Leak Copyright Bill to U.S.

    Copyright, U.S. lobbying, and the stunning backroom Canadian response gets front page news treatment today as the Toronto Star runs my story on new revelations on copyright from the U.S. cables released by Wikileaks. The cables reveal that former Industry Minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before it was to be tabled it in the House of Commons, former Industry Minister Tony Clement’s director of policy Zoe Addington encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list, Privy Council Office official Ailish Johnson disclosed the content of ministerial mandate letters, and former RCMP national coordinator for intellectual property crime Andris Zarins advised the U.S. that the government was working on a separate intellectual property enforcement bill.

  • Geist: Canada pressed on copyright law, cables show

    Parliament is set to resume in several weeks with the reintroduction of a copyright reform bill by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Christian Paradis slated to be one of the government’s top priorities. The bill is expected to mirror Bill C-32, the previous copyright package that died with the election in the spring.

    That bill garnered some praise for striking a balance on difficult issues such as fair dealing, damages, and the liability of Internet providers. However, its approach to digital locks — which are used to control access to DVDs, CDs, and electronic books — was roundly criticized by consumer, education, and technology groups since it effectively ensured that inclusion of a digital lock trumps consumer and fair dealing rights. The bill’s digital lock rules largely mirrored those found in the United States.

    The Canadian approach is difficult to understand if viewed solely from a policy or legal perspective. As a policy matter, concerns over digital locks was the top issue raised during the 2009 copyright consultation as well as in the hundreds of submissions to the Bill C-32 legislative committee. From a legal perspective, countries such as Switzerland and New Zealand have adopted a far more balanced approach, demonstrating that protection for digital locks need not eviscerate consumer rights.

    The rationale appears to lie not in law or policy, but in politics. While U.S. pressure on Canadian copyright is nothing new, secret U.S. government cables demonstrate not only a massive behind-the-scenes lobbying effort to promote U.S.-style laws in Canada, but also a shocking willingness by senior Canadian officials to cave to the pressure.

    In fact, newly released cables reveal that former industry minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before tabling it in the House of Commons and a former policy official with industry ministers Jim Prentice and Tony Clement encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list.

  • Did Conservatives sell out Canada to U.S. copyright interests?

    Documents released through Wiki Leaks are painting an alarming picture of Conservative collusion with U.S interests to force through U.S. style copyright legislation.

    New Democrat Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay) says the leaks raise serious questions about the role played by former Industry Ministers Maxime Bernier and Tony Clement.

  • MPAA’s Bogus ‘Piracy’ Numbers Mean It Thinks Downloaders Would Buy 200 More DVDs Per Year

    Over the years we’ve had plenty of fun with the MPAA’s bogus use of stats when it comes to “piracy” claims. They’re really laughable, and it would actually be kind of funny… if policy makers and the press didn’t actually believe those numbers and pass bad legislation based on them. Even the one time that the MPAA admitted its piracy stats were totally wrong, it was too late to stop a law that was passed on the basis of those bogus numbers.

  • ACTA

    • Doubts linger over ACTA compatibilty with European Union law

      European parliamentarians in the legal affairs committee have once again cast doubt on the efficacy of the controversial ACTA agreement, but stopped short of declaring it illegal.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Government of Canada Enters 21st Century

I was poking around a GC site when I found that “Linux” was a supported OS. Not only that but they supported Fedora Core 8 or Ubuntu 7.1 and FireFox 2.0.0.6+. I had none of those (Ubuntu 7.1 should probably be Ubuntu 7.10) but Debian GNU/Linux, the current version, Squeeze, worked just fine.

Kernel Space

• Sasken Offers Linux(R)-based Media Framework & Services on Texas Instruments’ DaVinci(TM) Digital Media Platform

• Graphics Stack

  • Untangling the Linux graphics stack

    As I tried to explain this a few times in the past to others and had trouble myself, when I started using Linux, I thought I take some time today and write down what parts comprise the Linux graphics stack and how they interact. I’ll ignore some parts which aren’t too interesting to an average user at the moment, to keep this post as consise as possible. Apart from that, I hope I’m able to put all the relevant data into one spot.

Applications

• Introducing The amazing GPS (Gimp Paint Studio)

  It would be hard to find a Linux user who´s never heard of GIMP, the incredibly powerful GNU Image Manipulation Program. Unfortunately, GPS (Gimp Paint Studio) may not be known to that many people, but it certainly deserves to be, and users deserve to know about it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Bootstrapping an Ubuntu Server on Rackspace Using Cloud-Init and Fog

• Games

  • Spirited Heart Girl’s Love Is Out !

    Winter Wolves released Spirited Heart Girl’s Love which is the yuri expansion to the popular fantasy life simulation game Spirited Heart.

  • Tetris Meets Physics In This Crazy New Version

  • Mari0 : Super Mario Bros. with a Portal Gun

  • Dungeons of Dredmor still coming to Linux!

  • Salem : New Crafting MMO for Linux Previewed at Gamescom 2011

    A new crafting MMO game Salem is coming soon to Linux. Published by Paradox Interactive and developed by Seatribe, the game is currently heavily under development with a closed alpha expected next month.

  • Unity GNU/Linux Update

    Cameron Bonde aka Vectrex has found an update on the Unity GNU/Linux Exporter that was posted earlier on LGN.

  • Unity GNU/Linux Update

  • Gametype-Revolution

  • Germany Lifts ‘Doom’ Ban After 17 Years – Toast Demons To Celebrate

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Share, Like and Connect

    An important part of the Plasma Active Contour user interface is the connection between the objects that i can view with my tablet, like images, webpages, and documents with the current activity, to help to organize your work and fun.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Get A Global Menu In GNOME Shell

    Remember Gnome2 Global Menu? It’s an applet that adds a global menu (the menu is displayed on the top panel) for Gnome 2 that wasn’t very active for a long time because Ubuntu built its own global menu. But it’s back!

  • Empathy at startup in Gnome 3

  • More GNOME 3 inanity

    In the brave new world of GNOME 3, there is no minimize button. Why? Here is the thinking behind it. Wow, he asked a whole two people — on the GNOME team! That’s not even usability testing. It’s like he asked for a focus group and no one came …

Distributions

• A distro that goes Plop

  For the most part my experiences with Plop were good.

• New Releases

  • BackBox Linux 2 penetration testing distribution released

    The BackBox development team has released version 2.0 of its penetration testing distribution. According to the developers, the latest release has a new look and feel, as well as a significant performance boost over previous versions.

    Based on Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, BackBox 2 includes the 2.6.38 Linux kernel and version 4.8.0 of the Xfce desktop environment. The release adds three new security audit sections: Vulnerability Assessment, Forensic Analysis and VoIP Analysis.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen” indepth Overview/Review

  • A Mageia Rant

    I’ve done a lot of Linux installs, but I’ve never seen this much hardware work
    right-out-of-the-box on any machine, let alone a laptop. The Win7 side couldn’t
    see the Bluetooth mouse without the driver CD, but Mageia 1 had it covered. Amazing.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Install Global Menu in Fedora 15

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta1 screenshots Tour

      • Ubuntu 11.10 beta 1 screenshot preview

      • The Ubuntu Login Sound in 5.1 Channel Glory

      • Early look on Ubuntu Friendly – Ensure the hardware you buy would supports Ubuntu!

      • Five Years At Canonical

      • Ubuntu 11.10: Proposed Aero Snap effect

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Was it my DreamLinux?

          It comprises modular structure familiar to me from SLAX with stability of Debian. Dreamlinux has ability to install on USB with persistence option. It includes all the necessary codecs for multimedia.

Devices/Embedded

• RaspberryPi — Your credit-card sized computer

  For a couple of months, I’ve been watching RaspberryPi with a lot of interest, because I think these guys are about to do something really cool for the computer industry.

• Phones

  • MeeGo to follow webOS into mobile limbo?

  • Chinaqualitycrafts.com: Intel May Stop the Development of MeeGo Platform

  • Report: Intel Stopping Development on MeeGo

  • Android

    • HTC Flyer Android 3.2 update confirmed and pictured

      A relatively complete developer test version of the Honeycomb update for HTC’s Flyer tablet appeared over the weekend, showing that, yes, HTC’s quirky 7″ tablet will indeed get an update to the tablet version of Google’s OS at some point in the future.

    • Motorola Xoom gets another price cut in the UK, now just £330

Understanding open source technologies, the ethical way

The recent times have seen many big companies and even US government face brunt of invasions by hackers from other countries, creating a huge impact on world politics.

With this trend several hackers offer help in repairing vulnerabilities in such systems. They in turn demand payments for the same, which is not ethical, because their work does not comply with pure assurance that an ethical hacker always guarantees.

Thus for us ethical hackers, this unethical wayposes a threat to our image, which is yet to be repaired in the minds of governments and people in general.

Web Browsers

• Browsers… a Wee Bit Off the Beaten Path

  Tired of those mainstream browsers like Firefox and Chrome in Linux? You have other options, folks.

SaaS

• Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos Discusses Open Source Clouds

Databases

• NSA proposes Accumulo NoSQL database to Apache

  Built on top of Apache’s Hadoop, Zookeeper and Thrift projects, Accumulo is a distributed key/value store based on the design of Google’s BigTable. Developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the Accumulo project has now been proposed to the Apache Software Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project. Accumulo’s big difference is that it has fine-grained label-based access control, which could allow different users to access a record but only see the fields they are allowed to see; the NSA developers believe such a database could work in “government, health care, and other industries where privacy is a concern”.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Another Crack in Oracle’s Case Against Google

• Oracle v. Google – Google Knocks Another (Minor) Chip Out of Oracle

  Two weeks ago Google won the right to file a motion for summary judgment on Oracle’s affirmative defense of assignor estoppel. As we explained at that time, Oracle was arguing that, since Google now employs some of the named inventors in the patents Oracle is asserting against Google, Google should be precluded from challenging the validity of those patents.

  Oracle has now decided to throw in the towel on that defense by agreeing to stipulate to its dismissal with prejudice, i.e., they cannot reassert this defense again in this case. 387 [PDF] This is not that big a deal. There was almost no chance that Oracle was going to be successful with the assignor estoppel defense (their attempt to apply it in this case went far beyond anything any court has allowed). Nevertheless, it knocks one more issue off the table. Note that the dismissal with prejudice on this defense is not final until the judge enters the order, but given the parties have agreed to the stipulation, that is a mere formality.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Software Freedom Day to be Celebrated September 17, 2011

• Software Freedom Day

• IT’S JUST “THE BEGINNING”

Project Releases

• wdiff 1.0.0 released

  So what has changed? As user noticeable changes we have updated translations for Updated Dutch, French, Danish and Slovenian as well as a completely new translation file for Ukrainian thanks to Yuri Chornoivan. The code will now give more useful results in case the diff program either cannot be executed or fails for some reason.

Public Services/Government

• Can Whitehall open up to open source?

  What’s Whitehall’s attitude to software procurement? A cynic might sum it up as “nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft”.

  The current government has vowed to change the civil service mindset that has always preferred to spend money with the biggest firms and has been conservative about open source software.

  The Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has vowed to create a level playing field for open source as part of a drive to cut costs.

  Now a BBC Freedom of Information (FOI) request has given us a glimpse of how big the challenge will be.

• Government a closed shop for open source

  Amid promises from the current Government to give greater opportunities to open-source providers, the BBC made a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests aimed at discovering the use of non-proprietary software in Whitehall.

  The figures from each department are hardly conclusive and vary in detail, but point to a situation in which conservatism rules the day, with civil-service buyers reluctant to look past low-risk, high-cost packages from big-name suppliers.

• Indian Government Takes the Open Source Route

  The draft ‘Policy On Device Drivers For Procurement Of Hardware For e-Governance’ states that the, “Government of India (GOI) endeavours to provide e-governance services, which are technology-neutral, cost-effective, interoperable and vendor-neutral. The GOI Policy on open standards is a step towards meeting this objective in the development of e-governance applications.” The policy will be applicable in all new e-governance projects, as well as in existing ones.

• Department for Transport Embraces Open Source Platform and Cloud-Based Hosting in Latest Kainos Project

  The Department for Transport (www.dft.gov.uk/) has become the latest central Government organisation to extend its relationship with Causeway, the application management services arm of Kainos, with a new contract to support the Department’s web activities and migration to a cloud-based open source platform.

Armageddon of IT

The “innocent” third parties for this change could either ship their products in virtual machines paying the “tax” or they could port their software to GNU/Linux. Either way would cost ISVs some money but all the software makers owe the manufacturers of all that lovely hardware a lot, I figure. They should be glad to contribute to software freedom. End users might need some retraining but the OEMs could easily host training sites to prepare users. There could be lots of opportunity for smaller ISVs to compete against the big guys if they can get software working on GNU/Linux sooner than the big guys.

Health/Nutrition

• Nurses to Obama: Heal America, Tax Wall Street!

  As President Obama gets ready for his big jobs speech Thursday, America’s nurses have a message for him. “Heal America, Tax Wall Street!” the signs read as nurses rallied in front of 61 Congressional offices this week. The nurses are proposing a bold alternative to the “cut, cut, cut” rhetoric emanating from Washington, D.C.

Cablegate

• Cables mentioning “Special 301″

  Below are links to two web page pages that have links to 973 U.S. Department of State cables identified on September 5, 2011, using the http://cablegatesearch.net/ tool for searching 251,287 Wikileaks cables, and the search term, “special 301.”

• “Who is Wikileaks?…A huge lie!” Bulgarian PM Borisov comments on the cables…

• India’s Mayawati says ‘Wikileaks founder has gone mad’

• WikiLeaks cable: Gaddafi funded, trained CPP-NPA rebels

Finance

• Pray for Goldman Sachs

  Because no amount of money ultimately protects you against the collapse of a nation, against raging compatriots in the streets too desperate to care anymore. Look at Rome, Greece, Rwanda, Russia (twice recently — the Czars, then the Commies). Take a look at Gaddafi, Hussein and all the other leaders in the Middle East who have been feasting off their people.

• WHo Do You THiNK BuiLT AMeRiCa?

  Watch the news this Labor Day. You will have the unique opportunity to hear and see politicians, robbers, thieves and human strip miners tell you about how they have the best interests of “working” American men and women at heart.

Civil Rights

• Facebook Complains About German Sites Changing Functionality Of ‘Like’ Button To Comply With Law

  Who’s more powerful when it comes to determining how social voting functionality works in Germany? The government or Facebook? You may recall a few weeks ago there were reports of a German official effectively banning the Facebook “like” button on third party sites as a privacy violation. While it doesn’t say it’s officially in response to this, the German news site Heise implemented a neat little workaround, in which you have to first click on the icon to “activate” it, and then you can click the “like” (Google translation of the original German). Under this system, the “like” button isn’t loaded until a user clicks on it, thus there’s no issue of Facebook automatically tracking folks via the button.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Limpag: Why you (likely) don’t need to pay for PC software

  This provides an opportunity for Linux, a free and open source operating system that anyone can download and use, to be more widely adopted in the desktop. Linux is dominant in the mobile space with Android. Apart from the wrong impressions that it is difficult to use, Linux failed to gain much traction in the desktop because people were tied to specific software that worked only on Windows.

Kernel Space

• About git rebase and more

• Texas Instruments Has New Open-Source Driver

  Update: David Airlie has replied to say he would rather not merge the plug-in portion of the driver unless there is an open-source module to take avantage of the plug-in API. Rob Clark has responded that he expects an open user within a month or so. This may put the OMAP driver out of reach for merging in the Linux 3.2 kernel, but would then become a target for integration in the Linux 3.3 kernel.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing and configuring a Ventrilo VOIP server

  • Changing the Port on tomcat

  • The Perfect Desktop – Pinguy OS 11.04

  • How to delete DigiNotar CA certificate from Firefox

  • SSH: Tips And Tricks You Need

  • How To Upgrade VMware ESXi 3.5 To 4.1 Update 1 (Free Version)

• Games

  • Marball Odyssey is out for GNU/Linux!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • the on-screen keyboard

    We have an on-screen (or, if you prefer, virtual or software) keyboard for Plasma. It can run independently of the shell by way of the plasma-keyboardcontainer application (which we use in Plasma Active) or the Keyboard Plasmoid that comes as part of the kdeplasma-addons repository.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • BackBox Linux 2 released!

    The BackBox team is proud to announce the release of BackBox Linux 2.

    BackBox 2 features the following upstream components: Ubuntu 11.04, Linux Kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0

    The images (32bit & 64bit) can be downloaded from the following location:

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Open Source: Mandriva 2011 vs Mageia 1

    As of today I find myself in the position of deciding whether or not to stick with my previously preferred distribution, Mandriva Linux.

  • Open Source: Live Migration of Mandriva to Mageia

    I took the plunge to migrate my personal / business desktop PC from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 today (Sunday, 4 September 2011). I used the instructions from this page: Migrate from Mandriva Linux. Specifically the section titled, “b) Upgrading inline, using urpmi (CLI)”. The migration is roughly three quarters done as I type this. I decided to try to use the PC while I ran the migration from console 1 (Ctrl Alt F1). In preparation for this I closed programs I suspected would be most affected. Such as:

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux: A Closer Look

          After reviewing Bodhi Linux I had some time to really play around with the system. Preferring a minimal environment, I decided to check out what the minimal installation theme had to offer. One thing is for sure, when Bodhi thinks you want minimal it takes you seriously. I found myself looking at a clock. That was the only gadget on the desktop… there wasn’t even a task bar. Now if this sounds like I’m complaining let me set you straight: I asked for minimal and I expected no less, so seeing this was quite a pleasant surprise. It means that if needed I can build my desktop from the ground up.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • 10 Reasons Why iPhone 5 Doesn’t Stand a Chance Against Motorola Droid Bionic

      Some retail locations have received all the tools necessary to sell the much anticipated Motorola Droid Bionic. With a surprise Verizon Korean translated commercial showing an additional 31-seconds frame revealing Sept. 8 release date, expect droid Bionic to be launched on Thursday.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Medion hides Android 3.2 tablet behind closed doors

    IFA 2011 Medion joined the throng of vendors touting an Android 3.2-based tablet at IFA, though it kept its offering, the LifeTab P9514 behind closed doors.

  • Why the Desktop Mode is necessary on Linux-based tablets?

    Many have predicted, that tablets will replace netbooks completely. While I cannot agree with this absolute statement, I admit that tablets serve a set of use-cases better than netbooks. The touch-interface and low power-consumption of tablets make content consumption more comfortable (e.g. no heating, no fan-noise, longer battery runtime, less weight to lug around…etc).

    That said, there are areas where tablets just cannot give enough. For example, any kind of work which requires more serious input while being mobile. The problem of efficient input can be solved with accessories like a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Usually, when you prepare your tablet for extra-home journeys, you buy a case which also hosts the keyboard.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• August 2011 GNU Toolchain Update

  RMS is working on a press release which will grant a special exception to the GPL to anyone who is using one of the affected tarballs. In the meantime new tarballs have been uploaded to the FSF FTP repository with the missing sources added. The new tarballs have an ‘a’ suffix to their name, but otherwise behave in exactly the same way as the tarballs they replace. So for example the latest 2.21 binutils release tarball is now:

• GNU Health at Savannah

  Health (GNU Health) is now an official GNU Project software. We’re the new kid in town at Savannah, but the project has been around since 2008.

Public Services/Government

• Democracy and cyberspace

  ou have often argued that the implementation of the White Paper ‘Open Source Vision – Nurturing the Proliferation of Open Source Software’, authored by the Malta Information Technology Agency, could be as important for the future of Malta and its role in the increasingly globalised world as independence or joining the EU. But you have almost always insisted on the economic significance of the proposal, while the best-known international advocates of the Open Source Movement lay just as much emphasis on its political significance from the point of view of democratic development. What weight do you give to this political aspect in the Maltese context in relation to the rapidly and radically changing Mediterranean setting?

Tech musings – Because I can.

I think the future of the desktop OS is going to be rather irrelevant though. Like it or not, we march on to the cloud and the volume of web-based apps that people are raving about will ensure that it won’t matter which platform you are running. The cloud has many people worried. I’m not one of them.

TechBytes is reaching its first year, the collaboration project that started with Roy Schestowitz making a one line request in Identi.ca has been the focus of much of my efforts this last year, in 2008 when I first started writing Linux articles online I remember the focus of those articles was showing people why Linux was far better than a Windows experience. I see myself having to spend less time doing that since even the tech uninterested are seeming to understand there can be a better (and happier) existence outside of Microsoft products.

Health/Nutrition

• Obama Administration Delays Life-Saving Smog Standards

  Today the Obama Administration made a decision that will endanger the health of tens of thousands of Americans. Its choice to delay stronger standards for smog lets polluters off the hook and leaves Americans with sicker family members and higher medical costs.

  Smog standards exist because smog is dangerous to human health. It causes respiratory illness, cardiac disease, and premature death. Though we have made progress in reducing this harmful pollution in American skies, we haven’t licked the problem yet.

Security

• Linux B-day celebrations rattled by break-in

• Tor/WikiLeaks hacker Jacob Appelbaum publishes full list of 531 compromised DigiNotar SSL-certificates. The Dutch government has shared it with him

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Obama: (Still) Killing Terrorists the Bush Way

  On an upcoming edition of PBS’ Frontline, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo argues that the CIA under President Obama is straight-up Bushian. “With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations,” Rizzo says. (Watch a clip of the Rizzo interview here.) Glenn Greenwald points out that this shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been paying attention.

  The real news: Frontline also reports that, during the 2008 campaign, Obama promised the CIA that it he had every intention of staying the course set by the Bush administration. That information, if it had come out at the time, might have damaged Obama’s end-the-war, stop-the-torture campaign mojo.

• Firms Aided Libyan Spies

  The recently abandoned room is lined with posters and English-language training manuals stamped with the name Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, which installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: “Help keep our classified business secret. Don’t discuss classified information out of the HQ.”

Cablegate

• In Defense Of WikiLeaks: Looking At Cables On Pharmaceutical Drugs And Trade Pressures

  Like many others, I have spent the past several days combing through countless US Department of State cables. I am primarily looking at the cables that describe our government’s efforts to drive up the price of medicine in developing countries. This is an act of state-sponsored violence that is rarely reported by the New York Times, the Guardian or other newspapers that had received early copies of the cables.

  I am also looking at the news of and the reaction to WikiLeaks’ failure to withhold access to cables that include the names of sources of intelligence, putting at risk the lives of the persons so named.

• WikiLeaks: The five funniest cables about the ‘war on drugs’

• Wikileaks Discloses The Reason(s) Behind China’s Shadow Gold Buying Spree

  Wondering why gold at $1850 is cheap, or why gold at double that price will also be cheap, or frankly at any price? Because, as the following leaked cable explains, gold is, to China at least, nothing but the opportunity cost of destroying the dollar’s reserve status. Putting that into dollar terms is, therefore, impractical at best, and illogical at worst. We have a suspicion that the following cable from the US embassy in China is about to go not viral but very much global, and prompt all those mutual fund managers who are on the golden sidelines to dip a toe in the 24 karat pool.

• This week in WikiLeaks press: 25-31 August, 2011

• Mugabe to die by 2013 – WikiLeaks

  obert Mugabe told a former US ambassador that the ageing president had prostate cancer that would kill him by 2013, leaked US embassy cables show.

  Central bank chief Gideon Gono made the claims in remarks to James McGee in June 2008 – when Zimbabwe was mired in election violence following Mugabe’s loss to then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of polls in March.

• NIF Officer: Demise of Jewish State ‘No Tragedy’ – Wikileaks

  A senior New Israel Fund officer told a U.S. official in 2010 that the disappearance of the Jewish state would not be a tragedy, according to a document that was leaked by Wikileaks.

  The officer is Hedva Radovanitz, who was at the time (February 2010) NIF Associate Director in Israel, according to the document.

  The document relates to the attempts to pass a law that would demand transparency of political NGOs operating in Israel that are funded by foreign countries.

• Julian Assange: The 60 Minutes Interview

  Naturally, “60 Minutes” wanted to hear from Assange himself. But for producers Tanya Simon and Howard Rosenberg and correspondent Steve Kroft just getting this interview was a story in and of itself.

• Drug war cables: ‘Burn poppies, burn’

• The Cult Of Julian Assange Worshippers

  It all began so innocently. I started hanging out with a bad crowd on the intertubes, digging into secret filez about energy wars and government corruption. The Afghan War Logs. The Iraq War Logs. Suddenly I was being called a “WikiLeaks groupie”.

  And it was true! Yes, I was revelling in this subversive counter-culture! I was spending hours and hours on my computer, chatting with other “groupies”, posting my findings on Twitter, writing up stories the media was ignoring and governments didn’t want people to know. I began writing for WikiLeaks Central and even got re-tweeted by Mr. @wikileaks himself – an intoxicating high for a crazy, deluded cyber-hippy like myself.

  It was just a fashionable thing, obviously. It would have passed soon enough, I’m sure. But then along came CableGate, with over 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables just begging to be investigated. How could I walk away now? Ignoring my wife’s futile pleas, I launched myself into the adventure like an alcoholic diving into a beer-filled swimming pool. Alas!

• Nadra outsourcing plans in disarray after WikiLeaks

  The National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) is bound to come under pressure to scrap its decision of outsourcing its work in the UK to a private security company after the WikiLeaks revealed that Interior Minister Rehman Malik had offered the US all the records of the Nadra.

• WikiLeaks Cable Shows US Embassy Believed Jakarta Election Was ‘Rigged’

  A leaked confidential US diplomatic cable reveals that the US Embassy in Jakarta believed the 2007 gubernatorial election won by Fauzi Bowo had been “rigged” by the capital’s elites.

  The cable, dated April 25, 2007, ahead of the election, was among the unredacted cables released by WikiLeaks over the past week. It is believed to have been written by the then-deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy, John Heffern.

• Wikileaks – Raw Notes On Ghana

  1. Embassy was approached by two advisors to National Democratic Congress (NDC) candidate John Atta-Mills, Edward Nunoo and Sylvanos Tamakloe, who told Political Office that Electoral Commission (EC) Chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan was being pressured by the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) to announce false results that would be supplied by the NPP. The EC Chairman told Ambassador that the allegations were “utter nonsense.” #WIKILEAKS

• Full-Disclosure, Unredacted WikiLeaks, Security and The Guardian

  The Guardian doesn’t “get” openness when it suits their purpose

• Wikileaks ‘exposes’ fierce fight in gov’t for control of Ghana oil

  The latest release of leaked diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks has revealed some persons around the Presidency have tried to use their influence to manipulate control of the country’s oil resources for their personal gain.

• LapdogCable Reveals Extent Of Lapdoggery From Swedish Govt On Copyright Monopoly

• Look Hu’s Coming to Dinner: How to Prepare for a Visit by a Chinese Leader

• Wikileaks throws new light on Nepal king’s surrender

  When Nepal’s controversial king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah handed over power to a resurrected parliament on April 24, 2006 and faced the abolition of his throne, it might not have been entirely the thought of his subjects’ wellbeing that prompted the move.

• Wikileaks: ICE / IFPI Infiltrate Pirate Topsites

  A diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks reveals that entertainment industry groups and law enforcement combined their efforts to infiltrate Warez Scene topsites. One of the strategies they discuss during a 2009 meeting is to have an informant leak music before the official release date, to gain trust of the site’s operator and gain access to the highly secured Scene servers.

• Australia: no plans to prosecute Assange over cables

  Attorney general says authorities have no plans to prosecute WikiLeaks founder, despite claims that unredacted embassy cables reveal identity of Australian intelligence officer

• China and its propaganda — A glimpse

• Wikileaks: India’s Mayawati ‘sent jet to collect shoes’

  The chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh state sent an empty private jet to get a pair of sandals from Mumbai, leaked US diplomatic cables say.

• WikiLeaks’ Asian field day

  In Indonesia, the national police are discovered to be using a hard-line Islamic group as its hidden “attack dog.” In Indonesia, octogenarian Singaporean founder Lee Kuan Yew calls Islam a “venomous religion”. In Malaysia, UMNO leaders are “willing to blacken Malaysia’s reputation to ensure the end to opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s political challenge.”

• Wikileaks: airBaltic cancelled planned flights to Iran after U.S. pressure

  Latvian national airline airBaltic cancelled its plans to begin flights between Riga and the Iranian capital Tehran in 2010 after pressure from the United States, according to confidential cables by U.S. diplomats released by “WikiLeaks”.

• Helium Diplomacy and the Jamaican Menace

  When policymakers are asked to name the terrorist breeding grounds that keep them up at night, they’re likely to mention Pakistan’s tribal areas, southern Afghanistan, or Yemen. Sunny Jamaica doesn’t usually make the list. But one 2010 cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Kingston warned that the country “potentially presents fertile ground for those who might commit acts of violence in the name of Islamist extremism.”

• Vatican pressured CBCP to back off Arroyo resign call: WikiLeaks

  MANILA, Philippines – The Vatican pressured the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) not to support protests calling for the resignation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2005, a US embassy cable released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks revealed.

• Feared clan outgunned Philippine military: WikiLeaks

  The 2,000-strong private army of a powerful clan suspected of carrying out the Philippines’ worst political massacre was better armed than the military and police, leaked US embassy cables showed.

• WikiLeaks’ obvious truth

  People must seek to protect not only WikiLeaks, but also the mechanism by which the information enters into our purview.

• Ex-Blackwater guards kept working in Iraq: US cable

  A leaked US diplomatic cable says that “hundreds” of former employees of Blackwater, which was barred from Iraq over a deadly 2007 shooting, later worked with other firms guarding US diplomats here.

  Iraq announced in January 2009 that it would not renew Blackwater’s operating licence due to a September 16, 2007 incident in which guards protecting a US diplomatic convoy opened fire in Baghdad’s busy Nisur Square, killing at least 14 civilians.

• 2011-09-02 Polish CIA prison: US and Poland had been trying to “put story to rest” #wlfind [Update 2]

• Smog readings had China hot and bothered

  This capital city’s skies were clogged with pollution, as is often the case, and China’s government was concerned. So it summoned officials of the US embassy to a meeting.

  But the session had nothing to do with hazy skies. Rather, Chinese officials were peeved that the Americans were monitoring pollution themselves, and posting their more precise findings, which usually judged the smog far worse than official Chinese readings, on Twitter for anyone to read.

• Curtain closing on Gillard experiment

  As gut-wrenching as it will be for Labor MPs to dispatch their second prime minister in a row, and to suffer all the bad jokes and gibes – including mine of Australia becoming the Italy of the Pacific, with four prime ministers in four years (Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Rudd?) – they have little choice. Gillard has shown she is not up to the job. Wayne Swan, who will also have to go when Gillard does, has described her as tough as nails. He’s right. One problem. Tough does not equal smart. She has made too many mistakes and shown a worrying inability to learn from any of them. Under her, Labor has fallen to its lowest levels ever.

• WikiLeaks – Rawlings uses drugs

  WikiLeaks has published a US Embassy cable that says former President Jerry John Rawlings uses drugs and his finance minister at that time was alarmingly incompetent.

Finance

• FHFA Sues 17 Banks Over Massive Mortgage Losses At Fannie and Freddie

  The ripple effects of the financial crisis continue to take their toll on banks, as reckless lending during the bonanza years catches up to them. Friday after the closing bell, and ahead of a Labor Day weekend, the Federal Housing Finance Agency confirmed it was suing 17 different financial institutions for misrepresenting the quality of mortgage backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Ex-Goldman Exec Started SEC Job After Earning $57 Million

  Weeks after Eileen P. Rominger left Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), she took the helm of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s investment management division as one of the wealthiest people to ever join the agency.

  Rominger reported $57.5 million in income from New York- based Goldman Sachs in a financial disclosure form covering 2010 and 2011. She also reported making $2.3 million to $13.2 million in investment income since the start of 2010.

Censorship

• The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech

  Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).