07.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: India’s next generation may commoditise computers with GNU/Linux (and other good news)
GNU/Linux
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From time to time, we like to give our sponsors the ability to talk about their products and share them with our readers. These posts are clearly labeled as “Sponsored Posts” as to not confuse them with our regular daily content. Our sponsors are offering products that are targeted to our reader demographics, so hopefully you’ll find something that is appealing as you read through these posts.
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AIX has two tools that, as a Linux enthusiast, I’m envious of: makesysb, and cfgmgr. The first tool, makesysb, can clone a running system onto a bootable DVD. It’s very similar to other cloning tools like G4L and Clonezilla, but it’s built into the operating system, and doesn’t require a reboot. It’s great for system migration, and for keeping a backup around for disaster recovery. We try to keep makesysb images on DVD for all of our systems quarterly.
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I follow a number of technology websites, video and podcasts when I get the time. This video has hit me as a bit of a surprise as it’s from someone that is normally pro-linux. Here’s my response to the issues raised.
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India
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The Linux-based computer is equipped with an Internet browser, a PDF reader and several other facilities, she said.
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An inexpensive laptop is one of the most commonly-discussed “want” devices for any poor second or third world country. While the OLPC $100 laptop, with its Linux OS and hand-cranking charger has been a serious boon, it’s still fairly expensive to produce and sell to interested companies, so the Indian government has decided to fill its own need by producting a $35 laptop that features a touch screen, 2GB of storage, USB port, color display, and WiFi Internet capabilities.
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The happy man you see above is not the nine gazillionth owner of an iPad, but the Indian minister for HR Development, Kapil Sibal. What he’s holding in his hand is, he claims, a $35 tablet that will give the OLPC a run for its money. It is, he told the press, “our answer to MIT’s $100 computer.” Developed by students and professors at India’s tech universities–including the IITs of Madras and Bombay.
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Audiocasts
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In this episode: A SCO representative finally reveals some of the Linux code SCO had a problem with and OpenSUSE 11.3 is here. Listen to the results of our new challenge, and we ask whether the likes of Red Hat, Novell and Canonical contribute enough back to the community.
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OpenStack, open source cloud computing software for building reliable cloud infrastructure.
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This week on the show: OpenSolaris is in trouble, Droid X self-destructs if you try to flash it, OpenStack is announced, a discussion about Zeitgeist and Gnome as an upstream, more Antennagate and the big Thesis / WordPress GPL debate.
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IBM
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Inside IBM’s dev-and-test cloud environment, there is an ‘open’ foundation architecture which supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise, as well as Java. For extensibility, clients can work with their own images, as well as images from IBM Mashup Center,
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Kernel Space
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Several patches submitted by a Google developer will enable the kernel to push considerably more data through network cables on multi-core systems. Some of the LAN and Wi-Fi drivers also promise greater throughput, or to use less power, due to various driver enhancements.
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The “scalability of Linus,” in fact, was the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet earlier this month on LWN, and it’s sparked quite a discussion.
“The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the ‘official’ repository,” Corbet begins.
A problem with that scenario, he notes, is the potential for repeats of what calls “the famous ‘Linus burnout’ episode of 1998.”
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Graphics Stack
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We have talked about the ATI R300g driver a lot lately since it’s working quite well with the R500 hardware and many times is faster than the classic Mesa driver while it also provides OpenGL 2.1 support (compared to OpenGL 1.5 with the classic stack) and works with more games and applications. The R300g driver, which started out as a Google Summer of Code project by Corbin Simpson, soon enough may end up replacing the classic Mesa R300 driver as the default open-source driver. Unfortunately, the R600g driver hasn’t been moving along quite as fast.
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If the impressive rate of Gallium3D improvements was not enough, there’s more good news for those of you running ATI Radeon R300-R500 graphics cards (up through the Radeon X1000 series) with the open-source Gallium3D driver: the Wine graphics support just got a tiny bit better. Committed to the Mesa repository this afternoon is support for the GL_ARB_depth_clamp OpenGL extension within the Mesa state tracker and as of right now it’s hooked-up for use by the R300g driver.
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Applications
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A few words of warning before you start adding Deskbar-applet to the panel. It might take some time to start, took around 10+ seconds on my system. So, be patient. Once done, you know where to find it. Now, click on the icon and you will see a search bar.
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Linux only: Free utility Ear Candy makes your sound system smarter. If you’re listening to music and a Skype call comes in, or you load a YouTube video, Ear Candy gently lowers your music volume to let the other sounds through.
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Proprietary
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There has been quite a bit of interesting chatter and a whole lot of speculation within the VMware community lately about the future and viability of its free VMware Server product. VMware does seem focused on the vSphere product and how it ultimately relates to cloud computing, but have they turned a blind eye to VMware Server?
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Instructionals
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Times are still tough out there, but our needs and desires don’t always flag just because the economy does. If an accident or an equipment failure has punched an unexpected hole in your computing life, you may be in need of a system—any system—to fill it. Or maybe you’ve discovered that your family just needs one more box to use as a Web terminal to keep the more powerful systems free more often. Whatever the circumstance, you may be tempted to drop $500 or even more on one of the cheaper, pre-fab models you can find at Costco, Wal-Mart, or from one of the major manufacturers. But once you’ve factored in all the attendant costs, taxes, and shipping, you could be spending a lot more than you planned—and that’s something to avoid, especially when every penny counts.
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For many users the standard email setup is great. It does everything they need: it sends and receives email (even HTML email if you so desire). But for others a little extra is needed…especially in the form of security. One way to secure your emails is to add a layer of encryption to them. This can be in the form of a simple signature or as much as a fully signed and encrypted email. Believe it or not, this is quite simple with the Evolution email client.
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Games
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0 A.D., the open-source RTS game that could radically alter the gaming scene on Ubuntu when it’s completed, recently reached another milestone with its third pre-alpha release. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s playable yet in any meaningful sense. But it has come a long way since we last checked in with the project in March 2010, so here are some updates.
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Thanks to humberto for letting us know Space Dream Factory have released their first beta of the game Babylon 5: I’ve Found Her for Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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This week is on skids right now. I am so busy during the day that I cannot even take my morning coffee break to get an entry started! Lunchtime is non existent, and tonight I walked out the office at 9pm.
KDE 4 was nice to work with and aside for my minor reservations here and there I really have no major faults to find with it.
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GNOME Desktop
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Give your desktop a dramatic make over with the ‘Elegant GNOME’ theme pack.
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It may have been a tiny bit misleading the other day, to drop a hint at a floppy-based OS that superseded anything I was discussing at the time. It’s true that I do have something very useful and very flexible to mention — mostly as a note to myself, of course — but it wasn’t 100 percent accurate to allude to it in the context of floppy OSes.
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Reviews
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So how does the netbook edition look on my dell mini ? amazing ! the icons/interface look better and the interface setup is perfect for the small screen estate of the netbook. the old 8.04 ubuntu version was boring , and this version is alive and makes me want to use the netbook even more. the 8.04 version doesn’t have an update OS feature compared to the later releases so it’s best to upgrade to a later version or 9.10. I can see why a lot of netbook ubuntu users are upgrading to the netbook version , it simply rocks !
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Mandrake
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If you have some spare time, you can give Mandriva Spring 2010 a try. I’m interested in two other products by Mandriva, the InstantOn and Flash. InstantOn boots in less than 10 seconds while Flash is a mobile desktop in a USB key. Unfortunately, they are not free.
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Now is a good time to change, so I’m leaving Mandriva at the end of this month (I’m already off, so don’t search me on irc / mail ).
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Debian Family
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Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it’s also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian’s package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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OMG! reader Sebastian stopped by the OMG! Mailbox to drop off a link to this immensely impressive Dell/Ubuntu promotional video that, curiously, I – nor anyone I showed this to prior to posting – had ever come across previously.
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Flavours and Variants
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Breaking with past tradition, the Linux Mint folks have done away with “Community Editions”, instead bringing the non-Gnome flavors of Mint fully under the Mint umbrella. Linux Mint 9 LXDE is now in general release. Here are my thoughts.
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As time goes on, I am becoming more and more fond of Linux Mint. The latest version of Mint (Isadora) was released back in May, and when I reviewed it I fell in love with it. However, I’m primarily a KDE user so I’ve been anxiously awaiting the KDE edition, which is about to be released. Will it be worth the wait? Absolutely.
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Summary: Sabily 10.04 is a fine update for anyone looking for a Muslim version of Ubuntu. It takes all of Ubuntu 10.04’s new features and gives them an Islamic flavor.
Rating: 4/5
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Phones
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HP and Palm officials are now largely silent on plans for WebOS as they figure out the details of what to do with it. There’s been some talk about using WebOS in HP printers (perhaps so they can directly run some applications around photo editing and document management) and porting WebOS to work on tablets, not just smartphones — both are obvious directions for WebOS.
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Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the GENIVI Alliance has chosen MeeGo as the basis of their next reference release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI).
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Code for America has a rather novel notion. It is that the U.S. would be a far, far better place if we stopped complaining about local government and started hacking it
No, no, they don’t mean hacking it open. Well, actually, they do in a way. What Code for America would like to do is to open up city governments to citizens and move into the 21st century. That’s because, as Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media stated at the The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, we need to stop thinking of the government as a semi-broken candy machine and get to work on fixing it.
The “fixing it” part is where non-profit Code for America Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka wants to see developers start devoting their efforts. Why? Because she’s found that much of the government isn’t just using out-dated IT, it’s using idiotic IT practices.
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Facebook has popularized the use of the term “social graph” as a way of describing all the various social connections you have to people in your life, both online and in the real world. But Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch.com and an angel investor in a number of web startups, says in a blog post published today that there is more than just one kind of social graph — in fact, he argues that there are actually about half a dozen different kinds, including graphs related to location and recommendations. Whether he is right or not, one thing seems pretty clear: Facebook not only wants to own them all, but is well on its way to doing so.
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Newspapers
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Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.
“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.”
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Rupert Murdoch is trying to make news at the Times and Sunday Times in London—but he’s not reporting on it. Will his paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that’s being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2£ ($3) a week for what’s heretofore been free.
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Science
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An Australian company is developing a laser tracking system that will help prevent collisions between satellites and space debris, thanks to a $4 million grant from the Federal Government.
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Astronomers have discovered the most massive stars known, including one at more than 300 times the mass of our sun – double the size that scientists thought heavyweight stars could reach.
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Security/Aggression
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A newly-developed heat-ray gun that burns the skin but doesn’t cause permanent injury is now with US troops in Afghanistan.
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In a grainy, black-and-white video that looks like a home movie of a UFO attack a sleek aircraft streaks through the sky one minute, only to burst into flames the next and plummet into the sea. The silent video, which Raytheon Co. debuts Monday at the U.K.’s Farnborough International Air Show 2010, however, is not science fiction. The defense contractor says it depicts part of a test conducted in May during which the U.S. Navy used a solid-state laser to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles over the Pacific Ocean.
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Although my intent is not to start the next GNOME/KDE-level war, it seems there must be a happy medium between total desktop insecurity and total desktop unusability. Linux offers so many ways to secure data that it’s important to realize it’s okay for folks to have different needs and desires. Sure, there are some basic security measures we all should take—things like:
* Don’t write your password on a sticky note fastened to your monitor.
* Don’t leave your e-mail account logged in on a public computer.
* Keep your system updated.
* Do have a password.
* Don’t use “password” as your password.
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Environment
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Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size – extra large.
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Animal Abuse
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Oh, and did we mention that the bottles come in stuffed animals-like stuffed animals that were once alive? The 12 bottles have been made featuring seven dead stoats (a kind of weasel), four squirrels and one rabbit. James Watt, one of the two guys behind BrewDog, put it better than we ever could: “The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing.” Just like we’ve all been waiting for!
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Finance
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Canadian stocks rose for the first time in three days, led by energy and raw material producers, as commodities advanced and some traders speculated the U.S. Federal Reserve would try to provide further economic stimulus.
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As general counsel of Goldman Sachs, Gregory Palm clearly has a very good income. Nor, some who know him say, does the Harvard Law School graduate—who grew up the son the a union electrician in upstate New York—live high on the hog.
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Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bond trader at the center of the government’s fraud probe against the firm, denied regulatory charges that he misled investors.
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Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) reacted to the news of Goldman Sachs’s settlement with the SEC in an interview with Post staff writer Zach Goldfarb: “I think it’s premature to either conclude that there’s not going to be any criminal action here… ”
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The weekend’s papers were filled with talk of a man named Oosthuizen, tests on BP’s well cap, and the continued fallout from Goldman Sachs’s recent $550 million settlement with the SEC.
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Now that Goldman Sachs has likely put its troubles with the Securities and Exchange Commission behind it, can the company finally breathe a sigh of relief?
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said second-quarter profit dropped 82 percent, missing analysts’ estimates on a slide in trading revenue, five days after settling U.S. regulators’ fraud allegations. Revenue and profit were the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2008.
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World markets fell Tuesday after lower than expected earnings from U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs and another downbeat report on the U.S. housing market.
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Matthew McCormick, a portfolio manager at Cincinnati-based Bahl & Gaynor Inc., talks with Bloomberg’s Lori Rothman and Dominic Chu about Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s second-quarter profit and the outlook for the U.S. banking industry.
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Citigroup Inc. hired Rob Biro from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to lead global oil trading in Singapore, the first U.S. bank to base a worldwide trading head in the city, according to two people with knowledge of the appointment.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Outrage and concern finally boiled over in Istanbul on Saturday as thousands took to the streets in protest of Turkey’s Internet Censorship policy.
Physical protests of Internet policy are really a never-before-seen occurance, even with all the twists and turns of cyberspace regulation that have occurred in the past decade. While the protests thankfully remained peaceful, they drove home a strong point of disapproval to the Turkish government that will hopefully be heard and acknowledged.
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A leading Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for new rules to require people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.
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Australia’s web-censors have outdone themselves. After Stephen Conroy (the Australian minister notorious for proposing the Great Firewall of Australia) promised greater transparency in his government’s efforts to regulate the Internet, they replied to a Freedom of Information request on plans to monitor Australians’ internet traffic with a document that was 90 percent blacked out…
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Seven Republican senators have announced a plan to curb the Obama administration’s push to impose controversial Net neutrality regulations on the Internet.
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Copyrights
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Acting as a middleman between business owners and graphic designers, the 99designs site hosts contests in which clients post their needs–website design, logos, print packages–and designers compete to fill them. Instead of bidding for the job, designers submit finished work tailored to the client specifications in the contest listing. 99designs calls it a win-win scenario: Its clients gain access to the site’s pool of 73,000 active designers, while the designers are given a chance to compete for “upwards of $600,000 in awards paid out monthly.”
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For many, many years, we’ve pointed to the growing body of research on how the fashion industry thrives, in part, because of its lack of copyright. However, time and time again, we hear about attempts by big designers to add a special fashion copyright. This makes no sense. The purpose of copyright law is to create incentives to create new works. Yet, the fashion industry is thriving. It’s highly competitive and very innovative, as designers keep looking to outdo one another. At the same time, the “knockoffs” help spread the concept of “what’s fashionable” up and down the economic spectrum in record time. This is not an industry that needs “incentives” for creativity. The only reason to put in place such a law is to prevent competition, not to encourage more innovation.
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File sharing service RapidShare doesn’t have to employ a word filter to combat the sharing of copyrighted files, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has now confirmed. The court reversed a preliminary injunction against RapidShare it issued last year, handing the company another legal victory.
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It seemed the perfect way for a budding young actress to raise money for a good cause.
Inspired by her grandfather’s love of Charlie Chaplin, ten-year-old Bethany Hare dressed up like the legendary comic to star in her own video tribute.
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The band of analogue holdouts is gradually dwindling. Because they are so few and so large, the holdouts are valuable: any technology firm that can persuade the Beatles to go digital will reap fat rewards. Theft provides another stimulus. All the analogue holdouts are widely available online—just not legally. That seems to be persuading even Harry Potter to look more closely at digital distribution. As Neil Blair of the Christopher Little agency, which represents J.K. Rowling, admits, holding the books back from e-readers “is not the best strategy for combating piracy”.
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The United States will make China “a significant focus” of its beefed-up efforts to fight global piracy and counterfeiting of U.S. goods ranging from CDs to manufactured products, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
A customs officer displays a counterfeit branded mobile phone at a rubbish dump site in Kunming
A customs officer displays a counterfeit branded mobile phone at a rubbish dump site in Kunming, Yunnan province April 26, 2010.
“It’s fair to say China raises a particularly troubling set of issues,” Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, said in prepared testimony to the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Therefore, China will be a significant focus of our enforcement efforts as we address intellectual property infringement abroad,” Espinel said testifying on the Obama administration’s new intellectual property enforcement strategy, which was mandated by Congress.
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From our view here at Bandcamp HQ, yesterday’s launch of Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele less resembled a record release than a coordinated strike of ravenous piranha. In one three minute period, her fanbase snapped up $15,000 in music and merch. It didn’t let up much from there: 4,000 digital EPs were sold, the vinyl sold out, most of the high end packages disappeared in minutes, and at the time of this writing, it looks like every other package will be gone in a matter of days. Late last night I caught up with Amanda’s Man-Who-Make-Internet-Go, Sean Francis, just before he passed out (he’d slept five hours in the last 48).
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We wrote about all the top-notch lawyers Google used defending its YouTube division against Viacom’s copyright claims.
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In fact, as a glance at the composition of the PPCA’s board underlines, the agency is run largely by and for the record industry. The board is stacked with record industry executives such as Warner’s Ed St John, Sony’s Denis Handlin and Universal’s George Ash, along with former Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison and prominent artist manager Bill Cullen. Representing around 75 per cent of the recorded music industry by sales, the PPCA is effectively a legalised cartel. (Like APRA, it even has a special dispensation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to operate as a monopolistic collection agency.)
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ACTA
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Over the past week, I have had several posts on ACTA in the wake of the most recent leaked text, including a scorecard on the major remaining areas of disagreement, one assessing the growing rift between the U.S. and E.U., Canadian positions on ACTA, the changed U.S. position on anti-circumvention rules, and a look at geographical indications, a key issue for the EU. On top of these posts, there is additional information disclosed last weekend that Luc Devigne, the lead EU negotiator is taking on new responsibilities (though the EU says he will continue on ACTA).
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The main progressive group in the European Parliament today complained to EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, that Euro MPs have been denied the documents on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations.
Mr De Gucht today held a one-hour discussion with members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs at the European Parliament. But S&D MEPs said there could be no serious debate since members do not know the content of the negotiations.
Jason Dixon Closing Remarks of DCBSDCon – BSD is Still Dying
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News links about Free/libre software
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I do not understand the concept of Free Software being evil in any way. We do not view family or community as evil. How could Free Software be evil? Families raise children and set them free. It would be frowned upon to raise children as slaves. Family, neighbours, communities and nations donate their labour and resources to help individuals and groups. That’s not evil. It is because we are social beings that we help one another.
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Have you looked at the new Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn’t need to purchase Office 2010.
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Facebook connects its 500 million users using an array of open source software to enable social networking as well as data intelligence. Facebook’s open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it.
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These days I am receiving quite a number of mails that ask the same question: If a FOSS project is sponsored by only one company or entity, do you think it’s a healthy project?
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Community. This little nine-letter word is the lifeblood of open source. Barely a day goes by without some aspect of it impacting our lives, be that via Linux, a local book club, your closest group of friends or any one of a million other places. In an age when anyone over 45 seems to have stories about the end of local communities, the open source community is thriving.
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ForgeRock/SUN
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ForgeRock today announced general availability of OpenAM 9.5 software, the latest release of the OpenAM access management product, part of the I3 Platform. This represents the first full release of OpenAM since ForgeRock commenced sponsorship of the open source OpenAM project and provides a smooth migration option for Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8 users.
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It’s significant for open source because it signals that the OpenAM community – especially the part on ForgeRock’s own team – is up to speed maintaining and evolving the code and that the transition from its former home is going well.
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I get that Oracle runs on open-source software. I know that Oracle is a major Linux supporter. But, please, please dont mistake Oracle as an open-source, open-core, or any other kind of “open” business at heart. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, is all about making billions of dollars. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what all businesses are about. But, to Ellison open source is just the means to that end and nothing else. If a program doesn’t fit into his plan, it’s not going to get supported.
So, while Oracle recently put up a page listing its native open-source projects and the ones that it inherited from Sun, don’t think for a minute that all those programs are actually going to be supported. They’re not.
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Events
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Linux.conf.au announced a Call for Papers for its 12th annual open source Linux conference for developers, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on Jan 24-29. Linux.conf.au 2011 (lca2011) starts off with two days of mini-conferences, and is followed by three days of main sessions and an “Open Day” of events and presentations that is open to the general public.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has reached an important Milestone as its new JavaScript engine “JaegerMonkey” is now faster than the current “TraceMonkey” in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0.
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A beta version of Firefox 4.0 has been released with a new look and new features
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As such, Blizzard will no longer be leading the the Evangelism group inside of Mozilla and will instead help to manage the web-facing side of Firefox full-time as the Web Platform Director. During his time at Mozilla, Blizzard notes that he has already worked closely with Mozilla’s engineering team, helping to determine what was important and what wasn’t inside of the project. Blizzard says that, while the ‘new’ job will be interesting, “It’s entirely built of soft skills: listening closely to web developers, both front end and back end.”
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SaaS
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In February 2008 Amazon S3 crashed and the whole of Amazon S3 stopped for a few hours. In March 2009 a bug inside Google Docs had allowed unintended access to some private documents. Some people with cloud concerns ask, “What if my documents, stored by the provider of the web office (eg Google Docs) are lost?” Different question: what if your laptop is stolen or your hard disk crashes? If you are using cloud services or not, it’s always a good advice to have a backup of your data.
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These hints can be used exactly the same when not using cloud services and they prove that it’s not very dangerous to use cloud. Or do you install non-open source software from sources you can’t trust? And you keep your credit card numbers secure all the time? And you do backups of your local data, don’t you?
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VMware is preparing to attack Microsoft Exchange across the IT channel. The strategy calls for VMware’s channel partners to begin selling Zimbra — an open source email system — starting on Aug. 1, 2010. Here are the details, which The VAR Guy confirmed at HostingCon.
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Pflaum also pointed out that VMware and Zimbra have no plans to build a VMware cloud and/or to host Zimbra directly for partners. Instead, Zimbra plans to leverage existing relationships with roughly 500 hosting companies that offer Zimbra.
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CMS
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In the past few days, WordPress has become entangled in a debate about WordPress theme licensing. It was specifically centered around Thesis, one of the last notable proprietary theme holdouts. Chris Pearson, who develops and sells Thesis, refuses to license Thesis under the GNU General Public License that applies to WordPress and all WordPress-derived code.
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If you’re not familiar with the background, however, the Cliff’s Notes version comes down to Thesis Theme using a license other than GPL, which created a conflict between Thesis Theme creator Chis Pearson and Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic (the parent of WordPress.com).
For more in depth coverage, please take a look at our original post about the subject, and then the follow-up as well.
Suffice it to say, we’re happy to see that Pearson will be working under GPL. It is worthy to note, however, that Thesis is now licensed under a GPL split.
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If I were really vested in this issue and had money (and my last name was Mullenweg) this is what I would do: I’d just buy a copy of Thesis and then start distributing it. From the front page of WordPress. Hell, I’d make it the default theme, push it out as a “critical update”, and announce it all on video in a leotard with my face painted up like The Ultimate Warrior. (Don’t miss the “Warrior Fine Art Gallery”!)
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Education
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So the NHS has decided not to renew a large Microsoft licensing deal. Basically it had agreed a while ago to spend £500 million on Microsoft software in return for a £300 million discount.
What a bargain!
No more though, in this time of cuts, just when we needed the money the most, the deal has been ditched and the NHS faces a massive licence bill. But it gets better; according to sources on the ground ‘the only option would be to move to free open source software’…but wait for this… ‘the staff would not move to an unfamiliar system’.
So that’s it then.
Literally they will pay for MS products with money they would otherwise use for the good. That’s how hard it is to introduce FOSS onto the desktops, even when those desktops are running crummy old DOS screens within MS XP home!
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Semi-Open Source
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Open core is usually built by a set of internal open source components held together by a dual-licensed wrapper, plus proprietary modules on the outside. One of the best examples of this is Zimbra (an excellent product on its own) but MySQL in recent editions can be included in the same group. As discussed in previous posts, dual licensing hampers contributions because it requires an explicit agreement on ceding rights to the company that employs it, in order to be able to relicense it for the proprietary edition. This means that Open Core companies, in itself, will have an easier time in monetizing their software, but will receive much less contributions in exchange. As I wrote before, it is simply not possible to get something like Linux or Apache with Open Core.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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New York, NY, July 21, 2010//Software vulnerabilities in life-sustaining medical devices such as pacemakers and infusion pumps pose a growing threat to public health, warns a new report published by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices will be presented at OSCON 2010 on July 23. It addresses the potentially fatal risk of source code defects in implantable medical devices and explores why patients, doctors and the public should insist that free and open source software be the standard approach.
“The findings of the paper are important to anyone who has a friend or loved one with a pacemaker or insulin pump,” said the paper’s author and SFLC General Counsel, Karen Sandler. “Clearly, we need mandatory, public, and broad safety review of code that runs these devices. At the very least, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must require device manufacturers to submit software to the agency for review and safe keeping.”
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Project Releases
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The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.3.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features and improved stability over previous versions.
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Government
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Kroes mentions Munich which has implemented FLOSS and open document flows but is still dragging its feet on GNU/Linux. They plan to be finished in 2013… If they run FLOSS apps, it is a puzzle to me why it is taking so long to move the OS. Maybe there is less urgency because the price of PCs dropped and they are running XP now… I just don’t know. Things like moving accounts and issuing memos on a few basic operations could be done on a weekend per department.
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Open Access/Content
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As a start and a workspace, I’ve posted the timeline I pulled together for the MIT OpenCourseWare Milestone Celebration in 2007 on the Consortium wiki. I invite the community to log onto the wiki and add additional events and items (I obviously have to cover 2008-2011 still as well), or if you are note comfortable editing the wiki, simply send me an e-mail (scarson at ocwconsortium dot org) with your items and I will add them in.
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Open Hardware
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Members of the open source hardware community publicly issued a list of standards that define a specific piece of hardware as open source. Among the signatures on the document were MIT Media Lab and Arduino lead software developer David Mellis, Adafruit founder Limor Fried, Creative Commons VP of Science John Wilbanks, and Wired editor and DIY Drones founder Chris Anderson.
There are eleven tenets to the open source hardware definition.
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Programming
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Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has a famous quote, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In the open source world, it is taken for granted that you want to open your work to the world quickly for the very simple reason that if you do, you make it possible for others to help you make it better faster (and you find the bugs).
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Standards/Consortia
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lpOD — languages & platforms OpenDocument. Definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard. Development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages. of a top-down oriented API.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, News Roundup at 4:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Latest steps taken towards operating systems freedom
GNU/Linux
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Sony did not make many friends in the tech community when the company forcibly removed the option to install Linux via a mandatory firmware update. The problem was simple: Sony had previously pushed this feature as an advantage its system held over its competitors, and later assured gamers that it would continue to be supported. That is, until Sony became spooked about the possibility of piracy. Lawsuits were filed, and Ars Technica has now learned that the court will bundle all seven suits into a single class-action case.
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GNU/Linux is an operating system. It allows us to run computers and create, find, change and display information better than that other OS:
* Of the million busiest web sites 66% use Apache
* The London Stock Exchange is switching to GNU/Linux because it works
* 90% of the top 500 supercomputers use GNU/Linux
* Brazil installed 356800 GNU/Linux desktops in schools
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Fortunately, the world is filling up with young people for whom migrating to GNU/Linux is a welcome, refreshing change. The current generation of young people will live in a world where there is choice in computing platforms. There are many forces leading to that result. One of them is exposure to GNU/Linux in schools. Another is the access to GNU/Linux on low-priced gadgets (smartphones are getting to that state soon…).
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Desktop
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First, most of the people who write me aren’t interested in the fine details of Linux. They are just sick and tired to death of Windows’ endless security problems or its costs. Indeed, most of them aren’t that interested in learning Linux. They just want a cheap operating system that will let them read e-mail, browse the Web, and run some office applications without worrying about malware.
So, here’s what I tell people who just want a good, working PC, and couldn’t care less about the specific differences between “free software” and “open source” or how KDE 4.4 compares to GNOME 2.30
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You may recall how Dell dug itself into an almighty hole last month, after proclaiming that Ubuntu was safer than Windows, before swiftly changing its mind and declaring itself more neutral than Switzerland.
Well, now the PC maker’s had time to think the matter through, another page has appeared on the Dell website, condensing the whole Windows vs Ubuntu debate into about 100 words.
From Dell’s perspective the choice is clear. You should choose Windows if (and I swear I’m not paraphrasing here):
* You are already using WINDOWS programs (e.g. Microsoft Office, iTunes etc) and want to continue using them
* You are familiar with WINDOWS and do not want to learn new programs for email, word processing etc
* You are new to using computers
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Server
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How do you eat an elephant? In small bytes. That old saying applies to Canonical’s emerging Ubuntu cloud strategy. Instead of attacking the entire hosting industry and attacking big rivals like Red Hat and Microsoft head-on, Canonical is quietly pursuing 10 hosting partners to pilot Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Here are the details from HostingCon in Austin, Texas.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has always had many user and developer fans. Enterprise business fans? Not so much. Canonical hopes to change that with today’s, July 21, launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform, in private and public cloud configurations. The company also announced that IBM has validated the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04.
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Canonical has released a virtual appliance for running instances of IBM DB2 database software, the company announced on Wednesday. The software appliance will contain a copy of IBM’s DB2 Express-C, which will run on the company’s Linux-based server distribution, Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.
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Canonical and IBM, as expected, have expanded their relationship. The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there’s a deeper story angle here… involving Canonical’s continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here’s the speculation.
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Audiocasts
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In this episode: A SCO representative finally reveals some of the Linux code SCO had a problem with and OpenSUSE 11.3 is here. Listen to the results of our new challenge, and we ask whether the likes of Red Hat, Novell and Canonical contribute enough back to the community.
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Google
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Over the next few months, we are going to be rolling out a new release process to accelerate the pace at which Google Chrome stable releases become available. Running under ideal conditions, we will be looking to release a new stable version about once every six weeks, roughly twice as often as we do today.
So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time:
* Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
* Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
* Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release
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Graphics Stack
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Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved – for desktop systems. The situation in the fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next big problem to be solved.
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Proprietary Applications
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Last Friday the Wine Project shipped Wine 1.2. This was the work of 328 people in over 23,000 separate patches over a span of two years.
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Instructionals
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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On April 23rd, developers from various finance-related KDE applications gathered in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, Germany for the first ever KDE Finance Sprint. The fellowship was composed of developers from KMyMoney, Kraft and Skrooge. This was a week after the ash cloud stopped all flights over Europe. Until the last minute, it was not clear whether those who were coming by plane would be able to make it. Fortunately, the airports opened just in time. Read on for a report for the meeting.
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Last time in the KDE contributor interview series, we talked with the KDE developer Stephen Kelly from KDE PIM. We’ve been digging around in the KDE interview vaults and found this interesting discussion we had with Albert Astals Cid on 12 May 2010. Albert is well known in KDE from his work with KDE España, as maintainer of Okular and the KDE Edu applications. The original interview in Italian is also available.
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With KDE 4.4, plasmoids can now be written in JavaScript or QtScript, thus opening up a whole new class of applications. Marcel shows how easy it is to build JavaScript plasmoids.
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Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.
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Reviews
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My favourite type of distros are Ubuntu based. For some time now I have been making a case for why you should be using Linux Mint. Even though I think Mint is fantastic, I still make it a point to try other distributions. I made a pit stop at Zorin 3 for a short while and even though it had many wonderful qualities it didn’t quite knock Linux Mint out of my top spot.
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New Releases
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User visible
* GCC 4.5(.0)
* GlibC 2.11(.2)
* X.Org 7.5
* preliminary (basic) support for LLVM/clang
* preliminary (basic) support to target MinGW / Win32
* over 200 new packages (now nearly 3221)
* most existing packages received an update
* over 10000 SVN revisions since the 7.0 branch!
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Today, we released the official Netrunner 2 – Blacklight ISO.
Compared to the RC, we fully integrated Ubuntu Software Center back again,
and updated VLC to 1.1.0.
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All new kernel, modules, libraries, and support for unlimited loops make up the new Tiny Core / Micro Core 3.0. Freedesktop support and many improvements to Apps Audit and OnDemand features. Also support for RAID disks and new bootcode to blacklist modules.
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Fedora
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Now I’m waiting for some 380+ updates to roll into the system, but so far everything works great. X was autoconfigured, wired and wireless networking are both working perfectly, and the mix of applications in the Xfce spin (more than the LXDE spin but less than the standard GNOME) looks pretty good so far.
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Debian Family
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In 2005, the Debian project voted to declassify messages on the debian-private mailing list after a period of three years. That is easier said than done, apparently. The General Resolution (GR) calls for volunteers to do the work of declassification, and few Debian Developers seem eager to do the work required to make it happen.
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Flavours and Variants of Ubuntu
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The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint variant of Ubuntu Linux released a scaled-down, fast-booting, site-specific browser (SSB) version. The “Peppermint Ice” distro switches to Google’s Chromium as the default browser, and while still supporting native apps, is even more focused on web-based apps than is Peppermint.
Written by Kendall Weaver, the creator of the Pepperment distro, which shipped in May (see farther below), Peppermint Ice was designed as a mechanism for launching web applications and/or cloud applications such as SaaS (Software As A Service) apps, says the Peppermint team. When a web based application is called from within Ice, the distro also pulls up a custom SSB using the default Chromium Browser, the open source version of Chrome. Chromium is used in place of the Firefox browser used as the default in Peppermint.
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After tons of popularity surrounding the Peppermint OS release last month, today Cloud lovers get a treat in the first release of Peppermint Ice, version 07142010. This Peppermint project was developed around the Chromium web browser and a new SSB or Site Specific Browser developed by Kendall Weaver aka “Ice”. This is where Peppermint Ice got its name. If you want to compare Peppermint Ice to Peppermint OS One, I did a Peppermint OS One screenshot review last month you might find useful.
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Synology America is shipping two network-attached storage (NAS) devices running its Linux-based Synology DiskStation Manager 2.3 software. The desktop DiskStation DS411+ and rack-mount RackStation RS810+ are both equipped with dual-core Intel Atom D510 processors, as well as four bays supporting up to 8TB each, with the RS810+ expandable to 16TB via Synology’s RX410 add-on unit.
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MontaVista Software announced a new version of its Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for embedded Linux. DevRocket 6.1 has been upgraded to better support the MontaVista Linux 6 commercial embedded Linux development platform, adding tight integration and a graphical interface to the new MontaVista Integration Platform build platform, plus enhanced analysis and debugging tools, says MontaVista.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Google’s Android is already hot in smartphones, and it’s going to be hotter than hot in Linux-powered tablets. So, where does that leave Intel and Nokia’s embedded Linux, MeeGo? In the dust? Actually, it looks now like MeeGo is going to have its own niche where it will be the embedded Linux of choice: Car entertainment, Internet, and navigation systems.
Tomorrow, the Linux Foundation will announce that GENIVI, a non-profit auto industry alliance committed to driving the adoption of an open-source IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) reference platform. With members like BMW, GM, Peugeot Citroen, and Renault this is a big deal. These aren’t hangers-on in the car business; these are core car companies.
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Android
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Sony Ericsson has returned to profitability thanks in part to its Android phones, and it’s contemplating dropping its Symbian and Windows Mobile phones, says the Wall Street Journal. The company has found success with its Android-based Xperia X10 and Xperia Mini and Mini Pro, says the story, and the company is now prepping a mid-range Xperia X8 model.
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As Palm’s VP of developer platform, part of David Temkin’s job was to build out the app catalog. But now as VP of mobile at AOL (NYSE: AOL), his focus is on Android and iPhone. “We are in a eyeball business. To the extent that Palm (NSDQ: PALM) or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) turns it around, we’ll pay more attention to it. It’s a two-horse race.”
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IE Market Research Corporation (IEMR) released a report projecting that the global market for GPS navigation and location-based services (LBS) will rise by 51.3 percent through 2014 to $13.4 billion, and will be led by Android. Meanwhile, location-enabled search and advertising will see the biggest growth in market spending, growing at 131 percent by 2014, says IEMR.
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Barnes & Noble released a Nook for Android application, competing with a similar Android app released for the Kindle, and Amazon announced that its Kindle e-books are outselling its hardcover books by almost two to one. Meanwhile, Entourage Systems, which makes the Entourage Edge dual-screen Android e-reader, announced several e-book content partnerships.
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1 Poor Performance
If your application is not responsive enough, your users will receive an ugly ANR (Application Not Responding) message. An ANR is thrown when your application is not able to respond to user input within five seconds, or the Broadcast Receiver does not complete in ten seconds.
An ANR message allows the user to either close the application or wait for it to respond. You know what most users will do, so optimise your application for performance. Or else.
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My question is: Is Apple doomed to repeat its own history? Should we continue to expect Apple market share growth? Or will this plateau as more and more Android devices flood the market offering more affordable and feature rich mobile computing experiences?
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Android is changing the way that Linux is perceived. It has become the single most widely adopted type of Linux on embedded devices. It is not only popular in the smartphone space but also expanding its coverage to tablets, set‑top Boxes, televisions and appliances. For an Android application developer, this means a broader market to reach out to. We have already covered the introduction to Android development back in issue 83, so this time we go beyond the ‘hello world’ basics and give you the tips and recipes you need to become a better Android developer…
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Sub-notebooks
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Tablets
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Presumably, the new version will maintain the Intel/Windows base, but replace Skylight Linux with the Linux-based Android, although this was unclear from the report. The Skylight netbook is definitely coming out with Android, says CNET, but the fate of the IdeaPad UI is still up in the air.
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Tattu Mobile is prepping an Android-based tablet based on ZiiLabs’ ZMS-05 SoC, with the help of Intrinsyc’s RapidRIL telephony technology, says Intrinsyc. Meanwhile, CNET reviewed the Dell Streak Android tablet (pictured) and dubbed it “the best Android-based tablet we’ve seen so far.”
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07.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: General news with emphasis on the Internet
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Asbestos has long been known to cause debilitating and often fatal diseases such as lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis. It is banned or restricted in 52 countries, and its use has plummeted in the United States since its peak in the early 1970s.
But since the mid-1980s, a global network of lobbyists has spent nearly $100 million to maintain a market for asbestos, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Borrowing a page from the tobacco industry, these trade associations have funded scientists whose studies raised doubts about the health risks of asbestos and have preserved significant sales by focusing on the developing world.
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Now let me introduce you now to the Church of Scientology in the United Kingdom.
I will leave you to form your own opinion of them, to be expressed once you have received legal advice.
One member of this organisation, which is of course NOT recognised as a “church” in the United Kingdom, did some searches of Twitter.
Presumably he used the search terms “Scientology” and perhaps “Church”.
Or perhaps he used the search terms “Scientology” and “stupid”.
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At the time, this open source re-implementation of BeOS, held a great deal of promise: It was fast, visually clean and surprisingly full featured for an “Alpha 1″ release of any operating system (certainly more polished than early alpha/beta releases of Windows or MacOS X tend to be).
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Security/Aggression
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Breaking news has just come in concerning the police officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests last year. Tomlinson died shortly afterwards, but the incident in which he was struck by a police baton while walking home from work, and thereafter pushed to the ground by an officer, was captured on camera and released to the public.
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Environment
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As John Podesta has said, the phrase “green tar sands” is like “error-free deepwater drilling” and “clean coal”. Thankfully, a key Canadian energy goal – construction of a 1,700 mile pipeline to bring dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast – has hit a significant speed bump, the U.S. EPA. CAP’s Tom Kenworthy has the story.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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From Baidu Tieba:
Three Gorges Dam impenetrable, can withstand a once in a 10,000 year flood. 2003 June 1.
Three Gorges Dam starting this year can prevent a once in a 1000 year flood. 2007 May 8.
Three Gorges Dam able to withstand a once in a 100 year flood. 2008 October 21.
Changjiang Water Resources Commission: Cannot have excessive expectations of the Three Gorges Dam. 2010 July 20.
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Iran has put fresh pressure on the woman it last month sentenced to death by stoning, demanding the names of those involved in the campaign for her release.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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T-Mobile is planing to ask companies like Apple and Google to pay for their mobile offerings, according to an interview that René Obermann, CEO of T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom, gave the German Manager Magazin. Obermann said the company could charge more for offering better quality of service or high transfer rates for mobile video or music, which should be “priced differently.”
He added that well-produced and successful online platforms should not be able to use the mobile Internet for free. Deutsche Telekom is already in discussions with Google about this very subject, according to Obermann. The Telekom CEO didn’t say whether T-Mobile would want to use this approach universally or restrict it to countries with less stringent net neutrality protections. The company operates mobile networks in more than 10 European countries, as well as in the U.S.
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The Net neutrality debate remains polarized, with broadband network operators opposing consumer groups and Internet content providers. Even the current discussion of legal authority for regulation elicits hyperbole, and many observers assume that final resolution of the issue will entail a win for one “side” in the debate and a loss for the other.
Although such a zero-sum game existed when Congress was considering competing versions of Net neutrality legislation a few years ago, there now is a real opportunity for an outcome in which network operators, consumers, and content providers all would be better off than they are today. This would be a win-win-win result, without compromise.
Radical solutions to Net neutrality, one way or the other, are politically impossible today. Neither the imposition of substantial common-carrier regulation nor, for example, permission to block lawful Web sites could be accomplished in Congress or at the Federal Communications Commission. Heavy government intervention is unwelcome, and the fundamental openness of the Internet obviously has been good for consumers and innovation.
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Copyrights
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Since the RIAA has stopped its litigation campaign, the odds of being sued for one night of casual, or even less-than-casual music sharing is almost nil. The same is true for movie file sharing. Though the U.S. Copyright Group has ramped a very large litigation campaign it only targets a small subset of movies, largely independent films such as “The Hurt Locker” and even then can only target a small percentage of the potential sharers.
Surprisingly, your best chance of getting hit with a copyright infringement demand letter, almost certainly, is for posting stock photos to your blog or website. Though it may seem like a relatively harmless thing, stock image companies have been especially aggressive in dealing with copyright infringement and have mounted a campaign that has lasted almost a decade against those who use their images without permission.
[...]
Simply put, image matching technology has moved forward a great deal in the last five years and the early adopters of it were primarily stock photo and image companies. However, rather than simply issuing takedown notices or cease and desist letters, many of the companies, most prominently Getty Images, have been sending out demand letters, telling infringers they have to pay as much as $1,000 or more per image.
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Anyone familiar with file-sharing operations and those who seek to disrupt them will be aware that there are many techniques used by both sides to thwart the other. While tracking solutions, fancy technology and sheer numbers perpetuate the fight, there are claims that a more traditional technique is in use against file-sharers – good old-fashioned blackmail. But that weapon can work both ways.
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The Grauniad reports today on the latest spat in the turf war that is developing on Twitter between comedians trying out jokes and material, and passing other parties quietly re using thus material, sometimes explicitly under their own name.
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ACTA
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The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) text will require far-going changes to EU legislation with regards to compulsory licenses.
Knowledge Ecology International has stressed the importance of liability rules. Under such rules, rights owners can not exercise injunctions against infringements of intellectual property rights, but only are entitled to compensation. This is important in cases of government use, public health, interoperability, the fight against climate change, etc.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Sections 3-7 of Digital Economy Act form a framework for an Initial Obligations Code. This is a set of rules, drafted or approved by Ofcom (and to be put into law via a statutory instrument by Parliament), which gives instructions to ISPs and copyright owners on how they can or must deal with cases involving online copyright infringement. The Act contains some guidelines as to what must be included in the Code (in the new Section 124E of the Communications Act but it is up to Ofcom to come up with a final version. This is expected to be done by September, so it can be sent to the EU for approval (about three months) before coming into force early next year.
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Ofcom’s draft code to cut down on illicit filesharing is flawed and should be torn up and redrafted, according to the Open Rights Group (ORG), an advocacy organisation pushing for more freedom on the internet.
The ORG said that the draft code “misses vital requirements to outline the standards of evidence” in determining whether to take action against alleged filesharers – and that this means it fails to comply with the Digital Economy Act, passed at the tail end of the Labour administration, which puts an onus on Ofcom to reduce the amount of illicit filesharing in the UK.
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Last week I had tea with Lord Lucas in the House of Lords (I know – whodathought?). He wanted to have a chat about what the Lords could do to help artists and music creators.
As soon as we sat down, he brought up the Digital Economy Act, a subject that had been discussed at length during the Westminster eForum, which he attended, a few days earlier. It was the part pertaining to the possible temporary disconnection of persistent illegal downloaders that had created heated discussions among indie labels and ISPs. “It’s dead in the water,” he proclaimed. “There’s no way we will alienate our voters and punish individuals.”
[...]
Lucas concluded that we need copyright reform. He doesn’t want any restrictions on usage, but obligatory remuneration – an impressive idea, but almost utopian in its implementation. Like so many who present a panacea to the music industry, he fell slightly short in his understanding of it. For example, he was under the impression that different songs were paid at different rates by the PRS, according to their genre and popularity. I explained that the composers of a popular song only get paid more because it gets played more.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Today’s news about digital freedom and openness
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Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
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Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting — a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
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If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
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Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world’s fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we’ll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
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The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download (“Save link as”) / upload dialog – in Linux that is, as I didn’t try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I’ve noticed it.
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SaaS
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There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion’s Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
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NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can’t achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn’t entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform’s code is open and some isn’t. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project’s founders.
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In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
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The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
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One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
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The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port–this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
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The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is “designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware”.
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Government
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Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
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We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
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After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
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Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary:News about GNU/Linux, structured with the new site format in place
GNU/Linux
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There is an old saying in the Linux community (actually in just about every community – but I heard it from a Linux developer first) “eating your own dog food” (or the shorter “hipster friendly” version dogfooding. This basically means using the product you create. It can also be associated with practice what you preach. Sometimes this ideology sneaks up behind you and stealthily bites you on the bum. This recently happened to me…and I thought I would share the experience with you to illustrate that user error is best way to an insecure Linux installation.
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Pune-headquartered Bharati Vidyapeeth has its institutions spread across India.In 2009, it adopted open source technology when it implemented the TechnoMail enterprise mailing solution to fulfil its communication needs.
With around 180 educational institutions under its umbrella,Bharati Vidyapeeth has become a leading national-level educational organisation. Today, it touches the lives of 2.5-lakh students, employs around 8,000 people and has used open source technology for smooth communication across the board to improve productivity. TechnoMail, the enterprise mailing solution by TechnoInfotech built on an enterprise Linux platform, was adopted in 2009 to provide a single communication platform that went a step ahead of just e-mail and catered to the organisation’s active and passive communication.
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The new Truecrypt 7.0 release is almost 7 times faster compared to 6.0 on my i7-620M with AES-NI. It is some hundred mb/s faster now than dmcrypt (which runs my system-encryption on Debian Squeeze), but that is expected since truecrypt makes use of multiple cores AND aes-ni and dmcrypt only supports 1 thread per mounted device, so unless you create a RAID consisting of multiple dmcrypt-devices, you can only use 1 core.
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In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today.
The reason for the desktop’s success is obvious. A desktop requires much less knowledge than a command line, and is suited to maybe 80% of the most common tasks that an average user needs. If the desktop needs much larger applications, that hardly seems a problem on a modern computer.
All the same, the command line continues to have distinct advantages over the desktop. Although casual users often consider the command line as prehistoric as a giant sloth, it continues to give you more options and more tools that the desktop ever has or is likely to.
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced a number of initiatives for its community members: these include LPIMall.com (http://www.lpimall.com) — a webstore for LPI affinity products for Linux professionals, a survey of LPI alumni, and prizes for volunteer contributors from around the world who assist with LPI’s exam development program.
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Desktop
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First off let’s get the boring bit out of the way: As netbooks go, the Starling is atypical of its competitors – Atom, RAM, Screen size. Counting against it slightly are a standard 3 Cell battery which will see you eek out 3.5 hours at best and the inclusion of 0.3MP webcam which, compared to most other netbooks, it pretty subpar. But at a base price of only $389, a gorgeous exterior and guaranteed compatibility from the off – including suspend and resume – it’s more than a match for it’s competitors.
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Dell updated its Europe site with a “Windows or Ubuntu?” page. I can understand Dell wants to continue to market PCs with both operating systems, however the information posted on this page is fragmented, at best.
On the page it states “Choose WINDOWS if:” and lists a few points:
“You are already using WINDOWS programs (e.g. Microsoft Office, ITunes etc) and want to continue using them”. No mention of Wine, which actually allows Windows programs to run on Linux. Instead, they could have provided a link to WineHQ’s Applications page, for customers to check application compatibility if they are considering Ubuntu Linux.
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Think Ubuntu is useless? Think again. Ubuntu can be an extremely effective tool for repairing and working on computers, even if you consider yourself a Windows purist. This is because Ubuntu is capable of loading completely from a Ubuntu Live CD, giving you access to your computer in ways Windows can’t – or when Windows is completely broken.
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Audiocasts
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Eben talks about “When Software is in Everything: Future Liability Nightmares Free Software Helps Avoid” to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law (SSCL) in Edinburgh, Scotland on June 30. Karen and Bradley introduce the talk to listeners.
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Kernel Space
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Have you ever wanted to look inside a tar.gz file but without expanding it? Have you ever wanted to just dump files in a .tar.gz file without having to organize it and periodically tar and gzip this data? This article presents another REALLY useful user-space file system, archivemount. It allows you to mount archives such as .tar.gz files as a file system and interact with it using normal file/directory tools.
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Applications
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We love Linux, and want to make it easier for others to do so, too. This first edition of the Lifehacker Pack for Linux includes our favorite apps that get things done and make your desktop great.
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When I first eyeballed the apps digiKam and Shotwell, I saw the former as being far more intricate and professional-looking. But first looks can be deceiving. Shotwell’s features and advantages are initially less obvious. Once I got more familiar with both of these apps, choosing one over the other got tougher.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Lets start with the big news for today 
A new version of Cube2:Sauerbraten was released today: Justice Edition!
Changes include two new player-models, 30 new maps, a mini radar and the new hold and efficiency game modes.
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After 7 years Troy Hepfner has finally started working full time on MyGamingCompany, the developers of : Dirk Dashing: Secret Agent!, The Adventures of Rick Rocket and Fashion Cents Deluxe which are all available for GNU/Linux.
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What? A “walk through?” Yes. We see Osmos as an arcade game — not a puzzle game, where giving away “the answer” can rob players of the satisfaction of discovering the solution for themselves. Here, it’s more about your understanding and skills; and as you improve, we believe your enjoyment of the game will also increase. We really want people to be able to finish the Odyssey (which we see as an introduction to the various level types) and spend their time enjoying and building skills at their own speed in Arcade mode.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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I had a lot to do today, and KDE4 proved a welcome ally in getting the job done – it was not obtrusive at all. This is probably my bias speaking here, but I think Gnome is less obtrusive – possibly because there is less going on. For what it is worth the Ubuntu notifications tend to be intrusive – I like them, but they tend to break your concentration if they pop into view in the corner of your vision.
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Even though I identified (and fixed) that this was due to the switchable graphics (both cards were running and sucking power), I was eager to optimize the power consumption. After some research, I came up with the following solution.
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GNOME Desktop
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Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other.
This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog the each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.
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Reviews
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PCLinuxOS
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PCLinuxOS is a APT-ified, Mandriva-based Linux distribution. It’s one of those distributions that offer a separate version for virtually every existing desktop environment. Four of them – Enlightenment, LXDE, Openbox and Xfce are recommended for intermediate to advanced users, while the GNOME and KDE versions are recommended for all user levels (beginner to advanced).
[...]
I left out Mint because it is an AWESOME distro. If it ever gets based on Debian testing, it will give PCLinuxOS a run for its money to take over my PC’s.
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As you probably expect at this point, I absolutely recommend PCLinuxOS 2010. I have been using it for only a couple days, but I have the feeling that it is the best Linux release I have tested in years.
PCLinuxOS 2010.1 is excellent for any kind of user, but probably most recommended for new comers. It brings down the need for CLI typing to almost zero.
Don’t take my word for it, DOWNLOAD it and give it a try! You will not be disappointed.
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Jolicloud
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Over the last week, Jolicloud started rolling out the first complete version of its Linux distribution to existing users.
The distro is highly netbook-centric and, until Jolicloud 1.0, looked very much like the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on which it is based. However, the new version looks significantly different to the ‘pre-final release’ that preceded it. That was an unusual move for the company, as major user interface (UI) changes tend to be tested in beta before their final release.
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I may have found it. Jolicloud is not perfect, but I’m struggling to think of a rival Linux distro that can be so easily picked up and run by an average user. Let’s just get this out the way first: the weakling Booklet 3G flies on Jolicloud. I do not miss Windows 7 (a great OS for bigger, brawnier computers) one little bit.
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Genealogy
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The Archives and History Library of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History has started a Genealogy Club which will meet on the second Thursday evening of each month from 6 – 7 p.m. The programs, which will focus specifically on genealogy-related topics, will take place in the library at the Culture Center, State Capitol Complex in Charleston. All sessions are free and the public is invited to attend.
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Would you like to try Linux but you don’t want to reformat your PC’s hard drive? There’s an easy way to take Linux for a “test drive” without affecting your PC. It’s called a Live CD.
A Live CD, (or DVD, or USB external disc) is a CD containing a bootable computer operating system. With most Live CDs, that operating system is a version of Linux.
[...]
I think you will agree that the Linux Genealogy Live CD is an easy method of trying Linux and of trying the included genealogy applications without spending any money.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is currently trading 19.50% above its May 6th low of $26.81. Investors are looking to see if this ‘flash crash’ low can act as support signaling the stock has completed a bottoming process.
In the past 52-weeks, shares of Red Hat have traded between a low of $20.58 and a high of $32.6 and are now at $32.03, which is 55.60% above that low price.
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Fedora
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Today I have released the 1st build of Fedora for the XO-1 which includes Sugar 0.88. You can get it here. Installation instructions are here
Since this build includes Sugar 0.88 I have changed the numbering scheme. This is build 100. Builds 16 and below will continue to be available and include Sugar 0.84.
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A long time ago, but not so long ago, http://fedoraproject.org was a simple splash page with just a bunch of links. Later on, it redirected straight to the wiki. After a release or two bringing the entire wiki down (and halting contributors from getting work done!) because of high-demand on the website for downloading releases, a very simple, lightweight set of static pages was put together to help alleviate the problem. It is the base of that lightweight static page set that we have been using for quite some time these days.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We seem to be quite good at turning up to technical events such as LUG meetings, technical conferences and other self-organised events and telling everyone how great Ubuntu is. However we seem to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted, speaking to people who already run Ubuntu or some other distro, rather than ‘converting’ people who have little or no exposure to Ubuntu.
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The second and last Ubuntu Developer Week online event for 2010 took place between July 12th to July 16th and covered various aspects of the Ubuntu and Kubuntu development process, from crash-courses in getting started with development to more advanced topics, such as Ubuntu hacking, creating applications for Ubuntu with Quickly or working with the Django web framework.
On the last day of UDW, we’ve had the pleasure of talking a few minutes to Daniel Holbach, one of the organizers of this wonderful educational event, which takes place twice a year. Daniel was a bit sad because UDW was almost over, but on the other hand he was very enthusiastic about the number of participants who attended, and the quality of the event: “Again I’d like to thank everybody for helping out with making Ubuntu Developer Week rock as hard as it did. 350+ attendees, 25 sessions, lots of covered topics and everything happened in a very seamless fashion. Awesome. Thanks again!,” said Daniel Holbach on his personal blog.
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Simply that users and members of the community are confused by what commercial actually means. Commercial is not against the community, the community is commercial, people are employed to work on Ubuntu, work with Ubuntu and to be a part of the community. A varied commercial community would actually be kinda nice, imagine if we had a Dell community manager, or a system76 guy in IRC who was chatting away to the rest of the community of users *and* business people. Take a look at Organisations Learning to contribute to FOSS the right way.
[...]
My personal concern is the lack of commercial involvement of Ubuntu’s users, basically it goes like this: Canonical is a business and is interested in making enough money to pay it’s developers a wage. What they work on is based around what makes money. The money comes from Dell and HP. The developers work on what Dell and HP want. Users never get a direct say in the development of Ubuntu because A) They have no commercial relationship with Canonical and B) Canonical doesn’t co-operate wonderfully on DX with other programmers (commercial or non) preferring instead to announce features at the last minute and rail-road decisions and opinions of others.
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Canonical’s Robbie Williamson has provided an update on the status of the Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS release, which is the first re-spin since the Long-Term Support release of the Lucid Lynx in April. Ubuntu 10.04.1 incorporates the package updates and minor fixes committed to Lucid since the original release. Ubuntu 10.04.1 was supposed to be released next week, but now it’s been postponed to August.
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Flavours and Variants
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Overall, I was impressed with the distribution. It’s lightweight, easy to install, and small enough to run largely from within my machine’s 2GB of RAM. The one quibble I have with it is the default selection of applications. The logic of what was included is consistent with the desire to deliver a truly “light” Ubuntu respin, but in my experience some of the choices resulted in a system that wasn’t as easily usable as other variants of the mother distribution. But the beauty is that that was easy to fix, and the underlying operating system was responsive and reliable.
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Indian government has a reputation for false claims when it comes to technology breakthroughs – the $10 laptop, which wasn’t really a laptop (turned out to be a USB stick) and then the Google Earth Killer, i.e. ISRO Bhuvan added to the technology achievements of the governemnt and brought international shame.
Today, the Union Minister for human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal unveiled a low cost computing-cum-access device which will be priced at $35, and expects the price to gradually drop to $20 (and ultimately to $10!).
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Android
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AppBrain estimates that 5,500 applications out of over 70,000 officially recognized titles are installed on 99.9-percent of all phones. The other 65,000 apps are installed on less than .1% of phones. In other words, about 8-percent of all apps in the Android Market can be found on just about every phone. The other 92-percent languish in relative obscurity.
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Interest levels in syncing music collections have notched up a bit of late with the introduction of a plethora of new Android-based super phones. That is, unless you happen to be one of those owners with a large quantity of digital music encumbered by digital rights management (DRM) better known as copy protection. In that case, you might want to do some research into converting said digital files into a more portable format. Meanwhile, for the rest, with media ready to load up on a new cool phone, we’ll take a look at Linux options.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 3:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from the Basque Country
Summary: One last bunch of news items for the day
Devices
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The biggest plus about Linux Distros (besides being free that is) is that nothing gets released before it has been peer reviewed through beta and alpha stages, so everything, from Operating systems to the thousands of programs available, is stable (unless you intentionally want to test something in beta or alpha stage that is). In other words, you’ll be downloading fully developed and stable software. Because of the manner in which software is developed and tested, most of it tends to be free of unnecessary bloat and tends to be incredibly well written and light. As a result your Linux distros can run from a bit over 50MB for the minimalist super light distros, to about 3-4GB for the fully installed full featured distros. Compare that to Mac OS which is about 10-12 GBs in size or windows which is a bit over 20GB. This means that Linux by and large can run very well with all of it’s features on older systems with lower specd hardware (and if a particular distro doesn’t run as efficiently as you would like, there is always another one that will). Linux is famous for giving old computers a new lease on life or by turning lower specd modern computers (such as netbooks) into full-fledged computers by running modern, powerful and up to date software. Again, VERY NICE!
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Everybody has a hobby, and for every hobby there’s software to help the hobbyist – even for something as apparently non-technical as knitting. A few 2-D visualization programs help knitters create patterns or turn a specific image into a chart, and that’s helpful, but if you want a full simulation of the fabric so you can tell not only what it’s going to look like, but how it’ll behave in your hands, your best bet is Knitter.
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Though only having been in the IT business for 11 years, ZacWare chief executive officer and founder, Damian Hickey, has already survived government work in two locations and has since become a contributor to the open-source community through his Joomla!-based Jentla multi-site content management system (CMS) offerings. Computerworld Australia recently talked to Damian about the transition from government IT to self-employment, and the perils of arrogance when looking for a job.
[...]
We earn our income from subscriptions around support, we don’t earn any income from licensing. The whole software world is tending to move in the direction of software subscriptions now and services-based income streams as well.
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With sights like the old town of San Sebastián and the Guggenheim museum at Bilbao, the Basque country in northern Spain is certainly worth a visit. But the reason that I and FSFE staffer Rainer Kersten spent a week there had nothing to do with old houses, art or pintxos. (Well, *almost* nothing to do with pintxos.) We went there to meet with people from the vibrant community of Free Software activists, to give talks and to build links between the local and the European level.
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There have been several reports about the next stage in the War on Piracy (must avoid making off-topic comments about the inherent stupidity of declaring armed hostilities against abstract concepts). I am talking of course about “Operation In Our Sites” (must not comment about some poor smug bureaucrat who thought the pun was funny). This new project from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is designed to execute domain name seizure warrants against websites engaged in movie piracy. In other words, ICE will ask a court to issue a warrant against these websites, and these will have their domain names removed.
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Finance
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When President Obama steps Wednesday onto the stage at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center to sign Wall Street reform into law, many of the titans of Wall Street will be absent.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to counter skepticism about Europe’s bank stress tests ahead of their publication, saying Wednesday that the scenarios against which banks’ strength is to be tested will be realistic enough to be credible.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. may face a “headwind” for business in Germany even after a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Handelsblatt reported, citing Berlin Finance Senator Ulrich Nussbaum.
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European governments are turning their backs on Goldman Sachs, the all-conquering investment bank that has suffered a series of blows to its reputation, capped by the biggest ever fine imposed on a Wall Street firm.
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Even as the president prepares to sign the financial reform bill, lobbying groups are rearming for a second round of advocacy for a universal fiduciary standard. This time, however, the battleground is not Congress but the Securities and Exchange Commission, to which Congress punted the issue.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. agreed to waive tax deductions it could have claimed after paying a $550 million penalty in a settlement with U.S. regulators, giving up as much as $187.5 million in savings.
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Royal Bank of Scotland PLC (RBS) is considering launching a civil suit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) to recoup additional losses sustained through its investment in a controversial mortgage-backed security…
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This much is clear. We haven’t heard the last about Goldman Sachs’ settlement with the SEC.
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The Abacus CDO, the SEC indictment indicated, was devised for precisely that purpose. The CDO was a so-called “synthetic” instrument—meaning investors did not actually buy any securities. Rather, they gambled on the future price of a selection of securities, much as people gamble on a horse race.
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Even before the official announcement arrived an hour later — that Goldman would pay $550 million to settle federal claims that it had misled investors in a complex mortgage investment — the financial markets gave Mr. Blankfein, Goldman’s leader, a resounding thumbs up, The New York Times’s Graham Bowley writes.
Goldman’s share price jumped nearly 4.3 percent on hopes that Mr. Blankfein and his bank had, in a stroke, put one of the most embarrassing episodes in the bank’s recent history behind them.
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The paper goes on to say that the SEC probably had some doubts about the strength of its case, and the news that the commissioners did not vote unanimously may undermine the agency’s PR that it was a major victory.
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The SEC’s $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs is naturally being touted by the feds as a major victory, “the largest penalty ever assessed against a financial services firm in the history of the SEC.” Maybe. But there’s another way to look at it.
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But perhaps another tidbit might well be considered. Earlier this week President Obama met with Warren Buffett at the White House. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. had invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs. According to the New York Times report on July 14th “the meeting covered everything under the economic sky”. Were the gathering storm clouds of the Goldman litigation part of the vista in view as well?
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Observers noted that the fines were a fraction of the $13.4 billion in 2009 profits at Goldman. Since 2008, Goldman has been a federally insured bank holding company that was bailed out of the financial crisis along with Citigroup, AIG and other financial giants whose exotic products and executive gluttony nearly choked to death the financial system.
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The financial reregulation package just passed by Congress is far from a comprehensive reform of American finance. Despite the enormous threat to the world’s financial markets created by the failure of Lehman Brothers and the stunning excesses of insurance giant AIG and banking conglomerate Citigroup, the reforms are in truth modest. Neither the Obama administration nor Congress opted to cut banks down to size, and the bill is only placing mild limits on risky banking activities. The giant financial institutions, meanwhile, are as big—even bigger—than ever and bankers’ compensation is once again at stunning levels.
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In fact, the current “war on Wall Street” seems all but over even before the President signs the financial “reform” bill. We have seen very few criminal prosecutions coming out of Obamaland. The recent settlement with Goldman Sachs was limited to one transaction, and quite affordable for the bank that’s been called a “vampire squid on the face of humanity.” Their shares went up when the slimy deal was done, and in any event, that $550 million they paid just represented 15 days of profit taking.
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Copyrights
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We’ve written a few times about how ridiculous the FTC’s proposals to “save journalism” are. They’re much more focused on saving newspapers, not journalism. And they seem to totally misunderstand the problem — or to believe the problem is some amorphous threat from “internet aggregators,” which is based on no actual evidence. Google has now responded to the FTC’s proposal, and, as Jeff Jarvis notes, effectively “taken the FTC to school” on the basics of journalism economics and copyright.
[...]
Hopefully the FTC pays attention, but you could see them just dismissing Google as a “biased” party. The newspapers pushing these sorts of solutions are barking up the wrong tree, and hopefully the FTC realizes this, rather than providing a big crutch for the news organizations unwilling to adapt to a changing market.
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An IFPI-affiliated anti-piracy group has announced that it has gathered evidence on dozens of file-sharers and will shortly hand it to the police. The group says it will hand over the results of its investigation into large scale file-sharers to the authorities this month and warns that the law allows those convicted to be jailed for up to 4 years.
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Service providers will split up to make smaller ‘pirate’ ISPs, in response to Ofcom’s draconian file-sharing proposals, says the Pirate Party
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