01.31.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Windows users have many, many reasons to consider switching to Linux, as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions already. For many, however, there’s one big, fat obstacle standing in the way: “Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome.”
That’s right: It’s the simple fact that most of us “grew up” on Microsoft products and so have trouble imagining any other way of doing things.
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Which is why I would like to welcome you to Linux city. This city is not a new one it has been and still is being built up. The best thing about this city is that it’s supporting structure is so simple, yet so strong that the largest computer cities ever built, ie. the worlds fastest supercomputers, use Linux.
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Desktop
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Inside the PirateBox sits a Free Agent Dockstar, an Asus WL330GE wireless router, and a SanDisk 16GB flash drive. The software, including Debian Linux and the DD-WRT open-source router firmware, is all free. The total build cost is under $100, not counting the lunchbox enclosure and the optional battery pack (the PirateBox can alternately run on AC power).
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Server
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The London Stock Exchange and one of its counterparts in the US are investigating attacks that hit their networks last year and were intended to disrupt their operations, The Times reported on Monday.
Officials for the LSE are investigating a possible breach of the open-source trading system last year that may have led to the wild Flash Crash last summer. On August 24, the share prices of five companies collapsed, prompting the exchange to shut down trading early. BT alone lost £968 million in market value in the SNAFU. Up to now, officials have blamed the crash on incorrect prices entered on a large number of stock orders.
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The London Stock Exchange’s new open source trading system may have been hacked last year, according to a report.
The alleged attack came as the LSE began the switch over to the Linux-based systems, according to the dates referred to in the Times newspaper.
The continued threat of cyber attack has resulted in the LSE keeping a close dialogue with British security services, which this year branded cyber attacks as one of the biggest threats to the country.
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Kernel Space
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Enthused by how Pugs impressed their professor in the last class, Shweta wanted to do so too. And there was already an opportunity: finding out where the output of printk had gone. So, as soon as she entered the lab, she grabbed the best system, logged in, and began work. Knowing her professor well, she knew that he would have given a hint in the class itself. Recalling what had been taught, she remembered the error output demonstration from “insmod vfat.ko” — running dmesg | tail. She immediately tried that, and found the printk output there.
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In open source, the idea that the endgame for a project won’t necessarily closely resemble the origin is a given, not a surprise. It’s part of the point of open source. If you look at what’s going on the Linux scene now, you see this concept being played out all around.
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Applications
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I am a writer. I write loads of technical documentation as well as novels (check out my fiction on Smashwords and Autumnal Press). Because of my trade I am always seeking out tools to aid in my own process. And although the web has made everything so much easier, it is still good to have a few dedicated tools around to make everything easier.WordNet+Artha: A great Linux thesaurus combo
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Started by one of our readers more than a week ago was a compiler deathmatch for comparing the performance of GCC, LLVM Clang, PCC (the Portable C Compiler), TCC (Tiny C Compiler), and Intel’s C Compiler under Arch Linux. This user did not stop there with compiling these different x86_64 code compilers, but he also went on to look at the compiler performance with different compiler flags, among other options. The results are definitely worth looking at and here are some more.
[...]
Overall these results are not too surprising compared to our previous Linux compiler benchmarks. Though with the addition of the Open64 compiler we see that in a number of benchmarks its able to produce incredibly fast binaries that are dramatically faster than those produced by GCC. We’ll be monitoring Open64 more closely, but for now be sure to also see the original compiler deathmatch thread with those separate test results, including of compiler tuning options.
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Shade is my absolute preferred skin for XBMC Media Center (and is to be featured in my upcoming XBMC Install, Setup and Configuration Guide for Linux Mint and Ubuntu). It combines the best features and views as popular skins (as well as some found nowhere else!) like Alaska, Confluence, and Aeon (and their mods and variants) while having a higher level of polish and professional aesthetic over the lot. (This conclusion has been researched and reached first hand over many hours of trying and configuring the various skins as well as demonstrating for others and getting their opinions on the aesthetics and appeals of the various skins.)
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Proprietary
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Do you use both windows and Linux? Wish you could remote into Windows from Linux and to other Linux distributions? Well, you can. Just like when using a Remote Desktop Connection between Microsoft platforms (or remoting between Linux machines), you can bring up the desktop of the other platform. You can click around the desktop and run applications just as if you were sitting in front of the computer.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Mandriva (the distribution) comes with Open Office and, apparently, the company behind it has not voiced its support toward Libre Office, as many other Linux companies already have (including the Mageia project) (Read here the list).
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Games
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A reader has put together an icon pack for various popular Linux games (thanks SeanW!):
http://half-left.deviantart.com/art/Faenza-Games-Icon-Pack-189876623
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The Legend of Edgar has been updated to 0.76:
* Fixed a crash when killing a centurion
* Corrected the makefile version number
* The fish in the Left Tower no longer become stuck if the player falls in the water
* Fixed a bug when the player becomes frozen in ice
* Fixed a bug where the player could not turn into a Slime if standing on the ground
* Added Spanish translation
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Game On 2010 is Mozilla Labs‘ first international gaming competition. Game On is all about games built, delivered and played on the open Web and the browser.
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Ive always maintained that there is a market for those simple, addictive games on any platform. You might be waiting for a download to finish, an email to come through or a message to pop up in IRC. Whatever it is though there are always a few minutes of void to fill and this is where the traditional “little game” comes into its own. On the Linux desktop I think users are sick to death of solitaire or mine sweeper and Entanglement fills that slot nicely.
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Desktop Environments
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You probably already know that a tiling window manager is one of the alternatives often provided by distributions alongside the standard Gnome or KDE desktops.
Instead of floating windows, with their ability to move anywhere, and stacked applications that overlap one another, a tiling window manager locks applications to the display, splitting as necessary to run applications side by side. When you run enough applications together, your desktop can start to look like a tiled bathroom, which is presumably why they’re called tiling window managers.
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Reviews
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Sabayon uses KDE 4.5.5, though it is possible to start using KDE 4.6 (which was released a few days ago and which I hope to review relatively soon) through updates. No part of KDE ever crashed, which is great news. I think it’s safe to say that the issues I had with Sabayon 5.4 KDE were due to VirtualBox, not due to either Sabayon or KDE.
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Having tried Chakra I find myself in a bit of a reviewer’s dilemma. The reason I tried Chakra was I had people telling me it was stable, despite the alpha branding, and that it was a wonderful fast, reliable, usable system. My experience was quite the opposite. Chakra failed to remain stable enough to launch applications, or sometimes even to finish booting, on my desktop machine. The installer either refused to complete or would crash, the Bundle application didn’t work and the project lacked documentation in a key area. I was further put off by emoticons on the website and in my status messages. I realize these are hobbyists and Chakra isn’t a professional distro, but I’m wary about handing my hard drive over to a product that writes messages akin to those found in the average Twitter feed. On the other hand, any criticism I can aim at Chakra can be swept aside with the project’s “alpha” designation. The project plainly warns it’s still in the early development stages and one should be prepared for bugs, crashes and hasmtericide. It’s probably best to wait until Chakra is pronounced stable before giving it a try.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Today started way too early (after going to sleep late). Breakfast was in the hotel food area. I had a nice chat with Dave Malcolm about python and packages and so forth, then off to the main event.
Lots of folks in the main opening talk. Lots and lots of barcamp pitches. Max wearing not one, but _two_ silly hats. A nice “state of Fedora” from Jared. Then over to the barcamp area where I had a nice chat with jlaska about AutoQA. I wish we had a better way to get people involved there, but it’s hard. I suggested a few new tests and suggested it might be easier to get folks interested once some of the tests are actually active.
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David Cantrell and Chris Lumens started the session by going around the room and introducing everyone on the team. They talked a bit about their storage testing framework (Chris did a separate session on this), and how Anaconda is pretty hard to get started with as a contributor, but the testing framework is an easy way to get involved – submit test. This can be even more helpful than submitting code patches and the test system is easy to contribute to. I didn’t catch how exactly / where to submit tests though; I didn’t catch Chris’ session on that.
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Debian Family
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Debian official releases are more rare than releases of other distributions, but tend to matter less to users. Judging by the second release candidate, Debian 6.0 will be no exception. In other words, the new release should deliver the usual ultra-reliability, and serve as a solid basis not only for Debian itself, but also the countless other distros that will depend upon it, including Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
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With this support, the installer can offer an impressive set of choices for those who want them. Packages can be selected according to the intended function of the installation — for instance, desktop environment, or file server or laptop. While dropping ReiserFS, partitioning includes both a choice of ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, JFS and XFS filesystems (sensibly defaulting to ext 3 as the best combination of mature features and stability), and multiple partitions (either placing /home on a separate partition, or sub-dividing a drive into root, /home /usr, /var, and /temp partitions.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.04 dubbed Natty Narwhal will bring some major changes to the traditional Ubuntu desktop. As the conventional desktop gets a major overhaul, the spanking new Unity interface is busy preparing itself to replace the time-honored Gnome interface. Furthermore, some well-known default applications are getting replaced by newer and more feature-laden ones. While many users have welcomed these changes with open arms, a few disapproving nods have raised doubts over their success. Nevertheless, Ubuntu 11.04, which releases on 28th April 2011, promises to bring a burst of freshness to the Linux desktop along with a slew of new users.
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Flavours and Variants
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Laptop refresh time is here, thanks Canonical. Faced with the prospect of finding a computer to spend a grand on I took the bus trip to Fry’s in Dallas. Fry’s is a large computer supermarket, I don’t recommend it for the cafeteria but they do have a large selection of laptops to browse. The staff are annoyingly keen to help you, until you start asking about the finer details of processor ranges and mention Ubuntu. All their laptops have glossy screens, a phenomenon I do not understand.
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Pleasingly Linux just works. Wifi is fine. Compositing great (Intel i915). Suspend is all good. External video works. Volume buttons works. Only wee issue is that mute button turns off hardware and software mute, but if software is already mute then it turns it mute off and hardware mute on.
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Phones
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Android
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Unless you miraculously found a way to live under a rock on the moon for the past 25 years, you’ve had a pretty good chance of seeing the Apple Macintosh 1984 commercial [below], the one directed by Ridley Scott, the one with the woman running through hallways of automatons ultimately to toss a hammer through a screen, smashing an image of Big Brother. This commercial was made to announce the release of the Macintosh personal computer. Today we’ve been treated to an ad spot made by Motorola to promote their upcoming tablet computer XOOM, featuring the new Google Android mobile operating system Android 3.0 Honeycomb, made specifically for tablets – this commercial directly targets the 1984 commercial for Apple Macintosh. Yesterday a massive article by creative director Steve Hayden detailed his work on and knowledge of the 1984 commercial, celebrating its excellence.
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Tablets
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It’s hard to keep up with the slew of identikit Ubuntu tablets slipping out on to the Chinese market, but at least this one has some new information for us to digest..
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Is it the be-all and end-all to ending sexism in FOSS? No. Is there a significant way to go in gaining gender equality, both in attitude and practice? Yes. Do you hate it as much as I do when people answer their own questions? I hope so.
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When people talk about the merits of Open Source software vs closed source/proprietary software, one of the most common advantages listed for open source is “you have the source, you can modify it, you can change it”. This is my worst favorite argument, and I even catch our own sales guys saying it now and then when they’re prepping for a presentation they’re giving. This is a great argument in some instances. But I hear it being used in a lot of situations where it doesn’t apply. For example, without a lot of coding experience and time, a network administrator can’t modify or change something like Snort. So why market Snort to them that way? It doesn’t apply. I’ve got a different opinion of what being “open source” does for the network admin (or security admin, if the company in question makes that distinction), and I recently got a chance to experience exactly this in real life.
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The King County Library System’s switch to nonproprietary software put the system at the forefront of a national movement to free libraries from the poor service and high costs some feel they are getting from commercial vendors.
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Events
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Sydney-based writer and futurist Mark Pesce has apologised for using sexy images during his keynote address at the annual Linux.conf.au (LCA) open source conference in Brisbane last week.
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While ABLEconf has already recieved many great proposals, it overlooked FUDcon: Tempe 2011 taking place the week after the close of ABLEconf’s Call for Presentations. For this reason, ABLEconf is extending the Call for Presentations two weeks: until Saturday, February 6th, 2011.
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at SCALE 9x (Los Angeles, California: February 27, 2011) and Indiana Linux Fest (Indianapolis, Indiana: March 27, 2011).
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google is clearly going to continue its headlong dash into the browser market in 2011, having just released version 10 of its Chrome browser. Just last month users were getting used to the stable release of Chrome 8 and already version 10 is popping up in the development channel.
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Mozilla
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I have seen many people and companies shy away from Microsoft products recently. Whether they are moving to a Mac or just want to save costs initially. There are a host of freeware products out there to fit your needs.
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Mozilla, developers of the popular Firefox web browser, has paid out US$40,000 in the past month for bugs on its websites and in its apps.
Last month, the open-source developer said it would extend its bug bounty program beyond its Firefox browser to include other web tools.
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For the last six plus months, Mozilla developers have been focused on building Firefox 4. That’s not the only effort that Mozilla is now sprinting to complete, developer documentation at the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is now also being completed.
Instead of a ‘code sprint’, MDN is having a doc sprint – starting Jan 28th and running for 34 hours until Jan 29th.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While strings and pages of data seem cryptic, a plot reveals the entire data flow at a glance. Interpretation suddenly seems much easier. Understanding that maze of numbers is just a glance away. Scientists, mathematicians, engineers, statisticians etc. rely heavily on plots. While OriginLab, an expensive commercial plotting software, is heavily used among university researchers or those blessed with bulging purses, GNUPlot doesn’t lag behind, and is much used by scientists at the IITs, IIScs and universities. In fact, knowledge and skill in GNUPlot is one of the requirements for some of the posts for Senior Research Fellow at the IITs!
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Government
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Enterprises or individuals that purchase software which uses open source components are entitled to demand access to the relevant source code despite recent changes to the law, according to Australian technology laywer Brendan Scott.
In mid-2010, Scott completed an analysis of the now-superseded Trade Practices Act for Linux Australia, and concluded that consumers were entitled to demand access to source code used in any hardware or software products under that act.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve been following the goings on in Egypt over the past week, it’s likely that you at least saw some of Al Jazeera’s rather comprehensive coverage. The Egyptian government was so annoyed by the coverage that it “shut down” Al Jazeera’s Egyptian offices (and Egyptian politicians are calling for trying Al Jazeera correspondents as “traitors”). Of course, it’s worth pointing out that most of us in the US have no options for watching Al Jazeera via a regular TV channel either, since almost no US TV companies are willing to carry the channel.
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Twice in the past week I have gotten into discussions with friends about the topic of processor architecture. One of these discussions was about the cell processor. The cell processor is a Power-PC based, micro-processor that was designed to bridge the gap between traditional 64bit processors and GPUs. The second discussion was about another type of processor architecture most of us use everyday – the ARM processor (as of 2007 an approximated 98% of mobile phones use an ARM chip).
The topics of the discussions were fairly similar – why is it with all these other architectures have to offer x86/64bit processors still dominate our desktop computers? Cell processors are incredibly powerful and ARM chips use an extremely low amount of energy for the processing power they provide.
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Violations are punishable by a fine and 5 to 8 years in prison. Thomas could be charged with separate counts for each year he falsely stated that his wife had no “Non Investment Income”
The Department of Justice publishes a handbook to provide guidance to prosecutors.
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Science
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Popular movies and TV shows often portray advanced fingerprint, voice, or retina recognition systems as a foolproof means of identification. In fact, governments increasingly are looking to biometric technologies as a better way to track terrorists at borders. And some companies have started using biometrics to control access to buildings or information. What does the scientific evidence say about the effectiveness of these systems for security or surveillance?
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Health/Nutrition
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The petition is being promoted by the Netherlands Drugs Policy Foundation, and has high-profile support from former EU commissioner Fritz Bolkestein and former deputy prime minister and scientist Dr Els Borst-Eilers.
It is a sign of the economic times in the Netherlands that the argument in favour of legalising drugs has moved from one of principled opposition to prohibition to one which highlights potential savings to the state of about €20 billion a year.
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The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it.
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It was recently reported that doctors had advised women in Fallujah not to give birth. There are many medical reasons for infertility which might shatter the dreams of a young woman. It is not difficult to imagine how heartbreaking it must be for a woman who is advised that she can never bear children.
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Security
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This Thursday, as thousands of Anonymous activists continued their two-week campaign of assistance to the successful revolution in Tunisia and the nascent pro-democracy uprisings in Egypt and Algeria, the governments of the US and UK scored a victory of their own, with the arrest of three teenagers and two young adults who are accused of participating in distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS, against the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Sri Lankan military is getting a makeover. Now that the war with the Tamil Tigers is over it is time to wash off the stains and spruce up. Military personnel may be spotted painting public buildings or engaged in projects to beautify Colombo, with defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa personally overseeing the transformation and development of the city.
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Civil service head Gus O’Donnell suggests Tony Blair breached ministerial code by not providing full text of legal advice
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A dissident artist accused of assaulting police told a court in Beijing that the case was “all fake”, his wife said today.
Wu Yuren denies obstructing public service with violence and says it was officers who assaulted him when he went to a police station to report stolen property last May. His companion that day has said he heard Wu screaming in pain after police dragged him away.
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Major student protests are planned tomorrow in Manchester and London and already police are warning that they plan to increase the severity of their tactics. I was at two of the protests at the end of last year, and the change in tactics was striking. Whereas on the 10 November demonstration no one was hurt, on 9 December there were large numbers of protester casualties – and a smaller but still significant number of less severe police injuries. The casualties seemed to be a direct result of the change in police tactics. If these now become even more extreme, there will no doubt be more violence and more people hurt. On the 9 December protest my son, Alfie Meadows, received life-threatening injuries in an incident that is now the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation.
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The lifting of the state of emergency that has been in force in Algeria for nearly 20 years has emerged as a rallying point for groups united for democratic change.
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Last week, the Iraqi government shut down social clubs that serve alcohol in Baghdad, enraging the educated class who demonstrated against the extreme Islamic-inspired order. Today, Iraqis woke up to hear a far worse order; the Iraqi Ministry of Education has banned theater and music classes in Baghdad’s Fine Arts Institute, and ordered the removal of statues showcased at the entrance of the institute without explaining the move.
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How important a role did Facebook play in the popular revolution that swept Egypt last week? According to data from security firm zScaler: it was very important. Fully 42% of the country’s Web surfing on January 27, the day before Egypt’s main ISPs abruptly severed ties to the Internet.
Activity on Egyptian Web servers monitored by zScaler surged by 68% on January 26th as the popular protests against the government of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak gained steam, as Egyptians looked for news coverage of the protests and leveraged Facebook and other platforms to spread the word about civil actions. Data from zScaler shows that traffic to social networking sites account for around 39% of all Web surfing on January 27th, while traffic to news sites accounted for another 27% of overall Web surfing activity.
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In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.
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The toppling of the pro-western March 14 alliance in Lebanon by its pro-Syrian adversaries – including Hezbollah – has led to a worldwide media scare. Many western news organisations portrayed it as some sort of Islamist takeover.
Even the BBC reported that the “Hezbollah nominee”, Najib Mikati, won the most votes to succeed Saad Hariri as prime minister. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News went further in that direction, reporting: “Hezbollah gain control of Lebanese government”.
The fact is that they are all missing the point. Syria, and not Hezbollah, won control of Lebanon’s government. In the past year, many articles have shown Syria recovering its political weight, and the latest developments in Lebanon are testimony to this.
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And Arabs from the Mashreq to the Maghreb are watching, egging on those protesters to topple Hosni Mubarak who has ruled Egypt for 30 years, because they know if he goes, all the other old men will follow, those who have smothered their countries with one hand and robbed them blind with the other. Mubarak is the Berlin Wall. “Down, down with Hosni Mubarak,” resonates through the whole region.
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Recently, the Turkish flotilla scandal centered around the question: was it a good idea for commandos to slide down ropes onto the ship, or should another form of attack have been adopted? Almost nobody asked: should Gaza have been blockaded in the first place? Wasn’t it smarter to start talking with Hamas? Was it a good idea to attack a Turkish ship on the high sees?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I was going to let this go after my last post, but it keeps coming up in email and on Twitter: “Obama talked about clean energy. Isn’t that the same as talking about climate change?” Add to that the characteristically smug posts from Innoventioneers congratulating themselves on winning the future, and it looks like I need to take one more run at this.
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The United States is poised to bet its energy future on natural gas as a clean, plentiful fuel that can supplant coal and oil. But new research by the Environmental Protection Agency—and a growing understanding of the pollution associated with the full “life cycle” of gas production—is casting doubt on the assumption that gas offers a quick and easy solution to climate change.
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Finance
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Just days before fleeing Tunisia, the embattled leader went on national television to promise 300,000 new jobs over two years.
Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak did much the same Saturday as riots gripped Cairo and other cities: offering more economic opportunities in a country where half the people live on less than $2 a day.
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TRULY startling revelations were few in the voluminous report, published last Thursday by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the origins of the financial panic. This is hardly a shock, given the flood-the-zone coverage and analysis of the crisis since it erupted four years ago.
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Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, had a rough 2010. But at least he got a raise: his bonus increased by $3.6 million, according to a regulatory filing.
The company’s board granted restricted stock valued at $12.6 million to Mr. Blankfein and other senior executives, including Gary D. Cohn, the president. The board also approved a new annual base salary of $2 million for its chief executive, up from $600,000. Mr. Cohn and others will see their base salaries increase to $1.85 million, according to the filing on Friday.
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Josh Birnbaum’s “Prepared Remarks of Ex-Goldman Sachs Executive Joshua Birnbaum” for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (April 27, 2010) can be found on Dealbook here.
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I listened to the State of the Union speech. What I heard, though, was not President Obama’s string of irritating platitudes, but the sound of a nation bent on self-destruction.
I don’t say this lightly. Intellectuals have been talking about the fall of the new Rome for decades, and mostly it has been hyperbolic nonsense. This time feels different. It even makes the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney administration seem like some distant, bygone utopia.
The reason for this change is the emergence of two extremely powerful groups that have not the slightest interest in any notion of the public good and are willing to put all of it in jeopardy to satisfy the shortest of short-term interests.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Ginger Thompson wrote in the New York Times on January 19 that former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide “rose to power as a champion of Haiti’s poor but became notorious for his violent crackdowns of political dissent.” [1]
The “political dissent” that Thompson refers to is a campaign that included murderous raids into Haiti by rebels comprised of former soldiers and death squad leaders. The rebels were given a safe haven and a base for operations in the Dominican Republic. They were audacious enough to mount an assault on Haiti’s National Palace in December of 2001. After a gun battle, they were chased back into the Dominican Republic. The rebels were led by Guy Philippe and Jodel Chamblain, a man responsible for the deaths and torture of thousands of people during Haiti’s military rule of 1991-1994 (after the first US backed coup ousted Aristide in 1991). [2]
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Censorship
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A leading Chinese journalist said he had been forced out of his job this week amid tightened restrictions on the media.
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Civil Rights
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A proposed law may lead to the destruction of Hungarian secret police documents preserved by the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security
In what serves as a very disturbing development for anyone with an interest in Hungary’s Cold War history, the Hungarian government is preparing to enact a new law which may lead to the blatant, politically-motivated sanitization of the country’s communist past. Allegedly out of a concern for privacy rights, citizens who were spied upon or observed by the previous regime’s state security officers may now not only ask to view their files at the Archives of Hungarian State Security in Budapest, but may also remove these preserved archival documents from the reading room, take them home and have them destroyed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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There has been numerous reports on the attempts by ACS:Law to drop its 26 outstanding cases whilst they are still under scrutiny by Judge Birss. Andrew Crossley appears to have more than a few issues to deal with after perusing what many call “speculative invoicing” in respect of alleged unlawful file sharing. Firstly he has to contend with a reported group action of harassment in respect of the letters he sent out to those alleged to be sharing copyrighted material, secondly he has Judge Birss scrutinizing the cases he is trying to drop, making some rather damning comments on how both Andrew Crossley and Media-cat have conducted these cases. Next he has the information commissioner looking at the ACS:Law email leak, that whilst Mr Crossley claims was as a result of hacking, its reported that whilst a Ddos attack brought his site down, it was incompetence of an admin that exposed the ACS:law emails to the world. All this and Mr Crossley has to yet again answer to the SRA at a later date as a result of numerous complaints he has received. Let’s not also forget any other cases that may be brought against him by disgruntled recipients of his letter campaign.
Linus Torvalds, Linux and GNU/Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While the fight for desktop dominance is still raging somewhere in the distance, Linux has quietly succeeded in the places no one thinks to look.
It’s being used in mobile phones, set-top boxes, media streamers and routers. It’s being used to fuel the London Stock Exchange and to provide in-flight entertainment for thousands of travellers.
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Desktop
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Is Linux really harder? Well, for a Windows user trying to switch a friend or relative…my goodness, yes. If I blasted back to early 2003 and tried to switch people over to Linux with the understanding I had back then, it would have been a mess. But like being the “support guy” for any family or group of friends, it can work and most DEFINITELY has its place. The key is to be the support guy who knows how to use it in the first place. You know, much like Windows or OS X.
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Server
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ARM is reported to be developing chip design for switches and servers. Microsoft recently stated that it is porting Windows to Arm processors to be used in mobile devices but servers are different because it is expected to run various existing software. Arm on the other hand reiterated that most servers need only to run a few software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL database, and PHP.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week on Linux Outlaws: Eric Schmidt replaced as Google CEO, OSI and FSF join forces to protect software freedom, Florian Mueller spreads anti-Android FUD, a review of Linux Mint 10 Debian Edition and much more…
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Ballnux
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After facing mounting criticism for its extremely slow pace of upgrading its T-Mobile Vibrant phone, Samsung is finally ready to deploy Android 2.2 to the device.
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Kernel Space
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The kernel is Linus’ domain, so I figured I better ask him what cool new stuff is happening in the next 6 months of kernel development.
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Besides the Linux graphics stack being talked about this week at Linux.Conf.Au, there was also a talk by Ted Ts’o about the EXT4 file-system.
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Graphics Stack
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The videos from this year’s Linux.Conf.Au conference are now available online. There were a few graphics talks by Keith Packard, Eric Anholt, and Adam Jackson, which can be found embedded below.
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Applications
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Displex, an application that provides similar functionality as “fusion-icon”, but using an Ubuntu appindicator, was updated to version 0.4.
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Version 1.0 of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries was released just hours ago after being in development for a long while. It surprised a number of people that EFL finally hit version 1.0, but here’s another surprise: MPlayer is getting closer to version 1.0 too.
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Proprietary
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Sublime Text 2 is a TextMate-like text editor currently in alpha which is now available for Linux too (as well as Windows and Mac OSX). The application is not free but its evaluation period does not expire.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Red Eclipse is a free and open source game single and multi-player FPS game which is the continuation of the now-terminated Blood Frontier project.
The game is based on the Cube 2 Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine.
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Desktop Environments
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If you missed it this Friday night, version 1.0 of the core Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) have been released.
[...]
After Enlightenment E16 1.0 was released in 2009, other milestones since then have been an E17 snapshot, Samsung sponsoring Enlightenment’s development, and Enlightenment is now even running on refrigerators.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Ever since I switched to KDE4 I kept having the weirdest issues with Plasma. The problems ranged from small design glitches to freakishly strange behavior which rendered Plasma unusable every now and then. Today I’ve solved (almost) all of those issues, which, as it turned out, could all be fixed within a minute. But let’s not jump to the cause & workaround just yet.
[...]
Finally: I can’t tell you how great and polished KDE 4.6 suddenly feels. It’s been a while I’ve been that proud of it. And all because of two extra digits in a little text config file.
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KDE 4.6 was supposed to ship with a transparent Oxygen style but in the end it didn’t make it “due to serious issues (notably with embedded widgets, such as videos) which cannot be fixed at the style level”. But that doesn’t mean you can’t install Oxygen-Transparent. Read on!
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Xfce
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XFCE 4.8 was released about two weeks ago, bringing GVFS support for Thunar (so it can now browse remote shares using FTP, Windows Shares, WebDav and SSH), XFCE panel improvements and more.
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There you go. Enjoy the under-10-second boot! As promised, it finally arrived. But then, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint what makes one laptop boot faster and another slower. You have ancient laptops that boot as quickly as brand new high-end notebooks. It’s a tricky combination of hardware and software, almost a magic, if you will.
Still, eight seconds – or rather, almost nine seconds, is an extremely reasonable number, more so when you compare to other operating systems. I did test with Fedora, openSUSE and several more distros, none gave boot times as good as Ubuntu. Furthermore, taking Windows as the main antagonist in this race, Maverick wins hands down. There’s the humble and unexpected battery life bonus, too.
I hope you liked this article. If you got any crazy ideas about other benchmarks, feel free to send me your ideas and your hardware. I’ll be more than glad to abuse them.
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Linux is joining the app store bandwagon. Major Linux distributions announced that they will team up to make an app store for Linux users. With a Linux app store in place, users will have a place to look for apps no matter what distribution they use.
An Application Store will bring more users to the Linux platform. Third party developers will also be lured to the platform. The normal users can find and install applications that will be added to the current package management.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva Linux’s latest release is testament to the work done by developers to make it one of the easiest to use Linux releases ever.
Despite ongoing financial woes, Mandriva Linux developers have delivered the latest version of this popular desktop Linux operating system. Mandriva Linux 2010.2 is the latest in a long line of Mandriva releases from the company that used to be known as Mandrake Linux, and it every bit as user-friendly as promised.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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FUDCon Tempe gets started tonight. Even if you’re not there, you can still join in. We’re finishing up the opensource.com anniversary week by liveblogging open source stories from FUDCon.
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Debian Family
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No fear, “torrent site:debian.org” finds 4700 hits. Perhaps the censorship is more targeted or being phased in.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 19, Virtualization : Debian Xen Part 2 and Installing Ubuntu with m23.
* Linux Lab – Creating a Multiboot USB stick.
* Review – KDE 4.5.
* Top 5 – Music Annotation Apps.
plus: Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!
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Flavours and Variants
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Today the Bodhi team and I are happy to announce our release candidate (0.1.5) is now available to the general public. This disc includes a number of package updates, most notably Firefox beta 10 and EFL 1.0 stable release. For a full change log see here.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Seamless Software Update (SSU) is the term Nokia used to brand the over-the-air updates of Maemo. Community Seamless Software Update (CSSU) is being developed by the Maemo community, for the Maemo community. It aims to deliver fixes which can’t be delivered easily through Extras, such as core Maemo packages. It won’t, however, bundle software which can be installed through the Extras repositories.
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Android
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Corporate email software provider Good Technology released its quarterly device activations report covering the fourth quarter and found that Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iOS continued to be the most activated platform, among Good’s enterprise customers, with roughly twice the number of activations of Android for all of 2010.
The company said that the Apple iPad accounted for more than 20 percent of all iOS activations in the enterprise since April 2010 when the iPad was first released. The financial services industry is where iPad adoption is the hottest.
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“adb” (Android Debugging Bridge) is a command line tool that comes with the Android SDK which allows you to perform various actions on your Android mobile device.
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Tablets
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The good news is that the first version of Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb has been ported to an existing Android tablet. Xda-developers forum member deeper-blue combined data from the preview SDK Google released this week with a kernel for the NOOKcolor eBook reader to get the software up and running on the tablet.
The bad news is that the port is mostly a proof of concept at this point. There’s no hardware acceleration yet, and while deeper-blue did manage to get touch input to start working, he says the tablet is very slow while running Android 3.0. Hardware graphics acceleration might improve things, and he hopes to work on that this weekend.
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I still use open source software extensively (I’m writing this in WordPress, using Mozilla on Gnome on Ubuntu), but then, so does everyone, whether they know it or not. Sometime around the early 2000s, Linux and other open source software stopped being a fringe, weirdo thing and started just being a sensible choice for most Internet projects. And since almost everything’s on the Internet these days, well, open source is just something that is.
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Events
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This survey is intended to identify Open Source Software (OSS) certification and education awareness among ICT profession in Malaysia. We aim to produce a report of OSS Certification in Malaysia which will help us to understand the current situation and make a better decision in positioning ourself.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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While I personally never had difficulties with Firefox’s built-in offline mode and automatic state switching to it, I have had contact with users who reported that this happened regularly in their version of Firefox.
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Oracle
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Days from announcing a commitment from Ubuntu, The Document Foundations debuts its first full, stable (and free) release of the next generation of OpenOffice – LibreOffice 3.3. Steven J. Vaughan has details on the new release and following is a gallery of some of the most important new features.
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So what does this mean now? Well, it means Jenkins lives. We’ve registered jenkins-ci.org, though it’s empty at the moment. In the coming days, we will be renaming the existing Google Groups to jenkins-*@googlegroups.com, renaming the Twitter account from @hudsonci to @jenkinsci, and renaming our organization at Github from hudson to jenkinsci. I wanted to make sure everyone had notice ahead of time that this was happening, so that no one gets surprised by changes to their incoming mail, etc. As said before, the initial, interim governance board will consist of me, Kohsuke and, if he and Oracle are willing, Winston. If Winston is unwilling or unable to continue in that role with Jenkins, we will select a replacement interim member. The interim board will work on the details of a more permanent governance process going forward. Discussions on the infrastructure changes (including things like the Maven groupId/artifactIds, etc) will be in public, on these lists. We’re working to get the JIRA and wiki contents migrated over to the Jenkins site, and hope to work with Oracle to get that done in the next couple days.
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BSD
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It was just last year that LLVM’s Clang compiler was capable of building much of FreeBSD. LLVM/Clang is now onto building the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Qatar-based cable news network Al Jazeera is not available on United States cable systems — except in local markets in Vermont, Ohio and Washington, D.C.
But that hasn’t stopped the major American news outlets from relying on the international news network for critical reportage on the growing unrest in Egypt.
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Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.
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Open Data
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The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). Today he explores three possible futures for Open Public Data, and on Monday he will suggest ways to ensure that we are moving in the best direction.
We tend to assume that the opening up of public data will only produce positive outcomes for individuals, for society and the economy. But the opposite may be true. We should start thinking further ahead on the possible consequences of releasing public data, and how we can make sure they are mostly positive.
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Open Access/Content
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Þorsteinn Hallgrímsson, formerly of the National Library of Iceland had a big idea: digitize all Icelandic literature all the way to the current day and make it available to everyone interested in reading it. The Internet Archive was eager to be a part of this bold vision.
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Programming
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Ruby/RoR in NetBeans made headlines three years ago, but after Sun was acquired by Oracle there where fears that support for dynamic languages would suffer, as this IDE would be downsized. This has become a reality, since as of version 7, NetBeans will no longer support Ruby.
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What Makes a Language Usable or Worth Learning?
This is a common question I see people discuss: most often I’ve seen it in “Common Lisp vs. Scheme” discussions common in Lisp forums. The question there seems directed at why Common Lisp has been so much more popular than Scheme. That’s a dubious premise, seeing that many people learn Scheme in college CS classes, at least that’s my impression (as I said, I’ve never taken such a class). The real premise of the question is “Why does Common Lisp have so many libraries, whereas Scheme makes you recreate format?” Paul Graham’s creation of Arc was driven by this contention: people say “If you want to actually get work done, use Common Lisp,” but Scheme is so cool, right? I have come to a different question which is “How does this language fit into my workflow?” This was also a critical part of choosing a Scheme implementation. There are tons of them, but they are all designed for slightly different purposes, or they are someone’s proof-of-concept compiler. Guile is a great example of the reasons I would put time into learning to use a particular language.
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LexisNexis has been charging litigants “unconscionable” rates to file online documents in some Texas state courts, creating a poll tax-like situation that creates an unconstitutional barrier to open courts, a class action claims in Bexar County Court. The company, and its Netherlands-based parent, Reed Elsevier, faces similar lawsuits in Georgia and Texas federal court.
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My personal life has been enriched enormously by the massive array of splendid products that you give out for free- of course in the hope of making some ad money. Since you now are at the helm of affairs, I’d like to put to you this simple wish-list of mine with regards to my continent Africa.
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An area lawmaker is suing a Perinton couple who are also his constituents.
Senator Jim Alesi is also suing the builder of the couple’s home. The lawsuit claims he was injured when he decided to look inside their house which was under construction at the time.
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She said that any attempt to introduce a guillotine – which David Cameron has threatened to do early this week following agonisingly slow progress on the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill – would provoke uproar and would almost certainly be defeated.
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Broken promises are part of technology’s natural cycle, but Leo Apotheker, HP’s new boss, says that’s not going to happen anymore at his company.
From now on, HP will only announce tech products that are a few weeks away from shipping, Apotheker said in an interview with the BBC. “”HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have,” he said. “… That’s a simple management decision, I don’t need to re-engineer the tanker to do that.”
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Some Amish may average from 5-6, while others register birth rates as high as 9 children per family (such as the Swiss Amish churches of Adams County, Indiana). Typically the average number of children is cited as 6 or 7 per family. Compared to a non-Amish average of slightly more than 2, the Amish family size is indeed quite large.
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In the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010. The huge growth stems almost entirely from the religious culture’s high fertility rate, which is about 6 children per woman, on average. At this rate, the Amish population will reach 7 million by 2100 and 44 million by 2150. On the other hand, the growth may not continue if future generations of Amish choose to defect from the religion and if secular influences reduce the birth rate. In a new study, Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge University, has looked at the broader picture underlying this particular example: how will the high fertility rates of religious people throughout the world affect the future of human genetic evolution, and therefore the biological makeup of society?
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Thirteen years after the Queen fulfilled the dream of the late film director Sam Wanamaker and officially opened his reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, she has become inadvertently involved in an unseemly squabble over money with its managers.
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The Chinese government has announced plans to amalgamate the nine major cities in the Pearl River Delta (home to a manufacturing-driven economic boom) into a single city with a population of 42 million people (more than Argentina, the world’s 32nd largest country), occupying an area twice the size of Wales.
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Science
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I’ve been asked a lot by folks recently about whether the work I’m doing now at Google is “research” and whether one can really have a “research career” at Google. This has also led to a lot of interesting discussions about what the role of research is in an industrial setting.
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President Obama made his commitment to science and technology very clear in the first minutes of his presidency, when he promised in his Inaugural Address that his Administration would “restore science to its rightful place.”
Tonight that rightful place will be the First Lady’s Box in the U.S. Capitol, where four remarkable science students from across the country will join Michelle Obama and other guests during the President’s State of the Union Address.
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A study suggests the emergence of multicore processors will support an overhaul of computing architecture and much faster operations.
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Security
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The general course of the attack was pretty standard. There was a root privilege escalation on one of our platforms which permitted exposure of credentials that were then used to access machines with externally-facing SSH. Our network partitioning prevented escalation to other zones of our network.
This is the point where we found the attack, locked down servers, and began work on analysis and response.
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Politics/Defence/Police/Aggression
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While the popular satellite channel Al Jazeera has been broadcasting live footage of mass protests in Egypt, a nearly countrywide clampdown on the internet means there have been little information from people on the ground via blogs and Twitter.
Despite this, and a mobile service shutdown, Egyptians have been finding ways around the internet blockage, using old-fashioned landlines, faxes and even ham radio. Telecomix News Agency said in a post on Twitter on Friday that it has been providing dial-up modem service and that activists are receiving Morse code messages over ham radio out of Egypt.
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And with Libya’s immediate neighbors convulsed by public protests over the brutality and kleptocracy of their ruling familes, a newly leaked cable from the U.S. Embassy in Libya suggests that strongman Muammar Qaddafi has created a decadent, money-hungry family dynasty that could find itself the target of the next Arab revolution in the streets.
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The first undercover police officer to infiltrate the environmental movement has warned against allowing the Metropolitan police to take over the unit responsible for monitoring “domestic extremists”.
Peter Black, who was undercover for four years, said it would be a “terrific mistake” if Scotland Yard were given control of the secretive unit, which has been running spies in protest groups.
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Security forces under the control of Laurent Gbagbo and militias that support him have, since late November 2010, committed extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, and rape, Human Rights Watch said today.
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Tunisia’s foreign minister, Kamel Morjane, has announced his resignation, state media reported, as authorities sought to appease protesters who want to oust other peers of the deposed former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
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Britain’s most senior military officer at the time of the invasion of Iraq told the Chilcot inquiry he repeatedly asked Tony Blair for an assurance that the war would be lawful and was emphatically assured the aim was never “regime change”.
In striking contrast to previous evidence about the former prime minister’s war aims, Admiral Lord Boyce said : “Our policy absolutely and specifically was not regime change”.
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When President Paul Kagame of Rwanda won re-election in August, he could look back with pride on his accomplishments. Rwanda has emerged from the devastation of genocide and become more secure and prosperous than anyone had a right to expect. The central task of his second seven-year term, which by law must be his last, is to add broader democracy to this security and prosperity.
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Eight people suspected of terrorist links have been banned from returning to Britain under deprivation of citizenship orders, described bya lawyer for some of them as “far more draconian” than control orders.
A freedom of information request by the Guardian revealed that, since 2007, eight people have been issued with these orders and had their passports cancelled while out of the UK, the same number as currently are subject to control orders. Often they were visiting family members abroad in school holidays when the notices were served, followed within a day or two by a signed order and an exclusion order preventing them from returning to the UK.
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An Edmonton police officer was found guilty Friday of assaulting a man he had taken into custody.
Const. Haoyin Zheng was found guilty of assault in relation to the arrrest of two suspects in a west Edmonton alley on Dec. 15, 2008.
Zheng faced three charges but was found not guilty of assault with a weapon and a second assault charge.
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Joe “Grim” Thomson has spent about eight years in jail. His rap sheet has 31 convictions, from theft to assault to break and enter. He was “jumped in” to a Toronto gang at the age of 10.
He’s been on the inside of the Don Jail and Metro West and experienced a prison riot at maximum-security Millhaven. But none of those compare to the makeshift G20 detention centre that housed more than 1,000 people arrested during the summit weekend.
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The Egyptian army has secured a famed antiquities museum from looters after dozens tried to steal priceless artifacts.
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According to sources in the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel is making preparations to welcome Hosni Mubarak into exile after Saudi Arabia rejected overtures.
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Something incredible is happening in Egypt. Protests are spreading across the country, threatening a 30-year dictatorship.
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We may have seen it in Canada, where the trashing of a police cruiser may have been a setup. The cruiser was supposedly stripped of it’s valuable computer, and abandoned, and the protestors who trashed it were wearing the same combat boots that uniformed police were wearing.
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Jan. 28, 2011 President Mubarak’s Steals 40 Billion. President Mubarak’s stash is worth 40 billion dollars as his personal worth or what he stole from the Egyptian people has risen to epic proportions.
Mubarak’s name can be added to the names of wealthy dictators throughout the world that most likely received the aide from the United States in their attempt to affect influence in foreign country politics.
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Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun at the idea that Twitter might have played a key part in the demonstrations, and there are many observers who share his skepticism. The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the frustration of the oppressed Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the word out, and in helping organizers plan their protests. In the end, it’s not about Twitter or Facebook: it’s about the power of real-time networked communication.
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I found this collection of pictures of women in Egypt protesting against the regime on Facebook collected by Leil-Zahra Mortada.
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First it was Facebook. Then it was Twitter. Now, in the face of massive protests in the streets of Cairo and throughout the country, Egypt has pulled the plug on the entire Internet for its citizens. As this chart from Arbor networks shows, Internet traffic mounted steadily in Egypt steadily over several days, then suddenly and precipitously dropped to nil at 5:20 PM EST yesterday.
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As the United States struggles to respond to rapidly changing conditions in Egypt, it is informative to look at the arc of US foreign policy over the past half century or so. Foggy Bottom is stuck in a fog precisely because the approach to foreign policy has not evolved sufficiently since the demise of the Cold War. US foreign policy today is just as dependent on supporting individual despotic leaders today as it was in the 1950′s and 1960′s.
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As political scientists, historians, and researchers in related fields who have studied the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, we the undersigned believe you have a chance to move beyond rhetoric to support the democratic movement sweeping over Egypt. As citizens, we expect our president to uphold those values.
For thirty years, our government has spent billions of dollars to help build and sustain the system the Egyptian people are now trying to dismantle. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Egypt and around the world have spoken. We believe their message is bold and clear: Mubarak should resign from office and allow Egyptians to establish a new government free of his and his family’s influence. It is also clear to us that if you seek, as you said Friday “political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people,” your administration should publicly acknowledge those reforms will not be advanced by Mubarak or any of his adjutants.
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The concept of awarding any officer an award, for any involvement in the G8/G20 fiasco is beyond the pale.
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Cablegate
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1:30 Just got email from Chris McGreal, Guardian correspondent in Washington, D.C., responding to my item earlier today about Bradley Manning as (possible) British citizen. Here, with his permission, from the email: “I think you are almost certainly right about him being a British citizen at birth through his mother who still lives in Wales. It maybe that he even obtained a British passport because, as the Daily Mail reports today, he went to Tasker Milward secondary school in Haverfordwest for a number of years before returning to his father. Which means he either entered the UK with a British passport or would have had to have obtained some kind of visa in his US passport that recognised his right to be in the UK through citizenship. Either way, there must have been some form of official British recognition of his UK citizenship for him to have gone to school in Wales.” If he is a citizen, British authorities would normally take an interest in the case, visit him in prison, etc.
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U.S. and British government officials have begun a global crackdown against pro-WikiLeaks “hacktivists” who briefly shut down Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon.com December 9. The loose group of hacktivists began a global cyber-attack called “Operation Payback” against the companies that earlier had caved-in to what was likely a U.S. federal government pressure campaign and similar electronic attack against the WikiLeaks website earlier in the year.
Five British citizens were arrested on January 27 in the anti-WikiLeaks government probe, and the U.S. government issued 40 search warrants the same day in a related move. The British arrests all involved young men aged 15 to 26. ABC News reported that many of the U.S. searches were “conducted in the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston area as part of an ongoing investigation that involved 26 FBI field offices executing search warrants.”
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David Cameron set to raise issue with visiting Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina after UK connection revealed by WikiLeaks
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Bill Keller, the New York Times’ executive editor, published an enormous article on the 26th of January about the New York Times’ dealings with Wikileaks. The article develops further the running story of Wikileaks’ relationship with its media partners, the subject of a Vanity Fair piece earlier in the month.
Much has been made of the negative light in which Julian Assange appears in the article. Wired’s Kim Zetter published a digest piece, in which the more absurd claims of the piece are given particular attention but little critical treatment. The more colourful parts of the article were, predictably, grist to the celebrity gossip mill.
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The following is a brief description of this project with instructions on how to participate and submit your video clips. Julian Assange’s extradition hearing date is set to occur on either Feb 7th or 8th, 2011. Our goal is to release this video is the day of his hearing. With your help it will be a very powerful message that will be heard by many people around the world. Due to our very tight deadline we ask that you submit video clips back to us by February 1st.
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¶1. (C) SUMMARY AND INTRODUCTION: PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSION IS THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM OF EGYPTIAN POLITICS. DESPITE INCESSANT WHISPERED DISCUSSIONS, NO ONE IN EGYPT HAS ANY CERTAINTY ABOUT WHO WILL SUCCEED MUBARAK, OR HOW THE SUCCESSION WILL HAPPEN. MUBARAK HIMSELF SEEMS TO BE TRUSTING TO GOD AND THE INERTIA OF THE MILITARY AND CIVILIAN SECURITY SERVICES TO ENSURE AN ORDERLY TRANSITION. IN THE CURRENT POLITICAL FRAMEWORK, THE MOST LIKELY CONTENDERS ARE PRESIDENTIAL SON GAMAL MUBARAK (WHOSE PROFILE IS EVER-INCREASING AT THE RULING NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY), EGIS CHIEF OMAR SOLIMAN, DARK HORSE ARAB LEAGUE SECRETARY GENERAL AMRE MOUSSA, OR AN AS-YET UNKNOWN MILITARY OFFICER. WHOEVER ENDS UP AS EGYPT’S NEXT PRESIDENT LIKELY WILL BE POLITICALLY WEAKER THAN MUBARAK. ONCE MUBARAK’S SUCCESSOR HAS ASSUMED THE POST, HIS FIRST PRIORITY WILL BE TO BUILD POPULAR SUPPORT. WE THUS EXPECT THAT THE NEW PRESIDENT WILL LIKELY ADOPT AN ANTI-AMERICAN TONE IN HIS INITIAL PUBLIC RHETORIC, IN AN EFFORT TO PROVE HIS NATIONALIST BONA FIDES TO THE EGYPTIAN STREET, AND MAY POSSIBLY EXTEND AN OLIVE BRANCH TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, AS DID PREVIOUS EGYPTIAN PRESIDENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THEIR TERMS.
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Julian Assange awakes to talk, from the nap he has stolen in an armchair at the Norfolk country house where he is staying. He has been up all night disseminating, on his WikiLeaks site, US State Department cables and documents relevant to the momentous events unfolding in Egypt, and they make remarkable reading.
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11:45 – The Daily Express (UK tabloid) has reported that the military are protecting the Valley of the Kings but that there has been no move by the UK government to evacuate Luxor.
CNN has reported on two tours and their experiences in Cairo. One tour, which started in Cairo, arrived safely in Luxor where they saw tanks but apparently no signs of trouble. They were transferred to their cruise ship which has sailed south, but the atmoshpere on board is described as “somber”.
Reuters has suggested that the protests may have only a short term impact on tourism in Egypt, but I guess that that will depend on the political outcome of the protests.
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This is an important blog post. Please distribute it widely.
My legal information is sourced from the UK Border Agency, specifically their caseworking instructions for all issues arising under The British Nationality Act of 1981. This piece of legislation has formed the basis of British nationality law since coming into force on 1 January 1983 and the caseworking instructions derived from it are the guidelines Border Agency employees refer to on a day-to-day basis when deciding who is entitled to British citizenship. This is an absolutely authoritative source.
Bradley Manning is a UK citizen by virtue of his mother’s nationality. He holds both US and UK citizenship.
Bradley Manning was born in the United States on 17 December 1987, the son of Brian and Susan Manning. As the son of an American father, born on US soil, Bradley Manning has held US citizenship since birth.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Barack Obama has paid less attention to climate change in his State of the Union addresses than any other president in the past 20 years, an analysis by a British researcher has found.
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The threat of the Greenland ice sheet slipping ever faster into the sea because of warmer summers has been ruled out by a scientific study.
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It’s true that water vapour is the biggest overall contributor to the greenhouse effect and that humans are not responsible for directly emitting this gas in quantities sufficient to change its concentration in the atmosphere. However, the scientific evidence suggests that the warming caused by man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is increasing the amount of water vapour in the air by boosting the rate of evaporation.
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Whales are not only the largest animals that have ever lived – they are also among the most intelligent, and yet we still know very little about them. New research, however, suggests that sperm whales at least use sophisticated communication techniques to develop distinct and separate cultures. Here to discuss the latest in cetacean research to mark next month’s Peninsula Arts Whale Festival, are Philip Hoare, a self-confessed “whalehead” and author of Leviathan or, The Whale, winner of the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, and Dr Hal Whitehead from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a world expert on sperm whales.
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In actual “energy and economic reality,” the oil and coal industries are killing Americans, weakening our economy, and destabilizing our planet. Pollution from burning coal and oil kills at least 20,000 Americans a year. Oil company profits are soaring — ConocoPhillips up 46 percent to $1.9 billion, Chevron up 72 percent to $5.3 billion — on rising prices that are sucking the lifeblood out of the economic recovery. Even Dr. John Felmy, American Petroleum Institute’s top economist, admits that raising taxes on oil companies could create two million American jobs.
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Finance
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The headline of the excerpt below says it all: Goldman Sachs is very much responsible for the size and length of the financial disaster that came to a head in 2008. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report is a very large book-length document but one that is not difficult to read. In Chapter 8 entitled “The CDO Machine” a small section is devoted to Goldman Sachs beginning on page 142. It is worth reading but really doesn’t tell us any more than what we have already been reading and writing about.
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The banking giant Goldman Sachs has created a “special purpose vehicle” for its high-net-worth clients that it says would further set them apart from the rest of the world by allowing the elite group an exclusive opportunity to invest in themselves.
“We just want to do our part for our business’ economy and make sure all of us are living the life we deserve,” said a Goldman Sachs spokesman. “We are capable of doing great things for this company, and if that happens to help out the country, too, then all the better. But we’re not worried about that right now and neither are our clients.”
In having its most prized customers invest billions in themselves through Goldman, the New York bank has established itself as the leading candidate to win the lucrative and prestigious assignment of its clients’ initial public offering, whenever that offering comes. It also puts Goldman in the position to reap millions of dollars in banking fees.
Goldman says it has already begun the process of wooing its wealthy clients to invest in themselves, forming an investment vehicle that seeks to raise as much $100 billion through the cabal of the super wealthy.
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Binyamin Appelbaum, as an addendum to this sobering look at the realities of corporate tax reform, points to the work of NYU’s Aswath Damodaran, who has compiled a rough estimate of the effective tax rates in various industries. You might already anticipate that the rates vary.
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In an attempt to patch up the relationship between the president and the nation’s top donors, Jim Messina, the 2012 reelection campaign manager and former Obama deputy chief of staff, will headline a Democratic Party event next week at the Park Avenue apartment of Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein, the Obama fundraising flagship in New York. The conciliatory mission, along with the selection of Julianna Smoot, the outgoing White House social secretary as Messina’s campaign deputy, signals an intention to rebuild the big-donor establishment that President Obama obliterated.
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A growing number of Americans consider the accelerating trend toward globalization a bad thing for the United States. At the same time, a majority now sees being the world’s No. 1 economic power as an important national goal.
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The world’s largest bond investor says the fight over raising the country’s borrowing limit threatens to throw the debt market into a tailspin.
“It’s the wrong way to do it,” says Bill Gross, manager of the $241 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, the largest mutual fund. “Obviously, I’m all for a move to a balanced budget over time. But this is like imposing the death penalty for shoplifting.”
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Behind closed doors, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, called it “the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.”
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that his country has more confidence now that there is a sustainable expansion – but added that it is not a boom.
“There’s much more confidence now that we’ve got a sustainable expansion,” he said at the World Economic Forum, but added, “It’s not a boom.”
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This would have been an appropriate headline for an AP article which included a quote from North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad implying that it would be reasonable to default on the government bonds held by the Social Security trust fund:
“I’ve received the lash from those who say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have to cut Social Security because there are trillions of dollars of assets.’ It is true there are trillions of dollars of assets. It is true that they’re backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It is also true that the only way those bonds get redeemed is out of the current income of the United States.”
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The findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have pretty much wiped away the already dwindling chances that federal prosecutors will try to hold a prominent Wall Street executive criminally responsible for the crisis. Both the majority and dissenting reports describe a wide range of serious problems in the financial system that led to the downfall of firms like Lehman Brothers and the American International Group, setting off a deep recession when the credit markets seized up in 2008.
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Workers saw their wages and benefits rise slightly faster in 2010 than 2009, but the gain was still the second-lowest increase in nearly three decades.
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A more active consumer was the main reason the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the final three months of 2010, the Commerce Department said Friday. It was up from 2.6 percent the previous quarter and the best since the start of last year.
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US taxpayers are likely to make a $12.3bn (£7.75bn) total profit on their bailout of financial group Citigroup, according to government officials.
The US treasury expects to net $312.2m on Monday when it sells the rest of its stake in Citigroup. The government holds 465.1m warrants in Citi that entitle it to purchase common shares in the banking group.
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The point about Davos is that it makes everyone feel wildly insecure. Billionaires and heads of state alike are all convinced that they have been given the worst hotel rooms, put on the least interesting panels and excluded from the most important events/most interesting private dinners. The genius of World Economic Founder Klaus Schwab is that he has been able to persuade hundreds of accomplished businessmen to pay thousands of dollars to attend an event which is largely based on mass humiliation and paranoia.
Wives feel sympathetic to their husbands and share their pain. But we have our own problems to cope with. After all, we are the on the bottom rung of the Davos ladder.
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Political PR/Deception
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Justice Antonin Scalia spoke Monday afternoon at a closed-door meeting organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and the House Tea Party caucus. In 2009, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas organized a tea-party group called Liberty Central, which urged conservatives to fight for the repeal of “Obamacare.”
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Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin made her first media appearance since discussing the Tucson shooting with Sean Hannity, this time speaking to Greta Van Susteren about her thoughts on this year’s State of the Union address.
Palin was, of course, disappointed in Barack Obama’s speech, calling his decision to refer to America’s “Sputnik moment” as a “WTF moment.”
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So the BBC is slimming down, in response to government pressure. The World Service is to lose five of its foreign-language services, and a quarter of its staff. And BBC Online’s budget will be cut by a quarter to £103m and the unit will lose 360 staff, at the same time as it embarks upon a radical “redesign” of the website and its navigation. Introducing these developments, the corporation’s director general explained that the hatchet-work was part of a broader strategy to do “fewer things better”. The changes to BBC Online would, he maintained, make the corporation’s web services “more focused and more valuable”.
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It’s a sobering thought that despite all the turmoil in Yemen there are people who look to it as a haven of safety.
Almost a quarter of a million Somalis have fled their homes since May 7 to escape fighting in Mogadishu and up to 12,000 of them have gathered in the northern town of Bossasso, hoping to be smuggled into Yemen.
So far, 30,000 have made the dangerous sea crossing to Yemen but more than 300 have died or gone missing in the process, AP reports via al-Jazeera and the Washington Post.
“These people are obviously reaching the end of their rope,” UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told a news conference. “They see no future in Somalia and many of them are so desperate that they’re willing to risk their lives and the lives of their families to escape.”
In Yemen itself, four policemen were killed and one injured – apparently by separatists – at al-Ayn (Abyan province). A local official said 10 gunmen attacked at 2am while four of the police were asleep and the fifth was on guard.
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Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.
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Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like the BBC
And sometimes the BBC doesn’t seem to like Rupert Murdoch either.
Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old “decadent” elites of Britain.
And I thought it would be interesting to put up some of the high points.
It is also a good way to examine how far his populist rhetoric is genuine, and how far its is a smokescreen to disguise the interests of another elite.
As a balanced member of the BBC – I leave it to you to decide.
Murdoch first appears in the BBC archive in a short fragment without commentary shot in 1968. It shows him ambling into the City of London on his way to see Sir Humphrey Mynors who was head of the City Takeover Panel
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Censorship/Neutrality
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“Neutrality” — if it’s good enough for the core of the internet, isn’t it good enough for the edge? The biggest internet providers say it is, and they would love to have the government slap a few neutrality rules on Google, just to see how the advertising giant likes the taste of the regulatory bridle.
In 2010, while the FCC was debating net neutrality rules, ISPs like Time Warner Cable settled on a “they’re gatekeepers, too!” strategy.
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The OLPC’s XO has meshnetworking capabilities. And some gaming systems, such as the Nintendo DS, have mesh networking built in. But we want to look at projects that are specifically aimed at replacing or augmenting the public Internet.
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Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.
The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.
[...]
Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed. While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can so they have a fair chance to fight the request if they so choose.
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Handing the responsibility of shutting down child porn sites to web firms and watchdogs removes any incentive for police to investigate the crimes, according to a European digital rights group.
In a report, The slide from “self-regulation” to corporate censorship, European Digital Rights (EDRI) criticised the trend of passing extra-judicial powers to an ever-widening pool of web monitors, including ISPs, bodies such as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and European watchdogs.
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Galvanized by the unprecedented Internet shutdown in Egypt, angel investor Shervin Pishevar has launched OPENMESH a forum for people who want to discuss ways of preventing governments from blocking communications networks. The site (which is admittedly sparse at the moment) was up within hours of Pishevar tweeting out his ideas, designed and built by followers @Laksman and @garyjaybrooks.
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With reports of Egypt’s government completing shutting down the Internet in the country, talk about an “Internet kill switch” bill in the U.S. has reemerged. Could it happen here?
The bill in question is the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, a cyber-security measure introduced in June by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. It was an over-arching cyber-security measure that, among other things, would create an office of cyberspace policy within the White House and a new cyber-security center within the Homeland Security Department.
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Beijing blocks searches for “Egypt” from microblogging site following protests there.
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The current state of affairs in Egypt looks quite bleak for people using Vodafone, Orange, TE Data, and other well-known service providers. It is reported that each of those companies was ordered by the Egyptian government to turn down their internet services. The nature of the order and its legality is of course very unclear at this time. What is known is that nearly in perfect unison many Egyptian ISPs turned down their BGP route announcements to countries outside of Egypt and from what we’ve been able to gather they’re also not peering with each other. The cables connecting (FLAG and SEABONE) Egypt to the world are still physically intact.
The impact of de-peering is significant; even if someone is able to get packets directly to the edge routers of TE Data or another ISP, no response will be forthcoming. Renesys, RIPE, and BGPmon have fantastic technical details for those without access to an active BGP router.
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Maybe Facebook is not the place to display our work as figurative painters. But in this difficult economy, and truly at any time, it’s hard to accept a limitation on your potential success based solely on a handful of people who don’t understand what you’re doing. It’s hard not to be angry when someone seems to blindly attack the thing that you hold so close to your heart… labeling it vulgar and obscene, when you see it as a thing of beauty and human dignity. You see it as a gift to them, and they see it as a threat. The issue with Facebook seems to be the same as the issue with the work itself: each of us has different definitions of what it is and what is should be… and for now at least, we’ll all have to agree to disagree.
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Privacy
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A Swedish ISP that is also responsible for hosting WikiLeaks, Bahnhof, has this week triggered a fresh debate into internet privacy by announcing its intention to avoid the new European Data Retention Directive and stick all of its customers behind an effectively anonymous Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Most VPN’s act as private networks that piggyback the public internet and are traditionally used to help employees stay connected with their work while away from the office. They can also have many other uses, such as allowing virtual Local Area Network (LAN) connections between users.
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The study finds that more Americans worry about their online privacy being violated (25 percent) than going bankrupt (23 percent) or losing their job (22 percent).
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Civil Rights
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A DHS fusion center in Tennessee — an agency designed to aid cooperation between state, local and federal officials in anti-terrorism investigations — has put the ACLU of Tennessee on a map of terrorist organizations because it sent a letter to schools warning them about Christmas celebrations and the First Amendment.
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AN OUTCRY is erupting in the US over how judges are giving lawyers rights to plunder private emails and posts in social notworking websites.
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A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes more than 2,500 pages’ worth of FBI documents extracted using Freedom of Information Act litigation and finds disturbing, system-wide violations of civil liberties on a scale that is far beyond anything reported to date…
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the month since the FCC adopted its open Internet rules, most of the DC debate over net neutrality has focused on FCC overreach. Verizon sued the agency. MetroPCS sued the agency. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill to strip the FCC of any authority to regulate Internet access.
But Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) have another point of view: the FCC didn’t go far enough. The pair yesterday introduced the “Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011″ (PDF) to extend net neutrality to all forms of Internet access (including wireless).
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IGP has obtained a copy of the US Commerce Department’s position paper for its February 28 negotiations with the ICANN Board over the new top level domain program. The “USG Submission to the GAC Scorecard” shows that the U.S. Commerce Department’s ICANN crew has gone off the rails. It supports direct governmental veto power over domains and demands that ICANN completely rewrite most of the consensus policies developed over 4 years.
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DRM
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Soon after Sony won in SF with a TRO against Mr. Hotz regarding the ‘metldr keys’, their MIB Team started the next step and have issued DMCA Takedown Notices to a number of various ‘scene’ developers that had code either mirrored or stored on their GITHUB’s or websites!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A Paris criminal court on Friday convicted former Vivendi SA [corporate website] chairman and CEO Jean-Marie Messier of misleading investors during his tenure at the helm of the French entertainment giant. Canadian Edgar Bronfman Jr., former vice-chairman of Vivendi and current Warner Music Group chairman and CEO, was convicted of insider trading and fined five million euros.
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At least 51 torrent sites have been taken down this month thanks to joint efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its dutch counterpart BREIN—12 in the US and 39 in the Netherlands. The two groups say they were able to work with the sites’ hosting providers to take them offline, though the names of the affected sites have not been released.
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“Under current law, Hollywood already has powerful tools to police online infringement, such as the DMCA takedown process, that were the result of years of negotiation and include protections against abuse.”
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THE ONLINE COMMUNITY believes it us under siege after the arrests of five Anonymous suspects, according to Pirate Party UK leader Loz Kaye.
While stressing its opposition to illegal activity, Kaye’s party says it understands why, in the face of government and corporate attacks against Wikileaks, individuals around the world want to fight back.
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Once in a very long while something comes along when the overused superlative ‘awesome’ can be applied appropriately. Something that’s truly extraordinary.
This “may be of interest to your readers, and perhaps might be worthy of a short posting”, says an email from someone who prefers to remain anonymous.
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ACTA
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You’ll find below the reply of the Swiss government (Minister of Justice and Police, from which the Swiss IP-Institute depends) to a letter and a critical analysis on ACTA we sent last November, asking the Swiss government and the foreign affairs parliamentary commission to reject ACTA.
Fedora Site Hacked? Sourceforge Hacked?? Unified Package Installer! KDE 4.6 Released!
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.29.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Two of my friends transfered out NIU this semester, both of them are running various forms of GNU/Linux on their personal computers. One of them is not so technically inclined and he asked me to help him trouble shoot why his Ubuntu system could not get an internet connection. After doing a bit of searching online I found that NIU had some special settings for connecting to their wired network via Cisco NAC.
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Desktop
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Although people spend all day with their iPhones, iPads or whatever else they’re using to casually search the web while watching TV or sitting at a cafe, most of them still have some sort of real computer on a desk somewhere. Some of these poor people (too many in fact) have been suckered into using a laptop as a desktop replacement. There’s really no such thing as a desktop replacement.
That said, the honkin’ desktop computer with the multi-core CPU isn’t in vogue, plain and simple. The productivity benefits have been forgotten.
First of all, let’s get real about computing in the modern world. It’s not about looking things up on the Web; it’s about getting more work done in a shorter period of time than ever before. This is largely because of the processing power of desktop computers. And, yes, a powerful laptop can be a workhorse, but get real. If given a choice between using a laptop – no matter how powerful – with a 15-inch screen and using a multi-core tower machine with two or three or four 20-inch to 30-inch monitors, why would I choose the laptop?
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Server
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These systems would be perfectly served by Linux distributions (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Suse) and Microsoft could not offer anything for them. Linux is already the strongest player in the datacenter and this would grow its market share considerably while reducing the market-share of Windows simultaniously.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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If you have any interest at all in the technical side of the Wayland Display Server, there’s been two mailing list threads in particular worth paying attention to this week. One is about proposals for Wayland’s input system an the other is in terms of defining a Wayland implementation.
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Applications
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There you go. I purposefully avoided listing just about any dock app available to minimize clutter and confusion. Even having three great choices is tough. Once you get comfortable with Awn, Docky and Cairo, you can start exploring further. In fact, I promise a sequel, where we will sample a few more dock programs.
Overall, any one will serve you well. Cairo leads with best themes and performance on machines with weak graphics cards. Docky and Awn follow closely, with some really neat transitions and effects. Whatever you choose, you can’t go wrong with either one.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Good news, settlers of the new world! (Or those who feel like settling new worlds but were born in the wrong period of history.) FreeCol 0.10-alpha has been released. Get it from the unstable version download area of their website (the current stable version is 0.9.5).
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Version 0.7 of Freedoom, a project which replaces the commercial DOOM game’s media assets with openly-licensed replacements (thus making Freedoom a complete FOSS game) was released. Here be the changelog.
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Cave Story is one of the most popular and highly addictive adventure game made by Japanese developer Daisuke Amaya. Originally developed for Windows, the game has been so popular that it has been ported to a number of systems that include a Linux port also.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Yakuake is a very cool Quake-like drop-down terminal emulator for KDE. If you’ve never seen Yakuake in action before, check out the following video which I’ve just recorded with Yakuake 2.9.8 in KDE SC 4.6…
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Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications are built on the KDE Platform, which is also newly enhanced. Application developers can take advantage of a new “mobile build target” for deployment on mobile devices. Developers can also use the Plasma framework for creating desktop widgets in QML, the Qt language, and there are new Javascript interfaces for working with data. Nepomuk, the technology behind metadata and semantic search in KDE applications, now provides a graphical interface to back up and restore data, and there is enhanced support for Bluetooth wireless technology. If you’re interested in more on the platform additions, read the KDE Platform 4.6 announcement.
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Is KDE SC 4.6 a good release? It is indeed.
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It’s been an interesting and useful exercise in choice and alternatives, at any rate. You see, we KDE3 lovers are not averse to change– we’re averse to changes that don’t work for us.
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On this release of KDEMU! We talk about KDE 4.6, KDE.in, Nightly KDE builds in ?ubuntu, TRON, and much more.
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Overall, it appears to be supported quite well. The big exceptions are the statuses on Kopete and Choqok. Choqok needs some real work when it comes to Spanish language support. If it weren’t so broken I would have stayed in Spanish for a while. There were a lot of terms that I had no idea were the right or proper term! It’ll definitely be fun to use it to learn technical terms. I just need to wait until Choqok is working.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome Activity Journal – a semantic file browser based on Zeitgeist – has been updated to version 0.6.0, adding quite a few new features.
Gnome Activity 0.6.0 comes with Xchat and Bazaar version control support, drag and drop for tree view and bookmark/pin area as well as some eyecandy tweaks like a welcome screen, usability tweaks, path’s label is now clickable and more.
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Developers from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and Mageia attended to a conference last week in which they’ve tried to find a way to make “installing and removing software on Linux suck less.”
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Máirín is a senior interaction designer at Red Hat. She’s highly creative and a great artist, who is also is also passionate about open source. For her the two intersect in Inkscape, an open source SVG graphics program. Read how she used it to introduce middle school students to open source.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’ve heard and/or read a number of complaints over the past while about how the process of becoming an Ubuntu Developer is difficult, so I thought I’d write up a short guide to one of the many paths to becoming a developer. I send this to the Ubuntu Developers list for maximum distribution, although I realise that many of you are already developers, so won’t find this as useful: please skip past it, or pass it on to those you know that are currently interested in becoming Ubuntu Developers (or extending the set of packages to which they have been granted upload rights).
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An update in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal finally brings ratings and reviews to Ubuntu Software Center.
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WebUpd8 reader Georgi Karavasilev, inspired by our own Y PPA Manager, has created a GUI tool called Mechanig which you can use to refresh the repositories, upgrade packages, clean leftover .deb and unnecessary packages and more.
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Next Thursday we are aiming for releasing the second Alpha milestone of Ubuntu Natty. Please help us to resolve the numerous targetted bugs.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Companies, institutions and individuals offering Qt training can now download and use some of our official Qt training materials free of charge.
Thanks to an initiative led by Jurgen Bocklage-Ryannel and the Qt learning team in Munich, over 700 of our slides and five plus hours of training videos are being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License for anyone to use as part of their own training or education programs.
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Android
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This suggests that we might not have to wait long before Android 3.0 arrives on phones in addition to tablets.
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The rise of Android in the smartphone sector nullifies Cook’s arguments against Android in the tablet world because precisely the same dynamics are at play. Apple’s locked-down approach means that it cannot compete when it comes to offering users a huge choice of systems from multiple suppliers. Choice engenders competition, which will drive down Android prices, helping to increase uptake yet further.
Indeed, the extraordinary proliferation of Android tablets has already begun. This includes famous brands like ASUS, Toshiba, LG, Samsung (with a new version of its Galaxy Tab rumoured) and Motorola, whose Xoom offering which has already garnered “huge pre-orders”, according to some reports.
But most of these are at the high end of the market, and therefore compete with the iPad. Far more interesting – and important – are the no-name systems that are beginning to pop up everywhere. If you want to get a feel for the future of the Android tablet market, try taking a look at site Newpad.cn, which covers the world of tablets. Yes, it’s in Chinese, but scanning through the product page and looking for the tell-tale “Android” amidst the Chinese characters (or using this Google Translate version), it’s clear that there has been a sudden rush of Android tablets launched recently (in Taiwan / China, at least) – and that’s even before the proper tablet version of Android (“Honeycomb”) is available.
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An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
Based in Germany, Open-Xchange has tripled its user base from 8 million to 24 million paid seats since 2008, with the help of three dozen service providers including 1&1 Internet, among the world’s largest Web hosting companies. Open-Xchange has 7 million users in North America today, but says most of its 2011 growth will occur on this continent, in part due to new agreements with service providers Lunarpages of California and Cirrus Tech in Toronto.
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Well, nobody gets tired of making predictions, or at least thinking of what the future looks like. Predictions were made for several technological categories like Security, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and a more generic forecast on Information Technology as a whole. Similarly, we can never stop thinking of making forecasts for one of the most loved technology solutions in the world – Open Source.
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Events
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Valerie Aurora, kernel developer, delivered a fascinating presentation on easing kernel development using User Mode Linux – a version of Linux that runs as a process within an already existing Linux installation. UML provides an alternative to having a seperate dedicated test machine or virtual machine, that needs constant rebooting in order to test. Valerie also mentioned briefly an upcoming project of hers – the Ada Initiative, to encourage women in Open Source.
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Update, Jan 29, 1.45pm: Chief conference organiser Shaun Nykvist was asked for his take on the issue; he deferred to Linux Australia president John Ferlito, saying he had been told not to comment.
Ferlito told iTWire that some people, of both sexes, had complained both to him and the conference organisers. “There were some complaints on Twitter and one or two came to Shaun and me and said this infringed on our policy,” he said.
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Linux.conf.au 2012 is set to be held at Ballarat University in Victoria, an institution that launched its bid to host the conference in July last year.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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10 Fresh and Awesome Google Chrome Themes: When Google Chrome was still at version 3.0, a very limited number of themes were available. During that time, we have showcased here our top ten favorite Chrome themes and shared with you a quick tip on installing and uninstalling Chrome themes.
Today, there are already tons of cool Google Chrome themes or skins at hand that can be instantly and easily downloaded and installed from the Chrome web store.
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Mozilla
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Databases
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For our systems based on Hadoop, Apache HBase is a convenient, high-performance column-oriented distributed database solution. With its dynamic partitioning model, HBase makes it really easy to grow your cluster and re-distribute load across nodes at runtime, which is great for managing our ever-growing data volume needs and avoiding hot spots. Built-in support for data compression, range queries spanning multiple nodes, and even native support for distributed counters make it an attractive alternative for many of our use cases. HBase’s strong consistency model can also be handy, although it comes with some availability trade offs. Perhaps the biggest utility comes from being able to combine real-time HBase queries with batch map-reduce Hadoop jobs, using HDFS as a shared storage platform.
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Oracle
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I’d say it’s more of an issue of fragmentation, and that we see this all the time – in Android itself, in Windows, say, and in the world of GNU/Linux through hundreds of distros, each with different versions and configurations. Nothing really new there.
Real forks are relatively few and far between precisely because of the differences between forking and fragmentation. The latter may or may not be inconvenient, but it’s rarely painful in the way that a fork can be. Forks typically tear apart coding communities, demanding that programmers take sides.
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There’s not an awful lot of difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice on the surface. The rapid development from beta to RC and soon a stable release means the team are putting a lot of effort in under the hood.
It’s just nice to know that if OpenOffice is discontinued then there’s a worthy replacement just waiting to take its place.
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After looking at the installed OxygenOffice 3.2 that I had installed on my machine, then the LibreOffice 3.3 release, and finally the newest OpenOffice 3.3, I must say that I believe that the newbies will be wowed by the improved interface of LibreOffice. It simply looks better, and more professional (more like something designed by the old Word Perfect staff, unlike the OOo interface, which looks like a great effort from a garage).
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Alfresco has announced the availability of version 3.4 of its Enterprise Edition of its content management system. The latest release of the commercial version of its CMS is aimed at providing a platform for social content management by making it easier for users to collaborate and share their content as quickly and easily as possible.
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Government
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Moving to the open source suite of office applications OpenOffice is three to four times cheaper than using a proprietary alternative, according to figures presented by the German city of Freiburg.
Rüdiger Czieschla, head of IT at Freiburg, presented on the city’s use of OpenOffice on 1 December, at a conference in Badajoz organised by Osepa, a project to increase awareness on the advantages of free and open source software. According to him, using OpenOffice cost the city 200.000 Euro. The proprietary alternative would have cost between 600.000 for just a text editor and 800.000 Euro for the proprietary office suite.
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The City’s IT department manages some 20,000 desktop PCs, used by some 38,000 city employees. The IT department in the summer of 2009 began migrating from one version of a proprietary operating system to the latest version of the same vendor.
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In writing my recent post about the failure of Google’s Knol, I went back to look at what I had written previously about it and I dug up a post from October of 2008, in which I discussed a series of predictions from Andrew Keen that struck me as particularly shortsighted and wrong. It was right after the latest economic crisis had shifted into overdrive and Keen had predicted that this economic change would lead to the end of “open source” and “free” business models because people would have to actually start making money. He also predicted that things like Facebook and Twitter would collapse in the economic realities of 2009:
The altruistic ideal of giving away one’s labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less “businesses” like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley’s wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.
How’s that prediction looking today? Right. (Update: For those who missed it, there’s a sarcmark around that “Right”)
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Science
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Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object’s light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.
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The explosion spread itself across the sky, pinned against the Earth’s atmosphere like a giant butterfly. A moment earlier, the Challenger shuttle had been a white streak propelled upon a tongue of flame, building to its ferocious full-throttle speed of 17,000 mph, and then, suddenly, frozen in time. Forever.
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Teachers who are unable or unwilling to teach the theory of evolution in biology might be one reason U.S. students are falling behind in science, according to new research.
The study, done at Penn State University, polled 926 high school biology teachers from around the country. It found that a large majority are reluctant to address the evolution in their classrooms.
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Supercomputers are the crowning achievement of the digital age. Yes, it’s true that yesterday’s supercomputer is today’s game console, as far as performance goes. But there is no doubt that during the past half-century these machines have driven some fascinating if esoteric pursuits: breaking codes, predicting the weather, modeling automobile crashes, simulating nuclear explosions, and designing new drugs—to name just a few. And in recent years, supercomputers have shaped our daily lives more directly. We now rely on them every time we do a Google search or try to find an old high school chum on Facebook, for example. And you can scarcely watch a big-budget movie without seeing supercomputer-generated special effects.
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Patents/Patented Seeds/GMO/Nutrition/Health
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Experts have said that cures for paralysis, blindness and diabetes could all be in reach with embryonic stem cell research, but the pursuit of medical progress is being choked by the US rush to secure patents.
Scientists are busily filing for legal patents that give them exclusive intellectual property rights for each discovery they make in the hopes that one day, one will lead to a blockbuster cure and big cash for those who devised it.
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These companies failed because each of them – my own among them – coveted the whole prize. With the eyes of a megalomaniac, each firm was going to ‘rule the world’. Each did lots of inventing, holding onto every scrap of invention with IP agreements and copyrights and all sorts of patents. I invented a technology very much similar to that seen in the Wiimote, but fourteen years before the Wiimote was introduced. It’s all patented. I don’t own it. After my company collapsed the patent went through a series of other owners, until eventually I found myself in a lawyer’s office, being deposed, because my patent – the one I didn’t actually own – was involved in a dispute over priority, theft of intellectual property, and other violations.
Lovely.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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US vice-president Joe Biden told PBS NewsHour that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (who as presided over a 29 year reign characterized by blatantly stolen elections, suspension of civil liberties, torture and arbitrary detention) isn’t a dictator and questioned the legitimacy of protesters’ demands. The USA provides $1.3 billion/year in military aid to the Mubarak regime.
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Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.
The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.
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Let’s leave aside for the moment the federal push for centralized “cyber security” operations controlled by military and intelligence agency entities and operatives. We can even skip for now the calls — about to be reintroduced in Congress — for what many would consider to be mandated U.S. Internet “kill switches” under government control, with the possibility that much of the Internet would ultimately be declared to be “critical infrastructure” subject to their purview.
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We think of the Internet as universal. We think of it in terms of a utility like electricity or water. It’s none of those things. In some countries, like the U.S., it would be very hard to ‘turn off’ the Internet. In places like Egypt, though, with a limited number of Internet backbones and a handful of Domain Name Service (DNS) servers, it’s easy. Here’s how it appears the Egyptian government turned their country’s Internet off.
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Cablegate
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It is certainly interesting what else WikiLeaks is revealing. For instance, the assumption that the New York Times is a “liberal rag” as the right blathers on and on about. RIGHT! It is obvious that Bill Keller is “uncomfortable” with a great many things including an informed American electorate.
[...]
Do we as Americans really want to continue supporting our global imperial garrison of possibly 1000 military bases? Or will we choose to allow wikileaks to let the gas out of this bag and finally reveal the truth that America’s addiction to war is killing not only our own democracy at home but democracies all around the world? Not to mention eventually leaving our nation both morally and financially bankrupt!
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act have played an indispensable role in protecting public health.
Today, their ability to do so is under siege from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress — and in the wake of the State of the Union speech, the President’s commitment to defending the EPA is looking none-too-strong.
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Finance
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For 2011, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf (pictured) says that the deficit will be about $1.5 trillion (nearly one-third of which will be due to the massive Republican tax breaks for the richest 2% of Americans — projected to be over $400 billion a year). So while complaining about the deficit, the Republicans actually increased it by nearly 50%. They promised in the last campaign to cut $100 billion, but now are only talking about cutting a little over $50 billion for 2011 (a drop in the bucket compared to the huge increase they created).
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Of course they didn’t admit they were acting in their own political interest. They couched the elimination in terms of saving the federal government some money and cutting the federal deficit. They bragged that this action would save $617 million over a ten year period (or about $61.7 million a year). While that may sound like a lot of money to the uninitiated, it is really a tiny amount when compared to the federal budget and will make very little impact on the deficit. In fact, it is only 0.000155% of the tax cut they gave the super rich (which increased the deficit by $400 billion a year).
Sadly, there will be some teabaggers and other right-wingers who will believe this is a real deficit-reduction measure. It isn’t. It’s nothing more than a naked attempt to give Republicans an advantage in the 2012 presidential election.
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Censorship/Egypt
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Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.
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Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said “Egyptian authorities” had asked the company to “turn down the network totally.” Mr. Colao said Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate under Egyptian law, and therefore complied with the request. “I hope” the decision will be reversed by Egypt “very soon,” Mr. Colao said, in comments to a Davos session on mobile devices.
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Many well-known activists including Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace laureate, have been arrested in their homes, civilians have been wounded and even killed in clashes with Egyptian police and security forces. As an Internet blackout imposed by the state covers the country, every citizen and grassroots organization will now be exposed to arbitrary police forces. As secret documents from US prove, during the demonstrations today, authorities might use physical threats, legal threats and extraordinary laws such the Emergency Law as an excuse to persecute and prosecute activists during the pacific demonstrations taking place in Cairo and other cities.
As described by Cable 10CAIRO64 sent from the Embassy of Cairo on 12January, 2010, “Egypt’s State of Emergency, in effect almost continuously since 1967, allows for the application of the 1958 Emergency Law, which grants the GOE broad powers to arrest individuals without charge and to detain them indefinitely”. The cable also describes how “The GOE has also used the Emergency Law in some recent cases to target bloggers and labor demonstrators”.
Excessive use of force by police during the protests led to arbitrary executions and detentions in a vast array of abuses, a situation that is known and acknowledged in the past by U.S. diplomats based in Egypt. It is important to bear in mind the long record of police abuse and torture by Egyptian police forces.
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The Egyptian military planned for a “smooth” transfer of power to the president’s son in the event of regime change, according to recently published US diplomatic cables.
A senior Egyptian politician told an American diplomat in July 2009 [09CAIRO1468] that the military would safeguard a “constitutional transition of power” and implied the armed forces would support Gamal Mubarak, the son of current president Hosni Mubarak. Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki, a former minister in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), claimed that even though “the real center of power in Egypt is the military”, they would have “no objection to a civilian” as the next president.
A remark interpreted by the US official as a “pointed reference” to Gamal Mubarak. Dessouki went on to dismiss the possible danger of protests against the current regime, calling opposition parties “weak” and democracy a “long term goal.”
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¶1. (C) Summary and comment: Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive. Contacts describe the police using force to extract confessions from criminals as a daily event, resulting from poor training and understaffing. Brutality against Islamist detainees has reportedly decreased overall, but security forces still resort to torturing Muslim Brotherhood activists who are deemed to pose a political threat. Over the past five years, the government has stopped denying that torture exists, and since late 2007 courts have sentenced approximately 15 police officers to prison terms for torture and killings.
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¶1. (C) During an hour-long meeting on February 17, Gamal Mubarak discussed with Senator Joseph Lieberman the problems with Gaza and Palestinian reconciliation, as well as the broader political split within the Arab world. Senator Lieberman sought Gamal’s advice on ways for the U.S. to engage Iran; Gamal offered that the best way to defeat Iranian ambitions in the region is to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Unfortunately, Qatar is playing “spoiler” in order to get “a seat at the table.” Gamal, a former international banker, opined that the U.S. needed to “shock” its financial system back to health, and said that Egypt — which had so far escaped much of the pain of the global economic crisis — was preparing to face tough economic times ahead. The Ambassador, Senator Lieberman’s foreign policy adviser, and the ECPO MinCouns as note taker were also present. End summary.
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¶1. Key Points
– (SBU) U.S.- Egypt military relationship is strong, but should change to reflect new regional and transnational threats.
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– (S) NDP insider and former minister Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki dismissed public and media speculation about succession. He said Egyptian military and security services would ensure a smooth transfer of power, even to a civilian.
– (S) Dessouki called opposition parties weak and democracy a “long term goal.” He said that the MB had no legitimate political role, adding that mixing religion and politics in Egypt was not wise and would not be permitted.
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¶1. KEY POINTS
– Egypt’s State of Emergency, in effect almost continuously since 1967, allows for the application of the 1958 Emergency Law, which grants the GOE broad powers to arrest individuals without charge and to detain them indefinitely.
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¶2. (C) Comment: Per ref B, credible human rights lawyers believe police brutality continues to be a pervasive, daily occurrence in GOE detention centers, and that SSIS has adapted to increased media and blogger focus on police brutality by hiding the abuse and pressuring victims not to bring cases. NGOs assess prison conditions to be poor, due to overcrowding and lack of medical care, food, clean water, and proper ventilation. Per ref E, following a landmark 2007 sentencing of police officers for assaulting and sodomizing a bus driver, courts have continued to sentence officers to prison terms for brutality.
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– (C) According to media reports the group is being held “under investigation” for an initial period of 15-days. MB sources tell us that the group was originally detained, and their homes searched, under the Emergency Law but that their detention will likely be justified under an “investigative file” that will opened to their lawyers next week.
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¶2. (SBU) The FPU has confirmed 31 cases where children have been illegally adopted in Egypt and either taken to the United States or raised in Egypt. The earliest confirmed case by the FPU is from 1989, although one Coptic priest admitted the practice has been going on since 1976. This particular priest also provided other insights during an interview with the Fraud Prevention Manager (FPM) on February 11, 2010. He stated that the majority of the priests involved in illegal adoptions are very charismatic, have numerous followers and are consumed with their position of power as leaders of the Coptic community. According to this priest, the “big” personalities of these individuals have prompted them to engage in activities not condoned by many others in the Coptic Church. He mentioned that the Church is more than capable of raising and educating unwanted Coptic children. He added that in Alexandria, literally hundreds of babies are given to childless families and only a few have been taken out of Egypt.
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The Egyptian “people blame America” now for their plight.
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¶4. (C) A/S Posner asked why the GOE has detained blogger Hany Nazir under the Emergency Law without charge since October 2008. (Note: per ref B, Nazir, a Coptic Christian, was detained following blog posts deemed offensive to Islam and Christianity. End note.) General Rahman responded that Nazir’s posts criticizing Islam were inflammatory, and in the context of Upper Egyptian sectarian tensions could have caused Muslims to attack him. Therefore, Rahman continued, the GOE detained Nazir “for his own security.” Rahman claimed that the GOE detained Nazir under the Emergency Law to gather evidence to prosecute him for defaming religion.
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¶5. (C) According to XXXXXXXXXXXX, the worst police torture takes place during murder investigations. He said that his brother-in-law who is a police officer in the Delta Governorate of Kafr El-Sheikh described “unrelenting pressure” from superiors to solve murder cases by any means necessary. XXXXXXXXXXX said human rights lawyers and XXXXXXXXXXXX have told him that to conduct murder investigations, police will round up 40 to 50 suspects from a neighborhood and hang them by their arms from the ceiling for weeks until someone confesses.
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¶2. (C) Torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread.
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– (C) GOE officials, including presidential advisor Soliman Awad, expressed displeasure with the number and the tone of U.S. recommendations at the February 17 UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Egypt’s human rights record.
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– According to the Amir, Hamas will accept the 1967 border with Israel, but will not say it publicly so as to lose popular Palestinian support.
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Thousands of people in Jordan have taken to the streets in protests, demanding the country’s prime minister step down, and the government curb rising prices, inflation and unemployment.
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Protests held across globe in a show of solidarity with Egyptian demonstrators attempting to oust president.
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A high-level Egyptian military delegation was in Washington on Friday for pre-scheduled defense talks, even as Egypt’s army took to the streets to face unrest sweeping the country.
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Police brutality in Egypt is “routine and pervasive” and the use of torture so widespread that the Egyptian government has stopped denying it exists, according to leaked cables released today by WikiLeaks.
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It was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first meeting as secretary of state with President Hosni Mubarak, in March 2009, and the Egyptians had an odd request: Mrs. Clinton should not thank Mr. Mubarak for releasing an opposition leader from prison because he was ill.
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¶1. (S/NF) On January 9, 2010, the Islamic Shari’a Scholars
Committee of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political
wing of the JORDANian Muslim Brotherhood, issued a fatwa
(religious ruling) condemning Egyptian construction of a
steel wall near Rafah. The significance of the fatwa lies
not in the decision itself — the proposed wall is deeply
unpopular with practically all segments of JORDANian society,
both religious and secular — but rather with its harsh tone
and its apparent readiness to support or condone violence
against the Egyptian authorities. The fatwa is highly
unusual in its willingness to address issues completely
outside of JORDAN and because of the force with which the
scholars condemn the actions of a neighboring Arab and Muslim
state.
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¶1. (S/NF) SUMMARY: JORDAN’s top military advisor and
brother of the King, Lieutenant General (LTG) Prince Faisal
bin Al Hussein, and Minister of Planning Jafar Hassan will
travel to Washington during the week of January 25. Their
itineraries include meetings with senior U.S. officials in
the Department of Defense, the Air Force, the Department of
StaQrQQ^,ON2}g5Congress. In the meetings, the
JORDANians are expected to offer significant increases to
JORDAN’s security support in Afghanistan in exchange for
additional economic assistance through an anticipated
Afghanistan supplemental appropriation. Contributions that
support U.S. goals can likely be obtained for reimbursement
at cost if we want to hold the line and not include JORDAN in
the supplemental.
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Privacy
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However, members of Congress chided the U.S. Department of Justice for suggesting a new law requiring Internet companies to keep records of user activity, but not disclosing details on how it should be crafted to aid criminal investigations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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And that’s bad news, considering how brutal overage fees are: while it only costs internet providers roughly one penny per gigabyte (a cost that is actually decreasing), they charge excess gigabyte rates at around $2 per GB – a roughly 20,000 percent markup, making even pay-as-you-go texting profits a drop in the bucket.
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NOTE: When UBB is implemented, Canadians will be charged for all the bandwidth they consume. That means that watching videos like the excellent “Did You Know” video from YouTube I’ve embedded above will cost much more. Don’t ask me how much, because I have no idea. From the sound of it, Bell gets to make up the figures as they go along.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
Tasmanian Police Pepper Spray a 13 Yr-Old Boy
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
01.28.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Many of the Linux apps actually work much better than Windows audio apps ever did and — as I understand it — Linux give you the best quality you can get out of your sound hardware, whereas Windows has many technical hurdles to overcome to make audio work correctly.”
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Sydneysider John Ferlito will continue to be the president of Linux Australia after he was elected unopposed in the organisation’s elections which were held recently.
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Server
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Eric Allman is a figure who is highly revered in the tech world; the man who wrote the first mail transport agent to make email a common thing may be a figure of the past but people will queue to even have a glimpse of someone whom they consider a legend.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Just a short (it’s grading hell….) episode about the little icons in your browser window and the bookmarks. It was a Microsoft™ invention (yes, they invented something 
) and so the most compatible file format is the Windows™ icon .ico file.
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Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it’s never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.
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The Arx Fatalis porting effort has been going full steam ahead; a lot of developments on that project. They recieved a Wiki sponsored by the PARPG guys, made subreddit to post updates to and have quite a few repositories where the different team members are working on the seperate goals of the project.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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* Eye candy tweaks
- Added “welcome screen” showed when the Activity Journal starts and loads the items.
- Go to Today button always highlighted.
- Path’s label clickable in MoreInformation window
- Usability tweaks to the views toolbar.
- Item’s categories becomes coloured when containing a searched item.
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Fortunately, Gentoo has a mature solution to this problem that works quite well. By default, your system configuration files are protected from modification during package installation. After the installation is complete, you are notified that there are configuration files that need updating. At this point, you can use any number of console-based or graphical utilities to merge the changes in the files.
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The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Fivehh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
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Exactly four years ago, even before Apple AppStore, Android Market and Nokia Ovi. I had the intuition that applications should have been brought to users with some “content” generated directly by other users. I called this “the Web 2.0 of software”. I’ve been able to implement some of my ideas, thanks to NLnet funds, wrote entropy.services package, wrote the “UGC” part of packages.sabayon.org. But when I tried to push the idea to the wild wild², I only got cold feedback.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva will participate to the FOSDEM 2011 (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting).
The FOSDEM is a conferences series which are held each year during a week-end. This year, the FOSDEM is taking place on the 5th and 6th February, 2011, at Brussels.
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading session at $40.00 well below calculated support at $45.50 placing the stock in oversold territory, as investors and money managers have been moving out of the stock
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.
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Equities research analysts at Stifel Nicolaus upgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research note to investors on Wednesday. The analysts currently have a $49.00 price target on the stock.
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FUDCon will include many sessions on topics ranging from SELinux and Fedora Spins to BoxGrinder, the Fedora Security Lab and how the Fedora Ambassador program has evolved over the years. This year’s event will also include a robust Legal track with sessions devoted to what Red Hat does to protect and enforce the Fedora trademark, special legal issues faced by many open source projects and how Red Hat’s legal team makes decisions affecting Fedora, including the company’s obligations to Fedora. A full schedule of sessions and events for FUDCon is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011.
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Debian Family
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Continuing with the “2011? series, let’s have a look today at the development planned for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Earlier posts can be found here: PC-BSD, pfSense, HeX Live, MaheshaBSD, GhostBSD.
Robert Millan from the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project emailed an update for his project.
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Both Linux and FreeBSD have their strong and weak points, but overall, they can do almost anything you ask it to do, but when one wants an answer to the question “FreeBSD or (Debian) Linux?” one needs to find an answer to the following questions first to see which operating system suits one’s needs best:
1) Is your current hardware supported? If the purchase of new hardware is planned, is it supported by either/both?
2) Which operating system is supported by the third party commercial applications vendors that you use? If it is not supported, is there an acceptable equivalent available for the operating system your preference goes out to?
[...]
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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My little sister Lisa gave me an old computer she had, a laptop that is even older than my now-ancient (by computer ages) laptop. It’s a Presario 2200, and had Windows XP installed on it. I intended to use it as a mobile computer since my laptop’s battery has long since bit the dust, and the Presario has enough battery left to be able to be moved, about 15 minutes worth of juice. I spent several days trying to remove enough of the existing software to make it usable for my tasks, but the thing seemed to get slower and slower as I went.
[...]
At least now I’m more convinced than ever that I can make that jump, and it won’t be nearly as much a pain as I was afraid it would be.
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Flavours and Variants
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Reviews
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Puppy Linux began life as a really cool small-sized Linux distribution designed primarily for lower specification hardware while still providing most of the amenities that make Linux fun and usable. It included lots of original utilities and tools for completing tasks and configurations without a lot of resource overhead. Best of all, it was blazing fast. Well, the little puppy has grown up some and branched out, but is still that same light-weight wonder in spirit.
[...]
Puppy is a fun little distro with lots of potential and flexibility. The live CD is suitable for any level of experience, although a permanent install might require a bit of knowledge about partitions and such. It has a cute appearance these days and runs like a scalded dog, …er, um, puppy.
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Being based on Ubuntu, I expected a full ~700 MB download, but instead I got a tiny 384 MB one. OK, fine by me, but let’s see the reasons behind this small size. Obviously, the download + burning of the image didn’t take a whole lot of time so I was quickly on board the Bodhi express, also known as the train to Enlightenment. This AKA goes two ways: the name “Bodhi” is Sanskrit for Enlightenment AND the distro’s desktop environment IS Enlightenment! You are now enlightened! Ta-da!
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Pandora
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Remember the Pandora gaming handheld? We brought you the world’s first review of the little emulating machine that could last Summer, but if you’ve been following it, you’ll know how tricky tracking one of them down has been thanks to a backlog of pre-orders.
Today though that changes: Brits can now buy one and get it within a week, with no more waiting lists. We spoke to the lead on the OpenPandora project to find out more.
Previously, you’d have had to stick your name on the list for a Pandora handheld and wait: production of the County Durham built device was running at about 70 units per day. Now though, we’ve confirmed that you can now order a Pandora for £309.99, and expect delivery within seven days.
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Like the idea of Sony’s NGP but not the closed ecosystem? Pandora is now offering its open-source Pandora console for general sale, promising a seven day turnaround on the $499.99 clamshell.
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The Pandora handheld is available to buy once again – just as a whole new titanic struggle starts to brew in handheld console-land.
In one corner we have the powerful Sony NGP, all cutting-edge technology, multiple control inputs and console-standard graphics.
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OLPC
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On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Brooks and I (Chris Lindgren) went over to Madison Elementary School for a Sugar on a Stick session. Kevin drafted the following plan:
1. Everybody gets a computer and stick.
2. Watch / time / note challenges of loading Sugar.
3. Ask everyone to open “Write.”
4. Give them a prompt: “Do you prefer to write on a computer, or with pen and paper? Why?”
5. Give them time to write, then see if they can find each other in the neighborhood. See how many they can find and read. Watch and learn to see how easy / hard this is. Goal: try to read others, and either respond to others if that is possible, or return to their own paragraph and add to it by considering others’ opinions.
6. Make sure they save (Keep) their work.
7. Close down Sugar.
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The open source movement has developed a new philosophy about intellectual property, maintaining that knowledge should be free – that although it is important to prevent plagiarism or passing off an inferior product as a trusted brand, to curtail the free exchange of knowledge and ideas is a disservice to society. In pharmaceuticals, this is literally a matter of life and death – or blindness. South Africa’s health minister once called the high prices of lifesaving medicines ‘a crime against humanity’. But this is increasingly an issue for our own NHS. One current struggle involves big business trying to prevent the licensing of Avastin – already being used with great success by doctors treating the main cause of blindness in the UK – at £50 per dose – and instead force them to use the ‘very similar’ but differently licensed drug Lucentis, at £750 a dose. Obviously, this sort of thing is unacceptable – but the importance of the open source movement is that it does not simply reject such approaches to intellectual property, but has built viable alternatives – real business models that outperform proprietary interests but still freely share the knowledge they embody. Viable business models that can deliver free services – something that ought to get the attention of social enterprisers engaged in health and social care. It is also relevant to social franchising.
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Web Browsers
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Don’t you just miss the previous version of browser wars? Netscape vs Internet Explorer. Scrappy young start up vs. Mr. Softy. Then Firefox vs IE. Scrappy young startup vs. Mr. Softy, round two. Then Chrome jumped into the mix and gave consumers another horse to bet on.
But what I didn’t see coming — and I presume many others didn’t either – was that the dynamics of the browser war would change from “Them vs Them” to today’s “Us vs. Them.” How did we, the online advertising community, suddenly find ourselves in the crosshairs of the browsers?
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Mozilla
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Today we’ve shipped Firefox 4 Beta 10. If you haven’t tried a Firefox 4 beta yet, you should definitely give this one a spin. It’s pretty amazing.
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However, the next version of Firefox is unlikely to require almost a year to be completed. Mozilla’s CTO, Brendan Eich, recently said that Firefox 4 will be released within four month after the final release of Firefox 4. This seems to be a result of discussions at Mozilla to accelerate the release schedule, which is one of the reasons why Google is gaining market share. Faster release cycles support the perception of a fresher browser, whether it delivers lots of new features or not. If you look at it, Firefox 3.6 looks pretty antiquated today.
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If you’d like to take it for a spin, head over to the Firefox add-ons site and install Home Dash (you’ll need to be using a Firefox 4 beta release for Home Dash to work). For some tips and help with Home Dash, see Mozilla’s follow-up post.
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Oracle
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Two downloads are necessary: the installer for LibreOffice itself, and a “help pack” executable, which contains US English helpfiles. If the latter isn’t installed, clicking the Help menu takes you to the documentation section of the LibreOffice Web site.
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LibreOffice 3.3 wasn’t even released yet when plans for upcoming versions were being hammered out. A release plan is now in place as well as a development philosophy.
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Editors’ rating:
7.9 out of 10
User rating:
10 out of 10
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There’s a new status report from Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek as to the state of GCC 4.6. While a GCC 4.6 release candidate is nearing, as Jakub says in today’s update, “significant effort has been made recently to fix lots of regressions, yet there are still way too many serious regressions.”
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Table of Contents
* GNU Status Reports: January 2011
* Binutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils)
* Coreutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils)
* Electric (http://www.gnu.org/software/electric)
* Freefont (http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont)
* Gawk (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk)
* GCC (http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc)
* GNUCOMM (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm)
* GNUtrition (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutrition)
* Grep (http://www.gnu.org/software/grep)
* GSASL (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsasl)
* GSEGrafix (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsegrafix)
* GSL (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl)
* GSRC (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsrc)
* Guile (http://www.gnu.org/software/guile)
* Hello (http://www.gnu.org/software/hello)
* Hurd (http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd)
* Texinfo (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo)
* XBoard (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard)
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Government
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Eva Herzog, Consultant Director of State Finance of the Basel Canton, summed up her Canton’s free software strategy adopted in early 2010, stating, inter alia, that in the future all software developments for the cantons should be made available as open source. She also presented a project where a hundred of workstations will be migrated to GNU/Linux and other free software over a period of two years while being integrated to the current system.
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I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the irony of it all this afternoon when I read Gary Gray’s pompous pronouncement that from now on, Federal Government agencies must consider the adoption of open source software in any technology purchase that they make.
Does anyone, I thought to myself, take this kind of thing seriously?
On the face of it, the policy sounds sensible enough, representing what many have long considered to be a rational idea; that is, if a government department or agency needs to procure software, it should look around to see whether there are free and flexible alternatives available first, before it jumps into bed with a proprietary software vendor like Microsoft or Oracle — with all the cost and, often, technical rigidity that implies.
The faster moving private sector has recognised this principle for decades now. Long before vendors like Red Hat came along to provide supported versions of Linux, system administrators around the world were covertly running their print and file servers on early versions of Slackware and Debian — and in many cases, their managers didn’t even know.
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Openness/Sharing
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Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera has a long relationship with Creative Commons licensing. Now, for its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, it has released photographs via Flickr and video on a CC license.
Available photographs and video are available for free use so long as the user gives attribution and does not alter the products. For the record, all the photographs and video in this post are from Al Jazeera.
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Security
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Paris police also announced on Thursday that a French teenager suspected of involvement in the DDoS attacks in the United States was taken into custody for a few hours last December.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Scotland Yard arrested five young men, aged 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26. They are also suspected of having carried out DDoS attacks and are said to face a maximum of ten years in prison and a fine of up to 5,000 pounds.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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My colleague at CPJ, Mohamed Abdel Dayem, was the first to mail me. “Just a second ago,”, he wrote, “about 10 contacts of mine all disappeared off instant messaging in unison. That cannot be a coincidence.”
That was yesterday, January 27th, at 5:34pm New York time. A stream of similar emails followed. Everyone I knew had lost contact with Egypt. On the wider Internet, the Twitter streams and Facebook updates from Egyptian journalists, bloggers, and others, which had been overwhelming us since the protests on the 25th, had all suddenly gone quiet.
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As protests rage on in Egypt, the close relationship between the U.S. government and the regime of Hosni Mubarak has already garnered a lot of attention. But it’s also worth taking a moment to examine the lobbying muscle that Egypt employs to secure its interests in Washington, including a mammoth $1.3 billion annual military aid package.
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In response to increasing civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have disabled almost all Internet connectivity with the rest of the world. The Internet’s global routing table, which is used by Internet routers to determine where to send traffic, has had virtually every Egypt-bound route withdrawn, giving the Internet traffic no path either into or out of the country.
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Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of president Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, experts said.
Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the internet to try and silence dissent.
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A nighttime curfew has begun in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, after a day where thousands of protesters took the streets, demanding an end to Husni Mubarak’s 30-year presidency.
The curfew was implemented on Friday on the orders of the president, along with an order that the military take charge of security, amid violent clashes occurred between police and protesters.
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An executive at London-based Vodafone Group PLC explained Friday morning that it did indeed have a role in the phone and Internet blackout affecting Egypt since Thursday night, confirming speculation that the firm had cooperated with the regime to close off protesters’ communications.
Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said that because the order by Egyptian authorities appeared to be in line with the nation’s laws, the company was “obligated” to comply.
Egypt, which has been under a declared state of “emergency” for decades, long ago passed a series of security provisions that were later mirrored in post-9/11 powers assumed by leaders in the US. Egypt’s provisions, however, went much further.
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For much of Friday afternoon, this city teetered between hope and fear. We knew the army would come – the question was when. About 7:30 p.m., six armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns arrived at the main square. Then something extraordinary happened: The soldiers were surrounded by hundreds of people – and after several minutes, welcomed. As I write this, ordinary citizens are walking up to the two vehicles stationed at Ramleh Square, and photographing each other flashing victory signs. The mood, tense for so much of the day, is turning festive.
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Cablegate
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The publication of the US diplomatic cables was a journalistic sensation for WikiLeaks and its media partners, including SPIEGEL. In an excerpt from a new book, Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach recount the tense negotiations with Julian Assange in the run-up to the publication of the diplomatic cables.
The joint publication of classified United States embassy cables in November 2010 in a number of major newspapers and magazines rocked the diplomatic world. In newly published books, editors at SPIEGEL and the New York Times have documented relationships between the founder of WikiLeaks and the publications that were at time tumultuous during preparations for the documents’ release.
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¶1. KEY POINTS
– (C) Egypt’s bloggers are playing an increasingly important
role in broadening the scope of acceptable political and
social discourse, and self-expression.
– (C) Bloggers’ discussions of sensitive issues, such as
sexual harassment, sectarian tension and the military,
represent a significant change from five years ago, and have
influenced society and the media.
– (C) The role of bloggers as a cohesive activist movement
has largely disappeared, due to a more restrictive political
climate, GOE counter-measures, and tensions among bloggers.
– (C) However, individual bloggers have continued to work to
expose problems such as police brutality and corporate
malfeasance.
¶2. (C) Comment: The government generally allows bloggers
wide latitude in posting material critical of the GOE.
Exceptions to this policy are bloggers who directly insult
President Mubarak or Islam, and the government has arrested
and jailed bloggers who have crossed these red-lines. The
GOE has also arrested activists, such as XXXXXXXXXXXX and
XXXXXXXXXXXX, who have used blogging to organize and support
protests (refs A and C). Activists are increasingly writing
blogs to advance their political aims. Contacts accurately
point out that bloggers have ceased to function as a cohesive
activist movement. It is noteworthy that bloggers did not
play a significant role in the most recent example of mass
cyber-activism — the April 6, 2008 strike orchestrated
through Facebook (ref G).
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Finance
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Barclays analyst Roger Freeman says it’s been difficult for Goldman to outline a comprehensive strategy going forward — much less start executing on one — until regulatory headwinds die down.
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Censorship
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How hard is it, exactly, to kill the Internet? Egypt seems to have been able to do it. But Egypt’s situation isn’t exactly the same as that in the Western world. And even though Egypt only has four big ISPs, the fact that everything went down after midnight local time suggests that it took considerable effort to accomplish the ‘Net shut-off. After all, it seems unlikely that President Hosni Mubarak ordered the Internet to be shut down as he went to bed; such a decision must have been made earlier in the day, and then taken hours to execute.
Also, the fact that such a drastic measure was deemed necessary may indicate that more targeted measures, such as blocking Twitter, didn’t get the job done. This nuclear option—see below—was intended to make online coordination of anti-government action impossible; at the same time, the mushroom cloud may give protesters hope that their efforts are not in vain. As one blogger writes: “It’s as if the regime has done the information aggregation for you and packaged it into a nice fat public signal.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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So the history of this issue is that I had DSL and a Cell phone with Hell Canada. The DSL is from a year ago. They are only contacting me about it now. Meanwhile, if you want to switch services from Hell Canada to Rogers or Telus, they will give you mad discounts. Yet if they steal from you and rip you off, they won’t help you.
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DRM
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Sony’s motion for a temporary restraining order, asking for an injunction and impoundment, has been granted [PDF]. The Hon. Susan Illston says she thinks Sony has demonstrated that it is likely to prevail on its DMCA claim. She has also ruled that Sony has met its burden to show that the Court has specific jurisdiction over George Hotz in California, because “he purposefully directed his activities at the forum state.”
A TRO is designed to prevent injury until a full hearing can take place, and a date for that isn’t set yet. So that will be the next step. Meanwhile, there’s a list of things that Hotz and anyone working with him can’t do and must do. Like clean up the Internet by taking back whatever he put up there about how to circumvent. Sigh. And hand over any computers or equipment that has any infringing stuff on it, and not erase anything. The judge says Hotz’s lawyers are free to file a motion challenging jurisdiction “on a fuller factual record,” if they want to, and they’ve said they want to. But I doubt it will influence anything, judging by this order.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Russ Mauch is concerned because sugar beet growers don’t know if they will be able to plant Roundup Ready beats this spring.
Mauch, a Barney farmer and president of the American Sugar Beet Growers Association president, says sugar beet growers are in limbo when it concerns Roundup Ready.
At issue is a lawsuit filed by several environmental groups concerned about Roundup Ready sugar beets.
The legal journey for Roundup Ready sugar beets began in January 2008. On Aug. 13, 2010 California Judge Jeffrey White vacated the deregulation of sugar beets, Mauch said. The crop is now regulated and can’t be grown until the USDA prescribes conditions for planting and cultivating the crop.
In separate litigation, Judge White issued an injunction in November against 256 acres of sugar beet stecklings or seedlings. The stecklings had been authorized by permits under the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The stecklings were part of a research and breeding project for basic seed and hybridproduction for 2012 and beyond. According to the injunction, the stecklings were to be destroyed by Dec. 7.
Raw Video: Man Shot in Egypt Protest
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Looking for a Linux system administration job? Many employers are looking for admins with Linux skills, but plenty of people are vying for those jobs. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to make sure you have the security skills that employers are looking for above and beyond Linux administration experience.
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Server
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Ever wish you could set up a small, efficient server? Maybe you’re setting up a mail server for a couple of people, or something to hand out music files over a home network. Do you really need a full-fledged PC with a noisy fan, sucking down 100 watts and heating up the room?
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Ballnux
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Samsung has announced that it has now shipped over two million of its Galaxy Tab tablet devices, surpassing the figure in just three months since the device launched.
The 7-inch tablet is now sold via 200 mobile carriers in 94 countries, with 750,000 Galaxy Tab’s being shipped to Europe, 350,000 to North America and 330,000 units in Asia.
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Kernel Space
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Last summer we delivered the news that a native ZFS file-system implementation for Linux was coming by an Indian company known as KQ Infotech where they leveraged the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories ZFS Linux code, finished it off in some areas, and took care of the POSIX support. This ZFS Linux module was eventually released to a group of beta testers — us included — and we ran some ZFS Linux benchmarks back in November using the latest beta code. Since that point, however, KQ Infotech has made their ZFS Linux port publicly available and earlier this month they declared this work as stable via its general availability release. We have decided to benchmark this latest ZFS Linux code to see where the performance now stands against the EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems.
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Graphics Stack
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The past few months Chris Wilson has been on quite a coding spree with making many changes and improvements to the xf86-video-intel DDX driver, among other components. Today though he has put out a patch to the X.Org development list that will affect far more individuals than just those using the Intel graphics driver, which is his primary focus being an employee of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center. This GLX patch has boosted the in-game frame-rate for him in one of his tests by about sixty percent!
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Applications
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Wine
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The Minnesota developers at CodeWeavers have made the surprise release this morning of CrossOver Impersonator and CrossOver Games Impersonator. The “Impersonator” is their name for the version 10.0 family of CodeWeavers products since they feel that this Wine-based software does a very nice job impersonating Microsoft Windows under Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Yes, the cover looks familiar, but don’t worry, inside are many pages of Ubuntu 9.10 goodness.
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Thanks to some crazy time-zone shenanigans (like not living in India) I wasn’t able to attend the awesome ‘Ubuntu Developer Day‘ that was held in Bangalore today/yesterday*.
Designed to encourage developers to ‘get productive’ on Ubuntu, the event saw Canonical team members giving keynote speeches and ‘hands-on technical sessions’.
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A new testing PPA for MPlayer – the robust media player for Linux – is now available for Ubuntu users to install from.
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Flavours and Variants
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For the study, Amazon donated 20 Kindles and associated accessories, including covers and power adapters.
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The Linaro 10.11 cycle was a great success. A huge amount of engineering effort was undertaken and the organisation as a whole has grown at such a rate as to quadruple since its launch in June last year. Whist the main goal of Linaro is to fundamentally change the way Linux works on ARM hardware upstream it is imperative that any changes Linaro does are well integrated, tested, and validated together in a common platform and that is where Linaro’s whole system images are most valuable.
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Phones
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Android
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While Sony didn’t make its upcoming PlayStation Phone official at its press event, the company did show off the “PlayStation Suite,” a new initiative that will bring original PlayStation games to Android-based devices. The games are coming this calendar year, with titles like Syphon Filter, Wild Arms, and Cool Boarders 2 shown at the event.
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Google released Wednesday a platform preview for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and an updated set of SDK tools.
This preview offers the best glimpse that we have seen thus far of the tablet-optimized Android. At CES earlier this month, Google showed off Honeycomb alongside the Motorola Xoom tablet.
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If you’re looking for the fully apped-out 21st century smartphone experience, for the moment the choice really comes down to Apple’s iPhone or a phone running Google’s Android OS. Here at Reevoo, we power reviews for around 18% of the UK market so we have access to a lot of data.
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Of course conventional wisdom states that developers don’t want to target multiple environments. Yeah – that was the wisdom that got us a decade of Java uber alles thinking, and a 20 years of Oracle-for-everything architectural decision making. The truth is Android so far has been been pretty decent on phones. I really like my HTC Desire. I am also lucky enough to have a Dell Streak loaner to play with; another solid device, that makes for a great armchair TV companion. But Android wasn’t designed for a bigger form factor, like Apple’s 10 inch iPad, at least in its early versions.
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As the graph indicates, RedMonk properties saw the relative share of Windows usage decline by 8.1% in 2010. The Android, iPhone and iPad platforms gained 6.28% collectively over the same period. Given that Linux and Mac platforms were essentially static on the year, both growing less than 1 percentage point, it seems self-evident that as developers use more mobile platforms, they’re using less Windows.
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A group of Australian Linux enthusiasts are using freely available software and hardware designs to engineer a space craft that could one day land on the moon and reap millions of dollars in prize money from Google.
The Lunar Numbat project was started by a team of Australians and New Zealanders who have partnered with the Google Lunar X-Prize team White Label Space.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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HTML5 needs spokespeople to work. There are a lot of people out there who took on this role, and here at Mozilla we thought it is a good idea to introduce some of them to you with a series of interviews and short videos. The format is simple – we send the experts 10 questions to answer and then do a quick video interview to let them introduce themselves and ask for more detail on some of their answers.
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Education
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For those who haven’t heard, the Obama administration recently announced $2 billion in funding for 2-year colleges, much of which will be used to produce open educational resources. The details are complicated and still being hashed out in discussions all over the internet, but it’s clearly the largest single investment in OER since, well, ever. It’s an event of seismic proportions in the world of open education. With silver linings, though, come clouds — and the SCORM cloud looks like it could be a big one.
Last Thursday, the Department of Labor announced a big grant program with a big name: the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program, or TAACCCT for “short”. A large part of the grant’s goal is to create great learning materials for career training — with the stipulation that all materials created with these grants will be licensed as CC-BY.
[...]
One possible solution might be to earmark some of that $2 billion in grant money for improving SCORM integration with open source projects like Moodle or Sakai, or even for Drupal. There’s nothing wrong with SCORM vendors making money, of course, but it seems like a good idea to invest in open tools to build open content. It’s not yet clear whether anyone will pursue grants for this purpose, and if they do, whether the grantors will consider this to be a good way to spend their money.
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There are 400 million openly licensed materials that can empower teachers to be better instructors through that openness. But there’s a big barrier: adoption. In this video, David Wiley talks about the opportunity and the challenges.
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Healthcare
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And the connection of this sorry saga with open source? Well, I’d hazard a guess that we are dealing with proprietary software here, and that my experience offers further compelling reasons why open source should be used instead. I don’t know for sure if proprietary software is at fault here, but I do know there is something that could be done about this ridiculous state of affairs that only open source could facilitate.
Supposing the system had, indeed, been written with and as open source software. This would mean that by definition it would be available for others to download. Which would mean – in theory, at least – that people could fix some of the bugs that may contributed to people like me wasting hours thanks to downtime and the general uselessness of the code.
Now, I’m not claiming that I could do that fixing (well, not unless they write these programs in FORTRAN), but surely at least having the possibility that someone could do that has to be better than what we’ve got at the moment?
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Government
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The ‘technology neutrality’ memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) urges Government agencies to “analyse alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies. This allows the Government to pursue the best strategy to meet its particular needs.” The memorandum also emphasises several key open source factors, such as interoperability and re-use in the selection of IT. The economic implications of this might be considerable, given that currently US Government agencies spend almost $80 billion (approximately €59 billion) to buy IT.
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The Joint Research Center of the European Commission (JRC) is making available its internal open source guidelines. The document is meant to help it’s software developers to manage their use of open source software.
The JRC approved its internal guidelines on the use of open source software in its projects on 6 October. The document can be useful to other public administrations, and the JRC kindly permitted the OSOR to make the document public.
According to the JRC guidelines, one of the leading ideas of open source projects is the building of a community of developers, that share their contributions and benefit from the contributions of the others.
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Fareed Zein: That’s right. So the technology behind this is called Ushahidi. It’s an open-source system that is developed by an organization called Ushahidi.com, and it’s a great platform. It was started by a group of developers in Kenya after the elections in 2008 where violence broke out. And so there was basically a simple texting mapped into a Google map. And then later on it was developed by volunteers around the world, really, into this open-source system that’s now available and has been used in many many instances, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or the floods in Pakistan, and other election events around the world. So this is the system that we have used, and we are supported obviously by the volunteers from Ushahidi.com that have done a fantastic job of supporting deployments around the world.
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Disaster response network Ushahidi has been using software called Yahoo Placemaker for this function, as many other developers do. But this week the organization announced that it is adopting an open source alternative called GeoDict. GeoDict, which was created by ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden, detects, standardizes and returns coordinates for text regarding 2.7 million locations around the world. As a part of the deal, Warden has officially joined Ushahidi parent organization SwiftRiver.
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Openness/Sharing
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This would clearly have a chilling effect on efforts by whistle-blowers to expose corporate wrong-doing. But it gets worse, much worse.
The French government, already one of the chief enemies of a free and open Internet (think HADOPI) wants all of Europe to give business this new “right”…
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I keep hearing some of the political discourse from the United States. Apparently socialism is worse than any of the dirty words. I’m surprised the FCC doesn’t bleep the word on network TV.
Did Americans forget they are a Social Democracy? This means that the US is mainly a capitalist state, but it uses socialism to smooth over some of the rough spots of capitalism.
In fact all the developed countries do this. But since the Americans do this slightly less than their developed country brothers and sisters they have convinced themselves in their discourse that socialism is evil.
But Republicans and Democrats are both responsible for the latest advance in socialism. That is they bailed out some banks and other lenders saying that there will be a trickle down effect to every person in the US. This is corporate socialism or corporate welfare. There is no way that every Democrat and Republican didn’t realize this.
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I frequently hear people attempt to equate the open education movement with socialism. After all, the logic goes, what could possibly be more socialist than freely sharing things with everyone? The attempt to characterize the entire movement in a single assertion assumes a uniformity within the movement that anyone working in OER knows does not exist. I will neither agree or disagree with broad, general assertion in this post. Instead, I want to disagree with the statement in a very specific context, and carve out a specific and concrete space in the discourse about the motivations that underlie OER.
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Defence Minister Peter MacKay might want to give his old Grade 5 geography teacher a call for a brush-up.
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Facebook’s defense is that they’re not telling anyone anything they wouldn’t have seen anyway. If you check in at Cora’s Cafe, that shows up in your friends’ news feed in accordance with the level of privacy you’ve specified.
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Imagine that you took the Axe Cop kid and teamed him up with the Wachowskis, along with every serious SFX wizard on the subcontinent, and said, “Go ahead kid, spend whatever it takes to make the most demented, blood-drenched, bullet-addled, ultra-super-duper-violent action sequence in the history of films.” Then you waited a generation for another Axe Cop kid to be born and raised on the first kid’s output, to grow to maturity, and you gave her the same challenge: that’s about one tenth of one percent as demented, glorious and violent as this ten-minute climactic scene manages.
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Science
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Not exactly, but it’s surprisingly close to printing a Kindle. Maker Stergios Stergiou has designed a combination case and magnifier that blows up an iPhone 4 screen to 6 inches in size – approximately the same size as an actual Kindle. This makes it much easier to read eBooks, for example.
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Color change confirms a new way to harvest energy from sunlight
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There were some interesting comments on my last post on tenure, and they got me thinking of science in academia and why the tenure track (TT) is becoming so competitive and difficult to enter.
[...]
The 300:1 ratio also comes at a time when science education standards in the US are clamoring for more political support. I didn’t realize that today if you’re a prospective US graduate student it’s much less competitive to get into the top graduate schools in the sciences that even10 years ago. So if you do have a prestigious degree from a highly ranked program it’s worth less than in the past. Coupled with this decline in prestige is the push for universities to require higher levels of specialization for positions. The system wants everyone to have more education and raise the bar for professional work. This is fine if the jobs are commensurate with the higher standards. But the 300:1 ratio suggests we here in the US are running the equivalent of a puppy mill. If you read the link you’ll see there are some distressingly similar parallels between current graduate education in the sciences and breeding dogs for profit.
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Homo sapiens might have spread across the world much earlier than previously thought – and it was a favourable climate, not a sophisticated culture, that allowed them to go.
Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Most palaeoanthropologists believe they stayed there for 140,000 years before migrating around the world, except for an abortive colonisation of what is now Israel about 120,000 years ago.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The message wishing her a happy new year came hours before the unnamed woman was to set off her suicide belt near Red Square, an act of terrorism that could have killed hundreds of people, The Leader-Post reported. She ended up dying at a safe house instead.
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Yesterday I listened to an interview on 5 Live with John Prescott, on the recent news that further evidence had came to light about the News Of The World phone hacking story. He was laser sharp on the dissecting the issues and very passionate in expressing himself. In short that interview showed his attributes that make him a very good MP. Where was this John Prescott on Iraq?
For people who don’t know John Prescott is now Lord Prescott; awarded a title after spending a long time as a Labour MP and his most recent role as a long serving Deputy PM to PM Tony Blair. John Prescott was an integral part of the cabinet during all of the good, bad and controversial decisions taken under Tony Blair’s time in office.
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Police could be forced to adopt more extreme tactics to counter the threat posed by student protesters and “hacktivists”, according to Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Speaking before major protests planned across Britain at the weekend, Orde admitted that use of text messages, Twitter and Facebook to organise campaigns in record speed had created “a whole new dimension to public order”.
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I agree. We don’t want or need the kleptomaniacal members of the ‘former Tunisian regime’ in Canada. But where the hell has our Prime Minister been hiding for the last two weeks? While Tunisians have fought for their freedom, Stephen Harper appears to have made no comments until now. In fact searches do not turn up any comments by him on Tunisia in the past. Ever. Curious that.
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In the streets around Abdel Munim Riyad square the atmosphere had changed. The air which had held a carnival-like vibe was now thick with teargas. Thousands of people were running out of nearby Tahrir Square and towards me. Several hundred regrouped; a few dozen protesters set about attacking an abandoned police truck, eventually tipping it over and setting it ablaze. Through the smoke, lines of riot police could be seen charging towards us from the south.
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This question has been posed to me constantly over the past two days from journalists doing their best to understand the relationship between online and offline forms of protest. I feel their pain – after the mainstream media went gaga over Iran’s 2009 protests, journalists must be considerably wary when tackling this subject: Go one way, and you risk overstating the influence, go the other and you’re dismissed as assuming individuals in the Arab world incapable of leveraging social media tools for organizing.
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Cablegate
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Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday he thought the release of leaked US diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks website could have a positive effect on international diplomacy.
Brandishing his iPad, the tech-friendly Medvedev said modern communications had linked people in such a way that “no very serious secret can be guaranteed immune from being disclosed today.”
“At the end of the day, I believe this WikiLeaks story should make the spirit of international relations healthier even if, in itself, this was an illegal activity,” he added.
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A set of 10 diplomatic cables released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks offers some insight into the recent upheaval in Tunisia and starts to answer the question of why so many Tunisians took to the streets to topple their leader.
The cables, written by the U.S. Embassy in Tunis between January 2006 and June 2009, cover topics ranging from corruption in the country to a dinner for the U.S. ambassador hosted by the son-in-law of Tunisia’s then-President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
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In one fell swoop, the candor of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage U.S. diplomacy.
It would be rational, for example, for American diplomats to believe that the revolution in Tunisia is unlikely to spur similarly successful popular movements in other authoritarian Arab countries, such as Egypt and Algeria. But by the same token, it would have been rational for them to believe just a month ago that no such revolution was possible in Tunisia. Or to discount the likelihood that the people of Kyrgyzstan would overthrow their corrupt government just weeks before it happened last year. Or to dismiss as a pipe dream that the mighty Soviet Union would fall, and that the powerless Baltic nations would become independent, democratic states, just a year before it happened. If we bet on the stability of authoritarian states, we will be right most of the time, but wrong at the crucial time.
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Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, has given a lengthy interview to Steve Kroft for a segment to be broadcast on “60 Minutes” this Sunday, Jan. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Kroft spent two days with Assange on the grounds of the private residence in England where he is under house arrest as he fights attempts to extradite him to Sweden to answer allegations of sexual assault.
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The Marines have changed the commander of the detention facility where WikiLeaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning is being held, days after his attorney filed a complaint claiming that Manning is being unfairly treated in detention.
Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart, who had been in charge of the detention facility at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, was replaced by Chief Warrant Officer Denise Barnes, Quantico spokesman Lt. Brian Villiard said.
The change in command was ordered back in October and is not related to the concerns raised by Manning’s lawyer, said Villiard. But Manning’s lawyer is holding out hope that the new commander will move his client to a less restrictive incarceration status.
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Despite the assertion of Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, PFC Bradley Manning is not being treated like every other detainee at the Quantico brig. Morrell stated during today’s Pentagon briefing that PFC Manning’s “confinement is not in the least different from the manner in which anyone else at the brig is being held.” This statement is patently false.
PFC Manning is being treated differently. He is the only detainee being held in Maximum (MAX) custody and under Prevention of Injury (POI) watch. Every other detainee is being held in Medium Detention In (MDI) and without POI watch restrictions. What is the difference?
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Although the mission of WikiLeaks is to “open governments,” it’s done quite a lot to make us think about how to open journalism as well. We’ve seen a number of new whistleblower sites crop up – OpenLeaks and Rospil, for example – as well as major news organizations – Al Jazeera, and perhaps even The New York Times – investigate ways to facilitate more whistle-blowing and leaking.
But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School’s Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.
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The AP reports that a Swedish company Visa Europe hired to study whether WikiLeaks was breaking the law or Visa’s own rules has “found no proof the group’s fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland.” But, the AP goes on, Visa will not accept WikiLeaks donations until it completes its own investigation, which has thus far lasted eight weeks.
Shorter Visa: “we’re going to keep investigating this until we find some justification to explain why we’ll accept donations to the Ku Klux Klan but not WikiLeaks.”
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In order to neutralize Sweden’s incoming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive, Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP and host of Wikileaks, will run all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN service. Since not even Bahnhof will be able to see what its customers are doing, logging their activities will be impossible. With no logs available to complete their chain of investigation, anti-piracy companies will be very, very unhappy.
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No details, no data
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• Assange has been giving interviews and taking part in online Q&As. He told the Associated Press he currently has 20 media partners and hopes to enlist as many as 60 as WikiLeaks seeks to speed up its release of the cables. In an online Q&A on a Brazilian blog, he said he was taking no part in the current slew of WikiLeaks film projects, but if he were to sell production rights it would be on condition that he was be played by Will Smith. (I get the impression Assange isn’t taking WikiLeaks the Movie / TV mini-series that seriously.)
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OpenLeaks is a project that aims at making whistleblowing safer and more widespread. This will be done by providing dedicated and generally free services to whistleblowers and organizations interested in transparency. We will also create a Knowledge Base aiming to provide a comprehensive reference to all areas surrounding whistleblowing.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The government is to make a partial climbdown tomorrow over proposals to sell off England’s woodlands, following pressure from campaigners and Liberal Democrats. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is expected to announce that up to 80,000 hectares of England’s most cherished woodlands, such as the Forest of Dean and Cannock Chase, will be put into charitable trusts with the requirement that their current goals are maintained.
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This consultation is about the future ownership and management of the public forest estate in England – land managed by the Forestry Commission on behalf of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
It sets out the rationale for a move away from the Government owning and managing significant areas of woodlands in England and the principles which will guide the Government in deciding on the way forward. The consultation proposes a mixed model approach to reforming the ownership and management of the public forest estate to create a far greater role for civil society, businesses and individuals.
We invite views on the mixed-model approach, the criteria for deciding which parts of the estate fit within each model, the principles guiding each model, the safeguards for providing public benefits, and alternative approaches. We also invite views on the implications for the future role of the Forestry Commission in England of these proposals.
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But I’ve since discovered our rights to roam will not be enough to guarantee continued access for everyone who currently enjoys our forests, if they’re sold off.
Firstly the right to roam only applies to walkers – it does not extend to cyclists, horse-riders and other activities that are currently permitted in many of our forests.
Secondly, there’s nothing to compel private landowners to maintain the existing car parking, toilets and play areas available at many forests. Without such facilities, a visit to the forest comes difficult if not impossible for some, especially families with small children and those with disabilities.
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The entire global capacity to generate electricity is about 2 TW.
To give you some idea of how big that is, if you were to weigh all the electricity humans generate in a year (we’re talking E = mc2 here) it would come in at almost a tonne. A year of the world’s electricity weighs about as much as your car.
To give you some idea of how small that is, if you were to cover a 100 kilometer square of one of the world’s deserts near the equator with solar photovoltaic cells, they would comfortably generate more than 2 TW, at least in the daytime. That’s an area slightly bigger than Devonshire.
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Charges of conflict-of-interest — particularly in the infamous Citizens United decision that opens the floodgates to anonymous corporate money in elections — have been raised by Common Cause. Both Scalia and Thomas have admitted, according to a newspaper in Palm Springs, to speaking at private dinners hosted by Kansas oil tycoon Charles Koch, who, along with his brother David, has funded a wide array of right-wing causes and spent many millions on behalf of right-wing candidates.
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Finance
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High speed trading systems were not the cause of the 2008 economic crash, according to the results of a two-year US government investigation.
“The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,” said a leaked copy of the report’s conclusions, seen by the New York Times. The investigations instead blame incompetence, aggressive risk taking and a total failure of political oversight.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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That’s a bit different outcome from what the Supreme Court majority wrote in their opinion, which held that “with the advent of the Internet” citizens and shareholders would basically be able to Google all the information they would need and that would provide the necessary transparency.
The answer is obvious. Instead of complaining about corporations perverting our democracy, average Americans should buckle down and make make more money so they can out-contribute them.
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Censorship/Libel Tourism
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My entire professional life has been in the law, but nothing had prepared me for this. I have been a tenured faculty member at the finest institutions, most recently Harvard and NYU. I have held visiting appointments from Florence to Singapore, from Melbourne to Jerusalem. I have acted as legal counsel to governments on four continents, handled cases before the highest jurisdictions and arbitrated the most complex disputes among economic ‘super powers.’
Last week, for the first time I found myself in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. The setting could not have been grander. As I entered the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the French Old Bailey, my lawyer whispered: ‘Emile Zola was tried here.’ Vive la difference: This was no Dreyfus Affair but the stakes for Academic Freedom and liberty of expression are huge.
As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may see all details here. The author of the book, claiming defamation, demanded I remove it. I examined carefully the claim and concluded that the accusation was fanciful. Unflattering? Yes. Defamatory, by no stretch of imagination. It was my ‘Voltairian’ moment. I refused the request. I did offer to publish a reply by the author. This offer was declined.
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It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.
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One of the key arguments that critics have often made against Google is that the company “meddles” in search results, effectively “picking winners and losers.” Google’s — quite reasonable — response for years has been that it’s all in the algorithm, rather than any personal choices. And, the algorithm was just trying to recommend the best result, no matter what that might be. Indeed, this is a perfect and sensible response. However, after lots of pressure from the entertainment industry (and politicians closely associated with the entertainment industry), last month Google announced plans to start censoring “autocomplete” results, such that “terms that are closely associated with piracy” don’t appear.
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Google won’t autocomplete searches for “bittorrent,” but if you are interesting in learning how to kidnap someone, make meth, build a bomb, cheat on your taxes, or shoplift, they will happily autocomplete your search for you.
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As we’ve seen in Iran and Tunisia, social networking tools have given activists in authoritarian regimes a powerful voice, which can be heard well beyond their own country. But the use of social networking tools has also given their governments ways to identify and retaliate against them. This week we are watching the same dynamic play out in Egypt. This is why it is critical that all activists —in Egypt and elsewhere—take precautions to protect their anonymity and freedom of expression. The protests in Egypt this week also highlight another important point: authoritarian governments can block access to social media websites, but determined, tech-savvy activists are likely to find ways to circumvent censorship to communicate with the rest of the world.
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Privacy
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The Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) industry has grown rapidly over the past decade. Private companies and state agencies are now collecting and analysing “publicly available” data on a vast scale.
This article by Ben Hayes, published in the Statewatch Journal last year, looks at the evolution, theory and practice of OSINT; its use by police and security agencies; the rapidly developing OSINT industry; the blurring of the boundaries between OSINT and covert surveillance; and the embrace of OSINT by the EU.
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Over at Public Service, I’ve written an article about the fact that (rejoice) local authorities have finally been denied surveillance powers for many purposes and have to get warrants to authorise use for the rest. Just as we called for in our report, our manifesto and our book. Very pleased. Let’s call this a win.
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Civil Rights
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Cuban authorities have released a well-known dissident after detaining him briefly as he and other opposition figures tried to block the eviction of a woman from a home in the central city of Santa Clara.
Guillermo Farinas told The Associated Press on Thursday he and 25 other opposition figures and local residents were taken into custody Wednesday afternoon, then released with a warning to stay out of trouble late in the evening.
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The Justice Department hopes to force ISPs to archive personal user data usage for help facilitate future law enforcement investigations, which puts the fate of our Internet privacy up in the air. Kevin Pereira talks to EFF’s Richard Esguerra about the upcoming hearing and the details.
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DRM
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With France at the Presidency of the G20 group in 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy has recently announced the intention to convene a G20 meeting to discuss Internet and copyright issues, before the full G20 summit of heads of state and government in Cannes in November.
The French President has had the same discourse for some time now, having pushed the idea of a “civilised” Internet on various occasions since the signature in November 2007 of the so-called “Olivennes agreement”, which established the Hadopi authority.
The subject of a “civilised” Internet will also be discussed during the G8 meeting that will take place in Deauville, France, on 26 and 27 May 2011. “We will table a central question, that of a civilised Internet (….).We cannot consume as never before images, music, authors, creation, and not ensure the property rights for the person who put all the emotion, talent and creativity (…). The day we no longer remunerate the creation, we will kill the creation” said Sarkozy.
In the French government’s opinion, expressed by Deputy Muriel Marland-Militello, France is the “world’s pioneer of the civilised Internet”, thanks to Hadopi.
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Last fall, when I learned of the Stuxnet attack on the computers running Iran’s nuclear program, I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another.
But as more details emerged, it began to look less like something new and more like a piece of hobbyist “street” technology, albeit one expensively optimized for a specific attack. The state actor — said to be Israel, perhaps working with the United States, though no one is sure — had simply built on the unpaid labor of generations of hobbyist vandals.
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The courts have just issued a temporary restraining order against George Hotz (Geohot). Sony filed this lawsuit because they were unhappy that Geohot had released the Playstation 3 decryption keys so other people could play unsigned games on it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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There is a reason US copyright law is sometimes “affectionately” known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; there is a strange coincidence at play here – every time the copyright on Walt Disney’s early creations is about to expire, US copyright terms get magically extended by another few years. Currently, a work is under copyright both in the US and the UK for 70 years after the author’s death. This might make sense for Disney—at least someone is still making money from Walt’s creations—but for the vast majority of creative works out there, this lengthy copyright term is an issue.
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While he claims his decision is because he believes that “pitting creators against the web is a mistake,” and noting that politicans have refused to listen to the people, his critics are claiming that “his compulsive passion for Twitter has played a dirty trick” on him. Not only that, but the Advisory Board of the Film Academy is threatening to oust him before his resignation, because of his being “tricked” by the internet. Apparently just talking the consumers and film fans and getting their opinion is prohibido in the Spanish Film Academy.
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The MPAA has managed to take a dozen torrent sites offline in the United States, with help from Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The 12 torrent sites – which remain anonymous – were pulled offline by their hosting companies following complaints from the two organizations. What effect this ‘massive’ takedown operation will have on the BitTorrent ecosystem is yet to be seen, but thus far there are no reports of ‘missing’ torrent sites.
Blocks & Regions
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In this exclusive Linux Pro Magazine interview, tell-it-like-it-is, Linux Today editor Carla Schroder talks about her latest book, The Book of Audacity , shares facts about herself you won’t find anywhere else, a peek into her current projects, and offers advice for women on making their own paths, encouraging children, and more.
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Server
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When you’re looking at hosting options, especially for a virtual private server or dedicated server, you have a choice between Windows hosting or Linux hosting. The reference to Windows or Linux is to the operating system that is used on the server or on the virtual private server. So you might be wondering which one is better.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Ubuntu is going to bundle Qt libraries with its base install. Google will no longer bundle H.264 with Chrome and Firefox 4 will only have limited hardware acceleration. Share our discoveries, try XFCE, and listen to your own conversion stories in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Targeting a release around March/April, the latest Linux Kernel series, 2.6.38, brings some very interesting and exciting new features.
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OK Labs announced the availability of a verified, “bug-free secure microkernel” version of its Linux-compatible OKL4 hypervisor.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD put out a rare beta Linux driver this Monday and they have now just announced the release of the Catalyst 11.1 driver as their stable monthly update for Linux and Windows users. With this Catalyst driver, there is though one interesting but hidden feature that is sure to please many ATI/AMD Radeon Linux desktop users.
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AMD is offering wide-ranging support of OpenGL 4.1 for Linux across select ATI FirePro, ATI FireGL and AMD Radeon graphics cards.
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Applications
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Anyone who uses the Linux operating system faces an embarrassment of riches when it comes to apps for office tasks. Jack Wallen narrows the field to the 10 he considers most useful.
Linux users enjoy a rich choice of applications in every area, but particularly for office tasks. That choice is so extensive that finding apps that meet your needs can be time consuming.
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Proprietary
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Brosix are happy to announce that many improvements and feature upgrades will take place during 2011. Some of these changes have already undergone development, while others are still in the early stages and are slated for release in the months to come.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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These days, the combination of CrossOver and all the hard work of our Advocates is amazing. Within 5 minutes, or less, you can easily download and install CrossOver and your favorite Windows application. But you don’t have to buy, install, or hassle with Windows. It’s like playing a game like Call of Duty without having to actually be in a real combat zone. Or like a man putting on a dress instead of getting a sex change operation. Feels a little funny, but strangely nice, and you still get to be a man afterwards.
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Games
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Graphic adventure games struggle to find success in today’s market, but once upon a time they topped sales charts year after year. The genre shot to the top of computer gaming in the latter half of the 1980s, then suffered an equally precipitous fall a decade later. It shaped the fate of the largest companies in the gaming industry even as the games’ crude color graphics served as the background for millions of childhood memories. It gave us Roger Wilco, Sam & Max, and the world of Myst. But few gamers today know the complete history of the genre, or how the classic Sierra and LucasArts titles of the late 1980s and early 1990s largely disappeared beneath the assault of first-person shooters.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In This Issue
* What’s New in Amarok
* Google and Amarok
* Roktober Success
* Interview with a Developer: Bart Cerneels
* Automated Playlist Generator: How to Use it
* Queue Manager in Amarok
* Installing and using a script in Amarok
* Amarok on Windows
* Transcode your media files
* Amarok Live CD
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Alright, some of you are out there mumbling and grumbling about Sulfur, the gui front-end to entropy. The largest complaint I see is how slow it is on start up and even slow operations after it is up and running. I personally don’t see this issue. It takes a bit for it to start up, but don’t see it any worse than starting up firefox. There is an alternative to using Sulfur and it’s called PackageKit.
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An absolutely massive interactive HTML-based graphic shows the timeline of your favorite Linux distributions. With the left side presenting 1992′s Debian, Redhat, and SLS, it shows how the various distributions we know today came into existence. Follow the lines to the right as they branch into CentOS, Fedora, Tinfoil Hat, Knoppix, Freespire, and many many more. Click on each name to be taken to the home site for that selected distribution.
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A variety of neuroimaging software packages have been released from various laboratories worldwide, and many researchers use these packages in combination. Though most of these software packages are freely available, some people find them difficult to install and configure because they are mostly based on UNIX-like operating systems.
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Red Hat Family
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Jason Galanis, an alleged financial fraudster who has been sanctioned by the SEC, has made false and inflammatory accusations against Matthew Szulik, former CEO of Red Hat, Inc. and a widely-honored and respected business executive, in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Boston. Mr. Galanis is the son of John Peter Galanis, one of the most notorious white collar criminals of the 1980s.
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Fedora
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Phil Knirsch announced a last evening, January 25th, the immediate availability for download of the Fedora 14 operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems.
Fedora 14, codenamed Laughlin, comes with a lot of new features and updated packages. The last release of Fedora for IBM System z was Fedora 6, announced on October 24th, 2006. Therefore, the Fedora IBM System z (s390x) Secondary Arch team is proud to announce a new and improved release of this operating system.
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Debian Family
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It’s a long way from the cold boulevards of Paris to the searing heat of Brisbane but Stefano Zacchiroli has spent the 20-odd hours needed to make the trip because he wants to tell people in the FOSS community about the vital role that the Debian GNU/Linux Project still has to play.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For those following closely the development of Ubuntu 11.04, in the process of going into the Ubuntu Natty repository this week is its new X stack. This means the latest snapshot of the unreleased X Server 1.10 and Mesa 7.10 for the open-source DRI / Gallium3D drivers. Due to the usual API/ABI breaks, this also means updated X.Org drivers are also going into the “Natty Narwhal” repository at the same time.
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Yes, the cover looks familiar, but don’t worry, inside are many pages of Ubuntu 9.10 goodness.
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Since Unity has been introduced in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, there have been many changes in it just since 10.10′s release. The switch from Mutter to Compiz is one example: Compiz, unlike Mutter, has more animations and other effects that allow some incredible things like autohiding of the Unity Launcher, Launcher transparency, and familiar things like the world-famous desktop cube enabled by other Compiz plugins that can run alongside Unity (also a Compiz plugin).
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Samuel: We already agreed that we would like the current Ubuntu Software Center to be improved and used in various distributions. If this happens, then we will have the same software center in many distributions, but this doesn’t mean that the available applications have to be exactly the same in every distribution. There are no plans to merge software repositories for now, nor package managers.
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After all, there’s been Canonical’s decision to adopt Unity as the next desktop Ubuntu’s default interface, and there’s been the equally shocking plan to switch away from X.org and onto Wayland as the distro’s new graphics system. And that’s on top of a raft of smaller but still significant changes!
Well, one can only hope Ubuntu fans have been taking their vitamins lately, because recently word got out that yet another big change is planned. Specifically, future versions of Ubuntu — post-Natty Narwhal, that is — will incorporate the Qt user interface libraries; they may, in fact, even include applications based on Qt.
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Flavours and Variants
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I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Bodhi Linux recently. It’s a young (just a few months old) Ubuntu-based distribution that exclusively uses the Enlightenment E17 WM. (The name is appropriate because Prince Siddartha (later to be known as the Buddha) achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree.) I’ve used GNOME, KDE, Openbox, and a bit of LXDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox, but I’ve never used Enlightenment before, so this is a totally new experience to me. Plus, not only is Bodhi Linux in beta at version 0.1.4, even Enlightenment itself, after over a decade of development, is still in beta at version 0.17 (hence E17); the release of E17 after E16 (Enlightenment 0.16) was a huge deal for its users. It’s a good thing that it’s built on a familiar Ubuntu base, or else I’d be totally lost. I made a live USB of this with UnetBootin and went on my way, so follow the jump to see how this experience goes.
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This thing is pocket-sized but it’s not a mobile thingie, it’s a desktop PC. CompuLab has been making industrial controllers and such using x86 but lately it is going with ARM. No doubt they like the performance per cubic centimetre/dollar.
I was expecting things like this to appear in the fall but these guys plan on shipping in April. No prices yet… If they can undercut eeeBox, we should have some competition in this space. Good.
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CompuLab announced a 5.1 x 3.7 x 0.6-inch computer built around the dual-core, 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, designed as an open platform for ARM software development, among other uses. Claimed to run on only three Watts, the “Trim-Slice” features 1GB RAM, dual SDHC slots, a SATA SSD, dual-head HDMI/DVI, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, plus gigabit Ethernet, USB, and serial connectivity.
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CSR plc announced a “major licensing agreement” with ARM that will result in the former’s GPS receivers being integrated with the latter’s IP (intellectual property). The “location-aware” SoC (system on chip) platforms will include application processors with Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A9 cores, according to the companies.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Over the past few months, there have a lot of potential iPad competitors entering (or preparing to enter) the market. The most common are Android-based tablets running either the current/recent Android releases or models that will ship with Google’s tablet-optimized Honeycomb release. There’s also a couple of new platforms on the horizon including RIM’s PlayBook and HP’s upcoming webOS tablets (along with potential webOS netbooks).
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Android
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Given the choice of an Apple iOS or and Android powered device, my choice is clear.
At the risk of sounding like a “hater” – I won’t be buying an iPad.
I know all the cool kids have iPads but I really don’t want one. I’m also tired of hearing how “awesome” the iPad is. It’s just a tablet PC, for goodness sake. The way some people carry on you’d swear the iPad was the equivalent of finding a cure for cancer or brokering world peace.
Of course the iPad looks cool. That’s what Apple does best: Apply their excellent design and marketing skills to relatively standard pieces of technology. No matter how cool it is, it is not enough to convince me to become an Apple disciple, which is what most Apple users quickly become.
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The last thing I wanted to see was Android to split into two “official” versions. Well, guess what, for all intents and purposes that’s what’s happened. Ack!
It’s bad enough that Android has multiple current versions. Then, Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK (Software Development Kit) Tech Lead, announced “Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets.”
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The Google-sponsored Android project has released a preview software developers kit (SDK) for the tablet-oriented Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”). In the process, it has revealed many more details about Android 3.0, including a revamped “holographic” UI, redesigned keyboard, a new animation framework and graphics engines, and enhanced Bluetooth support — among many other changes.
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If you are an engineer and own an Android phone, you can keep a close eye on NXP products through this new app.
The app allows users to search, buy and share information on over 10,000 products from NXP’s High Performance Mixed Signal and Standard Products portfolio.
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Android as an open platform is continuing to spread its wings far and wide and keeping sure that the smartphone is en route to becoming the standard. By 2015, it may be time to drop the “smart” and just call them phones.
We have already seen own-brand handsets and cheaper models particularly from the likes of Chinese manufacturers ZTE and Huawei. TechEye has previously reported that ZTE, with its affordable mobile phones and aggressive strategy for going global, is on the way to world domination. Juniper Research agrees: “Pricing of smartphones will come down to $80 by 2015,” analyst Anthony Cox says. With the internet widely regarded as not just a privilege but a right, it makes sense: mobile browsing in emerging markets can be sold on the cheap.
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Sub-notebooks
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In July last year, I wrote about my little netbook Toshiba NB-100. Even though it originally came with Windows XP preinstalled, I forced Redmond’s OS to make room for SimplyMepis 8.0. That’s how my dual-boot computer was born.
Sometime later, encouraged by the stability of Mepis and the flexibility of Linux, I went for a bolder move and installed Mepis 8.5 as well. I then had a triple-boot computer!! Oh, I was so proud of it!
Back in those days, I was happy to experiment with Linux. In fact, I seldom booted XP. Little by Little, XP moved away from the center and became more like a storeroom on my netbook. I didn’t wipe that system out because of nostalgic reasons. Besides, the thought “if something goes wrong with Linux, you can boot Windows” was still present in my mind.
Bullseye! At least in part. Something went wrong with Linux! This was something that both Mepis 8.0 and Mepis 8.5 brought about…
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The question posed at this week’s San Francisco Hadoop User Group is a common one: “what factors justify the use of an Apache Hadoop cluster vs. traditional approaches?” The answer you receive depends on who you ask.
Relational database authors and advocates have two criticisms of Hadoop. First, that most users have little need for Big Data. Second, that MapReduce is more complex than traditional SQL queries.
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Events
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The LinuxFest Northwest organizers are pleased to request proposals for exhibits and presentations for the 2011 Fest! Attendee participation is important to the success of the Fest. Thanks to sponsors and exhibitors the event is free to attendees again this year. Thank you for your support!
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The first Texas Linux Fest was, by most measures, a success.
Personally, I attended as a voyeur…attending many of the talks and I caught Joe Brockmeier’s keynote. Something I enjoyed throughly. I also messed around and learned some things…both about Linux and the people that breath the rarefied air at the top.
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LinuxFest Northwest, which will be held in Bellingham, Washington from April 30 through May 1, is calling for exhibit and presentation proposals.
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Wednesday opened with Geoff Huston from APNIC presenting on Internet Address Exhaustion, and how it presents a real and present threat to the openness of today’s Internet. Geoff walked the audience through the history of the internet, and covered some of the barriers to IPv6 adoption. Geoff then discussed how without open addressing there’s no open network, and detailed how the current environment provides little incentive for the very big internet players who have benefited from the initial openess of the Internet to maintain that openness when it levels the playing field for their competition. Geoff’s vision of the IP apocolypse was a bleak one, with only one viable solution left – to alter our environment to favour the rapid adoption of IPv6.
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Organised by German information security and data protection specialist SerNet, the 10th international Samba conference, Samba eXPerience 2011 will take place in Göttingen, Germany from the 9th to the 11th of May.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Hot on the heels of last week’s beta 9 release, Mozilla has pushed out another update for Firefox 4. With the final release drawing near, Mozilla is hard at work squashing the last few bugs blocking the Firefox 4 release. While the latest release, beta 10, doesn’t get them all, it is stable enough for early adopters.
If you’d like to try out beta 10 and help out in the testing process, head over to the Mozilla beta downloads page and grab a copy.
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Oracle
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If you’re a person inclined toward free software, your automatic reaction toward LibreOffice will be a positive one. You will also rebel against Oracle and find it a cold, cruel, merciless corporation. But please don’t, the first part, at least.
Least of all, LibreOffice needs your approval. What it needs is support and criticism. The splitting from Oracle is an excellent opportunity to make it a so much better product. Yesmanning it won’t do here, I’m afraid. You should be objective and harsh, if needs be, so that LibreOffice can learn from existing mistakes and grow into a powerful and modern competitor for the office suite market.
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In September 2010, a third of OpenOffice.org developers (about 20) objected to the open-source office suite falling under the custodianship of Oracle after the company completed its buyout of Sun Microsystems. They feared that Oracle wouldn’t provide whole-hearted support to an open-source application project that didn’t significantly contribute to its bottom line. They created the Document Foundation and forked the office suite code to create another open-source suite they dubbed LibreOffice. A little more than four months later, the developers unveiled on Jan. 25 a stable release of their first product, LibreOffice 3.3 (the numbering sequence conforms to the OpenOffice product chronology). The developers spent the time adding new features as well as extensively cleaning up portions of the the legacy code, said Italo Vignoli, one of the founding members of the Document Foundation. Previous OpenOffice fans will appreciate that LibreOffice 3.3 looks very similar to OpenOffice 3.3 and that many of the new features are also new in OpenOffice. But there are also a number of key differences that set the two open-source suites apart. The installer file is available on libreoffice.org, as well as a “help pack” executable, which contains the English language help files. Not installing the help pack means users end up in the documents section on the LibreOffice Website. If Java is not installed on the system, the application returns an error, but the installer doesn’t perform that check. So check that Java is installed before running the installer. Here are a few new features and cleanups that eWEEK found noteworthy.
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It’s only been a few months since the Document Foundation fork of OpenOffice.org was announced, and here they are with the first stable release of LibreOffice. The 3.3 release isn’t a huge leap away from OpenOffice.org, but it does have some features that make it worth the switch.
There’s a long list of new features for the 3.3 release, but a couple stand out above the rest for me.
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Yesterday the Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.3 . I guess you may already have seen the news if you read this blog. I wanted to express my joy and my pride of our community who made this release possible. Not only did we make our first release, but we also showed everyone we could improve the software in a significant way. This is just a beginning as you can imagine. In addition, we have now published our short term roadmap (stay tuned for our other releases of February, March and May) and announced our will to work along time-based releases.
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As promised we are finally organizing an Open Source Focus Group meeting to talk about office automation suites, interoperability and migrations.
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Java seems to be joining the community/open source versions of OpenSolaris and OpenOffice as they slide under the butcher’s knife.
The day ASF decided to quit the Java Executive Committee, Java’s distance with the community started to broaden. Unfortunately, Oracle took a U-Turn from its previous stand on Test Compatibility Kits (TCKs). When Java was under Sun, Oracle was pushing Sun lift restrictions from Java but the day Oracle acquired Java, it also acquired Sun’s stand on TCKs.
Oracle’s stand on TCKs has made it clear that the only reason Oracle wanted Sun to lift TCK restrictions was to gain access to it, there weren’t any concern for the community.
Oracle doesn’t need the community. It’s one of the hard-core enterprise centric proprietary companies, which is also known to be ruthless. The company was recently sued by the US government for overcharging the government itself.
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Business
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Last month, eCRM Guide wrote an article on the top ERP trends. As it turns out, there’s a lot more going on in this vibrant $20 billion market than could be squeezed into one article. So here are 10 more major trends in enterprise resource planning (ERP).
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But then, for the sake of completeness, I looked at Chrome’s extension count, and was completely blown away: Google’s rising-star browser lists 11,431 extensions. That’s nearly 250 percent more extensions than Firefox!
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend, a global open source software leader, today announced that it continued record growth and innovation in the second half of 2010. In just the last six months, Talend broke into the application integration market with the acquisition of SOPERA, completed a $34 million round of funding led by Silver Lake Sumeru and attained record growth numbers for the fourteenth straight quarter. Heading into 2011, the company is ideally positioned to extend its leadership position in the open source middleware market.
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Jaspersoft today released a broad set of software to support a wide variety of Big Data sources for Business Intelligence (BI) reporting. Companies are storing more and more of their data in data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases and massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic databases because of their inherent cost and scale advantages relative to traditional databases. Today, with the release of over a dozen Big Data connectors as part of its open source “Big Data Reporting” project, as well as beta connectors for selected Big Data proprietary databases, Jaspersoft becomes the first and only BI vendor to deliver native reporting for Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP analytic databases.
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Project Releases
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3 months after its latest release (2.2), GLX-Dock’s next stage is ready for testing.
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Government
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Government agencies in Australia should actively participate in open source communities and will be required to consider open source options equally when going to tender, under new policy announced Wednesday.
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Another option for open source could be a government open-source advocate like the government’s small business advocate Don Easter. Certainly in enterprise, open source seems to get more of a run if there’s a passionate advocate in the company (think De Bortoli CIO Bill Robertson or CIO for the Sydney Anglican diocese George Lymbers).
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Australia’s federal government has published a policy that mandates the consideration of open source software equally alongside proprietary products.
The move represents a dramatic change in the government’s position, according to Australian reports.
The policy was anounced just days after a decision by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) to standardise on Microsoft’s Office Open XML document standard sparked controversy.
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Licensing
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Under the Apache 2 license, Notion Ink is required to credit all copyrighted, patented, trademarked and attributed work.
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Openness/Sharing
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I’ve always been a great fan of the law of unintended consequences. It takes you places. Unexpected places. Sometimes good, sometimes bad but never a dull moment. The recent kerfuffle over Pirate Bay is too well known to require detailed recounting here. What is really interesting though is where it might just eventually take us in terms of internet freedom. This article describes the one fallout of the legal judgements against Pirate Bay and how its response may unintentionally help to protect and promote internet freedoms.
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Open Hardware
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I hadn’t heard of hackerspaces prior to producing this story about Noisebridge, a hackerspace located in San Francisco’s Mission District. A member of the space and our Tuesday Tech blogger, Laura Khalil, gave me a tour and introduced me to one of its co-founders, Mitch Altman.
Mitch is a technological Renaissance man; he’s a hacker, author, instructor and the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a device that allows one to turn off any television with a click of a special remote.
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In the previous two installmants of this series (It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees and More Tales of Terrible IT Managers) I shared some bad IT manager horror stories. We could mine this topic forever, and I would be tempted to except Scott Adams already does it with Dilbert, and I can’t improve on Dilbert.
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I can remember about 1957 I won a 5 cent coin for my efforts in the high jump at Field Day in a one-room school house in the bush. That was a prize rewarding me for accomplishment. Another more recent prize was for $600K or so for development UNIX by Dennis Ritchie, Ph.D., Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Emeritus, Bell Labs,
Alcatel-Lucent Inc., and Ken Thompson, Ph.D., Distinguished Engineer, Google Inc., a major step up in operating systems and, as it turned out, something of lasting value still widely used. That’s sweet. Here, I have been told that GNU/Linux or any UNIX-like OS is so old-fashioned.
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The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today reaffirmed its support for the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS), an agency that works to resolve disagreements between Canadians and their service providers.
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In this corner, a libertarian, tea party hero who ran several campaigns as a candidate for US president on the Republican ticket. And in that corner, a progressive icon of the left who also ran several campaigns for the US presidency but on the Green Party ticket.
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A new report issued by the Office of Special Counsel says George W. Bush’s Office of Political Affairs routinely violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits using federal dollars to pay for political activities and bars federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.
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Health/Nutrition
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What happens when an entire country legalizes drug use?
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Here’s the context. Pierce — an old (and probably now former) friend from my nearly two decades inside the insurance industry — was quoted by DiStefano as saying that I erred when I wrote that APCO set up and operated a fake grassroots front group, Health Care America, to discredit Moore and his movie because insurance company executives were terrified that Sicko would convince even more Americans that the government should play a much greater role in the U.S. health care system.
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Security
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Unlike the UK’s Royal family, I doubt anyone is listening in on my phone calls. But, if someone wanted to, they could.
Many mobile phone calls in the U.S. and Europe are encrypted with a stream cipher called A5/1, which is commonly used, in GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) voice communications. A5/1 is not secure. It’s been broken for years.
More recently, in 2009, A5/1 was busted by a German hacker in a way that demonstrated that if you can capture the voice stream anyone with generic computer equipment could break it. Since then, A5/1 has only gotten easier to crack.
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Five men have been arrested over a spate of recent web attacks carried out in support of Wikileaks.
The five males are being held after a series of arrests at residential addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London this morning.
The men were arrested in relation to “recent and ongoing” attacks by an online group that calls itself “Anonymous”.
Targets included the websites of PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon.
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It is not the first arrests in relation to the attacks. In December two Dutch teenagers were taken into custody and subsequently released over allegations that they had helped coordinate them.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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That, as H.G. Wells imagined it in 1898, was first contact with a technologically superior and implacable alien race from space, five years before humanity took to the air in anything but balloons. And that was how the Martians, landing in their “cylinders,” those spaceships from a dying planet, ready to take over ours, responded to a delegation of humans advancing on them waving a flag of peace and ready to parlay. As everyone knows who has read The War of the Worlds, or heard the 1938 Orson Welles radio show version that terrified New Jersey, or watched the 1953 movie or the Stephen Spielberg 2005 remake, those Martians went on to level cities, slaughter masses of humanity using heat-rays and poison gas, and threaten world domination before being felled by the germs for which they were unprepared.
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After the shooting spree in Tucson, a simple message appeared on the website of the nation’s premier gun-rights booster, the National Rifle Association: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy. We join the rest of the country in praying for the quick recovery of those injured.” Asked to comment on gun-control legislation floated since the massacre, the NRA sent a similar statement to Mother Jones: “At this time anything other than prayers for the victims and their families would be inappropriate.” Was the powerful gun lobby standing down amid calls for stricter gun laws? Nope, it was merely prepping for what could be a fierce legislative fight.
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Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.
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Transparency and disclosure in action! But wait! I shouldn’t mock! We can see from the punctuation that at least one exchange involved a question!
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Cablegate
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The New York Times is considering options to create an in-house submission system that could make it easier for would-be leakers to provide large files to the paper.
Executive editor Bill Keller told The Cutline that he couldn’t go into details, “especially since nothing is nailed down.” But when asked if he could envision a system like Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit, Keller said the paper has been “looking at something along those lines.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Schnitzer Steel of Portland, Oregon reported record revenues earlier this month. No surprise. The recycled-metal giant, which has roots going back over 100 years to the Alaska Junk Company, is uniquely positioned for the ongoing commodity supercycle. With iron ore, copper, and a selection of other metals now exceeding their 2008 price highs, the demand for salvaged metal is soaring. 2011, so far, pressages more of the same as the worst copper deficit since 2004 is set to unfold over the next two years. With production from mining under pressure, industry will have to turn increasingly to scrap.
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Acquiring “clean natural gas” and “getting off of foreign oil” are pitched as reasons to continue natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. And yet, beyond all the problems associated with fracking, Pro Publica’s Abrahm Lustgarten revealed in a January 25, 2011 article that “clean natural gas” isn’t all that clean after all.
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Gasland, the documentary produced and directed by Josh Fox, is up for an Oscar for Best Documentary in the Feature Category.
The film put the harms associated with natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in the national limelight and begat a propaganda campaign by Energy in Depth (EID). EID, for those who have not heard of it, is a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute.
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Finance
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The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry.
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A Republican who will play a leading role in the oversight of the Wall Street reform law said federal regulators should not be “rewarded” with budget increases for past mistakes.
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) told The Hill in an exclusive interview that it is “troubling” that financial regulators want to be given more funds and staff after failing to prevent the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
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The question that gets asked of every investor is the same: “How much?” Investments, after all, primarily matter for how much capital they give their beneficiary access to. But “how much” was a question that President Obama studiously avoided answering in last night’s State of the Union. And without knowing what Obama is actually asking from Congress, it’s hard to know what his vision amounts to. Yes, it would be good “to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world,” and yes, public policy has a role in helping us do that. But a small commitment to public investment is very different than a big commitment to public investment. Obama, after all, is not the first president to make competitiveness a theme of his State of the Union. The question is whether he’ll be the first to actually do something serious about it.
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The dollar spiked higher against the yen Thursday after a leading credit ratings agency downgraded its view on Japan’s debt amid concerns over its elevated borrowings.
Stock markets mostly traded higher, however, after the U.S. Federal Reserve gave few, if any, indications that it is thinking about changing its policy anytime soon. That suggests interest rates will remain at historically low levels and that the central bank will continue its program to pump $600 billion into the U.S. economy – a welcome combination for stock market investors.
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A controversial MBA scholarship has been introduced at Western. As it sits now, the Goldman Sachs Scholars Fund MBA Award (School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Business) is under review by the Senate Committee on Academic Planning and Awards (SCAPA). It is under review because Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Associate Dean and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS), raised concerns at the past SCAPA meeting about UWO receiving money from an organization such as Goldman Sachs.
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The 2008 financial meltdown was avoidable and largely caused by unnecessary risk-taking, corporate mismanagement and inept regulation, according to the US government’s official report.
The financial crisis inquiry commission’s official report is due tomorrow but according to leaks in the New York Times it will conclude: “The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”
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Word is beginning to leak out about the contents of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s (FCIC) final report, a 576-page official analysis of the causes of the crisis. The Commission, which got off to a slow and rocky start, managed to hold 19 days of hearings and interviewed 700 witnesses. According to the New York Times, the report puts blame where blame is due, on reckless Wall Street gambling, but also on the colossal failure of government.
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The Economist marked Professor Coase’s 100th birthday with an article, Why Do Firms Exist?, that reviews his major accomplishments. I like its edgy first paragraph:
“For philosophers the great existential question is: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ For management theorists the more mundane equivalent is: ‘Why do firms exist? Why isn’t everything done by the market?’”
Professor Coase’s work provides simple answers to to these questions. He explained that, in principle, a firm should be able to find the cheapest, most productive goods and services by contracting them out in an efficient, open marketplace. However, markets are not perfectly fluid. Transaction costs are incurred in obtaining goods and services outside the firm, such as searching for the right people, negotiating a contract, coordinating the work, managing intellectual property and so on. Thus, firms came into being to make it easier and less costly to get work done.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Being on the Fox News payroll has its advantages.
Not only did five potential Republican candidates get regular paychecks from the network last year, but they also got something even more valuable: airtime
Liberal watchdog group Media Matters found that the five received about $55 million in free advertising over the course of more than 85 hours of appearances in 2010.
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Censorship
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Egypt appears to have clamped down on web services, such as Twitter, that have been used to help organise anti-government protests in Cairo.
Twitter confirmed that its service has been blocked in Egypt on Tuesday from around 1600GMT.
A Swedish mobile video site called Bambuser also reported that it had been blocked around the same time.
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Privacy
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By virtually every measure, 2010 was a remarkably successful year for Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. Riding the wave of high profile investigations into the privacy practices of Internet giants Facebook and Google, Stoddart received accolades around the world, while garnering a three-year renewal of her term at home.
Last week Stoddart used her first public lecture of 2011 to put the Canadian privacy and business communities on notice that she intends to use her new mandate to reshape the enforcement side of Canadian privacy law. Speaking at the University of Ottawa, Stoddart hinted that she plans to push for order-making power, tougher penalties and a “naming names” strategy that may shame some organizations into better privacy compliance practices.
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By virtually every measure, 2010 was a remarkably successful year for Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. Riding the wave of high profile investigations into the privacy practices of Internet giants Facebook and Google, Stoddart received accolades around the world, while garnering a three-year renewal of her term at home.
My regular technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that last week Stoddart used her first public lecture of 2011 to put the Canadian privacy and business communities on notice that she intends to use her new mandate to reshape the enforcement side of Canadian privacy law. Speaking at the University of Ottawa, Stoddart hinted that she plans to push for order making power, tougher penalties, and a “naming names” strategy that may shame some organizations into better privacy compliance practices. Canadian privacy law has quietly undergone some important changes in recent years. Legislation designed to implement changes to the broad-based private sector privacy law (PIPEDA) has been stuck in the slow lane, but the federal government has passed anti-spam and identity theft legislation, while several provinces have enacted health privacy and security breach disclosure reforms.
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Yesterday, Facebook introduced a handful of new ad units that combine your “Likes,” Facebook Places check ins, and your use of certain apps with advertisements for things like Starbucks, Coke, Levi’s jeans and Budweiser.
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Data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has warned local councillors who handle personal information that they may have to register as a data controller or risk a fine of up to £5,000.
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Up to 13,000 councillors could be breaching data protection laws, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said.
Warning of financial penalties, the ICO said councillors who handle personal data must check if they need to register as a data controller or potentially face a fine of up to £5,000.
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Civil Rights
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The lawsuit said the pat-down “exposed him to humiliation and degradation through unwanted touching, gripping and rubbing of the intimate areas of his body.”
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Mark Kennedy, 41, a former Metropolitan Police officer who posed as a climate change protester known as “Mark Stone”, spoke out about the “grey and murky” world of undercover policing in which he said “really bad stuff” was secretly going on.
Last week the £1 million trial of six environmental activists accused of plotting to break into the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire collapsed amid questions over Mr Kennedy’s involvement.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is now investigating whether Nottinghamshire Police withheld secret recordings made by Mr Kennedy showing that those accused were innocent of conspiracy from the prosecution.
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The mainstream media largely ignored a story about an especially sophisticated and deadly backpack bomb found along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Washington last week, barely covering it beyond an initial mention. The device drew special attention from some news outlets because it contained shrapnel, was equipped with a remotely-controlled detonator, was “directional” (meaning aimed toward the parade route) and in the FBI’s words, was “capable of inflicting multiple casualties.” The major media barely mentioned the incident, and the lack of follow-up stories on it is even more deafening now that the FBI has concluded that the connection between this incident and racism is “inescapable.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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“Remember when Verizon sued the FCC over net neutrality rules? Well, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Al Franken (D-MN) see it a bit differently and have authored a new working bill titled ‘Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011 (PDF).’ The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including ‘(6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers’ end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets; (7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization… (9) refus[ing] to interconnect on just and reasonable terms and conditions.’ And that doesn’t count for packets sent over just the internet connections but also wireless, radio, cell phone or pigeon carrier. Franken has constantly reiterated that this is the free speech issue of our time and Cantwell said, ‘If we let telecom oligarchs control access to the Internet, consumers will lose. The actions that the FCC and Congress take now will set the ground rules for competition on the broadband Internet, impacting innovation, investment, and jobs for years to come. My bill returns the broadband cop back to the beat, and creates the same set of obligations regardless of how consumers get their broadband.’”
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Paul Gardner-Stephen, who co-founded the Serval project, first demonstrated the mesh network technology while experimenting with the use of Wi-Fi transmitters on phones to carry VoIP conversations.
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Presenting at linux.conf.au 2011 this week, Gardner-Stephen said community response had already surpassed expectations, with the Australian Red Cross voicing enthusiasm at the possibilities.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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About a week ago we got a nice letter from Franklin Covey letting us know that the number “7″ in conjunction with the word “habits” was their trademark, and that in order to keep their trademark they needed to vigorously defend it. The words “cease” and “desist,” while not trademarked, appeared in the letter as well. But it was worded as nicely as such a thing can be.
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Copyrights
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Bill C-32, the bill to amend the Copyright Act, is now being examined by a parliamentary committee in Ottawa.
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Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the company exploiting the Paris Hilton Sex Tape ‘One Night in Paris’ has filed lawsuits against 843 alleged BitTorrent users. While it has already made millions of dollars in profit from the dubiously obtained ‘motion picture’, the company is demanding compensation for losses allegedly caused by mass copyright infringement on BitTorrent networks.
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We’ve already talked about how people are starting to freak out about “lending clubs” forming on Facebook to share Kindle ebooks, now that Amazon has launched a ridiculously limited “lending” feature. Not surprisingly, such efforts are quickly moving beyond Facebook as well, such as with the launch of a service called eBookFling, which is basically a marketplace for matching up folks for “lending” such limited ebooks.
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Late last year, Massachusetts resident Dmitriy Shirokov teamed up with a pair of young lawyers to file a class-action lawsuit against attorneys from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver—the firm operating as the US Copyright Group. Shirokov had received a letter from DGW saying that he had shared the film Far Cry online; would he please pay $1,500 ($2,500 if he waited too long) to make the whole matter just go away?
He would not. Instead, he sued the DGW lawyers for racketeering, extortion, and committing fraud on the US Copyright Office (among 25 total claims). Even the settlement letters were said to be misleading, since they referenced other cases like the Joel Tenenbaum $675,000 P2P verdict—but without noting that a judge has already slashed that amount as being unconstitutional. According to Shirokov, DGW’s idea is merely to scare the accused into paying up.
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The major label roller coaster ride has intensified over the last few days with a series of staff cuts, executive changes and sale rumors that should radically shift the major label landscape. But will they lead to real change? Last week, new UMG CEO Lucian Grainge began his reign with 50+ staff cut across the U.S. operation. Finance, IT and administrative services appear to be the heaviest hit. Over at Warner Music Group, CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. seems to be trying to have it both ways.
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Apparently Forrester music analyst Mark Mulligan told the press recently that “digital music has failed,” which seems like an incredibly short-sighted statement. Mulligan’s a smart guy, and while we’ve disagreed with him in the past, I’m hoping he really said that because it’s a good line to feed the press, rather than because he had any actual belief in it. The fact is digital music has been a massive success for those who know how to use it. Digital music has allowed musicians to go from nobodies to stars. Digital music has allowed artists to connect with fans they never would have reached before. Digital music has allowed artists to massively expand their fan bases. Digital music has allowed artists to cut out unhelpful middlemen and route around gatekeepers. Digital music has meant more music is being produced, released and available today than ever before. How you can consider that a “failure” is beyond me.
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If I would only find myself on Twitter and not in real life I would almost believe that copyright is just a burden, just so much dead weight. And today I have the honour to exchange ideas with you about whether this is in fact true. Is copyright the devil?
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ACTA
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“The creation of a civilized internet” is what French President Nicolás Sarkozy proposed a few days ago for the agenda of the upcoming G-8 meeting. President Obama has also agreed to give priority to the issue of “taming the web” at the meeting of the most powerful countries. There seems to be a certain coincidence of interests in favor of varying degrees of repressive digital measures from a broad coalition formed by intellectual property hardliners, rabid wikileaks critics and a number of big brother authoritarian governments like those of Egypt or China.
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The European Commission has revealed that it is currently being sued over ACTA secrecy. In October 2010, MEP Marietje Schaake asked several questions of the EC including one on non-transparency.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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In some ways, the DEA will make it much easier for copyright holders to pursue those they believe have infringed their rights than it was for those who worked with ACS:Law.
Whereas Andrew Crossley needed court orders to identify those he wanted to target, the new laws will force large ISPs (with more than 400,000 subscribers) to cooperate immediately.
They will not hand over the names and addresses of customers observered unlawfully filesharing to rights holders, however, but will send out warning letters their on behalf.
MyScript Handwriting Technology for Google Android
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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One of the most common mistakes new desktop Linux users make is to give up too easily, often citing the frequently heard myth that “It’s too hard.” The truth, however, is that it’s just different. It may be difficult to remember at this point, but Windows took some getting used to, too.
How can you make the desktop Linux migration process as easy as possible in your business? Here are a few suggestions.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel version 2.6.38 supports AMD’s new Fusion CPUs and offers 2D and 3D acceleration with many current GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. Power economy for the graphics cores in Intel processors and chip-sets has been improved; new page flipping features aim to eradicate image flickering, tearing and incomplete rendering issues.
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Applications
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BlueGriffon is a new WYSIWYG editor which uses Gecko, the Firefox 4 rendering engine for displaying the web pages. It’s cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
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Recently in Germany there was a cross-distribution meeting among the major vendors (Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, Debian, Mandriva, etc) to discuss a common application installer for Linux and one unified application store / market-place. The goal would be to have a common user-interface for application installation, how/what meta-data to use, determine a defined protocol for non-static meta-data, and decide what meta-data to share across distributions. Fortunately, this was a very successful meeting.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME and KDE are the most popular desktop environments for Linux by a mile, but they’re not the only games in town. If you’re ready to shake things up on the desktop, we’ve got five of the best alternatives for you to choose from.
I’m using the term “window manager” a bit loosely in the headline because, well, it’s a headline. For the purposes of this round-up, I’m looking at the best desktop environment/window managers for Linux. What’s the difference between a desktop environment and a window manager? I’m glad you asked. Window managers do just that — manage placement and handling of “windows” in X. GNOME and KDE, for example, have default window managers (Metacity and KWin, respectively) but also provide a lot of features and applications that you won’t find with something like, say, FVWM or twm.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Nuno Marco Fernandes Pinheiro. Among other things he describes himself as an icon and UI designer, Oxygen coordinator, KDE member, freedom fighter, husband and dreamer.
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GNOME Desktop
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Since I started dogfooding The Board on a daily basis, it became clear to me that not having a simple way to arrange multiple elements in the page is quite annoying. If you wanted to arrange multiple elements in a specific area of the page, you’d end up having to move each element separately, one by one. Argh! This is why I decided to focus on an initial set of features targeting this specific issue for the upcoming release.
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What’s wrong? Zeitgeist is not a file manager. The GNOME Activity Journal can be used to replace a file manager and do file manager-like things, but Zeitgeist is more than that. Check the official Zeitgeist website for details.
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The code is now available for anyone who wants to try it out – for now there’s no GIT branch or such and instead, you must download an archive and replace the ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/js folder with the js folder from this archive.
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With the help of “magcius”‘s async work and other on the shell channel now I am ready to have people try out my work. Sadly I am shitty with Git, so for now I will upload my whole js directory for GNOME Shell and hope someone can help me clean it up. Tomorrow I will bug the ppl on #gnome-shell to help me create a patch out of it. This is how it looks like now…
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While I might not be the best developer around I do try to bring something new to the table and I do hope that GNOME can see it at some point. What started off as a GNOME project is now being endorsed by Unity, KDE and lots of small community projects. We worked on being a cross-desktop project with our roots in GNOME. I am not going to debate what needs to be changed in Zeitgeist to be more GNOME friendly (moving to git etc…) since its not fair for other deployments and not fair for us as developers who are used to our work environment. And while I might be the face of Zeitgeist the project has outgrown me and we have lots hackers and contributors around, so please feel free to get to know them.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Two weeks into our wallpaper contest we’re seeing lots of really interesting entries for the photographic part. As those of you who read the previous post about the contest will know we’re also reserving at least three places this release for non photographic wallpapers. The plan _was_ to use another site to manage these entries. Unfortunately the dedicated community team working on this site have hit some issues with keeping it running and so we’ve decided to move all entries to Flickr. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work and we’ll explore this solution again next cycle.
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Ubuntu 10.10 users will be able to rate and review applications within the Ubuntu Software Center come February, according the official wiki page timeline for the project.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi Linux is NOT yet another Ubuntu based Linux distro. Bodhi Linux is among a very few number of Ubuntu based distros that run Enlightenment(E17) window manager instead of the popular alternatives like GNOME or KDE. I had never used anything other than GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktops before and I have to tell you, my experience with Enlightenment desktop has been a completely refreshing one.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Android
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Google is “not happy” with the number of paid app purchases from the Android Market, with Android platform manager Eric Chu telling developers that the company had several strategies for driving app buyers in 2011. Speaking at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco this week, Forbes reports, Chu confirmed that carrier billing would be extended beyond just AT&T, so as to remove the payment obstacle for more users, while in-app payments would also come sometime this quarter.
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Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. It introduces a new “holographic” UI theme and an interaction model that builds on the things people love about Android — multitasking, notifications, widgets, and others — and adds many new features as well.
Besides the user-facing features it offers, Android 3.0 is also specifically designed to give developers the tools and capabilities they need to create great applications for tablets and similar devices, together with the flexibility to adapt existing apps to the new UI while maintaining compatibility with earlier platform versions and other form-factors.
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Google just announced the Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform highlights which include tons of new features such as a new “holographic” UI theme, an interaction model that builds on multitasking, notifications, widgets, and many others.
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A few questions for you:
* Will Larry Page use open source principles to lead Google from a bureaucratic culture back toward a more entrepreneurial culture?
* Does the disagreement over the China decision show that Page and Brin have a commitment to openness that Schmidt does not have?
* Do you think Google is better off staying committed to openness, or would the company become even more innovative if they moved closer to the direction of Apple?
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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RPM of the tenth Beta of next major version of Mozilla Foundation browser is available in remi repository for Fedora >= 10. Available for 76 locales.
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If you’re already running the latest Firefox 4 Beta, you can immediately try out Home Dash without restarting Firefox. You can leave feedback in this Google Groups thread and check out the source on GitHub.
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While accepting an award for distinction in international law and affairs from the NY Bar Association, Geoffrey Robertson, who will defend Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at his extradition hearings in London in February, warned that the United States “risked irrevocable damage to its reputation if it pursued Assange” by “aiming the blunderbuss of its 1917 Espionage Act, death penalty and all, at a publisher who is a citizen of a friendly nation,” according to the The Age: US told to drop Assange pursuit.
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GEOFFREY ROBERTSON, QC, has been given an award by the New York Bar Association – but used his thank you speech to deliver a broadside to the US, warning it risks its reputation as a ”bastion of free speech” if it continues to pursue Julian Assange.
Accepting the award for distinction in international law and affairs, Mr Robertson joked about Sarah Palin ”shooting from the lip” but seriously cautioned the US legal fraternity against ”aiming the blunderbuss of its 1917 Espionage Act, death penalty and all, at a pub- lisher who is a citizen of a friendly nation”.
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Oracle
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The dispute between Oracle and the Hudson community over control of the open source continuous integration (CI) software has become more divisive as Oracle says it does not plan to give up its ownership of the trademark. Oracle’s Ted Farrell, chief architect for tools and middleware, said in a blog posting that Oracle was intent on retaining control of the trademark “to ensure stability and consistency to Hudson users”. He also proposed that anyone who took the hudson-ci.war, the core library of Hudson, unmodified, could call the result Hudson even if it was shipped with “as many extensions and plugins as you like”. But, if the core library of Hudson was a modified version of Oracle’s definition, then a developer would have to change the name to something else.
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The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.3, the first official stable release of the open source office suite. It introduces a number of noteworthy new features and there are improvements throughout the included applications. More significantly, the release reflects the growing strength of the nascent LibreOffice project.
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CMS
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The Basque Parliament has recently replaced a portion of its older site with a new Drupal site that can be seen at http://www.parlamentovasco.euskolegebiltzarra.org.
This continues the trend of various government bodies around the world using Open Source software — and especially Drupal to power their official websites.
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Slim Amamou is one of the main figures of the Tunisian Open Source community, first arrested for his activism against the Tunisian regime during the last revolution, later appointed as Minister of Youth after the Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s fall. Issa Mahasneh asks in this blog post: “Should the Arab World need revolutions to have Open-Source-friendly ministers?”.
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Government
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In a statement published on AGIMO’s blog, Gary Gray — the Special Minister for State who oversees the agency — said the Government’s previous policy on open source, established in 2005, was one of “informed neutrality” — meaning agencies did not favour open source or proprietary solutions by default, but picked the technology which represented the best value for money and fit for purpose
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The Government’s previous policy, established in 2005, was one of ‘informed neutrality.’ This meant that agencies took an unbiased position that did not favour open source or proprietary software and procured the solution that was the best ’value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ for their specific requirement. Since then, there has been an increase in the maturity of the open source software products and the use of open source software by governments around the world. In recent years, many governments have revised their policies to increase the adoption of open source software.
This revised Australian Government policy on open source software will ensure that we maintain international best practice and that our purchases of software will continue to reflect best value for money for the Government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Many pundits were disappointed last night because collaboration doesn’t make good TV. Conflict is much more interesting to watch, if the success of Jersey Shore is any indication. Collaboration means working together towards a common goal. While collaborators may not agree on everything, they generally do agree that the goal is worth compromises on all sides. That’s how democratic government ideally should work.
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President Obama’s mentioned several of Sunlight’s core issues in his State of the Union Address issues last night. A closer look at what he said, and what he said last year, helps to sort out the rhetoric from the reality.
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Open Data
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The mainstream press is all a flutter that the wedding invites to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s nuptials were sent out by fax.
However what the great unwashed might not understand is that the Royal Household treats technology with some suspicion.
In the early 90s, I worked briefly for her Majesty in Windsor Castle, and I was present when the first fax machine arrived in the office. Since I was the computer bod I had it sat next to my desk and was the only one who ever used it.
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Melanie Redman, Rich Cooper, Matt Thompson (holding paper bag), Linda Read, (in green) Eric Boyd, (redhead) and Karl Lee, (foreground) are trustees of the Awesome Foundation’s Toronto chapter. They are six of the 10 people who will donate $100 each to the paper bag grant each month, which is bestowed on the creator of an “awesome” idea, with no strings attached.
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Intel’s acquisition of data security firm McAfee Inc cleared its last major hurdle after EU regulators approved the $7.68 billion deal on condition Intel grant rival firms access to its technology.
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Most of the abuses occurred in 2005 and 2006, as “Bush’s advisers were anxious about the looming midterm electoral losses that would hand control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats,” according to the Post. Conveniently, around that time, officials all of a sudden needed to take a lot of official business trips to key battleground states such as Ohio and Connecticut. What a coincidence.
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It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the dark days following George W. Bush’s re-election, frustrated progressives set out to build an enduring movement that would effectively advance and communicate their ideas, policies, and values. Funders and strategists created new institutions and scaled up existing ones, including think tanks, civic-engagement organizations, and media-watchdog groups. These institutions played a key role in the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress, the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and the passage of parts of the Obama platform in 2009 and 2010.
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Science
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An ancient mathematical puzzle that has fascinated mathematicians for centuries has found a new lease of life.
The magic square is the basis for Sudoku, pops up in Chinese legend and provides a playful way to introduce children to arithmetic. But all this time it has been concealing a more complex geometrical form, says recreational mathematician Lee Sallows.
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Health/Nutrition
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Before David Nicholson was formally appointed Chief Executive of the NHS in 2006 he was warned that the NPfIT would be an important part of his brief.
He accepted the challenge and was later appointed the NPfIT’s Senior Responsible Owner,
To his credit he tried almost immediately to move the NPfIT away from a centralised programme. In 2006 he set up the NPfIT “Local Ownership Programme”. But the NPfIT continued to be dominated by its centralised contracts – which were signed long before Nicholson’s appointment.
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Security
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page has been hacked by an unknown person who posted a status update suggesting that the site should let people invest in it rather than going to the banks.
The page belonging to the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was named Time’s Man of the Year in 2010, was hacked some time on Tuesday.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The B.C. Civil Liberties Association wants Kelowna RCMP to explain their actions in the wake of an excessive force scandal involving one of their officers.
Unsubstantiated allegations were made in the media against Buddy Tavares after video became public showing the Kelowna man being kicked in the face by an arresting RCMP officer on Jan. 7, said association executive director David Eby.
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Cablegate
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But that is the point. Everything is pure speculation to this point. No one knows what exactly Manning did or why he did it. The only thing that we knew was that he was a possible suspect.
To spin a theory that simply because Manning was gay he leaked secrets in order to attack the military’s DADT policy is an irresponsible stretch. And to demonize the lgbts, who have served and continue to serve bravely, for Manning’s alleged actions – without even waiting to confirm his guilt – is beyond irresponsible. It’s disgusting.
But it’s business as usual with these folks. And that’s even sadder. Those who bear the standard of decent journalism (Loesch) or the standard of “true Christian values” (Family Research Council, Kincaid, Fischer) should aspire to higher ground rather than to the level of pigs in the mud.
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WikiLeak-alikes are popping up around the globe, from regional sites focused on the Czech Republic to Indonesia. Even mainstream media like Al Jazeera and potentially the New York Times are getting in on the secret-spilling action. But few of these copycats and spinoffs can claim quite as much wild, conceptual ambition as an early-stage project called GlobaLeaks, which bills itself as “a worldwide distributed leak amplification network.”
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If you’re going to reveal a quarter of a million diplomatic cables that one of the most powerful governments in the world doesn’t want you to reveal, you’re gonna need secure servers. Bahnhof AB, a firm that offers hosting on its servers, is housed in a former bomb bunker drilled into the White Mountains of Sweden.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Dubai’s “The World,” a collection of artificial islands designed to resemble a map of planet Earth, is reportedly sinking back into the water.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Buried deep in a 216 page report News Corp. submitted to the U.K. government earlier this month is an unusual acknowledgment from the company: News Corp.-owned Fox News is “opinionated news.”
The description flies in the face of what Fox News executives have been telling U.S. audiences and advertisers about the channel for years: that while certain Fox News shows like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have an editorial slant, a significant chunk of programming — 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. — is objective news.
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Again, there’s nothing surprising about these findings. An inherent distrust of government is part of the American creed, we lionize business in a way that the citizens of other advanced countries do not, and especially since the 1980s, the corporate right has relentlessly emphasized that “free enterprise” is good and government is the problem.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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This morning, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security held a hearing on mandatory Internet data retention, once again reviving the debate over whether Congress should pass legislation to force ISPs and telecom providers to log information about how users communicate and use the Internet. The hearing, awash with rhetoric about targeting Internet crime and including an unexpected condemnation of EFF’s privacy advocacy, was purportedly an information- and fact-finding hearing to explore the issue of data retention and consider what Congress’ role should be. However, it’s already clear where the new House Judiciary Chairman, Representative Lamar Smith, stands on the issue: he introduced data retention legislation just last year and likely will do so again this year.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Some ISPs want to start charging customers by the gigabyte, or they want to set low data caps and charge overage fees. Netflix has a word for this idea: ripoff.
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Canadians can’t stand going without coffee. Even worse? Not having a team in the FIFA World Cup event for 2014. Absolutely unthinkable, say eight of ten Canadians.
But you know what they really hate? Metered Internet pricing, or Usage Based Billing (UBB) as they call it—letting the dominant Internet Service Providers charge broadband subscribers and smaller competitive ISPs by the quantity of data use.
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You guys made a billion dollars in Q3 last year, yet you employ DEEP PACKET INSPECTION to ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT THE SPEED OF MY INTERNET. That’s how Hell Canada made so much money, and then they bribe and lobby politicians so that YOU CAN MAKE EVEN MORE!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It was a surprise. He’d previously promised that a live auction for Red State’s distribution rights would happen right there in theatre, and the audience anticipated a spectacle. But following a short bit of theatre led by the film’s producer Jon Gordon, the pair sold the rights to themselves for $20.
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The one thing that the major record labels could really use at this point is an injection of new blood from folks who actually understand technology and where the market is headed. There are a few such folks out there, but they seem few and far between. Instead, it appears that the major labels are simply playing musical chairs at the top.
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A movie studio that filed suit against file-hoster HotFile and 1000 of their users recently has revealed their latest plan to extract money from file-sharers. Unlike untold numbers of their competitors who sue people first and then demand cash payments, Liberty Media want file-sharers to be proactive. That’s right BitTorrent users, it’s time to repent. Hand yourselves over to this movie company and make sure you have $1,000 with you.
Cops Don’t Have To Protect You!
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Blackmagic Design today announced that colorist Tony Dustin of Hollywood-based Technicolor used the DaVinci Resolve Linux non-linear color correction system for color grading work done on Paramount Pictures/Relativity Media?s critically acclaimed feature film ?The Fighter,? directed by David O. Russell. The film stars actor/producer Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, and recent Golden Globe® winners Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, and is currently in theaters nationwide.
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Server/Routing
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Cisco is expanding its push to attract more small business professionals to its networking gear. This week Cisco announced a new set of 200-series switches and a new router platform that adds several big-business features tailored for the needs of small business.
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Applications
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Since its arrival in the market, VoIP has undergone a lot of developments. Now it is being used in many large corporations as the only calling service. Here I would like to discuss the most popular VoIP apps for Linux.
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If you are a GNU/Linux user, then it’s easier, too.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In theory, cheap storage should have signaled the end of disk-space issues. But huge files and poor house-keeping mean you still need to know how to deal with overstuffed hard drives in Linux, says Jack Wallen.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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My KDE hero of the day is Nicolás ‘PovAddict’ Alvarez who dove into the KDE Examples module and turned it into a git module, complete with history even of the examples that existed prior to the creation of the KDE Examples module intact! When I queried Ian Monroe the other day about how much work it would be to migrate this module over, Nicolás simply jumped in and attacked the problem with the usual KDE gleam in the eye.
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In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that a leading Danish retail bank Sparbank has migrated to JBoss Enterprise Middleware to ensure high availability of a number of native mission-critical applications, such as investment assessment applications and risk assessment tools.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that registration is now open for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. This marks the seventh year that Red Hat has gathered customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts to learn, network and explore open source. The event will be held in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center, May 3-6, 2011.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) was upgraded to Buy from Hold at Stifel Nicolaus and set a price target of $49.
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Nearly half of the voters in Triangle Business Journal’s latest online poll believe that Linux leader Red Hat should choose downtown Raleigh as the site of the company’s new corporate headquarters.
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Red Hat (RHT) shares are getting a big boost this morning from Stifel Nicolaus analyst Tim Klasell, who raised his rating on the open source software company’s shares to Buy from Hold, while setting a $49 price target.
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Matthew Szulik, the former CEO of Red Hat software, who in December sued his family’s financial adviser for $55 million, is now the defendant in a lawsuit by an aggrieved Los Angeles businessman. Jason Galanis claims Szulik’s alleged losses were just a tax dodge, and that Szulik cost him $30 million in an effort to keep that scheme from unraveling.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer oriented conferences to user oriented trade fairs. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Future versions of Ubuntu will ship with LibreOffice, the fork of OpenOffice created by developers disillusioned with Oracle’s lukewarm — at best — relationship with the open source community. “Oracle is probably the prototypical vendor of commercial software, and its vision of open doesn’t include a lot of open source,” said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT analyst at Illuminata.
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Ubuntu Natty Narwhal will usher in a major change to the distro’s desktop appearance. The new Unity shell design will present a new appearance, a version of which I’ve been using on netbooks and laptops. I realize that my displeasure with Unity is based on my personal preferences for how I compute. But I subscribe to the theory that if something isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. I think the Unity design goes too far.
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IBM today launched a Virtual Desktop for Smart Business push — which allows Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally. The VAR Guy is intrigued. But the Big Blue effort sounds suspiciously like a previous initiative called the IBM Client for Smart Work package, launched in 2009 with Virtual Bridges and Canonical (the Ubuntu Linux advocate). So how does IBM’s latest virtual desktop push differ from earlier efforts? Here’s the update.
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I’ve been a Mac user since 2006, and for good reason – nothing compares to the build quality and attention to detail Apple puts into its products. Still, I’m beginning to get this half-sinking/half-exhilarating feeling that the next big thing is Ubuntu (pronounced oo-boon-too) Linux. And why not? After all, “Bunt” is free, yet it offers much more functionality than a stock install of Windows – and with none of the malware troubles. It’s not quite Mac OS X, but it’s slowly getting there.
[...]
Ubuntu is great. Rakarrack is great. That old PC, with a few tweaks and a few upcoming upgrades, will be really great.
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Wind River and automotive component manufacturer Magneti Marelli announced they’re collaborating on the first in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) solution based on the open source Genivi Alliance spec. Based on Linux (and MeeGo, most likely), the system will first be brought to market by BMW, says Wind River.
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Now, Intel’s Atom also has competition from ARM in the desktop PC arena. Israel’s CompuLab has presented the Trim-Slice, a tiny, fanless PC using NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 platform. The System-on-Chip (SoC) has two ARM Cortex-A9 CPU cores with clock rates up to 1 GHz, offering roughly the same computing power as an Intel Atom. But the multimedia equipment is even better. Two HDMI ports are provided, and Tegra 2 also includes an HD video accelerator.
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Tablets
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For what seems like forever, we’ve been hearing the Linux fanboys of the world proclaiming that the coming year will be the “Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s has become somewhat of a joke amongst Linux naysayers and even with the Linux faithful. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the year of the Linux Desktop or not, but it looks like 2011 is going to be the year of the Linux Tablet. The future success of Linux as a tablet and phone platform might not look as open and utopian as many supporters of free software would like, but it seems that it’s inevitable none the less.
[...]
Will it really be “The Year of the Linux Tablet”
Linux based OSes have the clear advantage when it comes to competing for market share against the iPad. If Microsoft had its act together and if Apple was the type of company to license operating systems, I might not have much hope for Linux’s success. But looking at the current market demand for tablets and the lack of a solid OS from Microsoft, I think this will truly be the year of the Linux Tablet.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has released a new Chrome extension to address privacy concerns tied to online behavioral tracking.
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Mozilla
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The Firefox 4 browser is edging closer to final release but still faces hurdles
Once the darling of the Internet digerati, the Firefox browser is still battling problems to issue a new release. Version 4 of the browser has suffered multiple setbacks and although it now looks likely to be released in February, the delays have caused Firefox to lose some of its shine.
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Online advertising networks use cookies to recognise internet users and serve them tailored advertising. Users can defend against this practice by deleting cookies, not accepting cookies, or setting an opt-out cookie, which declares that they do not want their online activity to be tracked.
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Project Releases
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VLC is among the most popular open source video players. According to the VideoLAN project, the 1.1.5 release has had 58 million downloads.
Now it’s time for those 58 million downloaders to update to VLC 1.1.6, for some security, bug and stability fixes.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s ready and it’s hot. First totally open and free (as in beer and as in freedom) film recommendations API is here for you as a gift from Filmaster. The API enables external programmers to create independent services or apps using our data and algorithms, it allows to easily integrate any website with Filmaster by presenting our content like reviews and film recommendations. Sounds interesting? Read on!
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Standards/Consortia
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Oh, the ever evolving nature of the web. Just a few days after the W3C unveiled its shiny new branding for HTML5, WHATWG has announced that it will stop using numbered versions to better represent the evolving nature of the standard.
According to WHATWG’s Ian Hickson, HTML5 was supposed to be finalised in 2012, but the rapidly changing nature of technology and the demands of the people who actually use it mean that new features would have to be added on a near continuous basis. For that reason, it makes a lot more sense to have the standard as a “living document” that can more easily be added to and updated.
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The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google’s effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force–but not so Google can standardize it.
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Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother has sued a funeral home and an auction house, claiming they sold the assassin’s original coffin, embalming table and records, and their mother’s funeral records, for more than $160,000, invading his privacy and breaching contract. Robert Edward Lee Oswald sued the Baumgardner Funeral Home, Allen Baumgardner Sr. and Nate D. Sanders Inc. – the Los Angeles auction house – in Tarrant County Court, Fort Worth.
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Health/Nutrition
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Binge eating, chronic pain, and addiction. Three very different medical conditions, all hard to treat. Could the virtual exploration of an island be part of the solution for these three patients?
Some European scientists are convinced it is. So this is the story of how research has managed to develop a serious videogame, for a serious purpose.
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Reading a recent issue of Public Citizen’s excellent Health Letter titled “Know When Antibiotics Work,” I recalled the recent tragic loss of a healthy history professor who was rushed to a fine urban hospital, with a leading infectious disease specialist by his side. No antibiotics could treat his mysterious “superbug.” He died in 36 hours.
Wrongful or overuse of antibiotics has a perverse effect—causing the kinds of bacteria that these drugs can no longer destroy. The World Health Organization has cited antibiotic resistance as one of the three most serious public health threats of the 21st century.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that just in hospitals, where between 5 and 10 percent of all patients develop an infection, about 90,000 of these patients die each year as a result of their infection. This toll is up from 13,300 patient deaths in 1992. Some percentage of these people have problems because of antibiotic resistance.
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Security
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Malicious code injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! stole login credentials of users critical of the North African nation’s authoritarian government, according to security experts and news reports.
The rogue JavaScript, which was individually customized to steal passwords for each site, worked when users tried to login without availing themselves of the secure sockets layer protection designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. It was found injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! in late December, around the same time that protestors began demanding the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the president who ruled the country from 1987 until his ouster 10 days ago.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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I have been summoned to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago on January 25. But I will not testify, even at the risk of being put in jail for contempt of court, because I believe that our most fundamental rights as citizens are at stake.
I am one of 23 anti-war, labor and solidarity activists in Chicago and throughout the Midwest who are facing a grand jury as part of an investigation into “material support for foreign terrorist organizations.” No crime has been identified. No arrests have been made. And when it raided several prominent organizers’ homes and offices on Sept. 24, the FBI acknowledged that there is no immediate threat to the American public. So what is this investigation really about?
The activists who have been ensnared in this fishing net with different groups to end the US wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to end US military aid for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and US military aid to Colombia, which has a shocking record of repression and human rights abuses. All of us have publicly and peacefully dedicated our lives to social justice and advocating for more just and less deadly US foreign policy.
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The international community – from Western authorities to Southern powers – lacks courage and hides behind “soft diplomacy” in confronting human rights abusers, a leading rights group accuses in a 649-page world report released Monday.
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Two Toronto police officers were found guilty Tuesday of assaulting a mentally challenged man they thought was drunk.
Richard Moore, 58, was headed home to his Gerrard St. East rooming house when he passed by two officers dealing with another situation on April 24, 2009.
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Evidence in leaked documents highlights role British officials played in creating and bolstering PA administration
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Al Jazeera`s stunning revelations about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have different meanings for Israelis, Americans and for Palestinians.
The bottom line is that, despite the assurances it gave to the Palestinian people that it was driving a hard bargain with the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority accepted Israel`s position on every key point: borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees.
On no major issue did the PA hold the line. None.
The Palestinians offered Israel everything Israel wants and Israel still said `no` with the backing of the United States.
So what does it mean?
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Egyptian police used teargas and rubber bullets and beat protesters in a bid to clear thousands of demonstrators from a central Cairo square late last night after people had taken to the streets earlier today demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in mass demonstrations inspired by the toppling of the government in Tunisia.
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Phil Mocek knows he isn’t required to show ID to fly, and that it’s perfectly legal to record video in publicly accessible areas of an airport. A jury agreed with him earlier this week, acquitting him of trumped-up charges brought against him by TSA and police officers who demanded obedience. He didn’t need to call any witnesses or testify himself; he was acquitted based on the evidence entered against him.
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The New York Times reports on the Illinois eavesdropping law, which allows for a felony charge and up to 15 years of prison for people who record police officers on the job. In addition to artist Christopher Drew—whom I’ve written about before and who goes to trial in April—the article finds another person currently being charged under the law. Tiawanda Moore, 20, goes to trial next month. She too could face 15 years in prison, in her case for using her Blackberry to record her conversation with internal affairs officers at Chicago PD about an alleged sexual assault by a police officer. Moore recorded her interview after feeling her initial attempt to report the incident wasn’t taken seriously.
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Chris Drew was finally ready to get arrested. An artist and activist, Drew had spent years protesting a Chicago ordinance that puts tight restrictions on where and how people can sell their art on the street. He was downtown, on State Street, selling silk-screened patches for $1 and defying the city to stop him.
He’d tried his act of civil disobedience three times before — a First Amendment lawyer on hand to argue his case, a team of videographers ready to film the arrest — but the police simply let it slide. When, on December 2, 2009, he finally succeeded in getting booked, Drew was ready for a few hours in lock-up on a misdemeanor, and a lengthy court battle. He was in no way prepared for what he would actually face.
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Cablegate
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The New York Times is considering developing a system that will let anonymous leakers easily submit large and confidential files directly to the newspaper. Sound familiar?
While nothing is concrete yet, NYT executive editor Bill Keller says that it could be similar to Al Jazeera‘s Transparency Unit, a system launched earlier this year that encrypts file submissions from anonymous leakers.
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A company asked by Visa to investigate WikiLeaks’ finances found no proof the group’s fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.
But Visa Europe Ltd. said Wednesday it would continue blocking donations to the secret-spilling site until it completes its own investigation. Company spokeswoman Amanda Kamin said she couldn’t say when Visa’s inquiry, now stretching into its eighth week, would be finished.
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Even as prosecutors build a case against the U.S. Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its “American Documentary Showcase” program.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A leading climate sceptic patronised by the oil billionaire Koch brothers faced a potential investigation today on charges that he misled Congress on the extent of his funding from the oil industry.
Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a thinktank founded by Charles and David Koch to promote their libertarian, anti-government views, appeared before the house energy and commerce committee in February 2009.
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Censorship
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The EU commissioner in charge of media issues, Neelie Kroes, has raised “serious doubts” about Hungary’s new media law in a letter to Budapest and given the country a two-week ultimatum to the government to explain itself. Hungarian leader Viktor Orban however said the law was intended to combat racism.
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The social media phenom Twitter may be sweeping America, but it’s banned in the Massachusetts Legislature, which has blocked lawmakers and staffers from tweeting from their office computers.
The Twitter ban is frustrating some Web-savvy legislators, who say they use the popular Web site to communicate with constituents.
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Privacy
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Facebook will tighten up privacy in its “Friend Finder” feature, following demands from German data protection watchdogs.
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Email snooping and computer fraud statutes (Stored Communications Act; Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) are starting to play a starring role in litigation between departing employees and their former bosses. Plaintiffs asserting claims under these statutes often press tenuous claims, with evidence for damages that are weak at best. There are often unclean hands all around, and the disputes end up just being messy.
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Civil Rights
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In his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting, President Obama urged us to be more civil in our dealings with each other:
“The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy – it did not – but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”
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The US Justice Department wants Internet service providers and cell phone companies to be required to hold on to records for longer to help with criminal prosecutions.
“Data retention is fundamental to the department’s work in investigating and prosecuting almost every type of crime,” US deputy assistant attorney general Jason Weinstein told a congressional subcommittee on Tuesday.
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Leading civil liberty campaigners tonight voiced fears that the reform of counter-terror laws to be detailed tomorrowwill amount to little more than “control orders lite”.
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The incidence of actual voter fraud at the polls in America is indistinguishable from zero.
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Berlin has asked pharmaceutical companies not to supply the United States with a drug used in executions for prisoners on death row, after the sole US manufacturer announced it would pull out of the market.
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AT&T wants us to believe that corporations are people, just like you and me, and that just like us, they have a constitutional right to privacy. Their case, argued before the Supreme Court last week, hinges in part on the relationship between an adjective and the noun it derives from. To prove their point, AT&T wants us to look both at the law and at the dictionary.
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The suspect’s house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles.
As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department’s aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Aside from how outraged I am about that news, I’m going to say something rather bold: Rogers, Bell, and Telus are killing innovation in Canada.
Every single year, we are gouged to the bone by these three gigantic corporations by receiving less service for more money. They treat us poorly, and they know they can get away with it because we have no choice. They don’t need to improve a damn thing because we are stuck.
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Smaller Canadian Internet service providers, who operate via networks owned by bigger telecom firms such as BCE Inc, will soon have to pass along the bulk of their host’s charges for extra bandwidth use, the federal telecom regulator said on Tuesday.
The move limits the independent ISPs’ ability to offer unlimited data plans, just months after Netflix opened for business in Canada, and gives greater pricing power to large carriers such as BCE’s Bell unit and Telus.
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A bill giving the president an Internet “kill switch” during times of emergency that failed to pass Congress last year will return this year, but with a revision that has many civil liberties advocates concerned: It will give the president the ability to shut down parts of the Internet without any court oversight.
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act was introduced last year by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in an effort to combat cyber-crime and the threat of online warfare and terrorism.
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A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.
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DRM
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The BBC is reporting on a new project to create web images that “expire” after a certain period of time. The thinking is that people who put photos up on social networking profiles may be embarrassed by them later, so, this way, the photo can only stay up for a set period of time and then no longer be viewable.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford says his comparatively tiny team won’t be suing mega-publisher Capcom for its blatant attempt to rip off the studio’s Splosion Man with iOS clone MaXplosion (pictured). “We’re definitely not going to pursue legal action,” Wilford told Joystiq. “While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom. That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide.”
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Once I realized we were wasting valuable time, resources and money in court, I decided to focus all of that energy on outdoing our competitor instead. We vowed to differentiate ourselves by focusing closely on our clients’ needs. Innovation became very important. When we started out we only offered a single software option. Now we have six tailor-made modules to meet the varying needs of companies of different sizes and industries. We might not have worked so hard to build out new tools if we hadn’t had a competitor biting at our heels.
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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IFPI boss Frances Moore apparently claimed that this is “a crisis affecting not just an industry – but artists, musicians, jobs, consumers, and the wider creative sector.” Except that’s not true. There are more people making music today than ever before. It’s cheaper than ever before to make, distribute and promote music. If you’re a musician, there are more ways than ever before to build a fanbase and to build a business model to make a living. It’s a great time to be a musician. It’s also a fantastic time to be a consumer. It’s hard to see how Moore can make such a claim that is obviously false, and no one calls her on the obviously false nature of her claims. When Moore took over last year for John Kennedy, I had hoped that maybe she’d bring some sense to the IFPI. Instead, she seems to be spreading the same propaganda as her predecessor.
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US Copyright Group makes good on its promise to target settlement holdouts in courts with proper jurisdiction, targeting two BitTorrent users, one for “Call of the Wild” and one for an unnamed movie.
For almost a year now the US Copyright Group has been trying to hold tens of thousands of BitTorrent users responsible for illegally distributing either of the less than stellar independent movies “Steam Experiment,” “Far Cry,” “Uncross the Stars,” “Gray Man,” or “Call of the Wild 3D.”
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Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry’s legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster’s demise, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a lower court’s pro-RIAA verdict.
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What were the stat changes?
- Period 2 had 38.6X more Pirates than Period 1
- Period 2 had 2.3X more Sales than Period 1
- (For every 15 or so Pirates, I received an extra Sale)
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The Motion Picture Association of America published an open letter in December discussing the contents of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which require universities’ participation in preventing illegal downloading.
The act requires schools to implement a plan to stop the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network, MPAA chief content protection officer Daniel Mandil said in the letter.
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By RADIOGIRL [from Comments to Stephen Hough's blog post on Liszt, Daily Telegraph] – Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now in place guidelines with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), that any qualified public broadcasting station that wishes to broadcast sound recordings over the Internet must not only register for agreement for those rights but must comply with the new rules. (BTW, this does not apply to commercial webcasters such as WQXR nor does it apply to recordings of live performances made for broadcast purposes.)
[...]
The influences that shape new musical trends are diffuse, complex, and impossible to codify, but if one person can be credited as being the fountainhead of modern music it is Franz Liszt … in three, totally different stylistic directions. Whether we like his own compositions or not, we cannot avoid contact with Liszt if we have contact with music from the late-19th or 20th centuries. Firstly, the heady combination of bel canto with chromaticism, a Lisztian fingerprint formed early in his life, was a major influence on Wagner and on to the latter’s progeny. It has been claimed that Liszt invented the ‘Tristan chord’. Even if such a ‘patent’ is open to discussion, the febrile harmonic instability of Tristan und Isolde is heard in Liszt before it is heard in his son-in-law. On rare occasions of collegial generosity Wagner even admitted this debt.
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We’ve seen the various mass copyright infringement factories popping up all over the world, often using similar strategies: suing or threatening to sue thousands of individuals based solely on an IP address. The whole “business model” is based not on traditional copyright infringement statutory awards, but on convincing people to pay up beforehand to avoid being sued. The model feels quite similar to what’s normally considered extortion (“pay up or we harm you”). Someone recently sent us a copy of what’s alleged to be a contract being used by a German law firm, Schutt, Waetke Rechtsanwalte, which has been involved in such mass threats for many years. You can find references online going back to at least 2005 of this law firm sending out such pre-settlement letters to thousands of Germans. I contacted the firm to see if they would confirm or deny the legitimacy of the contract, and they would not respond. So, perhaps take the details with a grain of salt, even though the firm has been connected to these sorts of pre-settlement jobs for a while.
GNOME Shell + Zeitgeist
Credit: TinyOgg
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