11.16.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s a lot of news flying around at the moment about the latest Russian attempt to create a national, Linux-based operating system. Let’s take a look at some of the issues that surround the creation of national Linux distributions.
The first point to make is that this isn’t the first Russian attempt adopt open source software. In 2007, the Armada group won the government tender to supply Russian schools with a Linux based operating system, making use of ALT Linux, a Russian fork of Mandrake Linux. Red Flag (China), Pardus (Turkey) and Bayahnian (Philippines ) were all created to meet the requirements of state institutions.
A national standard Linux distribution solves two of the biggest problems that face Linux adoption in education, business and government institutions:
First, Linux suffers from the problem of offering simply too much choice in terms of desktop environments and applications. If every school in the UK (for example) switched over Linux and open source tomorrow, they could, conceivably, all be using considerably different set ups. A national standard distribution offers the advantage of a standard platform that workers and students can be trained to use and maintain.
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Server
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Microsoft says a Windows-based supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed barrier, but the achievement is not being recognized by the group that tracks the world’s fastest supercomputers, because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux.
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Once upon a time, the Netcraft Web server market share was reported upon eagerly every month for the fact that it showed open source soundly trouncing its proprietary rivals. We don’t hear much about that survey these days – not because things have changed, but for that very reason: it’s now just become a boring fact of life that Apache has always been the top Web server, still is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I think we’re fast approaching that situation with the top500 supercomputing table.
I wrote about this six months ago, noting that Linux did rather well, with 91% of the top 500 machines in the world running some form of it. It’s time for an update, and I’m afraid it is indeed rather boring: Linux now holds 91.8% of that sector.
Happily, there are still a couple of other points of note. First and foremost, as the world and their canine has been commenting, is the fact that the list is now headed by a Chinese supercomputer (still running Linux, of course): if this surprises you, then you really haven’t been paying attention.
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If the June edition of the bi-annual ranking of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world represented the dawning of the GPU co-processor as a key component in high performance computing, then the November list is breakfast time. The super centers of the world are smacking their lips for some flop-jacks with OpenCL syrup and some x64 bacon on the side.
China has the most voracious appetite for GPU co-processors, and as expected two weeks ago when the Tianhe-1A super was booted up for the first time, this hybrid CPU-GPU machine installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has taken the top spot on the Top 500 list with a comfortable margin. Tianhe-1A’s final rating on the Linpack Fortran matrix math benchmark test is 4.7 petaflops of peak theoretical performance spread across its CPUs and GPUs (with about about 70 per cent of that coming from the GPUs) and 2.56 petaflops of sustained performance on the Linpack test.
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The rating system, Graph500, tests supercomputers for their skill in analyzing large, graph-based structures that link the huge numbers of data points present in biological, social and security problems, among other areas.
“By creating this test, we hope to influence computer makers to build computers with the architecture to deal with these increasingly complex problems,” Sandia researcher Richard Murphy said.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this special episode, Fab reviews the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas. We are also giving away a German copy of Fallout 3 & Fallout 3: New Vegas, details on the podcast.
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Applications
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Popular do-it-all media player VLC has updated to version 1.1.5, and there are a handful of noteworthy changes nestled amongst the bugfixes and security patches. For starters, VLC can now play live streaming video wrapped in Google’s WebM video container.
The second big addition can be found on VLC’s playlist window. Click the arrow next to Internet in the Media Browser box, and you’ll notice Channels.com has been added to the mix. While you won’t be able to access the entire vast expanse of shows Channels.com offers, VLC does include more than 1,000 popular offerings.
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VLC 1.1.5 has been released yesterday, introducing some small features and bug fixes.
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Granola is an application to improve your netbook / laptop battery life but can be used on your PC too and “make your PC environmentally friendly”.
Granola runs in the background but if you install the GUI, you’ll be able to see some statistics such as how much energy, money and CO2 you’ll be saving by running Granola on your computer as well as the overall savings by all Granola users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In the distant future humans have created friendly aide robots. But due to computer error robots rebelled against their creators. As a special agent you will have to eliminate all robots. To help you, scientists developed a unique bomber-o-mobil equipped with highly destructive bombs. During your mission you will find various power-ups and upgrade your vehicle, turning it into an efficient weapon of destruction. Blow all robots up and free your city!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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If you ask the guys from “IT Crowd”, this may be .. the Internet, but in fact is an ugly black box – yes, the same like Microsoft exchange.
What if you can rely on a better solution for your company? Why not be able to look what’s inside the box and to fix something to make your groupware experience better?
Come and see me, presenting the blue open box, called Kolab.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome-Shell’s UI revamp continues apace and the ‘relayout’ version of GNOME-Shell, first shown off at GUADEC earlier this year, is getting ready to land.
With it containing so many visual changes MrMars dropped off screenshots of the ‘relayout’ GIT branch in the OMG! Inbox! and a link to his Italian Ubuntu forum post touching on them.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After the announcement of LibreOffice, Mageia decided to give full official support to this new project.
There are obvious similarities between the histories of Mageia and LibreOffice. Because both projects futures were unclear, teams decided – in both projects respectively – to create a fork that respects the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) principles and sets a more predictable governance model that relies on its community.
[...]
We look forward to packaging, and contributing to the LibreOffice project and we will provide it in the upcoming Mageia releases.
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Red Hat Family
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No doubt, Red Hat is in catch-up mode when it comes to virtualization market share. But the company hopes RHEL6 and KVM can help to close the competitive gap. Here’s what it boils down to:
Red Hat claims RHEL 6 is designed to provide a focus on rock-solid physical computing, along with true virtual and cloud activity support. To that end, RHEL 6 includes kernel improvements for resource management, “RAS” (reliability, availability, serviceability), and more power-saving features. The KVM hypervisor can support guest operating systems with up to 64 virtual CPUs, along with 256GB of virtual RAM and 64-bit guest operating system.
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In the new version 6 of its flagship product, Red Hat has incorporated many technological developments of the past few years. Compared to its predecessor, this release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux therefore contains a large number of changes.
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Fedora
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Fuduntu is a Fedora 14 remix (remaster) designed especially for Asus Eee (but you can of course use it on other netbooks and any laptop/desktop computer) and comes with some interesting performance tweaks by default. It was created by Fewt, the Jupiter (an hardware and power management applet for netbooks and Laptops) developer.
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I think this is a stupid decision[1]. By the boards reasoning we shouldn’t package apache either, what if someone uses a server with fedora on it to serve child porn? What’s next are we gonna remove wireshark and etherape? What about Firefox, you can hack into things with a webbrowser?!?
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The minutes suggest that board members seem to think that SQLninja has no beneficial use. The minutes also suggest confusion about penetration testing tools in general. I saw in the minutes the objection that SQLninja is advertised as ‘get root on remote systems’. Are the board members aware that many penetration testing tools can be used to get root on remote systems, and it is precisely for this reason that they are useful for (legal, lawful, authorized) penetration testing? Are the board members aware that legal penetration testing can, and sometimes does, include getting root on remote systems?
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Debian Family
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Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia.
Squeeze will feature:
* FFmpeg 0.5.2, finally uncrippled thanks to zack! No mp3/h264 encoder, though. (still in NEW).
* mplayer 1.0rc3, finally with mencoder enabled.
* VLC 1.1.3
* VDPAU hardware acceleration in ffmpeg/mplayer (but feedback is welcome!)
* Guayadeque 0.2.5
* gmusicbrowser 1.0.2
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When most people talk about Ubuntu, they usually mean our flagship product, Ubuntu Desktop Edition. Sometimes, they might mean the Ubuntu project, or the community of people who work on it, or various other things.
Similarly, Debian might mean the Debian operating system, or the package repositories, or the project, and so on.
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Softastur, AsturLiNUX, Software Libre EII and Asturian LoCo Team organized the last friday an Install Party in Oviedo/Uviéu (Asturies). The distros used were: Ubuntu, Debian & Fedora. Thank you to all of you for the success of the party!
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Intel’s next-generation MID (Mobile Internet Device) platform to succeed Moorestown is codenamed Medfield and is slated to be released next year. However, in usual Intel fashion, open-source patches for supporting this next-generation platform under Linux are beginning to make their way out there months in advance of the hardware’s public availability.
Over the past few weeks there’s been an uptick in the number of patches surfacing for Medfield enablement within the Linux kernel. Many of these Medfield Linux patches are being published by Alan Cox, now an Intel employee. The most recent patch comes from Alan and Durgadoss R (another Intel engineer) for creating a Medfield thermal driver (patch).
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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What do you need to play?
* A N900
* Qaiku username and from Qaiku an Api-key, if you want to be social. This because the Tablet of Adventure uses Qaiku to manage comments in log and the positioning of other players in the map.
* An Internet connection that is constant.
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“MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, software development, AMD. “We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units.”
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Now here’s a very positive new sign for MeeGo’s future. AMD, Intel’s oldest and boldest nemesis, has added its name to the list of companies actively supporting the development of the platform — which got its start as a joint project between Intel and Nokia — and has pledged the contribution of its “engineering expertise” to the further advancement of the open source OS.
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Android
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Dell’s rather bravely announced an official launch date for its Dell Streak update, with the Android 2.2 upgrade set to start hitting phones from November 15. Which is today. Like, maybe even RIGHT NOW.
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Linux and open source technologies have started gaining acceptance and momentum with a host of technologies associated with FOSS having reached levels of maturity that are comparable with the best the proprietary software world has to offer. A perceived lower cost of ownership has been pushing enterprises and SMBs to switch to open source-based solutions.
According to Springboard Research, Linux on the server platform has grown its way to a prominent position in the Indian server OS market with its adoption rate increasing from 7 percent to 8.1 percent (and rising) over a 13-month period since April 2009.
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We’re delighted to finally take the wraps off the first issue of Libre Graphics Magazine.
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Some of you may be unfamiliar with the concept of open filmmaking. Well rest assured I was until I discovered this amazing way of producing top-notch animated productions with the power of open-source filmmaking, and a little program called Blender.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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One thing that happens next is that we’re all going to do some reading and viewing of both theoretical and practical appllications of creative commons licensing, intellectual property applications, and so forth in order to think along with others who are expert in this field and, by the end of next class, decide, collectively, how to proceed with Mozilla’s generous offer of taking our app through to implementation. We might not be ready to be developers and to be developed yet. That’s fine. That’s a perfectly sane outcome. We know that most businesses fail and entrepreneurs learn that failing is how you learn. Similarly, many ventures are not capitalized and that is a learning opportunity too. The only bad outcome of this process is if we squander it by thinking someone has to give up something that will be damaging to themselves in order for the product to go into development. With this group, with their generosity towards one another and their profound respect, I have no worries that this will happen.
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Design Jams are one-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. Similar to developer ‘hackdays’ they aim to get designers together to learn and collaborate with each other while working on actual problems. The sessions champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers.
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Databases
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I am happy to announce that MariaDB 5.2.3 is now released as a stable release.
During the gamma period we did not receive any serious reports for issues in 5.2, so we are relatively confident that the new code is of decent quality.
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Oracle
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Google has filed a response to Oracle’s claims that the internet search giant’s Android mobile OS deliberately breached patents owned by Oracle since it acquired Sun.
In the filing, Google claimed that Oracle might have hidden or deleted copyright headers and expressive material to make it look like as if Android’s Dalvik virtual machine was essentially a copy.
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Breaking up is never easy to do, but the split between Oracle and the new LibreOffice (news, site) team has been one of the more traumatic recent events in IT. CMSWire asked the new team’s Italo Vignoli what went on behind the scenes and what can we expect to see now from Libre/OpenOffice.
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Seemingly anxious to get the next version of the Java programming language ratified, Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its stance on the proposed Java Standard Edition 7.
“We would encourage Apache to reconsider their position and work together with Oracle and the community at large to collectively move Java forward,” wrote Don Deutsch, Oracle vice president of standards and architecture, in a statement posted Monday on an Oracle blog site.
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Openness/Sharing
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People create community.
Which is why when I hear the conversation move too quickly into tools, I try to steer it back to the tried-and-true foundations of solid communities, the things that bring people together and make them want to accomplish great things.
I never hear folks say they want to be part of a community because it has a cool website or because it uses some whiz bang technology. People join communities to contribute to something that holds meaning for them.
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The use of technology to connect government with the governed is not a new idea. The printing press was the Internet of the 17th and 18th centuries; news and opinion was circulated by a myriad homegrown newspapers eagerly read and discussed in coffeehouses and cafes. Benjamin Franklin pioneered the idea of “publick printer” in Pennsylvania and other colonies before the American Revolution (though the US Government Printing Office was not established as a federal function until 1860.)
Governments quickly adopted radio and television as well. In the UK, the BBC was established in the 1920s to harness the new power of radio to advance the mission of government. In the US, government funding of radio and TV came later, with Voice of America established in 1944, PBS in 1970, and C-SPAN in 1979. Starting with the activism of Carl Malamud to put the SEC online in 1993, the first Federal government websites appeared only a few years after the introduction of the World Wide Web.
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Open Access/Content
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An interesting partnership between UK mobile operator Three and The Times will see mobile broadband subscribers offered free access to both The Times and The Sunday Times websites, available to new customers until March 31 2011.
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This is an introduction to open access (OA) for those who are new to the concept. It doesn’t cover every nuance or answer every objection, but it should cover enough territory to prevent the misunderstandings that delayed progress in our early days.
If this overview is still too long, then see my very brief introduction to OA. It’s available in a dozen languages and should print out on just one page, depending on your font size. If these pieces are too short, see my other writings on OA.
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Programming
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Think the rent is, in fact, too damn high? Then stay as far away from online world Entropia Universe as possible, because its real estate prices will drive you insane.
Take, for instance, what just went down on Planet Calypso, where one of Entropia’s wealthier players has sold off his interests in a “resort asteroid” for an eye-popping $635,000.
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The trajectory for gifted children is not simply onward and upward; they are as likely to be plagued by crises of confidence as anyone. Perhaps more so: Their intellectual gifts mean they are even more aware of the flaws in their clay, of how short they fall from self-imposed goals.
“People are forever telling me the achievements of my life,” Dr. Sassoon says, “and yet I feel I’ve accomplished nothing – nothing compared to what I might achieve.” He has put his finger on a thorny issue: Is a gifted child destined to become an exceptional adult?
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“I didn’t want an actor or member of staff to be injured or killed because we have drunks on the stage crew,” said Donnelly, who was offered a £25,000 payoff in return for his silence, an offer which he turned down.
Donnelly is not the only person to have voiced concern over the backstage culture at War Horse, the first world war drama impressing audiences with its depiction of the horrors of war for both men and animals.
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Her stage name is Ruby, she is 17, and she may bring down Italy’s government.
The Moroccan-born belly dancer is the last of a long series of young women who have in the past two years embarrassed Silvio Berlusconi and the Italians. This time, the Italian Prime Minister has admitted intervening to get Ruby released when she got arrested for theft last May.
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This isn’t the first time. We’ve been through this before. Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis, and that makes me sad. There was naked Pam from The Office in 2008 (you thought you were so clever with that acetate overlay – I mean, how else would you depict transparency?). In 2003, you had the nice lady covered in synthetic diamonds. There were the sexy manga ladies and LonelyGirl15 and Julia Allison with their come-hither looks. And Uma Thurman, she’s a lady, and she was on the cover… But wait, that was for a character she was playing in a film based on a Philip K. Dick novel.
Come to think of it, the last time that a woman was featured on your cover, because she was being featured in the magazine for an actual accomplishment, was way back in 1996 when it was Sherry Turkle, the academic and author. And, the only other time was in 1994, when musician/author Laurie Anderson was featured. Because since then, I guess no women have done anything notable in technology unless it had to do with their bodies? Really?
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The movie quickly admits that money doesn’t matter to Zuckerberg. So why did he build Facebook? The Social Network offers no answer, except perhaps that an outsider wanted in, but that doesn’t begin to explain what he has accomplished and why; that’s nothing but simplistic prime-time plotting. The script says nothing about him wanting to connect the world or bring communities elegant organization. It doesn’t care. For this is a movie about tactics, not strategy, about people doing hard things to each other. Elsewhere, that’s just called business.
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How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?
This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.
This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.
These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users.
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This summer, the IEEE ratified IEEE 802.3ba, which sets down the technical guidelines for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100GigE Ethernet. Now, companies and organizations are beginning to deploy these faster than fast optical Internet backbones.
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Almost a year ago, I blogged about Between the Bars — a project that offers a blogging platform to the 1% of the United States population that is currently incarcerated. The way it works is pretty simple: prisoners send letters through the postal mail. We scan them and put them up on the web. Visitors can transcribe letters or leave comments which are mailed back to the authors.
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Science
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TWENTY years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world’s science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. They spent the most, published the most and patented the most. And what they produced fed back into their industrial, military and medical complexes to push forward innovation, productivity, power, health and prosperity.
All good things, though, come to an end, and the reign of these scientific aristos is starting to look shaky. In 1990 they carried out more than 95% of the world’s research and development (R&D). By 2007 that figure was 76%.
Such, at least, is the conclusion of the latest report* from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO. The picture the report paints is of a waning West and a rising East and South, mirroring the economic shifts going on in the wider world. The sans culottes of science are on the march.
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A pensive Barack Obama walking alone on the Great Wall of China in November 2009. Barack and Michelle dancing with school children in Mumbai in November 2010.
The front-page snapshots of Obama in India and China capture the difference in the political cultures of the two nations, flavours as contrast as spicy kebabs compared to chicken soup. The India photographs show a relaxed US President being spontaneous, hugging his host, grinning a lot and speaking freely. Obama in Beijing struck the pose of a lonely figure outside his comfort zone, his words censored in the Chinese media. The first lady did not accompany Obama to Beijing.
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A report at the BBC tells us that scientists at the firm’s Zurich research labs are working on the boxes, which they say will be driven by the need to be green more than their power.
Dr Bruno Michel told the BBC that future computer costs will hinge on green credentials rather than speed. “In the past, computers were dominated by hardware costs – 50 years ago you could hold one transistor and it cost a dollar, or a franc,” he said adding that now transistor costs were “1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page”.
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Security
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Security researchers, working with law enforcement and Internet service providers, have disrupted the brains of the Koobface botnet.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Phillip Ransom thought he had trouble Thursday night when his old van broke down on the side of the road, booming out backfires.
But that was when his troubles really began.
Two Kansas City police officers, mistaking the van’s backfires for gunshots, began firing at it.
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Johnnyedge checked the TSA’s website and learned that the San Diego airport had not yet implemented its porno-scanners, so he went down to catch his flight. When he arrived, he discovered that the TSA’s website was out of date, and the naked scanners were in place. He opted out of showing his penis to the government, so they told him he’d have to submit to an intimate testicle fondling. He told the screener, “if you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” After faffing around with various supervisors and supervisors’ supervisors, he opted not to fly, collected a refund from the American Airlines counter, and started to leave the airport. But before he could go, the supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor told him he wasn’t allowed to leave the checkpoint once he entered it, that he was already in for up to $10,000 in fines, and that he would have to return and allow the man’s minons to palpate his genitals before he’d be allowed to leave the airport.
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Just leaving Bolzano after three nights here for SFSCON (a small but perfectly formed FOSS conference). Passing through the tiny airport I noticed an unusual security requirement – which was being actively enforced. Despite apple strudel (that’s a delicious, giant pastry filled with spiced apple and mixed berries) being a major tourist item on sale in Bolzano, it’s banned on aircraft here.
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The European Union was sharply criticised by a leading human rights group today for failing to call to account member states, including Britain, for their complicity in the CIA’s rendition and secret detention programme.
The charge is made – ahead of an EU-US summit in Portugal on Saturday – by Amnesty International in a 53-page report, Open Secret, which, it says, contains mounting evidence of Europe’s complicity in rendition and secret detention.
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Finance
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Scale of eurozone crisis underlined as emergency bailout of Ireland appears increasingly likely and EU statistics body says Greek budget deficit was even larger than thought
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The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.
The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Is a vote worth $97? Sharron Angle seemed to think so. When all of the campaign spending by the Nevada politican and her supporters was tallied, that’s how much it came to for each vote she received in her failed bid to take down Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week.
Angle’s campaign, which attracted support from across the country, was the most expensive congressional contest nationwide on a per-vote basis, according to a Washington Post analyis of campaign finance filings and election results.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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An ongoing Twitter campaign called “Speak Loudly” attempts to raise awareness and prevent Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel “Speak” from being banned by people with good intentions.
If you censor books because of the ideas within, there is no way to challenge the idea. Instead of taking the opportunity to disprove it, or learn from it, or educate about it, you give the idea additional mystique.
The only way to guarantee free speech is to protect all speech.
Even speech we might not agree with.
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People will point out one year in a labour camp is very different from the few thousand quid fine meted out to Paul Chambers, and I of course would agree: the UK is not China.
But the *attitude* – that humour or satire is a “threat” of some kind, and must be punished in the courts – is shockingly similar. And that is what is most disturbing for me here in the UK about the #twitterjoketrial case: the authorities here are now *thinking* like their Chinese counterparts (who must be delighted to have this high-profile backing for their approach from those hypocritical Westerners). We are on the road to China.
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As far as I know, p2pnet is the only site of its kind — maybe the only site anywhere — with a section devoted specifically to the grim, ongoing commercial exploitation and ‘corporate education’ of children before they’re old enough to form their own standards and opinions.
[...]
Orrin ‘Terminator’ Hatch also saw the possibilities and used online kiddie porn to ram Hollywood-friendly bills through congress.
And there are more — a lot more — examples.
Bottom line, child pornography is just another weapon in the corporate arsenal to maintain iron control of consumer bases, and the channels which supply them.
The kids and the horrors inflicted on them are incidental
Kiddie porn is a terrible thing — unless you’re Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, or Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures.
They can’t live without it.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The public consultation, launched on June 30, received input from 318 stakeholders including operators, ISPs, national authorities, consumer and civil society organizations as well as individuals.
There is no firm definition of “net neutrality,” but the Commission takes the view that it represents the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, whatever its source or destination.
Most respondents felt that the European Union’s telecom framework, adopted in 2009, is sufficient legislation on net neutrality and that further review is not necessary until it has been implemented and applied at the national level.
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Apparently Netflix has not yet been offered up on Android phones because the platform just has too much damn freedom. Netflix admitted in a blog post that the lack of DRM that makes Hollywood happy means that it couldn’t offer movie streaming to Android.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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My conclusion is that, to talk about abundance is a very misleading message. Commons have much to offer us – sharing ideas without intellectual property constraints will help us, sharing scarce production and energy and pooling production arrangement and infrastructures will too, sharing may bring us into human relationships with many psychological and emotional rewards. In that sense we may describe commons as “having a generative logic” – But an “abundance” is not a message that I agree with – if it taken to mean, or implied to mean, an abundance of material production. In my opinion to use the word “abundance” is a misleading picture of the future that we are heading into.
An abundance of information about how we might make things is not the same as an abundance of things – it is an abundance of recipes not an abundance of food.”
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I didn’t sleep well last night. I had a nightmare. I think it was about the future of media and media organisations in the digital world. It was sparked by something I said at a recent conference. I have been turning up on Internet related conference panels since the mid nineties, and what is odd is that, although some of the vocabulary has changed, the theme is always the same. How do we, media companies, make money from the online opportunity. More than fifteen years since I was first asked that question, I am still being asked it today. It was as this thought was being processed in my brain that I had my nightmare.
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Copyrights
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Access Copyright (“AC”) has notified the Copyright Board of a change of counsel in the proposed post-secondary 1,300% increase file.
Barry Sookman and McCarthy’s are apparently no longer involved and AC will now be represented by Randall Hofley of Blakes.
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Of late the ‘three-strike’ or the ‘graduated response’ model for copyright enforcement over the internet is gaining popularity among nations, especially after the ACTA negotiations. In India too, the Committee on Piracy appointed by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry recommended this model. Barring few modifications, the model as the name suggests is essentially a three stage process progressing with issuing warning notices to online infringers and subsequently decreasing bandwidth or throttling protocols and eventually taking down connections on continuous infringements over a period. The warnings are intended to educate users and would furnish evidence capable of establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt. It is the duty of the ISPs to carry out the entire exercise. In some states, the ISPs are obliged to maintain a record of errant subscribers and relevant information and the copyright holder can have access to these records on obtaining permission from authorities (either judicial or administrative. In other words, if a user shares or downloads infringing material, the ISP would serve a warning notice with clinching evidence. If the person continues or commits another infringement within a month, his bandwidth would be reduced or access would be limited and if he still continues or causes another infringement within a year from the first strike, his connection would be liable to taken out and would be listed among infringers which the right’s holder has access to.
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When in court it is the job of the defense lawyer to cast doubt on the credibility of the prosecution’s case. Finding and highlighting those details which show the defendant to be misleading or unreliable can be the make and break of a case. Unfortunately for ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley, that is a knife that cuts both ways as yet again he is shown to have misled a reporter.
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Thus the real issue here seems to be that a site owner is worried about losing advertising revenue if people can skip over the home page. But the solution is simple: just put ads on the inner pages of the site, too. That way, you get the best of both worlds: directly-addressable content that also generates revenue. Is that so hard?
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Conor Lenihan, Minister of State with responsibility for Science, Technology and Innovation, has indicated he hasn’t given up on the chance of a negotiated settlement of the illicit file-sharing issue in Ireland. In an Intellectual Property debate, Lenihan praised the IRMA/Eircom agreement and said that while he hopes there can be more arrangements of this type, if they do not arrive, legislation will be the outcome.
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Girl Talk is going “one step further to getting the music to fans as quickly and easily as possible,” according to his rep. “While posting the album as a free download on the Illegal Art label’s site allows All Day to reach his fan-base quickly and with minimal cost, Gillis spent more time on this album than any previous release and considers it the most fully realized and evolved manifestation of the Girl Talk aesthetic.”
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Operation Payback has been without a doubt the longest and most widespread attack on anti-piracy groups, lawyers and lobbyists. Despite the massive media coverage, little is known about the key players who coordinate the operation and DDoS attacks. A relatively small group of people, they are seemingly fuelled by anger, frustration and a strong desire to have their voices heard.
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ACTA
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Participants in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations announced today that they have finalized the text of the Agreement, after resolving the few issues that remained outstanding after the final round of negotiations in Tokyo.
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Today, the USTR announced finalization of the ACTA text. It explained that, following a final meeting on “legal verification of the drafting,” ACTA will “be ready to be submitted to the participants’ respective authorities to undertake relevant domestic processes.”[1]
And that is where this story begins.
In many of the countries negotiating the agreement, including the EU, the normal procedures for entering a treaty, including consent by the legislative branch, will be used.[2] But not in the US. The USTR has stated repeatedly that ACTA will enter into force in the US as an executive agreement that does not require any congressional role.[3] Thus, USTR argues, the agreement will be binding on the US once Ambassador Kirk, as the US negotiating representative, agrees to it. Congress will not receive the opportunity to review and amend the agreement before it goes into effect, as it would in any traditional international agreement binding on the US. If USTR succeeds in this bold plan, it will dramatically expand presidential power to make law without congressional consent. But this success seems highly dubious. There appears to be no serious constitutional theory that would support USTR’s claims. ACTA is clearly unconstitutional as applied to the US.
In a “sole executive agreement,” the President binds the US to an international agreement unilaterally – with no formal ex ante or ex post authorization by Congress. This is the form of agreement that the USTR claims can bind the US to ACTA. But this claim is highly dubious because of the “strict legal limits [that] govern the kinds of agreements that presidents may enter into” without some form of Congressional consent.[1]
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Karel De Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, has welcomed a draft agreement on an international pact to fight counterfeiting and piracy.
De Gucht said in a statement released today (15 November) that agreement on an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) “paves the way towards a more efficient fight against counterfeiting worldwide”.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Federation Against Software Theft calls it “staggering” that after “years of consultation, of debate and of Parliamentary time” the Act is being challenged by ISPs. Says ISPs are using the review as a “fig-leaf for their own agendas” and that it’s merely a “last ditch attempt…to ensure they are not hit financially.”
Soon after it was announced that Justice Wyn Williams had granted a request by UK ISPs TalkTalk and BT for a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act the Federation Against Software Theft chimed in to make its displeasure with the decision known.
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BT and TalkTalk have won the right to a judicial review of the Digital Economy Act on all four of the contested legal grounds, the high court ruled today.
The verdict, delivered late on Friday afternoon, represents a 4-0 victory for two of the UK’s largest broadband providers, though the Act was already on its way to judicial review before Mr Justice Wyn Williams had made the judgment.
BMC on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.15.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Communication platform switches to Linux
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Desktop
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For all the talk of how open source software is kicking butt and taking names in the cloud space (see: Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell) and in embedded space (see Android, MeeGo), there’s one area where open source has consistently fallen woefully short: providing solutions for small businesses.
This is a weird sort of failure, too, because on the surface it seems like open source software products–with their collective low price tag, solid support, and better security–would be a perfect fit for the needs of smaller businesses, which often need superlative computing capabilities but can only afford the least-expensive hardware and software due to budget constraints.
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Server
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Marvell says it is now sampling a quad-core, ARM-based processor aimed at “enterprise class cloud computing.” The Armada XP runs at 1.6Hz, has a 2MB second-level cache, supports 64-bit DDR3 memory, includes four gigabit Ethernet ports and other interfaces, and uses fewer than ten Watts, according to the company.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This is my first podcast, and it is more an experiment than a real podcast with new content.
I am thinking about making some podcasts, let’s say one per month, but I would like to hear “read” your feedback, so this is somehow a test drive.
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s seven-inch, Android 2.2 Galaxy Tab tablet is now available on T-Mobile for $399 with a two-year plan or $599 without, says the carrier. Meanwhile, a 10.1-inch Samsung tablet has been spotted at a Chinese trade show.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Pelagicore is its newest member. Pelagicore develops products and technologies that serve the growing demand for open source infotainment systems from the automotive industry. The company is joining The Linux Foundation to collaborate specifically on MeeGo and its In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference design.
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Applications
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Burg manager app updated with new themes, new features
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Release of KGraphViewer, version 2.1.1. This is a bugfix only release that makes the kgraphviewer library cleaner: all necessary headers (and only them) are installed with a proper d-pointer in its sole exported class.
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VideoLAN have released an update to their popular media player. This is a minor update mainly containing bug fixes from v1.1.4 and a few new features. Support has been added for RTP access for H264 streams. Multiple language translations has also been updated within VLC, a new Austrian has also been added. You can find the full changelog below.
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Linux OS is actually considered as a robust platform. It is not easily attacked by virus and other unwanted Internet junk. Yet it is better to keep your system protected as a wiseman said, “Prevention is better than cure”. So, this would make you protect your Linux / Ubuntu system, so we compile a list of 5 best free Ubuntu / Linux firewalls.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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I’ve been using Bordeaux for about a week now and, though it has some rough edges, I’m enjoying the experience. Once I got the hang of the suite’s little quirks, I found it to be powerful and it makes working with Windows software on PC-BSD a more pleasant experience. Having a list of supported software takes some of the guesswork out of running applications on Wine. Having separate cellars is also nice in that it gets around the problem of different programs having special (or conflicting) dependencies. Right now the software feels like it’s aimed at system administrators who want to install and manage multiple Windows applications. Bordeaux is not quite to the point where I would suggest it for end-users, but with a few more progress bars, tool tips and (especially) documentation it can easily get there. The functionality is in place and just needs some friendly touches. This is definitely a product to keep in mind if you’re trying to transition between the Windows world and the Linux/BSD community.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE recently attended SoLiSC (website in Portuguese), a local free software meeting based in Florianópolis, Brazil. SoLiSC had been inactive since 2005, but in 2009 the Free Software Association of Santa Catarina (Associação Software Livre Santa Catarina) was created to revive it and succeeded in doing so in October this year. The aim of the Association is to create a permanent forum for the discussion of free software in the state of Santa Catarina.
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GNOME Desktop
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Printer sharing was once a big challenge for Linux. It almost always involved manually configuring Samba to share out your printers. That is not so now. With the latest releases of the GNOME desktop, printer sharing is as easy as it is in any other operating system. So longer will you need to open up that /etc/smb.conf file and spend hours or days trying to figure out the challenging configuration. Now it’s point and click.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic 5.7 includes the new 0.7.0 version of GParted and some major changes to networking. Wicd is now used as the default networking manager and Gnome PPP for dial-up connections. The old Start Network program is still in the panel menu if you want to use it. The vncviewer was switched to Real VNC Viewer. A DBAN clone called nwipe was added for more advanced disk wiping.
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The SliTaz team is pleased to announce the release of a new cooking ISO featuring over 2600 packages. It contains Linux Kernel 2.6.34 and was rebuilt with a new toolchain using glibc 2.11.2 and gcc 4.5.1. Xorg has been fully updated to 1.9.2. The LiveCD includes Midori, the Deadbeef audio player, and many more applications. Tazpkg and Tazctrlbox now support gettext translations and more UTF locales have been added. Many bugfixes, updates and improvements can also be found. A lot of work has been done during these past 6 months.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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So, who is right? Maybe they both are. It’s completely understandable that, for example, some Debian contributor feels that Ubuntu is in some way getting credit for their work. It is also true that, before Ubuntu, Linux was perceived as difficult to use and unsuitable for anyone but the most hardened geek.
Ultimately, all the open source projects and people that work in or around them make contributions to Linux, and because all the Linux distros are part of a shared community, they all contribute too. Which one you choose is really down to what you want to use Linux for.
What is certain is that there is a lot to discover in virtually every different flavour of Linux, so be adventurous – don’t just install one and stick with it. With virtual machine technology and a huge range of live distributions, it’s easier than ever to take a new version of Linux for a spin.
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Debian Family
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OK, this is still a beta, so any nits found here may be fixed before release, but these are my first impressions of Debian Squeeze Beta.
[...]
Overall impression: Good. There’s far less messing around required to get things working than was the case with Lenny. Applications are up to date and work as expected. With any luck the bugs I noticed will get fixed before release.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In recent days, it was announced that Ubuntu is going to make the switch to using Wayland as a replacement for X as a windowing system and Unity for the desktop environment. I dislike both of these changes for one specific reason: Both codebases for both projects are too new.
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I’ve been trying a new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) image out on my O2 Joggler this week and it is a big improvement over the 9.04 images I’ve been using previously and everything works out of the box without any fiddling.
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Reaction in the Linux community to news that Ubuntu will be getting a new graphics system — replacing X.org with Wayland — has been mixed, but the worriers seem seriously worried. “I really think they may have gone too far with this change,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger opined. “There are still plenty of ways to get better speed out of the existing system without a wholesale change like this.”
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint main menu has received even more changes in the recent release of Linux Mint 10. Users can now see new menu items highlighted, search for and install software, and search the web from inside of the menu. The main menu also supports GTK bookmarks and its own GTK theme independent from the rest of the desktop.
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In the most recent episode of the Acrossad GNU/Linux Oggcast, I stated that I was going to try Fedora 14 on a new laptop. I recently got my chance. I was able to test out Fedora 14 on a borrowed Toshiba Satellite L675 laptop.Fedora performed very nicely indeed. The built-in wifi does not work because Linux drivers for the installed Realtek wifi radio card do not yet exist.
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The Linux Mint team released the final Linux Mint 10 (“Julia”), based on Ubuntu 10.10. the popular desktop Linux distribution adds one-click upgrades to the DVD edition, as well as a new Mint-X theme, performance improvements, improved software and update managers, GTK support, and revised menus that highlight new apps.
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One reader commented that Linux already has a higher install base than Mac OS X.
While that might be true (with Linux being free to distribute it’s always going to be impossible to know exactly), it doesn’t mean Linux is living up to its full potential on the desktop.
My argument is not that Linux distributions should try to be like Windows or Mac OS X, my argument is they should care more about the end-user experience. And shipping stable, integrated software is key to that.
Windows and Mac OS X both appeal to non-technical people because a lot of administration tasks are either automated or only involve pointing and clicking.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Linux is difficult to use. But the lack of integration can be off-putting for someone who has never used it before.
In fact, there’s absolutely no reason why a free operating system can’t exceed the user experience of a commercial one.
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Probably the most difficult thing a user is going to run into with Linux Mint 10 (Julia) at this point is simply downloading it. Demand for the new release has obviously been far greater than anything they have seen before, and their servers have not been able to keep up with the load. As of this morning, Monday 15/11/2010 at 9:00 Swiss time, getting a response from their main web page is still inconsistent, so if you know of a mirror nearby, you would be well advised to go directly to it.
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Jungo Ltd. announced a Linux-ready middleware stack for automotive infotainment applications. The Automotive Connectivity Middleware offers a complete media and networking infrastructure, including wireless connectivity, phone management, and integration with mapping and telematics functionality, says the company.
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NetLogic Microsystems has released a Linux development kit and board support package (BSP) for its MIPS-based eight-core XLP system-on-chip (SoC). The XLP Multi-Core Processor Development Kit includes a development board, software tools, libraries, drivers, and reference solutions, says the chipmaker.
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The SBCs also offer identical ruggedization levels and operating system support. The latter includes board support packages (BSPs) for Linux, VxWorks, QNX Neutrino, and Integrity. Windows drivers are also available, says the company.
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TES Electronic Solutions announced a new member of its Linux- and Android-ready “Magik” computer-on-module (COM) and HMI development kit family, this time with TI’s DaVinci DM3730 system-on-chip. The Magik-MX-37 COM has 512MB RAM and up to 1GB of flash storage, and the compete kit offers a seven-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen plus I/O including Ethernet, USB, and HDMI.
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Trinity Audio Group demonstrated a prototype of a tablet running a MeeGo-based version 5.0 of its Transmission audio platform for musicians. Now open for beta testing, the Indamixx 2 tablet runs on an Intel Atom processor with 2GB of RAM, and offers a multitouch display, 160GB of storage, and the Renoise tracking and sampling application.
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Creative Technology announced 10-inch and seven-inch tablet computers along with a 3.2-inch portable media player (PMP) — all offering Android 2.1, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and “Pure Wireless Entertainment” branding. The Creative Ziio 10″ and Ziio 7″ each offer Creative’s 1GHz, Cortex-A8-based ZMS-08 processor, while the Zen Touch 2 Wireless Entertainment Device features a two-megapixel camera.
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With TI’s recent Linux port to the C64x DSPs, system designers developing signal-intensive equipment can take full advantage of the DSP cores directly with Linux, without requiring a SoC that also includes an ARM core. These would include the recently announced TMS320DM8168 as well as many other TI OMAP, Sitara, and DaVinci SoCs such as the DaVinci DM3730.
Presumably, similar streamlined access to Linux developers is being provided for the C66x family as well. TI has recently been making a major push to open up its DSP architectures to ARM Linux developers. These efforts include the release of two free Linux development tools to ease programming of the TMS320C6000 DSP. The C6EZRun tool partitions code between the DSP and ARM cores, while C6EZAccel offers an ARM-side API library of over 130 optimized DSP kernels.
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A P1010RDB reference design board incorporating the P1010 is planned for availability in Q1 2011, says Freescale. The company did not list OS support, but previous QorIQ SoCs have been supported with Linux support packages.
The new QorIQ parts will also be supported by Enea, Green Hills Software, Mentor Graphics, and Wind River, all of which offered testimonial quotes. Mentor Graphics and Wind River specifically mentioned Linux support.
Stated Brett Butler, general manager and vice president of Freescale’s Networking Processor Division, “The P1010 is the newest member of the broad QorIQ product family, which scales from single-core offerings at 500MHz to multicore processors that deliver 2GHz.”
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Electrophorescent (EPD) displays sourced from E Ink have been used in the majority of e-readers to date. Examples include Amazon’s market-leading, Linux-based Kindle — reecently updated to become smaller and lighter.
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Phones
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Android
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T-Mobile’s HTC-manufactured G2 smartphone was reviewed by eWEEK and found to offer blazing speed using T-Mobile’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. A strong feature set, Android 2.2, and reliable operation more than overcome a few flaws, Wayne Rash writes.
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Tablets
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PocketBook USA has launched both a $150 color e-reader tablet based on Android 2.0 and a $180, Linux-based monochrome e-reader tablet. The PocketBook IQ is a seven-inch, 800 x 600 tablet with Wi-Fi and 2GB of memory, while the PocketBook Pro 602 is a six-inch E Ink e-reader with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, says the company.
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Into this world comes Apache. They are programmers, they have jobs, but within Apache they also have a moral code, a sense of belonging, a common purpose, and important work that feeds the common good. They spin what in our time looks like wealth, then give it away free to anyone who wants it.
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Further, open source storage solutions are becoming more sophisticated as third-party add-ons that offer high-end features evolve. For example, OpendedUp, an open source deduplication file system for Linux that’s also known as “SDFS,” emerged in March. This is designed for enterprises with virtual environments looking for a high-performance, scalable deduplication system that’s not too costly.
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SaaS
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As Canonical COO Matt Asay notes on The Register, and as VCCircle has noted, there are strong signs that Salesforce.com is close to acquiring open source web conferencing company DImDim. Salesforce has been on a tear, with its stock hitting stratospheric heights, and is one of the primary companies illustrating how much promise the cloud holds for business technology users. It’s certainly believable that Salesforce might like to acquire DimDim, but do we want to see another celebrated open source-focused company swallowed up by a proprietary one?
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Databases
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MySQL is now really an Oracle product, price included. Which is a big chance for all other “really free” database servers, like Firebird and PostgreSQL.
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CMS
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Today marks reaching Drupal 7′s 0 critical bug milestone! We’ve rolled one final beta release to shake out any last minute problems and fix strings.
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BSD
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The DragonFly 2.8.2 release is now available! A great deal of stability and MP-related work has gone into this release relative to 2.6, as well as many new features, pkgsrc-2010Q3, and the return of the GUI release image for 4G USB sticks.
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The current release is OpenBSD 4.8 which was released November 1, 2010.
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2010-11-06: Security Alert, all users need to upgrade their FreeNAS to the latest stable (0.7.2.5543). If you can’t upgrade: Restrict WebGUI access from trusted IP addresses. Thanks to Brian Adeloye from Tenable Network Security for reporting this vulnerability.
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Finance
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I’ve seen some truly amazing feats of magic, but here’s one that beats them all. Right before your eyes, this thing rises into the air on its own, with no wires or mechanical devices giving it lift. And it hovers there effortlessly.
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2. Money doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it at some point. An old workmate of mine used to have a colorful turn of phrase to describe the possession of something that is ostensibly praiseworthy but practically useless: “That’s like tits on a boar hog.” Economists have a more formal way to discuss the extent to which nominal money may actually be like “tits on a boar hog”: The Velocity of Money. The Velocity of Money is a measure of just how often a particular dollar gets spent during the year, and the more often the better.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A few months back, we pointed to a discussion looking at how three countries with some of the biggest movie industries outside of the US — Nigeria, China and India — all were thriving, despite massive “piracy.” As you looked at the details of each, it showed how each industry had been adapting to a marketplace in which some of the content was widely available, but were still figuring out ways to make money (i.e., you can compete with free). However, because competing with free actually involves work, it should come as no surprise that some are seeking to implement government protectionist policies.
IBM on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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FUD just will not go away. People must be paid to manufacture it. I will not post a link to the latest FUD article I read but it has a bunch of points:
* GNU/Linux is faster and has more drivers out of the box
* GNU/Linux is faster to install and brings more apps to the table
which sounds great. GNU/Linux is a winner… Then TFA goes on to recount that
* GNU/Linux lacks “special drivers” for “special devices”, the Achilles’ Heel and
* GNU/Linux crashes a lot, especially when tweaking it
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Another piece of FUD caught my eye: “Linux vs. Windows: Suspending logic and reason for blind faith“. The authour, Donovan Colbert, expresses outrage/amazement at the unreasoning adherents of operating systems in the security debate. He compares the “many eyes” of FLOSS versus the “security through obscurity” of non-free software. This is an old story but he dredges it up anyway.
His argument is that the many eyes feature is also a vulnerability since the bad guys can also see the code, not just the good guys. This is nonsense.
[...]
So stuff from 1995 in X applications crashed 24% of the time in fuzz-testing but 100% of GUI apps in Lose 2000 crashed. Does being closed make you more secure? Nope.
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The events of this week reminded me why I love GNU, Linux, and free software so much. We leverage the power of communities of independent people better than any organization on the planet. It is simply a fact that gets proven over and over again. Discussions over the last several months have revolved around several interesting GNU/Linux and free software facts:
* If GNU/Linux were created solely by paid developers, it would have cost over 1 BILLION dollars to develop using conventional proprietary means. 1.
* Open source and free software are saving a lot of people in the real world a substantial amount of money, including government agencies. 2.
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It was no surprise when Jono’s announcement of the OpenRespect project was met with the usual mix of positive and negative responses.
[...]
Maybe Jono is a hypocrite who wants it all ways. I don’t think so, but so what if he is? We’re all imperfect, we all have pasts full of mistakes, and if all we do is focus a critical, judgmental lens on everything we’ll never accomplish anything. I think a reasonable baseline is to expect everyone to try, even a little, to get along with their fellow humans.
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And each year one “Linux” becomes more different than the next “Linux”. Some want compatibility and standards based development (even if it’s lousy at times). Others want “OMG, not some lame standard, pah! we’re the best! just do it!” and for Linux to do its own thing entirely. Neither approach is entirely correct, nor entirely wrong. But we’re not learning from UNIX either.
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Desktop
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It’s estimated that this year in India OEMs will ship close to 4,00,000 desktops with a Linux subscription or with preloaded Linux.
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The same page also features a break down of the figures with some really interesting stats. Ubuntu as usual, has a whooping 61% of the figures tallied so far, with Poland having a staggering 26% of the boxes?
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Server
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It’s been rumored, but now it’s official. The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). This puts it in the number one spot on the 36th edition of the TOP500′s world’s most powerful supercomputer list, the organization said Sunday.
As a result, the prior winner on the list—the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee—is now ranked in second place, with a score of 1.75 petaflop/s.
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Ballnux
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It’s about time Nexus One gets its successor. Engadget has been fueling rumors about the next Nexus phone; it’s not HTC. Two Samsung phones are believed to be the next Nexus phones.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As you might know OpenGL comes in two flavors: fixed functionality and programmable pipeline. With the fixed functionality you have to use API calls to influence the execution of each stage of the rendering pipeline. It is a very powerful API allowing you to do most of the stuff we use in KWin. The programmable pipeline allows to directly execute code (called a “Shader”) to do vertex and fragment processing. For example we are able to saturate a complete window as a whole with fixed functionality, but we need a fragment shader to be able to change the color of each pixel depending on the input color. This is for example used in the invert effect. A vertex shader can be used to influence the geometry. E.g. we could use it to transform a cube into a sphere. OpenGL 1.x is completely fixed functionality, in OpenGL 2 the programmable pipeline was introduced to exchange parts of the rendering stack, but fixed functionality was still around. With OpenGL 3 everyone expected the fixed functionality to be removed, but it was only deprecated and you can still use it. All the modern calls have been moved into a “core profile”.
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Applications
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DeadBeef is probably the simplest and the most lightweight music player I have ever used in my Ubuntu. If you are someone who loves to keep it simple and useful at the same time, DeadBeef is one music player you definitely don’t want to miss.
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Snort can be created as a program that you run when you want on a personal computer or it can be setup to run when your OS starts and protect all computers on your network from attacks.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Brutal Chess features full 3D graphics, an advanced particle engine, and several different levels of intelligent AI, inspired by the once popular “Battle Chess” released by Interplay circa 1988.
Beat the CPU if you can or just enjoy some of the best looking chess pieces on the internet – enjoy the view, engage your mind and checkmate!
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In late 1996 this top-down racing game took all by surprise with it’s addictive nature and excellent gameplay.
The basic idea behind Death Rally: win races, gather more money, buy upgrades to your vehicle. In between wreck your opponents, shoot your way through bystanders and keep the pedal to the metal!
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The Real Texas is an upcoming adventure game which will be available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The game looks quite interesting with some features that makes it different though it is an old school top down adventure at heart. (videos below)
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Reviews
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This build is a livedvd showcasing the newly beta EFL libraries for the E-17 window manager. It was built on the 10.04 Ubuntu core and follows PinguyOS, in being a working out of the box operating system.
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…GNU IceCat, Liferea, and Seamonkey. IceCat is a rebranded version of Mozilla Firefox, similar to Iceweasel. I was happy to see that most codecs are included out-of-the-box.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced on November 9th the immediate availability of the first beta version of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 operating system.
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Cree, Red Hat and SAS, three of the Triangle’s most successful home-grown technology companies, are members of an exclusive club.
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Fedora
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Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.
[...]
Personally, I don’t see any Linux distribution using Wayland as its default graphical interface until well into 2012. I also think it’s possible that a cleaned-up and revised X server may yet keep X as Linux’s dominant graphical interface. For now, though, Wayland’s star is in the ascendent and the venerable X Window’s star is descending.
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I’ve been sitting on old kernels for too long in Fedora 13. First I kept 2.6.33.8-149 because I could use the open-source ati video driver, but then I moved to 2.6.34.7-56, where I had working and speedy video with the fglrx driver direct from ATI/AMD as well as the ability to mute the speakers fed by my Lenovo G555′s Conexant 5069 sound chip.
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Debian Family
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The first Alpha of SimplyMEPIS 11.0 has been released and uploaded to the MEPIS master site. If you are an MEPIS subscriber you can download the file immediately. The global ISO mirrors should make the files available to the general public within 24 hours.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Eriq Jaffe has uploaded a new set of Radio Tray Mono Icons on Gnome Looks. The icons add more style and polish to your Radio Tray.
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In a post on her blog Story Peters, executive director of the Gnome Foundation, says as much:
“We’ve put a lot of work into Gnome Shell, our next big thing, and Canonical is saying that it’s not the best thing for their users. It’s disappointing because we are excited about our new plans and expect lots of users to enjoy them. And we rely on our distribution partners to get Gnome into the hands of users, so we were expecting Canonical to help us in that.”
Disappointment aside there are a couple of potentially good reasons for Canonical to switch to Unity.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you are dreaming of a free software suite to run your studio, then stop dreaming and download a copy of this distro and install it on your machine and be happy, your dream has finally come true.
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The German datacenter we’re using is moving to France and this impacts two of our dedicated servers:
* The www.linuxmint.com website
* The packages.linuxmint.com repositories
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Intel, Nokia lead MeeGo project has announced the release of MeeGo 1.1 SDK Beta. MeeGo 1.1 SDK release enables application developers to develop, install, and debug applications, as well as run applications on N900, Netbook, and Aava devices with MeeGo.
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Android
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Motorola CITRUS is now available in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com tomorrow for $49.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jolicloud is set to launch its own netbook preloaded with Jolicloud. The launch would beat Google Chrome which is expected to be launched soon. JoliBook seems to follow Apple’s strategy of bundling hardware and software.
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Today we’ve received in our mailbox a black envelope from Jolicloud, announcing the powerful and amazing Jolibook netbook device!
This month, according to the Jolicloud developers, something big is going to happen in the world of little computers. Jolibook, will be a netbook device powered by the Jolicloud 1.1 operating system, it will have a next-generation N550 CPU, a 250GB hard disk, and a LED LCD monitor.
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So getting back to the Great Blender Survey, scrolling to the end, what’s the first action plan proposed by the survey-taker? They hold up their Don-Norman-blessed edition of Don’t Make Me Think and start chattering about changing the interface on the website, as if the whole survey just went through them like chili through a cat.
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It seems Blender open movies have inspired quite a number of people. Chamba Swathanthra Cinema is an open movie project by a bunch of free software enthusiasts from Kerala, India. Chamba Swathanthra Cinema is probably first of its kind open movie project ever initiated by anyone other than Blender foundation.
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The 2010 edition of the Free/Open Source Software in Academia Conference (fOSSa) was an interesting event, (here’s my final report about fOSSa2010). In this page I intend to present something I found in common among several fOSSa talks. Something that is relevant for everybody who cares about effective business and human resources management in any sector, not just in the software industry.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 Beta 7 was a big release for Mozilla, but Beta 8 is already scheduled for release at the end of the month. The company also detailed improvements to its hardware acceleration engine for Windows XP – 7, as well as changes to HTML 5 support.
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Programming
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Oracle‘s Java ambassador Henrik Ståhl has reacted to reports from various media outlets about a dual license for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) based on a merger of the JRockit and HotSpot virtual machines. As presented at JavaOne in September, this “united” JVM is to consist of the best features of the two JVMs. The result is to be incrementally implemented in OpenJDK, although a number of components – such as Sun’s Java for Business and Oracle’s JRockit Mission Control, JRockit Real Time and JRockit Virtual Edition – will continue to be sold as proprietary, commercial premium extensions.
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Since my start at Mozy in September, 2009, one of the internal programs in which I quickly took interest was Mozy Labs. Labs’ main champion was a former Google intern named JT Olds, who had witnessed directly the power of allowing engineers free time for innovation and wanted that for Mozy.
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Standards/Consortia
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In this article, I will review the situations where a new consortium should and — as importantly — should not, be formed. I will also provide a decision tree for determining what activities a new consortium should undertake to increase the likelihood of its success, a description of the infrastructural elements needed to support these activities, and an indication of the stage of an organization’s maturity at which the addition of each activity becomes advisable.
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Anthropologists and indigenous leaders have warned that a Natural History Museum expedition to Paraguay could lead to “genocide” and are calling for it to be abandoned. They fear that the scientists and their teams of assistants are likely to make accidental contact with isolated indigenous groups in the remote region they are planning to visit and could pass on infectious diseases.
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Google has refused Facebook to automatically ‘import’ Gmail data from a user’s account by changing its terms of service. I see it as Google standing up to fight an abusive, monopolistic forces rising in the Internet world.
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The last time Google released something really groundbreaking was Gmail, if I remember right. Of course since then, they’ve cobbled up other small companies to add their own midas touch to make those companies hugely successful Google products, Youtube readily comes to mind here. However, even that strategy does not look to have worked for Mountain View this year given the 23 or so acquisitions.
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Health/Nutrition
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In an 8-3 vote, the board passed a preliminary version of a new rule that forbids toy freebies with meals that don’t meet minimum nutritional standards.
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In response to growing pressure about promoting unhealthy food to kids and contributing to the obesity epidemic, the fast food industry did what every industry that produces a harmful product does: it pledged to voluntarily end the harmful practices that started drawing scrutiny to the industry. Accordingly, in 2006 the Council of Better Business Bureaus launched its Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a voluntary code of conduct under which fast food purveyors pledged to promote healthier food choices in their advertising, and to use messages encouraging good nutrition in ads aimed at kids.
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I set fire to a lot of bridges when I accepted Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s invitation to testify as part of his investigation into health insurance company practices that for years have been swelling the ranks of the uninsured and the underinsured in the United States. With the publication of my book — the subtitle of which is, “An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans” — I am torching a few more.
I describe in the book how a huge share of Americans’ health-care premiums bankrolls relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts focused on protecting one thing: profits. I also describe how the industry’s PR onslaught drastically weakened health-care reform and how it plays an insidious and often invisible role in our political process anywhere that corporate profits are at stake, from climate change to defense policy.
They’re going to kill you, Wendell,” a former CIGNA colleague warned in an email after reading a couple of chapters this morning. “If I were you, I wouldn’t get anywhere near a cliff.”
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In his new book, former insurance industry insider Wendell Potter says insurance companies spend a huge portion of Americans’ health insurance premiums on relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts that are focused on one thing: profits. He describes how the insurance industry’s PR onslaught drastically weakened the new health reform law, and how it plays an insidious but often invisible role in politics any time corporate profits are threatened, on subjects ranging from climate change to defense policy.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has unveiled hard-hitting, graphic new cigarette warning labels that will be required on cigarette packs after October 22, 2012. The labels show corpses, a man smoking through a tracheostomy, pictures of diseased lungs, a bedridden man suffering from end-stage cancer, rotten teeth, a man in the throes of a heart attack, a woman blowing smoke in a baby’s face and similar depictions meant to show the actual physical effects of smoking.
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Cigarette packages currently come with a tidy black-bordered warning label, reminding users that smoking causes lung cancer, birth defects and heart disease. Dutiful, yes, and easily disregarded. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled 36 proposed new warning labels designed to grab smokers’ attention. The new labels will cover half of a cigarette pack with graphic warnings — think dead bodies and cancer-ridden lungs — about the risks of smoking.
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Things aren’t looking good on the most important issue of them all: environmental justice, or, in more stark terms, the future of the world as we know it.
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The largest operator of Southern California farmers markets has protected a vendor who buys produce wholesale and misrepresents it as his own, alleged one of the company’s managers, who made the claim at a listening session held by the California Department of Food and Agriculture last week in Santa Monica. The operator has denied the allegation, but the repercussions seem likely to reverberate in the farmers market world.
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One of the arguments against expanding the FDA’s powers over food safety is that the agency has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to enforce existing laws and to regulate aggressively in the face of corporate lobbying.
Unfortunately, we now have more evidence that the FDA may indeed be a bad-faith regulator.
The Center for Food Safety has unearthed convincing evidence that the FDA is attempting to freeze out marine and fisheries experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its rush to approve biotech company AquaBounty’s genetically modified salmon for human consumption.
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Security
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Once a proprietary software hole is found, it stays open for years. We’ve literally seen the case happen, here’s the 17-year-old Windows hole that just got patched this year. (…and the Register still says ‘hacker’ when they mean ‘cracker.’ See what we’re up against?)
Conversely, the same strategy doesn’t work against Linux, BSD, and other open source systems. Yes, true, you can penetration-test Linux and BSD. There’s plenty of tools out there to do that, too. There’s even distros like “Damn Vulnerable Linux” specifically built to be weak and demonstrate points of failure. But when you go to all that trouble to find a security hole in Linux and exploit it, you know what’s going to happen?
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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On Sunday, a military jury at Guantánamo handed down a 40-year sentence to Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan. The decision brought to an end a week of hearings that began when Khadr, now 24, accepted a plea deal giving him an eight-year sentence in exchange for agreeing that he was guilty of murder in violation of the laws of war, spying, conspiracy, providing material support to terrorism, and attempted murder, with one year to be served in Guantánamo, and the remaining seven in Canada.
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Tara Inanloo has taken a series of self-portraits ‘to represent the different Iranian women inside myself’. Now she is in grave danger if she goes back to her country
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Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair announced that 90 officers are facing disciplinary action after it was learned that they removed their name tags during the G20 Summit weekend. They will most likely lose a day’s pay.
On Wednesday, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair testified before the Commons public safety committee where he discussed police officers’ various controversial actions during the G20 Summit in June.
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A British couple kidnapped from their yacht by Somali pirates more than a year ago have been freed after a ransom was paid.
Paul and Rachel Chandler, 61 and 56, from Tunbridge Wells, were handed over by the pirates to officials in Adado, central Somalia, early this morning.
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Two young men beat a Russian journalist unconscious outside his office today, 48 hours after another reporter was attacked with an iron bar.
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A Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executive in charge of the utility’s SmartMeter program admitted Monday that he used a fake name in an effort to join an Internet discussion group of SmartMeter opponents.
William Devereaux, senior director of the $2.2 billion SmartMeter program, used the name “Ralph” when he sent an e-mail to the moderator of a discussion group for people trying to block deployment of the new, wireless electricity and gas meters. But his real name appeared next to his e-mail address.
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Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s executive in charge of its “SmartMeter” program got caught using a fake name to try and join an Internet talk list operated by people who are fighting installation of the new meters.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The smaller outer islands in the Solomon Islands are already seeing devastating impacts of the rising sea level. The impact of climate change is already affecting the rural population of Solomon Islands, an archipelago of eight bigger islands and hundreds of small, mostly uninhabited islands.
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BP and the other companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster were operating under a “culture of complacency” and need top-to-bottom reform, the head of the presidential investigation into the oil spill said today.
A day after releasing preliminary findings on the causes of the fatal explosion on the Deepwater Horizon – the first of multiple inquiries – William Reilly, co-chair of the commission, was scathing about the safety regime on board the Deepwater Horizon.
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Hundreds of scientists have signed up to two new campaigns that seek to regain control of the message about climate science.
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With fresh data out from EIA Washington just this afternoon, and, on the heels yesterday of IEA Paris’ long-overdue admission of Peak Oil, I thought I would release a crude oil forecast. This is a production chart that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. I use rough estimates of future world GDP, the recent mix of primary energy use with special attention paid to coal vs oil use, and then finally decline rates in global oil production. Despite these efforts, any forecast of this nature is at best general in nature. That said, the trajectory here is worth paying attention to.
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Finance
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A ticker-tape parade along Wall Street might appear crass in this era of austerity. But the victorious Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives can expect a warm, heartfelt welcome from America’s financial elite, who watched last week’s conservative electoral landslide with quiet satisfaction.
In the eyes of top US financiers, Barack Obama’s hammering in the midterm elections means the White House’s war on Wall Street is over. They feel, as one hedge fund manager told the president at a town hall meeting in September, like piñatas, constantly whacked with a political stick by Democrats keen to cast them as economic villains.
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The sweeping Wall Street reform bill that was signed into law this summer calls for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Just like other consumer regulators work to keep dangerous products off the market, the CFPB’s job is to make sure financial products and services don’t harm consumers or our economy.
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The two chairmen of the deficit commission, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, surprised Washington Wednesday with the release of their own draft recommendations on federal debt reduction. They were supposed to issue a report December 1, after the full 18-member panel had been given a chance to vote on each item. Knowing that it would be next to impossible to achieve a high level of support on the commission for their recommendations, the raiders decided to go it alone. Their package appears to be about three-fourths cuts and one-fourth revenue raisers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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For months, the problem for Democrats was correctly identified as the “enthusiasm gap”–the idea that the progressive base of the party was not excited about voting. The exit polls from Tuesday’s vote confirm that many Democratic-tending voters failed to show up. How, then, does one square this fact with the idea that Obama and Democrats were pushing policies that were considered too left-wing? If that were the case, then presumably more of those base voters would have voted to support that agenda. It is difficult to fathom how both things could be true.
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The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production.
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On Nov. 8, John Stauber presented his lecture, “Toxic Sludge is Good for You,” to University of Northern Iowa students, faculty and staff.
Stauber, an investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author, wasn’t really trying to sell the crowd on the benefits of toxic sludge. In fact, his first book, titled “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry,” explains how to promote critical thinking in the public relations profession.
“After decades of working as a public interest activist and organizer, I realized that there existed in the United States, especially, an institution devoted to propaganda and we call that institution a profession, the public relations industry,” said Stauber.
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The book, essentially a guide for pedophiles, drew massive media attention and a barrage of public scorn. At first, Amazon defended the author’s free speech rights and issued a statement saying it doesn’t condone censorship…
[...]
Soon after, though, Amazon yielded to complaints and threats of a boycott and pulled the book entirely. Amazon’s content guidelines for authors, including prohibitions on pornography or offensive material, could have prevented the e-book from being listed on its site to begin with, but the company’s confused handling of the situation left it facing even more controversy, including questions about its commitment to quality control and whether the company did, in fact, infringe on the author’s free speech rights.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Logging on the Internet successfully at my hotel, but discovering that while Gmail, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were all easily accessible, Twitter and Facebook were not. Social media more threatening to the censors than the high gatekeepers of Western media? (And if any of my readers has advice on how to connect to Twitter from China, please e-mail me.)
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Silvio Berlusconi’s standard response, whenever he is challenged about his media power, is to exclaim indignantly that the Italian press is as free as any in the world. That, of course, misses the point that he either controls or influences six of the seven main terrestrial channels (the sole exception being La7, owned by Telecom Italia). The effects can be seen clearly in TV coverage of the latest wave of sex scandals to wash over Italy’s prime minister. Corriere della Sera’s TV critic, Aldo Grasso, called it “a triumph of reticence”. He added: “if you followed the Italian television news bulletins, you would understand very little”.
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If technology had its own version of People magazine, this week’s cover story would involve pictures of Google and Facebook in opposing bubbles, looking angrily in each other’s direction.
The battle is now over data portability. To summarize, about a week ago, Google said Facebook wasn’t allowed to come over and play anymore. That is, because Facebook wouldn’t let users take their data back out of Facebook, Google blocked them from importing the data to begin with, which they could in the past.
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The U.S. Supreme Court may continue its march towards permitting greater corporate “rights” in the case AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, scheduled for oral argument on Tuesday. If the Court sides with the telecom giant, it will greatly weaken rules regarding an individual’s right to join class-action lawsuits, one of the most powerful legal tools available to citizens and consumers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a new paper says.
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Monopolies and the internet are the subject of articles by kdawson at Slashdot link here and Tim Wu at the Wall Street Journal link here. They note that the monopolies are innovative, but that they will not always remain so.
Actually, they are not real monopolies, but rather collectively they make up an oligopoly where the companies compete at the margins, mainly in the form of product differentiation, They are successful as long as they innovate. Why would they not continue to do so? On first thought, because they run out of innovations. But is that likely?
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Copyrights
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Congress is set to once again consider the Sen Leahy’s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act, a truly awful bill (with the appropriately awful acronym “COICA” — which sounds a little too much to my ears like “cloaca,” and if you don’t know what “cloaca” means, you can look it up here . . .). I have written a (relatively brief) “Law Professors’ Letter in Opposition,” which now has about 35 signatories, which you can read here. [There’s a summary of the bill’s provisions in the Letter — and the full text of the current version is posted here]
The bill would allow the Attorney General to institute an in rem action against the domain name of any Internet site “dedicated to infringing activities” — defined to include any site that “engages in” copyright or trademark-infringing activities where those activities, “taken together,” are “central to the activity” of the site. The court would then be authorized to issue injunctions — not against the offending website, but against “the domain name” itself — ordering the domain name registrar where the target site’s domain name was registered, and the domain name registry responsible for maintaining the authoritative database of names for the target site’s top-level domain, to “lock out” the domain name (and therefore prevent access to the site through use of the domain name).
Dell on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Topics for this podcast:
*Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
*Red Hat releases RHEL 6
*Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
*The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
*Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins
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Kernel Space
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You read the Fastest Flash article so you already know Ext4 can turbocharge your thumb drive. But you run Linux, so of course want even more! Is there anything else to do?
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Graphics Stack
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Alan Coopersmith has announced the first release candidate of X.Org 7.6. Originally the X.Org 7.6 release was supposed to come in October, but that didn’t happen and now into November we are finally seeing the first test katamari.
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Applications
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I mentioned in my Fedora 14 mini-review that I’m really enjoying Rhythmbox, the default music management application for GNOME. The other day, I decided to install the MP3 libraries for Rhythmbox. This is one of those unfortunate areas, where MP3 music is not supported “out of the box” on most Linux distributions, including Fedora. That’s because MP3 is patent-encumbered, so technically Linux distributors can’t include it without paying a license.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Here’s another “runs on Ubuntu with Wine”. Ignition is an old racing game that is now abandonware and it runs pretty well under Wine. As it’s abandonware (the company that created it no longer exists) it’s available to download from the Internet – I should point out that abandonware is yet another legal grey area (there are so many!) so check the laws in your country etc. etc.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The first step was to write a page on toggle buttons for KDE HIG, getting it reviewed and accepted on kde-usability mailing list.
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Remember a year ago when I blogged about the Social About dialog? The dialog in Amarok that replaces the dull old About dialog with something more colorful?
Last Wednesday, after an almost complete rewrite and a few days of review, I committed my KDElibs port of the Social About dialog to trunk, to be released with KDE SC 4.6.
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I’ve just returned from our local microbrewery, Brouwerij de Hemel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the place where I live after a nice dinner with my fellow KDE e.V. Board Member members. Friday and Saturday we had planned to hold a two+ day board meeting here in Nijmegen.
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The thing you do most of time is consulting files and if you type it manually it can be pretty annoying. But Kate can help 
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GNOME Desktop
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This post will either go one of two ways, either people will get more irritated or it will shed some light on why seemingly rational people keep on doing seemingly irrational things.
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Xfce
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GIO is a GObjects based abstraction layer of I/O. Overall, Xfce 4.8 is making extensive use of
GObjects.
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New Releases
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7.0 marks a huge milestone for the Webconverger browser only operating system, since the Debian base system has upgraded from “lenny” to “squeeze”.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Final shows up on 10th November 2010, almost 44 months after its previous major release (RHEL 5 was released on 14th March 2007). But at the time it came, it’s already bit obsolete for desktop use. Of course, desktop has never been a sweetpot for Red Hat. But was it really tarnishing it’s rock-stability by riding a few versions up on some packages? What was holding RH back from appropriating KDE 4.5 series, or for that matter jumping to GNOME 2.32? Sure, it must have backported some goodies from Fedora 13 and 14, but they work underneath, the worry is that it’ll put on these DEs till, say, 7 to 10 years. Moreover, KDE has undergone many improvements from its 4.3 to 4.5 versions.
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Debian Family
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It was a nice experience being able to have this much control over my system. Maybe this is why Arch is supposed to be so good. Stay tuned for a final[ish, but not really] report on the state of Debian-based Oxidized Trinity!
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That was the only issue that I ran into with the very first Alpha Build for the next SimplyMEPIS release. A lot of people reported a similar issue, so it is certain to get fixed in the very next Alpha Build, which will probably be available in a week or two.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We have featured a number of wallpaper collections here before which includes the likes of beautiful Ubuntu Maverick wallpapers, awesome Android desktop wallpapers etc. Now, here is a bunch of Linux/Ubuntu wallpaper packs among others you might like.
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Flavours and Variants
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The release of Linux Mint 10 has brought more traffic than we’ve ever seen before, and sadly also much more than our server is able to cope with. We’ve got dedicated servers for the website, the blog, the forums and the seeding of the torrents, and even with that, we’re not able to face the traffic!
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Linux Mint 10 is the first version of Linux Mint with built-in support for the B-tree File System (btrfs). Btrfs is one of the newest file systems in the Linux kernel. It is a copy on write file system with the following features: snapshotting and writtable snapshots, object-level mirroring and stripping, file system compression, multi-device support, online and offline file system checking, etc.
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Linux Mint is arguably the front-runner when it comes to Linux distributions that target Windows users looking to migrate to linux. Now Mint has released a new version named “Julia”. Mint claims to be a user-friendly OS that just works for the average user; its forte being elegance, ease of installation and usability. It began in 2006, based on Ubuntu, and basically follows Ubuntu except in some important areas which we will discuss after installation.
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This is certainly a great rescue distro: easy to use, responsive, elegant, and functional. The only flaw I found is that it does not fit a CD…which is the same case of the alpha release of SimplyMEPIS 11. Is Linux moving to Live DVDs instead of Live CDs?
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With the open source driver for the Kinect released, it didn’t take long for some Kinect hacks to surface. Now someone out there has used the open source Kinect driver to turn the device into a gesture-based multi-touch control device, allowing it to identify gestures that can be used to manipulate photos, similar to how it’s done in the Minority Report film. Check out a video of it in action after the jump, and a clip from the Minority Report film to remind you of what we’re talking about.
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Xi3 Corporation announced a compact PC it claims will be readily upgradeable, thanks to the use of one board containing the processor and memory, along with two separate I/O boards. The Xi3 Modular Computer offers a choice of AMD processors, SSD (solid state disk) storage, 1080p video output, two eSATA ports, and an “Xm3dia” expansion port, the company says.
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Sub-notebooks
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In May 2010, XO laptops from OLPC were deployed into two primary schools in Samoa – 48 XO-1.0 laptops to Laumoli Primary School children plus additional laptops to teachers and 27 XO-1.0 laptops to Paia Primary school children plus additional laptops to teachers. These schools are located on Savaii Island.
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A tithe is a voluntary tax (often 10% of income), usually paid yearly to a religious organization. I’d like to adopt this concept for free and open source software (FOSS), which in many ways is like a religion.
Please help me start a FOSS tithing movement. I’ve set up FOSSTithe.org to keep track of company pledges and amounts donated. I also set up a Google group for discussion.
I’ll go first: DuckDuckGo hereby pledges to tithe 10% of its income to free and open source software projects. I plan to keep this up indefinitely, i.e. as long as I’m in charge.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We have seen other elementary based works before like Nautilus Elementary and the Elementary 2.0 GTK theme itself, but the elementary version of Firefox here quite stand apart. The latest update brings in a name change as well. From now on, it will be called as ‘eFirefox’.
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I have been working with the latest builds of Firefox 4 for the last two months. The browser has changed tremendously, both interface wise but also under the hood. The interface changes will likely split the Firefox user base. This article is for users who prefer the “old” interface and way of working the web browser. It looks at each change and offers alternatives or options to undo it. That obviously depends on the change at hand, and there may be changes that cannot be undone at all.
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Databases
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Oracle
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The LibreOffice project has a preliminary logo. The symbol aside, I see some issues with the type. The combination of the top of the 2nd f and the dot of the i is a little unfortunate. The b and r might work for body text, but not here. Setting Libre in bold only emphasises the unfortunate proportion of the 2 words (close to, but not quite the same width).
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The Apache Software Foundation isn’t very happy with Oracle leadership of the Java Community Process. They’ve gone so far as to issue a lengthy statement saying that if certain items and conditions don’t change that they’ll leave the JCP.
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Project Releases
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Today We’ve received a letter from EditShare subscription. In this letter we’ve found that Lightworks is going to be released very soon, and we want to share these good news with you.
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Programming
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After countless commits, the generosity of dozens of proofreaders, and far too long proofreading the index, Modern Perl: the book is available!
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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New York Times obtains complete version of U.S. Justice Department report detailing the CIA’s use of Nazi émigrés for post-war intelligence purposes.
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It was the perfect story: a mix of glitz, hairspray and celebrity family-feuding that turned into a political scandal threatening to engulf the highest reaches of the French state.
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A leading Russian journalist has been left with a fractured skull, a shattered jaw and a broken leg after two men beat him close to death on the doorstep of his Moscow home.
Oleg Kashin, 30, a reporter with the influential daily newspaper, Kommersant, was rushed to hospital after the unknown assailants struck him repeatedly with a blunt instrument.
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When his head hit the pillow in his Singapore hotel room in the early hours of 18 July, Alan Shadrake must have believed his gamble had paid off.
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Finance
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Now he is forecasting mass mortgage defaults and an ugly popular uprising. The first stirrings are already visible, he says, with “anxiety giving way to the first upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America”, giving rise to a new “hard-right, anti-Europe, anti-traveller party”.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Lectures about fiscal responsibility from the occupants of a plush suite on the 20th floor of one of the fanciest hotels in Las Vegas stick in the craw like a slice of cantaloupe swallowed sideways. Appropriately, the Tea Party Express’s open bar, trays of fruit and skyline view at the Aria hotel on election night smacked more of a corporate event than a political, let alone a populist, one.
At one stage I turned to a man standing next to me and asked if he was a Tea Party supporter. “No,” he said. “I was hoping you were.” He was a state department official who had brought some foreign journalists in the hope of meeting some real Tea Party supporters to interview. But they couldn’t find any. There is a reason for that.
Symantec on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.14.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called CDE to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He’s got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo, ‘CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.’”
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Canonical’s Chase Douglas has corralled Daniel Stone’s X Input 2.1 Multi-Touch patches and have readied them for integration into the X.Org Server and related software components.
The patches for the xorg-server, protocol, and input drivers are now available on the mailing list. There’s also an X Input 2.1 Multi-Touch PPA for Ubuntu users seeing as all of the interest Canonical has had in multi-touch (with their own multi-touch framework and proposing an X Gesture Extension) and their plans to ship greater multi-touch support in Ubuntu 11.04 regardless of what’s pushed upstream in time.
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Have you ever had a machine get compromised? What did you do? Did you run rootkit checkers and reboot? Did you restore from backups or wipe and reinstall the machines, to remove any potential backdoors?
In some cases, that may not be enough. In this blog post, we’re going to describe how we can gain full control of someone’s machine by giving them a piece of hardware which they install into their computer. The backdoor won’t leave any trace on the disk, so it won’t be eliminated even if the operating system is reinstalled. It’s important to note that our ability to do this does not depend on exploiting any bugs in the operating system or other software; our hardware-based backdoor would work even if all the software on the system worked perfectly as designed.
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Applications
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YaRock is a new Qt4 music player designed to provide a nice overview of your music by allowing you to browse your music collection based on the album cover art. And this isn’t just about the visuals because YaRock allows you to browse your music in such a way (multiple ways actually) that you won’t need to use the search feature anymore (though it has that too).
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Linux users, regardless which distro you are using, it bound to come with a default PDF reader that you can use to read PDF files. In Ubuntu, that software is Evince. In most instances, Evince works well for me. It can remember the page where I last stopped and allows me to print without any problem. However, when it comes to big complex PDF files, this is where Evince starts to stutter.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week when I wrote about Canonical’s decision to go with Unity on Wayland I mentioned traditional desktop interfaces are mostly unsuitable for more mobile computers, including tablets, phones and netbooks. I should have been more specific about the interfaces themselves and not the software used to build them and, as the KDE developers pointed out to me, the Plasma Netbook workspace is an alternative for today’s smaller screens.
The popular open source and commercial desktops of Windows 7, Mac OS X and GNOME and KDE are well suited to the opulent widescreen monitors that plant themselves on computer desks like the one I’m sitting in front of now.
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Well, the ramp-up for KDE SC 4.6 has begun now, with soft freezes taking effect yesterday and the first beta due in about 1 week.
So… we have decided that there is no point to putting any more effort into the long-awaited KDEPIM 4.5.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Eugeni Dodonov, newly appointed Mandriva Cooker Manager, has posted the details of the next two Mandriva releases as well as announced the new release schedule policy. One of these release comes as a Christmas surprise, something seen from the Mandriva project before.
Dodonov posted to the Cooker mailing list that Mandriva will be releasing two releases in the coming months. The first will be seen around December 22, as a Christmas present for all Mandriva users. Mandriva 2010.2 is a freshly updated version of 2010.1, or Mandriva 2010 Spring, with all the security and bugs fixes that have been implemented since 2010.1 was released, “plus also lots of improvements, stability and performance fixes in many, many packages.”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 earlier this week. The new operating system, filled with technical innovations, performance enhancements, and customer-requested improvements, has met with positive press, as well as solid customer and partner response. However, how it’s being marketed could be much more important — to customers and to open source vendors in general.
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Former Red Hat Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Matthew Szulik is not surprised at all that the company he helped build into a global technology success story is contemplating moving from its Raleigh home.
Szulik, who retired earlier this year as chairman after stepping aside as CEO two years earlier to care for his ailing father and late father-in-law, says he faced constant questions from Red Hat’s board about whether to move the Linux software firm to Silicon Valley.
“It never stopped, Rick. It never stopped,” Szulik said in an interview.
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I was meaning to write this yesterday and before you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 final is out. But that doesn’t mean we can’t post a quick look at this one.
As most of you will know, Scientific Linux is a free clone of RHEL compiled from the original source rpm’s, and with the upstream branding removed. As such it is almost identical to the Red Hat product, but in contrast to the CentOS project the SL team are adding and tweaking a few packages to make it better suit their needs, the needs of CERN. It is cool to know that the people responsible behind the Large Hadron Collider are putting this together, and it makes me feel that on top of the proven reliability of the enterprise grade Red Hat product there is another layer of hugely competent folk that cross check and add their own finishing touches. As this distribution is used across many scientific sites and labs it has to have a sane base, be usable on laptops, and easily customizable for different sites and different spins. I imagine the labs will have somewhat different requirements from laptop users and admin staff. Scientific Linux has added wireless firmware and tools and a few packages that make life easier to the official Red Hat, and that’s a point in its favor for the user who would like to take advantage of the power of an enterprise product.
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Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the first major update for RHEL in over three years.
RHEL 5 debuted in March 2007 and used the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. Although incremental updates have added a number of kernel updates and new features, RHEL5 is starting to look aged. Of course much of the appeal of an enterprise distro is precisely that it ages well – ten years in RHEL’s case.
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Fedora
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So eventually, Fedora will switch to the Wayland Display Server.
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Looks like it is actually happening . I might actually have to try and make it work
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A couple of days back I decided a week was plenty long enough to be running a boring, stable OS like Fedora 14 on my desktop and decided to upgrade it to Rawhide instead. I’ve never gone to Rawhide this early in a Fedora cycle before (though I used to run Cooker permanently when I ran Mandriva), so it’s been an interesting ride. I’ve spent the last couple of days poking at various little issues and fixing some small things. Now I’ve got a pretty usable system going, at least for my purposes.
Before I could upgrade at all, I patched xchat-gnome to build against libnotify 0.7 and sent the patch upstream. Don’t be too impressed; it’s not exactly a complicated patch. There’s quite a lot of apps that haven’t been patched and rebuilt against libnotify 0.7 yet in Rawhide, but xchat-gnome was the only one I actually need.
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Debian Family
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Debian 5 is perfect for those who want a very stable system that provides a great deal of control to the user. It is not well suited for those looking for the latest & greatest of everything. If you bear that in mind and proceed accordingly, you might find Debian 5 to be a very useful desktop distro.
Those who want things to be a bit more up-to-date should really consider Linux Mint Debian instead. Bear in mind that LMDE is based on the testing branch (also known as Squeeze) rather than on the stable branch (Lenny). So you may not have the same sort of rock-solid stability that you get in Debian 5. It’s a bit of a trade-off, to a certain degree and it’s something you should know when you consider choosing between the two.
My experience with Debian 5 was overwhelmingly positive. I’ll be keeping it around to use regularly, though I suspect I will still lean a bit toward Linux Mint Debian a fair amount of the time.
Debian 5 is probably best suited to intermediate and advanced Linux users.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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However, there are still some issues with the Compiz based Unity (that’s why it’s only available in a PPA for now): Dash doesn’t work so to launch applications you can only use the Unity launcher (“dock”). Also, the icons in the upper panel are aligned to the left for some reason.
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Simply speaking, Unity is another visual representation to allow easy access to your installed programs. Compared to launching an application by using a keyboard shortcut, a menu entry, a docky/cairo/… dock icon or a graphical shortcut on the desktop, Unity uses a launchbar glued to left side of the screen plus a graphical menu where all applications are displayed as icons. Gone are the classic menus. Is this something to be afraid of? No, so technically speaking I see no reason to utter something negative about this way of representing an access method to launch applications.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 10 (“Julia”) has been released, based on Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat”). I’ve been running Ubuntu for about 4 years now and for the past couple of years have been running the spin off distribution “Mint“. Mint is Ubuntu with a lot of GNU GPL software added in such as Adobe flash and multimedia codecs, so it adds some functionality that isn’t possible under Ubuntu’s strict open source licenses. This moves away from the philosophy of Ubuntu but provides an even more functional distribution right out of the box. Many hardened linux users can’t stand the site of Ubuntu as it moves more into the Windows world of armchair computing and presents users with a computer they again don’t need to understand the workings of. I’ve flirted with Mandriva, Arch, Fedora, Suse, and Slackware but keep coming back to Ubuntu just for the ease of setup and the canonical repositories. My available time means I often just don’t have the time to go through some of the problems encountered when compiling from source code and hunting down dependencies. This isn’t a distrubution or linux fault – it’s just I don’t have enough understanding to race off and sort everything out, and I don’t have the time to learn more at the moment.
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I am really excited about some recent work by Marcin on starting a u-boot and Linux kernel port to the Mediatek MT6235 baseband processor.
Among GSM baseband processors, the MT6235 is a very unusual device. Unlike classic GSM baseband chips, it is not based on an MMU-less ARM7TDMI/ARM7EJS but on an ARM926EJS core. This is a full-blown ARMv5 core on which a standard Linux kernel could run.
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Phones
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Android
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Continuing with our cookery theme this morning, we now have a full tray of scrumptious-looking gingerbread Android men, courtesy of Google Mobile’s Twitter account. The whole world and his poodle already know that Gingerbread, Android’s next iterative update that’s presently expected to be given the numerical identifier of 2.3, is coming some time soon, but now Google’s taken to fanning the flames of anticipation with some home cooking.
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Come early 2011, Netflix will appear on “select Android devices,” according to the company’s official blog, which also promises a “standard, platform-wide solution” for Android in the unspecified future.
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Lenovo led us to believe that that our LePad chances weren’t terribly good, but CEO Yang Yuanqing recently told the Wall Street Journal that the Android tablet is indeed slated for a 2011 US launch.
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Sub-notebooks
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We’ve recently covered the fact that Google may have dragged its feet on delivering its cloud-focused Chrome OS operating system for too long now, but could another cloud-focused OS–backed by a startup far smaller than Google–represent another roadblock to widespread adoption of Chrome OS? Jolicluoud has a freely downloadable operating system that is completely designed to make working with cloud-based applications, ranging from Facebook to Google’s own apps, easy. I’ve used it extensively, and written about how it may have a strong future as a secondary operating system–one you use in addition to your primary one. Now, the first netbooks based on Jolicloud are coming to market, ahead of Chrome OS-based ones.
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UNR 10.04 Lucid Lynx is fast, sexy and useful. It plays popular media, suspends and resumes in a blink, has an eon of battery life, interfaces smoothly with all kinds of network shares, printers, gadgets, and whatnot, allows full customization, allows decent multi-tasking, and does not play any foul games.
UNR 10.10 does none of this except being sexy. You may eventually get it to do all kinds of pretty things, but you will be isolated in a virtual world, where your entirely experience is limited to online. Why plug in a USB drive or connect to your second box via Samba when you have Ubuntu One to share files? Why delete anything, after all, we’re in the era of information. Why bother where your stuff goes, use the inline search? Right? Wrong.
I wholeheartedly recommend Lucid Lynx for your netbooks. And it will be fully supported until 2013. But UNR 10.10 Maverick Meerkat is a flop. It may be a revolution, but I’m one of the victims, left bleeding in the ditch, covered with an old newspaper.
It’s amazing how good the desktop edition is compared to this. Really stunning. I really wonder where all the decisions come from and how they all blend. Using the distro name alongside the UNR badge does the autumn release a disgrace. Purrty and evil.
Stay away from UNR 10.10. If and when I miraculously discover how to tame this beast, I might update you, but the first impression is one of impotence and despair. Don’t touch this. Dedoimedo out.
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These are frugal times for business, and an organization starting out might have very little money to spend on IT. Even if you’re part of an established business, you’re probably feeling the pinch.
Here are five extremely useful computing resources that are free of charge for small business users–unlike some “free” services you might see that are only for home users. These choices have few if any restrictions, and are established services unlikely to shut up shop anytime soon.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Labs is back with an all new Design Challenge! We’re calling on all data visualization wizards to participate and help the Test Pilot & Mozilla Metrics teams create visual answers to the question: “How do people use Firefox?”
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As a longtime Firefox user, I’m understandably jazzed about version 4, the first major update of the browser since 3.5 dropped in June, 2009. Firefox 4 is due to arrive in early 2011, and with it a host of new features.
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Databases
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Launched by MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius, the MariaDB MySQL fork has been released for downloading as version 5.2. The open source database is based on MySQL 5.1.51, although MariaDB contains additional functions. The release notes say that all commands, interfaces, libraries, and APIs from MySQL also run in MariaDB so it’s a drop in replacement for current installations. No innovations were added following the Release Candidate; instead, the developers concentrated on troubleshooting.
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Oracle
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The litigation battle between Google and Oracle continues to heat up. The search giant fired the latest volley with a filing that outlines twenty separate defenses against Oracle’s claim that Google’s Android mobile platform infringes intellectual property that Oracle obtained from Sun. Google argues that no infringement has transpired, and that it isn’t responsible even if evidence of actual infringement is found.
This dispute erupted in August when Oracle sued Google over its use of the Java programming language in Android, even though Java is ostensibly an open language and Google uses its own clean-room implementation. Oracle grants a license to the necessary intellectual property to developers who can demonstrate their Java implementations conform with Java standards. Oracle has, however, refused to provide the requisite compatibility test suite under terms that are acceptable to third-party Java implementors—including the Harmony project, which Google relies on for its Java library stack.
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Licensing
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In July we launched the idea on the mailing list to setup a Nooku Incubator where developers can collaborate on building new an innovative Nooku Components. Over the past few months we have been making steady progress. The Nooku Incubator is being setup as we speak and will open it’s doors in the coming weeks.
In order to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of and commitment to Nooku when they choose to participate in the Nooku Incubator we have created a Nooku Contributor Agreement.
In simple terms, the Nooku Contributor Agreement states that:
* You retain the ownership of the Contribution
* You grant us a copyright license under the terms of the GNU LGPLv3/GNU GPLv3/GNU AGPLv3.
* You warrant that your Contribution doesn’t violate the rights of any third parties.
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Openness/Sharing
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Where do conservative urbanists, liberal activists, and free culture advocates congregate? Last week it was in Berlin at the first ever International Commons Conference (ICC) held by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Boll Foundation. The combination of traditional and digital commons was explored as a transformational paradigm for the first time through an international conference in keynote addresses, conference tracks, breakout groups, and plenary sessions over two days.
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Ahead of the EU-US summit on 20 November, MEPs agreed their recommendations on positions the Council should take regarding key transatlantic issues such as economic co-operation, personal data protection, the introduction of a US travel fee and recent leaks of US classified military documents on Iraq.
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How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google? It wouldn’t be impossible, but for even a moderate Internet user, it would be a real pain. Forgoing Google and Amazon is just inconvenient; forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet’s dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.
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If you want to realize just how amazing the level of progress has been with the internet, realize this: it was just 20 years ago, today, that Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web…
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Science
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There’s a science behind the comments on websites.
It’s actually quite predictable how much chatter a post on Slashdot or Wikipedia will attract, according to a new study of several websites with large user bases. And the thread of an online conversation — whether it sticks to the original topic or users comment on each other’s comments — can be modeled as a tree with discussions veering off on branches, researchers report online November 2 at arXiv.org.
The findings give hope to social scientists trying to understand broader phenomena, like how rumors about a candidate spread during a campaign or how information about street protests flows out of a country with state-controlled media.
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It changed how we program and think about the human brain
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Now a 29-year-old engineer and business owner, Lemire-Elmore has found himself among the vanguard of a thriving online counterculture. This group rejects traditional bicycles, and chooses to make their own bikes propelled by battery-powered electric motors. Many of them believe they’re helping to create future communities that will have fewer polluting vehicles and less traffic congestion.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A U.S.-developed video game that lets players try to kill Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro sparked an angry reaction from Cuba on Wednesday, the latest charge in the long history of bitter U.S.-Cuba ties.
“What the United States government did not achieve in more than 50 years, it now tries to do virtually,” said a story on government-run website www.cubadebate.cu.
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David Kernell, the former Tennessee student convicted of hacking into Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, was sentenced on Friday to one year in custody.
Kernell, 22, was convicted earlier this year of misdemeanor computer intrusion and a felony count of obstruction of justice. The jury found him not guilty of a wire-fraud charge and hung on a fourth charge for identity theft, after four days of deliberating.
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Former Tennessee student David Kernell, who was convicted of hacking into Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, was sentenced today to one year in custody.
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A former Secret Service agent says in his new book that he nearly shot President Lyndon B. Johnson hours after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
In “The Kennedy Detail,” Gerald Blaine recalls standing guard outside the Washington home of newly sworn-in President Johnson in the early hours of Nov. 23, 1963.
Blaine heard footsteps approaching. He picked up his submachine gun and, in the darkness, pointed it at the chest of a man who turned out to be Johnson.
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Sports, in its most profound sense, can be cathartic in ways beyond our comprehension. In times of turmoil and anguish, sports’ therapeutic abilities can lead us out of the darkness and toward a better place — if not tangibly, then in the recesses of our minds.
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On a planet hosting 6.7 billion human beings, having proof you’re unique is of tantamount importance. The ear, it turns out, may be the best identification yet.
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This morning, I tried to fly out of San Diego International Airport but was refused by the TSA. I had been somewhat prepared for this eventuality. I have been reading about the millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray machines and the possible harm to health as well as the vivid pictures they create of people’s naked bodies. Not wanting to go through them, I had done my research on the TSA’s website prior to traveling to see if SAN had them. From all indications, they did not. When I arrived at the security line, I found that the TSA’s website was out of date. SAN does in fact utilize backscatter x-ray machines.
I made my way through the line toward the first line of “defense”: the TSA ID checker. This agent looked over my boarding pass, looked over my ID, looked at me and then back at my ID. After that, he waved me through. SAN is still operating metal detectors, so I walked over to one of the lines for them. After removing my shoes and making my way toward the metal detector, the person in front of me in line was pulled out to go through the backscatter machine. After asking what it was and being told, he opted out. This left the machine free, and before I could go through the metal detector, I was pulled out of line to go through the backscatter machine. When asked, I half-chuckled and said, “I don’t think so.” At this point, I was informed that I would be subject to a pat down, and I waited for another agent.
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Police have arrested 33 people during protests on the metro system in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
They said they were protesting about the poor service of the underground network, which commuter groups say has deteriorated rapidly in recent months.
Police said the passengers prevented a train from leaving a station, and accused them of sabotage.
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Finance
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Investment bankers and traders in Britain will have their mobile phone conversations recorded in the latest step by the country’s financial regulator to crack down on insider trading and market abuse.
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Personal belongings seized from jailed financier Bernard Madoff will be auctioned off in New York on Saturday.
All of the proceeds will go to compensate the Ponzi schemer’s investors.
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It is the biggest rummage sale in Wall Street history — what one investment company calls “the Great Liquidation.”
Two years after Washington rescued Wall Street, hundreds of billions of dollars of bad investments — in many cases, the same ones that poisoned banks and then the economy — are going up for sale.
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Leaders of 20 major economies on Friday refused to back a U.S. push to make China boost its currency’s value, keeping alive a dispute that raises fears of a global trade war amid criticism that cheap Chinese exports are costing American jobs.
A joint statement issued by the leaders including President Barack Obama and China’s Hu Jintao tried to recreate the unity that was evident when the Group of 20 rich and developing nations held its first summit two years ago during the global financial meltdown.
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The Group of 20 summit for heads of government this weekend will apparently “hail bank reform,” particularly as manifest in the Basel III process that has resulted in higher capital requirements for banks. According to leading authorities on the issue, however, the Basel process is closer to a disaster than a success.
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President Barack Obama, capping a far-flung Asian trip of mixed results, assured Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Sunday that getting the Senate to ratify the START nuclear weapons treaty is a “top priority” of his administration.
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The harsh aftermath of the global financial crisis of two years ago still weighed on corporate chiefs and political leaders as they gathered on Thursday in closed-door discussions on the sidelines of the two-day meeting of the Group of 20 economic powers.
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President Obama’s inability to secure a free-trade agreement with South Korea reveals in sharp relief the limits of his leverage overseas after a devastating midterm election.
Obama’s visit to four Asian democracies is aimed at promoting trade and other economic partnerships to boost long-term job creation in the United States, where voters pounded his Democratic Party this month over a moribund employment market.
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Can you remember when the Federal Reserve was above criticism? When politicians vied for Alan Greenspan’s favor and fell all over themselves praising his wisdom?
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Voters who demanded Washington rein in the nation’s spiraling debt are getting a message from President Barack Obama and leaders of his deficit commission: It’ll hurt.
A proposal released Wednesday by the bipartisan leaders of the commission suggested cuts to Social Security benefits, deep reductions in federal spending and higher taxes for millions of Americans to stem the flood of red ink that they say threatens the nation’s very future. The popular child tax credit and mortgage interest deduction would be eliminated.
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In a politically incendiary plan, the bipartisan leaders of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission proposed curbs in Social Security benefits, deep reductions in federal spending and higher taxes for millions of Americans Wednesday to stem a flood of red ink that they said threatens the nation’s very future.
The White House responded coolly, some leading lawmakers less so to proposals that target government programs long considered all but sacred. Besides Social Security, Medicare spending would be curtailed. Tax breaks for many health care plans, too. And the Pentagon’s budget, as well, in a plan designed to cut total deficits by as much as $4 trillion over the next decade.
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President Obama and President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea failed to reach an agreement Thursday on a long-awaited free-trade agreement, saying they had decided instead to give their negotiators more time to work out differences, which revolved around Korean imports of American autos and beef.
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Janet Tavakoli, Tavakoli Structured finance, and I discuss bank and forclosure fraud via Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Countrywide, Bank of America, Citigroup etc. in the video commentary above.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) faces a class action lawsuit over two collateralized debt obligations it packaged and sold in 2006 and 2007, according to its latest quarterly regulatory filing.
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The Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs learned in mid-2009 that one of its traders had been formally notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission that he was the subject of an investigation. But Goldman did not tell other regulators about the inquiry for about seven months, a violation of securities regulations.
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Ben Bernanke in from of Congress stated: “The Federal Reserve will not Monetize the debt.” Audio can be found here.
Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said this past Monday: “The Federal Reserve will buy $110 billion a month in Treasuries, an amount that, annualized, represents the projected deficit of the federal government for next year. For the next eight months, the nation’s central bank will be monetizing the federal debt.”
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Natixis SA are in settlement talks to resolve a lawsuit over the termination of credit-default swaps that was scheduled to go to trial today.
Judge Elizabeth Gloster of the High Court of Justice in London agreed to postpone the start of trial until 2 p.m. today after Anthony Grabiner, a lawyer for Goldman Sachs, said the parties were likely to resolve the dispute “around lunchtime.”
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Goldman Sachs has limited its clearing services to accounts that manage more than $5 million, says Bloomberg.
Until now, the bank has cleared trades for anyone managing $1 million or more.
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Leading economists and financial experts say that our economy cannot recover until the too big to fails are broken up. See this and this. The giant banks have been sucking money out of the real economy and making us all poorer. But the government is refusing to even rein in the mega-banks, let alone break them up.
One of the too big to fails – JP Morgan – manipulates the silver market. See this, this, this, this and this.
According to the National Inflation Association, JP Morgan is “short 30,000 silver contracts representing 150 million ounces of silver. This is one of the largest concentrated short positions in the history of all commodities, representing 31% of all open COMEX silver contracts.” This could leave JP Morgan exposed if people go out and buy physical silver in large numbers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The CBC is reporting that an important government website had a significant security glitch that led to the disclosure of sensitive personal information of about 75 people.
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People who use the internet may have greater protection from electronic eavesdroppers following a consultation on changes to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
The Home Office recommendations include an explicit opt-in for information exchanged between a sender and receiver to be intercepted by a third party, and a civil sanction for “unintentional” breaches.
The changes arise from complaints that Phorm, which makes web advertisement-serving technology, bases its selection of ads on the illegal tracking of web browsers’ online behaviour. BT was condemned for testing Phorm twice without first telling its internet customers.
Complaints were escalated to the European Commission, which said that the UK’s implementations of the EU’s data protection and e-privacy directives were flawed.
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An official with Saudi Arabia’s communications authority says it has blocked Facebook because the popular social networking website doesn’t conform with the kingdom’s conservative values.
The official says Saudi’s Communications and Information Technology Commission blocked the site Saturday and an error message shows up when Internet users try to access it.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Report on “EU Summit on ‘The Open Internet and Net Neutrality in Europe” Brussels, 11 November 2010
An Internet slow lane of best efforts and a fast-lane of telco-surcharged managed services is being pushed by Europe’s telecoms industry. Will the EU resist it and support the needs of citizens? This was a key question arising out of the EU summit on Net Neutrality.’
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I’m currently in the process of writing my second novel for NaNoWriMo and getting ready to self publish my first novel, so this is a very busy month for me. So to start with, during November when I have any time at all, I thought I’d start answering some of the questions Canadians have asked about Usage based Billing (UBB) BB in the CBC comments section of a couple of the online articles they have published since the CRTC approval this terrible policy.
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Politicians like simple stories and simple solutions even when the issues are complex as with net neutrality. I get it. So they get told simple stories by lobbyists to get them to behave in a way that is beneficial to certain commercial interests. I get that. Complaints that the debates on net neutrality are dominated by extremes are legitimate. But the logical leap then to the argument that net neutrality purists should be dismissed and commercial interests prevail – i.e. saying one end of the spectrum is right and the other wrong – is a leap too far.
Jean-Jacques Sahels of Skype and La Quadrature du net’s Jérémie Zimmermann, for example, were very badly treated by the first afternoon session chair, Malcolm Harbour, who insisted in intervening in their contributions to the debate and disagreeing with them. At the same time Mr Harbour both explicitly and implicitly praised the contributions of those selling the anti net neutrality message. Mr Harbour’s duty as an MEP is to look to the public interest and undermining those who are attempting to speaking up for the public interest should not be part of his remit.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Howard Knopf has another post on Access Copyright and its effort to exclude 99 objectors to its tariff and to convince the Copyright Board of Canada to issue an “interim tariff” so that an important source of revenue continues to flow even as the collective demands a massive increase in fees. Knopf points to the many legal reasons why the interim request should be rejected in his post, which comes just as Access Copyright posts a open letter to the post-secondary education community. The letter claims that many in the education community are confused and frustrated by the current situation and professes to remain “open to negotiation so that we may continue to play a role in helping your institution reach its teaching and learning objectives.”
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Professor Lessig is right. His call for global copyright reform is welcome and timely. However, past WIPO led efforts in this area have rather been unsuccessful. New reform initiatives should draw lessons from previous attempts in order to increase their prospects for success.
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ACTA
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Today adopted: European Parliament resolution of 11 November 2010 on the forthcoming EU-US Summit and the Transatlantic Economic Council
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HP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Credit: TinyOgg
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11.13.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.
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Desktop
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Ubuntu-dedicated hardware company System76 have announced plans to begin shipping internationally.
The announcement, which will see orders sent to the UK from the end of this month onwards, is fantastic news to everybody everywhere. The more easily-accessible channels for people to acquire solid and well-designed Linux-running machines the better.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Laura Cowen, Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Tony Whitmore and Mark Johnson bring you episode 20 of season 3 of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!
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In this special episode, Fab reviews the Amazon Kindle 3 and we discuss the issues around it.
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This week on the show: Telstra violating the GPL, Ubuntu wants to move away from X, FSFLA says the Linux kernel is open core, Google sues the US government, Apple finally kills the Xserve and much more…
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s release of an open-source Android 2.2 update indicates official, carrier-supported versions of Froyo should be on the way soon.
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The much-anticipated Samsung Galaxy Tab has arrived, giving the Apple iPad a high-profile rival with which to compete. How do the two devices measure up to each other? The Galaxy’s smaller screen has its advantages and drawbacks. Galaxy trumps iPad in terms of Flash video support, but will consumers care? And how long will Galaxy’s advantages in areas like cameras and multitasking really last?
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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There’s a new Wine development release out this Friday afternoon that incorporates a few new features that have been brewing within the development community over the past two weeks. This release is Wine 1.3.7.
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Desktop Environments
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A month ago there was the 1.0 beta release of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which are the software libraries created to help in the development of the E17 desktop. EFL 1.0 also marks a point of API/ABI stability and is being used by projects outside of E17 proper, such as with Samsung’s Enlightenment usage. Today the second beta of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is now available.
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GNOME Desktop
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In the Ubuntu Desktop team we’re currently packaging GNOME 3 components for Ubuntu as per the blueprint decided at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit.
If you’re already brave enough to be running Natty, then you can additionally try some new GNOME 3 applications by adding the GNOME3 builds PPA into your sources. Expect the usual – the packages may not work perfectly, and it’s non-trivial to downgrade, so be warned!
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These days some people have started to ask about the current GNOME Shell accessibility status, probably a collateral effect of the Boston Summit, as Joanmarie Diggs and Alejandro Leiva (Orca maintainers) were talking there with GNOME Shell developers, mainly about the current Universal Access UI and how fit Orca on the new ui experience.
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Easily configure the GDM, ‘login manager’ to the rest of us, with ‘Change GDM GUI’ – a simple script for changing various aspects of the login interface.
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New Releases
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Linux Mint 10 “Julia” has been released today. “Julia” is based on Ubuntu 10.10 and among the significant changes in this version, are:
New version of the Mint Menu (available in the MintMenu WebUpd8 PPA for Ubuntu users) that highlights newly installed applications, finds and installs software from the repositories, includes search engines, now supports GTK themes and more.
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Red Hat Family
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A similar switch to stronger signing was already made in Fedora 11. This switch involved some changes to the RPM application.
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Fedora
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As has been previously announced OLPC is planning on moving to an ARM processor to advance the XO platform. The major advantage is similar computing power while having a massive reduction in power usage so as to maximise runtime.
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Just as with nature, we have cyclical changes within the Fedora Project as well. I think it’s both useful and healthy to point out a few of those changes, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I want to point out that every person in the Fedora community is a potential leader. Our policies of rotating leadership help ensure that everyone who is so inclined has a chance to lead and serve. Second, I’d like to personally thank those people who have diligently served the Fedora community, and wish them success as they move on to other endeavors.
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In recent days we have been talking a lot about Ubuntu’s plans to deploy the Wayland Display Server and the new Wayland activity, NVIDIA’s plans to not support Wayland, and John Carmack’s interests to support Wayland, but that isn’t the only solution in the world. Red Hat’s Adam Jackson has addressed the Fedora plans to support Wayland.
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We started officially the process of BoxGrinder inclusion into Fedora. I created a BoxGrinder feature page. Check it out and tell me what you think about it! We hope to have BoxGrinder included in Fedora 15 as a feature. This means that after Fedora 15 will be release BoxGrinder will be highlighted in release notes and therefore more visible to users.
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Fedora, a Linux-based operating system, is sponsored by Red Hat (News – Alert), the world’s most trusted provider of open source technology, and the Fedora Project, is a worldwide community of people who use and build free software from all over the world. They want to encourage the creation and spread of free code and content by collaborating together.
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Fedora’s refusal to accept the SQLninja tool into its repositories has met with considerable criticism. The tool attempts to penetrate Microsoft SQL Server-based systems via SQL injection attacks in order to open a back door on these systems. What is an evil hacker tool for hijacking computers to some, is a useful tool for testing their own servers to others. The Fedora project leaders chose the former point of view and unanimously voted against adding the tool in a (virtual) board meeting.
However, the issue was discussed at length, and various pros and cons were considered. In the end, the Fedora board decided against the tool to prevent potential legal claims against Fedora – even the sharing of hacker tools is an offence in some countries.
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Flame wars are a part of open source development and communities. A new effort called openrespect.org wants to try and change the tone of cross-distribution name-calling, but I think they’ve really gotten off on the wrong foot.
Openrespect.org is founded by Ubuntu Linux community manager Jono Bacon, as a way to encourage mutual respect across Linux distributions. Apparently though that mutual respect didn’t fully extend to Red Hat’s community Fedora Linux distribution.
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Debian Family
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It looks like the desktop team has selected the artwork (including wallpaper and GDM theme) for the upcoming Debian 6.0 release.
The winner of the small contest is SpaceFun by Valessio Brito. Included below is the splash screen, click here to see all the pictures.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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You may have noticed the heated discussions on Ubuntu and Canonical lately. The decision to move to Unity as the main desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and Canonical insisting on developers assigning their copyright to them hasn’t made them many new friends. Whether you agree with Canonical or not some people seem to speak very harshly of their latest actions and deviate from a well-mannered debate. There seems to be an increase of rudeness in the open source / free software debate. To counter these tendencies Ubuntu’s community manager Jono Bacon launched openrespect.org.
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Ubuntu 11.04 a.k.a. Natty Narwhal alpha is scheduled to be released on December 2nd: (see the complete release schedule, here).Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily ISO files are available to download (Note:Don’t install it on production machine), but you can test in VirtualBox.
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am pleased to announce that the proceedings from the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida are now available.
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The following idea on creating an by Daniel Planas was posted to the Ayatana mailing list. I think it’s quite a novel idea so thought I’d share it here.
Calling for ‘intelligent indicators’ Daniel’s idea proposes that the ‘Sound Menu’ panel icon changes to that of ‘headphones’ when, you guessed it, headphones are plugged in.
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This page summarizes many of the outcomes of the event, and for each track there is a link to further detailed notes. Please note: these are proceedings and plans, and some of these things may not get completed as planned for whatever reason. As such, please read this list as a set of goals, and not a promise of what Ubuntu 11.04 will include.
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Want to show off your Ubuntu desktop in the cloud ? Perhaps you want to demo it to some Windows or OSX friends. Perhaps new users at your loco event want to play with Ubuntu for a bit. Well, look no further. In this article I will create an Ubuntu maverick 10.10 desktop in the Amazon ec2 cloud, connect to it using the x2go terminal server, which leverages the excellent NX remote display libraries
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Yesterday in the ARM world there was not only a major milestone in that of unveiling the ARM Mali T-604 GPU for embedded devices with much faster graphics and even OpenCL GPGPU capabilities, but it was also marked by the first Linaro release. Linaro was formed less than a year ago but out now is their first engineering release, a.k.a. Linaro 10.11.
Linaro 10.11 marks the completion of their first engineering cycle and consists of tools and software for the latest ARM Cortex-A9 / Cortex-A8 processors. Celebrating this milestone was a press release that indicates there are now 70 open-source developers on Linaro’s engineering team (a collection of Canonical employees and from other ARM stakeholders), and signals there is momentum gaining for the Linaro 11.05 as their second engineering release.
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Not-for-profit engineering firm Linaro has released a 10.11 version of its open source Linux code and tools for ARM Cortex processors. Meanwhile, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments are showcasing multiple Linux distros — including MeeGo and Ubuntu, running on Cortex-A9 SoCs — using Linaro-related code or tools.
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Linaro, a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate embedded Linux development for the ARM architecture, has announced its first software release. Version 10.11 of the group’s software stack quietly debuted this week. The group appears to be attracting interest and making steady progress.
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Phones
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French citizens have been enjoying webOS 2.0 with their morning baguette for over two weeks, but it’s one step closer to home today — Pocket-lint reports that the Palm Pre 2 will launch in the United Kingdom this Friday.
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One app I’ve been wishing for on my Palm Pre is Skype — since I don’t have a cellular plan on it, being able to place calls via Wi-Fi would be pretty handy.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Despite the fact that the Nokia N9 was supposed to be the first MeeGo handset to be launched by the Finnish phone maker, it appears that the new mobile platform might be first appearing on the Nokia N900.
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Intel is pushing their apps market for Atom based devices (called the AppUp) which targets netbooks and now developers have been approached to push development on the new SDK for MeeGo app development for mobiles that Intel has outed. The Intel SDK is in association with Nokia and allows “using Qt* development framework from Nokia to create MeeGo application”. This would take off the constraint of building apps only for netbooks and bring smartphone app makers to the platform.
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Getting a Qt app into the Ovi store has always been a bit hairy – especially as the list of supported devices was amazingly short when the distribution started!
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Linpus , one of the leading Linux installations on open source solutions across platforms will be bringing out a Multi Touch edition of the popular OS with its basis in the MeeGo OS. Linpus announced today a full Meego-based multi-touch solution which is not just an operating system, but also includes a comprehensive suite of key applications including: an ereader, browser, media player, photo viewer, virtual keyboard and webcam.
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I would like to document my process for getting Meego Handset to run in a Maemo chroot on the N900 using Easy Debian, so you don’t have to multi-boot your phone.
But I can’t document everything in one post, and I’m documenting as I go, so this first post will be the just first steps: how to get an Easy Debian compatible image out of the raw Meego images that the Meego project is posting.
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MeeGo has been created by Nokia and Intel together to begin a shining new era in mobile computing.They created MeeGo, a Linux-based open software platform with a vision that all kinds of hardware devices viz. Mobile computers, PC tablets, media-based phones, Tvs and infotainment systems of vehicle. MeeGo is an open platform and can be used in new Nokia phones. Nokia N10 and Nokia E5x are those mobile phone which will launch in later 2010 or 2011 with Meego operating system.Thus, applications developed for this OS would easily sell Nokia’s Ovi Store.
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Android
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The browser wars have extended to mobile devices, and that’s good news for consumers.
Last week, Mozilla released a second Firefox beta for Android. Yesterday, Opera released its first Opera Mobile beta for Android. Neither is ready for prime time, much less used on more than a tiny fraction of phones, but already I see them as a step forward.
Why? Because now there’s an important new front in the browser wars.
And while that means more stress for browser makers and more testing for Web developers, it holds the potential to dramatically improve browsing for the rest of us.
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Today marks the 6th birthday of the popular Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Taken up from the source code of the Netscape browser, Firefox powers on through today to serve more than 400 million (and 45% of The PC Report’s readers) in performing just what it’s built for.
Throughout its run, Firefox has aimed to come first in the browser wars by providing unique features such as browser tabs, anti phishing technologies and of course, the several themes and extensions created by third parties.
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If you visit whitehouse.gov, you might see a screenshot for a very familiar browser…
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Firefox 4 will come with better support for HTML5 forms. In the latest beta we are experimenting with a set of new features: more inputs types (email, url, tel, search), new attributes (placeholder, autofocus, list), decoupled forms and different validation mechanisms. This is thanks mostly to the hard work of Mounir Lamouri.
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A Lego Mindstorms robotics kit controlled by an HTC Nexus One smartphone successfully untangled a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in 12.5 seconds at this week’s ARM developer conference in Silicon Valley.
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With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7, Mozilla returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings.
According to tests run by Computerworld, the new browser is about three times faster than the current production version of Firefox in rendering JavaScript, and lags behind only Opera among the top five browser makers.
On Wednesday, Mozilla launched Firefox 4 Beta 7, a preview that includes all the features slated to make it into the final, polished version next year.
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One of the most significant changes to the user interface for Firefox 4 was the rolling of the old menu items into one button, something we have called on this blog the “combined menu.” We’ve addressed the impact of this change in other posts, such as this one. We thought of one obvious follow-up: how often do people ‘bounce away’ from the combined menu before clicking something in it?
We define the bounce rate as this: given a user clicking the combined menu button, what is the proportion of instances where users do not click on one of the menu items? We built a small NumPy library to help us analyze the sequence of user-browser interactions.
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Sub-notebooks
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Just a few weeks ago, we got word (by way of a few Tweets) that Jolicloud was seemingly — if the images were any indication — in the final stages of developing a netbook of its own. Well, we’ve just gotten some official news on just that topic.
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Jolicloud – the company behind the Ubuntu-derived netbook operating system of the same name- are to launch their very own net/notebook dubbed the ‘Jolibook’.
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As we reported earlier today, Cloud OS startup Jolicloud has confirmed the “Jolibook” Netbook is coming this month, although we don’t know the price. Well, we may not know the price, but strolling round the Monaco Media Forum today I button-holed founder Tariq Krim, and got him to reveal where the Jolibook will appear first: the UK.
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Global Pulse, the UN agency devoted to monitoring “the impact of compound crises on vulnerable populations” is turning to real-time data and open-source development to stay on top of challenges.
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A European Commission study found that “The existing base of quality FLOSS applications… would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally.” That study was in 2006 and estimated the code base doubles every 18 to 24 months. There may not be much in the way of a knowledge economy right now, but there’s no reason to start from where everyone else did.
“Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services (in the EU) could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010,” continues the EC study. Not every line of code has to be monetized as strictly a line of code; KAUST could early on work with others to demonstrate that open source can be a viable business model option.
To facilitate this means some basic investments in connectivity. ITU data shows Saudi Arabia with 31.3 Internet users per 100 people, whereas the US has 75.8. By encouraging open standards and understanding the birth of the Internet as a platform for innovation, we start to find some ways to guide investments and policy.
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In the past, Microsoft used to be willing to admit that unauthorized copies helped the company, as it helped establish its software as a near-monopoly in certain areas, and kept competitors out. But, in the past few years, the company has become more adamant, not just about denying any possible “benefits” to unauthorized copies, but in trying to crack down on them at any cost. The NY Times has an article highlighting Microsoft’s “fight” against unauthorized copies, and does so with dramatic (and cinematic) claims about how organized crime groups are turning to software copying, as an alternative to drugs.
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Google has updated and re-released open-source software for cleaning, analyzing, and transforming data sets, now called Google Refine.
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Events
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One of the conferences was FSCONS 2010 – the Free Society and Nordic Summit. Despite its rather vague name, this was actually a meeting of a decent proportion of the free software world in the Scandinavian, Finnish and Icelandic worlds, with a goodly dollop of free content people thrown in for good measure.
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Three days later and with the event somewhat filtered in my mind, there is no doubt that it was well worth the opportunity costs and then some.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Sumo Development
* Careening toward feature completion.
* Please file bugs for string changes ASAP so we can get the new strings on Verbatim.
* Please keep testing and filing bugs.
* Test Day on Friday.
* Michael to file a bug that all articles are marked as “for Firefox 4″ when imported
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Firefox 4 beta 7 is out, and now is the best time to evaluate your add-on’s compatibility with the next major Firefox release. This is the first “feature frozen” release, meaning that there will be no more major changes performed to the UI, APIs or features in Firefox. Other than bug fixes and stability improvements, this the Firefox that will make it to the public, and you should be able to upgrade your add-on to work for this beta without having to worry about something being broken in the following betas and release candidates. Firefox 4 is coming! If you want your add-on to be compatible, the time is now.
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This project seeks to develop an application programming interface (API) for publishing Open Education Resources (OER) to remixable repositories. An API will provide developers a roadmap for navigating the education highway of OER repositories and and make it possible for the wider community to create services and tools to support wide-scale adoption and production of OER.
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Oracle
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Look at this, though. Google also says Oracle’s Exhibit J [PDF] attached to its amended complaint, Oracle’s side-by-side comparison of Java (J2SE) and “Android versions of PolicyNodeImpl.java” that seemed to establish copying, isn’t accurate, in that Oracle “has redacted or deleted from the materials shown in Exhibit J both expressive material and copyright headers that appear in the actual materials, which are significant elements and features of the files in question.” Wow and double wow. If that proves true, it reminds me of the 300 lines of code “proof” from SCO in the SCO v. IBM case, when IBM showed the judge at a hearing that Sandeep Gupta’s exhibit to a declaration he’d filed for SCO had “juxtaposed” code in such a way as to “give the appearance of similarity when, in fact, no similarity exists.”
But there’s more. Lots more, including a defense of misuse, alleging that Oracle, and Sun before it, has “impermissibly expand[ed] the scope of the Patents-in-Suit by requiring licensees to license items not covered by Oracle’s alleged intellectual property in order to receive a license to Oracle’s alleged intellectual property.”
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One of the most shocking aspects of Oracle’s lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringement was its unexpected nature. The assumption had been that Google was a big company with lots of lawyers and engineers, and had presumably checked out everything before proceeding with the Android project. And then suddenly it looked as if it had made the kind of elementary mistakes a newbie startup might commit.
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According to golem.de, a German IT news magazine, the Document Foundation has announced its first goals for the office suite LibreOffice. The dependency of Java shall be reduced and a general refactoring of all components is in the plans.
The number of developers has risen to over 90, which is far more than OpenOffice had.
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CMS
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According to the Small Business Administration, small businesses account for 99.7 percent of all U.S. businesses and employ about half of all private sector employees. This makes sense, since the definition of a “small” business is pretty big: “an independent business having fewer than 500 employees.” Have you ever been in a crowd of 500 people? Living in NYC all my life, I have, and I can tell you it’s pretty nerve wracking at times (think crammed train during rush hour).
So how do you get your “big” small business working effectively together? Well, with enterprise technology, of course. But although small businesses may have strength in numbers, their IT budgets usually fall short on the financial spectrum. The technologists in these companies, usually a one to two man crew, look for bargain-basement-priced technologies that have the punch of their larger-priced cousins.
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Education
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Yuvi tasked one student with creating a release of GTKJFileChooser, a file chooser dialog that has contributed to OpenJDK. The student created a patch to bump the version number, wrote some release notes, and created distribution files.
Four other students were unsure what project to work on, so I suggested Firefox. I pointed them at a Mozilla Education wiki page with a tutorial on altering Firefox’s XUL code. One of the attendees already knew Mercurial; he worked quickly, and was the first to discover that the article pointed at a revision that does not compile.
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Project Releases
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I’d like to announce a side-project I’ve been working on: The Light Display Manager (LightDM).
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It must be time to update on how progress is going with LightDM.
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My original motivation was to support annotation of texts in http://openshakespeare.org/ so we can collaboratively build up critical notes but since then I’ve seen this need again and again — in drafting new open data licenses, with scholars working on medieval canon law, when taking my own notes on academic papers.
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Burg Manager is an application to easily install Burg (along with the default Burg themes and a Burg emulator) and change most of the Burg settings such as the timeout, download and install new themes, remove Burg and restore Grub 2, set the default operating system and many advanced options.
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Licensing
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As some of our regular followers know, Fusion Garage has been asked to release the portion of our joojoo OS that falls under GPL guidelines, and we are in the process of finalizing the software for public distribution. This is not a case of avoiding the issue. We will be releasing the GPL-related portion of our original OS shortly Given the size of our code base and given that we are still a small team working on several things at once, we are still in the process of filtering the Fusion Garage code components from the open source components, but we have every intention of following through on our commitments in this area.
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Openness/Sharing
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This white paper, It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology, examines how intellectual property (IP) law impacts the rapidly maturing technology of 3D printing, and how incumbents who feel threatened by its growth might try to use IP law to stop it.
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3D printing means turning images into solid objects.
Not too long ago, the idea was the stuff of sci-fi writers. But in the digital 21st century, 3D printers exist. And since they’re open source, anyone with the right skills and knowledge can make one.
When mixed with just the precise amount of moisture and deposited appropriately by a 3D printer, you’ll get yourself a near-rock-hard mold suitable for sloshing in a hot metallic liquid of your choice. What will your first cast be? We know what Open3DP’s will be (see image above).
Last week, while unloading my dishwasher, I had a “eureka!” moment in which I suddenly understood why the machine had not been adequately cleaning up the cups and baby bottles in the upper rack: a small rubber tube had split open, and much of the water meant for the upper rack was spilling over the plates below instead.
In the dark ages before the Internet, this might have meant an expensive house call from an appliance repair company. Today, it means going to the manufacturer’s website, digging up the complete parts list for a decade-old appliance, and then placing an online order for the small rubber part, which will arrive in a box on your doorstep within the week. Magical!
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Sharing becomes a slippery slope when it comes to genomics: we need massive amounts of data in order to understand the human genome, but issues of privacy, abuse, and the distrust of institutions stand in the way. So how do we resolve this?
We talked to Robert Cook-Deegan, the director of the Center for Genomics, Ethics, Law & Policy at Duke University, about how the field of genomics is poised for takeoff, the challenges it faces as it scales, and how CC can step in as a neutral institution that will save the day.
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Open Access/Content
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My interpretation is this. “We are a commercial company who wishes to decrease our costs/increase our profits by getting rid of traditional copy editors (whose job is to improve the language and style of papers). We have outsourced almost all our production to companies who are not in a position to do copy-editing. We are therefore trying to get graduates to do this job for free so we can maximise our profits. By the way if you wish to publish in some Open Access Springer journals it can cost thousands of pounds.”
I would like to feel that publishers are part of the value added to scholarship. However it is becoming clear day by day that many (not all, but many) publishers are only in it for money and their primary effect is to restrict and cripple the publication process.
I am at a RLUK meeting where some of the keynotes have addressed the impossibility of continuing with the current publication process. I hope that people actually DO something instead of talking. “Reclaim our scholarship”.
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Open Hardware
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A year or so ago, we invited DIY enthusiasts from Instructables , Ravelry , Adafruit , Craftster , Dorkbot , and Etsy to fill out our survey on DIY communities, projects, and cultures. We received 2600+ responses in just a few weeks. Many many thanks to everyone who contributed!!
In this ‘Instructable’, we share some of our findings. We explore DIY as a broad cultural movement, spanning many domains and materials. This is just one way- and one starting point- for understanding DIY communities, motivations and practices. We would love to hear your feedback!
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Programming
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I Recently was working on building some Selenium tests and needed to compare a string after being saved to a database and returned to the user interface.
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Standards/Consortia
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ODFDiff is an OpenOffice extension for comparing ODF documents. It supports text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The differences are show using tracked changes, except for presentations. It also comes as stand-alone Java program for those that want to try it without installing OpenOffice. ODFDiff is fast and accurate.
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On Tuesday the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit research organization based in Washington, D.C., debuted its first HTML5 project, designed to make lengthier stories more palatable for readers using desktop and mobile browsers.
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This post is about expanding some thoughts and discussions I’ve been having on Identi.ca this morning around the epub format and the new Amazon Kindle 3. Calibre does convert a great many formats, it also optionally manages your collection, lets you edit metatags, transfer ebooks to and from your device. Converting epubs to a format the device accepts is no problem. It’s about registering a preference for me.
When I buy an mp3 player, I want it to play ogg, as much as converting it from ogg to mp3 is very easy, I’d rather it plays ogg natively. I make a point of checking reviews, comments etc on devices for ogg compatibility, and all else being equal, I use my choice as a user and consumer to buy the player which plays ogg natively. Why? I want my preference for ogg to be counted. It’s really that simple.
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The European Commission has launched a public consultation on the successor to the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme 2007-2013 (CIP). The CIP is the main EU budgetary instrument targeting competitiveness outside the research and skills areas. Its main priorities are SMEs, access to finance, innovation (including eco-innovation), take-up and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), energy efficiency and renewables. Through the consultation, the public is invited to have its say on what the priorities of future competitiveness and innovation EU funding should be. The consultation will remain open until 4 February 2011.
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Blekko, a well-funded new search engine that aims to be No. 3 behind Google and Bing, reports that it averaged about 1 million queries a day in its first week of being open to the public.
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Jimmy Wales likes to describes himself as a “pathological optimist”, so it’s no surprise that he’s extremely enthusiastic about the longevity of wikis, the group publishing tool epitomised by the mighty Wikipedia, which he founded in 2001.
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Dennis sent over an interesting story by a guy who helped Sal buy the dot com from the cybersquatter. It’s an interesting story of how buying domains works (with a lot of questionable things happening in the background). In the end, they were able to purchase the domain for $2,988. They actually paid $5,000 initially, but the company running the auction later said it detected fraudulent bidding, and lowered the price.
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The reason copyright management was a “solved problem with Xanadu” was because of something called “transclusion”, which basically meant that when you quoted or copied a piece of text from elsewhere, it wasn’t actually a copy, but the real thing *embedded* in your Xanadu document. This meant that it was easy to track who was doing what with your work – which made copyright management a “solved problem”, as Pesce says.
I already knew this, but Pesce’s juxtaposition with the sloppy, Web made me realise what a narrow escape we had. If Xanadu had been good enough to release, and if it had caught on sufficiently to establish itself before the Web had arrived, we would probably be living in a very different world.
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During one lengthy study they painstakingly monitored the falling survival rates and breeding patterns of the highly endangered black grouse.
But after reporting their findings, the couple were stunned to be told by the RSPB that rather than helping the species, their research could have actually contributed to its decline.
Now feathers are flying at the High Court in London after the couple sued the organisation accusing it of defamation.
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Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise!
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“HTML5 provides good reason to believe that the Web will remain the main platform for new services, while apps remain secondary. And this matters because the health of the Web is vital for creativity and entrepreneurialism.”
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Bill Gates didn’t invent the PC. Steve Jobs didn’t invent graphic operating systems. Marc Andreessen didn’t invent the web browser. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
Mail lists existed long before Craig Newmark started Craig’s List. Ward Cunningham implemented the first wiki, but Jimmy Wales built it up to world scale with Wikipedia. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
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Remember in March when we shared with you that more than 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, you continue to amaze us: you’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day.
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Many CEOs have admirers. Robin Li—the 41-year-old, American-educated chief executive officer of the Chinese search engine Baidu—has a fan club. And each year at the Baidu (BIDU) World conference in Beijing, the members of the Robin Li fan club come out to get close to the object of their worship.
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Gerald Marzorati, the New York Times’ assistant managing editor for new media and strategic initiatives, doesn’t know why people pay for subscriptions to his paper.
Marzorati made the surprising claim during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood New York conference. He pointed to the fact that only 0.01 percent of subscribers canceled home delivery after the paper hiked prices five percent during the recession as evidence that his readership doesn’t realize that they’re overpaying for news that’s available for free online.
“We have north of 800,000 subscribers paying north of $700 a year for home delivery … I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they’re literally not understanding what they’re paying … That’s the beauty of the credit card,” said Marzorati.
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Science
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“What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center,” said the phenomenon’s discoverer, Doug Finkbeiner, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We don’t fully understand their nature or origin.”
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Everything from industrial equipment to the human body loses some of the energy it uses to things like heat and vibrations. The ability to harvest some of this energy is usually pretty limited, as small heat differences and weak movements are difficult to concentrate into significant amounts of useful energy. But even an inefficient conversion can be sufficient to provide power for small energy-efficient devices, such as medical implants and short-range transmitters, so researchers are working on developing materials that can convert environmental noise into small amounts of useful energy. In a recent example of this work, researchers have demonstrated that they can print a bio-compatible device that can harvest the stress created when it’s flexed to produce over 10 nanoAmps of current.
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Street lights are an important part of our urban infrastructure — they light our way home and make the roads safe at night. But what if we could create natural street lights that don’t need electricity to power them? A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one – not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities.
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Alcohol, like caffeine, has an enormous reputation but loose understanding in popular culture. Learn how it’s absorbed and how fast, why it’s essential to reality TV altercations, its paradoxical sexual effects, and its life-lengthening potential, whether red wine or Bud Light.
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In the march towards Total World Domination, with the recovery of its stock and explosion of Android, Google seems to be in the driver’s seat. But what captures this march? If Microsoft is the Beast of Redmond or the Borg, then what is Google? For two years I’ve called it the Monster of Mountain View, but it is only rarely used.
Perhaps the “Borg” metaphor is more appropriate nowadays: not because it’s relentlessly crushing enemies, but the way that it’s inhaling raw talent. Particularly over the last two years, Google has the pick of Silicon Valley when it comes to recruiting as most IT companies are fighting the relentless march of commoditization. It’s #4 on the latest Fortune list of best places to work — the only Silicon Valley firm in the top 10 and one of three in California (the others being DreamWorks and Qualcomm.)
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Health/Nutrition
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In 1972, after a month of deliberation, Congress launched the nation’s most ambitious experiment in universal health care: a change to the Social Security Act that granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income.
It was a supremely hopeful moment. Although the technology to keep kidney patients alive through dialysis had arrived, it was still unattainable for all but a lucky few. At one hospital, a death panel — or “God committee” in the parlance of the time — was deciding who got it and who didn’t. The new program would help about 11,000 Americans, just for starters. For a modest initial price tag of $135 million, it would cover not only their dialysis and transplants, but all of their medical needs. Some consider it the closest that the United States has come to socialized medicine.
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Security
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In the era of instant blogging, microblogging and social networks we can share our ideas and thoughts of the day will millions at the click of a mouse, but what do we do for our private thoughts of the day? Before the internet, many people would have private diaries where they’d share their inner thoughts knowing nobody would ever read them. This is where you can be truly honest and write without being judged.
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Red Hat has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).
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Looks like we’re about to see lots more ENTIRELY FICTIONAL news stories about malware and virus attacks on Android, thanks to a deal between popular PC anti-virus maker AVG and a company called DroidSecurity.
[...]
Presumably AVG think there’s some merit in the product, probably because people are happily paying $9.99 for it.
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Despite its reputation for secrecy and technical expertise, the National Security Agency doesn’t have a set of secret coding practices or testing methods that magically make their applications and systems bulletproof. In fact, one of the agency’s top technical experts said that virtually all of the methods the NSA uses for development and information assurance are publicly known.
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How often should you change your password? I get asked that question a lot, usually by people annoyed at their employer’s or bank’s password expiration policy: people who finally memorized their current password and are realizing they’ll have to write down their new password. How could that possibly be more secure, they want to know.
The answer depends on what the password is used for.
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The total volume of spam hitting our collective inboxes continues to decline. According to the latest data from Symantec, the global spam volume in October declined by 22% month-over-month and over 47% since August. This reduction can be attributed to the shutdown of major spam networks like spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Even with this decline, though, spam still made up 86.6% of all emails in October. This is the lowest number Symantec has reported since September 2009.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Bill O’Reilly wants my head.
On Thursday night, the Fox News host asked, as part of a show that would be seen by 5.5 million people: “Does sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?” He then added, “That was a joke.”
Hilarious! Decapitation jokes just slay me, and this one had all the more hilarity because the topic of journalist beheadings brings to mind my late friend and colleague Danny Pearl, who replaced me in the Wall Street Journal’s London bureau and later was murdered in Pakistan by people who thought sharia justified it.
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Glenn Beck has railed many times against George Soros, a Hungarian-American financier and liberal philanthropist whom the conservative host dubs the “progressive puppet master.”
But Beck ramped up his criticism this week on Fox News and his radio show, making comments about how Soros survived in Nazi-occupied Hungary that have provoked denunciations from Jewish organizations.
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Fox has begun blocking the availability of its TV programming from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV, joining ABC (NYSE: DIS), CBS (NYSE: CBS), NBC (NYSE: GE) and Hulu.
A source at the network confirmed the move late Wednesday, but declined comment. The blog GTVHub first noted Fox.com’s disappearance from Google TV.
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The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth.
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“My First Cavity Search: Helping your child understand why he may be a threat to national security.”
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Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, has proposed amending the Espionage Act specifically to target WikiLeaks and other media organizations that “publish the name” of anyone “helping in our efforts against terrorism.”
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The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
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The question of freedom of speech online has been doubly in the news this week, with the parallel case of Tory councillor Gareth Compton, who posted a joke tweet suggesting that the world would be a better place without columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in it. It was an offensive joke with upsetting sexist and racist overtones, and the Tory party were arguably justified in suspending him from office – public figures are always required to be more careful with their language than private citizens. But this wasn’t just a party matter: police arrested Compton under the Communications Act 2003.
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A European Union prosecutor has named seven suspects in connection with an international organ trafficking network, BETA, EurActiv’s partner in Serbia, reported today (12 November). According to press reports, at least one of them held a high position in Kosovo’s health ministry.
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And yet, it must necessarily overcome an entrenched group of powerful leaders in corporations / politics / government organizations on the local, state, and national level / non-profit and advocacy groups / labor unions whose power and wealth depends on keeping individuals, families, and small, locally-owned businesses subservient to and dependent on the big guys who run the system.
We made some good choices in the late 1700s. For example, we sided with debtors against foreign creditors in a way that did not repudiate foreign-held debt, but made it uncollectable. We allowed people who got into financial problems or wanted adventure to disappear and take up new lives in the untamed West. We tried a national bank (twice, if I recall) and gave it up as a failure, leaving nearly all our banking in the hands of smaller local banks. And we (for the most part) expected that parents would take a leading role in directing their children’s education.
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A Rikers Island visitor trying to put money into an inmate’s account on Thursday was beaten by a correction officer and arrested after he angrily complained about the system.
The 49-year-old man was slammed to the wall, punched and knocked to the ground inside a waiting area after an argument with the officer.
Jail officials said Thursday they are investigating the incident – which was witnessed by a Daily News reporter.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Between 1994 and 2006, European fishing vessels were paid €3.4 billion in subsidies under the EU’s Financial instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG). €2.3 billion of this was from the EU budget, and a further €1.1 billion was paid from national budgets under the FIFG’s co-financing rules. 48 per cent of the money was spent on building or modernising vessels. 40 per cent was spent on scrapping vessels. A total of 39,174 subsidy payments were made.
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A few weeks ago, Nik Garkusha, Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy Lead and an open data advocate asked me: “are there any cool apps you could imagine developing using Canadian federal government open data?”
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To spread the word about Koch Industries and its long history of working to deceive the American people about climate change, we’ve launched a new website: www.KochIndustriesFacts.com.
Three weeks ago, we asked our members to nominate the worst corporate polluters of 2010. Our goal was to identify organizations that have hijacked our democracy, devastated our environment and denied the science of climate change — all while reaping massive profits. The response was overwhelming. In just a few days, more than 4,000 people submitted their nominations, many of which were passionate and articulate. The next week, we introduced the top four nominees: Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, BP and Massey Energy. A few days and 13,000 votes later we had our winner: Koch Industries.
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Finance
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Fancy that: European tax-payers are coughing up for a €15.7m IBM research project about storing objects in the cloud with metadata.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Glenn Beck spent the past week denouncing the liberal billionaire and philanthropist George Soros as a “puppet master” who is orchestrating a coup “to bring America to her knees.”
Given Soros’ alleged role plotting to destroy the United States, Beck and his Fox viewership might be surprised to learn that one of Sarah Palin’s top aides has been on Soros’ payroll for years.
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Secret internal company documents from the oil giant Shell show that in the immediate aftermath of the execution of the Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa it adopted a PR strategy of cosying up to key BBC editors and singling out NGOs that it hoped to “sway”.
The documents offer a previously hidden insight into efforts by the company to deflect the PR storm that engulfed it after the Nigerian activist was hanged by the country’s military government. Shell faced accusations that it had colluded with the government over the activists’ deaths.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Home Office has been forced to take action to change UK law, following the Phorm case, to ensure that citizens are properly protected against private interception.
Phorm attempted to sell technology to BT and other ISPs that intercepted web traffic and digested it to find keywords to create advertising “channels”. When complaints were made, citizens found there was had no official body that would investigate.
The Home Office have this week published a consultation to change RIPA to take account of the EU’s complaints.
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The Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether Google Inc. broke federal laws when its street-mapping service collected consumers’ personal information, joining a lengthy list of regulators and lawmakers probing what Google says was the inadvertent harvesting of private data sent over wireless networks.
Key Republicans and Democrats in Congress have indicated that the privacy issues raised by Google’s Street View data collection could be a factor when lawmakers consider new Internet privacy legislation next year.
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Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.
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Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.
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At the beginning of 2007, “Abdel Kareem Nabil (right), 22, the Egyptian blogger convicted of insulting Islam and president Hosni Mubarak, has been sentenced to four years in jail, says the Free Kareem! site”, said p2pnet.
He also blogged about discrimination against women ” and the Sunni University of Al-Azhar where he studied law until he was expelled and sued by his professors”, says Reporters Without Borders. noting he was also arrested for the same thing in 2005.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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As Industry Minister Tony Clement prepares to provide an update on Canada’s digital economy strategy later this month, the state of competition within the Canadian wireless sector promises to play a prominent role. Consumers have bemoaned the dominance of the big three carriers for years, leading to complaints about limited choice and high prices.
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BT and TalkTalk have won a judicial review of the Digital Economy Act after the telecoms companies voiced concerns over measures to tackle illegal file sharing.
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Today, Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net, participates in the Net neutrality summit co-organized by the European Commission and the European Parliament in Brussels.
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I had the privilege of being an invited delegate at the EU Summit on ‘The Open Internet and Net Neutrality in Europe’ in Brussels yesterday. The morning sessions were held at the Commission’s Charlemagne building and the afternnoon sessions at the EU parliament.
[...]
The sad thing about the simple “there is no problem, do not regulate” corporate message is that they are selling such a simple story to keep the policymakers out of their hair, yet the devil is in the details and the Jean-Jacques Sahels and Robert Peppers of the world know this. But when the debate is dominated by the stories being told yesterday I reserve the right to maintain my concerns about the direction of travel on the whole notion of net neutrality in the EU.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Screwball uses of the patent and copyright system are occurring with increasing frequency both at home and abroad. Here is today’s link here. The South Korean Army has applied for a patent on “the camouflage pattern on its newly developed combat fatigue, which would ban unauthorized use and sales of the same-patterned civilian attires and accessories. The military has been developing the new combat uniform since 2008. It will be distributed from next July to replace the current uniform within three years.” The army with its political clout in the South has every reason to believe the patent will be granted.
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I follow these six easy steps to make sure my art doesn’t get stolen online:
1) Be original.
I aim to make art so original that no one will question who made it.
2) Sell only live art.
I’ve given up on the idea that art in reproduction is for sale and I focus on making work that is better in person than in reproduction.
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Artist Gwenn Seemel’s post, “How I make sure my art doesn’t get ripped off on the Internet” is a wonderfully calm, sensible and practical approach to living as a 21st century artist in an age where reproduction is a given.
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In the university phase, the Braille books disappeared totally and were not available at all. The only way to access knowledge for a blind person was to get someone to read to him, as all the university text books were printed in the normal way. Even in the printed exams, I had to get someone that I dictated my answer to and he would write it. It was very difficult to find someone to read who would be available whenever I needed to study. Another problem was that the curriculum was extensive, with many books to read.
So this is why other blind students and I used to use a tape recorder to record the person who was reading for us so we could listen to those tapes later.
Thank God I passed this phase (the undergraduate) successfully so I could go on to another phase and fulfil my ambitions. I got an LLB [a law degree], and went on to my PhD.
In the PhD phase it was very difficult and very complicated, because how could I read and review the material I needed for my PhD in and endless amount reference books in different languages.
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Negotiators from GRULAC and other supporters of a treaty for the visually impaired wanted to see movement on the project as fast as possible, fearing the loss of momentum that often happens in complex WIPO negotiations. In May of 2009, Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay submitted to the SCCR a proposal of the World Blind Union for a Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons [pdf], and this was later supported by India and then other developing countries.
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Copyrights
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European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has warned copyright middlemen and content gatekeepers that they risk being sidelined. The restrictive systems they have set up irritate the public and leave “a vacuum which is served by illegal content,” said Kroes, who added that a new approach to copyright is the answer. One which looks beyond “corporatist self-interest”.
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While I definitely disagree with how Charlie Nesson conducted Joel Tenenbaum’s defense in his file sharing case, Nesson has been posting some rather interesting posts on his blog lately, including his recent post highlighting the history of statutory awards for copyright infringement, as written by Pamela Samuelson and Tara Wheatland. While he (oddly) does not say where the writeup is from, you can find the full 2009 paper if you’d like.
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The “first sale” doctrine in copyright law limits the rights of copyright holders to sue for infringement after they’ve sold their work—it allows for used and re-sale markets in books and DVDs, as well as library lending. In Costco v. Omega, a Supreme Court case argued earlier this week, the high court will decide whether the first sale doctrine applies to copyrighted goods sold abroad. So why is a case involving a retailer’s re-sale of luxury watches getting the attention of book publishers, the recording industry, and Hollywood? Because the case has everything to do with whether content industries will be able to control their international pricing.
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In the past year, news agencies have grown accustomed to re-broadcasting content posted on Twitter to help cover breaking news. But a lawsuit over photos of the Haiti earthquake may prove to be an early test of what kind of rights users of Twitter and related services retain to their content. The Agence France-Presse wire service has insisted that it has the rights to use Daniel Morel’s photos of the Haiti earthquake without Morel’s approval—all because the photographer used the TwitPic and Twitter services to try and sell his work.
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Clearly, Whitacre has no qualms about people being able to hear his music for free, since he knows that this is by far the best way to get the message out about it and to encourage people to perform it for themselves. The countless comments on these pages are testimony to the success of that approach: time and again people speak of being entranced when they heard the music on his web site – and then badgering local choirs to sing the pieces themselves.
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“The Arthur Rubinstein Collection is a 94-CD set containing 106 hours of music documenting this seminal pianist’s entire recording history. Rubinstein was one of the pivotal pianists of the 20th century, with his life spanning from 1887 through 1982. This collection will be central to the teaching and scholarly examination of the development of piano performance, the piano repertoire and Rubinstein’s own musical idiom. This Collection features includes all studio recordings made by Rubinstein, four previously unreleased recordings and over 200 recordings on compact disc, and also includes two live recitals and two special discs, which contain unreleased recordings and interviews.” – introduction from musicweb
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Regardless of what else the Recording Industry Association of America has done, most of us know them for fighting illegal music downloads by suing college students and sometimes grandmothers into bankruptcy. That made us wonder what the world would be like if other industries cared as much about money, and as little about horrifically bad PR.
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Once a year, the US government engages in an odd exercise: calling out the world’s “notorious markets” for copyright infringement and counterfeiting, often without any evidence that the markets in question are breaking either local or US law. Instead, the list is compiled from rightsholder complaints, and the US government then puts its imprimatur on them. And this year, the “notorious markets” list will be more prominent than ever.
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Georgia’s Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced.
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The largest copyright pirates are the large corporations, particularly in the content distribution business. Yes, those companies who scream the loudest that their customers are ‘pirating’ movies, songs, books, etc. In this series, we are going to look at cases where these companies have engaged in large scale copyright infringement, or in other ways have been ripping off artists.
In all cases I will be working with published information. It is possible that this information may not be up to date, or may not accurately reflect the current status of the situation. If I am supplied documentary evidence which shows a different status, I will publish an update. In cases where a lawsuit ensued, and the settlement was sealed, I will not update the published information, unless I am provided with:
1) A copy of the settlement
2) Permission to publish the settlement
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ACTA
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) criminalises ordinary companies and individuals, according to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII). In an open letter to the European Parliament, the FFII urges the Parliament to obtain the opinion of the Court of Justice as to whether ACTA is compatible with the EU Treaties.
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As the negotiations on ACTA come to a close, it is important to stress once more time the basic flaws of this dangerous anti-counterfeiting agreement, which compiles outdated and very controversial provisions from the United Stated and the European Union in the field of “intellectual property rights” (IPR). ACTA’s bias and lack of legitimacy should compel the legislative bodies of the negotiating countries to strongly oppose its ratification and acknowledge the necessity to reform patent and copyright law.
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New revelations on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a secretive global copyright being privately negotiated by rich countries away from the UN: ACTA will require ISPs to police trademarks the way they currently police copyright. That means that if someone accuses you of violating a trademark with a web-page, blog-post, video, tweet, etc, your ISP will be required to nuke your material without any further proof, or be found to be responsible for any trademark violations along with you. And of course, trademark violations are much harder to verify than copyright violations, since they often hinge on complex, fact-intensive components like tarnishment, dilution and genericization. Meaning that ISPs are that much more likely to simply take all complaints at face-value, leading to even more easy censorship of the Internet with nothing more than a trumped-up trademark claim.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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The most nauseating aspect of the Digital Economy Act for me is the responsibility shifted onto ISP subscribers (essentially, the person who pays the bill) for any copyright infringement that occurs via their internet connection.
To the layman this might make some sense – it’s often impossible to trace infringement to the actual person copying the film or song, and we live in a civil society where someone must take responsibility, right? Not quite, as I’ve explained in the past.
Obvious issues arise in any household with 3 or more occupants – notwithstanding the security of WiFi – and these problems are magnified many times over when considering larger organisations offering casual internet access to members of the public.
Intermediaries – organisations who are not ISPs but offer internet access to multiple persons; eg employers, schools, universities, libraries, café owners, etc will soon be forced to consider the consequences of what people do with this internet access.
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Three Wednesday announcements mean the UK’s approach to digital copyright infringement may be majorly halted and started over, despite months of wrangling over controversial legislation.
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BT and TalkTalk today won the right to a judicial review of the Digital Economy Act, throwing controversial government proposals to tackle illegal filesharing into uncertainty.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
11.12.10
Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We also perceive the shift quantitatively. In October of 2009, “opensolaris vs linux” was the #1 incoming query to RedMonk properties; “linux vs opensolaris” was #7. In October of this year, “opensolaris vs linux” is #13; “linux vs opensolaris” is not in the Top 100.
The simplest explanation for this might be the decline and acquisition of Sun, and the subsequent deemphasis by new owner Oracle to the Solaris brand generally and OpenSolaris specifically. But for this to be true, we should have expected to see commensurate gains to other operating system related terminology, be that Windows, Linux or combinations of both.
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It was a blog post by Jeff Hoogland that started the ball rolling. Entitled “I am a Linux geek and proud of it,” the post chronicles the story of a misbehaving netbook that led to Hoogland’s realization.
Hoogland fixed the netbook’s problem without too much trouble, causing him to observe, “Something that at one point would have taken me hours to figure out (and odds are would have required a few forum posts) I had resolved in minutes.”
Few of us today look like the classic stereotype of the Unix geek, Hoogland concludes. Rather, “Linux users come in all shapes and sizes.”
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Desktop
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This is such a huge benefit of Ubuntu (and Linux in general), it is for this very reason that I now do all my college assignments at home, simply because I get them all done way faster. I find it so much faster to multi-task on Ubuntu, although this is limited somewhat because I have a very old computer (Pentium 4 from 2003), but Ubuntu solves this by not frustrating me, it doesn’t throw error dialogs at me, it doesn’t waste precious CPU cycles telling me that there is a serious problem, it just quietly works through it and return’s to normal.
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Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of independent Linux vendor ZaReason, Inc., is a keynote speaker at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels on Feb. 5-6, 2011. FOSDEM bills itself as “the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Ubuntu may ditch the X Window system for Wayland, Fedora 14 has been released and Nokia takes Symbian back from the Symbian Foundation. Share our fortnight’s discoveries and hear whether we think Qt and KDE should merge APIs.
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Kernel Space
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Training and consulting company LinuxCertified has announced a new course that will help developers learn how to create device drivers for the Linux operating system.
Linux is an open-source operating system that is available for free. Although it trails in popularity behind its commercial competitors, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux has become increasingly widespread.
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Fall is in the air in New England and I am still sifting through the thousands of product announcements from Oracle OpenWorld 2010 (held in September). One of the questions I keep being asked by solution providers is “What does this new Oracle Linux Kernel mean to me?” Knowing how astute the VAR Guy’s readers are, I jumped at the chance to share my thoughts on this exciting announcement.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that the Linux 2.6.37 kernel merge window is closed and this next major release is in the middle of its development cycle, we have new benchmarks to publish looking at the file-system performance of Btrfs and EXT4 compared to earlier releases. The Linux file-system performance is under constant evolution as shown by our five years of Linux kernel benchmarks and more recent file-system-focused articles such as looking at EXT4 and Btrfs regressions in Linux 2.6.36, solid-state drive Linux benchmarks, and even ZFS-FUSE benchmarks, among other similar articles.
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Applications
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I want to thank you all for the contributions, patches, bugs, docs, testing etc.
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If you’ve ever experienced one of your kids saying “Mom, how do I solve this math problem? What should I do? I’m bored”, then you’ll appreciate KDE Edutainment to help you teach your kids basic mathematics and other sciences.
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Because judging your own ability is inherently subjective. Just as an example, I see myself as a beginner and probably always will. People graduate from university on a daily (monthly? quarterly?) basis with computer and Linux proficiency that far outstrips mine.
On the other hand, I have met more than one person — to include Windows “power users,” to be completely unfair and off-topic — who gave me an irritating smirk and the classic line from Brazil, that “Computers are my forte.” And then couldn’t turn the stupid thing on.
But above and beyond all that, I can’t say that I’m too thrilled with another post that somehow splices Linux’s learning curve with the mystique of the command line.
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The first 2 Conky setups above are very easy to configure – just install conky, then copy the extracted files (look for hidden files and folders too) into your folder and that’s it. Conky Ken takes a bit longer to set up but it’s not all that difficult, however I couldn’t get the weather to work (it might have something to do with might location though). For each of the 3 Conky setups above, download the archive and see the README for exact installation instructions.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In these games, the asteroids are destroyed by typing a number which will reduce the number (or fraction) on the asteroid. So, for example in the “factors” game, if the asteroid were marked “51”, then either “3” or “17” would cause it to break into separate “3” and “17” rocks.
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Taking much of the pain out of using Wine, PlayOnLinux is a must-have application for any Linux gamer. Providing automated installation scripts for dozens of games – and a wide variety of other software including Google Sketchup, Photoshop and AutoCAD – this program is worth checking out if you’re dependent on Windows software but prefer Linux overall.
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It’s been two years since the release of Urban Terror 4.1, an open-source first person shooter powered by the ioquake3 engine that started out originally as a Quake 3 mod. Extensive work has been made towards the next release, Urban Terror 4.2, with significant improvements being made from new maps and visuals to a new graphics renderer. However, this past week the Urban Terror developers announced some rather surprising changes, which includes Urban Terror no longer being distributed as an open-source, GPL game.
Urban Terror 4.2 is so radically different from Urban Terror 4.1 that it’s not going to even be called “4.2″, but rather is being renamed to “Urban Terror HD.” While renaming the title to Urban Terror HD isn’t a big deal, the big news is the departure from the open-source Quake 3 code-base to now being an official Quake 3 licensee with an official copy of the Quake 3 engine code-base.
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Source code is available and for those of you who don’t own this pretty handheld, the game can also be compiled in Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Ok, let’s stop talking about Paraguay. This first day we had all KDE lectures, tomorrow we are going to have Sandro’s mini-course (Desktop and Mobile Developing with Qt 4.7) and in the (almost) last event of the last day my mini-course about programming with DBus (next Friday).
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My favorite every day distribution, aptosid, very much a hobbyist distribution, not anywhere near as simple as SimplyMEPIS or PCLinuxOS to manage for beginners, but praised by veterans, aptosid, once called sidux, and evolved from another KNOPPIX inspired distribution, Kanotix, has been described as Debian Sid on mood stabilizers and steroids.
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Every little bit helps so if you can let a few ads load in your browser, and even click a few you are interested in then you might be able to help support your favorite distros without even having to make a donation.
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There is interesting question: How old are ebuilds in tree? (in term when they were touched last time)
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Red Hat Family
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We lease all of our hardware, which poses some interesting problems in itself, but also gave us a three or four year cycle for upgrading the operating system and software stack. In the past few years, we have transitioned to virtual machines, and gained a bit of hardware independence. Now the hardware can come and go, and we can run the same operating system image without the need, or opportunity, to upgrade the operating system.
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Fedora
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Enjoy more images from Fedora 14.
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The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the release schedule for Fedora 15, the next release of this community Red Hat Linux operating system that was recently codenamed Lovelock.
If this Fedora 15 release schedule is met, the official Lovelock release will come on the 10th of May. The alpha release is slated for the first of March and the beta release is penciled in for 5 April. Other important milestones include the feature freeze being on 8 February (and that’s also the point at which Fedora 15 will be branched from Rawhide) and the release candidate on 26 April.
Of course, this is just the expected release schedule, which may very well slip judging by past Fedora releases. Fedora 14 was going to ship on time as a new feature based upon their poor track record of sticking to their release schedule due to engineering/technical delays, but that didn’t happen. Will Fedora 15 ship on time? We will see. Regardless, Fedora 15 should make it out in May of 2011.
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One of the main complaints with Fedora is the lack of proprietary drivers and multimedia support. That’s where Fusion comes in. Fusion Linux aims to ship all the best software that will make for a superior desktop experience. The upcoming version, based on the new Fedora 14, is estimated to be about two or three weeks away, but early testers can try the release candidate announced today.
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One of the Fedora related things I’m still involved with is Fedora Insight, a Drupal instance I and a few others are trying to learn and launch. We want the capability to pass on interesting tidbits from the Planet, Fedora Weekly News, and even original media in a simple way.
And we love Drupal, especially because it’s packaged in Fedora and EPEL, and because of its very practical and compatible approaches to licensing (GPL!). However, we could use some help with our work.
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Fedora Project leaders have banned a popular penetration-testing tool from their repository out of concern it could saddle the organization with legal burdens.
The move came on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Fedora Project’s board of directors rejecting a request that SQLNinja be added to the archive of open-source applications. It came even as a long list of other hacker tools are included in the bundle and was harshly criticized by some security watchers.
“It seems incredibly short sighted to reject software based on perceived legal usage,” said Jacob Appelbaum, a full-time programmer for the Tor Project. “They have decided to become judges of likely usage based on their own experience. That is a path of madness.”
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Debian Family
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I decided recently to publish interviews from Debian contributors and I picked Joey Hess as my first target. He’s one of the few who have heavily influenced Debian by creating software that have become building blocks of the project, like the debian-installer (Joey uses the shorthand d-i to refer to it).
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Joey (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity is the official Ubuntu Netbook Edition’s new interface and is supposed to replace Gnome as the default environment for the forthcoming Ubuntu releases. Don’t worry, Gnome spin off would continue to be available for all Gnome lovers.
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And so it begins! The Compiz-backed version of Unity – to be the default Ubuntu 11.04 desktop – has arrived on Launchpad.
For those with itchy fingers and brave hearts ‘Unity Compiz’ (‘Compinity’ anyone?) will be available for installation via a PPA tomorrow according to Ubuntu Desktop Experience lead njpatel.
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Looking forward, I’ll be thinking about the longer term direction for the Ubuntu platform. The platform is the layer of Ubuntu which makes everything else possible: it’s how we weave together products like Desktop Edition and Server Edition, and it’s what developers target when they write applications. Behind the user interfaces and applications, there is a rich platform of tools and services which link it all together. It’s in this aspect of Ubuntu that I’ll be investing my time in research, experimentation and imagination. This includes considering how we package and distribute software, how we adapt to technological shifts, and highlighting opportunities to cooperate with other open source projects.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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In late 2007 ASUS released the Eee PC, a tiny little laptop that sparked a whole new wave of innovation in the computer world.
It was the first in the family of ultra mobile computing devices that now comprises a wide range of netbooks from all major manufacturers and even paved the way for a more widespread acceptance of the tablet form-factor.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jolicloud, the company that offers a cloud-centric Linux distro for netbooks, is getting into the hardware business.
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According to the makers of Jolicloud, the popular cloud-based netbook distro, something big is about to happen in the world of little computers. Introducing the Jolibook – the ‘Fast, Fun & Connected’ Jolicloud 1.1-powered netbook…
“Designed for people who live in the cloud, it’s running the new Jolicloud 1.1 and comes pre-loaded with Chromium, Facebook, Spotify, VLC, Skype, and a bunch of cool apps that are one click away,” reads the teaser card sent out to press this morning.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The open source arena is currently loaded with good battles to watch, with both operating systems of various stripes and applications fighting fiercely for dominance, but my favorite open source battle of all is the one going on between open source browsers. Although the majority of users still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, its market share has tumbled from where it was a few years ago. We’ve made the point many times that Firefox and Google Chrome are setting the innovation bar for browsers. That’s why it’s exciting to see Mozilla arrive at Beta 7 of Firefox 4, which you can download now or which you’ll be automatically updated to if you’re testing the betas, and which is loaded with challenges to Google’s fast-growing Chrome browser.
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This is a well-known problem caused by a Firefox add-on called Integrated Gmail. Google recently changed the way in which Gmail works (something it does all the time) and this caused the add-on to malfunction and behave in the way you describe.
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Firefox 4, with the release of Beta 7, is as good as finished. From now until its release in early 2011, no new features will be added, no significant changes will be made — Beta 7 is, for all intents and purposes, Firefox 4.
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We benchmarked beta 7 on an Ubuntu desktop computer with a six-core Intel i7 980X processor. It blazed through the SunSpider test in a mere 208ms. On the same computer, Chromium 6 took 224ms. Mozilla’s efforts to improve JavaScript performance are clearly paying off. The beta also opens and closes nearly as fast as Chrome and offers smoother scrolling and tab switching than the previous version.
Users who want to try out the beta themselves can download it from Mozilla’s website. For additional details, you can refer to the official release notes. The final release is expected to arrive next year.
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WEB BROWSER OUTFIT Mozilla has released F1, an extension that allows users to share content through social networks.
The extension aims to do away with the numerous “share” buttons that have popped up all over the web with webmasters trying to tap into the advertising potential of various social networks. The service, which is still being expanded, currently supports Facebook, Twitter and Gmail services, all of which use the Oauth protocol for authentication.
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Databases
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[L]ong before the Nazi comparison it is inevitable that someone will ask “is MySQL open core?”.
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Oracle
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Apple just announced that it is joining Oracle’s OpenJDK project to open source Mac OS X. OpenJDK is a free and open source implementation of the Java programming language.
According to the release, Apple will “contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client.” OpenJDK will open source Apple’s Java technology to developers.
Jim Whitehurst on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In summary, the pond is a stable and stagnant ecosystem. It doesn’t change or renew and if you were to drink from it you would become ill. If you were to bathe in it you would end up dirtier than before. The waterfall is a dynamic and constantly changing system. It is continuously renewing itself and as a consequence, it and anything in that system is cleaned and the dirt washed away.
[...]
This is one of the reasons I like Linux so much. Linux is a dynamic, constantly changing operating system ecosystem. Flotsam and jetsam does not have a chance to hang around for very long and is eventually washed away by better solutions. I think this is the reason why Linux has evolved far faster than any proprietary operating system I know of.
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Desktop
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Gwibber is an awesome micro-blogging tool. It provides simple and quick access to see all of my accounts together, helps me see a standard set of searches that I care about, and lets me tweet once and have the message go to all of my accounts.
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I just wish setting things up this way wasn’t so arcane; I gradually threw all these bits together over several years and I’m sure many of you reading this have similar stuff with your own personal twists set up for your systems, but it is something you need a bit of enthusiasm and technical knowledge to do. It may be inevitable that for most people the only way to get this effect is to rely on some company to do the server end in exchange for access to all your data, but it’s a bit of a shame, really. It’d be nice if we’d somehow managed to make these kinds of setup more accessible. I think it might be interesting if Firefox Sync really takes off, and the Weave protocols prove to be robust enough to handle other types of data from non-Mozilla applications; that could be a really interesting space for app developers to play around in, with a really big potential user base. And it’s a system that’s done right, with privacy built in right from the start and a good commitment to interoperability and the ability to run entirely independent from Mozilla’s own implementation.
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I’ve gotten rid of a great deal of hardware over the past year and then some. I don’t have any desktop systems left in my computer herd.
We’ve just set up our home office in the home-office space we built more than 7 years ago (another topic, another time, another blog), and I elected to bring my Compaq Armada 7700dmt — circa 1999 — back here for the time being.
Even though my long-gone white box known as This Old PC was more powerful (333 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive) than the Compaq, known as The $15 Laptop (233 MHz Pentium II, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive), I really like the Compaq, a marvel of laptop design and engineering for its technologically ancient time.
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Server
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Marvell said today that it has built a chip designed for servers that uses the same architecture as chips inside cell phones. The chip’s four 1.6 GHz processors aren’t notable for their performance compared to today’s server chips, which use the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD. However, the power savings will likely be significant compared with an x86-based chip.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Membase is a distributed key-value database management system, optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications.
Guest: James Phillips for Membase.
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This is a mini episode from East Bay Mini Maker Faire. I take a look at a couple of exhibits from this years rainy event in Oakland, CA. I talk to a few guys who went all out to build the ultimate gaming chair. Then I learn how to decorate eggs the geeky way.
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Kernel Space
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It didn’t take long for the hacking community to come up with open source drivers for the Kinect … no Xbox required!
Adafruit offered a $3,000 bounty for open source Kinect drivers, and it’s been won by a clever hacker called Hector Martin (@marcan42). The open source driver supports the RGB camera output and depth camera.
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Graphics Stack
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So Wayland ultimately will be able to switch between GPUs and drivers without requiring a restart of the display server.
The other feature brought up is concerning full-screen applications on Wayland and how that will be handled in an attempt to make this display server better for handling games than an X.Org Server.
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Oliva believes Linux is following the same model. He told iTWire that though he had known for a long time that Linux was non-free because it contains blobs (sourceless software), it was only a couple of months back that he decided to go public.
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Applications
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I am far from being a music genius. In fact, if there’s one facet of my personality that lacks perfection, it would be my music skills. Nevertheless, I do believe I’m qualified enough to say that Performous is a very useful and fun program. It’s simple, elegant, designed with style, powerful, challenging, and addictive.
If you have a tough team of buyers or investors coming over for an icy corporate dinner, you now have the perfect tool to spice up the mood. Performous is the tool you need. Grab some 80s classic and you have no reason to leave your home, ever.
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Do you remember the days when keeping a hard disk from getting full was essential to keep your machine running well? That was then, this is now, right? Well, not quite. The truth is, “The more you have, the more you need.” Today, people are saving more on their drives, and that “more” consists of files that are far larger than what hard drives were once filled with. I see people filling up even terabyte drives faster than they can name the videos they just saved.
So… What do you do when that drive is full and your operating system is Linux? Do you have to do some special incantation or magical programming trick? Or do you just need a bit of common sense to help you through? Although common sense will be a great aid in this task, it also helps to know a few things about the operating system in general and how to use it properly. Let’s take a look at some things you can do when your Linux box begins running out of space.
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It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted any open source NLE updates, and there have been new releases across the board. Here’s a quick round-up of a few noticeable updates.
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Burster is an initiative by iTechnologie and Blender Project to bring 3D gaming to the web browser. Burster web browser 3D plugin uses the Blender Game Engine to integrate the fascinating world of 3D into a web page.
The plugin is free, lightweight and powerful and uses blender player. Excerpts from the official website…
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Proprietary
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Opera Software just unveiled Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Android tonight, but we’ve had a chance to play around with a prerelease version for several days.
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Instructionals/Technical
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S5 is the opposite of Impress or PowerPoint. No GUI, all text. You use HTML to create your slides and use a pre-written system of CSS and JavaScript to use your browser to display your presentation. If you have a computer with Firefox, Chrome, or another standards-based browser that has good CSS/JavaScript support. (So, you might want to give IE a miss.) S5 is all about HTML. Well, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But really — you only need to know HTML. And only a tiny bit at that. Let’s take a look at what you need to know.
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So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle. While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt. All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym. I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano. Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod. Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Chani recently blogged about the last progress of the activities management: in the Plasma Desktop workspace 4.6 finally the advantages are starting to be exposed to the user. In brief: can virtual desktops stop and start applications on demand when they switch? can an application be on 2 out of 5 vd? can a vd be stopped and when recreated be restored exactly as it was? (wallpaper, desktop widgets, running applications etc) can the user remove a non empty, non last virtual desktop? Can an application behave in a way that is specific for a certain desktop, like showing only work related contacts?
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When I blogged about the freehand region capture feature I added to KSnapshot a couple of weeks ago, it caught me by surprise that post quickly turned into a wishlist for KSnapshot. I didn’t expect people missed anything in our good old KSnapshot after so many years of development.
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TuxRadar
“Let’s merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let’s put all KDE libraries, support libraries, and platform modules into Qt.” So says Cornelius Schumacher, long-time KDE coder and the current president of KDE e.V. Such a bold move would be a “massive effort and require huge changes”, he says – and the community would have plenty to talk about as well. See here for the full story, and then let us know what you think for our next podcast. Is this a good move to simplify the Linux desktop stack and eliminate redundancy, or are the projects simply far too separate and distinct?
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UDS in Florida is over, we flew home and left the sun behind. The main outcome from the conference is a long Kubuntu Todo list.
In the packaging section we naturally want the latest bits of KDE and Qt. We’d like to try raster in Qt. We’re going to try gtk-oxygen theme. Scott is going to look at automatic bulids on his ARM machines. GStreamer will be investigated. We’ll be looking at whether it makes sense to packaging Owncloud and Plasma Media Centre. Then there’s Project Neon, a top secret relaunch of the project to make daily builds of Qt and KDE.
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There are many “unknown” linux derivatives nowadays, most of which are not original creations, but rather are unofficial customizations of existing base distributions like ARCH, Slackware, etc. Chakra GNU/Linux is one of these, quoted from their site, “Chakra is a free, user-friendly and extremely powerful GNU/Linux distribution born from Arch Linux, based on a half-rolling release model focused on KDE software, and so targeted at any KDE lover. Its repositories are full of binary packages for KDE, Qt and CLI applications, and there is also a bundle system for other applications.”
[...]
Pros:
* Beautiful and easy-to-use Tribe installer
* Exquisite and full-featured KDE 4.5.3 Desktop
* Stable even for a beta
* Half-rolling-release philosophy translates into a pretty stable system
* “Bundle” apps are a cool concept and reinforce Chakra’s commitment to a pure KDE experience (gtkfree)
Cons:
* It’s unfinished in some areas (Shaman)
* Some problems with some video drivers (ATI/nVidia 96xx)
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GNOME Desktop
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If you didn’t even knew about Nautilus extensions before, you might want to check out our collection of 6 useful Nautilus extensions and scripts first. Nautilus Flickr Uploader is a nice and simple application that will allow you to easily upload pictures directly from Nautilus into Flickr.
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New Releases
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Steven Shiau announced earlier today, November 9th, the immediate availability of a new stable release of his system-cloning Linux distribution, Clonezilla 1.2.6-40. The new version is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32-27, and it introduces a couple of important bugfixes, as well as many enhancements and changes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS is a rolling release distribution, which means users can usually update through the package management rather than perform a fresh install every six months. But a few times a year developers release Quarterly Updates for new users or machines. Recently it was that time again when several varieties of PCLOS saw new releases.
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Red Hat Family
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Following yesterday’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, we are pleased to announce a new certification, Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA). The RHCSA certification allows system administrators to validate their ability to perform the key tasks required of Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administrators in today’s IT environments. The new RHCSA credential will replace the Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) certification. Coverage of the RHCSA exam will be similar to RHCT, but with the addition of some key skills identified in an in-depth survey of Red Hat certified professionals. RHCSA certifications will be issued retroactively to individuals who have earned RHCT on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With the launch of Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), Red Hat will be offering a certification with a title that is more aligned to usage in the marketplace and reflective of system administration skills.
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With the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 yesterday, Red Hat Training has made exciting changes to its Linux curriculum. First, we restructured our Linux curriculum to provide four clear, role-based learning paths to align with our evolving customers’ profiles. Second, following a deep technical survey of Red Hat credential holders, we worked with the Red Hat Certification team to restructure our Linux administration courses and certifications. The sequence of administration tasks we teach map to the contemporary job roles of Linux administrators and senior Linux administrators. Third, we substantially changed our teaching approach by instilling a facilitative and interactive learning methodology designed to actively engage course participants in the learning process. We believe that less lecture and more participation equals better understanding and retention. With these changes to Red Hat Training, our curriculum is better aligned with today’s IT roles and responsibilities, and offers a much more interactive learning experience.
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The honors have come in droves to Matthew Szulik for more than a decade. Perhaps the most precious came Wednesday night as the North Carolina Technology Association presented him with its Outstanding Achievement award.
“It was very surprising – and very humbling,” said Szulik, who retired as chairman of Raleigh-based Red Hat earlier this year at the age of 53.
“To be honored with an award given to other leaders such as former Gov. Jim Hunt and Jim Goodmon [CEO of Capitol Broadcasting] is hard to imagine.”
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Fedora 14, the latest release of Red Hat’s fast-moving, community-supported Linux distribution, hit the Internet earlier this month bearing its typical crop of updated open-source software applications, with a particular focus on updated developer tools, such as the latest versions of the Eclipse and Netbeans Integrated Development Environments.
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Fedora
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Just a quick update to my earlier article on getting the Wacom Bamboo CTL-460 working in Fedora: I have tested the tablet with F14 now and while it’s still not automatically detected, at least the udev rules part of the procedure I detailed earlier is now obsolete.
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Debian Family
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It looks as though 11.0 is going to break the 700 MB CD barrier, propelling it into the DVD-zone. Current alphas are 801 MB, but rumors are floating around that SimplyMepis will now include lots more software goodies since that barrier is down. On the other hand, further speculation is that “lite” for CDROM and USB versions may also be released. We’ll have to wait and see.
It’s been said that “Warren’s alpha’s are like other folk’s betas, betas like RCs, etc, etc” but several posts to the MepisLovers forum indicate there are hardware issues. Several people, like yours truly, are experiencing boot showstoppers while a others are having graphic issues.
While 11.0 is definitely on its way, it appears many users will have to wait until the next release to see what’s new. Stay tuned.
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Buck-Security is a security scanner for Debian and Ubuntu Linux. It runs a couple of important checks and helps you to harden your Linux system. This enables you to quickly overview the security status of your Linux system.
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Most of my recent Debian work has been the usual pkg-telepathy stuff (mainly in experimental while we’re frozen), and hacking on the Quake III engine.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I was in a serious state of anxiety. Here I was, pouring my heart into this damn thing. And not just coworkers at Canonical, but our immense community contributors, pouring our heart and souls into this release, and to be slapped in the face with failure, ouch! What was he upset about? Some stupid work around he applied 2 years ago to get his stupid Broadcom wireless card working. And on an upgrade it broke.
As it ends up we’ve reached a new level of what people expect.
My “linux geek correct” answer would have been “Hey bro, you have a broadcom card, it’s a saving throw; each distro release has different set of variables”. If you’re lucky you roll a natural 20 on a certain release of a distro — and if you’re lucky an upgrade is totally easy. I don’t even know what to say to the people to who own these realtek cards. People are still recommending “ndiswrapper” for these cards. That’s basically “Hey, I can’t fix your problem, so here’s a work around”. That’s not sustainable.
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Tomorrow, there’s a global online event planned in which anyone can donate a little bit of their time to improving Ubuntu. It’s called Ubuntu Bug Day, and it’s a great opportunity for users and fans to get involved and contribute to the operating system–no training or experience required.
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The site is a firm favourite of mine – not only does it offer up CD wallets, posters, presentations and other Ubuntu-orientated goodies (many of which we’ve featured here on OMG! Ubuntu!) but it also allows you to submit your marketing materials too.
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And so it begins! The Compiz-backed version of Unity – to be the default Ubuntu 11.04 desktop – has arrived on Launchpad.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you don’t need a standardised, easy to install solution, you could build something similar to what Lubuntu offers, and lighter still, by beginning with a Debian netinstall and then adding LXDE and any other components that you need.
In many ways, Lubuntu is a example of what’s so great about Linux as it offers yet another balance of options and compromises by positioning itself between the genuinely light weight distributions and the full, mainstream solutions based on KDE and Gnome.
If you’ve ever wanted to install Ubuntu but wished that it was a bit less resource heavy, Lubuntu might be for you. Although the website claims that it is usable on machines with 256MB and sub 1 GHz processors, it’s clearly going to work best on machines with a CPU that’s a little bit above that level and closer to 512MB of RAM. However, this is an important niche as there are many machines of that speed lying around and in need of a well featured, secure operating system.
The other target is netbooks. Here too, Lubuntu may well be a valid choice for people who could just about run a more standard distribution but want to get out from underneath the escalating memory footprint and CPU drag of KDE and Gnome and enjoy some extra speed and battery life.
In both usage cases, Lubuntu could well see some of these machines saying a final farewell to Windows XP.
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When Mark Shuttleworth announced that future versions of Ubuntu will use Unity by default on the desktop many users of Linux Mint, a highly polished Ubuntu-derived distribution, were left wondering what it would use.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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We are very pleased to announce the release of Qt Mobility 1.1.0. We are especially proud of this release because of the latest announcement on Nokia’s strategy with Qt and Qt Quick as a primary development framework. QML bindings included in this Qt Mobility release is very well aligned with this strategy and will give you a competitive edge in developing stunning applications.
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You can download source and binary packages for this release from the Qt Download Page. Alternatively, you can grab the source directly from the public git repository, where the “v4.7.1″ tag matches the content of the released packages. The Qt 4.7 documentation has also been updated.
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Android
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Android 2.3, codenamed Gingerbread, is expected to materialize this month. Little is known about Gingerbread’s features, however, because Google develops the operating system behind closed doors and doesn’t publish a roadmap. This has fueled a lot of speculation among Android enthusiasts.
Google has hinted that 2.3 could bring a user interface refresh that will reduce the need for handset makers to broadly deviate from the standard user experience. Various leaks have suggested that the platform is being overhauled to boost its suitability for tablet devices. Google’s new WebM multimedia format, which uses the VP8 codec, will likely be supported out of the box. It’s also possible that Gingerbread will include some of the music library streaming and synchronization features that the search giant demonstrated this year at the Google I/O conference.
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Tablets
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We have already featured here several tablet computers. Some are designed for the enterprise such as the Cisco Cius and the Avaya, while others are made as multi-purpose tablets like the Shogo. A unique tablet computer that is especially created for students has been recently introduced. Its name is Kno.
The Kno is a Linux-based tablet PC that can function as an electronic textbook, eBook reader, notebook, and web browser among others. It will be available in two form factors: the cheaper single-screen model with 14-inch touchscreen; the more expensive clamshell dual-screen model with two 14-inch touch-sensitive screens.
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Sounds like a simple chicken versus egg problem, isn’t it? But in fact, this is a very deep question. How you answer reveals the “soul” of your business.
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Whether the writers are newcomers with a keep grasp of the obvious or more experienced users with particular grievances, the tone of these articles always seem to resemble a manifesto’s. They demand that free software add support immediately for certain types of hardware, such as smart phones or wireless cards. They insist that the community create — apparently in a process resembling immaculate conception — software such as an exact PhotoShop or MS Exchange. They call on the community to make things just work, to become less geeky and less political, and to develop a more relaxed attitude about using proprietary software
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Events
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What happens when you bring together open source projects with businesses and non-profits? A whole lotta awesome, that’s what. One man is making it his mission to do just that. Meet Mark Wyatt of Ardent Technologies. As a former coder, turned software architect, turned executive, Mark has spent the last 20 years bridging the gap between t-shirts and suits (and not in the Don Johnson way). He’s one of the rare people that can translate geekspeak to execspeak and vice versa.
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Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes PyPy as its newest member. PyPy joins twenty-two other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.
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This is the second list of selected main session talks for FOSS.IN/2010. Unless there are cancellations, this will be the final list.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A new release of Firefox 4 Beta is now ready for you to download and test! This release boosts performance in some important ways: it adds the JägerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler; adds more support for hardware-accelerated graphics, as well as hardware acceleration for Windows XP and Mac OS X; and enables 3D capabilities, without the need for plug-ins, with WebGL.
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Today marks the 6th birthday of the popular Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Taken up from the source code of the Netscape browser, Firefox powers on through today to serve more than 400 million (and 45% of The PC Report’s readers) in performing just what it’s built for.
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When you think of a giant lizard-monster stomping through a major metropolitan area, you tend to think of Godzilla. Or maybe Rodan. What you probably don’t think about is a non-profit corporation that helps millions around the world gain access to the information they need in their day-to-day lives…
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The Mozilla team seems to be back on track with the release of the seventh beta of the upcoming web browser Firefox 4. The release marks a milestone in the development as this is the first feature complete release of version 4 of the Internet browser. What does it mean? That the developers won’t add new features to the browser. All they do from this point in development on is test, test and test to fix bugs and get the browser ready for a prime time release in the beginning of 2011.
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One of the major components essential for the future of Firefox just landed in the beta build of the browser, and it gives the open-source browser the page-rendering speed boost that it had been lacking.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 4 is now available on the download website.
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Let’s not forget that Java, like the Linux kernel, has moved along over the years thanks to contributions and community participation from many deep-pocketed organizations, including Google and the Apache Software Foundation. Now, Oracle is suing Google over aspects of Java, which we’ve already dubbed “the anti-open move of the year.” Under Oracle, questions swirl around the future of Java in ways that they never did under Sun, and, because of the many open source projects that Oracle acquired along with Sun, Oracle’s ability to shake openness in general goes well beyond Java.
We’ve also noted that as Oracle has taken over stewardship of OpenOffice, many developers have resigned and the project is forking. How many lawsuits, threats and adjustments of major financial contributions is it going to take before Oracle adjusts its policies toward openness?
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In the wake of Doug Lea leaving the JCP, I just want to say that I think the JCP is salvageable. This idea the JCP is an unworkable entity is plain and utter myth. A myth propagated by those that want to see it fail (i.e. SpringSource) or those that want to create their own, and controlled, specification efforts (IBM), or those that are more interested in doing their own thing than collaborating with others (i.e. Google and SpringSource). Don’t believe me? Well, let’s discuss it a little more.
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Education
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There are a few holes in this idea, and it certainly would not be easy to orchestrate. Nonetheless, if University X teamed with RedHat or IBM to finance a few project liaisons to act as go betweens for a single CS elective course that was basically Open Source participation 301, imagine what the press could be like for the involved parties. What percentage of CS students who participate in that course would land desirable positions? How many bugs could the University’s elective course-taking CS body claim to have resolved? How much time/money would those students effectively end up putting toward the projects in which they participate? Letters for your CS major home page detailing, “Open Source participation 301 really put me above my competition, I had a choice of jobs after only a handful of interviews…”. Higher profile businesses start recruiting more from University X, because they know the students who took OSP 301 are intimately familiar with an open source technology on which they rely. Tech businesses recruit because they know that students who worked on open source project Q during their OSP 301 course are experienced with a particular bug tracker, wiki, vcs, etc. that the business uses in their workflow. RedHat/IBM offer press releases, “Just donated $80,000 to open source project Q and University X to support collaborative education/open source learning and programming efforts.”
Who loses here? I realize that the projects/companies I relayed might be out of reach, but the I would think the right pitch could spark interest from a Mozilla project, PostgreSQL, LibreOffice, and countless others.
Opensource, Colleges/Universities, CS majors – Can we make something like this happen? Why not?
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Or, why free software advocates love to hate open core
I’ve been trying to figure out why it is that free software advocates are so fixated on the open core licensing strategy and recently came to the conclusion that there is only one explanation: open core is free software’s evil twin.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Walter Bright of Digital Mars has brought up with the GCC list what steps need to be traveled so that GDC, the GNU D Compiler, can be merged into GCC. Right now the GNU Compiler Collection doesn’t have support for the D programming language, but that may soon change if this merge by Digital Mars is successful.
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Standards/Consortia
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Today the Document Foundation has issued a press release that marks the beginning of something exciting; but it’s likely that not a lot of people will understand what’s being explained through the multiple layers of buzz and general statements that were made. Here’s the statement:
“”The Document Foundation is about documents and the associated software is pivotal to create, exchange, modify, share and print documents”, says Thorsten Behrens, a software developer and a member of TDF Steering Committee. “LibreOffice 3.3 is the first flavour of this long term strategy, but the journey has just begun, and the enormous advantages of our developer-embracing environment are not yet fully reflected in the upcoming software release”.
LibreOffice 3.3 is based on OOo 3.3, with code optimisations and many new features, which are going to offer a first preview of the new development directions for 2011 and beyond. TDF founders foresee a completely different future for the office suite paradigm, which – in the actual format – is over 20 years old, to be based on the document (where the software is a layer for the creation or the presentation of the contents).
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Last week, after CNET pointed out that a company called 70 Holdings Inc. was spamming Google News under the moniker of Red Label News, Google pulled that content from its site. However, over the weekend 70 Holdings popped back up using one of the 44 domains it owns to once again flood Google News with the same type of nearly empty stories tied to search-friendly keywords and advertising.
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The mafia boss was having a dreadful time dealing with loss. But he wasn’t struggling with the loss of lives, or even the loss of his freedom.
“Doc, it’s my hair,” the mobster from the ‘ndrangheta crime syndicate confessed to his psychiatrist in jail. “I’m afraid of losing my hair.
[...]
“If you’re a mafioso, and you’re anxious, you’re not trustworthy and you have to be eliminated,” said Lo Verso. “A mafioso is paranoid about everything” — trusting the mafia code of silence (“omerta”) more than the medical code of patient confidentiality.
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Although the BBC Trust has yet to release any official statement on the move, BBC Worldwide head Smith declared the plans in an interview with the Telegraph stating: “Not only will that mean international fans of, for example, Doctor Who can get their fix legitimately, but it has the potential of opening up a new revenue stream for the entire UK production industry.”
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Democracy is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially when dealing with bodies that, in its name, seek to infiltrate and distort egalitarian processes. This is exactly the case with the Not-for-Profit Organisations Constituency (NPOC), which recently submitted to the ICANN Board a Notice of Intent to form a new constituency existing within the scope, mandate and mission of ICANN’s Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG). According to NPOC’s statement “membership is open to any not-for-profit organization/NGO with missions such as: philanthropic, humanitarian, educations, academic and professional development, religious, community associations, promotion of the arts, public interest policy advocacy, health-related services and social inclusion”. This new constituency does not require that such organizations are commercial or non-commercial in nature or whether they are meant to serve commercial or non-commercial interests. So, what does a constituency that fails to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial interests want within a purely non-commercial group?
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Hardware
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A quick refresher: Bobcat is AMD’s low-power Accelerated Processing Unit that can handle both computational and graphical duties, Ontario and Zacate are the chips built upon that core, and Brazos is the overall platform that they’ll be doing their work on. Clear enough? We hope so. AMD has finally allowed a few tech pubs to get their hands on Brazos-based systems and, along with feedback about their experience, the guys have come back with some added spec notes. There’ll be two initial Zacate options, the dual-core E-350 running at 1.6GHz or the single-core E-240 clocked at 1.5GHz, while Ontario will offer 1GHz dual-core and 1.2GHz single-core variants.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The grim-looking mugshots on the right are of Sergio Diaz-Palomino and Alma Vasquez whose family photos “morphed into an immigration nightmare” when a Walgreens worker “flagged pictures of their naked son”, said ABC News.
Sergio was consequently accused of sexual exploitation, the mildest of the horrifying charges later laid against him.
The accusations were dropped but the two were found to have entered the US illegally, enmeshing them in the “nightmare” cited in the intro.
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Waterboarding, which was banned by President Barack Obama, helped foil attacks on Heathrow airport, Canary Wharf and a number of US targets around the world, according to Bush.
In Decision Points, published today, Bush insists the practice – which simulates drowning – is not torture, describing it instead as one of a number of “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
But Downing Street confirmed the British government still shared Obama’s opinion that waterboarding constitutes torture. “It comes under that definition in our view,” a No 10 spokeswoman said.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Tiny, slimy – and pricey. This is the glass eel, the baby of the critically endangered European eel. As market prices hit a record $2800 per kilogramme, France has blocked an agreement to stop European exports, crippling efforts to restock Europe’s increasingly eel-less rivers.
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About one in 16 crows and black-capped chickadees suffer from a condition called avian keratin disorder, which causes their beaks to become morbidly elongated and crossed.
Rates of the debilitating disorder are 10 times higher than usual. That’s higher than has ever been recorded in any wild-bird population, and most of this rise happened over the last decade. Dozens of other bird species are afflicted. Nobody knows why, but it’s probably not a good sign.
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Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who will seek the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship maintains that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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We are excited to announce the Who’s Lobbying site launches today! The site opens with an analysis of ministerial meetings with outside interests, based on the reports released by UK government departments in October.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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There are countless reasons why many people around the globe want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously. In many parts of the world, opressive government regulations threaten free speech, and worse, which has produced an extensive list of technologies that people around the world use to beat the Internet censors. Browsing anonymously is a moving target, with ever more easy-to-use software available that can erase your tracks. Of course, especially if you live in a society where violating Internet usage policies can land you in jail or worse, any attempt to stay anonymous should be approached with extreme caution. Here is an updated collection of resources on some of the tools that are available from the open source community for this purpose.
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YouTube has found itself in the middle of a heated controversy between Japan and China thanks to a leaked video that shows a Chinese fishing boat crashing into a Japanese coast guard vessel. Google has now apparently turned over its records pertaining to the user who uploaded the video to Japanese prosecutors, who cited breaches of local laws by the anonymous video uploader.
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The media are abuzz today with stories on how China is trying to create an international boycott of the Nobel Prize awards in Oslo. Not surprisingly, it’s blocking Chinese activists who it believes may be leaving to attend the ceremonies, and it’s trying to strong-arm other countries from participating.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The following public and private bodies and individuals submitted comments in response to the Consultation on the open internet and net neutrality. The corresponding contributions can be accessed by using the links.
Omitted from the list are those who requested confidentiality. Furthermore, the name of the respondent has been omitted when requested or not provided.
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Hard as it might be for Webheads to believe, a significant fraction of the US population doesn’t use the Internet at home. In fact, 23 percent of all US households report that no one in the home uses the Internet anywhere. Why not? A detailed new study (PDF) from the Department of Commerce reminds us: many people don’t see the need for this “Internet” thing at all.
Commerce parsed a big batch of US Census Data, most recently from late 2009, on US Internet use, and found that in general, it has exploded. Between 2001 and 2009, broadband usage in the US increased sevenfold, but a significant number of people just don’t see the need.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The first and second laws of thermodynamics should also be called the first and second laws of economics. Why? Because without them there would be no scarcity, and without scarcity, no economics. Consider the first law: if we could create useful energy and matter as we needed it, as well as destroy waste matter and energy as it got in our way, we would have superabundant sources and sinks, no depletion, no pollution, more of everything we want without having to find a place for stuff we don’t want. The first law rules out this direct abolition of scarcity. But consider the second law: even without creation and destruction of matter-energy, we might indirectly abolish scarcity if only we could use the same matter-energy over and over again for the same purposes — perfect recycling. But the second law rules that out. And if one thinks that time is the ultimate scarce resource, well, the entropy law is time’s irreversible arrow in the physical world. So it is that scarcity and economics have deep roots in the physical world, as well as deep psychic roots in our wants and desires.
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As recently as late December, Monsanto was named “company of the year” by Forbes magazine. Last week, the company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television stock market commentator. “This may be the worst stock of 2010,” he proclaimed.
On Tuesday, Forbes publicly lamented its decision to deem Monsanto “company of the year.” The headline was cutting: “Forbes was wrong about Monsanto. Really wrong.” How did Monsanto go from Wall Street hero to Wall Street doormat?
According to The Times’ Pollack, Monsanto’s troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent on Roundup, Monsanto’s market-dominating herbicide, has run out, exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2) its target audience — large-scale commodity farmers in the south and Midwest– are turning against its core offerings in genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.
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Copyrights
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Last week marked the return of the copyright debate to the House of Commons as Bill C-32 entered second reading. Six months after its introduction, it became immediately apparent that all three opposition parties will be seeking changes to the bill in return for their support.
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The Public Knowledge think tank has issued a white paper warning that the open source community faces new intellectual property challenges with the growth of 3D printing.
3D printing uses technology based around thermal inkjet printers to build 3D objects, laying down a strip of molecules at a time. It is likely to be vital to future motherboard manufacturing, and could have much wider uses.
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Just as computer inkjet printing revolutionised colour document production in the office and home, 3D printing is set to revolutionise how we create and use everyday objects.
Applying printing technology to the manufacture of actual 3D objects has been possible for some years, but only on large industrial machinery which was expensive to purchase and run.
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Their next door neighbors, Britain, have now decided to take the same course. Curiously as has been noted in many places, all of the spending cuts affect the poor and the middle class. The Toffs make out just fine, thank you very much.
And now the Americans want to do the same thing. And will do the same thing. And will suffer the same fallout. Massive unemployment, massive underemployment. The entire audience that the RIAA/MPAA companies depend upon for their sales will be in the poorhouse, and unable to afford to buy entertainment. After all, food and housing come first. You can survive without entertainment. Life is more fun with it, but life is impossible without eating.
Possibly this is the reason that the Entertainment Distributors have been so interested in pushing ACTA, in the hope that they’ll be able to increase their sales outside of the United States. Of course the other countries are interested in pushing their creative industries too, so that may not work.
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Since we last blogged about CC in Barcelona, we’ve been very productive. Two weeks worth of open events have yielded several talks around open educational resources (OER) search, discovery, and policy at Open Ed, recommendations and tools for greater open content reuse at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and a 12 month plan for the future of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).
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Meet Creative Commons board member Jimmy Wales. You probably know him best as the founder of Wikipedia. Here, he talks to us about the importance of Creative Commons, why fundraising is hard, and his crazy travel schedule.
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CC communities throughout the Arab World displayed their rich culture and commitment to openness this past week in Lebanon and Qatar, showcasing creative works, inter-regional collaboration, and a focused dedication on legal and copyright issues in the region. Following the Digitally Open conference in Doha and a regional meeting including members of CC’s communities in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria and UAE, Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig and CC CEO Joichi Ito visited Beirut for the official launch of the Creative Commons Lebanon project.
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A non-commercial blog which specializes in reporting on Amazon Kindle related news was taken down by WordPress after it linked to site hosting an unauthorized copy of a book. Although this is a legal act under Spanish law, WordPress blocked the site following a complaint from an anti-piracy group who said the blog owner had ignored them, but when one learns how they made that complaint, it’s no surprise he did.
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4chan and movie piracy are closely linked: Many of the anarchic message board’s users frequent sites like the Pirate Bay to download movies they can watch alone in their parents’ basement. Now, 4chan is attacking the champions of anti-piracy efforts.
The Motion Picture Association of America’s website has been down since this morning, felled by a malicious flood of traffic co-ordinated by 4chan. (A similar attack brought down Gawker briefly this summer.) The assault appears to be in retaliation for the CEO of an Indian tech firm boasting that his company launches similar attacks on movie pirating websites like The Pirate Bay at the behest of film studios. That company’s website was quickly brought down, as the panicked CEO tried to backtrack from his comments.
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In a fascinating interview with TVOntario’s Search Engine podcast, Michael Geist describes and predicts the likely outcome of the years and years of wrangling over Canada’s new copyright bill, C-61 C-32, which includes a sweeping DRM clause that makes it illegal to modify your own equipment, even if you’re not otherwise breaking copyright law, making it one of the most radical DRM laws in the world. Michael sees reason to hope for a more moderate C-32 in its final form — I hope he’s right.
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Bill C-32 will be our new copyright law – Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, explains what that means for our digital rights.
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There hasn’t been too much case law around the legitimacy of Creative Commons licenses, and some have questioned whether or not they’re really legitimate. I’ll admit that I do have some questions about certain aspects of CC licenses, but over in Belgium a court has pretty clearly claimed that Creative Commons licenses are perfectly legitimate. The case involved a band that had released its music under a CC attribution-non-commercial-no derivatives license. However, a theater apparently used the music (in a modified form) as part of an ad for its upcoming season, and the ad played on national radio.
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This is an extremely interesting ruling for various reasons. Firstly, it helps to eliminate the typical FUD that tries to undermine Creative Commons as licences that are not valid because they lack case law.
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ACTA
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GUE/NGL and I are preparing a draft resolution along with MEPs from other political groups. You are most welcome to comment on the content of the draft here: https://actamotion.co-ment.com/text/GEyBvVpfwDj/view/
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How close were we to getting an ISP liability regime in ACTA? New leaked documents reveal more about what went on and how the EU and US are trying to sort out their differences.
A raft of EU documents discussing changes to the ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) emerged unexpectedly in the public domain yesterday. The documents, which appear to originate from within the ACTA team in DG Trade, signal that the the US and EU are close to sorting out their differences, with the EU ‘winning’ on some matters.
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