• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Terminal Man

Ed sold MiTS and started medical school less than three years after introducing the Altair 8800. In one sense this could be seen as a logical transition from a dodgy electronic kit company that had almost gone under many times.

[...]

Linux might have called him back but by the time it was available Ed wasn’t.

Fun with Linux on Easter!

I’ve been offline for more than a day, and haven’t had time to blog, but yesterday I saw my old friend Dean Esmay. Among other things, he was installing, tweaking, and playing with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, and burned an extra CD for me.

[...]

I am very, very impressed, and I highly recommend Ubuntu Linux.

PlayStation Pull-Back Hurts Inexpensive Supercomputing

In the case of the PS3, however, the benefits of Linux on the CellBE-processor device were immediate. In 2007, the researchers at NorthCarolina State University clustered eight PS3 machines that ran Fedora Core 5 Linux (ppc64). That same year a University of Massachusetts team found that putting together an eight-node PS3 cluster together (for a cost of about US$4000) would perform with the same processing power as a 200-processor supercomputer.

Kernel Space

• Linux: First Release Of nftables

  Netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy recently announced a first alpha-release of nftables, slated to eventually replace iptables as the standard Linux packet filtering engine. Nftables aims to simplify the kernel ABI, reduce code duplication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient execution, storage and updates of filtering rules. Patrick began with a high level overview of the three pieces that comprise the firewall, “the kernel provides a netlink configuration interface, as well as runtime ruleset evaluation using a small classification language interpreter. libnl contains the low-level functions for communicating with the kernel, the nftables frontend is what the user interacts with.” An insightful overview can be found on lwn.net.

• Linux: Memory Compaction

  The patches, first posted in May of 2007, provide a mechanism for moving GFP_MOVABLE pages into a smaller number of pageblocks, reducing externally fragmented memory.

• Emergency Mesa 7.8.1 release coming this Monday.

Applications

• Do You Have an Aptitude for Software?

• adeskbar, for fun and profit

• Lyrebird: from the ashes of songbird

  It’s early days for the fork so the team are actively looking for contributers. Head on over to #lyrebird on irc.mozilla.org to see how you can get involved.

• Rolling Back the Clock: Shell only Programs

  The results were interesting, due to circumstance I had to use a graphical browser to take care of work related stuff, however, everything else worked great. It is worth noting that in the past I have used all of the utilities mentioned here for a period of time for one reason or another (for instance I used to secure shell into a mail server and use mutt to read mail locally) so it isn’t like this is new so much as a trip back in time. In fact it has worked out so well, I continue to use all of the utilities because for me personally I work faster via a keyboard with less mouse rather than the other way around.

• Proprietary

  • Mockup: Opera 10.5x + Ubuntu 10.04

    Opera 10.5x for Linux doesn’t seem to be evolving at the rate that I had originally expected as I interpreted from several Desktop Team blog posts, but it does seem to be inching its way forward on the stability end of things.

  • Transgaming customers can now save 25% off CrossOver Games

    CodeWeavers and Wine-Reviews have put together a special dealcode just for gamers and especially Transgamers. So if your a current or ex Transgaming Cedega customer and you would like to take the leap and switch over to CrossOver Games now is the perfect time to do so. With this special dealcode “ComeToTheLight” you will receive a instant 25% discount off the normal retail price of CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional.

• Instructionals

  • HowTo Find out if Installed Linux is 32 bits or 64 bits

  • Using Gimp’s IFS Tool

  • How to develop on KDE & Amarok without trashing your System

  • Perl – How to change @INC to include non-standard path

  • Broadcom Wireless Driver Fix In Lucid

  • Errors compiling VMware Server on Fedora 12

  • Make Firefox use as much Screen as Chrome

  • Nvidia Tegra2 and Gentoo: Part Two (Running Gentoo!)

  • Quick Filtering in Thunderbird

  • Converting #Blackboard to Moodle

  • [ How to ] Auto-mounting internal drives in Ubuntu

  • Create an encrypted USB drive for Ubuntu Linux

  • Control users loggin /etc/passwd file

  • Configure alerts for email and contact groups in Nagios

  • Configure hostgroups for Nagios

  • Chromium getting you down? I finally found out what’s sexually assaulted the poor pooch

  • VMplayer crash in fedora 12

  • Install Bold New Miro 3 in Ubuntu Karmic, Jaunty

  • iptables rules for desktop computers

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Spreading KDE at the Southern California Linux Expo

    From February 20th to the 21st, Linux enthusiasts from the greater Los Angeles area converged at the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles Airport to celebrate Linux and Free Software at the annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE8X). KDE was there once again showing attendees the work of the KDE community.

  • You Be The Judge: Plasma Javascript Jam Session

    Here, along with a description by the authors, are the competing Plasmoids in alphabetical order…

• GNOME Desktop

  • I have seen the future, and it is GNOME 3

    GNOME 3 is different. Very different. Gone is the start button, to be replaced by the Activities button. No more are you fumbling around in menus to find what you need. What you will have is a very streamlined, sleek, and sexy desktop that is sure to make your computing life easier. Oh of course there will be those that say “If it isn’t broke…” Well, I am one of those who will first claim that it is, in fact, “broke”. The current desktop that most everyone uses is klunky, kludgy, and ugly. It’s a task bar, and menus, and icons, and blah blah blah…there’s no “Apple factor”. What do I mean by “Apple factor”? Simple – there is very little energy given to aesthetics. And believe me in the current incarnation of the modern, capitalist society – it is all about form over function. You have to look good before you can be good.

  • GNOME 3 System Status Area Mockups

    In GNOME 3, the System Status Area is a place where System Status Indicators represent the status of the system to the user. This is not an area that is variously called the Notification Area or System Tray and should not be used by applications (foreground or background) to indicate their status. This distinction is necessary to ensure the entire top of the screen is designed properly, system owned and coherent, able to be modified or extended, scale well to smaller form-factors, and not become a dumping ground or high-profile branding opportunity.

  • Possible New GNOME 3 System Status Area Changes [Mockups]

  • The Case for Gnome Shell

    A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future. Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface. Here’s what he had to say.

    In general, Jon’s message was that many of the criticisms I made of GNOME (not Gnome, I’ve realized…) Shell were unfair, given that its targeted release date remains six months in the future. For example, Jon assured me that my experience with a laggy interface was likely due to known bugs involving certain Intel GPUs, which the GNOME developers are working on fixing.

Distributions

• Feature: Peering down the business end of Asturix

  One of the fascinating things about open source software is the way in which it can be adapted to suit many different, previously unexplored tasks. Linux, with its flexibility, can be used in many different niches. Take, for example, Asturix. The Asturix project is an attempt to make a better operating system both for the world in general, and Spanish speakers in particular. The project recognizes that Linux users often need to interact with applications and networks that aren’t always open-source friendly and have tailored their offering to make those situations as easy as possible. To achieve their goals, the Asturix team has created three editions of their distribution:

  * Business – for use in offices
  * Desktop – for people at home
  * Lite – designed with older computers in mind

• New Releases

  • Distribution Release: Puredyne 9.11

  • Estrella Roja (formerly Red Star GNU/Linux) 2.6.7

  • Linux 6.1.1K

  • Clonezilla Live 1.2.4-35

  • IPFire 2.5 – Core 37

  • GhostBSD 1.0 64amd first release.

    We are proud to release GhostBSD 1.0 64amd.

    Base on FreeBSD-8-64amd-stable
    Run on Gnome 2.28.2.
    We update Firefox to 3.6.
    We remove gnome-games and Epyphany. We add some use full apps like Thunderbird, Abiword, Gnumeric, Geany, Planner and Gimp.
    Some user of GhostBSD ask for it.
    You can use sudo and su In terminal with out password.

  • Untangle Gateway 7.2

  • PC/OS 10.1.1 Released

    We are pleased to announce the delivery of PC/OS OpenWorkstation 10.1.1 PC/OS GNOME 10.1.1 as well as PC/OS WebStations 10.1.1. With this release we bring many bug fixes and enhancements to the platform. This release is a bug fix and precursor to the release of PC/OS 11. Some of the highlights of this release include.

• Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • KDE 4.4.2 available for Mandriva 2010 !!

    The second bugfix release of KDE 4.4 was released this week and again thanks to neoclust we have packages for Mandriva 2010 since today, this time for both i586 and x86_64 platforms at the same time !!. With 4.4.1, packages for x86_64 weren’t built but I didn’t care much as I wasn’t using that plaform, but last night I reinstalled my system with 2010 x86_64 and it was a really great surprise to find this morning both platforms available to install. If you are upgrading from a previous KDE 4.4.x upgrade then don’t forget to disable or delete the old KDE 4.4.x repository before starting this upgrade, just in case.

  • First Look – Mandriva 2010.1 beta 1 – Gnome Edition

    The first beta release of Mandriva 2010.1 has been made available for testing. Being fans of the 2010 release (it was, in our opinion, Mandriva’s best to date) we were eager to see what kind of progress is being made on their next stable release.

• Debian Family

  • [Debian] Bits from the Release Team: Scheduling, transitions, how to help

  • Ubuntu

    • A Look At All Ubuntu Mascots (Code Names)

      The development codename of an Ubuntu release takes the form “Adjective Animal”. Initially these weren’t in alphabetic order – until Dapper DRAKE (6.06) that is.

      Let’s take a look (in pictures) at all Ubuntu mascots – from the warty Warthog to the latest maverick Meerkat…

    • Mergimus: Making Patch And Branch Review Easier In Ubuntu

      I believe part of the problem here is that reviewing patches is just too hard. At the Ubuntu Global Jam on Friday I was talking this through with a few people and I started drilling on the idea of a desktop tool that improves viability on patch contributions and automates much of the work involved. I believe this tool could greatly open up the world of patch review to more people.

    • Ubuntu and the FSF Ideal

      It’s an interesting relationship, but I think we all understand where each of us is coming from. The FSF seeks to be a defining entity that stands for a very precise ideal and raising awareness of that ideal through appealing to people’s politics. Ubuntu seeks to increase awareness and use of Free Software by providing products that work. So long as we in Ubuntu never forget to mention the ideals, philosophies and principles of the Free and Open Source ethos that gives us the great fortune of being able to make computers work better, then I think we have no real conflict.

    • Ubuntu and its commitment to software freedom

      Ubuntu does not include “Non-Free” desktop software in a default installation: When installing Ubuntu, there is no desktop software that can be considered “Non Free” and that’s the main premise of Ubuntu today. Ubuntu provides the best free software to millions of people using it daily. Ubuntu never promotes proprietary applications over Free Software. However, it allows people who want to use non-free software, such as Skype. This is something that is true for Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse, ArchLinux, and even in the considered free distributions like gNewSense. The user chooses. Ubuntu does not force the user to use “non-free” software.

    • UbuntuOne Gets Contacts Mobile Phone Sync Support [But It's Not Free]

      A recent message on the Ubuntu One mailing list announces that Canonical has teamed up with Funambol, an established software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile phones and other devices who have built a community around different client plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc).

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 187

      Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #187 for the week March 28th – April 3rd, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat, Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 freeze now in effect, Ubuntu 8.10 reaches End-Of-Life April, 30, 2010, Call for Session Leaders for Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Manual Team call for help, LoCo Directory: Team Events app Rocks, Ubuntu Ireland Global Jam Review, Help Translate the main LoCo Council page, Ubuntu One contacts, now with merging, Kubuntu Netbook Edition ScreenKast, At Home With Jono Bacon Podcast, Better sounding music with Rhythmbox, Ubuntu-UK Podcasts, and much, much more!

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged box PC offers choice of Pineview Atom CPUs

• Mobile PoS reader runs Linux

  Dutch “digital security” company Gemalto announced a lighter, more mobile version of its Linux-based Magic3 family of point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. The Magic3 W-1 runs the company’s “Open&Sec” PoS security stack on top of Linux, and offers a USB port, an Ethernet port, and WiFi dongle support, says the company.

• Toughest Linux box ever, cool!

  While it may not look like a computer, this armored baby is actually a high performing embedded Linux System…

• Pogoplug: An Interesting, Linux-Friendly NAS

  While more and more computer peripherals and gadgets these days are running Linux internally, not many vendors are matching their internal Linux support with external Linux customer support. For the Pogoplug though, which is made by CloudEngines, this is not the case. The Pogoplug is a network attached storage device that is far more than a basic NAS like the Icy Box NAS4220, but the Pogoplug can integrate with social networks like Twitter along with providing a rich web 2.0 interface for accessing the device from anywhere in the world. The Pogoplug device runs Linux and is built upon popular open-source packages, but Pogoplug does not hide this fact and they actually encourage community developers to work on the Pogoplug with complete support for SSH-ing into these devices and making modifications. CloudEngines also offers a 32-bit/64-bit Linux program for interacting with the Pogoplug.

• Phones

  • Android vs Maemo – Hands on Review

    There is no doubt that Linux will be the dominant player in the mobile market by the end of 2010. This is namely thanks to Google’s Android OS, which has been appearing on more handsets than I can count the past few months. Android however is not the only mobile Linux operating system (however it is easily the most popular) that exists. I have done more than a few posts about my Nokia N900, which is another mobile device that runs a variation of Linux known as Maemo.

  • Nokia

    • Meego Provides First Glimpse at New Mobile OS

      The Meego Community blog explains in more detail “The MeeGo architecture is based on a common core across the different usage models, such as netbooks, handheld, in-vehicle, and connected TV. The MeeGo common core includes the various key subsystems including the core operating system libraries, the comms and telephony services, internet and social networking services, visual services, media services, data management, device services, and personal services.”

  • Android

    • Digg Launches Android App, Announces Hiring

      Now, Digg has launched its Android App.

    • Fennec comes to Android

      Firefox’s little cousin is now on Android, showing what an alternative browser can do for Google’s platform.

    • Developers turn sour on Apple iPad

      Android is on the rise, despite the fact that Google insists on fragmenting its fledgling market. Meanwhile, BlackBerry is up to 43 per cent, and mobile Windows – following the introduction of Windows Phone 7 – has leapt from 13 per cent to 39 per cent.

    • Rogers Launching Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 On April 15 2010

      Yesterday, we summarized on the happenings of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android device heading to Rogers.

    • Report Shows More Planning to Buy Android over iPhone

      According to the results, 30% of those polled are considering Android as opposed to 29% for the iPhone. While the number is very close and not indicative of all potential buyers, it’s still worth noting. Even more telling for Android’s growth is that it jumped 9% from December.

    • Motorola’s Devour: An Android Phone for Info Gorgers

      The Devour comes with the typical Android array of Google applications — Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps and Google Maps Navigation. Additional applications can be downloaded from the Android Market, which has between 20,000 and 30,000 apps.

    • Google Is Missing an Android Opportunity on Non-smartphones

      Android is growing like crazy on smartphones — and stagnating everywhere else. That’s because Google is keeping its app store off all Android devices that aren’t smartphones. Such an approach is understandable only in the sense that it gives the company more control over the Android experience, but it will ultimately serve to send consumers in search of devices that offer them more freedom.

      Take the ARCHOS Internet Tablet that debuted in September of last year. The 5-inch slate device offers a mobile web experience powered by the Android platform, yet doesn’t offer access to the Android Market — preventing its owners from making use of even the most basic Google apps, like Gmail.

• Tablets

  • JooJoo tablet faces an uphill battle

    If you don’t recall, the JooJoo tablet is an Atom-based 12-inch tablet that primarily is meant to give people a big touch browsing experience. It’s got Flash and about a 10 second boot time.

  • Techno-hysteria

    The iPad is the latest embodiement of Huxley’s Soma. It’s a seductive, closed device designed for passive consumption of pre-approved objects. That’s why the old ‘content’ industries are slavering over it. They see it as the way to undo all the damage wrought by the openness of the Web and its TCP/IP underpinnings, a way of rounding up all those escaped couch-potatoes and getting them back into the pen. And of being able to charge them for everything they use — and collect the money via Apple’s toll-gate.

  • Five open source alternatives to the iPad

    Neofonie WePad
    A bit bigger than the iPad with an 11.6″, 1366×768 display, the WePad runs the Android OS. You can get apps from the Android Market or the WePad App Store. It also has a 1.3 megapixel webcam, which the iPad infamously did not include. What about the other iPad holes most often complained about? Flash? Yes. Multitasking? Yes. And the USB ports, modem, and 6-hour battery life won’t hear many complaints either.

    Touch Book
    Touch Book is sort of a netbook, sort of a tablet. It’s made by a company called Always Innovating, and it has a feature that really appeals to me–a detachable keyboard dock. Their website shows its many with-or-without-dock configurations with titles like “Yoga: Downward dog,” “Separation under way,” and my favorite, “Fridge magnet.” The hardware and software are fully open source–ready for you to do with what you like. It comes with a custom operating system, but you can install any mobile OS you like. Take a look at it at Gizmodo.

    [...]

  • Hacker jailbreaks the iPad less than a day after release

Open Source: Computing for the masses

At the El Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek, Al-Masry Al-Youm sponsored the “Free Open Source” festival on Saturday, also known as “Install Fest” or “GNU Linux” day. Volunteers held sessions on a range of topics, with a focus on the Open Source concept, explaining how even common applications could enhance user security.

5 reasons why you must support the spread of Open Source Software

Open Source Software guarantees quality closed source software
It is very ironic but true. Without enormous pressure from mostly freely available and quality OSS, most closed source software would have just been junk. For instance, without pressure and competition from Linux, Windows 7 would not have been such a polished and nice software. OSS keeps closed source software developers on their toes in the knowledge that there is always some alternative available to users should they get it wrong.

Open Source Software reduces cost
Imagine your company in need of a particular software that is not available in the form it wants but there are others out there it can tweak to suit its needs. In this case, your company has two options, either build from scratch (which can be very expensive and time consuming) or grab the source code of an existing software and tweak it to their taste. Which would you prefer if you were the CFO?

Software Wars : Can u predict the winner?

I found Few pictures which shows the status of software wars which has been going for years…Actually these are maps depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft.

Hosted Exchange Veteran Makes Open Source Move

As of December 2010, Open-Xchange has about 150 active channel partners, up from about 80 active partners in December 2009, according to The VAR Guy’s second annual Open Source 50 survey (complete survey results will be announced May 2010). And all of Open-Xchange’s annual revenues come from channel partners, the company adds.

12 More of the Best Free Linux Books

Many computer users have an insatiable appetite to deepen their understanding of computer operating systems and computer software. Linux users are no different in that respect. At the same time as developing a huge range of open source software, the Linux community fortunately has also written a vast range of documentation in the form of books, guides, tutorials, HOWTOs, man pages, and other help to aid the learning process. Some of this documentation is intended specifically for a newcomer to Linux, or those that are seeking to move away from a proprietary world and embrace freedom.

Mozilla

• GNU IceCat

  Gnu Icecat is a project to create a fully free and remixable version of Firefox. So Why do I love it so much and why do I use it over firefox? Well First I feel it is important to have a browser that is fully remixable and is not under any licensing restrictions. Second as a Free Software activist I want to only be running free software plugins and Icecat makes it a snap!

Schools

• OLPC Australia kicks on

  One Laptop Per Child Australia today has expanded its deployment plans and now intends to roll out 15,000 XO educational laptops to remote schools across Australia over the next 12 months.

• The Secret Lives of Faculty: Background

  I submitted a proposal for a talk to OSCON titled “The Secret Lives of Faculty.” The Twitterable blurb went like this:

  This presentation will introduce open source practitioners to the secret lives of computing faculty in higher education. We will introduce the kinds of students we teach, the curricula we teach to, and the metrics by which we are evaluated.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• An App, By Any Other Name

  The developers of Ubuntu, the popular flavor of Linux that is installed on the computers in the Science Center, showed questionable judgment by picking a name that is a pretentious reference to an African philosophy. But to make matters worse, Ubuntu developers mucked up their clever release dating system with a completely ludicrous set of nicknames. Each release of Ubuntu is dated by the year and the month—9.10, for instance, came out last October—but the numbers are also paired with an alliterative combination of an obscure adjective and a rare animal, yielding such gems as Edgy Eft, Intrepid Ibex, and Jaunty Jackalope. It makes pompous names like Mac OS X Snow Leopard seem almost reasonable by comparison.

  In the pantheon of bad programmer names, recursive acronyms must sit near the top. It’s a perverse concept popular with MIT alums in which one of the letters in the acronym stands for the acronym itself. A relatively benign example is the web scripting language PHP, which stands for PHP: Hyptertext Preprocessor. Older, stranger examples are the free operating system GNU (GNU’s not Unix) and related spinoffs: Cygnus (Cygnus—Your GNU Support), a now-defunct company which provided support for free software, and Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator), software which helps run windows applications on Unix.

• proclus/GNU-Darwin Lives!

  I’ve been keeping this journal the way it was in 2000 for historical archival reasons. If you are interested in current information, here are some up to date links.

• EnSilica updates eSi-RISC development suite

  Version 2.1 includes a new hardware evaluation platform based on Altera’s Cyclone III FPGA with rapid software development and debugging facilitated through the Eclipse integrated development environment and GNU GCC 4.4.0 toolchain, which now features native support for the eSi-RISC architectural features.

• Mano a Mano With the Cult of SEO

Releases

• VirtualBox 3.1.6 stomps dozens of bugs

  An update to VirtualBox fixes a diverse list of bugs in the virtualisation software.

• VirtualBox Virtual Appliances

  VDI images of pre-installed “Open Source” Operating System distros. Pre-installed virtualbox images ready for you to explore and play with.

Openness

• Forget Avatar, the real 3D revolution is coming to your front room

  But what if increased business opportunities were only the beginning? What if 3D printing actually changed lives not just for entrepreneurs but for consumers, for citizens? Adrian Bowyer is a senior lecturer at the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath. Since 2005 he has been working on the Reprap, a project with a clear aim: to make a 3D printer that can reproduce itself.

• Open Access/Content

  • Two Million Free Texts Now Available

    The Internet Archive is pleased to announce an important manuscript, Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, as the 2,000,000th free digital text. Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public for free on archive.org since 2005.

  • Video: Staying in touch with nature by sharing.

Programming

• Forking, The Future of Open Source, and Github

  Last Wednesday, at the kind invitation of the folks from Eclipse, I had the opportunity to sit with more august company – Justin Erenkrantz (Apache), Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus), and Jason van Zyl (Maven/Sonatype) – on a panel charged with debating the future of open source. Among the questions posed to us was this: is the future of open source going to be based on communities such as Apache and Eclipse or will it be based on companies that sell open source?

  My reply? Neither. It’s Github.

Standards/Consortia

• Kroes on the effect of the crisis challenges and open platforms (nederlands)

• Anuncio ODF Plugfest Granada 2010

• OpenOffice.org celebrates Document Freedom Day

• OpenOffice.org celebrates Document Freedom Day

• Public Intervention document freedom day

• Document FreeDom Day

  OpenOffice’s default format is ODF only.
  Its Writer saves as “odt – open document text“.
  Its Spreadsheet saves as “ods – open document spreadsheet“
  Its Impress saves as “odp – open document presentation“

• Making the Grade With the Open Document Format

  HOSEF conducts a monthly ‘Open Source Pizza’ so that people can learn more about what is happening with Free and Open Source Software. Thіѕ presentation is about the adoption of the Open Document Format by the University of Hawaii’s College of Education.

Apple May Build a Search Engine to Shield iPhone Data from Google

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones. This competitive advantage has not gone unnoticed by Apple. Building its own iPhone-centric search engine would help Apple shield Google from its App Store data, Munster said in a March 30 research note.

Acer moves to AMD

COMPUTER MAKER ACER has changed horses and is backing AMD with the announcement that its 6000 series servers will be powered by Magny-Cours based Opteron processors.

Nominet chairman quits

Bob Gilbert has resigned as chairman of Nominet, the non-profit company in charge of the .uk domain registry, it was announced today.

Former Exec Indicted on CDT Price-fixing Charges

A grand jury in San Francisco has indicted a former executive of a Taiwan-based color display tube (CDT) manufacturing firm for his alleged participation in a global conspiracy to fix prices of the tubes used in computer monitors and other devices.

The battle for libel reform has only begun

In 2008, I published an article in the Guardian questioning whether chiropractors should be treating various childhood conditions. I was then sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, which helped ignite the debate over libel reform, and whether the courts are stifling scientific debate.

For the last two years, my legal position seemed pretty grim, largely owing to the state of our libel laws. Yesterday, however, the court of appeal ruled in my favour by agreeing that my article is about recklessness, not dishonesty, and that I could use the more flexible defence of fair comment. Suddenly it seems I can mount a successful defence. Does this mean that libel reform is no longer necessary?

Unfortunately, the English libel system is still notoriously hostile to journalists, and the case for reform remains as strong as ever. Indeed, my case alone demonstrates many of the problems.

Wayne Crookes wants to freeze the net

As things stand, nothing happens in isolation online. But Wayne Crookes (right), ex-Green Party of Canada organizer and financial backer, wants to change that.

He says linking to an article is the same as publishing it and that linking to an allegedly libellous article can, therefore, be the same as defamation.

He says that’s what happened to him and so he wants to freeze the net solid, turning it into a sterile, featureless, colourless landscape.

Science

• Hubble: It’s been quite a journey

  April 2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. To honor the vast accomplishments of this telescopic pioneer in space-based astronomy, NASA and Abrams Books have collaborated with the illustrated book “Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time.”

• Russian spacecraft blasts off

  A Russian spacecraft blasted off from a facility in Kazakhstan Friday on a mission to the International Space Station.

  The launch of the Soyuz TMA-18 comes three days before the launch of NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, which is also bound for the space station.

• Moral judgments can be altered … by magnets

  By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.

Security/Aggression

• Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief

• National Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign Challenge

• Police secretly snapping up to 14m drivers a day

  POLICE chiefs are facing the threat of a High Court privacy action over a nationwide network of cameras that is being used to take up to 14m photographs of motorists every day.

  The images are being stored daily on a huge “Big Brother” database linked to automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) technology to track vehicles’ movements.

• Document Friday: “Narrative summaries of Accidents Involving Nuclear Weapons.”

  Some of these accidents were disclosed for the first time only in this report. The DOD explained that these nuclear accidents “may or may not [have been] divulged at the time depending upon the possibility of public hazard or alarm.” Trust me, if I had lived at any of the above locations, I would have preferred that the government “divulge” the fact that a nuclear accident had occurred.

Environment

• China Spends Big to Counter Severe Weather Caused by Climate Change

  China is ramping up preparations for typhoons, dust storms and other extreme weather disasters as part of a 10-year plan to predict and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

• Greenpeace Links Apple iPad to Global Warming

  A Greenpeace report questions the degree to which the Apple iPad and mobile devices that similarly rely on cloud computing are contributing to global warming. It also calls on IT leaders such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft to take the lead in pursuing critical climate-change goals.

• Greenpeace issues warning about data centre power

  Greenpeace is calling on technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to power their data centres with renewable energy sources.

• Why Greenpeace is Wrong about the iPad

  Except when you actually look up the numbers. Computing accounts for a bit less than 3% of U.S. energy usage, according to Lawrence Livermore Labs. The global IT industry as a whole generates about 2% of global CO2 emissions.

• Greenpeace labels Dell ‘a bloody marketing machine’

  Greenpeace has lambasted Dell’s decision to “backtrack” on its commitments to remove hazardous chemicals from all of its products.

• Japan indicts Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activist

  Prosecutors today indicted an anti-whaling activist from New Zealand on charges that could lead to a lengthy prison term after he boarded a Japanese harpoon boat to protest at the ship’s whale-hunting expedition in Antarctic seas.

• Sundolier Robot Pumps Sunlight Indoors for Powerful Daylighting

  What if you could light your entire building using no electricity, or artificial lights – but just the natural light from the sun? Conventional sky-lights do this well in certain types of single-story spaces, but are not very adaptable, powerful, and often have problems with excessive solar heat gain and heat loss. Enter the Sundolier, a powerful sunlight transport system that’s like putting a solar robot on your roof to pump sunlight indoors! The manufacturer claims a single Sundolier unit can provide enough light to illuminate a 1000-2500 sq. ft. area without any other sources.

Finance

• CMD Releases Bailout Tally, $4.6 Trillion in Federal Funds Disbursed

  Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding. Our tally shows that the Federal Reserve is the real source of the bailout funds.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Chef Alice Waters and Chez Panisse the Targets of a Toxic Sludge Protest

  What has this got to do with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse? Francesca Vietor, the Executive Director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, whose mission is to promote Edible Schoolyard organic gardens, is also the Vice President of the Public Utilities Commission. The PUC is refusing to permanently end their sludge give-away, nor agreeing to clean up the gardens already contaminated with the sewage sludge, as the Organic Consumers Association and the Center for Food Safety have asked.

• Watching Bill Moyers

  As we suspected, the vast majority of bailout funding came directly from the Fed with no Congressional vote or oversight. TARP represents only about 10% of the total amount disbursed by the government. While much of this funding is in the form of loans, as we have reported in the past, little information has been revealed about what the Fed has accepted for collateral for these loans. This makes it very hard for the public, policymakers and the press to make independent assessments of our chances of being paid back. The study was picked up by CNN and other news outlets.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• What will the net do to institutions in the next 10 years?

  The latest Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project report is out: “The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future” surveys 895 tech experts on the way that technology will change institutions (government, business, nonprofits, schools) in the next ten years.

• School laptop spy case prompts Wiretap Act rethink

  When Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district installed remote control anti-theft software on student laptops, it had no intention of dragging Congress into a national debate about wiretapping laws and webcams—but that’s exactly what it got (in addition to some unwanted FBI attention and a major lawsuit). The key question: should the school’s alleged actions be made illegal under US wiretap law?

• Sony Steals Feature From Your PlayStation 3

  If the messages in EFF’s inbox today are anything to go by, a lot of people are upset and angry — with good reason — over Sony’s announcement that it is going to disable a feature that allows people to run GNU/Linux and other operating systems on their PlayStation 3 consoles.

• Philip Pullman on censorship and free speech — pithy and wonderful

• Jerry Ford OKed Warrantless Wiretaps in U.S., Memo Reveals

  President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document.
  The Dec. 19, 1974 White House memorandum, marked Top Secret/Exclusively Eyes Only and signed by Ford, gave then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe and his successors in office authorization “to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• The 21st-Century Orchestra: Now Hear It This Way

  Orchestras are moving into these areas largely out of necessity. The commercial classical recording industry, as it was configured in its late-20th-century heyday, is vastly diminished, and there is little money to be made in the business. The New York Philharmonic, for instance, a giant of the recording industry in the Leonard Bernstein years, has not had a long-term contract with a commercial label for a decade.

• China’s National People’s Congress Amends the Copyright Law

  On February 26, 2010, the National People’s Congress passed the second amendment to the Copyright Law. Only two articles of the Copyright Law have been amended, and the changes will take effect on April 1, 2010.

• Hot news: The next bad thing

  Yes, there are legal aggregation sites – such as Google news – which contain short snippets of news stories. If newspapers want their content removed from these sites they can do so easily by simply changing the data contained in something called the robots.txt file. Google or Yahoo will no longer index their pages.

  But the newspapers do not want to do this, because legal aggregators drive a great deal of traffic to them. And in any event, they do not need a new right to stop the practice. There are also sites that do illegally copy the entire contents, or the entire article. Their behaviour is already illegal under copyright law. (And in any event has a small effect on revenues. Do you read the FT stories at some shady site or at the FT?)

• The Flower of Free Culture

  There cannot be a free culture license because a license is an intrinsic impediment to cultural freedom (being a submission to copyright, let alone fraught with incompatibility and re-licensing issues), so it would be counter-productive and, despite the best of intentions, hypocritical to promote licenses as a means of achieving cultural emancipation.

• Launching Public Discussion of CC Patent Tools

  We’re happy to announce that we’re launching the public comment and discussion period for our new patent tools: the Research Non-Assertion Pledge and the Public Patent License. We invite you to join the discussion at our public wiki. There you can read about these tools, catch up on hot topics of interest to the community, or join our public discussion list to contribute your thoughts and suggestions.

• Anti-Piracy Lawyers Vandalize Wikipedia Page

  As mass file-sharing litigation lawsuits go inter-continental, not everyone is proud to be associated with this type of work. Lawyers Tilly Bailey & Irvine in the UK have been hard at work this month, editing large chunks of their own Wikipedia page in an attempt to hide their involvement and also earning themselves a copyright infringement warning.

• Is music the unacceptable face of capitalism?

  Lord Mandelson today accused the bankers of being the “unacceptable face of capitalism”. Isn’t this somewhat hypocritical, given that he wants the Internet industry to spend £500 million on an electronic fence to protect the rich in the music industry (ie, the Digital Economy Bill)? Is this acceptable when the country is virtually bankrupt?

• Code To Track BitTorrent Users Bought For $750 (Max)

  As the practice of hunting down alleged file-sharers and then issuing legal threats in order to force money out of them gathers pace, questions are continually raised over the quality of the technical systems used to gather the evidence. According to information on a rent-a-coder site, such a system was bought in 2008 for between $250 and $750.

• “Ashes to Ashes” election campaign posters probably breach copyright. The proof? A mouse mat

  1. Does the Labour Party have a Licence to Use this image for this purpose? This is a publicity (PR) picture – a PR Licence does not normally permit use for party political advertising. We won’t know unless and until someone produces a Licence to Use, and whether that Licence includes advertising. If not, they are in breach of copyright.

  2. If they do have such a Licence, from whom did they obtain it? Monastic Productions, Kudos Film & Television or BBC Worldwide?

  3. Why was it granted? On the evidence of this picture, the BBC almost certainly holds rights in all publicity images from the series. The BBC is prohibited by its charter from engaging in partisan political activity.

• ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

  • Opposition mounts to UK’s Digital Economy Bill

    The government has published a new draft of a controversial clause in the Digital Economy bill, in an effort to ease its progress through parliament.

    The Liberal Democrats said they will oppose any plans to rush the Digital Economy bill into law.

  • PublicACTA

  • Make a submission on copyright in the digital environment.

    And note this in your diary, too: the PublicACTA conference, being held in Wellington on 10 April, just days before the (secret) ACTA talks open in Wellington.

  • Google DC Talk 11.1.10: ACTA – The Global Treaty That Could Reshape The Internet

  • This Tuesday, the government will rush a law that could cut you off the Internet

  • Open Rights Group raises Flash Mob… of 7

    Music House — HQ for a number of the UK music industry’s trade groups — was in a lock-down situation this lunchtime as an Open Rights Group Flash Mob descended, protesting against the Digital Economy Bill.

  • Clause 18, DEB redux

    No specification of what form a notice requesting blocking should take (a la DMCA) so an ISP can at least find the right site (or part of a site) and know the request comes from genuine rightsholders, with genuine grievances, and not A N Other. No need to notify a site if it is blocked without court order. And no provision for a site to go to court and demand it be unblocked or at least demand to know why it has been blocked (“stay up” a la DMCA “put back” . A model for these already existed. Why has it been pointedly ignored in favour of a profusion of “mays” and “likely”s?

  • Disconnection notices served to UK Music, BPI and politicians

    On Thursday, our ‘Police’ visited the offices of the BPI, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties, and UK Music, and presented them with notice that the Digital Economy Bill is disconnected, from democracy, human rights, public opinion and sound business sense.

  • The Digital Economy Bill: Thinking about Banana Ice Cream

    Imagine there was a little tinpot dictatorship somewhere. Let’s call it a Banana Ice-Cream Republic.

    [...]

    Which is why the change in the law made so many of the townspeople very angry. They didn’t believe that banana ice cream stealing was going on at the levels that are claimed. They didn’t believe that the banana ice cream industry was losing as much revenue to stealing as the industry claimed. They didn’t believe that ice cream vans had much of a future, they thought that there are better ways to make and deliver ice cream. Some of them didn’t think that ice cream distribution was all that important anyway.

  • The Digital Economy Bill: Fred Figglehorn, won’t you please come home?

    Cruikshank introduced the Fred Figglehorn character in videos on the JKL Productions channel he started on YouTube with his cousins, Jon and Katie Smet. He set up the Fred channel in October 2005. By April 2009, the channel had over 1,000,000 subscribers, making it the first YouTube channel to hit one million subscribers and the most subscribed channel at the time.

    Over a million subscribers. And creator Lucas Cruikshank is 16 years old. He calls his channel “programming for kids by kids”. By kids. Let’s remember that.

  • The Digital Economy Bill: Be Careful What You Wish For

    If you feel really passionate about something, take the time to step back and look at things from the opposite perspective.

    Now the Digital Economy Bill is something I feel passionate about, which is why, as we approach Tuesday 6th April 2010, I’ve been writing a post a day on the subject for the past few days.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

What will come after Linux?

I do think that the time of proprietary operating systems are coming to a close. There are too many free and open source solutions available and the most important part of any computing system, the data, can be easily transferred between them. So while windows keeps trying to entice the public with eye candy, MacOS keeps its hardware to itself and AmigaOS keeps with the unfortunate business decisions, the average Joe Blo and SOHOs will look around for alternatives. Enterprise businesses are like large religions. Stubborn and take several thousand years to make a minor change.

So the day comes and Linux has toppled windows off of its pedestal. Linus Torvalds is as revered as Bill Gates was and Richard Stallman is throwing chairs when he hears about the new, up and coming operating system. Linux is pre-installed on just about every single computer sold and the whole computing industry is geared around providing service and support for Linux. I just wonder if we, as Linux supporters, will be treating the advocates of the new prodigy operating system the same way windows supporters treat us today.

Audiocasts

• Linux Outlaws 143 – Lime Neeson

  This week on the show: Sony disables Linux on the PS3 for good, SCO on the brink of death, Google’s plans for Froyo, Paul Frields to step down as FPL, new Gnome icons and a huge pale on Fab’s fart.

• FLOSS Weekly 115: The ACM/IEEE Super Computing Challenge

  Doug Smith joins the FLOSS crew to talk about the ACM/IEEE Super Computing Challenge in New Orleans.

  Guest: Doug Smith.

Desktop

• New laptop

  Well, I finally heard back from System76, and they told me something that changed the whole landscape. They had ONE Darter Ultra left!!!

• Celebrate the 2010 Dewey Winburne Community Service Honorees

  Ken Starks
  As founder and Lead Director of The HeliOS Project, Ken Starks spearheads the effort to gather decommissioned or broken computers and refurbishes them. These computers are then given to Austin-area children who normally would not be able to afford one. To date, The HeliOS Project has placed more than 1000 computers.

• Appearance

  • 4 new themes added for bisigi themes project and screenshots included

  • 16 Best Linux Desktop Customization #3

  • Top 5 Ubuntu Lucid Wallpapers From The Ones Shortlisted For Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

Kernel Space

• A stable kernel release storm

  Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of four separate stable kernels: 2.6.27.46, 2.6.31.13, 2.6.32.11, and 2.6.33.2.

Applications

• co-ment: Document Collaboration and Annotation Tool

  Google Docs is maybe the king among Web-based collaborative editing and document sharing applications, but the productivity suite from the all-mighty giant is not the only fish in the sea. An open source Web-based solution, co-ment provides an efficient document collaboration environment which offers everything you need to edit, annotate, and share documents. co-ment is not just a mere Web-based word processor, though. While you can use co-ment as a no-frills Web-based word processor, it’s designed for easy and efficient document annotation.

• Light and Fast Download Accelerator for Linux

  Light and Fast Download Accelerator for Linux: Some of you may have used a download accelerator through a browser add-on but are not contented with the download speed gain. Perhaps you should try a light and fast standalone and desktop-based download manager that could help give considerable increase in download speed.

• Grsync (Rsync GUI) 1.1.0 Ubuntu 9.10 And 10.04 .deb Download

• 5 cool Linux audio editors worth knowing

  Ardour

  Released under the GPL, Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. The application aims to provide a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use with features such as recording, mixing, editing and mastering. Ardour relies heavily on plugins ot get some features to work.

• Compatibility Layer

  • Another CrossOver Linux 9 Review

    Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there’s some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. Thats where CodeWeavers latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in.

  • Wine 1.1.42 Released

    The Wine development release 1.1.42 is now available.

    What’s new in this release:

    * Support for shared 32/64-bit setups.
    * Dwarf debug info support for better backtraces.
    * More standard actions supported in MSI.
    * Support for TIFF image format in WinCodecs.
    * A number of Direct3D improvements.
    * Shell fixes for better Internet Explorer support.
    * Various bug fixes.

• Instructionals

  • Help! Finding Community Linux Support

  • How to Create Screencasts in Linux

  • Gentoo on EC2 From Scratch

  • Can You Find it? 7 Easter Eggs on Linux / UNIX related software

  • Linux: Updating a Linux Unfriendly Motherboard BIOS

  • 11 Crucial Things an Ubuntu Newbie Should Know

  • Rhythmbox as media server

  • The Complete Guide to Saving Your Windows System with a Thumb Drive

    If you or your in-need friends or relatives can’t boot into your Windows desktop, or you can’t actually do anything once you’re into it, booting up a live Ubuntu system from a USB thumb drive, or off a burned CD, can save your system, recover files, and pull off other miracles.

  • Geek Week VDI Day 3: Virtual Bridges VERDE 3.0 Summary

Distributions

• Arch on the Meso

  So last night I figured it was time to give Arch a spin on the Meso. Next to Slackware I have a real soft spot for Arch. It’s a great distrobution with fantastic documentation and a wonderful community.

• Mandriva 2010.1 Beta1

• Red Hat Family

  • A Red Hat Day as Traders Go Bullish on Tech

    Options traders demonstrated confidence in Qualcomm Inc., Micron Technology Inc. and Red Hat Inc., selling “put” options in all three technology companies in hopes the stocks stay strong in coming weeks.

• Debian Family

  • SimplyMepis 8.5 Review

    Today marks the release of version 8.5 of SimplyMepis, the popular Debian based distribution that focuses on the K desktop environment. We decided to take it for a run and see if there have been any significant changes since the previous release.

    [...]

    Overall Impressions:

    Pro’s:

    * Based on Debian which means the package selection is quite good.
    * Plenty of configuration utilities for those uncomfortable with the console.
    * System feels stable.
    * Pre-installed browser plugins for Firefox save users some time tracking them all down.

    Con’s:

    * Visually unappealing.
    * Welcome screen doesn’t start at first bootup which negates any value it might add.

  • Ubuntu

    • There is More to Linux Than Ubuntu

      Kubuntu was my favorite distribution for a time, back during the KDE 3.5 series. I was a KDE user all the way back to 2.0. Before Kubuntu I used mainly Debian unstable on the desktop, and Debian stable on servers. Way before that, Red Hat and Slackware. Red Hat 5 was my first Linux, on actual 3.5″ diskettes. Somewheres in there I used Libranet, which was a super-nice Debian derivative, but sadly it died with the passing of its founder.

    • Quick Look at Lucid

      Ubuntu just released the beta 1 version of their new LTS (Long Term Support) Distribution, Lucid 10.04. The theme is based on “light” and it looks great. Here’s what to expect and what not to expect when you first install this new flavor of Ubuntu:

      The first thing you notice when you launch the live CD is Ubuntu’s new logo. Don’t worry, they still have the basic logo but they added some new typography and use the logo like a registration mark. They went with the black desktop theme for their default which is fine, but they moved something around. The window manager buttons went from the right side to the left, which is difficult at first if you are not used to it.

    • Maverick Meerkat A Perfect 10?

      Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx (10.04) isn’t out yet but Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, and his team look toward the October 2010 (10.10) release they’re calling Maverick Meerkat. On his personal blog this morning, Mark wrote, “It’s time to put our heads together to envision ‘the perfect 10′.” Mark, himself, has a new vision for the upcoming release already knowing that 10.04 is almost “in the can.” His new vision is one of lightness-lightness in footprint, in deployment and in support requirements. A grand vision but can he do it?

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Maemo Shown Running on an HTC HD2: Fake?

    Windows Mobile devices are very versatile. They can (sort of) run Android, Ubuntu, plus other flavors of Linux. In this video, it appears that someone has figured out how to run Maemo on an HTC HD2, or it’s very possible that they are simply using a VNC client to access an Nokia N900 (which is a Maemo device) through the HD2. What do you think?

  • One Android To Rule Them All?

    Android is looking good, no doubt about it. What has started as a Linux-based OS for handsets (i.e., mobile phones) has now rapidly spread to different devices. There are small tablet computers like Archos’ Internet tablets and Enso’s zenPad, e-book readers like Barnes & Noble’s nook and Spring Designs Alex, and even a netbook – Acer’s Aspire One D250 (actually dual boots with Windows 7).

• Sub-notebooks

  • IBM, Canonical, Simmtronics Offer Cheap Netbooks For Emerging Markets

    The lightweight computers run on Ubuntu and come pre-loaded with IBM’s office productivity suites built on OpenOffice.org code.

• Tablets

  • JooJoo: The “other” tablet arrives

    The arrival of JooJoo seemed kind of fishy because 1) it was April Fool’s Day, 2) there was so much buzz on the blogosphere about this weekend’s release of the iPad that it just had to be a joke and 3) Engadget said it was so overwhelmed with iPad coverage that it wouldn’t have its own review out until next week – and readers should not expect a side-by-side comparison to the iPad right away.

  • The iPad’s Linux competition

    Linux developers should be able to build applications for this platform without too much trouble, since the OpenTablet’s “Flash applications may invoke class modules that are written in C/C++” and its “application hosting framework controls the loading/unloading of applications.” I can also see the OpenTablet doing well in businesses since “The system is fully managed with a device management system client that allows the server to monitor the device, provision the device, and send notifications (e.g., firmware updates or domain-specific messages such as peak pricing notifications for energy).” That means that, unlike the iPad, it should be easy to manage OpenTablet in a corporate network.

Unleash your inner Old Master with MyPaint (Open Source)

MyPaint is a lightweight, easy-to-use open source painting application that you might not have heard of before. Unlike some of the more mature open source raster-graphics applications (such as Krita or Gimp), MyPaint doesn’t try to do everything: it’s not a photo editor, it doesn’t bother with paths, geometric shapes, text manipulation, or fancy masking options. Instead, it focuses on one and only one use: painting.

MyPaint is built around use with pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, and puts natural-media-simulation first. There is only one “tool” per se, the paintbrush with which you draw directly onto the image. However, you can choose from dozens of different profiles with which to use that brush, simulating everything from charcoal to pencil, to ink to watercolor. Each has a different behavior, including the way it responds to pressure, speed, changes in direction, and interacting with pixels already on the canvas.

1,500 Teachers Will Learn to Create Educational Software

The Romanian Ministry of Education and Research has launched the “The Teacher – Educational Software Developer” strategic project that is to be implemented between September 2009 – September 2011 (24 months). The target of the project is three million pupils around the country.

In the project, eighty experts will train 1,500 pre-university teachers from all over the country to develop the competences that they need in order to create their own educational software applications and to improve their ability to use teaching-learning interactive methods.

Mozilla

• Best Firefox Add-On: Cool Previews

  To cut this post short, I would like to introduce you to my “new” favorite and best Firefox Add-On of the month called Cool Previews!

• Mozilla’s Q1 2010 Analyst Report – State of the Internet

Business

• Community Open Source as the Raw Material of Computing Utility Providers

  It’s April 2nd, so the Apache Software Foundation’s 2010 April Fools’ joke is over. Here is why I liked it a lot. It represents a hypothetical: What if the ASF and its projects could be bought? Or, if not bought, then put under control or strong influence of corporate interests like in traditional open source consortia? It would put the very software infrastructure we take for granted under partisan control and there is no guarantee that those partisan or corporate interests would be in the interest of the public good.

BSD

• pc-bsd-a quick tour of the desktop

  this clip show some of the games/apps/etc that come pre installed with pc-bsd

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• Free Software: Phase Two

  The SFLC’s founding director, Eben Moglen, said in his talk that the movement has reached “a point of inflection.” The challenge it will face in “Free Software: Phase Two” is to explain the relationship between privacy, the integrity of human personality, and free software. The movement will have to figure out how to convince people they need a solution to a problem they don’t know exists, he said. “It’s not about we’re done. The war is over. It’s about, what’s next.”

Licensing

• Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe, by Till Jaeger

  GPL enforcement is successful in Europe. In several court decisions and out of court settlements the license conditions of the GPL have been successfully enforced. In particular, embedded systems are the main focus of such compliance activities. The article describes the practice of enforcement activities and the legal prerequisites under the application of German law.

Programming

• Ruby Summer of Code raises $100,000

  Ruby Summer of Code has announced it raised $100,000 in three days, allowing it to sponsor up to twenty interns. The Ruby Summer of Code is modelled on Google’s Summer of Code, but focusses on the Ruby community.

Standards/Consortia

• Google Shows How HTML5 Can Run Quake In The Browser

• Quake II ported to use HTML5 technologies

• Document Freedom Day – rOgg on in April!

  This week the German and the Austrian team >published a press release about our DFD activity (at the moment only in German)). The news that we and FFII will give our this years DFD price to Deutschlandradio (Germany) and Radio Orange 94.0 for their use of Ogg-Vorbis already got good media coverage on Gulli, Golem, Heise, Netzpolitik, OSZine, and Pro-Linux.

• Reject Microsoft Office Attachments Says Free Software Group

  Just say no to Word, Excel attachments say free and open software campaigners

  [...]

  Microsoft and Apple formats are against freedom, says FSF

  Documents, spreadsheets and presentations sent in Microsoft Word or Excel native formats, or documents created in Apple’s iWorks, are proprietary and incompatible with freedom and an accessible web, the group says.

Feds found Pfizer too big to nail

Prosecutors said that excluding Pfizer would most likely lead to Pfizer’s collapse, with collateral consequences: disrupting the flow of Pfizer products to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, causing the loss of jobs including those of Pfizer employees who were not involved in the fraud, and causing significant losses for Pfizer shareholders.

“We have to ask whether by excluding the company [from Medicare and Medicaid], are we harming our patients,” said Lewis Morris of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Australian gamers unable to play Settlers 7 due to DRM woes

Our review of The Settlers 7 concluded that fans of city building, micromanagement RTS games could do worse than check it out, with particular reference to the robust community features of online multiplayer.

Sounds great! I’m sure we’re all going to love it! There’s just one problem – most of us can’t, thanks to ongoing issues with Ubisoft’s controversial new “always online” DRM.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Training provided to drive growth of Open Source professionals in Nigeria

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate organization, LPI-Nigeria, has successfully completed a program of free Linux training for youth in an effort to promote workplace development of skilled Open Source professionals. Lifeforte International High School (Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria), the LPI-Nigeria affiliate, has undertaken a two year program of training, Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) exam lab events, and other special initiatives with the country’s National Youth Service Corps and government agencies to promote this goal.

VDI is More Costly Than LTSP

With GNU/Linux, you only need one copy of an app running per terminal server to serve N users simultaneously, greatly increasing how many processes and users one server can accommodate. With VDI and that other OS, each user needs several times as much RAM to get the job done and you have a licence fee or more per user. GNU/Linux thin clients are the way to go. You can use bare X on secure network or NX or X over SSH on a normal network.

X.Org Server 1.8.0 Is Here

At the time of publishing, an official X Server 1.8 release announcement has yet to appear, but you can find this new release tagged in Git.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • Modular Multi-FX Unit In Many Formats

    Loomer have released Sequent in a wealth of standalone and plug-in formats: Windows EXE, VST, and RTAS; Mac OS X Audio Unit, VST, RTAS, and App; and Linux VST and executable. Sequent is a modular multi-effects unit that loomer says is the ideal tool for mangling audio on stage or in the studio. Here’s some details directly from Loomer…

  • What’s Google planning for Chrome 5?

    The new Chrome 5 is available in beta now for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, not that most Chrome users will ever have to know the version number if Google has anything to do with it.

  • Chrome 5 becomes the Flash browser, integrates plug-in with dev build

  • Lost Luggage Studios Catalyst Deluxe Mac and Linux versions released

  • DTP in Linux with Pagestream

    Pagestream is a very powerful DTP tool. Although this was just a cursory glance, you should easily see how powerful this tool is. We will revisit this tool and dive deeper into how it is used and some cool tips and tricks with its usage on a later date. Until then, enjoy Pagestream!

• Instructionals

  • Create Global Application Shortcuts in Linux

  • Install osTicket for a free (open source) help desk tool

• Games

  • Heroes of Newerth goes into Open Beta; sign up tomorrow

    Previously, we held a contest here of GamingBits.com for a closed beta key giveaway on the game Heroes of Newerth (PC, Mac, Linux). Although we ran out of beta keys a long time ago, the good news is that S2Games has just announced Heroes of Newerth will be entering open beta on March 31st and plans to release quite a few new updates as well. This means that beginning tomorrow, March 31st at 4PM PST, anyone can sign up to play the wildly addicting Heroes of Newerth game.

  • How to play OpenTTD without original TTD data files

    OpenTTD 1.0 has just been released! And do you know what this means? A whole new era of gaming fun.

  • BrainParty’s awesome minigames go open source

    BrainParty is extremely popular on the App Store at $0.99, packing 36 fun puzzle games into a single download and charting just how much gray matter you’re packing. To share the fun with an even bigger audience, its developer has decided to release the source code under the GPLv3 license.

Distributions

• Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 1 available

    Time has came for first beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. It’s now available through 32 and 64 DVD isos, as well as live-CD isos for GNOME and KDE on public mirrors

• Debian Family

  • SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Final Switches to KDE 4.3.4

    SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is ready for the spotlight with all the bugs and rough edges remaining in the final release candidate being ironed out. No new features have been introduced since RC3, but SimplyMEPIS 8.5 has plenty to offer users who want a great Linux experience right out of the box. SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is based on Debian Lenny, the latest stable release, but also comes with newer packages when the developers believed they were stable enough or offered enough improvements to justify their inclusion. The new release also marks the transition from the KDE 3.5 desktop environment to the newer KDE 4 software compilation.

  • GroundWork Open Source Launches New Ubuntu-Powered Virtual Appliance for IT Monitoring

    “As Ubuntu Server continues its growth in enterprise environments, GroundWork’s Ubuntu-powered virtual appliance is a great solution for those looking to measure, monitor, and manage their mission critical Ubuntu infrastructure,” said John Pugh, Software Partner Manager, at Canonical. “And the virtual appliance form factor has added benefits for those considering cloud computing.”

  • Variants

    • Linux Mint 8 Helena Announces the Release of Xfce Version

      Linux Mint developers are proud to announce the release of the Xfce version of Linux Mint 8. This latest release features the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and has most of the nautilus features in built.

    • Linux Mint 8 Xfce and LXDE Editions Released

Devices/Embedded

• Vyatta 6.0 adds IPv6 and firewall improvements

  Vyatta, an open source networking software and hardware specialist, has announced the release of version 6.0 of its Linux-based router and firewall software. The latest release of the networking distribution features a number of changes, including IPv6 and firewall enhancements, Netflow logging and analysis, and quality of service (QoS) improvements.

• Linksys

  • Cisco decides to snoop on users

    Going back to its core business of flogging network equipment, the firm launched a bunch of Linksys branded wireless routers. All the units support 802.11N but the most interesting of the bunch is the E2100L which has a Linux OS underpinning it. Linksys equipment became popular with hardware enthusiasts once the WRT54 firmware was hacked and spawned many router distributions, all based on Linux.

    The firm realises that not everyone who purchases its kit will know, or particularly care, whether it is running Linux or not.

  • Cisco Unveils Valet Easy-To-Use Wireless Routers

    For Linux users, Linksys will offer the E2100L router ($119) with a USB port for added storage, enabling Linux to build apps and hacks on top.

  • Cisco Announces New Valet, Linksys 802.11n Wireless Routers

    While it’s not yet clear how Linux is implemented in the E2100L, Linksys routers have long been popular with homebrew router firmware developers, so it’s likely that the E2100L will cater to a do-it-yourself crowd.

• Phones

  • The Motorola VE66 is an effective and stylish slider phone handset

    The Motorola VE66 is a slider phone with a difference, offering as it does a wide array of useful functionality whilst also offering a Linux-based operating system. The handset measures 103 mm x 49 mm wide and is 15 mm thick, whilst weighing 121 g in weight.

  • Nokia

    • Nokia’s all-rounder: the N900

      When it was first announced last summer, the Nokia N900 was Nokia’s answer to a smartphone market that seemed to be progressing rapidly without it. Not only was it highly specced – with a TI OMAP 3430 SoC – but it was the first smartphone to run the Maemo Linux-based operating system developed by Nokia.

      So without further ado, let’s have a look at it.

    • Intel and Nokia Waiting for Developers to Join Their Mobile Ambitions

      The MeeGo society, created by Intel and Nokia, on Thursday released the MeeGo allotment infrastructure and working arrangement base to developers. Imageries which were released include Intel Atom-based netbooks; ARM-based Nokia N900; and Intel Atom-based phones operating on the Moorestown chip.

      Imad Sousou, Co-chair of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group, said that the images that had been downloaded were presently boot into workstation because user understandings for them have not yet been released. In the upcoming days, the imageries will boot from a USB stick or be straight sparked on the gadgets from developers’ Linux Computers.

  • Android

    • Survey: Developer Interest in Android Up, iPad Wanes

      Appcelerator, maker of the open-source Titanium cross-platform mobile, desktop and Web development platform, has released a new survey of its developer base that indicates that, while still hot, developer interest in Apple’s iPad is slightly on the wane from earlier this year, while interest in the Google Android platform continues to grow.

    • MIPS targets Android handsets

      MIPS Technologies, the microprocessor core licensor, has identified penetration of the cellular handset market as its top corporate priority.

      “It’s at the top of my agenda,” Sandeep Vij, who took over as CEO of MIPS last January, tells Electronics Weekly, “two customers are building chips for Android handsets based on MIPS – one in China and one in EMEA.”

Open Source Electronic Resource Management System: A Collaborative Implementation

Librarians and strategists at Simon Fraser University (SFU) have collaborated with a team of middle-sized libraries to expand the open-source CUFTS Researcher suite of tools to include an Electronic Resources Management (ERM) system. This paper focuses on: the development and implementation of the CUFTS ERM; interoperability between CUFTS ERM and integrated library systems (Millennium); impact of the ERM on acquisitions, serials, and collections workflows and staffing at SFU Library and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) Library.

The Palmetto Open Source Software Conference is coming

Registration opened last week for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON,) the premier free and open source software confence in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s a great way to both educate and involve yourself, or your organization, in free and open software and technology.

Portland Open Source promoter created Google map after bomb exploded

Sitting in a restaurant, the designer and organizer of an upcoming Open Source conference saw tweets flashing on his screen. Within five minutes, the hashtag #pdxboom emerged. And so, Beels waded in, creating a Google map for people to mark where they were when they heard the bomb and how it sounded.

It’s Baseball Season

With the official start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season just days away, I thought it would be a great time to talk about two baseball related open source projects that I have on GitHub. These projects are Gameday API, and Baseball Tracker. Gameday API is a Ruby API that makes it easy for you to get live MLB statistics direct from the MLB servers that power their own Gameday application.

BusinessWeek Special Report

• Crowdsourcing and open source: where we are now

  We just published a collection of articles on the state of play within open source design and innovation. It’s an interesting bunch of pieces, with op eds from the likes of Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who makes the case that Toyota should open source its cars’ software systems, and San José State innovation and entrepreneurship professor Joel West, who explains precisely why many big companies find collaboration and sharing control so challenging.

• Open Innovation’s Challenge: Letting Go Is Hard To Do

  While most people have heard of Linux, an open-source community founded by individual programmers, increasingly companies are sponsoring their own communities and supplying development resources, infrastructure, and initial technology in the hope of attracting individuals and other businesses to help them create products and services for potential users. Sponsors also set rules for developing and using cooperatively developed software, to align the community to corporate objectives and avoid time-consuming negotiations inherent in shared governance.

  But the tighter their control, the harder it is to attract outside participation. Sharing seems particularly challenging for large companies that are used to having their own way and running their own ecosystems. In the past five years, three big companies have created new open-source projects and communities to adapt Linux for use in mobile communication devices. None would be mistaken for a grassroots democracy.

• Thinking About Open Design

  Organizations that embrace “open” will innovate better, cheaper, and faster. Here are three things to think about when implementing open-design principles

Mozilla

• Mozilla Labs Explores Open Source Design

  Software developers have dominated the open source community, leading to the creation of a tremendous volume of free code used to build the foundations of Web sites and browsers. Less attention has been paid to how they look and how easy they are to use. Design often gets short shrift in open source.

• Geek Tool: KeySnail Adds Emacs Editing to Firefox

  The keystrokes are based on Emacs, a somewhat complicated but powerful text editor for Unix-based systems such as Linux. Some commands allow for rapidly skipping around a Web page or among open tabs, while others offer mode-sensitive editing features that work only while in a text entry area, for example.

• Mozilla pegs worldwide Firefox share at 30%

  Mozilla estimates that Firefox now handles almost 30 per cent of worldwide web access.

• Mozilla has 30 per cent of the browser market

• Mozilla: Firefox over 350 Million Users and 30% Market Share

• Mozilla: ‘no plans’ to bundle Flash with Firefox

  Unlike Google, Mozilla says it’s not committed to the idea of integrating Adobe Flash with its web browser.

SaaS

• Companies Create Alliance to Push Open Source Clouds

  IELO, Mandriva, and Nexedi this week joined forces and formed the Free Cloud Alliance, which will work to push open source products for cloud computing.

• 10 Hot Open-Source Cloud Computing Plays

• Who’s Making Money From Open Source in the Cloud?

  At this morning’s Bunker Session, the central question of the relationship between cloud computing and open-source software was answered early and often. The one thing everybody agreed upon is that most clouds of any appreciable scale are built on open-source software and, in fact, might not even exist without it. As to whether there’s any money to be made with open source, however, there was enough contention to go around.

• Om Malik: Exclusive Event: Cloud Computing & Open Source

Databases

• Ingres’ open source rebirth unlocks value for AAH Pharmaceuticals

  Pharmaceutical distributor has found the Ingres database better value and more forward moving since its ‘commercial open source’ makeover

• Ingres and OpTech Answer the Call for Open Source in Government

• Ingres: Catalyst For Open Source In Governments

  Ingres Corporation and OpTech have entered into a strategic reseller agreement to bring open source solutions to government agencies across North America.

  As part of the agreement OpTech, a systems integrator (SI), will promote Ingres Database and encourage migrations to Ingres Database from Oracle and Sybase IQ. The Ingres partner program offers ISVs and SIs the opportunity to innovate and profit, while building a loyal and satisfied customer base.

• Online Analytics in Action

  3. Open source. Open source solutions are popular and cutting-edge. For example, Hadoop, an open source solution for scalable and distributed data storage and data processing, is growing in popularity as it has shown the ability to handle massive data while using cheap commodity hardware (computers) similar to cloud environments. R, an open source analytic solution, is widely considered one of the most robust analytic tools available. Given that both solutions are open source, both communities work happily together to integrate. Other open source solutions that may help with additional tasks include the data integration toolkit Jitterbit and traditional open-source databases such as MySQL.

Oracle

• Why Java could thrive at Oracle

  While there is no reason for Oracle to upset the Java community at this point, I highly doubt the company will continue with certain projects that are either direct open-source competition, or that require too much additional effort to be worth it for Oracle to continue.

CMS

• Alert: What’s Coming for Open Source CMS in April 2010

  By March 15, just a month before DrupalCon San Francisco, Robert Douglass of Acquia (news, site) reports that there were over 1700 registered attendees, which exceeds the sum total of all previous DrupalCons. The conference program was also announced for the San Francisco Drupalcon.

• Oshyn, Inc. Explains the Realities of Choosing Open Source Content Management Systems

Business

• Alfresco Strengthens Open Source ECM Market Leadership with Record Q4 and 2009

  Alfresco Software, the leader in open source ECM today announced the closing of its 2009 fiscal year ending February 28th with 61 percent year-over-year revenue growth.

• Open-Source Success: Alfresco Software Reports Record Revenues

  Alfresco reported both record fourth quarter earnings and record revenues for 2009. Growth is up 61% compared to last year. We look at these results with a grain of salt but in Alfresco’s case it increased its staff 29 percent and also added 300 customer, including companies such as Cisco, Merck and the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• Pentaho Release Blends Data Integration, BI

  Most people think of Pentaho as an open-source business intelligence vendor. In fact, the company’s most popular product is ETL software. Pentaho now hopes to trade on that popularity with an integrated development environment (IDE) that blends data integration and business intelligence.

  The idea behind Pentaho Data Integration 4.0, announced this week, is speeding development of BI applications by combining ETL, data modeling and data visualization into a single IDE. Pentaho’s Kettle project has long provided the ETL part of that equation, and it has been notable success.

Releases

• Openrate Releases Version 1.1 of Their Commercial Open Source Mediation and Rating Engine

  Tiger Shore Management Ltd, the operating company behind the OpenRate open source mediation and rating engine for use in telecommunications, utilities and logistics environments, today announced the release of the long awaited Version 1.1 of their flagship product. The OpenRate V1.1 “Convergent” release consolidates the improvements made during 2009 and the early part of 2010 in the real time processing framework, meaning that OpenRate now offers a true “configure once, use anywhere” high performance charging engine.

  [...]

  OpenRate is a fully open source product, professionally supported with a dual licensing strategy that makes it accessible to both end user organizations and service providers or resellers.

• Streamgraph code is available and open source

  Some people love ‘em and others hate ‘em. Now you can play with streamgraphs (seen here and here) yourself, whatever side you might be on. Lee Byron has made the code available on Github, under a BSD license.

Government

• Making Voting Systems Open Source Could Forever Change Election Technology

  Now it appears some of that transparency may be taking root. A California-based nonprofit is creating a suite of open source election software that lets users view and modify the underlying computer code. Proponents of the approach say exposing the code used by e-voting machines allows a worldwide community of experts to evaluate the security of the code and make beneficial modifications.

  In October 2009, the nonprofit Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation made the computer code for its election system available on the Web. The foundation also plans to make other open-source election tools available this year through its Trust the Vote initiative.

• Open Source Electronic Voting Systems Slow to Catch On

  Now, open source advocates are teaming with tech industry giants and some electronic voting systems manufacturers to usher in a fundamental change to the way Americans cast their ballots. But it won’t to be easy. There are still many reasons voters conjure to be skeptical of electronic voting. And the electronic voting systems market is populated by a small, and powerful group of manufacturers who still deploy proprietary technology to keep a competitive edge.

• A look at WhiteHouse.gov and why more IT shops are turning to open source

  Once President Obama arrived at the White House, it was clear that the new administration had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. “We couldn’t keep up with what the new media team wanted,” Klause said.

National

• KuwaitNet & Redington Value underline importance of open source solutions

  Redington Value, the value-added distribution division of Redington Gulf, along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference ‘An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges’. The event revolved around how open source solutions is an option that IT decision makers should consider as part of their IT strategy, and how it can unlock the potential of existing IT infrastructure. This was presented in context of Red Hat, a leading open source vendor.

• KuwaitNet: Open source solutions to boost performance and cost- effectiveness among business community

  Redington Value along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference ‘An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges’.

• Stimulate the Economy in Scotland by Using Open Source Software

  Open Source software (OSS) is standards based software that is free to acquire and free to modify. OSS runs the mission critical servers for global organisations like Google and IBM and is generally acknowledged to be less error-strewn and more secure than conventional proprietary software. Traditionally OSS occupied the uber-geek territories of operating system (Linux) and infrastructure (Apache Web server) but is increasingly available for line-of-business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Licensing

• Understanding open source software licenses: An overview [part 4]

  This is the 4th article in a series giving a practical overview of intellectual property rights, targeted towards normal people like you. This one talks about the GPL (The GNU General Public License) and other such”open source” software licenses, and what does a regular business need to be careful about with regard to such licenses.

Openness

• Steampunks gather for Great Exhibition

  Many of those involved in steampunk do take a political stance by championing open source software, transparency and the use of licences that let anyone rip mix and burn what they have done.

• Mapping data and geographic information from Ordnance Survey

• Open source prosthetics

  I found out about www.openprosthetics.org in March, and immediately fell in love. NPR described the creator, Jonathan Kuniholm’s mission, as an “open-source collaboration that makes its innovations available to anyone.”

• Open-source biotechnology

  The free software community, along with the commercial ecosystem which surrounds it, is widely seen as having pointed the way toward successful, collaborative development of common resources. We have seen a number of attempts to port the free software model to other areas of endeavor. Open content, headlined by sites like Wikipedia, has adopted this model with considerable success. Other areas, such as open hardware, are still trying to find their way. Your editor recently read an interesting book (Rob Carlson’s Biology is Technology), which raises an interesting question: is there a place for an ecosystem based around free “software” running on biological processors?

Programming

• Google Summer of Code 2010: Student application deadline announced

  Google has announced that the deadline for student applications for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is Friday, the 9th of April at 19:00 GMT.

Standards/Consortia

• Google Gets Quake II Running In HTML5, Just For Fun

  A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software’s gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers— you know, for kicks—as a way to show just what HTML5 compatible web browsers are capable of.

• Brightcove Embraces HTML5, Passes On Theora Support

  In my opinion, Brightcove, like most of the others that are announcing support for HTML5, is not acting as a friend to the Open Source movement by going with H.264 encoding and not adding support for Theora.

Life in ‘Tin Can Town’ for the South Africans evicted ahead of World Cup

Sandy Rossouw says she was among 366 people evicted from the Spes Bona Hostel in the district of Athlone three months ago because a stadium there is to be used for training by some of football’s biggest stars. She is now one of five family members who squeeze into one bed in her shack at Blikkiesdorp.

“We were forced out of our hostel because of the World Cup,” Rossouw said. “The hostel is on the main road to the stadium, only about 200 yards away. We didn’t want to move because we’re used to it and it’s close to everything. But they said if we didn’t get out, they would move us out with law enforcement.

Stalker jailed for planting child porn on a computer

An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker he was obsessed with locked up in jail, backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, a 48-year from Essex.

His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman, and to do this he broke into the couple’s home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner.

Security/Aggression

• Information is beautiful: war games

  Yep, the United States spent a staggering $607bn (£402 bn) on defence in 2008. Currently engaged in what will likely be the longest ground war in US history in Afghanistan. Harbourer of thousands of nuclear weapons. 1.5m soldiers. Fleets of aircrafts, bombs and seemingly endless amounts of military technology.

• Trashing evidence-based drugs policy

  Alan Johnson got his way on mephedrone, but good drug policy depends on looking beyond the media-driven demand for action

Finance

• Africa may have lost £1tn in illegal flows of money, researchers say

  More than £1tn may have flowed out of Africa illegally over the last four decades, most of it to western financial institutions, according to a new report.

  Even using conservative estimates, the continent lost about $1.8tn (£1.18tn) – meaning Africans living at the end of 2008 had each been deprived of an average of $989 (£649) since 1970, according to the US-based research body Global Financial Integrity (GFI).

• Lead Vanishes for King of the Downturn

  JPMorgan Chase’s crisis lead appears to have vanished. Its investment bank was crowned king of the downturn. Last year, it sat atop the rankings for debt and equity underwriting, and was No. 2 in merger work, behind Goldman Sachs. But it looks as if the edge is proving hard to keep.

• Looting Main Street

  …JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. “Look,” the commissioners told him, “if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms.” LeCroy didn’t blink. “Whatever you want,” he told them. “If that’s what you need, that’s what you get. Just tell us how much.”

  Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan’s point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount’s trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County’s investment bank.

  [...]

  That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. “This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior,” says Taylor, the former regulator.

• Goldman Sachs Has A Message For The World

  If I know my Masters of the Universe– and I think I do!– the message is this: “blow us.” Or variants thereof. Prove me wrong.

• Will Obama’s DOJ take action against Goldman Sachs for bribery in the Jefferson County case?

• Goldman Sachs: Don’t Blame Us

  For the past year, as its name was sullied, Goldman maintained a bunker strategy, largely fending off media inquiries. (The one major exception proved to be a disaster. After Blankfein sat for an interview with the London Times in November 2009, he famously quipped, when he thought he was off the record, that he was just a banker “doing God’s work.”) That fleeting attempt at humor created a weeks-long media storm, after which Goldman stopped trying to defend itself.

• Finance expert Tavakoli criticizes Goldman Sachs

  “Goldman is trying to pretend it didn’t know any better, while also trying to say they are great risk managers,” says Tavakoli, the president of Chicago advisory firm Tavakoli Structured Finance. “Goldman cannot have it both ways.”

• Farzad Says Goldman Sachs Executives Deny `Conspiracy’: Video

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• EFF Joins With Internet Companies and Advocacy Groups to Reform Privacy Law

  As part of a broad coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today issued recommendations for strengthening the federal privacy law that regulates government access to private phone and Internet communications and records, including cell phone location data.

  The “Digital Due Process” coalition includes major Internet and telecommunications companies like Google, Microsoft, and AT&T as well as advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). The coalition has joined together to preserve traditional privacy rights and clarify legal protections in the face of a rapidly changing technological landscape.

• Spoof site mocks tourism push

  TOURISM Australia is investigating legal action against an internet “brandjacker” who is lampooning its new $150 million advertising campaign.

  The site is targeting Tourism Australia’s new campaign, There’s nothing like Australia.

• The Vigilantes of Comedy: A Guest Post

  Late one Saturday night in February 2007, a stand-up comic named Joe Rogan decided to take the law into his own hands. Rogan, a well-known comedian, was on stage at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most important comedy clubs. For weeks, Rogan had been furious over reports from fellow comedians that an even more famous stand-up, Carlos Mencia, had stolen a joke from one of Rogan’s friends, a relatively obscure comedian named Ari Schaffer. Rogan spotted Mencia in the audience, and he blew up. Slamming Mencia as “Carlos Menstealia,” Rogan accused his rival of joke thievery. Mencia rushed the stage to defend himself, and there began a long, loud, and profane confrontation.

• N.J. Supreme Court upholds privacy of personal e-mails accessed at work

  A company should not have read e-mails a former employee wrote to her lawyer from a private, password-protected web account, even though she sent them from her employer’s computer, according to a state Supreme Court ruling today that attorneys said could influence workplace privacy rules across the country.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• What Can We Blame Next On YouTube? How About Unauthorized Software Copying?

  Now, of course, it’s preposterous to blame YouTube for this, but how much do people want to bet that’s exactly what’s going to happen? The article notes that this may be “the next big headache for YouTube,” and it seems likely that sooner or later some software will try to pin the blame for such videos on YouTube, rather than the creators/uploaders of the videos.

• How to Make a Documentary About Sampling–Legally

  I recently co-produced a documentary titled Copyright Criminals, which examines the messy three-way collision between digital technology, musical collage, and intellectual property law. It aired on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning series Independent Lens, played at the Toronto International Film Festival, and got a DVD release. My filmmaking partner Benjamin Franzen and I should be celebrating, but we’re actually kind of terrified.

  While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can’t sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we’d be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.

• The Christian Science Monitor’s Bold (And Successful) Experiments

  Reader cram points us to a paidContent post by John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, in which he makes a lot of great points about digital strategies for news publishing.

  A year ago, we ceased publishing the daily, 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor newspaper and launched a weekly magazine to complement our website, on which we doubled down by reorienting our newsroom to be web-first. Our web traffic climbed from 6 million page views last April to 13 million in February. Our print circulation rose from 43,000 to 77,000 in the same period.

• But I Thought Counterfeiting Movies Ran Rampant In The Wild West Of Canada?

  Except… Canada already does have copyright/counterfeiting laws in place, and they seem to work pretty well.

• cd-roms and ipads

  Watching that $14 Elements demo for the iPad reminded me again of the throwaway line that geeks of a certain age make of the iPad — that it all seems a bit CD-ROM.

• ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

  • ✍ Digital Liberty Activism

    In my interview in this episode, I focused on digital liberty issues, which I believe to be hugely important and becoming more so every day. If you’re ready to find out more about the issues I discussed, here’s a quick guide along with hints on taking action. I mentioned writing to your MP and MEP – there’s an encouraging guide to read if the idea makes you nervous.

  • What’s Yours Is Ours

    You’ll have heard of the Digital Economy Bill: it introduces powers to cut your Internet connection if you’re caught illegally downloading films, music or software. It does more than that. It takes your photographs from you, too.

    Until now, if someone found one of your photographs and wanted to use it commercially, they couldn’t without first asking you. Clause 43 changes all that by allowing the use of “Orphan Works” – photographs, illustrations and other artworks whose owners cannot be found.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

7 Things That Are Easier To Do In Ubuntu Than In Windows

When the average computer user hears about Ubuntu or Linux, the word “difficult” comes to mind. This is understandable: learning a new operating system is never without its challenges, and in many ways Ubuntu is far from perfect. I’d like to say that using Ubuntu is actually easier and better than using Windows.

This doesn’t mean you’ll experience it that way if you’ve used Windows for a long time: at a certain your habits begin to feel like conventional wisdom, and any system that doesn’t match your current habits will seem difficult.

[...]

In many ways, Ubuntu is easier to use than Windows. Does this mean Ubuntu is superior to Windows? Of course not, and I wouldn’t suggest so. You should use whatever operating system works best for you.

Linux Gazette – April 2010 (#173)

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Lexmark’s Linux Secret

Not only are they providing CUPS drivers, but also they are even printing Tux in the corner of every box they ship right besides the Windows and Apple logos. Do you know who we are talking about? Probably not, but it’s Lexmark. After months of wrangling within the company, Lexmark has stepped up to become a Linux and open-source friendly company. We are seeing how far this Linux support extends as we try out the Lexmark Pro905 Platinum multi-function printer.

Applications

• PlanCake Keeps You on Track With Task and Todo Lists

• 7 of the Best Free Linux Bible Software

• Artha – A Linux desktop dictionary worth having

• Miro 3.0 and Miro Video Converter Make Movie Watching a Breeze

• Research and Organize Your Family Tree With Gramps

  Gramps has a mile-long feature list of ways to help you organize and analyze the data you gather on your family history. Use it to record the details of individual people in your family, and also manage the intricate relationships found in your family tree.

• Nautilus Trash Information Plugin: Date Deleted And Original Location

Distributions

• Element 1.1 for home theater PCs

  Element is a lightweight Linux distribution for use on a home theater PC (HTPC). It comes with most of the same video-playback applications one would find in a modern desktop distribution, but the development team has put considerable effort into wrapping the applications in an environment that is easy to navigate from across the room, and comfortable for non-multimedia-hackers. Tough challenges still remain for any HTPC distribution at the hardware and configuration level, but Element’s results are definitely an improvement over basic Linux systems in setup, application integration, and usability.

• What’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5

  Optimised virtualisation, support for recently introduced AMD and Intel processors, new versions of OpenOffice, PostgreSQL and Samba as well as numerous fresh drivers are all among the major advancements of RHEL 5.5.

  After releasing a beta version in early February, Red Hat has now released version 5.5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As usual at the first stage in the life cycle of this Linux distribution for corporate customers, the new version not only offers new drivers and various corrections, but also numerous new features.

• Ubuntu

  • Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat

    Our mascot for 10.10 is the Maverick Meerkat.

    This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself. We want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move. We will deliver on time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver this cycle. Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little. Let’s hear the best ideas, gather the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the next two year major cycle.

  • Ubuntu 10.10 to be codenamed Maverick Meerkat

    Ubuntu 10.04 is a long-term support release, which means that the focus during the current development cycle has largely been on stabilization and refining the existing technology. Shuttleworth says that we can expect to see a return to experimentation in the 10.10 release, with the potential for some radical changes.

    Some of the most important goals include delivering a new Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface, improving the Web experience, boosting startup performance, and extending social network integration on the desktop. Shuttleworth also hopes to advance Ubuntu’s cloud support by simplifying deployment and making it easier to manage cloud computing workloads.

  • Final Decision For Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Window Controls Placement Announced By Mark Shuttleworth

    Mark Shuttleworth announced seconds ago that the Metacity window controls will remain on the left in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), however the order will change to: close, minimize, maximize.

Devices/Embedded

• Cool fastest Linux on the road

• Android and Chrome OS Look Poised to Accompany Other OSes

  Acer’s Aspire One line of netbooks has been a huge hit, and the company continues to experiment with designs and software configurations. As the number of applications for Android has risen, it makes more and more sense for the operating system to run alongside Windows and various flavors of Linux. After all, Linux resides on many dual-OS systems, and Android is Linux-based.

• Eekore’s Ubuntu-based Tablet Focuses On Flexibility

Paralyzed Artist Relies on Open Source Device for Drawing

Even though Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Tony Quan’s body has been ravaged by Lou Gehrig’s disease, his mind is as sharp as ever. Unable to move anything but his eyes, he nearly had to give up his love of creating art until a group of hackers stepped in with an alternative. They designed Quan an open source eye tracking device that allows him to continue creating his artwork using nothing but the muscles in his eyes.

Mozilla Labs where the future is being made today

A good place to join the discussion is around Mozilla’s Concept Series, which as the name implies is really a system for brainstorming. Once a prototype is built and a group created around it, it gets its own icon and identity, as with the Bespin code editor or Raindrop messaging group.

WordPress theme generator for non-geeks

WordPress is unquestionably the most used blogging platform out there. There also are thousands and thousands of templates ranging from the free to the most expensive available for use on any WP powered blog.

Pentaho Secures $7 Million in Funding, Looks Toward the Future

Open source business intelligence (BI) software vendor Pentaho has raised a cool $7 million in fourth-round funding, bringing it’s total funding to around $32 million. Company CEO Richard Daley talked to OStatic about how Pentaho plans to use its cash influx, and has some advice for other companies considering an open source business model.

Programming

• Ruby Development Gains Commercial Support on Java as New JRuby Version Looms

• Conditions

• Build Web applications with HTML 5

• Elevate Your PHP Development with PHP 5.3′s Powerful New Features

  By typical development conventions, PHP 5.3 only qualifies as a “point release.” However, the features packed into this new version are easily the most significant PHP development enhancements since PHP 5.0 was released in 2004. The powerful new PHP 5.3 features include namespace support, lambda functions and closures, late static binding, improved Windows support, and a host of syntactical additions. This article provides all the information you need to begin taking advantage of these PHP 5.3 goodies.

‘Supertaskers’ can safely use mobiles while driving

A University of Utah study into the effects of mobile phone use on people’s driving skills has come to the expected conclusion that using a phone while driving can be highly dangerous.

Developers aim to attach transfer fee to homes

Freehold Capital Partners, a company started in Texas, is selling developers across the country on a plan that would attach a private transfer fee to homes, allowing developers to profit for generations.

EBay Wins Tiffany Trademark Appeal, Faces Ad Claim

EBay Inc. isn’t responsible for the ssale of fake Tiffany & Co. jewelry on its Web site, an appeals court ruled, while returning Tiffany’s lawsuit to the trial court for further action on a false-advertising claim.

Security

• How many does China execute?

  You might have heard it said that China executes more people than all other countries in the world put together. Not just a handful, but thousands and thousands of people every single year. This, broadly, is true.

Environment

• Rotterdam whale meat blockade

  The activists chained themselves to the mooring ropes of the container ship NYK ORION, which has meat from 13 endangered fin whales onboard in seven containers. Greenpeace is calling on the authorities to seize the containers and urging the protection of whales at the upcoming meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

Finance

• A London trader walks the CFTC through a silver manipulation in advance

  On March 23, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Maguire is a metals trader in London. He has been told first-hand by traders working for JPMorganChase that JPMorganChase manipulates the precious metals markets, and they have bragged to how they make money doing so.

• Goldman Sachs not sorry for role in economic crash

  Goldman Sachs is back. This time, they are not at the door asking for handouts to shine their guilded toilet fixtures. They are on a public relations mission to recover their image. Perhaps, they shouldn’t have claimed they were doing God’s work as they plundered billions from public coffers to save themselves if they cared about public perception.

  [...]

  The fact of the matter is that Goldman Sachs has reached its tentacles into the Obama administration, as it had the administrations of George W Bush and Bill Clinton. Thus, there has been little movement by the adminstration to follow through on it’s promise to reign in Wall Street’s risky behavior. This is where the people need to be heard.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Why Quietly Pro-War ‘Hurt Locker’ Has the Oscar Edge

  After another divisive war, Hollywood now has a chance to get back in the good graces of the American people, who always want to see our fighting men portrayed positively.

• US oil company donated millions to climate sceptic groups, says Greenpeace

  Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Israel’s Supreme Court rules that no legal procedure is available to reveal anonymous commenters

• Sham Email Subpoena Violates Whistleblower’s Constitutional Rights

  The whistleblower, Charles Rehberg, uncovered systematic mismanagement of funds at a Georgia public hospital. He alerted local politicians and others to the issue through a series of faxes. A local prosecutor in Dougherty County, Ken Hodges, conspired with the hospital and used a sham grand jury subpoena to obtain Mr. Rehberg’s personal email communications. The prosecutor then provided that information to private investigators for the hospital and indicted Mr. Rehberg for a burglary and assault that never actually occurred. All the criminal charges against Mr. Rehberg were eventually dismissed. Hodges is currently running for Attorney General of Georgia in the Democratic primary.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Obama admin: time to make radio pay for its music

  The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.

• Spain’s piracy epidemic has studios considering no longer selling DVDs there

  As if problems in the U.S. home entertainment market weren’t bad enough, with declining sales revenue and continued pressure from low-cost rental services Redbox and Netflix, the major movie studios are close to being overwhelmed by piracy in a second major foreign market.

• Hollywood Threatens To Stop Selling DVDs In Spain In A Push To Increase Unauthorized File Sharing?

  I’m really curious how Lynton keeps his job when his response to a market challenge is to leave the market entirely, shifting the unauthorized rate from whatever it is all the way up to 100% by choice. This is the same guy who claimed that the internet was killing the movie business, in the midst of a year with more movie releases than ever before and the largest box office take ever. He’s also in charge of the company that wouldn’t even support one of its own movies for the Oscars because it was afraid that the Oscar reviewer copies would end up online, even though the movie was already available for download.

• On April 11, Jill Sobule and John Doe are recording their next solo releases in Los Angeles and they’re doing it together. YOU ARE INVITED ! !

  Keeping with the idea of creating innovative ways to fund recording sessions of new music while involving fans in the creative process, Jill Sobule and John Doe are inviting 40 fans to buy tickets to both participate and observe an exclusive recording session with Grammy-award winning producer, engineer, and mixer Dave Way on Sunday April 11th in Los Angeles. We’ve laid out a couple of different paths to experiencing the studio with the artists for your enjoyment:

  ALL-DAY “MUSICIAN’S MUSICIAN” ACCESS ($200)
  For recording engineers, DIY musicians or anyone that wants to see it from the ground up. Only 10 tickets are available.

  Attendees will be able to see and interact with every aspect of the recording process for the entire day, starting at 10am: set up, getting sounds, tracking, overdubs, editing and rough mixing. No prior recording experience is required but we’ll drill down as much as you’d like into the technical side of the process.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

Having said so, I kept feeling Windows 7 would never surprise me again after a mere couple hours of use. Windows offers immediately its goods, but once discovered, all paths beyond them seem to end very quickly. In turn, Ubuntu felt more like an empty canvas, offering a vast amount of choices. From system configuration to Look&Feel and applications available, there were options all over the place for the end user to pick. In that sense, Ubuntu and Linux don’t feel immediate or still, but ever changing and evolving after the user’s will and skills.

Aside from its inherent flexibility, Ubuntu keeps a 6 month release schedule, which allows it to stay much more current and fresh. While Windows 7 will remain almost unchanged for a good 3-4 years, Ubuntu 12.04, for instance, will likely be very different to 10.04.

Sony’s PS3 Drops Linux; Why You Should Care

While Sony is pulling away from Linux and the community, we can’t help but to think about the other end of the spectrum and a company that has fully supported the enthusiast community: id Software.

Rather than increasing restrictions over time, id has a great history of decreasing restrictions over time. One good example is how they release the source code to their game engines via GPL after a reasonable amount of time. If Sony were following id’s model they would be opening up RSX support in a future version of PS3 Linux as opposed to pulling it away.

I sent a few quick questions to John Carmack, co-founder of id software, lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace, Linux supporter, and an all-around good guy to get his thoughts on the situation.

Audiocasts

• TLLTS #347

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 5

  Ubuntu switches to base 10, Novell fights a takeover bid while Sony removes Linux support from its older Playstation 3 consoles. We reveal how little we’ve used Emacs and ask whether Wikipedia should use open codecs.

• Importance of open source screen readers for accessibility: Interview with Joanie Diggs

• The growing popularity of open source assistive technology: Interview with Will Walker

  The day before I discussed the importance of open source screen readers with Joanie I interviewed Will Walker about open source accessibility and development of assistive technology.

Server

• QA with IBM’s Dan Frye: “Everything Has Changed”

  You will be talking about 10+ years of Linux at IBM. What has changed about Linux in a decade? What hasn’t?

  Frye: Whoa. Everything has changed. Nothing is the same, with the possible exception of the “can do” philosophy of the global Linux development team. Everything has evolved – the technology, the market, customer adoption, the development process (yes, Linux community does have processes, even if they’re frequently loathe to admit it….). And all for the better. One of the most amazing things about the Linux market has been unbroken chain of success over the past decade – not once did the Linux pause or even briefly decline. The rise of the Internet ushered in the age of open standard computing with customers demanding freedom from relying upon any single, closed operating system provider. As a result, today, Linux is an unstoppable force in the industry, changing the economics of information technology, driving open standards in a way never before possible, and advancing customer innovation.

Kernel Space

• Linux: Removing The Big Kernel Lock

  Arnd Bergmann noted that he’s working on removing the BKL from the Linux kernel, “I’ve spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have [a] bkl-removal branch in my git tree”. He went on to explain that his branch is working, and lets him run the Linux kernel, “on [a] quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL being mostly obscure device driver modules.” Arnd noted that this effort has a long history, “the oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy’s patch to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that removes it from most of the VFS.”

Applications

• Terminator 0.90 Finally Released [Multiple Terminals In The Same Window]

• Using Alexandria

• Proprietary

  • The best windows emulator for Linux.

    When I tried using the programs they all ran smoothly and with no glitches, crashes or unexplained pauses. Even the network functions worked properly. I could use netscan and gencontrol on our active directory network with no hassles whatsoever. To really give it a workout I decided to give Nero a try and see if that would work. Nero installed fine and I was actually able to burn a CD with it with files from my Linux home directory. Internet explorer 8, Chrome and the windows version of Firefox all worked like a charm. The best thing is, I didn’t have to go searching for windows dlls or make any configuration changes. Installing those programs was no different to installing them under windows.

• Instructionals

  • Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4

  • A few Ubuntu “power user” tips

  • Running Commands at Startup in Debian and Ubuntu – The Simplest Approach

  • Beginner’s Guide to Grep

  • HOWTO: Using the USB Cable in Linux

  • iptables rules for desktop computers

  • Script: average

  • How to Install Applications from GetDeb Website

  • How to Get wireless button working on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li1718

  • Ubuntu: Make ALSA default instead of PulseAudio

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • KDE4: It hurt, but did it work?

    Two years on, things are back on track. It’s perhaps time to begin a campaign of telling people who left KDE, “it’s safe to come back!”. As it stands, not only is KDE 4.4 a superb desktop, thanks to the new frameworks that are now in place the potential for new developments is almost overwhelming. Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend KDE4. However, it’s been a rocky couple of years getting here.

• GNOME Desktop

  • First Look: GNOME 2.30

    April Fools turned out to be a great day for Linux enthusiasts, as GNOME developers decided to offer them something to look forward to except getting punked and do a proper launch, and a pretty big one at that. GNOME 2.30 is now available for everyone and the final release of the 2.xx series is packing some serious punch and plenty of goodies for even the most demanding user.

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Paludis is Going Into a Cave

    The following applies to Gentoo, not Exherbo. Exherbo developers (Exherbo has no users) already know what’s going on there. I figure it’s worth having a clear source of information on this for Gentoo users, though, rather than making people rely upon rumours and third hand transcriptions of what’s been said on IRC.

  • Interview with Andrzej Wasylkowski from the checkmycode project.

    4. How is Gentoo involved in the project?

    All the source code that the analysis uses to find patterns comes from the Gentoo distribution (i.e., the snippet you submit gets compared to the source code of projects coming from the Gentoo distribution).

• Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu Manual Audio Book

    The Ubuntu Manual Team strives to improve its availability of educational resources by catering for a wide audience of people across all aspects of life, be it translating the manual into different languages or providing size 25 font versions for those with sight difficulties.

  • Will Ubuntu’s new look bring in the masses?

    With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.

    We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole?

  • Ubuntu 10.04: Five Changes You May Not Have Noticed

    All in all, I’m impressed by the number of changes Canonical decided to make for Lucid, given that it’s an LTS release–for which Ubuntu developers have traditionally focused on delivering maximum stability, with minimal novelty.

Devices/Embedded

• HTC Desire and HTC Legend Gets Root Access

  The two new Android phone – HTC Desire and HTC Legend have been rooted for full file system access on Android 2.1. Paul at Modaco forums has confirmed to have got full su (root) access on the said devices, and is currently going through final release mechanics before he makes it public for everyone to use.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Edition On My Dell Mini 10 v

    So how does the netbook edition look on my dell mini ? Amazing ! The icons/interface look better and the interface setup is perfect for the small screen estate of the netbook. The old 8.04 ubuntu version was boring , and this version is alive and makes me want to use the netbook even more. The 8.04 version doesn’t have an update OS feature compared to the later releases so it’s best to upgrade to a later version or 9.10. I can see why a lot of netbook ubuntu users are upgrading to the netbook version , it simply rocks !

  • Acer to bring out dual-boot Windows/Android netbook

    At a launch event for its TimelineX notebooks in Europe, Acer let it slip that it is working on an Aspire One D260 netbook that will have dual-boot capabilities with Android and Windows, likely XP. An update to the Aspire One D250, it is expected to ship with the latest Atom processor, though technical specifications are not yet finalized. At the same time, Acer revealed a netbook running on Chrome OS is also due in the summer of this year.

  • One Laptop Per Child delivers 200 XO computers to NT kids

    The Linux-based user interface which runs on the XO laptop, Sugar, is currently developed by the open source community.

• Tablets

  • Europe’s biggest publisher embraces the WePad

    But Buchholz must have jumped the gun, because the WePad’s creator Neofonie had scheduled all official announcements about the WePad’s hardware and media partnerships for April 12.

Former Sun open source officer joins OSI board

Simon Phipps, who was chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems for the past five years, has become a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors.

In an email response to questions Thursday, Phipps said he was not offered a position at Oracle, which closed its acquisition of Sun in January. Phipps worked nearly 10 years at the now-defunct company.

Why Toyota Should Go Open Source

The software development equivalent of kaizen, of course, is open-source software. As the chief executive of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open-source technology solutions, you can color me biased, but open source represents the most significant change and most disruptive force in software development in 20 years. In the open-source software model, the human-readable source code is distributed along with the computer-readable machine code. Users are encouraged to understand the code, find flaws, suggest fixes, and add functionality. As with kaizen manufacturing principles, open source encourages participation and continuous improvement. It can shrink defects to a negligible number. Since 2006, the Coverity Scan Open Source Report has analyzed more than 60 million unique lines of code from more than 280 popular open-source projects, including Firefox, Linux, and PHP. In 2009, states the report, open source code had roughly one defect per 4,000 lines of code, a marked contrast with the stats for proprietary code.

GIMP

• GIMP has to catch up again!

• GIMP 2.8: A preview of the new features! [April 2010]

• Two great plugins for Gimp !!

  Today will show you another two nice plugins for Gimp, the first one is Sunny landscape : This script changes a rainy landscape to a sunny one, the second is called Resynthesizer, and can generate textures from a given sample the same way Photoshop’s content-aware fill does.

• Gimp for the kids: Debian Junior Art

  If you’ve ever tried your hand at The GIMP, you know that, at first, The GIMP can be a bit challenging to learn. That is coming from an adult. Imagine a younger user attempting to use The GIMP.

  Believe it or not, there are plenty of tools for the Linux operating system for children. There are educational tools, interfaces, and more. One of those “and mores” is the Debian Junior Art package. This package includes both Tux Paint and Xpaint. This article will show you how to install Junior Art and introduce you to both tools.

Mozilla

• Firefox Education Toolkit

• March Mozilla Drumbeat Update

• Firefox claims 40% of Euro browser share

  Mozilla’s little browser that could is actually on its way to dethroning Internet Explorer as the default, most widely used browser in the world, and the apex of its growth is in Europe.

• Leaving Labs, Joining Firefox

  I’m happy to announce that I’m moving to the Firefox team, where I’ll be taking the role of Creative Lead for Firefox to help in designing and guiding the future product path for Firefox. I’m excited by the new role, excited by the team, excited by the possibilities, and excited by the potential to make nearly 400 million people’s lives demonstrably more rad.

Openness

• The human genome at ten

  The race to complete the first human genome sequence had everything a story needs to keep its audience enthralled — right down to a neck-and-neck sprint for the finish by two fierce rivals. In the end, the result was basically a tie. The rivals — the international, publicly funded Human Genome Project and the private, for-profit company Celera Genomics then based in Rockville, Maryland — jointly announced the completion of their draft sequences in June 2000 at a gala televised press conference attended by US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

• Dramatic Growth of Open Access: March 31, 2010 Edition

  The March 31, 2010 issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available. Highlights: DOAJ is now at 4,863 journals, having added a net total of 864 journals in the past year for a DOAJ growth rate of over 2 titles per day. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now searches over 23 million documents; this is an increase of over 1.2 million in the last quarter, or over 13,000 documents per day. There are now more than 200 open access mandate policies listed in ROARMAP, with strong growth in every category. Compliance with the U.S. National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy is 62% – still not 100%, but definitely getting closer. In the past year,120 more journals began contributing all content as open access to PubMedCentral. There are now more than 5,000 journals around the world using Open Journal Systems (OJS).

• Achieving Impossible Things with Free Culture and Commons-Based Enterprise

• Paywall/Open Debate Applied To University Education As Well

  Now, the OCW critics will claim that this takes away from the big schools that put content into OCW, but again, that’s misunderstanding the market, and assuming a zero-sum game, rather than an ability to expand the overall pie, recognizing that better education programs across the board are a good thing that open up many more opportunities than they take away.

• Ordnance Survey opens up UK mapping data!

  Ordnance Survey opens up UK mapping data!

  Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week – today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public.

Programming

• Perl 4, Back Where It Belongs

• Linux on your iPhone

  As an April Fool’s joke, I created a fake Linux app for the iPhone that made it look like Linux was running on your phone. It doesn’t actually do anything – when you type text, it just spits out one of several pre-determined responses, but there are various geeky in-jokes for people in the know. The idea was that you’d buy it knowing it was fake (it was made very clear in the app description), then show it to your Linuxy friends, say “hey, I installed Linux on my iPhone!” and see how long it took for them to figure out it was a joke.

  Sadly, Apple rejected the app for various reasons.

Standards/Consortia

• Introducing ISO ODF 1.1

  Formally this alignment to ODF 1.1 would be done via an amendment to ISO/IEC 26300:2006, to add the enhancements from OASIS ODF 1.1 — primarily accessibility improvements. The process will look something like this:

  1. OASIS submits the full text of ODF 1.1 to JTC1 (done)
  2. The ODF Project Editor will work with SC34/WG6 to prepare the text of an amendment to ISO/IEC 26300. Think of it as a diff between ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 (in progress)
  3. A ballot of SC4 NBs in what is called an FPDAM (Final Preliminary Draft Amendment)
  4. A ballot of JTC1 NBs in what is called an FDAM (you guessed it — a Final Draft Amendment)

• Document Freedom: How to know when you have it

  Today is Document Freedom Day. In the five years since Open Document Format (ODF) first was approved in OASIS we have certainly made progress, but there is still work remaining to be done. How will we know when we have arrived? At what point can we declare victory and say “Free at last”?

F.T.C. Is Said to Have Looked Into Amazon-Google Ties

Last month, John Doerr, one of America’s most celebrated venture capitalists, announced that he would step down later this year from the board of Amazon.com, a company that he helped to finance and build. At the time, Amazon said Mr. Doerr “has decided not to stand for re-election and will focus more of his time on new ventures.”

Sweden Tops The Global Information Technology Report

Libel

• Simon Singh wins libel court battle

  Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.

  He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.

  The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.

• MPs’ revolt may scupper libel reform

  Government plans to limit success fees charged by “no-win no-fee” lawyers in libel cases were put in serious doubt over becoming law before the general election after a Labour rebellion in a House of Commons committee.

• Study: 52 Percent Of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists

  According to a new study released by PR Week and PR Newswire, 52% percent of bloggers surveyed consider themselves journalists.

Science

• Science in the public view: A good gamble

  Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, did something gutsy but smart Tuesday: they revved the Large Hadron Collider up to a new energy level in full public view.

Security

• Counting a billion: India begins new census

  Adding to the complexity of counting and classifying the world’s second biggest population will be a simultaneous process of collecting biometric data on every person, to be used in a new National Population Register.

• Court OKs Repeated Tasering of Pregnant Woman

  A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

  The lawyer representing Malaika Brooks said Monday that the court’s 2-1 decision sanctioned “pain compliance” tactics through a modern-day version of the cattle prod.

• The Price of Justice

  I am shocked. I am appalled. But above all, I am outraged.

  As a child, I was always taught that the police force deserved maximum respect; they were the people looking after our welfare, the people who were protecting us. I would see a fluorescent jacket and feel safer for it. As a woman walking alone after dark, I would be relieved by the sight of an officer on the beat. As a student, I knew that if I got separated from my friends, the police patrolling the ‘party streets’ of Norwich would help me to get home safely.

  Unfortunately, I no longer feel reassured by the sight of an officer in uniform. Instead, I wonder if I will be arrested for using my camera phone. I wonder if I’ve inadvertently dropped my notebook and will be given an on-the-spot fine for littering. Most of all, I fear for my personal safety – and not just when I’m on the other side of a picket line.

Environment

• Shell Oil Behind London Science Museum Decision to Take Anti-Science Stance on Global Warming?

  The Times of London reports that the London Science Museum has decided to change its position from promoting understanding of the science of global warming to one that they deem “neutral” in their climate science gallery. And by neutral they mean a stance at odds with the widely accepted science on climate change. Science accepted by NASA, the UN IPCC and climate scientists around the world. And science being visibly demonstrated right now – today – in places like Antarctica and Nepal where ice is shrinking and in Africa where bodies of water are rapidly decreasing from drought and climate changes and in our oceans where coral reefs are dying at an alarming rate. But better not to upset a confused public. Let’s stay neutral.

• Koch Industries’ Extensive Funding of Climate Denial Industry Unmasked

  Koch Industries has “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” spending over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the climate denial machine, according to an extensive report today by Greenpeace.

  The Greenpeace report reveals how Koch Industries and the foundations under its control spent far more than even ExxonMobil in recent years to fund industry front groups opposed to clean energy and climate policies. Koch spent over half the total amount -nearly $25 million – funding climate denier groups from 2005 to 2008, a period in which Exxon only spent $8.9 million.

• Yunnan Drought Photos: Fish Trapped In Dried Lake Bed

• Lighter Later: Redefining climate change campaigns.

  This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.

• EU warned fuel quality plans will increase oil emissions

  Draft rules on implementing the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive would allow imports of tar sand and other energy intensive oils to the EU, undermining greenhouse gas emission savings, environmentalists have warned.

  The European Commission is currently drafting implementation measures for the Fuel Quality Directive to establish a methodology for calculating greenhouse gas emissions from fuel. The directive, adopted to complement the climate and energy package in December 2008, requires suppliers of petrol, diesel and gas oil used in road transport to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of fuel by 10% by 2020.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Big Brother on Your Trail

  These developments explain why a coalition of organizations and companies—including Google, AT&T, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American Civil Liberties Union—have joined in asking Congress to drag our privacy laws into the 21st century. They think search warrants should be required before law enforcement can demand this sort of electronic communications information.

• Court Says President Bush Violated Wiretapping Laws With Warrantless Wiretap

  In a huge ruling, a court has said that the US government violated wiretapping laws in eavesdropping on phone calls without a warrant.

  If you haven’t been following the fight over the legality of warrantless wiretapping, this case, involving lawyers working with the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is extremely important. When it was revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phonecalls without a warrant, lawsuits were filed — but the “problem” was that the parties (such as the ACLU) that filed the lawsuits didn’t have “standing” because they had no evidence that they, personally, were impacted by the warrantless wiretapping. This created a ridiculous Catch-22 situation. As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.

• Web site posters’ anonymity an invitation to mischief: Connie Schultz

  Web site posters’ anonymity an invitation to mischief: Connie Schultz

• Netzpolitik-Interview: Background on the Censilia-plans

  Joe McNamee, the European Policy Affairs Coordinator for European Digital Rights (EDRi), recently discussed the current EU Commission’s plans to introduce internet blocking measures with the British webportal Index on Censorship: Out of sight, out of mind. On this theme, I asked him a few questions to further illuminate this topic.

• Open letter to Commissioner Malmström

• Censorship in Scotland

  Something very disturbing is happening in Scotland. At one time it was a beacon for transparent and democratic government. Kevin Dunion, the Scottish Information Commissioner, made bold rulings on the people’s right to know including a decision that all Members of the Scottish Parliament would have to disclose their expenses. It was this decision that I used as a legal precedent in my own case against Westminster MPs.

  Now it seems some Scottish politicians are regressing. The SNP Government is going to court to try and strip the Scottish Information Commissioner of his power. Ministers, including First Minister Alex Salmond, want the Court of Session to rule that the Commissioner doesn’t have the right to ask the Government for information as part of his FOI investigations. This comes after Mr Dunion launched a freedom of information probe after ministers turned down a request to see government files. When the Government refused to provide the files, the Commissioner issued an “information notice” against ministers, demanding they provide more details.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Official Statement Objecting BBC/OFCOM Proposal

  The Linux Foundation, on behalf of its members, would like to register its serious objections to the current BBC/OFCOM proposal, which would impose content management controls on new free-to-air high definition channels. The plan, which involves restrictively licensing the Huffman codes used in the electronic programme guide, would have a negative effect on open source applications and would distort the markets which have built up around those applications.

  The treatment of Open Source in the BBC document is incorrect and ignores the severe market distortions that this content management scheme would produce in open platforms. The use of Open Source within the market segments that would be affected by the BBC proposal can be divided into two business models: Proprietary but built on Open Source and fully open platforms. The HD Freesat system the BBC used to characterise Open Source falls into the Proprietary but open category; no analysis at all was attempted of the fully open category. The failure to look at fully open platforms leads to an important segment of the market being ignored.

• An Open Letter to Ofcom on the BBC HD DRM Proposals

  …teach and conduct research at the Open University, which since its inception has used broadcast and multimedia technologies in education, we are writing to express our objections to the proposal to allow the BBC to add a Digital Rights Management (DRM) flag to its high definition (HD) output.

• Last Chance to Save BBC from DRM

  This leading question (and they are all phrased thus) pretty much indicates that Ofcom has made up its mind about the issue, and is simply going through the motions of consultation. Note, too, the euphemism “copy management”, when what we are talking about here is DRM, plain and simple: even Ofcom is aware that trying to espouse the benefits of DRM is a lost cause.

• How do you want to watch HD TV in the future? It’s time to tell Ofcom

  If you run open source capture/viewing software, such as MythTV, things get a little trickier. The developers of MythTV can’t sign an agreement with the BBC in order to obtain the decoding tables, because part of the terms of the agreement are that the decoding tables aren’t given out to anybody else. This is fundamentally opposed to the open source nature of the project, so simply won’t happen.

• DRMs in the draft Copyright Amendments

  India has been under a lot of pressure from the US, due to the Special 301 report which US puts out annually, to amend and enforce its copyright laws to a standard closer to what the US would want; usually standards which the US has succeeded in pushing through in WIPO treaties. Therefore, essentially, it is the same lobby which pushes for stricter laws in US as it is in India. (Incidentally, I recently wrote a post on Hollywood tying up with Bollywood to check piracy in India). To further add to this, even as their effect in US has come under severe criticism; for them to be the lobbying party in India without due regard for the local context, economy and culture seems absurd. For a developing country like India, which even other developing countries look up to, it is important to get their copyright law correct, since the alternative is that instead of incentivizing and aiding creation and creative works, it is creating unnecessary barriers to access to creative works (especially considering that there is a big emphasis in Indian culture to adapt and improvise on works already in the public domain).

Newspaper Industry

• Fox News goes liberal (on copyright law)

  Fox News loves “fair use” … if it can help win a copyright lawsuit.

  Rupert Murdoch may be on the record attacking the legal doctrine as an excuse for online piracy, but attorneys for the mogul’s top-rated cable news network are hanging their hat on fair use in responding to a lawsuit brought by a TV producer who claims FNC improperly aired an interview with Michael Jackson’s ex-wife during its nonstop coverage of the singer’s death.

• NSFW: The Madness of King Rupert – I Admit, I Was Wrong About Murdoch’s Mental State

• Johnston’s Local Pay Site Trial Has Been ‘A Disaster’

  We could have told Johnston Press, when it announced the plans back in November, that people won’t pay to read local newspapers online. But you can’t begrudge the publisher finding out for sure for itself…

  Its three-month pay trial on six local papers sites is now ending, with apparently dismal results. One paper staffer tells HTFP the trial was a “disaster” with subscribers “in single figures”, while another title got subscribers only “in the low double figures”, Press Gazette says.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• The Collapse of Complex Business Models

  I gave a talk in Edinburgh last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs?

  That kind of question comes up a lot. It’s a tough one to answer, not just because the answer is unlikely to make anybody happy, but because the premise is more important than the question itself.

• Crookes v p2pnet link case goes to Supreme Court

  Hyper-linking is what the net is all about. Without it, the Internet would become a drab and pale facsimile of the exciting news, data and information medium it is today.

• IsoHunt told to pull .torrent files offline, likely to close

  The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content—an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung’s two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he’s still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won’t result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren’t looking good for the torrent site.

• Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content

• Legal limbo: Disney could go after you for posting vacation videos online

  Lots of people use YouTube and other video sharing sites to upload videos taken on their vacations. But when it comes to footage of your last trip to Disneyland, a park run by corporate masters who are famously vigilant in protecting their intellectual rights with lawsuits, you may want to keep those videos to yourself.

  [...]

  Disney doesn’t deny it either way, but the wording of its policy, and its ominous reference to its “options,” might suggest otherwise. Disney has no stated policy against your right to post videos that document your park experiences. It also has no stated policy saying you can.

  To stave off persistent accusations of enabling copyright infringement, YouTube historically been quickly compliant with corporate complaints. It follows a largely pre-emptive policy of summarily deleting any video for which you can’t prove you own the rights. Its policy can be as erratic as Disney’s is vague, inciting the ire of Web watchdog groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (That may be annoying, but at least you don’t live in Italy, where the government is proposing you have to obtain a license if you want to upload any moving picture to the Internet.)

• Record industry: ignore that French piracy study!

  A few days back, we highlighted a new study out of France that found piracy actually going up after the country passed a strict Internet disconnection law. Though the law won’t be implemented until later in the year, les internautes are already moving away from P2P networks; the thing is, even more of them are moving to other forms of piracy not dealt with by the new law, like online streaming and one-click downloads.

• An open letter to Victoria A. Espinel, US “IP Czar”

  On one hand, I would propose that you abandon “intellectual property enforcement” (which actually means “intellectual freedom restrictions”) since the restrictions in question are clearly unethical and extreme.

  On the other, I would recommend stepping up the enforcement — maybe doing so will make enough people aware of the oppression so that they will see the value of free culture and free software, and finally, bring about the political change that is needed to eliminate the cancer on our society that is deceptively labelled “Intellectual Property.”

• NZ’s Labour party rejects cutting off pirates

  New Zealand’s Labour party, currently in opposition, has stated that it would no longer support provisions for cutting off file sharer’s internet accounts.

  The policy is a back-flip on the party’s position on graduated response legislation in the past, which supported termination of internet access.

• Spain Finds Film Piracy A Hard Habit To Break

  It has been the setting for many a spaghetti western, but now Hollywood has warned that Spain could be facing high noon over its appalling record of movie piracy, with a future devoid of DVDs.

  The unauthorised downloading of films from the internet is so rife, with film-makers complaining that a legal void makes people think movies are free, that Spain could become the first European country to be abandoned by Hollywood studios.

• Internet S.o.S Part3: the EU perspective

  The Telecoms Package contains a provision which means that graduated response measures cannot be imposed without giving the user a right to due process. The actual words are ‘a prior, fair and impartial procedure’ which guarantees the presumption of innocence. (EU Framework directive 2009/140/EC, Article 1.3a). The intention of the European Parliament was that users would have a court

• Results From Dungeons & Dragons Online Going Free: Revenue Up 500%

  Last year, we wrote about the decision by Turbine to turn its formerly fee-based Dungeons & Dragons Online MMO into a free offering, that had reasons to buy built into the game. At the time, we noted that the early results looked good, but over time they’re looking even better. Reader Murdock alerts us to the news that DDO was able to get 1 million more users and boost revenue 500%… all by going free.

• 1978

  It’s all about access to knowledge

  In 1978 we were accessing information very differently to how we are accessing it today. If we’re not accessing information via a computer, we’re doing it via a mobile phone. But doing it, we are.
  The Copyright Act, which is one of the major acts that governs how we access information, is 32 years old. It is now time to be updated.

• Fifth OiNK Uploader Walks Free

  During October 2007, the popular BitTorrent tracker OiNK was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. Three months ago the site’s administrator was cleared of all charges. The remaining uploader had his case dropped today and also walks free.

• ACTA

  • ACTA leak 2010/01/18 consolidated text

• Digital Economy Bill

  • The DEBill and why it should go.

    Lilian Edwards (well, her Pangloss persona, anyway) offers another characteristically trenchant analysis here of the shocking mess that is the Digital Economy Bill. The DEBill* appears to be yet another in the growing list of legislative measures in which the Bill is drafted so as to confer disproportionate powers, while we are assured by the sponsoring Minister‡ that they will either never be used, or be used only for good.

    [...]

    The DEBill is wrong at the meta-level, too. Not only does the Bill itself enshrine evasions of due process (as described above), it is also about to be pushed through Parliament without debate, as part of the inappropriately-named “wash-up” process in the closing days of the legislative session.

    On April 6th, the Bill will be given its second reading and then become a bargaining chip in an unaccountable and undemocratic haggling session amongst MPs whose chances of forming part of the next legislature are entirely uncertain.

    I urge you to let your MP know that you object to the Bill and its passage through Parliament.

  • Coadec’s concerns with Copyright Infringement Provisions of Digital Economy Bill

    • The biggest concern with the User Notification Rules is the potential effect on ISPs, which includes not just upstream providers but anyone who makes Internet access available (and so theoretically applies to cafes and other providers of wi-fi hotspots). The administrative burden on these smaller ISPs is likely to be very high, and in combination with potential fines of up to £250,000 for non-compliance, these provisions may be enough to put many ISPs out of business. The long-run effect will be substantially reduced Internet access in public places, which (1) will have a disproportionately large impact on the earliest-stage entrepreneurs, who rely on publicly-available wi-fi to develop their innovations before they move into an office and (2) conflicts with the Government’s mission of make high-speed access widely available.

  • Beware as Mandelson sneaks in new web blocking clause

    Lord Mandelson, who is putting through the protectionist Digital Economy Bill on behalf of the wealthy creative industry corporations, has come out with a revised version of the BPI’s website blocking clause. But beware, because this is merely a ruse to get 3-strikes carried when it goes before the House of Commons next week.

    The Clause is not substantially different from the one proposed by Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Howard of Rising. All it seems to do is to create another layer of legislation, and possibly it could have two effects: one is that Mandelson is trying to get the rest of the Digital Economy bill passed before the election, so this is a ruse to leave out the most controversial clause. And, in putting it off until the political heat is also off, he can sneak it through more easily.

  • The Digital Economy Bill: The Power of Not Being Elected

    The Digital Economy Bill now represents a wonderful opportunity for would-be next-Parliament MPs. Show us why we should trust you. Show us that you will stand in the gap and uphold democratic rights and due process. And think before you alienate a good slice of your electorate.

    I guess dinosaurs have to be allowed their ritual dances as they exit the evolutionary stage. And this Bill, flawed as it is, may still become law. Because of clever timing, apathy. And the Power Of Not Being Elected.

  • Draft Clause 18 Published

  • Writing (Yet Again) to my MP

    I would therefore urge you to press ministers for a full debate on the Bill, perhaps by signing this Early Day Motion (EDM 1223):

    “That this House believes that the Digital Economy Bill [Lords] is too important to be taken further in the last days of a dying Parliament; and considers that a bill with so many repercussions for consumers, civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet should be debated and properly scrutinised at length and in detail, with a full opportunity for public discussion and representation in a new Parliament after the general election and not rushed through in the few days that remain in this Parliament.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Linux and Small Business: The Ongoing Disconnect

  Still, Linux has found multiple back doors into the small business market — without necessarily attracting much attention from small business owners.

  Small business network appliances — everything from routers to switches to security hardware — often have Linux at the core. Plus, a range of managed services and SaaS applications run atop Linux. (One prime example: N-able’s N-central software for MSPs was written on Linux.) And Google Android will surely give Linux a lift in the mobile small business market.

‘Crapware’

• Linux and Crapware

• Linux, Where Crapware Goes to Die

  Sure, there are dumb programs that can be installed in Linux. Generally, they are pretty straightforward to uninstall though. Sure, you could mess up your Linux system if you tried hard enough, but in general programs are fairly easy to sanitize or destroy. Certainly there are complexities at play with things like gconf, but they’re nothing compared to the Windows’ system registry.

• The Taxes of the Tech World – Linux, Microsoft, and More!

  If your set two machines side by side at Dell, you’ll notice in some cases that both machines, although equal in hardware specs and feature, are different in price, with the Linux machine actually being more expensive than the equivalent Windows machine. So what gives? Why does a machine with Windows cost less than one with Linux on it? One simple word: Malware.

Server

• Solaris

  I could rush out to try OpenSolaris now, while it still lives, but I think GNU/Linux does what I need very well.

• Linux-ready Linksys 802.11n router rev’d

  Cisco announced an updated line of Linksys wireless 802/11/b/g/n routers for the home market, including a Linux model.

Kernel Space

• The kernel column #85

  Another month, another kernel release. Last month saw what is hopefully the final RC (release candidate) 2.6.33 kernel, and so it should have been released by the time you read this. The latest kernel includes lots of shiny new features that have been developed over the past three months since 2.6.32, including some nice virtualisation speed-ups (detecting when virtual machine guest’s VCPUs are within spinlocks and automatically yielding), driver updates and the removal of the legacy ‘anticipatory’ IO scheduler (long since replaced in function by the CFQ or ‘Completely Fair Queuing’ one).

• MeeGo

  • Creator of Linpus Lite Joins Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linpus Technologies is its newest member.

    Linpus is a popular Linux distribution for the consumer PC market with a long history of shipping on notebooks and netbooks for many of the world’s largest OEMs. It is becoming a member of The Linux Foundation to play an ongoing role in the MeeGo project and other community initiatives that advance Linux’s competitive position for a new generation of computing devices.

  • The first MeeGo release

    Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open – as we set out to do from the beginning.

  • MeeGo code released for netbooks, the N900, and Aava phone

    The MeeGo community has “opened the repositories” on early code for the open source mobile Linux operating system, which combines the Intel-backed Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms. Images are now publicly available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base “from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer,” says the community.

  • MeeGo gets going: source code and developer builds available

    In a statement today at the official MeeGo community Web site, Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imad Sousou announced that the MeeGo source code and first installable images are available for download. The platform itself is still incomplete and under heavy active development. The purpose of this release is to make it possible for third-party developers to begin participating in the project.

Applications

• Makagiga – Easy-to-use application for doing a variety of tasks

  Makagiga is a free, easy-to-use, cross-platform application for doing a variety of tasks, such as text editing, todo listing, RSS reading, and simple image viewing. Plugins are used to implement its various capabilities. It can perform file import/export, backing up files, Internet searching (Google, Wikipedia), and more.

• E-mail: See it here, see it there, with Sync Mail Dir

  You may not be able to be in two places at once, but there’s no reason your e-mail can’t be. The Sync Mail Dir tools let you synchronize a pair of mailboxes in maildir format across a network over a Secure Shell (SSH) link, so you can have all your messages available in two places. It’s similar to the Maildirsync utility in design and requirements, but more efficient, and while that program hasn’t been updated in more than five years, Sync Mail Dir’s newest version was released just last week.

• Viewnior 1.0 Released; still fast, awesome image viewer

  Version 1.0 of lightweight image viewer Viewnior – which reached number 5 on our 12 top applications of 2009 – was released yesterday.

  It’s still easy to see why. Not only is Viewnior lightening fast and super light but still manages to pack in the features including in-app cropping and support for animated images.

• peekabot—3-D Robotic Visualization

  According to the peekabot project’s Web site:

  “peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

• Instructionals

  • Install Latest VLC Media Player in Ubuntu Lucid, Karmic in 2 Easy Steps

  • A fast guide to system rescue using open tools

  • command ls -l output explained

  • Ubuntu 9.10 automount

  • Combine Dropbox with Ubuntu One

  • GNOME Split File Splitter Application for Ubuntu

  • Home » Linux » MPlayer on Fedora

  • Linux Commands: Making Bash Error Messages Friendlier

  • Buck-security – Security scanner for Ubuntu Servers

  • PS3 Firmware (v3.21) Update

  • Alice in Colorland: RGB vs CMYK

  • Choose Your VIM Color Scheme With Color Sampler Pack

  • Linux / UNIX: Encrypt Backup Tape Using Tar & OpenSSL

  • Secure Your SSH Server with Denyhosts

  • Customized Effects with jQuery 1.4

  • Cucumber Makes Behavior-Driven Ruby on Rails Development Cool

  • VBoxHeadless – Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 3.1.x On A Headless CentOS 5.4 Server

  • Linux Commands: Making Bash Error Messages Friendlier

• Games

  • Stone Soup 0.6.0

    That’s via telnet crawl.akrasiac.org, on a 120Mhz Pentium machine running Crux. As you might be able see in the lower corner, the memory and processor load are negligible, probably because the bulk of the responsibility is shifted off this machine and out into the ether. I have installed crawl directly on to this computer, but the work involved seems a bit overkill when I can just use telnet to jump into a game remotely.

Desktop Environments

• KDE picks Kim Kardashian to promote next release

  The KDE Desktop Project has hit upon the idea of having the American socialite Kim Kardashian promote its next release.

  April 1st is a very difficult day for me. Both my parents tested positive for the gullible gene. The Internet makes it…

  KDE is one of the two major desktops for Linux and most of its applications have names beginning with “K”. Kardashian manages to keep her name in the headlines all the time, most recently by releasing a sex tape which led to the calling off of her marriage to American sports personality, Reggie Bush.

• GNOME Project Updates Free Desktop with 2.30 Release

  The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features.

  GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME 2.28 release from September 2009.

Distributions

• April 2010 Issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine Released

  The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the April 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

• Happy Birthday, Gentoo!

• PureOS 2.0 Screenshots

  Built with Linux-Live scripts 6.2.9, the Debian-based PureOS 2.0 Linux distro has been recently released. This distro and live CD features the KDE 4.3.4 desktop environment, Linux kernel 2.6.33 w/ with Squashfs 3.4 and LZMA, Iceweasel 3.5.8, Icedove 2.0.0.22 with Lightning 0.9, OpenOffice 3.2.0 and many other new applications. The PureOS 2.0 release announcement shows a Full List of included packages.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Released; RHEL 6 Coming Soon

    Red Hat is updating its flagship Linux server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to version 5.5 providing performance and feature improvements.

    The new Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) release takes advantage of the latest Intel and AMD processors as well as advancements in virtualization and Windows interoperability. The release of RHEL 5.5 comes as Red Hat is about to begin to ramp up its next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.

• Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu Unravelled

    There is also an Ubuntu Foundation that has dedicated funds of $10 million that could keep Ubuntu going if Canonical stopped backing it. I’ve previously been critical of Canonical keeping the grasp on the trademark, and not giving the dormant Foundation greater control. With the funds Canonical has put into Ubuntu I suppose it is reasonable for it to have a pseudo-guaranteed position. Mark Shuttleworth has been a member of the ‘Community Council’ since inception and was willing to stand for election as if he was any other person of the community. This is quite telling of Canonical not enforcing a control that it legally could. At the last developer summit Mark announced that he would be passing the helm to Jane Silber allowing Mark to take a more ‘hands on’ role.

  • OMG! Replacement coloured indicator message alert icons for Lucid

    The above icons come in all main Tango! colours as well as one awesome Ubuntu Aubergine coloured one for the brand-obsessed contingent, too. (Which, I must say, looks mighty awesome when using the Radiance theme)

  • Ubuntu 10.04 Beta One Released – My First Impressions

    I’ve read about all of the changes online (which are below), and from what I’ve read, it’s faster, more reliable, cleaner bootup screen (which is very simplified), and a brand new theme. It always seems to be that Ubuntu always has a different theme when they release a new version!

  • Variants

    • Linux Mint 8 “Helena” Xfce released!

      Quick steps:

      * Download the ISO or the torrent.
      * While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features in Linux Mint 8 Xfce, read the User Guide and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
      * After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5 (as described in the user guide).
      * Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy Linux Mint 8 Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• Intel’s Moorestown Could Be Game Changer for the Chip Maker

  As for Microsoft, Moorestown’s funky power management approach and non-standard PCI implementation could give Linux a healthy headstart in mobile x86 devices. But that’s a topic for another day.

• Why have an Iphone if you can have a Bphone? Linux, rotating screen, Cool

  available from chinagrabber.com this is the Bphone, a hybrid netbook/cellphone which features a rotating touch screen and a keyboard…

• Android

  • Android on HTC Kaiser (Tilt 8925)

    My current Android build of choice for my Kaiser, and the second one I would like to recommend here, is Myn’s Warm Donut. Under this build I have a fully functional Android system on my Kaiser. Warm Donut is a variation of Andriod 1.6 for your device, this version is quite snappy/responsive. Which of the two builds you would like to use is up to you – personally I recommend trying them both and seeing which one you enjoy more/suits your needs.

  • Google mum on Android split-up rumor

    Google declined to comment on Engadget’s claim that Google will decouple Android components from core code releases, offering them over Android Market, says eWEEK. In other Android news on eWEEK, the Motorola Droid started receiving Android 2.1 updates, and Google denied that it’s sharing ad revenues from Android apps.

What’s in a name? Still open source

A few of years ago, we saw a spate of open source name changes, including Likewise and SpringSource. The reasoning then seems to remain the case today: the positive association of open source with cost savings and the positive connotations of an open source project in the enterprise outweigh any disconnect or disassociation with the project. This seems true even though differentiation from open source projects was a key challenge among vendors we polled recently for our report on sales and marketing for open source software.

CSH Seminar Series: Karlie Robinson

Karlie Robinson, a Rochester local and open source entrepreneur, gave a short talk at RIT about open source and business as a part of the Computer Science House (CSH) Seminar Series. This year, CSH has hosted speakers such as Kevin Purdy, contributing editor of Lifehacker, and Charles Profitt, of the Rochester Linux User Group (LUGOR), which meets regularly at Rochester Institute of Technology in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.

How and why contributing to FOSS can benefit your organization

At first glance, the ecosystem in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world can seem a bit complicated. There are several ways to get software: project websites where you can download it directly, use a software management tool that your Linux distribution provides, or you may also be able to install a Linux distribution that includes everything you need right out of the box! Once you understand this ecosystem, you can find where your contributions would be most useful, and why contributing is beneficial to your organization and the FOSS community.

Fusion

• New Application Could Make All Software ‘open Source’

  Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible, according to researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software open source.

• Prefab system ‘makes all software open source’

  A University of Washington team has developed a system it says makes all software effectively open source, allowing users to add custom features to any program.

  “Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

• Is Prefab legal?

• GNU/Linux and freedom: non-free software hidden in your GNU/Linux distribution

  Most people with an interest in software freedom will turn to GNU/Linux as their operating system of choice. Few realize however, that the vast majority of GNU/Linux distros are not entirely free. Imagine migrating away from Windows, only to find that by installing GNU/Linux you are accepting a restrictive Microsoft license!

  Many distros promote the use of proprietary software, knowingly show incorrect licenses, and attempt to hide the problem under the guise of an ‘option of freedom’. When the majority of developers of a collection of software don’t care about freedom, neither will their users. Non-free distros make almost no attempts to inform their userbases of the importance of freedom, even though they wouldn’t exist without it. I will discuss how the option of freedom is an unacceptable solution, and propose some real fixes.

  The problem

  I’ve been using GNU/Linux for over 5 years, but I’ve only recently discovered just how much non-free software my distro contains. I decided to search through my system and remove everything that was non-free, and there was quite a lot that I removed.

Education

• The Journal: State Leaders Weigh In on Open Source Assessment

  As an advocate for open source the additional observations left me feeling good because I can assist with many of them. I currently present at educational technology conferences about FOSS and how it provides greater value to education than merely lowering costs.

• A K12 Educator’s Guide to Open Source Software

  Since this needed to be a single double-sided sheet of information, it’s been edited quite judiciously! A lot of great stuff has been left out here, but I think this is a sampling of the best-of-the-best of the resources out there. So if you’re a K12 educator looking for more information on open source but overwhelmed by the amount of info out there, I’m hoping this will be a good shortlist for you to start from!

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s Q1 2010 Analyst Report – State of the Internet

  Today we released the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the State of the Internet. This is the start of something new… in addition to metrics related discussions on this blog and across the broader community, we wanted to create a somewhat standardized, ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes. You should expect to see this report released at the end of each calendar quarter.

• Firefox 3.5.9 and 3.0.19 security updates now available

  As part of Mozilla’s ongoing security and stability update process, Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.0.19 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.2.

• Mozilla Updates Firefox for Security, Ends 3.0.x Branch

• Firefox coders propose fast-graphics deadline

  And now the Mozilla graphics team have issued themselves a goal, according to a mailing list message: ship a developer preview version of Firefox with Direct2D support that will work on at least some machines by the end of the second quarter.

• Firefox developers block old CSS leak

  The issue is caused by the fact that traditionally web browsers have displayed visited and unvisited links differently. A web application can use this information to find out what pages a user has visited. The W3C has responded to this problem by modifying the CSS 2.1 specification to allow browsers to represent all links as unvisited, or to take other measures to ensure the privacy of the user.

• Mozilla spits out last version of Firefox 3.0

  On Tuesday, the open sourcers pushed out Firefox 3.0.19, which includes several security and stability updates, and in a brief blog post, Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto confirmed that this would be version 3′s final incarnation. It patches six vulnerabilities, five listed as critical.

SaaS

• JumpBox: Delivering “Open Source as a Service”

  JumpBox, providers of IT infrastructure solutions, announced a major upgrade to their offering, including the unveiling of their new product, which delivers open source server applications as a service. Here’s what resellers should know.

  “Open Source as a service,” as JumpBox calls it, is exactly what it says on the tin. The company now allows 55 of their namesake “JumpBoxes,” each one a virtual machine containing an open-source server application like Ruby on Rails or MySQL, to be deployed in on-premise, cloud, and hosted environments. The packages can be downloaded directly from JumpBox with a paid subscription.

Funding

• Enterprise Open Source is Booming

  VC’s pouring more money in, record setting financials and analyst acclaim validate that open source is finding an eager market in the enterprise

  [...]

  First MuleSoft, makers of open source middle ware announced that they have just raised another 12 million dollars in a level C round. In the present money raising market, this is no small feat. MuleSoft has raised nearly 30 million dollars now from some very blue chip Silicon Valley investors. They claim 5 out of the top 10 banks in the world as their customers, 2,500 deployments and over 1.5 million downloads.

BSD

• FreeBSD 7.3-release: I’m not done yet

  I’ve heard on BSD Talk, which I recommend highly, that some kind of journaling is coming to the FFS/UFS in FreeBSD. I don’t know what the real-geek opinion of journaling in BSD is, but it seems to me like a good idea.

  So I’ll have a whole lot of user files (with my 3 GB+ of Thunderbird mail on an 8 GB ext3-formatted USB stick) on this FreeBSD installation, and I could very well see myself in this environment at least until Debian Squeeze’s release as a Stable distribution is imminent.

Releases

• NexentaStor Community edition 3.0 released

• Online Petitioning Software Made Public

  British organization Public-i has made its ePetitions software publicly available under European Public License (EUPL) on the Forge page of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) information service.

Openness

• Law.Gov — opening up primary legal materials

  The primary legal materials of the United States — laws, hearings, opinions, dockets, regulations, and other writings issued by the government that govern our daily lives — are not readily available. A national conversation is taking place in 2010 at many of the top law schools in the country to help define what it would take for our government to embrace the ideas behind Law.Gov that all primary legal materials should be readily available in authenticated registries and repositories. These workshops have strong participation from the legal academy, including law librarians, professors, and deans. But, they also involve senior officials from the federal and state government as well as a strong representation from non-profits and for-profits involved in presenting legal information to the public and to the legal profession.

Standards/Consortia

• The importance of Document Freedom Day explained by Microsoft job offer

  On January 4th, 2010, Microsoft published on his website a job offer for a Linux and Open Office Compete Lead. Since then the offer has been removed, but a PDF version of that page is still available here and in other places online. Reading that offer is very interesting because it proves, in case you weren’t convinced yet, what really constitutes the reason of Microsoft’s huge market “share”.

  Among other things, the job offer says that (bold fonts are mine) “the job consists of focusing on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for… Steve Ballmer… The core mission of CSI is to win share against Linux and OpenOffice.org”. Responsibilities include (last bullet on page 1) “to see where Linux Server and OpenOffice challenges arise.”

  Here is, in normal language, what Microsoft actually said with that job offer:

  1. Operating systems which are alternative to Windows, like Linux, are a “big issue” only in the server market (the servers are the computers powering websites, databases and other centralized services: the computers on people’s desks, and by extension the software they run, are called “desktops” instead)
  2. In the desktop market the real “big issue” for Microsoft are not alternatives to Windows, like Linux, but alternatives to Microsoft Office, like OpenOffice

• Document Freedom Day Interview with Chris Moore, CIO, City of Edmonton

  ODFA: Edmonton is obviously in good company among leading Canadian cities embracing open standards and interoperability, along with efforts underway in Vancouver and Toronto. Have you been working collaboratively with those cities to share insights, and do you think the Canadian Federal Government will follow the lead? What are they doing in this area, and should they be following your lead? Do you think it’s harder for a Federal Government to transition than municipal or local governments?

• OpenOffice market share worksheet

  Drew Jensen, a stalwart OpenOffice.org community contributor, pointed us to this worksheet describing office suite market share. It should probably be posted, too, to Major OpenOffice.org Deployments – OpenOffice.org Wiki and also to our Market Share wiki, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis

• Why I support Document Freedom Day

  In this sense, I am reminded how Tommy Douglas, the founder of universal medical coverage in Canada, explained why he stood by his social democratic beliefs when most of them had no chance of being widely accepted:

  You say the little efforts that I make will do no good; they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance. I don’t think I ever thought they would, but I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

  In other words, sometimes you need to stand up for what you know is right, regardless of consequences, simply out of self-respect. Campaigns like Document Freedom Day give the opportunity for such self-reaffirmation, and I would support them for that reason alone, even if more practical reasons did not exist as well.

• Flash clash

  Adobe’s Flash is still the dominant rich media platform on the Internet, but HTML5 is coming.

  Love it or hate it Adobe’s Flash technology is a key part of the Internet as it currently exists. It hasn’t always been so and it may not remain so for much longer if the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft have anything to do with it.

Security

• FBI, DOJ Falling Short on Identity Theft: Report

  An audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General reveals that while the FBI and Justice Department have made “various efforts” to fight identity theft crimes in recent years, these initiatives have “faded as priorities” mainly because the agencies have failed to develop a coordinated plan to deal with what’s become an epidemic of cybercrimes.

• Why do our paranoid, anti-fun police seem to think they run the country?

  This Thursday a year will have passed since Ian Tomlinson died after a police assault at the G20 protests. No charges have been brought against the police; no one has been punished. Despite 300 official complaints about the policing of the protests on 1 April, and plenty of video and photographic evidence, no officer has faced serious disciplinary proceedings. Those who removed their identification numbers, beat up peaceful protesters and bystanders and then repeatedly lied about what had happened remain untroubled, either by the law or their superior officers. There has been no apology to Tomlinson’s family.

Environment

• Climate researchers ‘secrecy’ criticised – but MPs say science remains intact

  MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a “culture of withholding information” among the climate change scientists whose private emails caused a furore after being leaked online in November.

  The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the “standard practice” among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee’s chair, Phil Willis MP, described as “reprehensible”. He added: “That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.”

• Chagos Islanders attack plan to turn archipelago into protected area

  This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.

Finance

• Fed Releases Details on Bear Stearns, AIG Portfolios

  The Federal Reserve for the first time released details of individual securities acquired in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos., part of the information that Bloomberg News sued the central bank for in 2008.

  The Fed, through its New York regional bank, also identified securities acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. The central bank had agreed to take on the Bear Stearns assets, including mortgage-backed securities and commercial real estate loans, to ease the investment bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

• Attention Bloomberg Readers, No, There Was Not One Trader Who Lost AIG $35 Billion

  He did lose them $616 million though. Here’s how he did it.

  1. Lucido’s team bought a bunch of CDOs. For example, a $7 million of a mostly subprime bond.
  2. They put the CDOs in a $1.5 billion fund managed by TCW (like these guys Lewis shows us were total idiots in his new book) called Davis Square Funding.
  3. A few months later, TCW asked them to buy more and Lucido bought $3 million more.

  [...]

• California Debt Beats Greece’s in Bond Sales: Credit Markets

  Debt issued by California, the world’s eighth-largest economy, is outperforming Greece’s bonds as funds including Cumberland Advisors say investors are betting the lowest-rated U.S. state’s credit risk has been exaggerated. The cost to protect against California not paying its obligations is the lowest relative to Greece in at least 15 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• Goldman Sachs Isn’t as Good as You Think

  But Goldman seems to be proving that it will continue pushing forward in the aftermath of the financial crisis and amid a media backlash against the company. After a dismal fiscal 2008 and a systematic burying of its December 2008 results, $13.4 billion in 2009 profits makes it look like the Golden One is back to printing money from the cozy confines of its New York office.

• Regulator seeks to rein in energy market trading by big Wall Street firms

  By reversing course, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under its activist chairman, Gary Gensler, is trying to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few large businesses. For example, a single firm, the United States Oil Fund, was able to gain the rights to nearly one-fourth of all the publicly traded crude oil scheduled for delivery during one month last spring, the fund’s head said in an interview.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google and Yahoo criticise Australia’s ‘heavy-handed’ internet filter plans

  Australia came under fire today from the United States for its proposed internet filtering system, which, if implemented, would be the strictest of any democracy.

  A US state department official said that it had raised concerns with Australia over the plans, which are to be voted on by its parliament.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Usenet – The new(old) target? – Newzbin fails to convince court?

  Usenet is now looking to be the new target for those seeking civil recourse for their material being shared without authorisation.

  [...]

  So we repeat the cycle (yet again) of sucess, failure, sucess, failure (in respect of filesharing cases) and whilst both sides take their delight in their respective victories, the filesharing issue continues and damages the industry. Mark my words as we see more aggressive attacks on filesharing, we will merely see a change of technology, I don’t think the industry can keep up with the innovation nor can law have the remit to cover all facets of modern tech.

• What’s inside your home is yours, except computer files

  I’ve written two controversial pieces concerning intellectual property. One with the view that if it should come to pass that the MPAA / RIAA / xyz advocating new enforcement law to monitor users of the Internet and are found to have illegal copyright material, then who should regulate it, in which I proposed that the FCC is one possible solution.

  I wrote immediately thereafter that intellectual property associations are going way overboard and border on the absurd? Just because file sharing is going over the internet, should these associations have the right to find you guilty, have multiple different mediums content distribution, many of which are free to the public while being able to sue you for infringement? They need to change their business models.

  This week, 50,000 new lawsuits have been filed against downloaders. It’s only going to get worse.

• Stop The Digital Economy Bill

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux – A supercharged development environment

Linux has come a long way from being just a geek’s operating system. But there is no doubt that Linux is still the best operating system for geeks and developers. The effect of Linux as a development environment has not just been limited to Linux, but has spread on all systems including embedded devices. Projects like Firefox, FileZilla, Qt and SuperTux were originally created on Linux and then made their way to different platforms.

Sony Deletes Feature On PS3′s; You Don’t Own What You Thought You Bought

It used to be when you bought a product, you owned it. Simple, right? And once you owned it, you could do what you want with it? But, lately, thanks to digital products and an always connected world, many companies have changed things around — so the products you thought you owned, you actually rent.

Chelsea School Uses Ubuntu To Create VMampache

I have an awesome story that I would like to share, it involves Ampache, Ubuntu, Chelsea School, and the use of FOSS in education.

Server

• Oracle’s Linux Server Slant

  Based on Oracle’s recent actions, it seems the company is hell-bent on driving as many of its potential customers as possible away from the UNIX offerings it acquired from Sun and into the arms of Red Hat and other enterprise Linux vendors.

• A Sys Admin’s Guide to the Server OS of Your Dreams

  What’s startlingly clear from this little exercise though is how dismally Apple’s operating systems match up to this list of ideals. Quite simply, OS X Server doesn’t tick any of these boxes at all. If Linux is the closest thing to a dream OS, then OS X is without doubt an OS nightmare. Think, being chased by monsters, your teeth falling out and finding yourself naked in public all rolled into one.

Kernel Space

• Linux 2.6.34-rc3

  Ok, so -rc2 was messy, no question about it. I’m too much of a softie to hold back some peoples work, so my hard-line -rc1 didn’t work out the way I wanted. But _next_ time! For sure this time.

  Anyway, from a messy -rc2 we now have a -rc3 that should be in much better shape. Regressions fixed, and the ShortLog is short enough to be worth posting to lkml (-rc1 never is, and -rc2 seldom is. It’s not like -rc2′s are generally wondeful, this time around wasn’t _that_ much different).

• Coming Soon: X Server 1.8

  According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.

Applications

• Meet Dash – DanRabbits awesome new project: an entirely new file browser!

• Thunar and Rox Filer: Mighty File Managers With a Difference

  Thunar and Rox Filer are different from the average file manager, and different from each other too. Both are powerful and flexible, offering features unavailable in other Linux file managers. Thunar has an XP-like interface but it’s Linux to the core. Rox has a unique look and feel — and a rhyme and reason all its own. It grows on you.

  [...]

  Describing any Linux app as a counterpart for a Windows program can be a kiss of death, but that is what first attracted me to Thunar. When I migrated to Linux, Windows XP was my comfort zone. So Linux apps that gave me the look and feel of Windows made the transition easier. All file managers do not work the same way. Thunar worked like what I knew.

• Introducing Brain Party

• Instructionals

  • A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux

    This free guide will tell you all you need to know in 20 illustrated pages, helping you to take your first steps. Let your curiosity take you hostage and start discovering Linux today, with this free manual as your guide!

  • A Quick Guide to Lynx

  • Substitute maximized window title and buttons with GNOME Panel applets

  • Fix Blue and Green Tinted Video Problem in Ubuntu Linux

  • Pana – A music player based on Amarok 1.4

  • How to increase the priority of a running process in Linux

  • HowTo: Save A File In Vim / Vi Without Root Permission

  • Functions

  • Building rpm package from source

  • Three door security for your Linux -Firewall, knockd, fail2ban

  • Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives

  • Easy Samba Setup

  • How To Switch To ALSA Or OSS Instead Of PulseAudio In A Few Seconds [Ubuntu Linux - GStreamer]

  • A Debian Package Primer: Part One

  • User management with SSSD on shared laptops

  • Top 50 Software Easter Eggs of All Time

    47. Debian GNU/Linux: Got Apt-Get?: Log in to a shell as root, type “apt-get moo” and press Enter. An ASCII-based drawing of a cow saying, “Have you mooed today?” will appear. If you type “apt-get,” a help file with the various switches appears. At the very end, it says, “This APT has Super Cow Powers”.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• KDE: Kate Tabify Plugin

• Creating Plasmoids

  We take a peek at how to create your own plasmoids for the latest KDE desktop, giving you the power to build the perfect active desktop environment.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat update supports the latest server chips

    LEADING LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux version 5.5 and it is capable of running the latest Intel and AMD server processors.

    RHEL 5.5 comes out just as Intel has announced its launch of the Xeon 7500 line based on its Nehalem EX architecture, and it has support for users wanting to run Linux workloads with cool stuff like virtualisation, cloud deployments and high-performance computing.

  • Red Hat optimises Linux for new multi-core Intel and AMD chips

    Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to take full advantage of the latest spoils from the heated microprocessor battle between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. RHEL version 5.5, released this week, has been reconfigured for Intel’s just-released eight-core Nehalem-EX and AMD’s almost-as-recently released 12-core “Magny-Cours” Opteron 6100 Series processors, said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president for platform engineering. The software also supports the IBM eight-core Power7 processors, released in February.

    “This is a great time for the next version of RHEL to hit the market,” said Pund-IT analyst Charles King. This latest round in the continued proliferation of cores within AMD, IBM and Intel processors represents an “inflection point” for the industry, one that could spur a lot of data centre server consolidation, through the use of virtualisation, he said.

• Ubuntu

  • OMG! Interviews: Chris Johnston from the Ubuntu Beginners Team

    Chris started using Ubuntu on his server back in 2007 with Ubuntu Server 7.10. After realising the awesomeness of Ubuntu, he began using it on his desktop and laptop in 2008 with the Hardy Heron. Last year he was awarded Ubuntu Membership status for his continued work in the Ubuntu Beginners Team, Ubuntu Classroom and his LoCo in Florida.

  • Variants

    • Trisquel 3.5 and Truly Free Software

      WHAT price do you put on a principle?

      Some people put their principles before their lives, dragging the whole of the human race along with them to a better place.

    • Announcing Netrunner!

      This is something that’s been cooking for a while now and we are finally ready to serve it up to a hungry world!

      Highlights

      Here’s the bullet points:

      * Based on Ubuntu
      * GNOME
      * Includes Wine by default
      * No Mono
      * Some QT/KDE apps by default
      * More you, less them

Devices/Embedded

• Zotac MAG HD-ND01 Nettop review

  Price: £229
  Tech Specs
  OS Tested: Ubuntu 9.10, Moblin 2.1, Fedora 12

  [...]

  We found the Zotac MAG HD-ND01 a real pleasure to use for everyday tasks. It dealt with fully fledged 32-bit distros like Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 wonderfully, thanks to its dual-core Atom processor. And its Ion-powered graphics will really hit the spot with videophiles looking for a slimline media unit.

• Phones

  • Linux phone ships with RF-enabled keyfob panic button

    Italian start-up Synaps Technology announced a Linux-based feature-phone that ships with an RF-connected keyfob panic button for GPS-enabled security response. The Petra phone is equipped with an ARM9 processor clocked at 266Mhz, and offers a 2GB SD card, GSM tri-band cellular service, a 2-megapixel camera, and a highly sensitive uBlox Neo 5G GPS receiver.

  • Android

    • Google’s plan to end Android fragmentation

      Of course, Google’s Android defragmentation strategy is just speculation at this point, but it makes sense. There already are several manufacturers who customize various Android releases (HTC Sense, SE Timescape), so there has to be a better way to deliver core applications updates to users.

    • Exclusive: Android Froyo to take a serious shot at stemming platform fragmentation

    • KDDI Will Sell Sharp-Made Android Phone From June

      KDDI Corp., the country’s second- largest mobile-phone operator, will introduce its first handset running Google Inc.’s Android operating system in June to catch up with rivals NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Softbank Corp.

      The new model, made by Sharp Corp., will feature a 5-inch touch screen, full physical keyboard and will be able to receive television broadcasts, Tokyo-based KDDI said in a statement today. The handset is the first Android phone by a Japanese manufacturer.

    • Latest AdMob Report Shows Android Eating Symbian’s Share of Pie

      Here in the United States, Android continues to gain steam as it grew from 27 percent to 42 percent share over the last four months.

    • Users Sound Off on Droid Android 2.1 Update Delay

      The delayed Android 2.1 update for the Motorola Droid is starting to tarnish the successful launch of Verizon’s first smartphone to run on Google’s open source mobile operating system, according to posts at Motorola’s Facebook page.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Cool portable linux music studio

    If you like ubuntu and like making digital music you should definitely take a look at Indamixx’s Transmission.

  • ASUS Confirms Tablet Plans

    Although it hasn’t been confirmed, one device is expected to be Windows-based while the other is either Android or Chrome.

  • Linux on Netbooks Reloads With Ubuntu-based Jolicloud

    Jolicloud plans to release an SDK to help port apps to its platform, but since apps are in HTML5, any developer writing HTML5 apps won’t need to make a “port,” per se, said Krim.

    For now, Jolicloud is a free product. Krim said the company is looking at different ways to monetize the software and/or services but for now, “we want to provide a compelling user experience before charging people.”

What if all software was open source? A code to unlock the desktop

What if all software was open source? Anybody would then be able to add custom features to Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes or any other program. A University of Washington project may make this possible.

“Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

[...]

“It dramatically lowers the threshold to getting new innovation into existing, complex programs,” Fogarty said.

Research has been funded by the Hacherl Endowed Graduate Fellowship in the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering, a fellowship from the Seattle chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists, and Intel.

The Palmetto Open Source Software Conference is coming

Registration opened last week for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON,) the premier free and open source software confence in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s a great way to both educate and involve yourself, or your organization, in free and open software and technology.

Mozilla

• Five questions about building community with Chris Blizzard of Mozilla

  Our role in the market is to act on their behalf and make their lives better, both through strong positive product improvements, but also sometimes by standing up and saying that something is wrong. Our market share (30% of all traffic to Wikipedia comes through Firefox!) gives us a lot of leverage in that space to make choices in the market or drive other browser vendors to make the web better as well. It’s a virtuous cycle.

• a ten year old dream realized

  Ten years ago next month, I moved to California to work on Mozilla full time and one of my first discoveries was a metal worker building giant metal dinosaur sculptures. I suggested to folks at Mozilla, back then, that we get one. Today, thanks to the efforts of Tiffney Mortensen, we finally have one.

• Early Build of Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Sneaks Out [VIDEO]

  MartinSchirr put together a few videos of Fennec on his Milestone (Droid) to show how things are progressing.

• What your web browser says about you

Databases

• Open Source MongoDB Gets Commercial Support

• The Basics of SQL Joins in MySQL

  When making your first forays into relational database development, you can use simple SQL statements to mine your data easily enough. However, as your data grows in both size and breadth, you’ll need to begin employing more sophisticated strategies for exploiting increasingly complex data relations. After all, pulling data from a single table is easy, but what if you need to query for data spanning three, four, or even eight different tables?

• 7 performance tips for faster SQL queries

CMS

• On highly customizing that open source code

  The original article referenced discussed how The Onion moved from Drupal, a PHP application platform, to Django, a Python framework.

BSD

• Geek Of The Week: Bill Joy

  After finishing his Bachelors Degree from the University of Michigan, and his Masters Degree from UC Berkeley, Joy wrote the original BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX operating system. Many modern operating systems are based on BSD, including NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly, Ultrix, and Mac OS X. In addition to BSD, he also wrote VI (Visual text editor), NFS (Network File System), and Csh (C shell). Yes… you read that correctly… Bill Joy wrote the VI editor and the C shell!!! Any UNIX-guru is more than familiar with these programs. They are still widely-used today.

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• The Software Freedom Law Show

  Bradley and Karen discuss the obligations and details of serving on a Board of Directors of a not-for-profit organization. Following that, they briefly discuss The Open Source Business Conference and LibrePlanet conference.

Releases

• OpenSSL 1.0.0 arrives

  After a beta phase lasting exactly a year, the final version of OpenSSL 1.0.0 is here. The source code is now available to download and the list of changes from the previous version 0.9.8(n) is extensive. Version 1.0.0 includes several new features and enhancements, including support for the Whirlpool free hash algorithm, an alternative to the MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms, which have been under scrutiny due to the existence of simplified collision attacks.

• Shishi 0.0.43 (release candidate for 1.0.0)

  Shishi is an implementation of the Kerberos 5 network authentication system. Shishi can be used to authenticate users in distributed systems. Shishi is part of a GNU system.

• GCC 4.5.0 Status Report (2010-03-31), trunk is frozen

  We have reached the zero P1 GCC 4.5 regressions required for a release candidate build of GCC 4.5.0. To allow this state to prevail the trunk is frozen for non-documentation changes starting April 2nd (use your timezone for your advantage). A release candidate will not be built before the end of Easter.

Government

• A landmark decision of the Italian Constitutional Court: granting preference to free software is lawful

  In short, according to the Court, favoring Free Software does not infringe freedom of competition, since software freedom is a general legal feature, and not a technological aspect connected to a specific product or brand. This ruling demonstrates the weakness of the arguments of those who, until now, have opposed the adoption of rules aimed at promoting and favoring Free Software arguing that they conflict with the principle of “technological neutrality”.

Schools

• What’s your school project? An alternative to Microsoft Windows!

  The final year of all Italian High Schools (18/19 years age students) ends with a formal State Exam. Depending on which category of school they attend, all students are tested in a different group of subjects and the final vote also depends on personal projects prepared for each subject. This year, among all the final year students in Italy there are two who are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting.

  [...]

  The final year of all Italian High Schools (18/19 years age students) ends with a formal State Exam. Depending on which category of school they attend, all students are tested in a different group of subjects and the final vote also depends on personal projects prepared for each subject. This year, among all the final year students in Italy there are two who are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting.

• CH: School IT agency recommends switching to open source

  The Swiss agency for IT in education, SFIB, is recommending that all schools switch to open source software. The IT agency is developing support offerings for schools that are using free and open source software.

  The IT agency for Swiss schools, SFIB (Schweizerischen Fachstelle für Informationstechnologien im Bildungswesen) on 1 March posted several documents on its web site, recommending schools to start moving to free and open source software and to stop purchasing or renewing proprietary software licences.

Licensing

• The GPLv3 in Plain English – The Parts Microsoft Worries About

  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Batman! What the fsck does that say? Here’s my plain English translation:

  If you (or one of your partners) provide software licensed under GPLv3, and agree not to sue anyone — the agreement not to sue (and the use of patents that are in the software) will apply to all future recipients of that software.

  Any patent agreement which attempts to nullify any rights given to you or others in the GPLv3 is invalid. This includes paying a partner distribute the software for you and agreeing not to sue them.

Openness

• Go Ahead, Play with Your Food

  Open-source recipes

  After a day of shopping and a night of stirring, seasoning, tasting and waiting, you’ve created a food symphony — a perfect meal and a killer recipe. Now, thanks to open-source recipe sharing, you can make your recipe public for chefs everywhere to recreate.

Standards/Consortia

• Document Freedom Day: Passion and politics

  Incidentally, an Italian court ruled yesterday that public authorities in Italy’s Piedmont region can legally maintain a preference for Free Software in their purchasing decisions. The court considered that such a requirement refers to a characteristic of the software, rather than to a specific product or technology.

  This should give a further boost to public bodies that want to use Free Software and Open Standards. It should also remove an obstacle for those that are interested, but haven’t yet made the jump.

  In this context, Document Freedom Day is a day of hope. It shows that people around the world are passionate about Open Standards, Free Software, and the freedom to use technology as they wish. Governments in Europe and elsewhere should take note.

• Document Freedom Day – March 31st, 2010

  Today (March 31st) is Document Freedom Day, and I encourage everyone to talk about Document Freedom with all of your friends, and even your enemies.

  In 1973 I worked for Aetna Life and Casualty, at that time the “largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the Free World”. We did not know what the government was using, and we did not know what the Russians were using, but other than that, Aetna was the largest.

  [...]

  One day I was finding out where a series of magnetic tapes were located for a project that I was working on and I typed the tape numbers into the mainframe. Eventually I was finished, and curious, I typed in the tape number “000001”. The machine came back:

  TAPE NOT LOCATED

  I typed in “000002”.

  TAPE NOT LOCATED

  Being persistent (some people unkindly say I am “stubborn”), I typed in “000003”:

  TAPE NUMBER 000003 IS LOCATED AT IDAHO SALT MINE, 500 FT, 7-TRACK, 128 BITS PER INCH, RETENTION PERIOD 999999, DATASET NAME: INCORPORATIONPAPERS

  Astonished at this, I went to my boss and said “Tom, how in the world are we ever going to read this magnetic tape in the future?” Tom looked at me wisely and said, “No problem. If we ever have to read that tape we have a seven-track tape drive wrapped in bubble-wrap at the salt mine too.”

• Freedom! (Document-wise)

  So of course this is all hinting at ODF (OpenDocument Format), which has a specification (v.1.1) and a process for updating the specification when needed. I believe the specification itself has its issues — it really is difficult to specify syntax and semantics with rigor — but it gets the job done and, most importantly, is written in good faith and available for everyone to implement on a royalty-free basis. The latter is important because we want to play by the rules but also need to enable current and future implementations of tools that use the document format without restrictions.

• Send me attachments I can read, use open standards!

  When you attach a file to an email, please make sure that your correspondent will be able to read your files correctly. It is a basic principle of courtesy. And there is an easy way to make this possible: use open standards. If you do so, your correspondent will have the possibility to choose which program he or she wants. Open standards guarantee sustainability and interoperability for your data, making sure you will be able to access them in the future, even with another software, on another platform or operating system.

• Why I’m rejecting your email attachment

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched a campaign calling on all computer users to start politely rejecting email attachments sent in secret and proprietary formats: for freedom and the good of the web!

  The campaign is in support of Document Freedom Day and the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument is an ISO standard that allows anyone to create software that supports it, without fear of patent claims or licensing issues. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations sent in Microsoft Word or Excel native formats, or documents created in Apple’s iWorks, are proprietary and incompatible with freedom and an accessible web.

• Created with Free Software! A button to spread the word

• Document Freedom Day 2010

NYTimes Has To Apologize, Pay $114k For Mentioning Singapore Had Father/Son Prime Ministers?

According to other reports, the NY Times also paid $114,000 to the father and son (and to a lawyer representing both). Either way, this whole thing is very odd. Why would a reporter for a respectable publication ever agree not to give an opinion on something? And why would the NY Times’ cave for merely stating that having a father and son both as prime minister’s represents something of a dynasty?

9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

April Fool’s Day Pranks for Geeks

Security

• Senate panel passes Cybersecurity Act with revised “kill switch” language

  Last April, Sen. Jay Rockefeller [D, WV] (pictured at right), the Chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 to his committee. The goal of the bill was to develop a public-private plan for strengthening national security in the case of internet-based attacks. But it stalled almost immediately because of a controversial provision that would have give the President unilateral authority to declare a cybersecurity emergency and then shut down or limit access to parts of the internet without any oversight or explanation.

• Fingerprint system ‘stigmatises pupils’

  Schools are denying pupils their civil liberties by fingerprinting them without seeking the consent of their parents, teachers warned yesterday.

  Around 80 secondary schools have introduced a new method of scanning the thumbs of pupils as part of a biometric system to replace swipe cards for registration, library book borrowing and cashless catering for school meals. The use of fingerprinting comes despite fears – acknowledged by the Information Commissioners’ Office – that some parents believe the practice leads to children being “treated like criminals”.

• Barnet Council admits loss of 9,000 secondary school pupils data

  PERSONAL details of 9,000 school pupils has been stolen from the home of a Barnet Council worker, it has been revealed.

  Twenty unauthorised and unencrypted CDs and memory sticks with details including names, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers and school attainment were taken from the house a fortnight ago.

• Video Surveillance deployed inside London Public Bathrooms

  You can imagine my surprise after I paid my 50pence to use the public bathroom, walked in and found myself staring at not just one but three ceiling mounted video surveillance cameras. I had to get real close to their enclosures to convince myself that I wasn’t seeing things. Not only was it really there, but it was a Pan-Tilt-Zoom model with a microphone to top it off. Must get some great noises coming from there. It has also been reported that London officials are now installing cameras with speakers to allow them to talk as well as see and listen. Perhaps its just me, but I had absolutely no idea that this was legal anywhere, let alone in downtown London, UK. Sure I knew that London has more cameras per square mile than any other country on the planet, but in bathrooms?! How are they getting away with that one? It is appalling!

• DNA misdirection from our former PM

  The second issue is that the former Prime Minister implies that those opposed to an expansion of the DNA database are somehow letting ‘murderers, rapists and those who commit violent assault’ get away with their crimes. Yet, as a staunch opponent of the retention of DNA from those who are later proven innocent, I can say without any doubt that I am not opposed to DNA being collected from those three groups of ne’er do wells.

• A disgraceful judgement

  Earlier this month we highlighted the tragic case of Jim Railton – the auctioneer from Alnwick who had been arrested for putting a 19th Century wooden cabinet containing birds eggs up for sale at his auction house.

  Jim is a parish councillor and a law-abiding man who, because of this ridiculous episode, has now had his DNA added to the national database and gained a criminal record.

• The Disappearing Blood Stain

  John Thompson spent 18 years in a Louisiana prison, 14 of them in a windowless, six-by-nine-foot death row cell. According to a federal appeals court, “There were multiple mentally deranged prisoners near him who would yell and scream at all hours and throw human waste at the guards.” Thompson, whose execution was scheduled half a dozen times, was a few weeks away from death by lethal injection when his life was saved by a bloody scrap of cloth.

• Break TrueCrypt hard drive encryption quickly

  The latest version of Passware Kit Forensic has become the first commercially available software to break TrueCrypt hard drive encryption without applying a time-consuming brute-force attack. It was also the first product to decrypt BitLocker drives.

• Report: Malware capital of the world is Shaoxing, China

• Weak passwords stored in browsers make hackers happy

  Nearly a quarter of people (23 per cent) polled in a survey by Symantec use their browser to keep tabs on their passwords.

  A survey of 400 surfers by Symantec also found that 60 per cent fail to change their passwords regularly. Further violating the ‘passwords should be treated like toothbrushes’ maxim (changed frequently and not shared), the pollsters also found that a quarter of people have given their passwords to their spouse, while one in 10 people have given their password to a ‘friend’.

• Eyes turn to “value for money” London 2012

  London is “on budget and on time”, according to organisers, but the cost is about three times the original estimate. The economic downturn scuppered its private and public partnership plans for two of the park’s biggest projects, the Olympic Village and media centre, forcing the taxpayer to step in.

  Experts say the security budget of 600 million pounds, the same as Vancouver, is hopelessly optimistic given that Britain will be a much bigger target for potential attackers after its support of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Environment

• The iPad, internet, climate change link in the spotlight

  To be clear we are not picking on Apple, we are not ‘dissing’ the iPad, but maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.

Finance

• Could Bloomberg Lawsuit Mean Death to Zombie Banks?

  Bloomberg, which has done some of the best reporting on the financial crisis, is also leading the charge on the fight for transparency at the Federal Reserve and in the financial sector. While many policymakers and reporters were focusing their attention on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout bill passed by Congress, Bloomberg was one of the first to notice that the TARP program was small change compared to the estimated $2-3 trillion flowing out the back door of the Federal Reserve to prop up the financial system in the early months of the crisis.

• Prosecuting Financial Crimes: Will Anyone Bunk with Bernie?

  Kaptur is authoring a bill, H.R. 3995 the “Financial Crisis of 2008 Criminal Investigation and Prosecution Act of 2009,” that gives the FBI 1,000 more agents and forensic experts and tells them to get cracking.

• Ex-contender for top IBM job pleads guilty on securities charges

  The insider trading scheme revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, the founder and managing director of Galleon Management, formerly a $7bn New York hedge fund that was unwound last year in the wake of the scandal, and Danielle Chiesi, an employee at New Castle Funds, formerly the equity hedge fund group of Bear Stearns.

• Bank security guru: Sue your bank for refund

  Noted banking security expert Ross Anderson was forced to threaten action in the small claims court before his bank agreed to refund a disputed transaction.

• There’s wealth and then there’s wealth.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• PR Firm Behind Propaganda Videos Wins Stimulus Contract

  President Obama’s push for electronic medical records [1] has faced resistance from those who question whether health information technology systems can protect patient privacy.

  So last week, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services hired a public relations firm to try to win consumer trust.

• Coverage Now for Sick Children? Check Fine Print

  Just days after President Obama signed the new health care law, insurance companies are already arguing that, at least for now, they do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.

• Toxic Sludge Taints the White House

  Unfortunately for the Obamas, and for the entire nation, once the story hit the news, it became politicized. While the issue was initially raised as a comment on the safety of using sewage sludge as fertilizer – an issue that has no political party – the right soon grabbed a hold of the story as a way to make fun of the Obamas. Some on the left fiercely defended the Obamas in return. But the Obamas are not the villains in this story; they are the victims. They are among many other Americans whose yards and gardens are contaminated with sewage sludge without their knowledge and who, as a result, are exposed to toxic contaminants in the soil. And lead is just a fraction of the overall problem.

• John Boehner “Hell No You Can’t” Video Mashup Making Waves

  The original “Yes We Can” video set to music Obama’s campaign speech featuring the phrase, “Yes We Can.” In the new mashup, Boehner repeatedly interrupts Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech with his harsh yell of “Hell no you can’t!” The soothing and melodic guitar in the piece only serves to make Boehner’s yell sound harsher. The mashup video has gotten over 445,000 views in the last six days, and prompted an opinion piece from the conservative media outlet FoxNews.com which said Republicans are close to “destroying their brand” and desperately need a new, more positive marketing spin, or else “the Republicans will be in the wilderness for a very long time.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Government goes to war with Google over net censorship

  The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy.

• Are you being watched online?

  Many broadband users wonder whether their broadband provider is monitoring and recording their online activity. We get the facts.

• Do You Need Absolute Privacy?

  You would think that the owner of every single WordPress site out there would want as many visitors as possible, but you’d be wrong. Not everyone needs Sunday Morning SEO.
  There are plenty of reasons why you would want to keep a blog as private as possible. Perhaps you’re using it as an project site in conjunction with the awesome P2 theme and you only want the project members seeing the posts and responding or perhaps you have just set up a site for you newly born and you want to share those early updates with just your family.

• Tech coalition pushes rewrite of online privacy law

  That law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, is notoriously convoluted and difficult even for judges to follow. The coalition hopes to simplify the wording while requiring police to obtain a search warrant to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices–which is not always the case today.

• FTC alerted to Buzz

  A GROUP of lawmakers have written to the US Federal Trade Commission and asked it to have a look into Google Buzz.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Million pound Usenet indexer found guilty

  Newzbin was a members-only website and had turnover of more than £1m in 2009. It provided members with a search engine for Usenet groups. Precise terms of the judgement are still to be decided, but the site is unlikely to continue in its current form.

• ‘Smallville’ producers claim Warner Bros. self-dealing cost them millions

  The frequency of vertical integration lawsuits has slowed in recent years, thanks to increased studio efforts to negotiate at arms length and new deal language that has kept many disputes in private arbitration rather than public litigation.

• James Cameron: Innovation trumps digital piracy

  Oscar-winning director James Cameron says the key to combating digital piracy in the movie industry is to use technology to create an experience that is unmatched anywhere other than the theater.

• House Bans File Sharing By Government Employees

  The House has passed a bill that would prevent government employees from using peer-to-peer file-sharing software either in the office or when accessing government networks remotely from home.

• IFPI and BPI goons get brought up short

  THE CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE has dropped a legal case against a seventeen year old boy accused of illegally distributing copyrighted material.

  The boy in question, Matthew Wyatt, was seventeen when he was accused of sharing three albums and one single and arrested at home in front of his parents despite a lack of evidence.

• Extortion-Like Mass Automated Copyright Lawsuits Come To The US: 20,000 Filed, 30,000 More On The Way

  Uh oh. It appears that a group of independent filmmakers don’t seem to recognize the kind of backlash they can receive for going to war against file sharers. It appears that a company, ridiculously named the US Copyright Group, has signed up a bunch of independent filmmakers, with the unofficial backing of Independent Film & Television Alliance, to follow in the footsteps of the disastrous European automated copyright infringement threat letter campaign, and have already gone after 20,000 alleged file sharers with another 30,000 about to follow. Five specific lawsuits have been filed, listing the 20,000 IP addresses accused of infringement.

• Warner Bros. Recruits Students to Spy on Pirates

  Warner Bros Entertainment UK is recruiting tech-savvy students to help the company with their anti-piracy efforts. During the 12 month internship the students will have to maintain accounts at private BitTorrent sites, develop link-scanning bots, make trap purchases and perform various other anti-piracy tasks.

• Who Is That Masked Chocolate Candy? Zorro Slashes M&Ms Over Trademark

  You may have seen the news that Zorro Productions is suing Mars, the makers of M&M’s, over a trademark infringement claim, concerning an M&Ms commercial that apparently involves some sort of Zorro costume. But wait a second… just like Sherlock Holmes, it appears that at least some of Zorro should be in the public domain by now. Pamela Chestek writes in to give her very thorough analysis of this particular case, noting that, in some ways, it may be setting up some future lawsuits concerning the difference between trademark and copyright in characters.

• The Economics Of The Music Industry: A Band Has To Work Hard To Get Its Part

  These days, a lot of that money is up for grabs — and the record labels are upset that they’re not getting more of it. Instead, it may be going to others, such as Apple or an ISP or someone else entirely. But, really, it’s up for grabs — and that’s why we see a lot of smart musicians figuring out how to take advantage and get their share.

• OK Go and the Old Media Model

  This presages the direction a lot of creators and artists will start to take as they leave the copyright-mired Old Media Dinosaurs behind.

• Google Sued For Using The Term ‘Gadgets’; Tiny Company Afraid People Will Think They Support Google

• Digital Economy Bill

  • The Digital Economy Bill: A taxation on salt

    MPs have the opportunity now to take the Digital Economy Bill in wash-up and do just what a wash-up implies: clean it out. If they don’t, and if lobbies like BPI get their way, we’re in for a satyagraha.

  • Lib Dems to fight Digital Economy Bill over ‘wash-up’

    The Liberal Democrats will try to block the Digital Economy Bill from being fast-tracked into law before the election.

    On Tuesday afternoon, the party’s chief whip Paul Burstow tweeted that he had told the government the Liberal Democrats will not support the bill as it is drafted because there is “not enough time for MPs to examine it in detail”.

    The bill is expected to be become part of ‘wash-up’, a brief period at the end of a sitting parliament when outstanding legislation becomes the subject of back-room deals between the main two parties, the Conservatives and Labour.

  • 7 days to stop the Bill!

    ORG and 38 Degrees are pushing to get national advertising placed just before the debate on Tuesday next week: when Parliament will, in effect, allow the Bill to be passed into ‘wash up’ without proper democratic scrutiny, denying us a national discussion about the rights and wrongs of this Bill.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Journal Insider – May 2010

Apple: Simplicity taken too far?

One could discard such fulminating, except for the fact that Google (with Android) and other open-source communities are increasingly focusing on delivering open-source software that prioritizes ease of use, as Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka Lucid Lynx) release shows.

What Linux needs

Because what Linux needs is people who want to use Linux. I said a long time ago that if Linux was Windows, nobody would need Linux. By corollary, if what you need is Windows, don’t tell me Linux has shortcomings. Linux doesn’t need application X, it needs someone who is so prepossessed with the idea of creating application X that they spearhead an independent movement to duplicate it, gather a few like-minded and talented peers, and as a group they roll up their sleeves and get to work making application X.

Sony

• PS3 Hacker Geohot on Lost Linux Support: I’m Sorry

  Sony has only pinned the change on “security concerns,” but hacker George “Geohot” Hotz, who released the first-ever PS3 hack earlier this year (preceded by several high-profile iPhone jailbreaks), which could ultimately allow piracy or other nefarious uses of the consoles, believes he played a role:

  First off, I want to apologize to all the people who use Linux on their PS3. Before releasing, I weighed the pros and cons, and considered the possibility of an impact on OtherOS support. My logic was this. OtherOS support had already been removed from the Slim … The builders had apparently no intention of including it in future products. So for the purposes of openness why not release?

• iPhone Hacker: I’ll Hack to Keep Linux on PS3

  iPhone hacker George Hotz promises PS3 users a work-around for Sony’s decision to nix OtherOS support.

• Geohot Looks To Enable Other OS Support For The PS3 3.21 Firmware

  It looks like Geohot (a famous hacker) isn’t too happy that Sony will be removing Linux support from its upcoming PS3 3.21 firmware, and the person who demoed an untethered iPhone jailbreak a short while ago, is determined to do something about it.

• Hacker vows to avenge Sony’s PS3 Linux cut-off

  Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony’s announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns.

Desktop

• A plea for relief from Microsoft’s escalating anti-competitive tactics.

  For years the Microsoft corporation has earned around 70% to 80% net profit from sales of its operating systems and application software. Only in areas like Thailand where Linux on the desktop has just begun to gain a foothold has Microsoft stated that it will release versions of its operating system platform and application software at a lower price to Original Equipment Manufactures (OEMs) and retail consumers than is available in the rest of the modern world. Consumers benefit where real competition exists.

• An Easy and Inexpensive Quad-Core System for Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux

  The quad core processor especially makes a difference for GNU/Linux users because most of the time we are running a lot of separate processes. These can be shared over the available processors, achieving a degree of parallelism. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the 3D graphics and sound software (often major headaches to configure) appear to work exactly as they should on this hardware.

  Everything clicks into place and works. The worst problem so far has been a few lock-ups of the X windows system which might be due to video driver issues (or it might just be a flaky hard drive — the one we’re using is pretty old. We’re eventually going to replace that).

Applications

• 10 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux

  With the Lucid Lynx release of Ubuntu just around the corner, we decided to take a look at some alternative browsers for Linux (some of them making their first appearances in the Ubuntu repositories with the 10.04 release). While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it can sometimes be slow and get bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result (and just because it’s fun), some people have started to search for alternatives to Firefox on Linux. Thankfully, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.

• Instructionals

  • All about Kernel Mode Setting (or why your $500 nVidia card only displays in 16-colors)

    Graphics cards from different manufacturers are very different beasts, in fact, often different generations of graphics cards from the same manufacturer can be pretty different too. While there’s a great deal of standardisation for things such as resolutions, colour depths and talking to monitors; the software side has almost no standardisation whatsoever.

  • Mandriva 2010.0 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • KDE SC 4.4.2 arrives with various bug fixes

    The KDE developers have released version 4.4.2 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), the latest bug fix release for the popular Linux desktop. In addition to several translation updates and stability improvements, the second KDE 4.4 update addresses a number of issues found in the previous 4.4.1 release.

  • KDE Software Compilation 4.4.2 Release Announcement

• GNOME Journal

  • Letter from the Editor

  • Mallard: Better Help for Better Software

  • Unchaining The Opportunistic Developer

  • Interview with Juan José Sánchez Penas of the GNOME Advisory Board

  • Canonical, Upgrading GNOME Bugzilla, and Commercial Sponsorship

  • GNOME Miro Community

Distributions

• Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Free Cloud Alliance Formed – Open Source IaaS, PaaS and SaaS for the Enterprise

    IELO, Mandriva, Nexedi and TioLive join forces to create the Free Cloud Alliance (FCA), an alliance of Free / Open Source Software publishers which provides 100% Open Source solutions for the fast growing market of Enterprise Cloud Computing. The Free Cloud Alliance (freecloudalliance.org) is the first Open Source Cloud Computing Stack which covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) with a consistent set of technologies targetted at high performance and mission critical applications.

  • PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE 4.4.1 Beta 2

    Saw a notice that the subject’s beta 2 for their first KDE 4.4.x release was available. Downloaded, burned and booted it.

    First impression: I saw HAL leave a note on the screen about detecting my Intel GM45 chip, setting up its parameters, and configuring the AGP aperture. The result was that when KDE 4.4.1 came it it was lightening fast. Installed Stellarium and got 50-60 fps, which is unprecedented for this GM45 chip in any version of Kubuntu, Mandriva, or several other LiveCDs I’ve tried in the last year and a half. The best Lucid gives me in Stellarium is about half, 25-40 fps. Turning on Desktop effects had NO noticeable slowdown in PCLOS. In Kubuntu it drops my fps to 10-15 fps. Kubuntu’s 3D gives me an occasional tearing over the bottom panel. PCLOS’s 3D is rock solid stable.

  • Planning a move to PCLinuxOS 2010

    But, all in all, it’s a sour-sweet thing, because my current 2009 installation is absolutely solid, stable, and fast. Everything works as it should, and when rebasing a Linux distribution there’s always the chance of a rough start. I trust Texstar and his team, but something could slip through the cracks. So I’ll be on the safe side and wait a few weeks before reinstalling everything.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat expands to desktop virtualization

    Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday.

• Debian Family

  • SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Goes Gold

    MEPIS LLC has announced the availability of SimplyMEPIS 8.5 from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.01-rel1_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.01-rel1_64.iso respectively. Deltas are also available.

    On behalf of the MEPIS Community, Paul Brooks was on hand to say: “This is one of the best releases ever. The Community collaboration with Warren has strengthened over the past couple of years, with in-depth testing and the contribution of ideas and tweaks. In particular, the Community provided artwork and documentation, which I believe are top notch. Also community member Marcos led the charge to improve MEPIS utilities and to create new Community contributed utilities.”

  • Ubuntu

    • AAC codec may be removed from Ubuntu repos

      A closer examination of the libfaac codec, a free software project containing an AAC encoder installable and used by various packages in the Ubuntu repositories, has turned up a conflict: the codec cannot be freely distributed under the LGPL, a common license used for the distribution of media libraries in free software, due to the inclusion of several other licenses’ which are incompatible with the LGPL. This is despite the fact libfaac declares itself as compatible with LGPL.

      Ubuntu 10.04 users wishing to play AAC format audio may find themselves out of luck.

    • More Right Window Button Ideas For Ubuntu 10.10

      A recent idea by Izo makes a lot more sense than all the previous ideas. Have a look (it’s called “The Workflow Button”)…

    • ‘Additional buttons’ concept for the right-hand side of windows

      It’s a refined – and do-able – concept that makes use of the current way in which many people use their desktops (i.e. workspaces) but whether it’s ‘innovative’ enough to come to life will remains to be seen.

Devices/Embedded

• Gemalto Expands Range of Secure Linux Payment Terminals

  MagIC3 W-1 is part of Gemalto’s MagIC3 product family, which incorporates the Open&Sec technology running on Linux.

• DeviceVM Co-Founder and CEO Mark Lee Elected to Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation

  DeviceVM Drives Linux Proliferation Across More Than 30 Million PCs;Company Also Will Support the Open-Source MeeGo Project Hosted by the Linux Foundation

• Phones

  • Reality Check: Making mobile Linux work

    The variety of Linux-oriented initiatives and activities in the mobile industry, including the recent announcement from Nokia and Intel regarding the formation of MeeGo, clearly reaffirms the fact that Linux will be the technology that underpins a large proportion of next-generation mobile devices. In fact, leading analyst firms predict that between 30-40% of smartphones shipped will be based on Linux by 2015. This column addresses a few key issues pertaining to this growth in mobile Linux including the need for consolidation at the core level of the mobile software stack, the choice of Linux as the technology that will be common across a large array of mobile devices of various form factors and the business models around mobile Linux.

  • Android operating system to power a smarter Telstra phone

    MOBILE phones powered by Google’s Android open-source operating system have been scarce in Australia until now.

    Occasionally, models from Taiwan’s HTC have bobbed up on Optus and Vodafone, but they have failed to make much impression on a smartphone market dominated by BlackBerry and iPhone.

    That may change with a coming explosion of new models, featuring the much improved Android 2.1 version of the OS.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Jolicloud 0.9 Robby Pre-Final Brings the ‘Cloud’ Closer

    The makers of Jolicloud have been on a roll lately. Jolicloud is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu aimed at netbooks. It lays a great emphasis on cloud apps and many believe it to be a true competitor to Google Chrome OS. Several big updates have arrived in the span of just a few days so the team believs the OS is pretty much ready for its final release and have launched Jolicould 0.9 Robby Pre-Final. It’s not quite production-ready, but it is the de facto release candidate.

• Tablets

  • Ekoore releases 10in slate PC to compete with iPad

    The device – previewed on Linux for Devices – has a 10.2in display with a resolution of 1,024×600, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk, and a plethora of connectivity options including both wireless and wired network along with Bluetooth and USB. The main system processor is the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, as found in many netbook devices on the market today.

    Perhaps the most interesting feature of the ET10TA is the software: Ekoore has announced that the device will ship with both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux as a dual-boot system, giving purchasers the option of running either operating system – or both, for different tasks.

New technology could open gaming world to disabled

A new computer game designed by Imperial College London students could open the gaming world to those with severe physical disabilities.

Using the open source game Pong, students at Imperial College London were able to make adaptations so that the player moves the bat using their eyes while wearing special glasses.

Zenoss: Open Source Infiltrates Large Service Providers?

Olivier Thierry (Chief Marketing Officer) and Brian Riley (VP Global Alliances) described several Zenoss business milestones to me earlier today. Among the anecdotes Thierry and Riley shared:

* Zenoss generated roughly 150% year-over-year revenue growth in 2009 vs. 2008;
* the Zenoss customer base grew roughly 40% in 2009 vs. 2008
* for every $1 customers initially spent with Zenoss, the same customer typically spent an additional 40 cents in order to expand their use of Zenoss;
* major service providers and consulting firms embracing Zenoss include Accenture, CSC, Perot and Verizon; and
* VMware itself uses Zenoss to manage virtualized data centers.

Open10MS: Still Open … Still Free

I’m sitting in my office, which once housed all three of the OpenNMS Group founders, drinking some Copperline Amber while listening to the “tap tap tap” of the drums as the guys in the next room play Rock Band on our HD projector.

SaaS

• Open Source ERP Heads into the Cloud

• How Much to Charge for Cloud Based Open Source?

  xTuple develops a suite of open source ERP solutions that run on the PostgreSQL open source database. Whether they are open core, open source or based on open standards is a question we can answer another day. The truth is probably a little bit of each. But what I wanted to discuss today is their move to offering a hosted version of their software.

• JumpBox Unveils ‘Open Source as a Service’ and Empowers Businesses with Affordable, Utility-based IT Infrastructure

• NorthScale Memcached Server Speeds Farmville

  The firm is a user of the memcached open source code system that distributes needed data across a server cluster.

Databases

• 10gen Announces Commercial Support for MongoDB

  10gen, the company that started the MongoDB project, today announced commercial support and training for MongoDB. MongoDB is an open source, non-relational, document-oriented database used in production at organizations including Boxed Ice, SourceForge, Justin.tv, GitHub, Business Insider and Disqus.

Oracle

• Oracle clamps down on Sun hardware support contracts

  “This sudden about-face in which Oracle wants a support contract for essentially any use of Solaris will make me think long and hard about deploying Solaris instead of Linux or another free OS in the future,” said Bill Bradford, a senior systems administrator at an energy services firm in Houston, Texas.

CMS

• concrete5 Launches Version 5.4 With a Trip to SXSW

  concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong.

• Platinum and Gold Sponsors Announced for DrupalCon

  “Open source software adoption reached a major tipping point over the past year, and Drupal is leading the charge. From WhiteHouse.gov to the US Department of Defense official memo on open source software to adoption by global organizations like Nike, Intel, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and thousands more, tells us that open source software is changing how enterprises do business,” said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. “The tremendous growth in Drupal adoption is a testament to the talent and passion of the Drupal community, and Acquia is proud to support this community as a Platinum DrupalCon sponsor.”

• Why WhiteHouse.gov chose Drupal

  From the minute President Obama walked into the White House it was clear that the web team would have to rethink their strategy. “Branding is what the Obama administration and campaign team are all about,” said Klause. The new administration also had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. “We couldn’t keep up with what the new media team wanted,” he said.

  The WhiteHouse.gov team needed a fully functional content management system with an improved workflow and blogging features. Klause also wanted to be able to create new content types on the fly and add community-building features. Klause decided it would be helpful to go with a platform with an active and innovative community. “We needed a system with agility and to me, innovation happens in the open-source communities,” explained Klause.

Government

• Italian Court OKs Preference for Open Source

  Here’s a big win for open source: the Italian Constitutional Court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive:

  Just over a year ago, the Piedmont Regional Council passed a law which states: “… the Region, in the process of choosing computer programs to acquire, prefers free software and programs whose source code can be inspected by the licensee” (Article 6, paragraph 2).

  This choice was welcomed with enthusiasm by Free Software supporters and civil society, while the Presidency of the Italian Council of Minister contested this law, by referring to the Constitutional Court in order to declare it unlawful.

  On March the 23rd, 2010, the Court ruled that the preference for Free Software is legitimate and complies with the principle of freedom of competition.

• Watering down European standards

  The concept of open IT standards, which is central to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), is to be watered down to such a degree that it will fade into insignificance. At least that’s the impression given by a current EIF 2 release leaked to the Free Software Foundation Europe.

  The internationally recognised European Interoperability Framework (EIF) for using open standards is to lose further weight and definition during the version 2 revision process. After a first draft became public in November 2009, a new EIF 2 “Release Candidate” leaked in March has added further fuel to the earlier criticism.

• EIFv2 ad nauseam

  What do you get out of this? The whole EIF2 was a document to be ready and delivered in 2007 latest. We are in 2010 now. It is just a small paper to be attached to a communication.

Openness

• CDK-Taverna: an open workflow environment for cheminformatics

  To freely support open science based on these data resources, it is desirable for the processing tools to be open-source and available for everyone.

‘Meow meow’ review may be hampered after drug adviser quits in scientific objectivity row

Dr Polly Taylor, a consultant veterinary surgeon and long-standing member of the government’s drugs advisory council, offered her resignation to the home secretary, Alan Johnson, in an email late last night.

Taylor is the sixth expert to resign from the committee since the controversial sacking of the chairman, Professor David Nutt, last October. Several other council members are considering their positions, the Guardian has learned.

Science

• LHC research program launched with 7 TeV collisions

  At 1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, the first protons collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider. These first collisions, recorded by the LHC experiments, mark the start of the LHC’s research program. For more information about this milestone event, the LHC’s physics potential at 7 TeV and American participation in the project, read the press releases below. You can also tune in live to CERN’s LHC First Physics webcast before 12:15 p.m. Eastern time (6:15 p.m. CEST) today.

• Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life

  HAVE Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA’s robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.

Security

• High-tech copy machines a gold mine for data thieves

  Want to know what expenses your boss claimed last month? How much your colleague makes? What the co-worker down the hall is really working on? Forget about hacking their computers – you might want to hit the nearest photocopier instead.

Environment

• The trillion-dollar question is: who will now lead the climate battle?

  As an array of expertise, it is formidable: but then so is the task they have been set by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. In effect, the world’s top financiers have been told to work out how to raise at least $100bn a year for the rest of this decade, cash that will be used to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.

Finance

• Bill Lockyer, Furious That California Is Riskier Than Kazakhstan, Sends Angry Letters To Goldman et al About State CDS Trades; (Or The Greek CDS Scapegoating Campaign – Animal Style)

  Do you see what happens Larry when you sell CDS on California? You get a Greek-style scapegoating campaign. Cali’s State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, exasperated at his impotence to sell $2 billion in GO bonds, has resorted to the last option: sending angry missives and trying to make a media circus out of it. It is now all Goldman’s fault that California is bankrupt, just because it dares to make a market in Cali CDS. Ring a bell? It worked miracles for Greece, whose bonds are now tumbling a day after everyone said Greek issues were resolved. Also, we can’t wait to uncover, just like in the Greek case, that the biggest buyer of Cali CDS is PIMCO, CalPERS, TCW, Western, Oaktree, or some other California-based fund. Now that would be even funnier than Cali considered a more worthless “asset” than Kazakhstan. At least their potassium deposits are best in region.

  From Bill Lockyer’s letter, attached below:

  Dear Mr. Blankfein:

  I write to request information about your firm’s market activities related to credit default swaps on municipal bonds in general, and State of California general obligation (GO) bonds specifically.

• PR problems hurting Goldman Sachs’ business

  We suggested recently that the Treasury (Treasury news) really couldn’t select Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) as top underwriter and advisor for its staggered sale of its massive horde of Citigroup (NYSE: C) stock. It just would’ve been way too controversial, red meat for the conspiracy theorists.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Missing Chinese dissident Gao Zhisheng reappears

  But now the outspoken activist, feared by some to be dead, appears to have re-emerged in circumstances as mysterious as his disappearance. Reporters and friends said he spoke to them by phone today, saying he was living at a Buddhist landmark in Shanxi province.

• China has just blocked Google, Conroy to follow suit?

  A news report in Forbes says that China has blocked Google with its great firewall, now the world waits to see if Australia’s Minister for Censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy, will do the same following his outrageous attacks on Google.

• US reveals concerns over Conroy’s net filter plan

  The Obama administration has questioned the Rudd Government’s plan to introduce an internet filter on the grounds that it runs contrary to stated US foreign policy of using an open internet to spread economic growth and global security.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• High Court Finds Newzbin Liable For Copyright Infringement

  Newzbin, the Internet’s premier Usenet indexer, has lost its High Court case against several Hollywood movie studios. Justice Kitchin found the company, which turned over more than £1 million in 2009, liable for copyright infringement and will issue an injunction restricting its activities later this week.