• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Google

• Google Apps for Government: Inextricably Tied to Chrome OS

  While Google Apps for Government, a version of Google Apps certified for use by the U.S. government, is much in the news, not everyone is perceiving how closely tied the move is with Google’s much-ballyhooed upcoming Chrome OS. Google’s operating system, due in a matter of weeks, with numerous high-profile hardware partners committed to making netbooks based on it, is at the center of many initiatives from the company. In the case of Google Apps for Government, Google hopes to lend credibility to its cloud-based applications because Chrome OS is, through and through, a cloud-centric OS.

Kernel Space

• YAFFS2: Yet Another Flash File System

  As flash sizes increased and Linux moved into more embedded niches, the need for read-write flash file systems was answered by JFFS2 which for a long time was de-facto standard Linux flash file system. As flash sizes grew even more and devices such as cellular phones that store large amounts of information (pictures, mp3 files) started using Linux, JFFS2 reached its scalability limits. As a result, new file systems specifically designed for large NAND flash devices were developed — UBIFS, LogFS, and YAFFS. For a long time only UBIFS was part of the mainline kernel and both YAFFS2 and LogFS where available as a patches. At some point in time it looked like LogFS developed was stagnated, with the latest patch available for kernel version 2.6.24. However, LogFS suddenly resurfaced and rather surprisingly was quickly merged into kernel 2.6.34 indicating that its developers kept working on this project, albeit with little publicity. YAFFS2, which contrary to LogFS was widely used, undergoes a similar process with respect to inclusion into mainlaine Linux kernel. It looks like even though in the past YAFFS2 developers did not make any significant effort to put it into the mainline kernel, it is going to change now.

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

  • NVIDIA Puts Out Two Drivers, Including For OpenGL 4.1

    While there’s very few people that NVIDIA’s dead open-source driver update helps out, NVIDIA has released two new binary Linux driver updates. The NVIDIA 256.44 pre-release driver adds in support for some new GeForce and Quadro GPUs along with introduces some “Fermi” (GeForce GTX 400 series) stability fixes while the NVIDIA 256.38.02 Linux driver introduces initial OpenGL 4.1 support.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Collaborate and manage projects with Todoyu

    You’ll need a machine running the Apache/PHP/MySQL stack, or the XAMPP package.
    You’ll also need the latest release of Todoyu.

  • Free Resources For Getting Your GIMP Graphics Game On

    If you’ve spent any time at all working with graphics–whether you favor open source software or not–you’re probably familiar with the power of GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. Of course, if you know your way around GIMP, you’re probably also familiar with the many effects you can execute with it. Scott Photographics has an excellent exploration of how to create see-through text effects posted, and you can learn to do so with GIMP in about five minutes. While you’re at it, check out this post’s collection of useful, free resources for GIMP.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Opinion: Re: Canonical release cycle for Ubuntu Server

      Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Hacking the Nokia N900 Phone

      Do you remember the Frankencamera? The API used for the Frankencamera has been released for the Nokia n900 Phone, making the phones camera programmable. For those with programming skills this could be a very interesting Journey. FCam API provides you with full low level control of your camera, enabling you to hack your Nokia N900 and program it however you wish.

  • Android

    • Use your Android Phone as a Wireless Hotspot (Rooted Phones Only)

    • In China, Baidu Fights Google for Control of Android’s Search

      Baidu, China’s largest search engine, is working with handset makers to become the default search box on Google Android phones for the Chinese market. Robin Li, Baidu’s founder and CEO, wants “a search box very prominently on the phone’s screen,” says the WSJ. Li’s initiative could be met with a simple Baidu search widget, but a far bigger coup would be if Baidu replaced Google as the default search engine when an Android phone user presses the dedicated search button on the handset.

    • Sprint Opens Android Market Store

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla’s Tab Candy is the first step to sweeter browsing

    Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn’t really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

Oracle

• The AEGIS Conference website is open for business

  As announced recently, the first International AEGIS Conference – “Access for All in the desktop, web and mobile field: an end-user and developer perspective” – will take place in lovely Seville, Spain on October 6-9, 2010. Now the conference website is open for business. You can browse the conference programme, learn about the venue, review the recommended hotels, and most importantly, register for the conference! Also, potential exhibitors are invited to review the exhibitor package.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.5.1 Released; GCC 4.5.2 Is Up Next

  Just as expected, GCC 4.5.1 was released today thereby meeting their target of releasing this point update to the GNU Compiler Collection prior to August. GCC 4.5.1 targets regressions and other bugs since the release of GCC 4.5.0 in mid-April.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Mapping Startup CloudMade Raises $12.3M

    Steve Coast, a cofounder of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company founded the OpenStreetMap community mapping project in 2004, and CloudMade draws its data from OpenStreetMap. Through application programming interfaces and other tools, CloudMade helps developers take advantage of OpenStreetMap’s geographical data to power their own location apps, then takes a share from the apps’ advertising revenue.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Judge to RIAA: No LimeWire asset freeze

    In March, U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood ruled that Lime Group, parent company of Lime Wire and founder Mark Gorton are liable for copyright infringement by enabling and “inducing” users of the file-sharing software LimeWire to pirate songs from the four major record companies.

• Devices/Embedded

The Foundations of a Community: Western PA Linux User Group – Part One

The time was ripe for Linux and free software in the late 1990′s. Netscape formed mozilla.org in February 1998 to fight the Microsoft in the browse war. Oracle, the proprietary database, supported Linux as a platform in October 1998. Sun Microsystems released Star Office in November 1998, the previous name of the Microsoft-crushing Oracle Open Office suite. Red Hat went public in August 1999 and quickly acquired Cygnus, the makers of the Cygwin – a bash shell with GNU tools for Windows. Meanwhile Apache gained and maintained at least 50% market share in the web server market, an achievement which Microsoft has never been able to do.

The Foundations of a Community: Western PA Linux User Group – Part Two

Desktop

• Why Windows still has good sales figures

  16:29:53 Agent Makrand_Karante
  is there any thing else that I may assist you with today?
  16:30:07 Customer Alan
  well not really. I just wanted a laptop running Ubuntu.
  16:30:19 Customer Alan
  Do you have any without an operating system at all?
  16:30:28 Agent Makrand_Karante
  I am afraid no
  16:30:36 Customer Alan
  oh
  16:31:23 Customer Alan
  so if I want a laptop from Dell I have to buy windows

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • The State of the Android Ecosystem

      The G1 was almost completely un-branded as an HTC phone. Instead, HTC gave over control of the UI to Google to ship a completely “stock” version of Android OS 1.0 (later given an over-the-air update to 1.6), and carried by T-Mobile. But Google had been clear from the inception of the Android OS: Its intended goal was to have multiple hardware configurations, running multiple versions of the OS, supported by multiple carriers simultaneously.

    • Android’s UK phone sales quadruple

      Sales of Android-based phones more than quadrupled in the UK during the most-recent quarter.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology for $35 Tablet

    The nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government’s planned US$35 tablet.

    In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology.

SAP Warms to Open Source

In 2005, Shai Agassi, then the SAP executive in charge of the company’s product group, expressed ambivalence over using open-source software. In the years since, however, the company has warmed to the idea. Certainly, SAP’s chief rival Oracle, for instance, is an active, if controversial, supporter and sponsor of many open-source software projects.

Healthcare

• Wrap-up of the health care IT track at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention

  The first health care track to be included in an O’Reilly conference covered all three days of sessions at last week’s Open Source convention and brought us 22 talks from programmers, doctors, researchers, corporate heads, and health care advocates. We grappled throughout these three days–which included two popular and highly vocal Birds of a Feather gatherings–with the task of opening up health care.

• VistA scenarios, and other controversies at the Open Source health care track

  Yesterday, as I described in my previous blog, we heard an overview of trends in health care and its open source side in particular. Two open source free software projects offering electronic health records were presented, Tolven and openEMR. Today was VistA day, and those who stayed all the way through were entertained by accolades of increasing fervor from the heads of vxVistA, Medsphere, and ClearHealth. (Anyone who claims that VistA is cumbersome and obsolete will have to explain why it seems to back up so many successful companies.) In general, a nice theme to see today was so many open source companies making a go of it in the health care field.

American Psychological Association claims to pay for peer review. Should we send them a bill?

The reality: publishers do not pay for peer review; this is provided on a voluntary basis by the academic community itself.

This is an argument that keeps coming up over and over again, and I am wondering how to get the point across that it is foolish to claim to pay for valuable services that you are getting for free?

Bloomsbury to e-publish one-million page Churchill archive

Bloomsbury is to make its first move into archive publishing, digitising and publishing in electronic form the one-million page personal archive of wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill.

Publisher argues free access to research violates administration’s transparency initiative

Free online access to federally funded research articles defies the White House’s open government directive, a journal publisher told House members at a hearing on Thursday.

A December 2009 presidential memo on transparency in government instructed federal agencies to abide by the precepts of public disclosure, civic engagement in policymaking and collaboration with the private sector, but not at the expense of national security, privacy or “other genuinely compelling interests.”

Security/Aggression

• Nuclear News: Document Reveals Military Was Concerned About Gulf War Vets’ Exposure to Depleted Uranium

  ‘For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans. But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about DU contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance. Shinseki’s memo, under the subject line, “Review of Draft to Congress – Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army — Action Memorandum,” makes some small revisions to the details of these three orders from the DoD: 1. Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with DU contaminated equipment. 2. Complete medical testing of all personnel exposed to DU in the Persian Gulf War. 3. Develop a plan for DU contaminated equipment recovery during future operations. The VA, however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to DU.’

• FBI admits probing ‘radical’ historian Zinn for criticizing bureau

  FBI files show bureau may have tried to get Zinn fired from Boston University for his political opinions

  Those who knew of the dissident historian Howard Zinn would not be surprised that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept tabs on him for decades during the Cold War.

• Italy will fine people who disagree with Berlusconi

  THE GLORIOUS GOVERNMENT of the Piccolo Duce Silvio Berlusconi wants to fine bloggers and Facebook users for writing things that disagree with government lines.

  Berlusconi took time away from his busy casting couch for European MPs to push through a law that will fine bloggers up to €25,000 for publishing “incorrect facts”.

Environment/Wildlife/Nature

• Whale fossil stuck in Egypt customs wrangle

  For years archaeologists have been unearthing a remarkable collection of whale fossils, all the more surprising because the area is now inland desert in upper Egypt.

  It is believed that about 40 million years ago the area was submerged in water, part of the Tethys Sea. As the sea retreated north to the Mediterranean it left a series of unique rock formations and also a cornucopia of fossils.

• Will notorious forest destroyer Sinar Mas come clean?

  The short answer: not likely.

  In fact, not only will they not be likely to come ‘clean’, but today we are releasing fresh evidence that Sinar Mas’s notorious forest destroying practices continue unabated and in direct violation of the company’s own environmental commitments on protecting forests and peatlands.

• Al Gore cleared of assault allegations made by masseuse

  Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.

• Curbing Emissions with BRT, Leading with Clean Energy, and Bringing Information and Communication Tools to Remote Areas

  Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging…

• Metroradruhr: Germany’s Ruhr Valley Inter-City Bike Sharing

  This summer brings a new regional bike-sharing system, Metroradruhr, to ten industrial Ruhr valley cities. Started on June 18th in Dortmund, Germany the system has now reached five of the cities. Bikes are now, or soon will be, available in Bochum, Bottrop, Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Hamm, Herne, Mülheim an der Ruhr and Oberhausen. This is not just a series of suburban satellite additions to a larger city system, but a single system connecting nearby cities together.

• Subsidising oil spills

  When oil started leaking from Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, did you know that you were paying BP and Halliburton to contribute to the disaster?

• Oil disaster impacts reach far and wide

  Today we visited one of the Bird Rehabilitation Centers in Louisiana. We saw dozens of birds, from different species, cleaned of oil with detergent, water and toothbrushes and tagged. They are monitored and then released to the wild. The center has treated and release more then 500 birds so far, a small number if you take into account that more then 550 miles (885Km) of shoreline has been impacted by the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

• A funeral and a celebration: grim clouds over Dalian

  I arrived in Dalian on the day of the funeral for firefighter Zhang Liang, who drowned beneath the thick crude when his crew jumped into the ocean – without safety gear – to attempt, in vain, to fix an underwater pipe. Our lead photographer, Jiang He, who by now has reached legendary status globally for capturing the final seconds of Zhang’s life, continued to cover the very emotional moments of this oil spill disaster.

• Oil spill in China worsens

  We continue to keep a close watch on the development of the oil spill in Dalian, China, which has already cost the life of a firemen and continues to grow, posing an increasingly severe threat to the area’s coastal ecosystem.

• Floods wash 3,000 chemical barrels into China river

• Oily action

Finance

• Ponzi Schemer’s Bankruptcy Trustee Sues Florida GOP for Donations Payback

  Bankruptcy attorneys for the Scott Rothstein estate have filed suit against The Republican Party of Florida, seeking the repayment of $237,000 in campaign contributions from the jailed former attorney.

  In a suit filed Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Lauderdale, Berger Singerman, the law firm for trustee Herbert Stettin, alleges that the Republican Party has refused to return more than 10 different donations made by Rothstein over a four-year period.

  “The Trustee has made repeated efforts over a period of several months to resolve this claim without resort to litigation,” said Paul Singerman of Berger Singerman in Fort Lauderdale.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• How WikiLeaks Could Change the Way Reporters Deal With Secrets

  For the past several decades, there has been an informal understanding between the reporters who uncovered newsworthy secrets and the government intelligence agencies, which tried to keep them from public view.

  We would tell senior officials what we’d learned. And they would point out any unforeseen consequences that might arise from publication, such as the death of an American informant. Ultimately, the call on what appeared rested with editors. But it was a decision informed by more than our own guesswork.

• Sherrod Says She Will Sue Blogger

  Ms. Sherrod also said she intended to sue Andrew Breitbart, the blogger, who runs BigGovernment.com and who posted the edited video of her making what appeared to be antiwhite remarks in a speech that was really about racial conciliation.

  “He hasn’t apologized, and I don’t want it at this point,” she said of Mr. Breitbart, adding that she intended to sue him. “He will definitely hear from me.”

• New partnerships

  There are several marvellous things to note about this latest bombardment from cyberspace. One, when new media challenges old media, it is still possible for the latter to outshine the former.

  Get on to the Afghan War Diary web pages on Wikileaks and you will be suitably fazed. How to get something useful out of these bald listings without investing inordinate time?

• Military transfers Manning to Quantico, VA

• US will press criminal charges against Manning, alleged Wikileaks source

  The U.S. military has announced that it will press criminal charges against 22 year old Pfc. Bradley E. Manning for allegedly transferring classified military information to his personal computer, “wrongfully adding unauthorized software to a Secret Internet Protocol Router network computer,” obtaining “more than 150,000 classified U.S. State Department cables,” and transmitting data to unauthorized persons.

• WikiLeaks: We don’t know source of leaked data

  WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief claims his organization doesn’t know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghan war, telling journalists the website was set up to hide the source of its data from those who receive it.

• US Army: alleged Wikileaks source Manning faces 52 years

• A tide turns

  Technology used to help spies. Now it hinders them

• Russia blocks Youtube

  VIDEO SHARING WEBSITE Youtube has been blocked by a Russian Internet service provider (ISP) after a court deemed that the service carries extremist videos.

• Russian city blocks YouTube

Digital Economy (UK)

• Digital Economy Act: users and ISPs hit by Ofcom Code

• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Simmtronics Rolls Out Slim Desktop PCs

  Simmtronics SDC 2711S comes preloaded with Ubuntu.

• Where are Dell’s Ubuntu PCs?

  Back in February, I covered Gripe Line reader Cal’s complaint that Dell seemed to have stopped carrying Ubuntu machines. At the time, I spoke to Anne Camden at Dell, who assured me that the company would be refreshing its Ubuntu line “in several weeks.” Thus, I was surprised to hear from Gripe Line reader Ken recently, who has been watching the Dell/Ubuntu situation closely because he is in the market for a Ubuntu desktop.

  “I just want you to know,” Ken writes, “that Dell still isn’t offering any new Ubuntu machines.” Instead, the company is carrying only one laptop and a netbook.

• Dell release OpenManage Server Administrator for Ubuntu

  Dell has announced the release of its proprietary OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) 6.3 for Ubuntu 9.10 or later. OMSA is a web browser or command line driven system administration tool for servers. The .deb packaged and community supported release was completed with a “generous donation” of several weeks of engineering time by Canonical, which allowed the Dell Linux team to become better acquainted with .deb packaging.

• Dell Adds Linux Desktop PCs, But Stops Web Sales of Linux Laptops

  In a reversal of its long-time approach to Linux, Dell has now added a desktop PC pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux to its Web site, while halting online sales of Linux-based netbooks and notebook PCs.

  Dell started selling the Studio XPS 7100 with Ubuntu on its Web site earlier this week at pricing of $459.99 without monitor. The price includes a one-year basic service plan.

Applications

• Instructionals

  • Ubuntu Linux solution stack implementation, Part 1: Introduction to the UNIX environment

  • How to make see-through text to image in GIMP

  • Speeding up Ruby on Rails

  • Speaking UNIX: Get to know Ksplice

  • Adding periods to SCHED_DEADLINE

  • Setting Up OpenVPN on a DD-WRT Router, Part 2

• Wine

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

    What’s new in this release (see below for details):
    – Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
    – Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
    – New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
    – Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
    – Translation updates.
    – Various bug fixes.

• Games

  • Open games with closed content

    Some Linux users have at least a general familiarity familiar with RMS’s four freedoms and the GPL. Some of the games mentioned in this column, in the past as well as in the future, are licensed such that the game itself is under the GPL or a similarly free license, but the content is not. That is, you are free to do whatever you want with the game engine itself, but don’t mess with the content.

    For example, let us consider the game Sauerbraten. Now, the Cube2 engine that is the heart and soul of Sauerbraten is totally copylefted. You can distribute it, modify it, and even rub it in your belly, if you so desire. However, the data files that are associated with Sauerbraten is not free. While you can run Sauerbraten with the associated data files that compose the actual content of Sauerbraten, you are not permitted to include the data files along with any changes you make to the Cube2 engine itself. If you want to modify the game engine and release your own modified version of the game called Schnitzel, for example, then you need to create your own maps, textures, skins, and music to go with Schnitzel.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Census report now available as free download

    I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Devices/Embedded

• New controller chip sets stage for color e-readers

  Monochrome electrophorescent (EPD) displays sourced from E Ink Corporation have been used in the majority of e-readers to date. Examples include Amazon’s market-leading, Linux-based Kindle — updated today to become smaller and lighter.

Lockheed Goes Open Source. Blankenhorn Hates It.

Wait, what? Open source advocates have, for years, been trying to encourage more code to come out from behind corporate skirts. Where companies can build business models around governing and supporting open source projects, we want them to take the plunge. If more code is open, that makes everyone smarter. And that, my friends, is exactly what Lockheed Martin did today. Someone who probably never contributed code in their lives just gave the community a project they’ve been working on for months, or even years. I think that’s amazing. In return, this brave developer gets painted as a nefarious secret agent out to steal our thoughts and bug our laptops. Or whatever.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Presentations at Debconf in NYC

  The first is “FSF’s Campaigns for Freedom” on Sunday, August 1st, from 14:00 to 15:00 in 414 Schapiro. I’ll give an overview of some of the current FSF campaigns, like the GNU Project, Working Together for Free Software, Defective by Design, PlayOgg, Windows 7 Sins, and the High Priority Projects List; and resources like the Licensing & Compliance Lab, Free Software Jobs page, Hardware Directory, and the Free Software Directory. But I’m going to save plenty of time to talk with the room about things the FSF should or could be doing.

• Pictures from the GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague (July 2010)

  The European GNU Hackers meeting took place this weekend in the Hague. Two days of talks about GNU projects, nearly 50 hackers, prodigiuous amounts of coffee, and exotic food. All followed by two days of coding for those who stayed on Monday and Tuesday.

Science

• Mars site may hold ‘buried life’

  Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.

  The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae.

  Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a “dead ringer” for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.

Environment/Wildlife

• Saudia Arabia and Russia

  As I have discussed previously, without Russia the world of Non-OPEC supply would have fallen down into a hole shortly after 2003. Indeed, without Russia Non-OPEC production (Non-OPEC ex-Russia) would have fallen every year from 2004 through the present day. What’s been a surprise is that Russia has been able to sustain its current ~9.5 mbpd for over four years now.

Finance

• High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

  Last year Gomberg and a fellow programmer quit their jobs and cut a deal with HTG Capital Partners of Chicago, whose programmers typically trade on regulated futures exchanges. HTG supplies office space, technology and access to exchanges. Gomberg keeps 40% to 80% of net profits, with the percentage rising as his profits do. More importantly, says Gomberg, the programmers retain ownership of the code they write.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google Search Engine Is Blocked in China

  Google said that the search engine was functioning normally in China. “It’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night, when there was a relatively small blockage,” said Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Google adds ‘phone home’ DRM to Android Market

  Google has added a licensing server to the Android Marketplace which will allow an app to verify whether the user has purchased it or not before opening.

• Internet ‘Key Holders’ Are Insurance Against Cyber Attack

  In a move that seems inspired by “The Lord of the Rings,” seven “keys” have been handed out to a trusted circle of people who might get called upon to “save” the Internet in the aftermath of a cyber attack.
  But contrary to other news reports, the seven key holders have not been vested with the power to resurrect the entire Internet should it be sabotaged by hackers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Tech Comics: “Intellectual Property Infringement”