12.05.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
We’ve covered using Google Drive on Linux with third-party software, but why bother jumping through those hoops? You can use a cloud storage service that officially supports Linux instead – several of Google Drive’s competitors do.
Google may be leaving Linux users out, but other services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, SpiderOak, and Wuala don’t ignore Linux users. They even offer more storage and other useful features, such as local encryption of your files.
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
-
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, December 4, the immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
-
Graphics Stack
-
One week after NVIDIA published 2D open-source driver code for their Tegra 2 ARM SoCs, which is applied to the Tegra DRM driver that will premiere with the Linux 3.8 kernel, code has now emerged for supporting the NVIDIA Tegra driver within the libdrm component.
-
Applications
-
As a Linux user, you have plenty of photography applications to choose from: digiKam, GIMP, Rawstudio, Darktable, just to name a few. However, if you are just dipping your toes into the world of photography, you might want to keep things simple, and start with a less complex tool for managing and tweaking your photos. In this case, consider gThumb. This image viewer packs several powerful features which make it a perfect tool for managing photos and retouching them.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Desktop Environments
-
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.
I remember when Google Earth got big. I was already into Linux so I went through the rigmarole of getting it to work on Linux. In actuality, it wasn’t much work although it wasn’t installed in the usual manner. I played with it for a few days, but I was already past the age of caring too much about geography. I would have loved Google Earth when I was in elementary school and I used to marvel at my globe and peruse atlases. It certainly would have been interesting to grab the update on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than have an out of date globe or map I’d have an up-to-date resource. Of course, that does go back into the whole political thing – when Google decides to show this or that disputed region as belonging to someone they are, in a sense, making a political statement. And they make another one – they tend to show country names as written in that country in addition to English.
-
-
-
-
The two most recent releases of Kubuntu, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, have both received a new update for KDE, pushing the version number up to 4.9.4.
The announcement was made today on kubuntu.org and lists 71 bug-fixes, major improvements to Dolphin file manager and Kontact PIM as well as stability improvements. Improvements to the 55+ available translations have also made this release.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
The GNOME project took an important step when Matthias Clasen announced that it would support a set of extensions that would re-create the GNOME 2 desktop. Many observers, including me, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Katherine Noyes immediately interpreted the news as proof that GNOME was turning itself around and finally starting to listen to users.
-
Privacy Panel arrived today in GNOME Control Center, and is one of the three new Panel (Privacy, Search, Notifications) we will get on the next GNOME. But there is also a re-designed Power Panel, and there are many improvements for Wacom, Users (added History Logs), Wireless, Bluetooth..
-
-
New Releases
-
Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.
-
I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release.
In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the xfce4-panel ‘deskbar’ mode which introduces many new features just like extensible plugin support and the ability to more flexibly configure your desktop.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Mageia 1 has now reached EOL (end of life) and will not receive any further security or bugfix updates.
-
Gentoo Family
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
RHEL 6.4 provides users with improved security enhancements as well as a number of new Microsoft-enabling features. The new RHEL beta update follows RHEL 6.3, which debuted in June and provided users with enhanced virtualization scalability.
-
-
-
Fedora
-
The beta of Fedora 18 has been released, and here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in it. This release has been dubbed “Spherical Cow.” Apparently, the Fedora developers have decided to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Ubuntu by using cute animal names for their operating system releases.
-
-
There have been a number of threads about how the new Anaconda UI is unintuitive or hard to use. So many that I thought maybe there was something to the claims. Maybe working on Fedora for the past many years and being involved constantly for the past year and a half has skewed my opinion so much that I wouldn’t even recognize something being hard to use. So I decided to find a couple people that don’t work on Fedora and have never done a Fedora install at all. That is to say, I used my family as guinea pigs.
Now, before you shout and rant about this, I am not claiming this is a scientific study. I’m not pretending this is somehow valid User Experience interaction data. This is is just me wanting to observe what happens when you sit someone down in front of a newUI screen and ask them to complete a default install. I found it interesting. If you don’t, then that’s cool with me. That’s why I gave the short answer at the top. OK, onto my experiment.
-
Debian Family
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Many people believe Ubuntu revolutionized dpkg package management with its Ubuntu Software Center. And there is no question, Software Center is certainly user friendly by most people’s standards.
But is it truly good enough for the masses?
In this article, I will look at the current state of Ubuntu software management, how far software management has come since Ubuntu first came out, plus where I think Ubuntu software is headed.
-
-
So, I’ve blogged a few times randomly about getting ZFS on GNU/Linux, and it’s been a hit. I’ve had plenty of requests for blogging more. So, this will be the first in a long series of posts about how you can administer your ZFS filesystems and pools. You should start first by reading how to get ZFS installed into your GNU/Linux system here on this blog, then continue with this post.
-
The Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope is an Unity Scope that allows users to easily search the Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms or words. It uses the same API as the Dictionary app.
The best part is that Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope allows you to search words right from Unity home, without accessing a Lens first.
-
If you’re running Ubuntu and want the same look and feel for your system, it won’t take much to make it happen
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Ubuntu Satanic Edition 666 is a Linux distribution based on two different versions of Ubuntu, 10.10 and 11.04, and comes in two distinct flavors.
-
-
Husband and wife-led team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming at 24-hour hackathon in Leeds
[...]
…Dhajan developed a Pi operating system to replace the Pi’s Linux.
-
It’s a rare product indeed that surpasses expectations as utterly and thoroughly as the Raspberry Pi did this year.
Conceived as an educational tool that would be used in teaching kids to program, the device has since gone on to inspire countless new uses that must surely boggle the minds even of its creators.
-
Phones
-
There was certainly a loud buzzing on the internet regarding Nokia’s recent moves. Nokia is certainly on the spotlight since people are watching what they will do next. After all, the company practically vowed revenge and plans to take the number 1 spot in mobile phones once more.
-
Android
-
After accepting a phone upgrade from my service provider, I decided to embark on a mission of investigating some new Android software and for the first time found myself genuinely keen to download a game. The game in question – Zookeeper. Why? Because its probably the one game I wasted months of my life to on the Nintendo DS (before giving over ownership of aforementioned DS to my kids)
So now I’m presented with the “adult” version of the same DS title. I say adult because by my reckoning anything that goes on my phone is just as acceptable for adults to play as anyone else and I can fully justify wasting hours of time on a tile matching game featuring cute animals as long as its on my phone.
-
-
Announced on Tuesday for Google Apps customers, the Google Play Private Channel lets IT shops build their own applications and distribute them to employees on the Google Play store without making the apps available to the general public. “Whether you’ve built a custom expense reporting app for employees or a conference room finder, the Google Play Private Channel is designed to make your organization’s internal apps quick and easy for employees to find,” Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers wrote in a blog post. “Once your company has loaded these internal apps using the Google Play Developer Console, users just need to log in with their company email address to browse the Private Channel and download apps.”
-
-
Yesterday’s WSJ.com video “Tablet Wars: How Are People Using Tablets?” had a shocking statistic: 98% of the web traffic from tablets comes from Apple’s iPad. Further, most of mobile commerce is from Apple’s iPhone:
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
There are plenty of great Android tablets on the market now that weren’t around even a year ago. If you’re looking for one to wrap up for someone special, get your game on, or get some work done, you have plenty of options. Earlier last week, we asked you which models you thought were the top of the class, and then we took a closer look at the five best Android tablets. Now we’re back to crown the overall winner.
-
Amazon has introduced Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a special bundle available only on the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD that brings books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows—into one easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8.
-
Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.
You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.
-
Conceptually straightforward and easy to work with, Storm makes handling big data analysis a breeze.
-
Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm’s API with a small demonstration app.
-
Events
-
open2012, Maven’s upcoming conference at the Computer History Museum on December 11th, 2012, seeks to bridge that gap. open2012 will bring leaders of the Open Innovation movement to Silicon Valley to highlight their successes and discuss areas of pain. The event will feature keynote addresses by Venture2 and Procter & Gamble, Open Innovation case studies by Intel, Strategyn, Boston Consulting Group, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, panel discussions including Roche, SAP, Agilent, Wrigley, GSV Capital, and Citi Ventures, and company presentations by BrightIdea, NetBase, Spigit, Inno360, competIQ, and many more.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
I guess you all know about the upcoming Firefox OS, but what you might don’t know is how easily you can run it in GNOME and play with it.
Its Apps and Interface is made totally by WEB Technologies (CSS JavaScript, HTML) and I think it could easily catch up with Apple’s and Google App Stores. Besides we all have bored to listen and talk about Google 
-
SaaS
-
Databases
-
-
The MySQL community in exile made a significant announcement yesterday in London at the Percona Live conference. The three main companies investing in the MariaDB fork of MySQL joined with leaders of the MySQL development community to unveil the MariaDB Foundation, intended as a home for serious, commercially backed development of future versions of the popular open source SQL database. Already enjoying substantial commercial backing, the new foundation is seeking further participants and aims to elect a representative board in two months.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements.
Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also increase friction for those anxious to swap out ageing applications and infrastructure for better alternatives. But how long can ELAs block customers from embracing the future of IT?
[...]
Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company.
-
Healthcare
-
The Veterans Affairs Department will establish a separate repository for its fully open source Gold Disk version of its VistA electronic health record system to assure a common software baseline compared with the 133 instances of VistA operating at its hospitals and clinics across the country.
VA also will put in place a software testing platform, standards supporting open source development and documentation of open source community outreach planning, according to a Nov. 27 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.
-
Business
-
As an end consumer looking at the cloud space, there are two major types of clouds to choose from: open source clouds, championed by the likes of Citrix and Rackspace, and closed clouds, characterized by Amazon, HP and Google. There are reasons that the two types of cloud technology are differentiated, whether from a functional or marketing perspective, but in the end which is better for an end consumer’s business?
-
One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.
-
BSD
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
The OpenACC 1.0 API has been public for more than one year as an open standard to simplify parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, but to this point it’s basically only backed by commercial compilers. OpenACC is similar to OpenMP in terms of using PRAGMA compiler directives and special functions for tapping multiple CPU cores in an easy and straight-forward manner with C/C++ and Fortran code, but unlike OpenMP, OpenACC is also aware of GPUs.
-
Public Services/Government
-
Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he’ll tell you about his vision of government as a platform.
-
You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it’s been upgraded again: now it’s a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.
This situation sounds improbable, but it’s how open source software development takes place.
-
Draft legislation proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to overhaul federal information technology has drawn opposition for its section on open source software adoption.
The draft (.pdf) would require the Federal Chief Information Officers Council to issue guidance that mostly reaffirms open source’s status as a commercial item under federal acquisition regulations, but it would also create a governmentwide open source software approval process to address “issues such as security and redistribution rights.”
-
Openness/Sharing
-
…using open-source principles.
-
Programming
-
I have been having an absolute blast of a time testing out a new operating system for this article. It is called Haiku OS. It is not a Unix or Linux based operating system, but rather an operating system based upon BeOS.
-
Beneath the placid surface of Amazon, authors and reviewers have been in a ferment this fall. After several well-publicized episodes involving writers soliciting or paying for reviews, the retailer seems to be cracking down on log-rolling. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of book reviews have been killed. Amazon has not explained exactly why.
One possible target: authors who have sent gift certificates to reviewers to buy their books. While it’s easy to see the potential for abuse here — “Here’s a $100 gift certificate. Buy a copy of my novel for 99 cents and keep the change” — some writers argue it is no different than sending a physical copy of a book to someone, which is what publishers do in the offline world and therefore is allowed by Amazon. At least, the line between the two is blurry.
-
Hardware
-
Security
-
A hacker by the name of Kingcope has found another security problem with the popular MySQL database. Using an already well-known characteristic of the database’s user management, it is possible to significantly increase the speed of a brute force attack. “Brute-forcing” typically involves trying out a huge number of possible passwords in order to guess the actual password of the user. Each password would be presented to the login process which can take time, and when thousands of passwords need to be processed, that time can become substantial.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
Once completed, the DIA will have approximately 1,600 so-called “collectors” the world over who will be “closely aligned” with the CIA and elite military commando units. As the Washington Post notes, “an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Alameda County, California, sheriff’s office has been forced to suspend the purchase of a surveillance drone after constitutionalists and activists slammed the agency with concerns that the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle would violate privacy protections.
Sheriff Gregory Ahern had asked the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to approve a $31,646 grant to purchase a drone. The money was part of a $1.2-million grant handed out by the California Emergency Management Agency.
-
-
-
-
-
-
The legality of drone strikes was a recurring theme among panelists speaking on national security and armed conflict at the 22nd Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law, held Friday at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C.
-
-
…our country’s invidious use of drone warfare.
-
They had met with anti-drone activists and relatives of the 760 civilians murdered by U.S. drones.
-
Cablegate
-
-
-
-
In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, The New York Times missed the boat.
Over the past several days, as compelling testimony over the harsh treatment of this 24-year-old Army private turned whistle-blower (or illegal informant, depending on your point of view) flooded the media zone, The Times was notably absent.
-
-
Julian Assange is wasting little time while shut inside Ecuador’s embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder has recently released a book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book consists chiefly of the transcript of a conversation between Assange and three others. In a nod to openness, he has chosen not to offer the ebook version on Amazon. Instead, the book is being sold exclusively on reKiosk, a self-described uncensored portal.
-
-
Julia Gillard was tipped off by the US government that the WikiLeaks cable dump would be embarrassing for her and the federal government, prompting the Prime Minister to make the claim the group had acted “illegally” in 2010.
-
We welcome the call by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for an immediate stop to the US persecution of private Bradley Manning who is accused of allegedly disclosing information to Wikileaks resulting in the exposure of atrocities by the US military in the name of the US people.
We likewise call on the Nobel Laureates in Sweden this week to take a stand for global justice and support a resolution for the freedom of Julian Assange.
-
As the alleged source of many of the most vital WikiLeaks reports of the past several years, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning shed considerable light on how the United States has prosecuted the Iraq and Afghan wars. Other State Department cables reportedly leaked by Manning conveyed vital information about U.S. foreign policy.
-
Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning—the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks—testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a “cage” inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.
-
WikiLeaks number two and the official spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organization, Kristinn Hrafnsson spoke with the Voice of Russia regarding the recent ruling by the European Parliament regarding the extra-judicial economic blockade by US based financial institutions who are in violation of international and European law in their continued blockade of the organization. Mr Hraffnsson also spoke about Bradley Manning equating his detention to torture and when asked about WikiLeaks, promised more releases to come.
-
-
Finance
-
The real threat to the middle class is not there, it’s in the erosion of the programs I just mentioned. That is to say, it’s in the attack on the public schools, it’s in the squeeze on higher education, it’s in the threat to Social Security. When you look at housing, you have a very large unambiguous loss. Millions of people have been displaced, but many, many more have lost the capital value of their homes. They won’t be able to sell and retire on the proceeds.
-
After the backlash from this year’s Budget, the Chancellor has been quick to stress once more that we are all in this together. This was a joke in 2010. It is a sick joke today. Some window dressing measures will not compensate for slicing 5% off the top-rate of income tax – paid by the richest 1% – back in March. That measure alone gave an extra £42,500 a year to anyone earning over £1m annually.
-
-
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
A new report by the International Forum on Globalization details the role of David and Charles Koch in undermining international talks to address the rapidly escalating problem of climate change. As the United Nations meets in Doha, Qatar this week, the goal is to create a framework in which the governments of the world make internationally binding commitments to cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep climate change within the agreed threshold of 2C.
-
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward obtained an audio recording of a conversation between David Petraeus, the general turned CIA Director who recently resigned in the midst of a sex scandal, and Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland. The conversation took place in spring 2011 in Kabul, during the time that Petraeus was the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. McFarland is a national security analyst for Fox News and has a long resume working for GOP administrations going back to Reagan.
-
Privacy
-
Obviously we never thought that we would be joining in with all of the media that has amassed after the announcement of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy. However the Duchess has found herself embroiled in a data protection scandal.
Extraordinarily, a prank call made by Australian 2Day FM radio presenters to King Edward VII Hospital enabled them to obtain intimate medical information about the health of Catherine. The presenters pretended to be the Queen, Prince Charles and, most bizarrely, corgis in order to attempt to get Catherine live on air. The transcript shows that, despite a very unconvincing performance by the presenters, a nurse gave private details of Catherine’s condition.
-
Relief is on the way. Cellphone users are sending more text messages than ever, but increasingly they are free — thanks to the Internet. While that is good news for consumers, it could cost the world’s wireless companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
-
-
European data stored in the “cloud” could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe’s strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.
-
-
If you travel to China or Russia, assume government or industry spooks will steal your data and install spyware.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
The BPI have this afternoon confirmed to us that they have asked ISPs to unblock PromoBay.org as the organization responsible for maintaining the list of sites blocked under the injunctions to block the ThePirateBay.se.
On Monday, ORG wrote to Virgin, BT, O2, TalkTalk and Sky to ask them why the PromoBay.org is being blocked. Virgin confirmed to ORG that the site was supplied to them as a domain to be blocked.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.04.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
…nearly 1.3 million Android devices were activated daily,
-
-
-
If you operate solely in the world of proprietary software, it’s easy to think that Microsoft‘s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) emerged as the preeminent remote-access solution a long time ago. But in a sign that the battle for this niche is hardly over–and that cross-platform compatibility is key to winning it–Splashtop, an alternative to RDP, recently announced support for Ubuntu Linux in its desktop streaming platform, making it easier to access Ubuntu PCs from anywhere.
-
Desktop
-
Dell announced its Project Sputnik earlier this year to a warm if not ecstatic reception. The firm had preloaded Linux onto its consumer machines before but they were hard to find and on forgettable machines. However with the XPS 13 the firm is not only loading Linux on its most high profile laptop but showing that Microsoft’s operating system isn’t the only choice in town for OEMs and consumers alike.
From a Linux community perspective, Dell’s XPS 13 comes with Intel’s ultrabook branding, which might mean little to those who actually read and understand specifications but means a lot to the customer in the street who is bombarded with Intel’s ultrabook marketing message. Dell might be pitching its Ubuntu XPS 13 laptop as a developer’s machine rather than one for Facebook and Youtube users, but that isn’t a bad idea in the long run either.
-
The Chromebooks have landed. They cannot be considered a toy or an experimental fad by Google, any longer. Now they are here to stay as the new and revolutionary intelligent terminals of the Cloud Centric Age. In the past, we used to installed all apps in our computers, and run them locally. For that we needed faster and faster PCs with more and more memory, both ram and hard disk.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
-
-
-
FlashFire is a buffer-based write reordering layer for SSDs on Linux, which can lead to greater disk performance for flash-based storage devices.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
Shortly after improving the HyperZ support in R300g, Marek Olšák has now enabled HyperZ support by default for ATI R500 (Radeon X1000 series) GPUs.
The R300/R400 GPUs don’t yet have HyperZ support enabled by default until sufficient testing has been completed, but the HyperZ support can be toggled via the RADEON_HYPERZ environment variable. The newer Radeon GPUs with the R600g Gallium3D driver also don’t yet have usable HyperZ support enabled by default. HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that’s been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer.
-
-
Unvanquished, one of the few open-source games that actually has good art assets, saw its tenth alpha release this weekend. The first person shooter derived from the ioquake3/XReaL engine has improvements to its OpenGL 3.x renderer, initial x32 architecture support, and other enhancements.
-
AMD has released yet another beta Linux beta driver for the Catalyst 12.11 series.
While there isn’t any official change-log for Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 compared to the earlier 12.11 Linux betas, it’s now available for download from AMD.com.
-
The Linux Kernel A-synchronous I/O support has been receiving some performance improvements and clean-ups that should soon be merged to mainline.
-
Applications
-
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
-
Splice, a unique and very interesting puzzle game created by Cipher Prime Studios, will be arriving on Linux in the near future.
-
-
-
-
Guild Wars 2, the MMORPG, recently came out on the PC and everyone, including us, loved it. It’s also making its way over to Mac.
We recently had a chance to sit down and sit with the MMO’s game director, Colin Johanson. We asked him if we’ll be seeing a Linux port anytime soon, and he said that while the team has “talked about it”, they “won’t be working on it in the near future”.
-
Desktop Environments
-
Global warming has even forced worms to make adjustments.
A group of French earthworms have migrated to Ireland owing to the rise in global temperatures, according to a new study published in the RoyalSociety Journal Biology Letters.
-
But it’s not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What’s going on?
I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 — make it easy — despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).
Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making. My biggest complaint was with the cartoonish and annoying tiles. Made for touchscreens, they’re fairly usable when you’re holding a small device at, say, a 45-degree angle. But when the touchscreen is a monitor sitting on a desktop at something closer to 90 degrees? That results in a phenomenon called gorilla arm, a situation blamed for the failure of touchscreens on the desktop as long ago as the 1980s.
-
After reading Andrew’s excellent Roundup on alternative desktops (p30), I’m not sure how I feel about the way desktops are going. I’m still surprised, for example, that both Gnome and KDE developers made such massive changes to their desktops, when for many years the old versions had worked brilliantly. KDE 4.9 is stable, but it still takes a lot of effort to make the environment your own.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Sometimes, you notice that writing an OS is like playing chase: sometimes you open the latest MS system, and go “Uhm… Where did I see that before?”, and sometimes you proudly show the results of hours of work, and what you get is “Heh, everyone else did that ages ago!”
-
-
Anybody who’s talked with me about running Linux on the desktop within the past year has almost certainly gotten an earful about Cinnamon. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the basic description: clean, beautiful, fast, and traditional desktop environment.
-
-
As 2012 nears its cold, wet conclusion*, we’re asking you to look back over the past year and let us know which distro you think deserves the award “Best distro 2012″. If you’re nominating a distro that’s had more than one release, let us know which one.
Raspbian and Android Jelly Bean are a couple of less-conventional ones that have caught our eye. Security-focused distros such as Tails and Qubes are becoming increasingly important in a digitally-hostile world. Mint continues its relentless march towards world domination. Mageia has had a great year while Ubuntu has had it’s ups and downs. System Rescue CD protects you from Zombies (honest). Fedora and OpenSuse have continued to deliver. Zorin seems to be attracting interest, as does Rosa. Arch continues to be perfect (if you believe Graham). Gentoo earned a perfect 10 in an LXF review … the list goes on.
-
-
New Releases
-
-
It’s out! Slacko is one of our flagship puppies, built with the latest Woof from Slackware 14.0 binary packages. It is all-puppy right through, with the advantage of binary compatibility with Slackware 14.0 and access to the Slackware package repositories.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Electronic hardware buyers may soon get access to a variety of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) products already embedded.
The world’s top Linux software developer and services provider is looking to expand the reach of its Linux and JBoss products through a distribution agreement with global hardware distributor Avnet.
Financial terms of the agreement, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.
Red Hat will work with Avnet Embedded, which is part of Avnet (Nyse: AVT).
The Raleigh-based firm hopes the Avnet deal will better connect it with original equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors who work with Avenet across the Americas.
-
On December 4th, Red Hat announced the release of the next beta for its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 is now available. According to the company, the release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, and storage as well as productivity tools.
-
Fedora
-
In the beginning, the Installer was all. If you wanted to upgrade a Red Hat / Fedora system you downloaded the CD images, burned them all to CDs, and sat around swapping disks in and out until your system was upgraded. What fun!
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
If your ear has fallen within the radius of a supermarket or shopping mall’s sound system anytime since October then you’ll know that the festive feel-good season of Christmas is all but upon us.
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
There may be a lot of users who would want to use the light-weight Cinnamon desktop instead of Unity on Ubuntu systems, without switching to Linux Mint. Developer Robert Bennett has spinned a Linux distro for such users.
-
-
I have been playing around with the Raspberry Pi (Pi) for two months now. I started by installing Raspbian on a spare 4 GB memory card. I also had a wireless Wifi dongle and a wireless keyboard-mouse lying around. I plugged the WiFi dongle and the dongle for the wireless keyboard-mouse in the two USB ports of the Pi and when I plugged in my spare mobile charger into the Pi’s power input, the Pi booted. I felt lucky to see the display on the TV without any hassles. So far all in all, out of the box experience and all I had bought was the Pi. I already had the other stuff lying around. It was fun to see something on TV that I am used to seeing on a computer monitor.. The next thing I did was fire up the Python interpreter and tweeting the output of os.uname( ).
-
Phones
-
Most of us will be aware of the story behind Jolla by now. The company has been founded, and is mostly staffed by, former Nokia employees, from the Maemo and MeeGo teams. While the company is not a subsidiary in any form and doesn’t have any of the rights to any Nokia products, it’s easiest to think of Jolla as a continuation of the team behind open source Maemo products like the N900.
-
Android
-
-
If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on XBMC for Android but weren’t thrilled at the idea of compiling it yourself or suffering through a nightly, the team behind XBMC have taken the wraps off of an official beta release that you can try.
-
It was not that long ago that a leading-edge tablet device was a fairly big deal. Family members would ask where the tablet was; the house clearly wouldn’t contain more than one of them. What followed, inevitably, was an argument over who got to use the household tablet. But tablets are quickly becoming both more powerful and less expensive — a pattern that a few of us have seen in this industry before. We are quickly heading toward a world where tablet devices litter the house like notepads, cheap pens, or the teenager’s dirty socks. Tablets are not really special anymore.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
-
-
Not satisfied with the current crop of Android tablets and the restrictions Google often places on its mobile OS? Finally, the Linux army has its own portable, touch-screen option.
As of this morning, PengPod, a spin-off of a Florida-based importing company, officially closed its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for its line of open Linux and Android-based tablets and mini-PCs on a stick.
-
-
This Thanksgiving break was a fun and relaxing one, but as usual, Mira (my 7-year old daughter) had her “I’m bored!” spells one day. After trying to get her to draw, color, paint, read, etc. I tried something new. We went outside and looked at interesting things. The Moon was pretty that evening. Then came the question:
-
If you’re looking for a great Android tablet, there are plenty on the market to choose from—many more than there used to be, and they’re only getting better. That doesn’t mean all of them are worth your money, or worth buying for someone else who wants a new tablet. This week we asked you which Android tablets you thought were the best of the best, and here are the top five based on those nominations.
-
-
We took the fourth-generation iPad, the Google Nexus 10 and the Microsoft Surface and put them through the paces to determine which tablet is the best for everyday tasks.
-
Google turned heads this summer when it released its Nexus 7 tablet. Together with Asus, the company produced a solid Android tablet that offered an affordable price tag, nice design and smooth performance to rival the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. But can the company do it again with a 10-inch version to take on the reigning leader, the Apple iPad?
-
-
Last month, Jos Poortvliet’s job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.
-
Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.
-
Web Browsers
-
After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.
Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.
-
Chrome
-
Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.
-
Mozilla
-
-
-
Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla’s demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.
-
-
Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a “father of the Internet,” writes: “Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn’t even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba…Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas.”
-
SaaS
-
-
Cade Metz has an interesting historical look back at how Amazon evolved from online bookseller to dominant player in the cloud. Meanwhile, many analysts note that Amazon’s lead in the cloud is as substantial as Microsoft’s lead in PC software was in the 1990s. The AWS re:Invent conference drove home the fact that while we’re hearing a lot about OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, open source cloud platforms don’t have the adoption yet that Amazon has.
-
Databases
-
A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.
-
MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.
Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”
-
CMS
-
The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a “pilot” sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?
-
t…arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.
-
Funding
-
Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm’s ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.
The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as “Investor Growth Capital” as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.
-
BSD
-
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.
-
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Project Releases
-
One month after Git 1.8.0 was released, Git 1.8.1 is now being prepared with several new features as well as fixes.
-
Public Services/Government
-
The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.
-
Licensing
-
Meanwhile, the folks at Renesys look into just how difficult it is to cut a country off from the internet, and whether other countries are at risk of the same sort of thing. Basically, it comes down to how decentralized the internet is in various countries — and in many countries there isn’t much decentralization. As Renesys notes, some countries have just one or two telcos who handle all internet traffic to and from the world. Those countries are easy to cut off. Renesys helpfully provides a map:
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Data
-
Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.
-
Open Hardware
-
My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It’s emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.
-
In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.
-
-
Programming
-
If you’re starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you’ll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you’re not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.
-
Science
-
Health/Nutrition
-
US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking
-
Monsanto’s marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what’s really going on in the fields.
-
Security
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
He rejects this, and both activist groups and the Tibetan government-in-exile say the self-immolations are protests against tight Chinese control of the region and religious repression.
-
-
State officials confirm Israel started to ease restrictions on civilians; sailing limit for fishermen extended. Farmers allowed to visit land near security fence. Hamas’ Marzook says group won’t stop smuggling weaons into Strip
-
-
-
Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern promised Tuesday to prohibit the use of a remote-controlled aerial drone…
-
-
“The real reason for most of these strikes has been to protect a regime in Pakistan or Yemen,” Zenko said.
-
“Legal, ethical, and wise” is how the Obama administration chooses to describe drone warfare…
-
-
-
Sindh High Court Bar Association (SHCBA) here Monday condemned US drone attacks in Pakistani territories…
-
-
-
A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs on Tuesday, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to state media, as the civil war closed in on President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.
-
An open letter to the president to end his lethal — and ever-expanding — drone wars
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Rarely does the release of a data-driven report on energy trends trigger front-page headlines around the world. That, however, is exactly what happened on November 12th when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of its World Energy Outlook. In the process, just about everyone missed its real news, which should have set off alarm bells across the planet.
-
The United Nations sounded a stark warning on the threat to the climate from methane in the thawing permafrost as governments met for the second day of climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
-
-
-
Satellite measurements show flooding from storms like Sandy will put low-lying population centres at risk sooner than projected
-
The recent UK flooding caused terrible damage and waste, yet many insurers insist that things must be put back as they were
-
Finance
-
An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.
-
Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn’t. But that’s because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they’ve ever been.
-
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.
-
The “fiscal cliff” plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich
-
Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill
-
Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.
If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual’s Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
In 2012, the total spending of outside groups — the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns — amounted to about $1.3 billion.
-
The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin’s economy? Apparently not.
Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.
-
Privacy
-
-
The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.
-
-
The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.
-
Civil Rights/Sppoks
-
-
Former member of the US Congress, Cynthia McKinney on Tuesday criticised CIA and FBI as well as other law enforcement agencies of the US for violating its constitution, national and international laws and human rights throughout the American history.
McKinney was speaking at a seminar titled, ‘US Justice System: Dynamics and Practices’, chaired by former secretary foreign affairs M. Akram Zaki and was also addressed by Sara Flounders, co-Director, International Action Centre and former senator Barrister Saadia Abbasi.
-
-
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.
-
Copyrights
-
Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.
[...]
Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.
-
Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.
-
-
Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.
In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say “alleged” because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, “attempted fraud on the Court” for sending a “representative” to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.
-
lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.
I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.
-
Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.
-
-
I’ve been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven’t had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don’t seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn’t just wrong. It’s completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let’s dig in a bit.
-
Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it’s run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and… doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute “an exclusive bundle” of extra, related, content. That’s still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.
-
The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will “cease standalone publication”.
The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.
-
Jay-Z has since referred to it as “genius” and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 — a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.
Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he’s one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song “Crazy” a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn’t “harm” them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, “it’s not a question of damage, it’s a question of rights.”
-
Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be “owned.” You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.
-
In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Competition in automotive technology has long been about who’s got the most horsepower, the best towing capacity or the fastest acceleration. These days, though, it’s all about having the slickest infotainment systems and most-connected cars.
-
Desktop
-
Kernel Space
-
From the ‘Thank You Microsoft for *allowing* Linux on Windows 8 hardware?!’ files:
-
This week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile is with John Stultz. Based in in Portlandia, John works for IBM and is on assignment with Linaro. His love affair with Linux began in 1997, and he’s never looked back.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
Marek Olšák has fixed up the HyperZ support within the R300 Gallium3D driver so that it’s working properly for more applications. R300 HyperZ is finally in a state where he may be looking to enable the feature by default.
HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that’s been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer. Benchmarks of HyperZ show that it can certainly improve the OpenGL frame-rate for gaming, but within the open-source Radeon Linux drivers the HyperZ support has been buggy for new and old hardware.
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Everyone by now should know about Humble Bundle, they used to be a provider of great DRM FREE and cross platform (Linux, Mac and Windows) indie games including games like Osmos, Aquaria,
Psychonauts, World of Goo etc.
A lot of people including myself used them as shining examples of how things should be done – cross platform, drm free, buy once get all platforms and even support charity! Now is not the case.
They launched a THQ Bundle which has AAA games (that’s not the issue) the issue is that the games are DRM-bound, tied to one service (Steam), not cross platform and from a developer who even supported some rather shady internet bills.
-
-
Steam Greenlight is the entry point for new games to be released on Steam. Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers can post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution.
-
Most Ubuntu users would have heard about Family Farm, its one of the most popular games and possibly one one of the first commercial game to be available on Ubuntu Software Center. The company behind Family Farm, Indie Studio Hammerware, have released its sequel, Goodfolks which is also available on Linux platform.
-
The ET: Legacy project is an open-source initiative that seeks to create a fully-compatible client and server for the award-winning Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
It was in August of 2010 that id Software open-sourced Enemy Territory along with Return To Castle Wolfenstein. In writing yesterday about XReaL and OpenWolf game engines that do have compatibility with Enemy Territory, there were interesting comments within the forums.
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
Climate advocates celebrated after winning nearly every Congressional race they targeted during the national elections, including four of the “Flat Earth Five” climate deniers in the House of Representatives. But with the balance of power essentially the same in Washington, many rightly worried that little would change moving into the 113th Congress.
-
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Giovanni Campagna today released the first version of GNOME Weather (v0.1), a small application similar to Clocks written in Python3. Its current state is very basic, and you can only select a region from a drop-down auto-complete list, and Weather will display the weather of the next 5 days, from yr.no (Norwegian Meteorological Institute).
-
“GNOME is a big boy and was the preferred DE for many experienced users, as well as classical GNU/Linux distributions’ default DE,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “So, there must be a compromise between the developers’ avant-garde ideas and what power users need and want to use.
-
-
New Releases
-
RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc., (NYSE: AVT). Avnet Embedded will offer flexible, integrated systems based on Red Hat Embedded Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions to its large base of OEM and independent software vendor (ISV) partners throughout the Americas.
-
Fedora
-
Google Chromebooks are one of the hottest devices in the market. These devices allow you to boot into a cloud oriented environment where you can seamlessly manage all your music, documents and files on the cloud, on the go. The advantages are many. The device boots up fast and works great as long as you have Internet connectivity. You don’t need to fear about hard drive crashes or data loss as it is stored on the cloud and accessible via your Google account from any device.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
The name of Dell’s Project Sputnik may not exactly conjure images of cutting-edge computer technology. But the laptop that the endeavor has launched is certainly no piece of outdated space junk. Targeted at developers and based on Ubuntu Linux, the machine potentially represents a new kind of direction for Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). Will the company, long derided by some open source fans, now fully enter the good graces of the Linux community?
-
-
-
A developer by the name of AndrewDB is currently in the processing of modding Ubuntu Linux so that it runs on inexpensive PCs-on-a-stick powered by Rockchip RK3066 processors.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
You take your smartphone everywhere, so it knows a lot about you: where you are, who you’re with, what you’re listening to, even whether you’re standing or sitting. To make the most of this, Media Lab alumni Nadav Aharony, Cody Sumter and Alan Gardner have developed Funf, an open-source Android platform that simplifies data collection and lets developers create apps that tap into this huge cache.
-
-
The cheapest Android tablet I’ve ever seen costs $20, with a $2 per month unlimited data plan, and I’m holding it right now. It might not just change the tablet market. It might change the world.
The Ubislate 7ci, also known as the Aakash2, is the latest gadget from Datawind, a Canadian company that’s spent seven years trying to find the ideal market for some really neat data-optimization technology. On devices like the PocketSurfer and PocketSurfer 2, Datawind showed that it can display desktop Web pages quickly with low-cost devices on super-low-bandwidth networks like 2G GPRS. But it never gained major market traction in the Western world, especially as 3G and 4G networks have spread.
-
-
-
-
Nokia has been clear in its plans to develop solutions for its HERE Maps service, which has already launched on the App Store (to muted reviews).
-
-
According to older rumors the Galaxy S IV would have a full HD AMOLED display, a quad-core cpu,the latest version of android, a 13 megapixel camera and the screen size would be 5.0”
Our insider could not confirm the specifications at this moment! He only knows the new project name called: Project J for the next Galaxy.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Android/Linux lovers are whooping it up now that a startup called PengPod reached its crowdfunding goal.
PengPod promised to ship affordable 7- and 10-inch tablets if it could raise $49,000 by today.
With a few hours left, PengPod has raised almost $60,000.
-
Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
-
-
So I was on the Kernel Panic Ogg cast last night (the episode should be for download later this weekend). While we where discussing a number of things related to Bodhi our ARM port and tablet interface came up. ARM hardware is a very different beast from your normal x86/64bit devices. Meaning even if you have functional kernel drivers for a given device – you still often need a seperate file system images for each device you wish to be easily installable on.
-
WishTel announced the launch of the world’s cheapest Linux-based tablet PC, “PrithV”. Designed and manufactured in India, and priced at US$50, the tablet is designed to serve all the global education needs.
-
A $100 tablet that can run both Android and Linux is on the verge of becoming a reality. We wrote about the “PengPod” last month when its creators were seeking $49,000 on a Kickstarter-like site called Indiegogo. The project’s deadline expired last night, with the PengPod getting a healthy $72,707 from more than 500 contributors.
-
Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as “SOA,” but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source’s demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being “faux-open source” with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code).
-
Web Browsers
-
Databases
-
SkySQL and Monty Program release the MariaDB Client Library for C and MariaDB Client Library for Java Applications
-
-
Oracle had better watch its back. There’s a new(ish) database player on the market that wants to eat its lunch; dinner, breakfast and dessert too, for that matter.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn’t be more different. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this, it’s “go the whole hog or not at all”.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open source Business Intelligence and data integration company Pentaho has pushed some additional product releases to SourceForge web-based source code repository this week.
-
Programming
-
A software research project being funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with its Cyber Fast Track program is looking at ways for providing a flexible and integrated security infrastructure by using LLVM for dynamic and static security tasks.
-
-
Please stop saying “This is the thin end of the wedge. Once legislation is introduced, it will grow.” You are possibly the best informed and, if not the most powerful, certainly the most vocal lobby in this country. It’s not like additional legislation will slip past you.
Please stop saying “There is already adequate protection in the law.” You know full well this protection is only available to those with money, time, knowhow and connections. I was having a beer with a buddy last night, who used to work in the tabloid press. He tells me that the single deciding factor in running or not running a less than well founded story is usually the subject’s financial ability to sue.
Please stop saying “We are special. We perform a vital public service. We should be protected.” The same applies to doctors, pharma companies, lawyers, police, farmers, the fire service, pilots. They are all, quite rightly, regulated. A badly put together article might leave me dissatisfied. A badly put together gas boiler can leave me dead. The imposition of professional standards in a fact of modern life.
Please stop saying “We have already changed. It will be different this time.” You sound like a recalcitrant abusive alcoholic begging his wife in hospital not to press charges.
-
-
The Hollywood Reporter has the somewhat amusing cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t use various social media tools to make promises you can’t back up. Hip hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie apparently lost his laptop recently while on tour in Germany. He then went on YouTube and posted a video offering $20,000 if anyone returned the laptop. He noted that the laptop contained music and videos that he wanted back. Another video was posted later with a message that reads: “In the interest of retrieving invaluable intellectual property contained on his laptop and hard drive, Mr. Leslie has increased the reward offer from $20,000 USD to $1,000,000 USD. He also tweeted the same info directly, saying: “I raised the reward for my intellectual property to $1mm.”
-
Science
-
All free schools will be forced to present evolution as a comprehensive and central tenet of scientific theory, ministers have announced, following lobbying by senior scientists concerned that Christian-run institutions could exploit loopholes in the rules to present creationism as a credible theory.
-
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Today, the Government Accountability Project’s (GAP) Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is praising President Obama for signing into law the strongest federal whistleblower protections in history. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate earlier this month. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections.
This law’s enactment plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those workers charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers who desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but chose to stay silent for fear that existing whistleblower protections will not effectively shield them from retaliation.
-
We all should be aware of the dangers posed by the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons have 10,000 plus nuclear warheads. And, especially post-Fukushima, we now understand firsthand the potential danger of nuclear power plants, many which are aging and highly vulnerable to natural disasters. As of August 2012, 30 countries are operating 435 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. Sixty-six new nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries.
But how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.
In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.
-
During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.
These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”
Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.
Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037310_Barack_Obama_Monsanto_lobbyist.html#ixzz2Dv0TB5GX
-
I am at a loss to explain how, even in the 60′s or 70′s, an unsupervised kid was able to walk into anyplace where one could see Cherenkov radiation with their own eyes, at such a short distance. I understand that water is a good radiation shield, and don’t believe that I received any significant radiation exposure. This experience left me, for my lifetime, more sanguine than the average person regarding radiation hazards.
-
-
-
-
Security
-
In August, the Australian Parliament passed a new cybercrime bill that increased the powers of law enforcement to require Internet service providers to monitor and store their users’ data.
The country’s privacy advocates were up in arms. One of them was Asher Wolf (a pseudonym), a 32-year-old who had built up a following on Twitter for tweeting news about WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement and who cared deeply about online privacy. A friend of hers, @m1k3y, tweeted that in light of the new legislation, maybe now was the time to have an “install-the-crypto-apps party,” referring to the programs for computers that help protect a user’s privacy. Wolf half-jokingly agreed: “Let’s get together in the backyard with some chips,” she said, “let’s have a CryptoParty.”
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
-
Israel’s reported to be planning to use long-range Heron drones to launch pre-emptive strikes on ballistic missiles in Iran from Azerbaijan.
-
However, Israel being the recipient of more than $3 billion in U.S. aid annually, much of it in arms, has given rise to an asymmetric warfare that has gone largely unregulated and unchallenged; a governing principle in which both the U.S. and Israel carry out indiscriminate drone attacks against vaguely identified “militants” or “combatants.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles, referred to as drones, have become the predominant means for carrying out targeted attacks, which U.S. military experts gladly tout as “surgically precise” and effective for “minimizing” collateral damage and civilian casualties.
-
-
Progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald details his experiences interviewing the Pakistani victims of U.S. attacks
-
We all knew it was coming, but the ACLU has the docs to prove it’s about to start happening here: The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is trying to buy a drone aircraft in part to spy on people.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
President Obama has an opportunity to name a director of the Central Intelligence Agency who will re-establish the C.I.A.’s commitment to objective and balanced intelligence and rebuild the Office of the Inspector General, which has been severely weakened by the Bush and Obama administrations.
-
-
Please, Mr. President, no macho men, politicians, policy wonks, admirals or generals. The new C.I.A. director should be a seasoned, professional intelligence officer capable of taking the agency in a different direction – back to basics.
-
Britain has MI6 super-spy James Bond, who recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first cinematic adventure; the US has the Central Intelligence Agency. Since its inception in 1947 the agency has been the backdrop for dozens of films and television series and, regardless of geopolitical trends, the movies and shows keep coming.
-
-
Frustrated commercial drone companies say the Obama administration is falling further and further behind in meeting congressional demands to clear the path for full integration into American airspace by 2015. Billions of dollars of investments as well as commercial applications for drones could be caught up in the delay, they warn.
-
“We could have made sure he turned himself in. If [he] was guilty of any crime, then arrest him, put him on trial.”
-
-
It’s thought the missile could penetrate the bunkers and caves believed to be hiding Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.
-
-
Staff consisted of CIA paramilitaries who were working in cooperation with the local militia. The ambassador would not be privy to operational details and would only know in general what the agency was up to. When the ambassador’s party was attacked, the paramilitaries at the CIA base came to the rescue before being driven back into their own compound, where two officers were subsequently killed in a mortar attack.
-
-
-
A war veteran who claims he was falsely arrested, beaten, and almost died due to neglect in an Oakland prison has launched legal action against the jail, claiming his pleas for help were ignored.
Kayvan Sabeghi, 33, was arrested during an Occupy rally in Oakland, California, in November last year. Video footage shows him being beaten with batons and he suffered a lacerated spleen which his attorney Dan Siegel says almost killed him after he was left without treatment for 18 hours in prison.
-
-
-
-
Instead, it has often targeted enemies of allied governments in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan.
-
Syria sole country to employ deadly mines in 2012; US among few countries still maintaining right to produce them
-
The latest in a series of leaks purporting to show Iran’s efforts to design a nuclear warhead emerged this week in the form of an Associated Press exclusive about a diagram of the blast dynamics of a bomb said to be three times the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
-
Why was he killed when he could have been easily captured? wonder family, neighbors of suspected al-Qaida operative
-
-
Eight important al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a record number of 122 drone strikes which were carried out by the CIA in Pakistan in 2008.
-
Israel plans to use unmanned drones it deployed in Azerbaijan to preemptively strike Iranian missile sites in the event of a war, the London-based Sunday Times reported.
The report comes amid mounting speculations that Israel may launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities next year, in which case the latter would retaliate by firing Shahab-3 and other long-range missiles at the Jewish state, while Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Gaza militants would follow suit.
-
-
-
The FAA is set to select six unmanned system test sites.
-
-
-
-
-
The wave of fiery protests inside Tibet continues unabated with reports of another self-immolation protest today in Bora region of Sangchu region in eastern Tibet.
-
Cablegate
-
-
OVER the past 2½ years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed late last week, when the 23-year-old US army private, who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, testified at his court martial about the conditions of his detention.
The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures he endured, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced them as ”cruel and inhuman”. President Barack Obama’s State Department spokesman, retired air force colonel P.J. Crowley, resigned after condemning Manning’s treatment. A prison psychologist testified last week that Manning’s conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantanamo Bay.
-
The government psychiatrist charged with evaluating Pfc. Bradley Manning during his early detention at the military brig at Quantico told the judge at a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday that his recommendations for the Manning’s treatment were repeatedly ignored by the Marine guard unit responsible for him.
-
Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — messages sent between the State Department and its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as an alleged source.
-
FORT MEADE, United States / Maryland: Two of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning’s former prison guards have denied abusing him in custody, and described an incident in which the US Army private suddenly burst into tears.
-
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
-
Obama said that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
This morning, a group of students and alumni delivered over 1,000 signatures to University of Wisconsin Foundation President Mike Knetter demanding that the university divest its holdings from the fossil fuel industry. The activists point to science that shows the industry is slowly cooking the planet and divestment, or “hitting them where is hurts,” as a moral imperative.
As the students gathered on a December day which will top 60 degrees, Elisa Collins Zinda carried her one year-old daughter strapped to her back and talked about why she was there. “I hope my daughter will be able to build a snowman some day,” she said.
-
-
-
-
-
-
In an attempt to deal with the 206 million gallons of light crude oil erupting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, BP unleashed about 2.6 million gallons of Corexit dispersants (Corexit 9500A and Corexit EC9527) in surface waters and at the wellhead on the sea floor. From the beginning the wisdom of that decision was questioned. I wrote extensively about those concerns in “BP’s Deep Secrets.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Finance
-
-
Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates.
-
Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.
-
On paper, Glenn Hadden seemed to be the ideal person to run a large bond trading operation at Morgan Stanley when he was hired in early 2011. Mr. Hadden, a former Goldman partner, was one of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street.
But there was more to his story than just stellar financial results. He had left his previous employer, Goldman Sachs, after questions about his trading activity. And now, Mr. Hadden is under investigation over his trading in Treasury futures while at Goldman, according to a regulatory filing.
-
-
Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at the Bank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England’s obsession with inflation targeting and “price stability”. Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured – to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail.
-
Matt Yglesias passes along this remarkable chart from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker showing that 88 percent of all the profit growth in the S&P 500 this year has been concentrated in ten firms in a grand total of two industries: technology and finance. In particular, seven of the ten firms are financial companies. Keep this firmly in mind the next time some Wall Street titan complains yet again that Obama hates banks and is out to destroy them. This is not a sign that Obama has done anything serious to hurt the financial industry; it’s a sign that America’s bankers are comically thin-skinned whiners.
-
-
Israel will not transfer tax and tariff funds its collects for the Palestinians this month in response to their successful bid for upgraded UN status, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.
-
Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should “lower their expectations” when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new “face of class warfare” in the United States.
“I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.”
-
It seems outrageous that powerful, ruthless “vulture funds” can threaten action which may result in “an end to Argentina’s recovery” and a fresh round of turmoil in the global financial market (Comment, 26 November). Another aspect is the legitimacy of debt incurred by regimes that are not democratically elected. If an individual borrows vast sums of money and spends it on the high life and doesn’t repay it in their lifetime, it is right that creditors can use the law to go after all the funds and assets of the estate. It would not be right if they could use the law to go after the children and grandchildren of the debtor, forcing them to live in penury to pay back money they did not borrow nor benefit from. It seems the same logic applies when vast sums are borrowed by a corrupt dictator and the citizens of the country are forced to pay back the debt.
-
It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.
-
In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.
Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.
The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various spending programs that further raised the deficit.
-
A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies
-
A campaign to radically reform and open up the secretive workings of the powerful local authority governing the City of London has been launched by a diverse group whose supporters include activists from the Occupy movement, clerics and the Tory MP David Davis.
-
As low-wage service jobs become the new normal for millions of families, we should rethink the balance of power between fast-food workers and their corporations
-
The EPA surprised quite a few people on Wednesday when it announced sanctions on BP related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP won’t be allowed to get any new government contracts until it cleans up its act, the agency said.
This was announced in a short press release that wasn’t really very specific about what that penalty means in practice. It could bar the company from new contracts for as long as 18 months—and potentially longer, if there are ongoing legal proceedings against the company. And it’s not just BP’s Gulf of Mexico affiliate—this suspension applies to all of BP’s affiliates, barring the company from billions of dollars in potential future contracts.
-
MI6 passed up an opportunity to kill a senior leader of al-Qaeda because lawyers advised them they would be breaking the law, it can be disclosed.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Censorship
-
Insulting God will no longer be a crime in the Netherlands after the Dutch parliament decided to revoke a decades-old blasphemy law from the statute books.
-
-
Privacy
-
AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.
-
-
Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.
-
…nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”.
-
In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus’ sex scandal—uncovered largely through the disclosure of explicit e-mails between him and his mistress—the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a new amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on Wednesday.
The bill as it stands now (PDF) would require a warrant by law enforcement agencies before they can go digging through e-mail, social networking posts, and other data stored on cloud-based services. If it passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president, it would mark an important shift in privacy protection for electronic communications. As we’ve reported for some time now, those protections (or lack thereof) are woefully out of date.
-
Changing the behaviour of citizens to reduce the demand placed on public services is now a top priority for both central and local government. From voting or volunteering more, to simply accessing council services online, new habits must be developed to meet the financial challenges the government faces.
With direct human-to-human contact being replaced with human-to-screen interaction, local government websites have a central role to play in delivering that change in behaviour. But behaviour change is fundamentally a soft skilll; you do it with emotions, not excel spreadsheets. So how do you put the human back into that virtual relationship?
-
When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.
-
-
Civil Rights
-
-
-
A Colombian journalist, Guillermo Quiroz Delgado, died in a hospital after suffering head injuries while in police custody.
Police claim that he sustained the injuries after falling from a police vehicle. But his family and colleagues believe he was beaten and thrown from the truck.
-
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not happy that the government might have to actually convict a suspected terrorist of a crime before locking them up forever and throwing away the key. So he’s working on an amendment to the pending defense bill that would make it clear that if the government thinks you’re a terrorist, it can put you in prison without ever having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you so much as vandalized a dive bar bathroom wall.
-
I don’t want to check that “Caucasian” box. To me, it says “hey, I’m white, go get the other guys”.
-
Human rights tribunal hears allegations of abuse and low pay against clothing companies that supply high street stores
-
-
Islamic clerics on Afghanistan’s Ulema Council are the country’s religious authorities, but their opinions on questions of Islamic law are treated as guideposts rather than legally binding decrees.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.
-
This article arises from Future Tense, a joint effort of Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate that looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and for society. On Thursday, Nov. 29, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of Internet governance. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation’s website. The event will also be streamed live.
The Internet is often seen as a place of chaos and disorder, a borderless world in which anonymous trolls roam free and vigilante hackers wreak havoc. But as a crucial United Nations conference on the future of telecommunications looms next week, there are fears governments are secretly maneuvering to restructure and rein in the anarchic Web we have come to know and love, perhaps even ushering in a new era of pervasive surveillance. So just how real is the threat of change and what might it mean?
-
The United States faces “the cyber equivalent of the World Trade Center attack” unless urgent action is taken, a former U.S. intelligence chief warns.
John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton and then as director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and President Obama, told the Financial Times (subscription required) that such an attack would cripple the nation’s banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure.
-
-
We await with interest the report from the joint committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, and trust the committee has properly considered the substantial evidence submitted. The debate is hotting up, with Theresa May pitching hard in the Sun.
We are very interested to see if the Committee took a look at the submission by Caspar Bowden on page 102 of the written evidence highlighting the testimony given by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre), in support of the draft Bill. Mr Davies gave an example of a murder case in Lincolnshire in which increased data retention could have helped.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Auckland has seldom hosted a more globally important meeting than the nine days of negotiations that start today on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
The TPP offers the most promising advance of free trade since the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round. Regional free trade treaties are a poor substitute for a global agreement but when they are based on the same principles and open to all countries that can meet their standards, they are the next best thing.
-
Copyrights
-
Guardian readers may have followed the industrial dispute that played out in New Zealand over The Hobbit. This dispute arose because a union of performers (Equity) sought to exercise its members’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain. It was nothing more and nothing less. What played out was an unexpected journey of misrepresentation, led partly by the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers, but particularly by the New Zealand government.
-
Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as “copyleft” licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law’s protectionist character.
Yet open source licenses (in their current forms) rely on copyright law. Copyright law supplies the bundle of statutory rights that empower the “keep it open” requirement of an open source license. Without copyright law, an author would have to find another legal theory to prevent others from, for example, taking a developer’s code and hiding it behind technological walls. And what do you sue for when someone violates the terms of an open source license? Copyright infringement (among other things).
-
Reports from TorrentFreak that the legitimate website PromoBay.org is being blocked by several UK ISPs highlights some of the problems with website blocking as a strategy and practice.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
We have long been familiar with NetApplications’ web stats. Sorting out all the bias is tough. Today I tried a new tack. For the users who know they have choice, how many use GNU/Linux?
-
You don’t need an anti-virus program on Linux: I’ve said it before, but Don’t Surf in the Nude started because of an interest in internet security, so I can’t resist trying out anti-virus programs in Linux.
I noticed today that Comodo has produced a Linux anti-virus program with real-time scanning. Files are checked as they are accessed or created- for example as they are downloaded from the Internet.
I couldn’t resist trying it out. They’ve created the Windows AV experience on Linux, but like crime in multi-storey car parks, it’s wrong on so many levels.
-
If you see the immense success that Linux, Firefox, Android and other software have achieved over the years, it’s all thanks to the power of open source. What makes open-source software so great is that it is a result of selfless work of thousands of developers from around the world, who, in their free time, volunteer to create or help build their favorite applications.
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
For the past several months there has been work on vhost-blk, an in-kernel virito-blk device accelerator. This kernel-based accelerator can provide measurable speed-ups for disk/block device access by virtualized guest machines.
-
Unfortunately, the rules stipulate only legal United States residents over the age of 18 are eligible, and that current members who renew are excluded; this promotion is only available to new members.
These caveats are disappointing but ultimately moot; the reason to join is to directly support and promote the work of the Foundation which includes direct backing of Linus Torvalds himself. Individual membership is $USD 99 and student membership is $USD 25.
Whether you win the $75 gift card or not, the Linux.com store can hook you up with t-shirts, hats, mugs and accessories relating to your favourite free open source operating system.
-
Graphics Stack
-
With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
-
With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
-
With a number of commits made to the mainline Mesa repository recently that concern the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for pushing OpenGL onto the CPU, here are benchmarks of the very latest Mesa Gallium3D development code from and AMD FX-8350 Vishera Eight-Core CPU when using both LLVM 3.1 and LLVM 3.2 SVN.
-
Wayland 1.0.1 was just released ten days ago but Kristian ended up deciding to release Wayland/Weston 1.0.2 ahead of schedule. The reason for the early releases are due to important bug-fixes and “stable releases are cheap.” The original plan was to release v1.0.2 after the Weston Test Suite landed.
-
A handful of memory-related issues were plugged up yesterday in Mesa thanks to the Coverity static code analysis tools.
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
In an intervirew with Cheerful Ghost, star Linux developer Ryan “Icculus” Gordon said that Unity3D game engine and Steam coming to Linux are good foundations to an awesome 2013.
Ryan has brought numerous game projects and tools to Linux and he has also been working with Humble team. Below are some excerpts (full interview can be read from here):
-
-
-
-
On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.
-
The open-source Alien Arena game is going to see a major update soon that will enhance its renderer and bring other improvements. Alien Arena 7.65 is this exciting game update that’s forthcoming.
-
With November coming to a close, here’s some statistics on the most popular content on Phoronix this month.
During this month, while I may be stepping down from publishing roles here in the near future, on Phoronix I published 206 news articles (an average of more than six Linux/hardware/open-source news items per day) and 22 full-length featured articles. This brings the tally to more than 7,300 news articles and over 2,200 featured articles/reviews since founding the site eight years ago.
-
While this week saw the release of the Doom 3 BFG source-code and word that a Sauerbraten update and a major Alien Arena advancement advancement are forthcoming, what’s the state of the impressive XReaL open-source game engine and the similar OpenWolf engine?
-
- Ryan believes that Valve coming to Linux is specifically because of the Windows Store found in Microsoft Windows 8. This is a large part of it as when I was first to report back in April on Gabe Newell’s distaste for Windows 8.
- Also good for Linux gaming have been Humble Bundle, Unity game engine on Linux, and Kickstarter seeing lots of Linux-friendly work.
-
We’re really happy to announce that we’ll soon be opening IndieCity up to Linux systems, so we’re on the look-out for people with Linux games and applications who’d like to be a part of the launch line-up. If you are such a person, or you want to point us in the direction of someone who is you can email us at Enquiries@IndieCity.com.
-
-
-
Ouya, one of the most popular Kickstarter project, has stuck to its deadlines. The team has posted an update on the official blog that the units will start shipping on scheduled date December 28th. These units are for those developers who backed the project on Kickstarter.
-
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
-
As a Linux user, I’ve learned to appreciate the differences of doing things using the different desktops available.
I started thinking of how one can see going from point A to point B in KDE and GNOME and I could not help to find some amusement in this metaphor.
Ready for the ride? “How do I go to B? Let me count the ways:”
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you’re wanting to play Valve’s Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma.
-
This alpha is special because it is the alpha released the day after rasterman’s birthday.
-
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about non-composited fallback modes in various Desktop Shells and of course I have been asked several times about the fallback modes in KDE Plasma workspaces and whether they would be removed, too. Now instead of answering the same question again and again I decided to write a blog post to discuss the situation in more detail.
-
I took some time this evening to relax in a quiet, empty house by plonking away at the Plasma Active Alarms app UI. I’m still not 100% satisfied yet, but it’s getting a lot closer.
-
-
-
Last post was about a new QML component available in Plasma workspace 4.10 with an important design pattern that comes with it: Lazy loading everywhere when possible.
Next couple of posts will be about other new and old components and the UX concept behind them.
-
These days we are celebrating a special anniversary. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of KDE e.V., the organization behind the KDE Community.
-
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
-
Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
-
What do you think of the GNOME desktop and the recent changes? You have a chance to share your opinions on the GNOME free software project by participating in the 2012 GNOME User Survey.
-
-
Well, well, well… what do you know, after all the fuss about the GNOME Fallback mode being removed from the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, it looks like the GNOME developers decided to implement a similar mode for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.
-
GNOME Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t bumped to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) who is also senior maintainer at udisks.
Already there are many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, though it is still far from completed.
-
-
The portable Linux distro that you can modify yourself is getting a long awaited update, with KDE 4 and more
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
On December 1, Pierre Schmitz proudly informed Arch Linux users that the usual monthly release install medium, Arch Linux 2012.12.01, is now available for download.
-
-
Today the OS4 team is pleased to announce the much anticipated update of OpenDesktop 13 with OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 . With this release we bring new features and bug fixes to OpenDesktop. OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 still continues to revolutionize the linux user experience with an excellent interface, easy to use applications and comes with new options to enhance your OS4 user experience. Superior Functionality with some great new options.
-
After two months of upgrades and bugs fixes, a new version of Parted Magic is ready for release.
-
Patrick Verner announced a couple of hours ago, November 30, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.
-
We finally have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2012-01 “Θάνατος” release, shipping in the following flavours:
* KDE-lite, amd64, en/ de, ≈635 MB.
* KDE-lite, i686, en/ de, ≈630 MB.
* KDE-full, amd64+i686, en/ de (cz, da, es, fr, it, ja, nl, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, uk through liveapt) ≈2.1 GB.
* XFCE, amd64, en/ de, ≈515 MB.
* XFCE, i686, en/ de, ≈510 MB.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
We are sorry to announce today, December 1, that the Mageia 1 operating system has reach end-of-life (EOL) and it is no longer supported.
Announced last year, on June 1, 2011, Mageia 1 was the first Mageia release and it was supported for 18 months.
Starting with December 1, the Mageia foundation stoped “feeding” its first born operating system with security/critical fixes and software updates!
-
Debian Family
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical is pushing Ubuntu in so many different directions. On the desktop, it has introduced Unity; on the server, it’s pursuing state-of-the-art ARM and cloud platforms; and it’s even trying to get Ubuntu on to mobile phones and televisions.
Trying to keep track of how all this is going, how it all fits together and what’s coming next is a full-time job… which is why we spoke to Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, whose job it is to keep track of everything.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
I have been using Ubuntu since 2006 and I always felt that it is one of the easiest to use distro, especially for new Linux users. That was in the past. Nowadays, when people ask me for recommendation, I would certainly recommend Linux Mint over Ubuntu, and here are the reasons.
-
I do realize Xfce is not for everyone, and I used to be one of those people. And I still think the environment is a little rough round the edges. But there are no cardinal issues, nothing that cannot be resolved in about 10 hours of quick coding. And that would truly make this release outstanding to the max. Xubuntu Quetzal is a damn fine version. It cannot get the highest mark, because it needs to work on those little quirks, but 9.8/10 is an extremely good achievement. Honestly, do try this one, you will not be disappointed.
-
-
My bottom line: If you’re considering buying an Internet TV streaming box this holiday season, choose a Roku.
-
-
-
-
As a research operating system, Plan 9 has a bunch of really weird, but useful features. For one, everything about a computer running Plan 9 is distributed; the memory can be running on one machine, the processor on another, and the display can run on yet another machine. This modularity gives Plan 9 the honorable title of, ‘more Unix than Unix’.
-
Phones
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux–based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
“Our objective as a technology and manufacturing company is to create affordable range of products that can contribute to society by extending education for free and without boundaries,” Wishtel CEO Milind Shah said in a statement.
-
-
NEW DELHI: Mumbai-based Wishtel said it will launch computing devices, tablets and netbooks, starting at $50 later this month. The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablets and netbooks, PCs, it said in a statement.
-
-
PetStore.com revealed a new look with enhanced features and search technology last week when the online pet supply store relaunched its website on the open source Magento platform. The 13-year-old e-commerce company had previously run its online retail operations using an in-house website technology environment.
-
Open Source software has been at the heart of modern financial institutions and capital markets for several years. The Open Source model for developing software is now also taking root in the Financial Services sector thanks in part to the OpenMAMA collaborative effort run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
OpenMAMA is an effort to build an open source implementation of the MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API) that financial services companies use for passing data across messaging applications. OpenMAMA was first announced in 2011. The OpenMAMA project includes big names in the financial services sector such as Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan and NYSE Technologies, among others.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
-
All the way back in 2008, Mozilla brought Private Mode (aka Porn Mode) to Firefox 3.1. Over the last four years, not a whole lot has changed in Firefox’s implementation of private mode, but that might change with Firefox 20 in 2013.
Currently when a user enters Private Mode, a new browser window spins up in Firefox (it works the same for Google Chrome’s Incognito mode). The problem with Firefox is that the Private Browsing mode can only operate with the one Private window – that is users cannot concurrently have a regular Firefox window and a Private Browsing Firefox Window open at the same time.
Firefox 20 could change that model (maybe)
-
Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step. ISOC provides organisational and administrative backing to the IETF and other entities that are involved in the stewardship of the global network. It has 55,000 members in 90 chapters around the world and over 130 organisation members.
-
SaaS
-
CMS
-
Project Releases
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Programming
-
The Surface Pro, Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet/laptop for the enterprise, may offer too little goodness for too much money.
-
Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the “real” way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There’s an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more “real” simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
popular announcements when no one’s listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That’s when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry.
This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It’s not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. For the the crops that cover the bulk of US farmland like corn, soy, and cotton, the seed trade is essentially dominated by five companies: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow. And a single company, Monsanto, supplies nearly all genetically modified traits now so commonly used in those crops, which it licenses to its rivals for sale in their own seeds.
-
Australia has become the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
From now, all tobacco company logos and colours will be banned from packets.
They have been replaced by a dreary, uniform, green/brown, colour accompanied by a raft of anti-smoking messages and photographs.
-
Security
-
-
Back in September, we posted a leaked version of a draft for a cybersecurity executive order that the White House had been passing around, mainly to try to force Congress into passing a cybersecurity law. With the last ditch attempt by Senator Harry Reid to move that process forward failing, it took exactly a week for the White House to revise its draft exec order, and start passing it around on November 21st. And, today, that new draft leaked as well. You can see the full draft here or embedded below.
It’s basically more of the same. It insists that there’s a problem without providing any real evidence of that. Much of the order focuses on increasing information sharing among and between different government agencies. As expected, it’s designed to encourage private companies, who are “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” to “participate, on a voluntary basis, in the Enhanced Cybersecurity initiative.” This is part of what had people so concerned about the various bill proposals: whether or not companies would get broadly defined as “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” and then be forced or pressured into sharing private information, all in the name of “cybersecurity!”
-
Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
-
At Cybercom, a component of Strategic Command, he is responsible for planning, coordinating and conducting operations and defense of the Defense Department’s computer networks.
-
The man was Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole who had been spying for the KGB for six years. Grimes didn’t know it then, but she came to suspect Ames as the investigation went on. When the group was scrutinizing lists of people for who might be the mole, their choices in an informal straw poll were weighted by points. Of everyone on their list, Ames got the highest score as the most likely candidate. Eventually, the FBI opened a full investigation, Ames was arrested in 1994, pleaded guilty and is now serving a life term in prison. His motivation appears to have been simple greed.
-
-
He pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact and a gun charge.
-
-
-
-
The Syrian regime was the only government in the world to lay new landmines this year, campaigners said Thursday as they issued an annual report on the use and effect of the devastating weapons.
Mark Hiznay, the editor of the report for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), said the finding is a significant change from last year, when four governments laid mines, and represents the lowest number since the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed in 1997.
-
-
-
-
-
-
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by drone strikes.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Cablegate
-
But the one foremost on some people’s minds was: How will the U.S. react when other countries with drones start taking out American targets?
-
-
-
Question: Why is it OK for the U.S. to not only have a drone program, but also to use it, often times illegally, to bomb the crap out of folks (suspected terrorists as well as civilians) in Central Asia, but it’s not at all cool for China to develop the same technology?
-
It is difficult for journalists to verify the casualties from drone strikes since the government forbids foreign journalists from travelling to the area without a military escort and the Taliban often seal off the sites of strikes.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin in February.
-
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights is an FDL contributor and also Julian Assange’s lawyer. He was in court for Bradley Manning’s testimony this week, and appears on The Real Network News with Paul Jay today to discuss it.
-
We’ve called him a “seed-spilling sex creep,” a “pale nerd king,” and “a real-life The Matrix extra,” so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.
-
PFC Bradley Manning choked back tears during a second day of testimony at a hearing before his military trial as he claimed he didn’t tell his family about the conditions of his confinement at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., because he did not want them to worry.
He also expressed concern that doing so could lead to an end to visiting privileges for his family.
-
That story — itself considered of such little importance by AP that it didn’t even by-line the piece (perhaps the agency didn’t send a reporter either, but simply picked up snippets from other sources) — reduced the entire motion, and the long, intricate, systematic government attack on Manning’s psyche, to a matter of petty petulance on Manning’s part, a whiner’s attempt to weasel out of what’s coming to him.
-
During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
-
During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
Burnett moved quickly from an opening discussion of Assange’s new book, Cypherpunks, to the subject of his relationship to Manning. For allegedly passing cables to WikiLeaks, Manning “could end up spending the rest of his life in jail,” Burnett said. “Do you feel any guilt about that since the information the U.S. government says he stole was published by you?” she asked Assange.
“The case [that was heard this week] is not about whether Bradley Manning allegedly stole cables or not,” Assange said. “The case is about the abuse of Bradley Manning” during his 2-year-long detainment, a portion of which United Nations investigator Juan Mendez described in March after a 14-month investigation as “cruel” and “inhuman.”
“Why was he treated that way?” Assange asked. “Well, his lawyer argues, and many others who have followed the case argues [sic] it was ordered to coerce him into a confession that would bring down me or bring down WikiLeaks… That’s the case that’s ongoing now. And that case is a reflection of the decay in the rule of law.”
-
“Since 2010, Western governments have tried to portray WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation, enabling a disproportionate response from both political figures and private institutions,” he wrote in the Huffington Post.
“It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” he said, citing some of the once secret State Department cables that his site disclosed.
-
Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg praised the Wikileaks release…
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
A newly released study finds that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing three times faster than they were two decades ago, the latest evidence supporting the existence of global warming.
The study was published in the journal Science and is considered an extremely accurate portrayal of ice melts in these polar regions. According to the paper’s authors, the rapid polar ice melting has caused an increase in sea level that may become problematic to low coastal regions.
-
Finance
-
Regulators are worried about the explosive growth of shadow banking, and they should be. Shadow banks were at the heart of the last financial crisis and they’ll be at the heart of the next financial crisis as well. There’s no doubt about it. It’s simply impossible to maintain a system where unregulated, non-bank financial institutions are able to create their own money (credit) without oversight or supervision. The money they create–via off-balance sheets operations, securitization, repo or other unmonitored mega-leveraging activities–feeds into the economy, creates artificial demand, lowers unemployment, and fuels growth. But when the cycle slams into reverse (and debts are no longer serviced on time), then thinly-capitalised shadow banks begin to default one-by-one, creating a daisy-chain of counterparty bankruptcies that push stocks into a nosedive while the economy slips into a long-term slump.
-
-
Censorship
-
An Austrian operator of Tor servers—that were used to anonymously route huge amounts of traffic over the Internet—has been charged with distributing child pornography. This comes after police detected illegal images traversing one of the nodes he maintains.
-
Obviously, there are reasons to investigate possible child porn distribution, but it still seems ridiculous that law enforcement still seems skeptical of tor exit nodes and assumes that they must be used for nefarious intent. This isn’t the first time of course. Last year, here in the US, ICE seized a tor exit node as well. While it eventually returned the equipment, it warned the guy that “this could happen again.” And, of course, just this week, we wrote about a German case where a court actually held someone responsible for the transmission of encrypted traffic on a tor-like system.
-
-
I had really thought that we’d reached the point where lawyers working for large, well-known companies recognize just how incredibly stupid it is to file lawsuits against websites that criticize them. Sure, a decade ago or so, it was common for big companies to go after so called “sucks sites” or “complaints sites,” often alleging trademark infringement. But, at some point, many of them realized that (a) trademark complaints were a dead end since there was no confusion and (b) that these lawsuits only drew a lot more attention to the sites in question. Apparently, however, there are still some throwback lawyers working for United Continental, and they’ve decided to go after a popular passenger complaints site that goes by the creative domain Untied.com.
-
-
The UK government must legislate to establish a new press “self-regulation” body — independent of both publishers and politicians but overseen by media regulator Ofcom — because newspapers have “wreaked havoc” in the lives of innocents, says the nine-month inquiry report in to the culture, practice and ethics of the business.
Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.
-
Privacy
-
Civil Rights
-
Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for the policies which govern use of its service.
For the last few years, as I’d mentioned in Wired a few months ago, Facebook held sham elections where people could ostensibly vote on its policy changes. Despite lots of responses (the most recent Site Governance vote got far more people participating than signed the secession petitions on the White House website), Facebook never promoted these policy change discussions to users, and the public has never made a substantive impact on site governance.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Syria lost two major links with the outside world on Thursday as the largest commercial airport in the capital canceled flights because of fighting nearby and Internet access disappeared across the country, perhaps signaling an impending escalation by the government against the uprising, opponents of the Syrian government said.
-
An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Trademarks
-
Copyrights
-
After snapping up film rights for $5 million, Universal is upset over a porn movie it says is a “rip-off, plain and simple.”
-
Still, the thing that strikes me about this — and which isn’t mentioned in the filing at all — is that Fifty Shades, itself, actually came out of a “pornographic adaptation” of the Twilight series. In fact, while those behind Fifty Shades have sought to erase this history, it does seem like a relevant point. Fifty Shades was pornographic Twilight “fan fiction,” which was later rewritten to scrub it of references to Twilight. While Fifty Shades’ author, EL James, her agent and publisher all like to claim that the Twilight fan fic James wrote and the eventual Fifty Shades book are really different works, someone compared the two using a plagiarism checker and found them to be 89% similar.
-
Almost half of the UK’s internet users aged twelve and over cannot say with confidence whether or not the sources of online content they use are legal or not, according to new research by OfCom. The study is the latest in an ongoing series of reports by the government’s media regulator attempting to identify trends in online copyright infringement before the ‘graduated response’ system for tackling online piracy set out in the Digital Economy Act is enacted.
Of the 5099 people surveyed between May and July this year, 47% weren’t able to distinguish with certainty between legal and illegal services, while only 16% actually admitted to accessing unlicensed content, and only 8% said they relied on illegal sources of music.
-
Malt points out that there are several legal services, most of which are inexpensive, including ad-funded streaming services which give listeners access to thousands of tracks for free. (“Inexpensive” is, of course, relative. Ofcom’s study shows that music retailers and streaming services would convert a majority of casual infringers by cutting prices 50-70%. resulting in 2-3x the number of purchases.)
-
A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.
-
The saga of Cindy Garcia and her attempt to get The Innocence Of Muslims trailer off of YouTube continues. If you’ll recall, Garcia is one of the actresses who performed in the controversial almost-film “Innocence of Muslims”, which sparked protests throughout the Arab world. Since the protests and media blitz began (as opposed to since the flim’s trailer was released), Garcia has been trying to get the YouTube video taken down by throwing the proverbial legal kitchen sink at proverbial legal kitchen-everyone, including claims that she was duped by the flimmakers and that she owned a copyright on her portion of her performance. Buttressing her argument was her claim that she never signed any kind of release for the film.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
“The vast majority of us can do with smaller and cheaper computers,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “It’s obvious to anyone that a smartphone is a PC for most purposes, and all we have to do is add a larger screen, a keyboard and printing to do just about anything possible with larger more expensive PCs. I have no doubt that the future holds mostly all-in-one PCs with everything in the keyboard or mouse.”
-
-
Eben Upton, a key player in the Raspberry Pi’s genesis, said out-of-work graduates should get busy with computers in their spare time if they want to land a job. And he didn’t mean logging into Facebook.
Speaking in a Google Hangout video chat conference call thing, Upton drew on his years of hiring newbies at chip giant Broadcom and his time teaching computer science at Cambridge University.
-
Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for sub-Saharan Africa, today announced it has added the product sets of NetFort to its portfolio.
“NetFort addresses the business need to monitor what users are doing across their networks,” commented Jan-Jan van der Vyver, Managing Director of Linux Warehouse, “and complements our existing data centre stack.
-
(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 29, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, applauds the release of the flagship report “The Information Economy Report 2012: The Software Industry and Developing Countries” by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report provides specific recommendations on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for national policy makers and includes two examples of the value of LPI’s training and certification programs for ICT development.
-
Desktop
-
-
In our recent ZaReason UltraLap 430 review, Ars alum Ryan Paul lamented that even though putting Linux on laptops is easier today than ever, it’s still not perfect. Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working. Major OEMs aren’t yet putting forth the same concerted effort to build and support laptops with Linux as they are their more high-margin servers.
[...]
The XPS 13 used in the Developer Edition features a number of upgrades over the pilot Project Sputnik hardware, including an Intel i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge CPU and 8GB of RAM (the pilot hardware used Sandy Bridge CPUs and had 4GB of RAM). The Developer Edition also comes with a 256 GB SATA III SSD, and retains the pilot version’s 1366×768 display resolution. The launch hardware costs $1,549 and includes one year of Dell’s “ProSupport.” Additional phone support options aren’t yet available.
-
This is the XPS-13 at $1549 in “developer version”. It’s an “Ultrabook”TM with that other OS. I guess it’s a nearly optimal notebook with GNU/Linux although I would prefer Debian GNU/Linux instead of Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
-
Linux fans may recall the excitement that greeted the launch of Dell’s “Project Sputnik” earlier this year.
Made possible through an internal skunkworks effort, the project aimed to create an Ubuntu-preloaded laptop targeting developers, in particular, with what Dell has called a “client to cloud” solution.
-
Do you want a serious—I mean serious—developer laptop? Then Dell and Ubuntu have the system for you in the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.
-
-
-
Dell has launched an Ubuntu version of its attractive XPS 13 ultrabook. The ultrabook is aimed at developers, offering them “the essentials they want” bundled up in a Linux-harboring device. The laptop is available for purchase now from Dell starting at $1,449. You can also nab a Windows version of the machine if Ubuntu isn’t your thing.
-
-
What once was just an internal skunkworks project, Dell’s Project Sputnik has taken off with the release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition. The thin and light darling of the Ultrabook crowd is now shipping with a Precise Pangolin Ubuntu build pre-installed, along with feature-complete drivers that ensure maximum peripheral compatibility right out of the box.
-
-
-
-
Dell has launched its Ubuntu laptop for developers in the US. The project, which was first announced in May, uses an XPS 13 Ultrabook as the base for a customised Ubuntu 12.04 installation that is aimed at application developers and systems administrators. Dell has worked with Ubuntu sponsor Canonical and various hardware manufacturers to provide support for the hardware, and the system ships with additional features such as the sputnik command that allows developers to easily replicate their development environment on other machines.
-
Server
-
According to IBM’s 2011 Annual Report, by September 2015 fully 50% of IBM’s profit is expected to come from its software group (SWG). On the surface, this is surprising, because software is a distinct minority of IBM’s total revenue. In 2011, SWG’s $25B represented less than a quarter of IBM’s revenues earned. Here is IBM’s revenue broken down by business unit (Finance and Other are omitted here).
-
The latest update of Rocks codename Emerald Boa is now released. Emerald Boa is available for CentOS 6.3 (Rocks 6.1). Rocks 5.6 will be released when CentOS 5.9 becomes available The Rocks-supplied OS rolls have all updates applied as of November 27, 2012.
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
-
-
We interview Jordan Brock from indie development house Hit the Sticks about Just Tactics which is a cross-platform turn-based strategy game.
-
Kernel Space
-
LXF: Has the Linux desktop failed because there’s too much choice? [Laughter]
Linus Torvalds: I don’t think the desktop is doing too well, and there’s technical reasons. You’ve probably seen my rants about how, to some degree, I think the desktop is going in the wrong direction, but the big reason is normal people don’t want to install an operating system. You can’t get a desktop unless you have pre-installs, and that hasn’t happened. There are cases where, if you knew where to look, you could get Linux pre-installed if you bought Dell. But, realistically, nobody has done pre-installs.
-
Thousands of people contribute to Linux every day. As our annual “Who Writes Linux” paper reports, individuals from around the world are writing millions of lines of code every year. Equally important are the hundreds of companies supporting Linux every year, from sponsoring Linux kernel development to collaborating on technical initiatives to supporting The Linux Foundation.
-
-
Linux 3.7 supports ARM64, the processor used in the Raspberry Pi, and Intel’s SMAP security feature. The next kernel release will also include new tools for tracing processes and improved collaboration with Microsoft’s hypervisor.
-
In addition to the Samsung Exynos ARM SoCs being really attractive right now due to the impressive performance of the A15-based Exynos 5 Dual, the hardware is also nice for its open-source DRM graphics driver that keeps advancing.
-
Rocks, the RHEL/CentOS-derived operating system focused upon supporting Linux on real and virtual clusters, has delivered on its 6.1 release.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
After earlier this week delivering a 12-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison with the open-source Linux Gallium3D graphics driver, being published today is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side. Tested for this article were eight NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from multiple hardware generations while using the very latest open-source Nouveau driver code.
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
Recently I asked Ryan C. Gordon some questions about his work in porting games, the current state of gaming in Linux, and where he sees it in the future. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, Ryan has been involved in porting many games and other software to Linux and Mac OSX. Most recently he has been working with the folks at Humble Bundle to ensure their games are cross-platform.
-
The game tells the story of Hoston, a young botanist who is on a quest to save his father from a mysterious illness. Along with his two best friends Alina and Edessot, the three friends embark on a quest seeking a rare herb to cure the illness of Hoston’s father. Little do they know, it is the beginning of a winding journey that unravels his father’s past and the mystery of Pier Solar and the Great Architects.
-
-
Follow the story of an atypical robot hero set out to rescue his robot-girlfriend, and in turn save the city and defeat the bad guys.
-
If you are an Indie game fan or a developer, you must have heard of IndieCity. IndieCity is an online Indie game store that allows developers to publish their own games and earn revenue/donations in return. Much like Steam, it had a client that users can use to download and play the games. But unlike Steam, people at IndieCity have announced that they will bring their own client to Linux, and its before their Mac version.
-
Desktop Environments
-
We’ve taken you through a tour of Window Managers in Linux, and now it’s time to show you the Window Manager’s bigger brother: the desktop environment, or DE for short. With a sea of choices out there, we can see where Linux newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed. Catch us after the break and we’ll show you some of our favorites, along with a few honorable mentions.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
While Qt 5.0 is hopefully being released in December, Digia has announced today the release Qt 4.8.4.
-
-
-
The development on KDE 4.10 is is on full swing (we have created a KDE 4.10 update page) and today the KDE project leader Aaron Seigo announe that the upcoming release of KDE will change how window grouping is handled in the task manager.
Currently multiple windows are grouped together in the task manager and this is indicated by a black arrow and a small number showing the number of multiple windows open.
-
Last Tuesday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning and presented a video interview with emeritus board member Mirko Böhm. Today, we focus on the present with interviews with two current KDE e.V. Board members, Lydia Pintscher and Cornelius Schumacher. On the bottom, we’ve got a nice puzzle for you. And next week, we’ll present an impression of the day to day activities of KDE e.V.
-
Hello ROSA users and just KLook fans. I have some great news for you. Several days ago we published on the our build system build system – ABF a new version of KLook with the many improvements. Most of these improvement have made in KLook architecture, so you will not see many visible changes, but you will felt them.
-
Thanks to Windows 8 and Valve, GNU/Linux may finally become a first class citizen for the gaming industry. So which desktop should be your preferred for Linux gaming? I will answer that question but first see how different is KDE when compared with it’s cousins Unity and Gnome Shell.
Martin Gräßlin, a lead KDE developer, addresses some queries around a topic bugging Gnome and Unity users – the fallback mode. I recommend reading his ‘abridged’ post. Here I am picking the points that I found interesting for our readers. The questions is: will KDE retain the fallback in 4.10 and after?
-
Qt lead developer Lars Knoll has announced the release schedule for version 5.0 of the C++ GUI framework. According to this schedule, Qt 5.0 is due to arrive before the end of the year. The first “major” release in eight years was originally planned to be released in summer 2012, but its arrival has been delayed by the main developers’ move from Nokia to Digia.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
GNOME is changing, as every community driven project, GNOME is involved in a daily evolution.
-
-
-
New Releases
-
Gentoo Family
-
I graphed the Gentoo Developer Web of Trust, as motivated by the (outdated) Debian Web of Trust.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
According to all Linux distribution packages, Oracle Linux has a much smaller footprint than the Windows Server operating system. This means that if you want to maximize your storage space on a server, Oracle Linux could be a good option for you.
While it does not run on many older x86 machines like some of the really small Linux distributions, there is an Amazon E3 Cloud package for Oracle Linux that can be used if you are planning on using Amazon’s very capable cloud based storage environment.
-
-
Fedora
-
The Fedora 18 release date has been delayed about half dozen times in last couple of months. Other than a few snide remarks, Fedora has mostly been given a pass since one of the features causing delays is the new installer – and no one wants that too early. However, the release team recently released Fedora 18 Beta, giving users a preview.
Fedora 18 should be sporting a new package manager currently dubbed DNF, a fork of Yum 3.4. Yum and DNF will be included in Fedora 18, but early plans are to remerge the two eventually. One of the advantages of DNF for end users is increased performance and simplified operation. Check out Fedora’s wiki for more technical information on DNF and the underlying library Hawkey.
-
-
Debian Family
-
Veteran Debian developer Bdale Garbee will give the third keynote at the Australian national Linux conference next year.
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
he developers of Linux Mint 14 haven’t forgotten about their users and are porting some of the features for the previous 13 release.
Linux Mint 13 is an LTS or Long Term Support. This means that it benefits from five years of security updates. Why not benefit from other great features implemented in Linux Mint 14?
-
-
-
-
If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi.
This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
-
-
I recently made a post comparing the specs of the A10 based MK802 to the RaspBerry Pi. For those who are unaware the MK802 is a low cost, Android based media PC you can pick up on Amazon for less than 40 USD. A little over a month ago I replaced my desktop sized media computer with an MK802 – today I would like to share with you my thoughts on the device.
-
A job ad posted by Nokia on employment network LinkedIn sees the company looking to hire a senior engineer to work on new mobile devices and software, but they’re not Windows Phones. It’s for Linux. Which is the core of Android.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The pair of Motorola smartphones will see a Jelly Bean update starting the first week of December.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
-
-
PengPod plans to start shipping 7 and 10 inch tablets with support for Linux as well as Google Android in January. The company, founded by Neal Peacock, has been raising money to help support software development for the tablets — and Peacock just wrote in to let us know the project has surpassed its initial $49,000 fundraising goal.
-
Whether you prefer open source or proprietary technology, there’s no shortage of virtualization hypervisors to choose from these days. With so many options, which solutions are enterprises selecting, and where will momentum in this channel lead in the future? I recently spoke with virtualization expert Jon Braunhut, who offered a lot of interesting observations and predictions on this topic based on his experience as chief scientist at KEMP Technologies.
-
Geeks often describe programs as being “open source” or “free software.” If you’re wondering exactly what these terms mean and why they matter, read on. (No, “free software” doesn’t just mean that you can download it for free.)
-
-
Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.
-
Whether you want to monitor your network bandwidth, secure your network against malware, or setup a simple mail server, there’s an open source or free software available for the job. Presented here are more than 40+ of them
-
Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words “open source.” Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable “software” policy.
-
Web Browsers
-
Using HTTPS doesn’t just mean that your traffic is encrypted—encryption is only half of the story and it’s useless without authentication. What good is it to encrypt something between two parties if you can’t be sure of the identity of the person to whom you’re talking? Consequently, being able to serve HTTPS traffic means you must posses a cryptographic certificate attesting to your identity. Acquiring such a certificate requires you prove your identity to one of many Certificate Authorities, or CAs.
-
Chrome
-
-
Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple’s Passbook application.
-
-
Mozilla
-
Seamonkey is not the first name that comes to mind when you talk about browsers. Nor is it a fourth. In fact, it’s not even a browser. But then, in those terms, neither is Opera. Seamonkey is an all-in-one cross-platform Internet suite, a collection of Web-facing programs all bundled into a single product. Worth your time? Perhaps, we will discover today.
-
-
hroughout its history, Mozilla has supported innovation on the web by investing in people and its own development. Today Mozilla is moving to the next stage in its evolution, formally investing in a mobile startup that could help to enable its nascent FirefoxOS platform.
Mozilla is participating in a $25 million series C funding round for Everything.me, which is an HTML5-focused mobile startup. Mozilla is joining the venture team of Telefonica Digital as well as SingTel Innov8 in the funding round.
-
-
While the phone Firefox OS was running on couldn’t take advantage of a mobile data network, the developer was able to tether that phone to another one. Obviously, this being pre-alpha software, things didn’t work as well or as smoothly as in the final version. But even in that early form and running on underpowered hardware, Firefox OS showed promise.
-
Mozilla is trying to fix a problem that’s bugging its Android users running Firefox. Since Adobe doesn’t support Flash for Android or any other mobile devices, Firefox users were not able to play H.264 encoded videos.
-
Databases
-
-
Widenius told The Reg he’s scared about the future of MySQL. He said he is concerned that if the database giant further breaches its commitments to the EU, it will produce an irreconcilable fork: with MySQL at Oracle going one way and those extending MySQL – such as Widenius’s MariaDB and Facebook and Twitter – going another.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Kohei Yoshida is a well-known individual on the LibreOffice project. To many, he is considered as one of the core group of developers who have contributed to the steady development and code improvement of the project, and one of the leaders of the calc component. Kohei takes a little time out from his busy schedule to let us know a little more about himself and why the LibreOffice project appeals to him.
-
CMS
-
Healthcare
-
VA is continually evolving the health care we deliver to Veterans, from enhancing treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to enabling clinicians and patients to use mobile devices to improve care. The VA Innovation Initiative (VAi2) supports this constructive evolution by tapping the talent and expertise of individuals inside and outside of government for creative solutions and providing a method for new ideas to be evaluated, tested, and deployed.
-
Business
-
The Open Source CRM project Zurmo has released Zurmo Version 0.8.0, which allows users to send emails directly from within the application.
-
Semi-Open Source
-
Ah, open source … so free, so transparent, so egalitarian, but not always. Increasingly, vendors are slapping the label “open source” on products that do not offer customers the freedom and control originally intended and instead lock them in, reports Simon Phipps at InfoWorld.
-
Funding
-
Acquia, a U.S. startup that advises enterprises on open source content management system Drupal, said it has raised $30 million from Investor Growth Capital and other venture firms to finance its expansion.
-
So, please consider supporting one or two of your favorites projects. On my side, I’m installing Ubuntu, just to buy Uberwriter, and I have contributed a little with Ubuntu at the time of downloading it. And I have already made my very small contribution to the Debian Handbook.
-
New round of funding will help build and expand the operations of open source enterprise content management system vendor Acquia.
-
A focus on young people in the open source world is just starting to become a priority, and we’re also starting to see more larger corporations demonstrating their commitment to open source. Open source is indeed spreading as more and more people understand the value of the open source way.
-
Project Releases
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Access/Content
-
Today PLOS Computational Biology launched a collection of seven existing Software articles which present novel biological insights on an open access platform and break new ground by sharing the open source software that enabled the featured discoveries. This combination of Open Access and Open Source can only help push the development of computational biology’s many diverse fields – and create a model for other scientific disciplines.
-
-
Open Hardware
-
Build Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night RidingBuild Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night Riding Riding a bicycle at night is a bit dangerous, but electronics blogger Jenna DeBoisblanc shows off how to build a system that includes turn signals, a strobe light, speedometer, and brake lights to keep you safe.
-
Programming
-
The LLVM compiler infrastructure is frequently talked about on Phoronix whether it be about its Clang C/C++ compiler or one of the innovative use-cases for LLVM such as with the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver or as a JIT engine within some free software projects like Mono. However, for those that don’t understand much of the internals of LLVM, here’s a brief overview.
-
Some of the would-be cool kids of software say we are in the “post open source” world. Several weeks ago, James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, put it this way on Twitter: “younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github.”
But as Outercurve Foundation’s CTO Stephen Walli replied, “promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software transmitted diseases.” Since then, I have heard more and more people mention this trend of regarding the copyright and collaboration terms of a project as irrelevant bureaucracy. Appealing as it may be to treat the wisdom of the years as pointless, doing so creates a problem for the future.
-
-
-
-
Genode OS, the very interesting research operating system, is out with a new release that boasts some interesting features.
Genode OS is one of the early non-Linux operating systems that ported Gallium3D and GEM for its graphics drivers, provided a Gallium3D LiveCD, and then grew ambitions to become a general purpose OS. In its latest release it was ported to ARM and picked up other features, but now it’s been even more improved.
-
-
-
If there’s one valuable thing Twitter holds, it is the company’s vast treasure trove of billions of tweets. It is an opus of thoughts and utterances, all made in real time, that make up the company’s most precious asset — the “interest graph.”
Twitter knows this. And for years now the company has had agreements with a number of third-party companies, giving them access to the “firehose,” or the raw stream of Twitter data flowing through the company’s pipes. These companies comb through the scores of tweets to find meaningful insights, and resell that information to companies across multiple industries. It’s a “big data” economy, built entirely around Twitter’s never-ending flow of information.
-
Hardware
-
In a piece called Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it SemiAccurate reports that Japan’s PC Watch has reliable, but unidentified reports that Intel has told OEM’s that Intel will decline to offer pluggable processors for the Broadwell architecture (which will appear after 2013′s Haswell architecture.) Instead OEMs will recieve ball grid array multi-chip modules (BGM MCM). These modules will be installed onto the motherboard by soldering, effectively making the CPU part of the motherboard.
Readers please remember that this isn’t an Intel press release. This news is only off-the record reports from manufacturers who have been talking to Intel. Intel also has a history of changing their plans.
It could all be speculation because it would be silly to solder a very expensive processor onto a cheap motherboard. What’s more likely is that in 2014 Intel will focus on delivering hi-frequency Haswell chips for the desktop, while it reserves the next-generation Broadwell chips for low-power applications. This would explain the rumors of why there will be no socketable Broadwell chips. So, Intel simply skips a single generation for the Desktop sockets. No more, no less.
-
-
Health/Nutrition
-
A study published this week in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, “Novel and High Volume Use Flame Retardants in US Couches Reflective of the 2005 PentaBDE Phase Out,” reveals that 85% of couches purchased in the United States between 1985 and 2010 contain chemical flame retardants. The most prevalent include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), tris (1-3-dichloroisopropyl) phosphate (TDCPP), and the newer Firemaster 550 (FM 550) mixture, as well as tris (4-butylphenyl) phosphate (TBPP), which according to the study has not been reported to be used as a flame retardant until now.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
Drone crashes at overseas civilian airports have increased significantly over the past two years, according to a new report by The Washington Post…
-
-
-
This can’t go on. American drones have taken lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines. Meaningful public review of this most secretive of government programs is long overdue. We don’t need a new rule book; we just need the existing rules — international human rights and humanitarian law — to be applied.
-
Warren, who the court said was a rising star in the agency, was accused of drugging and then sexually assaulting a married Muslim woman while working as a high-level official for the U.S. embassy in Algeria in 2008. He targeted the woman because he believed her religion and local customs would keep her from reporting the assault, the sentencing judge concluded, according the ruling. Later that year, the woman reported Warren’s conduct to an official at the embassy, according to the ruling.
-
-
W
ith the new vacancy on the fifth floor at Langley, a robust debate has resumed over whether the Central Intelligence Agency should continue trending toward paramilitary activity and targeted killings, or return to its traditional focus on sending spies to recruit agents and collect human intelligence. The controversy was foreseen as early as 2003, when Robert Kaplan essentially argued one side of the discussion now underway. He pointed to the “old rules” whereby small groups of men overthrew large governments, and asserted that future technological developments will “make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.” His contention: Such acts are morally preferable to war, and that “the war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified.”
-
Judicial Watch announced today that it has received documents from the U.S. State Department pertaining to the targeting and assassination of U.S. born terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi by a U.S. drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011. In 2010, President Obama reportedly authorized the assassination of al-Aulaqi, the first American citizen added to the government’s “capture or kill” list, describing the radical Muslim cleric as “chief of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”
-
-
-
Bottom line: It is fraught with discrepancies and outright contradictions, and it gives a good sense of why the number of civilian casualties in general is such a disputed subject.
-
That’s an astonishingly low rate of civilian deaths. And it’s fiercely contested by researchers who have tracked the CIA drone program.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
A recent opinion piece in The Daily Athenaeum declared that the Obama administration’s continued use of the drone strike program, originally developed and implemented under President Bush and expended by President Obama, is unethical, given the civilian casualties attributed to the strikes and the legal questions raised by several international figures.
This piece represents one side in the debate involving a subject that has been gaining increasing attention in the national consciousness since the past election.
Although those opposed to the program raise very valuable questions, they generally fail to provide viable alternatives. The question they raise about the authority of a government to carry out military operations within the borders of another sovereign country, especially without that country’s consent, is an issue of utmost importance if the United States is to have any hope of achieving tangible victories in the upcoming phases of what is commonly called “the war on terror.”
-
…jailed for protesting drone strikes.
-
It seems to me to be flat-out wrong to take out people who pose a threat to us, killing alongside these presumed threats their families and neighbors.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
“This waste of money is even more shameful when you consider millions and millions of Americans out of work or losing their homes and here’s ‘Mr. Green Jeans’ Obama spending money to duplicate what’s already being done by his own government and the private sector,” said political consultant Mike Baker.
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Columbia study is quick to critique the drone data compiled by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, yet it devotes negligible attention to potential shortcomings in the Bureau’s reporting. The study repeatedly applauds the Bureau’s investigative practices, analysis criteria and the breadth of its sources. It offers the most guarded criticism, writing only, “we do not agree with the Bureau’s analysis of media sources in all cases.” Upon reading Columbia’s “Counting Drone Strike Deaths,” one is led to conclude that the Bureau’s casualty estimates are both methodologically rigorous and empirically sound.
[...]
Columbia only analyzed reports for 2011, but had they continued on with their research, they would have found that these problems pervade the Bureau’s reporting on strikes from 2004 through 2012.
-
-
As President Barack Obama enters his second term, the nation will likely scrutinize the president’s actions to improve the economy and implement certain “Obamacare” initiatives while foreign policy takes the backseat. Obama’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, however, is unmistakably the biggest failing of his administration thus far and deserves more attention.
The drone strikes, which began under former President George W. Bush in 2004, use unmanned weapons to remotely target hostile militant leaders. The technology is fairly new, and carries extreme risks, as the drones have proven to be very dangerous to civilians. Since Obama took office, as many as 53 civilians have been killed in attacks directed toward militants. The number of militants in Pakistan who died in drone strikes since 2009 is 2,681.
The definition of militant is not without question. The president defines “militants” as “all military-age males in a strike zone.” It is an utterly transparent tactic to lower the number of reported civilian deaths. Because of the murky definition of “militant” it is hard to know exactly how many actual civilians are killed by drone strikes.
-
-
Donilon’s statement also came about a month after United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson announced in a conference at the Harvard Law School that the UN Human Rights Council will form early next year a unit that will investigate drone attacks that also caused civilian deaths.
-
-
-
The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”
In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.
The facts, however, suggest otherwise.
From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks. Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.
-
Cablegate
-
-
Looking beyond the Assange/WikiLeaks case, it’s worth noting that, unless one clings to a relatively neutered view of leadership, be it in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere, it is only risk-takers who possess the capacity to change a collective worldview. That kind of leadership can be obnoxious and hard for others to take—so much so, in fact, that many won’t recognize it as leadership at all. But without the risk-takers, where would we be? Have you taken any risks lately? Were they worth the price you may have had to pay?
-
-
-
-
-
As a Canadian, perhaps I should feel a surge of patriotic pride now that Mark Carney has been designated the new head of the Bank of England – quite a step up for the current governor of the Bank of Canada. There is no question that Mr. Carney is a market-savvy guy (he did, after all, work for the vampire squid), and his experiences as Chairman on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) suggests that he is sensitive to the ongoing systemic risks present in our increasingly complex global banking system.
-
-
-
-
-
An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history has testified that he felt like a doomed, caged animal after he was arrested in Baghdad for allegedly sending classified information to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.
-
-
In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy Now! from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. “Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. … Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade.” Assange also speaks about his new book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” “The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies,” he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. “The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward,” Assange says. “Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States.
-
-
In the glittering Knightsbridge district, in the heart of London, just behind the famous Harrods department store, there is a red-brick building guarded day and night by Scotland Yard agents and by one or two large police vans equipped with cameras keeping a watchful eye. Refuge has been taken here at the Ecuadorian Embassy by the man who infuriated the White House and diplomats all around the world, by exposing war crimes and secret deals: Julian Assange. It is in this embassy that l’Espresso met the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in this building since the 19th of June. A hundred and sixty-five days, in addition to the eighteen months he spent under house arrest forced to wear an electronic manacle around his ankle.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
When it comes to progress on climate change negotiations, the best thing for Canada to do is to stay home and stop sabotaging the process, says the leader of the Green Party.
“Canada continues to be a country that pushes other countries to do less. Our role is not just an embarrassment, it’s reckless and brings our once good national reputation into disrepute,” argued Elizabeth May at a news conference in Ottawa today.
World governments are in Doha, Qatar working out a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. Canada announced it was pulling out of the Kyoto process last year but is still officially involved in the Kyoto process until Dec. 15.
-
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Five registered non-profits run by super-lobbyist Rick Berman’s for-profit PR firm, Berman & Co., are the target of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint filed this month by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
-
A press release from a conservative think tank criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provides crucial insight into how the organization works — and helps illustrate that while ALEC says its purpose is to facilitate an exchange of “practical, state-level public policy issues,” it sells access by the private sector to lawmakers and essentially sells policymaking to the highest bidders. The release documents how the “exchange” that happens at ALEC is more like a stock exchange rather than a free marketplace of ideas.
-
Censorship
-
-
As a Russian immigrant whose grandparents were killed by Nazis, Irina Chevaldina appreciates the First Amendment better than many Americans.
That is why she is refusing to back down against one of the richest men in Miami, Raanan Katz, a minority owner of the Miami Heat who also owns more than 6,000,000 square feet of retail space in Miami.
-
If Parliament votes on the press, the press isn’t free. To split hairs between statutory underpinning and statutory regulation is not an acceptable distinction in a free and democratic country.
-
Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.
-
The Internet has always been guided forwards by collaborative, open approaches. We believe that these approaches are one of the reasons why the Web has become and remained the wonderful, powerful and empowering place we know today. In the coming weeks, this successful model of governing and shaping the future of the Web will be at risk.
Today, we’re launching a kit of tools and resources to inform and mobilize the Internet community about what’s happening at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and support people in taking grassroots action. Mozilla stands behind transparency in Internet governance, but a free and open Internet depends on you.
On December 3rd, nations from around the world will be meeting in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a meeting of the ITU. These governments will be meeting behind closed doors to determine if an old treaty will be amended to allow countries the power to more fully regulate and control the structure of the Web.
-
Remember Raanan Katz? The Florida real estate mogul and part-owner of the Miami Heat, made some news earlier this year for suing Google and a blogger for copyright infringement after the blogger posted an “unflattering” photo of Katz. Katz, who was clearly annoyed at the blogger — a former Katz tenant who is (to put it mildly) not a fan of Katz — for blogging critical stories about Katz (including highlighting some earlier lawsuits Katz had been involved with and posting the related legal documents). In addition to suing for defamation, Katz purchased the rights to the “unflattering” photo the blogger, Irina Chevaldina, had posted of him, and then sued for copyright infringement. Google was included on the case for refusing to take down the photo. While Google was later dropped from the case (one assumes that someone somewhere finally realized that, perhaps that end of the suit wasn’t going to end well), Katz has continued his case against Chevaldina.
Earlier this month, the judge in the case signed off on a ridiculously broad injunction against Chevaldina, that not only says that she can’t “trespass” on Katz’s properties, but that she can’t blog anything that is intended to “otherwise cause harm” to Katz. That doesn’t seem even remotely constitutional. Criticizing someone is protected speech, even if it may (or is intended) to cause harm to someone’s business. And the “trespass” injunction may seem like no big deal, especially since trespassing is already illegal. But, in this case, the court has indicated that by “trespassing” they mean that Chevaldina cannot even go to any of the properties that Katz owns — which includes stores and shopping malls.
-
Privacy
-
We’ve written a few times about how the FBI has been doing a bang up job foiling its own terrorist plots, so we’re a bit skeptical every time we see headlines of some giant “terrorist bust.” Almost every time, once you dig into the details, it involves some gullible, confused suckers who had no actual connection to terrorists, but were led along by FBI agents and informers until they were “convinced” to take part in a “plot” that was entirely concocted by the FBI. The latest headline-grabbing case of “arrested terrorists” actually appears like it may have slightly more substance, however, in that they may have actually had some sort of connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
-
-
-
The trial of former CIA agent and whistle-blower John Kiriakou has prompted many Americans to strongly criticize the Obama administration and its lack of oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Kiriakou, who uncovered the torture program that was started under President Bush and continued under President Obama, will face 30 months in jail and lose his government pension. Since his trial began in April, whistle-blowers such as Kirk Wiebe and William Binney, both of whom worked at the National Security Agency and then left because of mismanagement and corruption, have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar data processing and analysis systems.
-
Civil Rights
-
The only reason to redact is embarrassment.
-
A Senate committee on Thursday unanimously backed sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
-
nited States (US) State Department spokesperson on Thursday demanded Pakistan to release Dr. Shakil Afridi, a CIA spy who helped in locating al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in Abbotababad, a garrison town of Pakistan.
-
Yesterday I attended the first of the Department of Justice’s Advisory panel meetings on the new Data Protection regulation laws being proposed at the EU.
The new laws are already the subject of intense lobbying and pressure. The key changes are designed to strengthen the privacy rights of citizens, in several ways:
-
A couple of months ago, Julian Sanchez wrote about the ridiculous situation in which he filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to reveal the latest semi-annual report from the Justice Department concerning how it was implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. As we’ve been discussing, for a while, how the FISA Amendments Act broadly expanded the ability of federal law enforcement, in particular the NSA, to spy on everyone. While there is some language that suggests it’s only supposed to be used on foreigners, it’s been revealed that there is a secret interpretation of the bill, that likely allows them to use a loophole (plus the secret interpretation) to collect and review tons of data on Americans. The FAA is up for renewal, and it’s likely that Congress will rush through a five year extension — despite overwhelming evidence that many in Congress don’t know how the NSA is interpreting the bill (and even making statements that directly contradict the evidence of how the bill is being used).
[...]
Once again, this seems to raise questions about the process here — and how much of it really has to do with law enforcement officials being careful… and how much of it is purely political, seeking to hide damaging information that might impact the FAA renewal.
-
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.
-
Earlier this summer, we wrote about Syria briefly deleting itself from the internet. We wondered about the logic behind this, seeing as other countries who attempted this — namely, Egypt and Libya — had regime change follow quite closely after such a decision. Furthermore, not too long ago, reports were that the Syrian government was trying to use the internet to get its own story out. Of course, a lot has happened in Syria in the interim. So perhaps views have changed.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Trademarks
-
It turns out that this holy grail of nicknames is apparently worth suing over, at least in the eyes of a musician. Apparently Mark Durante, a man that the TMZ link describes as a “1980s musician” (meaning he made his bones before Kevin Durant could tie his own shoes), claims he had trademarked the term “Durantula” long ago and has been using it to sell mechandise for years. As such, he is taking Durant, along with Durant’s private company, Nike, and Panini America Inc. (ostensibly so that the trial will be catered with delicious sandwiches), to court over the mark.
-
Copyrights
-
HONEY OBSESSED anthropomorphic bear Winnie the Pooh made headlines this month for all the wrong reasons.
Pooh, of Pooh Corner, the Hundred Acre Wood, has apparently carved out something of a niche for himself as a model and no longer stresses about honey, attempts to cheer up a donkey, or takes an interest in the machinations of a piglet. Nay, instead he is lending his face to children’s laptops these days.
One of those laptops was confiscated from a nine year old girl this month, simply because she might have downloaded one CD.
-
About ORG: a digital rights campaigning organisation. We care about the impact of technology and technology policy on our rights, on society and the public. We work across privacy, government surveillance, open data, and freedom of expression.
We were founded in 2005 and are sustained by around 1,500 paying supporters and grants from institutions like Open Society Foundation, Sigrid Rausing and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.
-
-
-
-
Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.
“The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies,” the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague.
-
-
Thank you for your letter on November 23rd, 2012, (which we have reposted below in its entirety, minus your contact info) in which you mistakenly suggest that Techdirt has infringed the copyrights of your company, Human Synergistics, via its post from October 5th, 2012, entitled Copyright As Censorship: Author Removes Blog Post After Being Threatened For Quoting 4 Sentences. First of all, it is astounding that you do not appear to recognize the irony of threatening us over a blog post that goes into detail as to why someone else’s use of a tiny snippet of your company’s work was quite clearly fair use under US copyright law. In fact, it leads one to wonder if you even read the post in question before sending your letter.
Even if we ignore the question of whether or not that original blog post by Patti O’Shea constituted fair use, I can assure you that Techdirt’s use is fair use. Furthermore, your claim that a lack of permission to quote your silly exercise (solely for the purpose of explaining your overaggressive use of copyright law to censor people against your own best interests) is somehow “a direct violation of our copyright” is absolutely false. It is not just false, but an exaggeration of the rights you hold under copyright law — a situation called “Copyfraud” by legal scholar Jason Mazzone.
-
Over the past few days, a post concerning copyright claims began making the rounds on Facebook, presumably written in response to the news that Facebook would no longer be letting its users vote on site policies. This announcement arrived with the news that Facebook would also be combining profiles across various other services like Instagram.
[...]
The simple fact that this semi-viral post is completely wrong shows how colossally screwed up our current copyright system is. People are still under the impression that copyright needs to be “declared” (usually with the © symbol). Many also seem to think that if they “declare” copyright and trot out a million limitations, everyone approaching their copyrighted content is obliged to follow every stipulation. Facebook users are picking up the clues that maximalists are dropping and cobbling together legal-sounding threats with nothing behind them. What Facebook users really want isn’t the same thing maximalists want. Behind this flawed statement is the feeling that Facebook “gave” users a place to share their photos, etc. with friends and family, but now it wants to turn uploaded content into marketing tools.
-
We know that when music streaming services became available in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, illegal downloads were halved. The BPI’s obsession with punishing illegal download sites blinds it to the fact that Google plans to launch a far better way of dealing with them: not through extrajudicial censorship in the form of doctored search results, but simply by offering something that people are happy to pay for. The UK recording industry should be embracing new ventures like Google Play Music wholeheartedly, not using them as bargaining chips in its pointless fight over search results.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Ever been 500 miles away from your Ubuntu Linux server and the only computing device you had to manage it was an Android smartphone or an Apple iPad? Splashtop is working on the program. for you: Splashtop Streamer for Linux.
The beta Splashtop Streamer, when used with Splashtop 2 a remote desktop app. for Android devices, iPad, and iPhone and iPod Touch, will enable you to connect remotely to Ubuntu 12.04 systems. It does not support, at this time, other versions of Linux or Ubuntu. Splashtop 2 already supports Mac OS X and Windows.
-
Splashtop for Ubuntu Linux is being released today and it claims to be 10x faster than VNC plus offering a host of other features.
-
-
-
-
Desktop
-
I guess today is “Cyber Monday” or something like that? I’m looking for a reasonably priced laptop for my 13 year old daughter and saw that I had an email from Dell with some offers in it.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
In Linux it is often said that every device is a file. To most of us a file is something just there. The kernel boys and girls actually tweak the bits right down to the hardware to make the magic of a file somewhere becoming accessible to the system, mounting the file.
Last week, one developer found a recent version of Linux mounted files considerably slower than it usually did. He noticed because he mounted a lot of file-systems. When careful timing was done the difference was measured. Indeed mounts were an order of magnitude slower. By repeating the measurements for several versions and finally versions with and without certain patches/changes, the cause was found. Then discussion broke out about how to fix both issues, why the change had been made and how to do it differently.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
The Mesa state tracker as used by the Gallium3D hardware drivers has support for handling the creation of OpenGL 3.1 Core Profiles.
-
Last week I shared some early benchmarks of the Samsung Chromebook while running Ubuntu Linux. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it’s one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM “Cardhu” tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.
-
Applications
-
Frogr is a handy Gnome application that allows you to manage your Flickr account right from the Linux desktop. It supports some basic features like uploading photos, adding descriptions, setting tags as well as managing sets and groups.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
Dear Esther, a unique first person adventure game powered by Valve’s Source Engine, will soon be released as a native Linux client. Currently the company is seeking out testers to try out the Linux port.
-
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Ubuntu and even Windows have been moving away from the traditional drop down menus which appear in application windows. Ubuntu borrowed the concept of Global Menus from OSX and integrates the menu items with the top panel. These menus appear, for the corresponding application or window, when a user takes the mouse to the top panel. Windows has split these menu items between what they call ribbon. Even applications like Google’s Chrome has switched from the traditional menus.
-
Yesterday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We published interviews with two of the founding members (Matthias Ettrich and Kalle Dalheimer) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Today, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts in the video interview (transcript included). Tomorrow there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.
-
My favorite desktop environment just turned 15. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has come a long way. There were good times and bad times, and I temporarily abandoned it during one of those bad times. But like many KDE users at that time, I was convinced that I had a good reason to.
-
Lars Knoll has laid out his plans for branching the Qt 5.0 code-base and seeing the long-awaited update to the popular open-source toolkit see the light of day before year’s end.
“Qt 5.0 is getting closer, and we’re still working to get the final release out before the end of the year. To make this easier and also allow new development towards 5.1 to happen again, we’ll branch the qt repositories during this weekend in preparation for the Release Candidate,” begins a new mailing list message by Knoll.
-
-
In preparation for the imminent release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.2-Randaberg, final validation testing was done on a variety of Linux operating systems in Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud. Many of the official Linux images were benchmarked from the c1.xlarge High-CPU Extra Large Instance, including Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
-
-
Fedora
-
Fedora 18 release may have been stuck by a lot of delays, but developers are already planning to release Fedora 19 in May next year. Fedora 18 beta was released just a few days back and it’s currently in testing stage. After some major bugs have been fixed, the final Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” will be is expected to be released in January 2013.
-
After almost two months’ delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named “Spherical Cow”, includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18′s default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint’s Cinnamon are also available from the distribution’s repositories.
-
There is a significant amount of people unhappy with the direction of GNOME 3 who do not enjoy KDE and find LXDE too weak in features or who just like the look and feel of the old GNOME 2 desktop. Here are their options in Fedora 18, as they can be seen in the recently released Beta.
-
Fedora 18 was not released on schedule, but knowing how the Fedora project operates, this was no surprise, because unlike other distributions, a new Fedora edition is almost never released until all major issues have been fixed.
What makes this delay unique is the stable release will not hit public download mirrors until next year. And I think this marks the first time that a Fedora edition has been pushed back this far. But now that a beta edition has been released, here are some screen shots from test installations of the KDE and GNOME 3 editions.
-
-
Debian Family
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Last week was Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, but for the last few weeks I have been on paternity leave, so I didn’t get a chance to blog about it. I just wanted to take a few minutes to offer some thanks.
Choosing people for Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day is always tough as we have so many wonderful people who actively participate in our community. From our developers to docs writers to translators to testers to advocates and more, everyone puts their brick in the wall to build a strong, competative, and proficiant Ubuntu. We would be nothing without your contributions.
-
Ubuntu may be lucky enough to become the first Linux distribution ready for gaming, thanks to Windows 8 and move from companies like Valve. Valve’s move inspired Nvidia to improve performance of Ubuntu with their driver updates. To improve the performace of Ubuntu itself (which is slow and sluggish due to Unity) , an Ubuntu developer Timo Jyrinki has written a patch for Compiz that will allow better full screen performance of games in Unity.
-
The Compiz 0.9.8.6 update soon coming to Ubuntu 12.10 will enable “Unredirect Fullscreen Windows” by default in an effort to boost the OpenGL gaming performance of the Linux distribution when using the Unity desktop.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution that features the Enlightenment desktop and a noticeably lack of included applications. It’s main goal is to offer a light-weight high-performing base on which to build your ideal desktop system. It recently turned two years old and founder Jeff Hoogland is looking back.
-
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Coming off an abysmal quarter and generally lackluster performance of late, the phone maker could use a good marketing push.
-
-
The question is, does Apple’s tablet market share – or Android’s for that matter – actually matter? Apple is certainly selling more of the darn things, but after a brief year’s relief, sales of Android alternatives are rising even more quickly.
According to ABI Research, a market watcher, Apple’s share of the world tablet market fell in Q3 2012 to 55 per cent, the lowest share Apple has ever had since launching the iPad in 2010.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
As you’ll see in a moment, the answer to the question of which tablet is best is highly dependent on your own personal priorities relative to price, performance, screen resolution, and other issues. To get the ball rolling, let’s compare the four tablets’ out-of-box homescreens.
-
Shortly after the iPad’s introduction in 2010, there were predictions that Android would eventually overtake Apple’s market share in the tablet market the same way that Android smartphones had done with the iPhone. But early predictions tended to favor 2015 or 2016 as the crossover point at which Android tablets (from a variety of OEMs) would actually overtake iPad sales in terms of broad market share. Others still saw Apple dominating even longer – a 2011 Gartner study suggested Apple would keep 47 percent of the market in 2015, with Android coming up with just 38 percent.
-
An explosion in the number of open source technologies and projects is driving the new paradigm of application development in the mobile, cloud and big data era.
Of course, one would have to live under a rock not to notice the huge “app” industry around smartphones and tablets.
But Android is not the only open source game in town driving the innovation. jQuery, Phonegap, Hadoop, Sencha , Apache Cordova, dojo, Ehcache, Riak, Munin and OpenStack are among the many key open source technologies driving the new wave of innovation across the consumer space and enterprise markets, according to Forrester Research.
-
-
-
NYSE Technologies has announced the launch of the OpenMAMA Enterprise Edition as a part of its Open Platform which also features the Open Market Data Model (OpenMDM) and an upcoming OpenMAMA Enterprise Edition certification program.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
-
-
Mozilla is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, and we are dedicated to building the Web as a powerful platform for compelling app experiences.
-
Databases
-
The developers of MongoDB at 10gen have announced that they are making MongoDB’s APIs report failed writes by default. The previous default behaviour of the open source NoSQL database had been to return from API calls as soon as possible, without reporting errors, because the design of MongoDB was predicated on the API working with an HTTP-based web server and a pattern was developed of checking for write errors for an entire page being loaded.
-
EnterpriseDB is gaining customers with its cheap database alternative to wares offered by much larger companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
For the past eight years, Bedford, Mass.-based EnterpriseDB has been selling add-ons for a free, open-source database management software called PostgreSQL.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its 2012 Giving Guide, a resource for people looking for ethical electronics gifts this holiday season.
-
-
Project Releases
-
Openness/Sharing
-
-
Open Data
-
Open Access/Content
-
As a child I remember being fascinated by science, and developed an overwhelming urge to learn how everything worked. I loved science fiction, seeing authors explore the very edges of possible futures, extrapolating out the possibly feasible to its very limits. As I grew older and began a degree in Physics, I became even more certain I wanted to be a scientist and had a vision of what real science was all about. I remember the first few months of my PhD work being quite disappointing, learning that papers often lacked the necessary details to reproduce key reactions, or that I didn’t have access to certain papers due to their age or the journal they had been published in.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
EFSA has now released its final assessment of the Seralini study. It has not changed any of its initial critical responses to the study, which Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) rightly characterizes in its new report (see the extracts below) as resembling “more a compilation of other’s criticisms than an attempt to clarify the issue in the public interest; more like a prosecution than an evaluation.”
CEO also notes that the final report’s conclusions are in stark contrast with the conclusions of at least two of the national regulatory agencies that were also involved in the assessement of Seralini’s study which have called for additional research and a review of current risk assessment guidelines.
-
Security
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
When U.S. intelligence officials testified behind closed doors two weeks ago, they were asked point blank whether they had altered the talking points on which U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice based her comments about the Benghazi attacks that have turned into a political firestorm.
-
-
Who within the Obama administration deleted mention of “terrorism” and “al-Qaeda” from the CIA’s talking points on the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi?
It isn’t the only unanswered question in the wake of the tragedy, but it’s proven to be one of the most confounding.
-
-
-
-
-
The covert strikes are unpopular in Pakistan, where the government in public denounces them as a violation of sovereignty, but US officials believe they are a vital weapon against Islamist militants.
-
-
Parliamentary Ombudsman Petri Jääskeläinen plans to examine suspicions of Finland’s possible role in secret prison flights arranged by the CIA.
-
Cablegate
-
Giant US financial intermediary Visa is partly relying on the Gillard government’s claims that WikiLeaks acted “illegally” to justify its ongoing financial blockade of the whistleblower and media outlet, new material obtained by WikiLeaks has revealed.
-
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Volatility in climate has drawn the attention of policy makers for a decade. But as so often is the case, a dramatic event like superstorm Sandy – the largest storm to hit New York since the colonial era – has punctured the psyche of the densely populated East Coast, including the New York-Washington, DC axis where U.S. policy is made.
-
Finance
-
There is something appealing to human beings about a small individual taking on a powerful adversary, and most people are aware of the David and Goliath story where a small insignificant boy took on and defeated a powerful giant because his unwavering faith gave him courage and conviction that right would overcome might. For the past eleven-and-a-half years, one American with unwavering faith in the judicial system has taken on a modern day giant without respite based on a belief that justice is due diligence and that in America, right overcomes might. However, in this circumstance, the system that exists to ensure justice prevails has conflated power with right and gave an already powerful giant a wall of separation from the law, and yet one small individual continues battling for justice against a behemoth.
-
On September 17, the German Labor Ministry sent a draft report “on Poverty and Wealth” to the other ministries to be rubber-stamped. Only the final report, once sanctified by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be made public. The draft was supposed to remain hidden. But it seeped to the surface almost immediately. And it was hot. Too hot.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Several Wisconsin legislators are attending this week’s conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) at the Grand Hyatt in Washington D.C., and likely doing so on corporate-funded “scholarships,” which the Center for Media and Democracy believes violate state ethics and lobbying laws. The three-day meeting, held November 28-30, will bring state legislators together with corporate lobbyists and special interests to craft “model” bills – many of which will likely be introduced in the ALEC-majority Wisconsin legislature in the session that begins in January.
-
Fox News was publicly skewered and filleted this week by one of their own guests, Thomas E. Ricks, an expert on military and defense policy and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. His interview was abruptly and unceremoniously ended after he calmly tagged Fox as “a wing of the Republican Party.”
-
This week in Washington, DC, Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” (FEE) is meeting just five blocks away from the post-election conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial corporate bill mill working on profitizing public education among other legislative changes, but the ties between the two groups are even closer.
-
Censorship
-
For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran’s continuing efforts to throttle its citizens’ access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach
-
Civil Rights
-
Wearing the wrong color socks, talking back and being late landed young Cedrico Green in jail. The Justice Department says there are many more students like him.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK. Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2′s UK-based payment provider, and the site’s operators have decided to shut down.
-
If you’re watching an illegally downloaded movie, someone could be watching you.
A forensic software company has collected files on a million Canadians who it says have downloaded pirated content.
And the company, which works for the motion picture and recording industries, says a recent court decision forcing Internet providers to release subscriber names and details is only the first step in a bid to crack down on illegal downloads.
-
Creative Commons is celebrating 10 years of helping artists, writers, technologist, and other creators share our knowledge and creativity with the world. We’ve been able to maximize our digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. For example, governments are using Creative Commons for their open data portals.
-
A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.
-
Prenda Law, one of the law firms involved in the ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US, is using a recent TorrentFreak article to threaten alleged BitTorrent downloaders. While we generally encourage people to promote our content, being used as a tool in extortion-type letters is not something we’re happy with. As a result we saw no other option than to troll the copyright troll.
-
We heard rumors of this a couple weeks ago from people involved in some of the six strikes program at various ISPs, but the six strikes effort, already delayed from its original planned starting date of July until around now, has been pushed back again until “the early part of 2013.”
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
-
-
If you’re a real gamer you know just how terrifying Windows 8 can be. With the changes they’ve made there just might not be any sort of viable way for real gamers to get the kind of experience they want.
-
Server
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
Some major changes are supposed to make drivers for Intel and NVIDIA’s graphics processors more robust. Linux 3.7 also includes a number of new DVB drivers and makes better use of modern audio chips’ power-saving features.Kernel Log – Coming in 3.7 (Part 4): Drivers
-
Graphics Stack
-
NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.
-
-
For those that don’t closely follow the Mesa Git repository, there’s finally a few more “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver fixes that arrived this morning for slowly but surely bringing up the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series 3D support.
-
NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.
-
Applications
-
GIMP developer Nicolas Robidoux seeks to leverage a freedom-based crowd-funding solution to bank-roll completion of the Nohalo/Lohalo/Lojaggy/Loblur suite of image resamplers for GEGL. The idea started back on Nov. 11th in the GIMP mailing list. Robidoux answers whether or not he plans to create a project on Kickstarter or not.
-
Ekiga, the long-standing Linux “softphone” VoIP program for GNOME on Linux, hasn’t seen a major release since Ekiga 3.2 three years ago. Arriving today fortunately is Ekiga 4.0, which is codenamed “The Victory Release”, and packs a huge number of changes for this open-source telephony program.
-
-
Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It has no option to resize or minimize. Its user interface lacks the traditional windows-control icons to minimize, maximize or close the window. This may require some personal workflow adjustments if you multitask or use numerous virtual workspaces on the Linux desktop.
-
Proprietary
-
Netflix Finally Comes to Ubuntu in the Form of an Unofficial Desktop AppUbuntu: Watching Netflix on Linux has always been a pain, since Microsoft Silverlight isn’t available on Linux. The unofficial Netflix app for Ubuntu makes it easy to install Netflix and start watching movies right away.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
Indie hit Dear Esther will be soon heading to Linux platform. The game has been made by thechineseroom, an independent game studio based in Brighton, UK.
-
Hit Mac racing game ‘RC Mini Racers‘ is gearing up for an Ubuntu release.
The racing title has proved popular on OS X, spending several weeks at #1 in the Mac App Store’s ‘Top Free Games‘ chart and 5 months in the top 10.
-
Bethesda has made a major announcement through its wholly-owned id Software subsidiary: the release of the source code for Doom 3 BFG Edition under an open-source licence.
The release, designed to allow the game to be modded on a far more fundamental level than most as well as making the latest version of the Doom 3 engine available for third-party developers to use in their games, follows id Software’s tradition of releasing older versions of its game engines for free under the GNU General Public Licence. Designed for open-source efforts, the GPL allows users to make use of id Software’s engine without paying a penny in royalties or licence fees – but only if they agree to release any modifications they make to the engine available under the same open-source licence.
-
Valve’s upcoming release of Steam for Linux is the best news student and game developer Damien Levac has heard since he started using Linux three years ago. Not only will it raise the profile of Linux as a gaming platform to rival Windows and OS X, he says, it also reinforces his belief that Linux is the best programming environment for games.
-
Intel has tagged their quarterly driver package for their customers looking towards the best open-source Intel graphics experience on the Linux desktop.
For those not familiar, the quarterly Intel Linux driver package isn’t a new software release/component per se but rather the recommended versions of the key software packages making up the Intel Linux driver software stack. These packages have been released in the past days/weeks.
-
The Steam for Linux beta can change the entire gaming landscape for Linux – it’s a boost for the Linux Gaming Community and Linux Games Titles. There are a lot of titles coming to Linux and there are a lot of titles that are currently being ported to Linux.
One of these titles is a popular experimental First Person Adventure game called Dear Esther. The original game was released back in 2008 as a free mod for the Source engine.
Once it became hugely popular it was repackaged for commercial distribution and released on Feb 14, 2012. More than 15,000 copies of the game were sold within hours after its release on Steam.
-
An official update to the Sauerbraten game atop “Cube Engine 2″ is imminent while work on the Tesseract project — basically a modernized and more visually advanced version of the open-source Cube Engine 2 — is still in development.
-
-
-
Thorvalla is a new RPG on Kickstarter by Guido Henkel who has worked on some big name RPG games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2!
G3 Studios are looking to get $1M initial funding to make this new RPG game, considering the background this one could be an easy win. You will need to pledge at least $15 to get a copy (although that tier is limited!).
It will be supporting Linux from the start as well which is brilliant to see so no nasty extra stretch goal for us this time folks. They are using Unity by the looks of it so it’s not surprising!
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Today (November 27, 2012) is the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Tomorrow, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts. On Thursday there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.
-
-
Fifteen years ago today, KDE began — and I, for one, am glad that it did. I run virtualized versions of all the major desktop environments, and have a few more on secondary machines. Sometimes, too, I’ll log into a desktop like Mate, Xfce, or LXDE just for a change of pace or to keep myself in touch. Yet, on my main workstation, I always return sooner or later to KDE. Of all my available choices, it’s the one whose design philosophy, communal attitudes, and vision come closest to my idea of what a desktop environment and its project should be.
That wasn’t always the case. Although my first year of working in GNU/Linux was on KDE, I spent close to eight years as a die-hard GNOME user. Glances over the year suggested that KDE’s default theme looked as though it were based on plastic Fisher- Price toys, and that its organization was casual at best. The clean lines of GNOME seemed far less of a distraction from my work.
But as my familiarity with GNU/Linux grew, GNOME’s minimalistic philosophy began to feel restrictive. Key GNOME applications such as the Evolution, which had seemed so radical a few years earlier, appeared stuck in maintenance mode.
-
Appmenu support for KDE is now available in master for testing.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
The developers of the GNOME desktop for Unix systems have released the second beta for the upcoming version 3.8 of the open source desktop. GNOME 3.7.2 drops the fallback mode as planned and the developers have completed porting all components of the desktop to GStreamer 1.0 as well.
-
Why Gnome3 does a touch screen interface when you can’t actually run Gnome in any tablet -at least today ..is a typical question. A typical answer would be, because all screens will be touch-screens by 2013-2014.
-
Javier Jardón has announced today, November 27, the second development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.
The development of the GNOME 3.8 is well under way and the developers have announced a few major changes already.
-
-
Many of us came to Linux via odd routes. Some of us decided that we were tired of our software and computing choices being made for us. Some of us are just adventurous or bored and want to see what other choices might be available to us.
-
-
-
Gentoo Family
-
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today served monetary penalties totaling £440,000 on two owners of a marketing company which has plagued the public with millions of unlawful spam texts over the past three years.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
The comprehensive agenda will include visionary keynotes along with a range of technical and business sessions, hands-on training and labs, demos, customer and partner panels, networking opportunities and partner showcases.
-
-
-
The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is growing fast, as enterprises race to a more efficient cloud model for application development and deployment. While PaaS solutions enable the cloud, they don’t always have to reside outside of an enterprise’s firewall.
Today enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat advanced its PaaS platform with a new on-site solution. The OpenShift Enterprise release builds on Red Hat’s open source OpenShift Origin platform and its existing OpenShift online service.
Ashesh Badani, GM of the Cloud Business Unit, explained that OpenShift Enterprise is an on-premise PaaS that provides auto-scaling, self service features and is enterprise class.
-
-
Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to keep going. In keeping with Red Hat’s open source ethos, the product was released as an open source project called OpenShift Origin. This allowed anyone to deploy and run the Red Hat PaaS on their own hardware. Like most open source projects, though, OpenShift Origin doesn’t come with any official support.
-
OpenShift is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product from Red Hat, Inc., a leading open source technology software outfit based in Raleigh, North Carolina. OpenShift is both a cloud platform and a free application that you can run on your hardware.
-
Fedora
-
The Fedora Project on Tuesday announced the long-awaited beta release of Fedora Linux 18, complete with numerous improvements for users, developers, and systems administrators.
-
-
-
-
-
After a number of delays, the beta of the Fedora 18 Linux-based distribution has been released.
The beta release date had been extended six times over the past two months, mostly due to an underestimation of the amount of work required to rewrite the Anaconda software, which is used to install or upgrade Fedora.
-
-
-
The Fedora Project team has (finally) announced the beta release of Fedora 18, code-named ‘Spherical Cow’. It was recently finalised that the beta would be released on 27th.
Fedora 18 offers a brand-new version of the Gnome desktop, version 3.6, straight from the upstream development process. Updates have also been made to the KDE, XFCE and Sugar desktop environments; additionally, the MATE desktop is available for the first time in Fedora.
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
-
-
Steve Langasek of Canonical has pushed their latest Upstart init daemon into Debian unstable. Debian GNU/Linux can now handle either SysVinit, systemd, and Upstart to handle a head-to-head system booting battle.
-
Thanks to the ifupdown, sysvinit, and udev maintainers for their cooperation in getting upstart support in place; to the Debian release team for accomodating the late changes needed for upstart to be supported in wheezy; and to Scott for his past maintenance of upstart in Debian.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
It was only a matter of time before the proprietary software started populating in the Ubuntu Software Center. This was something Mark Shuttleworth had been promising for quite some time. Not only proprietary software, but plenty of other purchasable items would arrive:
* Movies
* Music
* Magazines
-
Canonical’s rigidly regular release schedule has been the subject of calls for change, but Mark Shuttleworth and plenty of others see no need. In fact, the regularity may be exactly what makes it work, satisfying the needs of both desktop and enterprise users, said Jay Lyman, senior analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group.
-
Working from my Ubuntu desktop all day has given me an interesting perspective into what works and what doesn’t when it comes to applications. In this article, I will offer you a roundup of software titles that enable me to make my day a more productive one. These applications range from productivity tools down to the Web-based tools that I use on my desktop.
-
Benjamin Drung points out that Ubuntu will reach the letter Z with 17.04 and wondered in what direction would they go after. Would they just start at the beginning of the alphabet again and start with “A?” Turns out he overheard the response at the latest Ubuntu Developer Summit.
-
Users can install the free Ubuntu package on their home computers, and use Splashtop’s array of mobile apps to connect remotely via an Android or iOS device. (A monthly subscription fee of $1 or a yearly price of $10 must be paid in order to do anything but connect across a LAN, however, and some tablet variants of the mobile app also cost a few bucks.)
-
Can Ubuntu Linux ever pay for itself? The conventional wisdom is that it can’t, because no distribution has done so in the past. However, that doesn’t stop Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial arm, from trying hard. At the very least, Canonical is trying to defray as much of the cost as possible.
Canonical is not a publicly traded company and does not release any financial figures. The company is quick to announce distribution deals, but the value of those deals are noticeably absent from many of its news releases. Ask its public relations directly for such information, and you are told that it is “confidential.” Nor is this lack of information surprising, since, from a traditional business perspective, Canonical has nothing to gain from transparency.
-
More than five years after it began selling PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled in the United States, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has compiled a lackluster record in the eyes of many Linux advocates when it comes to promoting open source alternatives to Windows. Yet as a Canonical employee recently pointed out, Dell is now offering a $70 markdown on one laptop model when customers purchase it with Ubuntu instead of a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) OS. Is this a mistake, or a sign of changes to come on Dell’s part?
As the only big name OEM that provides Ubuntu preinstalled on certain PCs and laptops in developed markets, Dell can hardly be called anti-Linux. But since introducing Ubuntu computers in 2007, the company has taken flack for failing to market them aggressively, burying Ubuntu options on its website and charging the same prices whether users order machines with Ubuntu, which is free, or with Windows.
-
As we’ve noted before, Canonical and giant PC maker Dell Computer have already found new horizons for Ubuntu in China in India. And, Dell deserves praise for being one of the few big hardware makers to offer Linux options on its computers over the years. Now, as Canonical employee Rick Spencer reports in a blog post, on Cyber Monday, Dell was listing the very same Vostro notebook for $369 with Windows 7 pre-loaded versus $299 for it with Ubuntu pre-loaded. The real news here is that you can actually get a solid portable computer with Ubuntu or any Linux distro pre-loaded for much less than $299.
-
With the Election in the rear-view mirror for Americans we are starting to learn about the tools, assets and people that helped President Barack Obama win re-election.
-
Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign’s IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux—particularly Ubuntu—was used as the server operating system of choice. “We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose,” VanDenPlas said. “Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js.”
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Linux Mint returns with updates all round, but has it addressed the minor issues we had with Mint 13 along the way?
-
Hot off the press, we are welcomed with a new version of Linux Mint codenamed Nadia. This released is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and comes with Cinnamon 1.6 desktop environment and features significant upgrades in the GUI alone since version 13.
As always Linux Mint is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit and comes in the form of a Live Media CD which can be installed if you enjoy Linux MintThis new fresh Linux Mint has quite a number of improvements under the hood and for those who used the previous version there’s no drastic changes where one would have to relearn things. With Cinnamon 1.6 comes a new file manager called Nemo which features shortcuts on the left hand side and displays the contents on the right. It is quite sleek and it is easy for a user to add a shortcut to one of their folders if need be.
-
-
-
Earlier this month, Texas Instruments (TI) announced it was cutting 1,700 jobs and dropping its consumer mobile processors to focus on the general embedded market. TI cited the reduced profitability of the consumer mobile business, which is marked by intense competition and short lifecycles.
Others noted the growing competition from device vendors like Apple and Samsung, which now design their own ARM processors. In addition, pricing pressures have grown sharply, due in part to one of TI’s chief customers, Amazon. The online retail giant, which uses OMAP chips in its Kindle Fire tablets, considered buying the mobile, Android-focused portion of TI’s OMAP processor business before negotiations broke down.
-
-
Advantech (2395.TW), the leading embedded platform and integration services provider, announces the release of the Linux version of SUSIAccess 2.0, an innovative remote device management software preloaded in all Advantech embedded solutions, allowing efficient remote monitoring, quick recovery & backup, and real-time remote configuration. The launch of the Linux version of SUSIAccess 2.0 provides System Integrators more flexible options for creating a more intelligent and interconnected embedded computing solution.
-
Raspberry Pi, the bargain micro PC released earlier this year, has fertilised the imaginations of the public, bringing with it a boom in inventive approaches to computing not seen since the good old days of 8-bit.
-
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, maker of the $35 mini computer, is on a mission to get more kids to learn to code – and what better way to get children excited about the power of programming than by involving virtual block-builder game Minecraft? An official Mojang produced port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition was announced for Pi at the weekend – known as Minecraft: Pi Edition. Now the Foundation has put up a video showing how Minecraft gameplay on Pi can be combined with programming commands so kids can use text commands to control the world
-
Phones
-
Android
-
For users who chose Android over competing mobile operating systems because it was released under a free and open source license (Apache), or because they didn’t like the overbearing control exerted on them from certain smartphone manufacturers, it’s not hard to see how the existing Android marketplaces would leave a lot to be desired. These markets are full of applications which are closed source, have unclear licensing, contain advertisements, track their users, and other manners of nefarious deeds.
-
A report from Taiwan states that Google is working on its own house-brand Nexus Chromebook with a touch screen. This, in turn, suggests that it might run a mixture of Android and Chrome OS.
-
-
-
The story of a bug in Google’s People app got lot of press when it was found that it had the whole December missing. Google is quickly looking to fix this bug and others (Gtalk bug, broken Bluetooth and battery issues) by rolling out a 4.2.1 update before December arrives. As indicated by the size of the update i.e. 1.1 MB it is only to patch up the bugs that were found in the Jelly Bean 4.2.
-
Powered by Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” and offering a data-plan option (via AT&T), the Samsung Galaxy Camera is the idea of an Android camera fully realized, and puts to rest any doubts about whether or not the Android software — with its robust ecosystem of apps — even belongs in cameras. Absolutely, it does. And it can thrive.
-
The latest rumor from Asia is that ZTE is working on a smartphone codenamed “Apache”, equipped with 8-core CPU from Mediatek. According to MyDrivers.com, Mediatek beat Qualcomm and NVIDIA in the battle for the heart&brains of the next ZTE flagship with, as yet unannounced, ARM15 MT6599 chip manufactured with TSMC’s 28nm tech.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Technology writer Prasanto K Roy tests the upgraded version of the world’s cheapest tablet computer Aakash 2 and discovers a significantly improved product.
-
-
Google has started sending out notifications to potential customers that their flagship device Nexus 4 will be (re)available on Google Play Store today. These emails are being sent to those customers who signed up to be notified whenever the device is made available.
-
This continually updated screenshot tour demonstrates more than 50 of DeviceGuru’s favorite Android tablet apps. They span device customization and management; text, voice, and video communications; productivity; news, weather, maps, and navigation; music, video, games, and e-books entertainment; and more.
-
-
For all the appeal that comes with a $100-$150 Android tablet, experienced users are often quick to point out the omissions and holes. One particular detail that often comes up is the lack of Google Play and the growing library of apps. E FUN is no stranger to this as they have announced a number of devices over time, all of which are inexpensive options that don’t have Google Play. That is not the case with the new 7-inch model, the Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP.
-
Apple’s share of the tablet market continued to best all others with 55% unit shipment share in the period, reveals new data from market intelligence firm ABI Research. Despite maintaining its lead for 10 straight quarters, competition from tablets powered by Google’s Android OS continue to eat away at Apple’s success. Fifty-five percent is the lowest share Apple has ever had since launching the iPad in 2010.
-
Black Friday first spread to Cyber Monday, then Grey Thursday. Now the week-long spending frenzy has turned charitable with Giving Tuesday.
New York’s 92nd Street Y teamed up with the United Nations Foundation to gather a growing group of companies and non-profits “to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season [and to] celebrate and encourage charitable activities that support nonprofit organizations.”
-
Many within the open source community have recently bemoaned the lack of open source apps for mobile devices. However, their contention that open source has ignored the ongoing transition to a post-PC world isn’t entirely accurate.
While it’s true that the number open source mobile apps haven’t kept pace with the exponential growth of mobile apps in general, open source developers are slowly but steadily adding to the library of open source apps for smartphones and tablets.
-
Netflix has moved on from just releasing the tools it uses to test the resilience of the cloud services that power the video streaming company, and has now open sourced a library that it uses to engineer in that resilience. Hystrix is an Apache 2 licensed library which Netflix engineers have been developing over the course of 2012 and which has been adopted by many teams within the company. It is designed to manage how distributed services interact and give more tolerance to latency within those connections and the inevitable failures that can occur.
-
Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.
-
-
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
-
Firefox 18 is now officially in Beta and it is likely to be the fastest browser ever released by Mozilla.
The reason of the speed boost is a new tech that I first wrote about back in September called IonMonkey. It’s the latest iteration of Mozilla’s JavaScript engine and follows in the footsteps of JaegerMonkey/SpiderMonkey.
-
-
SaaS
-
-
Open-source cloud platform Eucalyptus Systems is rolling out its 3.2 release in December in a move that aims to provide admins with greater visibility into cloud operations and expand storage options.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
CMS
-
Open source content management system (CMS) Joomla has announced that it has surpassed 36 million downloads worldwide two months after the launch of Joomla 3.0.
The company reports downloads grew an impressive 27% compared to November 2011, while more than 1,500 extensions for the CMS were introduced by its community in this period of time.
-
Business
-
Semi-Open Source
-
Some vendors want you to think you’re benefiting from open source when you’re not. Keep an eye out for potential traps
-
-
Funding
-
Fred Wilson is not alone in claiming that patterns of venture funding are shifting away from consumer startups towards enterprise oriented alternatives. Industry chatter has been concerned with this trend for some time, amplified in part by an industry analyst industry that has historically been over concerned with the enterprise at the expense of consumer technology trends.
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
The city has now migrated over 80 percent of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux, it’s own distribution of Linux.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
-
Open Hardware
-
I became aware of the Arduino Project from occasional media reports and a presentation at Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. I was impressed with what the Arduino community was doing, but at that time, I saw no personal use for it. It took a grandson who is heavily involved in a high-school competitive robotics program to change things for me. During a 2011 Thanksgiving family gathering, he asked me some questions about robotics-related electronics, and I told him to google Arduino. He did. Arduino ended up on his Christmas list, and Santa delivered.
-
Just a few clarifications: Arduino is not suing anybody. We never intended to do that in the slightest. We love Kickstarter and , as I said in the post, we think they are important to Makers. We are now in contact with Kickstarter to make sure that in the future the communication between us are more direct and clear. Our manufacturing partner in Italy has issues with some statements made in the Kickstarter campaign and they are getting in touch directly with the project creator to clear the situation.
-
Programming
-
Microsoft is the next Research in Motion.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
The coalition has been accused of presiding over a sham “listening exercise” on NHS reform last year, as a leaked document reveals how the private health lobby worked with Downing Street behind the scenes to ensure that the new legislation went ahead.
-
Dr. Latisha Smith, an expert in decompression sicknesses afflicting deep sea divers, has cleared criminal background checks throughout her medical career. Yet someone searching the Web for the Washington State physician might well come across an Internet ad suggesting she may have an arrest record.
-
Security
-
-
-
These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
At the bottom of the sandy dunes sit wide turquoise craters, looked over by gritty hills where haphazard tents made from tarpaulins and thatch serve as shelters for the men descending into the hollowed-out pools with pickaxes and buckets. Fifteen metres deep, they scavenge for tin, cutting into the sand with their hands and feet, just like Suge used to do, until one day in August his pit collapsed, burying him alive and snapping his left shin in half. His cries of “Longsor! Longsor!” – Landslide! – were drowned by the mud that killed the three friends who had been working beside him.
-
-
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal of a controversial Illinois law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.
By passing on the issue, the justices left in place a federal appeals court ruling that found that the state’s anti-eavesdropping law violates free-speech rights when used against people who audiotape police officers.
-
-
The Salt Lake City police chief said Wednesday that he hopes to eventually replace the department’s dashboard cameras with new light-weight ones that officers will wear at eye level.
“I think this is the way of the future,” said Chief Chris Burbank during a presentation about the cameras at the city Main Library. “It is a technology that is coming very quickly.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Foreign Ministry has concealed death toll in drone attacks and submitted a confusing reply and report to the Lahore High Court
-
(Washington, DC) – Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
In Peter Watkins’ remarkable BBC film, The War Game, which foresaw the aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the narrator says: “On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons, there is now practically total silence in the press, official publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?”
The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.
-
-
A new report found lawmakers received drone-related campaign funds and pushed through an agenda despite problems
-
-
human rights violations by US armed forces, particularly his unadulterated admiration for drone attacks involving untenable collateral damage
-
-
-
Earlier this month, at China’s biennial air show in Zhuhai, an imposing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles was seen on the tarmac — drones bearing a striking resemblance to the American aircraft that have proved so deadly in attacks on insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Israel, Britain and the United States have pretty much had a corner on the global drone market, but the recent Chinese air show and a Pentagon report have exploded that notion.
“In a worrisome trend, China has ramped up research in recent years faster than any other country,” said the unclassified analysis published in July by the Defense Science Board. “It displayed its first unmanned system model at the Zhuhai air show five years ago, and now every major manufacturer for the Chinese military has a research center devoted to unmanned systems.”
-
The United States has a long history of violating international law when its leaders believe foreign policy objectives justify doing so. The belief in the right of the United States to overthrow democratically elected governments (Guatemala, Iran, Congo), to train and arm insurgencies (Nicaragua), and to launch aggressive wars (Iraq) free of the inconvenience of the law grows out of the nationalistic fervor of “American Exceptionalism.”
-
With drones from the beginning there has been a kind of technological determinism associated with the idea that since the United States possesses this relatively new technology it should use it. Facing the uncertainty of reelection, President Obama became so concerned about the lawlessness of his drone killings he sought hastily to codify the rules governing their use. What began in the Bush era as a means for targeting al Qaeda leaders hiding in remote areas has become a vast “amorphous” death machine targeting suspected “militants” in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Now we’ve learned that, in addition to “personality strikes” aimed at individuals deemed enemies of the United States, there are now what’s called “signature strikes” where any congregation of suspicious looking military-age men is open game.
-
According to a report published Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to establish a more systematic and regular program of using unmanned drones to kill people selected by the White House for death.
-
The Navy said that sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman took delivery of the drone on Monday from Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, where it had been undergoing tests.
-
Came the end, though, and Bashir asked him about the “moral justification” for the use of drones. O’Hanlon answered him by saying, essentially, that only American lives count.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Cablegate
-
-
“…has a chronic lung condition that could worsen at any time”
-
-
Yet a European arrest warrant stands ready to whisk Assange to Sweden, where consensual sex without a condom can – for reasons I’ll never understand – count as rape, where he can be locked in solitary without charge or extradited to America.
-
Some of the milestones of Madman Joe Lieberman’s illustrious career:
The ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010′. Madman Joe was coauthor. The bill would have facilitated the ‘kill switch’ for the US president to shut down the Internet.
Opposition to WikiLeaks which Glenn Greenwald called ‘one of the most pernicious acts by a US senator in quite some time’. Greenwald compared Lieberman to ‘Chinese dictators’ and accused him of having abused his position as chair of homeland security ‘to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host – and more importantly what you can and cannot read on the Internet’.
A suggestion that ‘the New York Times and other news organisations publishing the US embassy cables being released by WikiLeaks could be investigated for breaking US espionage laws’.
A ‘bill to amend the Espionage Act in order to facilitate the prosecution of folks like Wikileaks’. Some things aren’t legal. But that’s OK – you pass a new law to make them legal. No worries, dictator dude.
The Enemy Expatriation Act which would allow the US government to strip US citizenship without requiring a criminal conviction.
-
…confinement in the Quantico brig amounted to illegal punishment.
-
Bradley Manning is being punished – and tortured – for a crime that amounts to believing one’s highest duty is to the American people and not the American government
-
-
President Barack Obama signed new whistleblower protections into law, the White House said Tuesday.
The law, known as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (pdf), expands protections for federal workers who blow the whistle on misconduct, fraud and illegality.
-
Coombs asked Choike if he believed joking about the underwear was something that an officer should have done. Choike then said something to the effect that he realized this could be brought up by Manning with his attorney and it might become “another media issue.”
-
The legal issue is that if this treatment was seen as punitive then that’s a problem. People can be held pre-trial, but they’re not supposed to be “punished” as part of the process. The Defense Department has been trying to claim that the treatment of Manning had to do with fears that he would harm himself, and the latest hearings were to figure out which version of the story is really accurate. The details look pretty damning for the Defense Department.
-
The soldier charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history, was appearing before a military court at Fort Meade, Md., Tuesday, seeking to avert a trial by arguing that he has been subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment” and “unduly onerous confinement conditions.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Two “hard right” politicians, Joseph Lieberman and Peter King, went directly to the transnational credit card corporation MasterCard and arranged an extrajudicial financial blockade of Wikileaks, according to heavily redacted European Commission documents.
-
Credit card companies that blocked WikiLeaks a couple of years ago didn’t do anything wrong, the European Union’s European Commission said today.
Last year, donation collection gateway DataCell complained to the commission that it was unfair for MasterCard Europe, Visa Europe, and American Express to have blocked donations to WikiLeaks. DataCell provided payment gateway services to WikiLeaks, accepting donations for the controversial organization. It was able to facilitate those transactions by operating its datacenter in Iceland — away from legal prying eyes.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century’s end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action by sharing devastating scenarios of flood, famine, drought and cyclones. Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change–rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and insect infestations–pose threats greater than those from terrorism ranging from massive food shortages to a rise in armed conflicts.
-
The evidence of climate change is clearer than ever. The poor countries have done everything asked of them. Now the rich nations must face their responsibilities
-
-
An effort to stomp out state renewable energy mandates across the country has roots in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As reported by The Washington Post, the Heartland Institute wrote the bill, had it passed through ALEC, and is now targeting the 29 states and the District of Columbia, which have passed renewable energy requirements in some form.
-
Corporate lobbyists and right-wing legislators of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) will be gathering in Washington, DC today for ALEC’s annual States and Nation Policy Summit. Today also marks the release of an in-depth report on the failure of ALEC’s economic recommendations for the states. The report claims that “states that were rated higher on ALEC’s Economic Outlook Ranking in 2007,” the first year the ranking was published, “have actually been doing worse economically in the years since, while the less a state conformed with ALEC policies the better off it was.”
-
-
-
Assange and his “cypherpunk” compatriots believe the solution is for everyone to master encryption. That’s simply not going to happen. We are addicted to convenience and desperate to belong. This is a world where the head of the CIA was caught using Gmail to share illicit messages and professional politicians can’t resist sending naughty pictures via Twitter. Assange doesn’t have an answer to the human fear of missing out which drives so many to join social networks and remain there.
-
Finance
-
-
In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.
-
For about twenty-four hours, Walmart workers, union members and a slew of other activists pulled off the largest-ever US strike against the largest employer in the world. According to organizers, strikes hit a hundred US cities, with hundreds of retail workers walking off the job (last month‘s strikes drew 160). Organizers say they also hit their goal of a thousand total protests, with all but four states holding at least one. In the process, they notched a further escalation against the corporation that’s done more than any other to frustrate the ambitions and undermine the achievements of organized labor in the United States.
-
Huh. So Blankfein–who was paid $16 million last year, and owns $210 million worth of his company’s stock–thinks that people can retire on Social Security after working for 25 years? As Gene Lyons pointed out, that would mean that people are getting their first paychecks when they’re 42–or, assuming they’re willing to take the severe benefit cuts that come with early retirement, at 37. Or possibly he mistakenly believes Social Security allows you to retire at 41.
He also thinks people typically live to be 92 or 97, depending. In real life, of course, most people start working as early as 16, so they reach retirement age after 51 years of labor, when they have a life expectancy of 17 years–or 14 years if they’re an African-American man.
-
Colonialism is back. Well, at least according to leading politicians of the two most famous debtor nations. Commenting on the EU’s inability to deliver its end of the bargain despite the savage spending cuts Greece had delivered, Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the opposition Syriza party, said last week that his country was becoming a “debt colony”. A couple of days later, Hernán Lorenzino, Argentina’s economy minister, used the term “judicial colonialism” to denounce the US court ruling that his country has to pay in full a group of “vulture funds” that had held out from the debt restructuring that followed the country’s 2002 default.
-
Argentinian politicians and global debt campaigners have responded with fury to a US court judgment that risks plunging the country back into default.
-
New research found that while median wealth plummeted, the top 1 percent increased wealth by 71 percent
-
The Boston-bred Birkenfeld was a banker for UBS, a Swiss financial behemoth with major US operations. His specialty: devising tax shelters in the form of offshore shell companies and peddling them to the superrich. According to court documents, 85 to 90 bankers in UBS’s wealth-management divisions drummed up business at high-roller events like the America’s Cup yacht race and Miami’s prestigious Art Basel exhibition; Birkenfeld took pains to keep his customers happy, going so far for one client as to purchase diamonds overseas and smuggle them into the US in a toothpaste tube to avoid taxes and duties.
It was one of Birkenfeld’s biggest clients who would prove his undoing—Igor Olenicoff, a Forbes 400 billionaire (forbes.com) and major developer in Florida, Illinois, Nevada, and the Southwest. Olenicoff’s fortunes took a dive in 1994, when the Internal Revenue Service, in the course of monitoring fund transfers, noticed large sums moving from Olenicoff’s accounts to countries with a reputation as tax havens. The suspicious IRS agents eventually called in the Justice Department; Olenicoff, they discovered, had stashed some $200 million in unreported assets in UBS accounts offshore. In 2007, Olenicoff agreed to pay $52 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties for tax evasion, and for lying about his accounts.
-
Paul Joseph Watson: The “surprise” announcement that Canadian Mark Carney is to be appointed Governor of the Bank of England means that the 2012 Bilderberg attendee completes Goldman Sachs’ virtual domination over all the major economies of Europe. Carney’s appointment has come as a shock to many who expected current BoE deputy governor Paul Tucker to get the nod, but it’s not a surprise for us given that we forecast back in April Carney would be headhunted for the position.
-
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Judge wants tobacco companies to say they deliberately deceived the American public about smoking’s dangerous effects
[...]
Each corrective ad is to be prefaced by a statement that a federal court has concluded that the defendant tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking.” Among the required statements are that smoking kills more people than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined, and that “secondhand smoke kills over 3,000 Americans a year.”
-
An unsettling trend appears to be underway in Arizona: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.
The state has graced national headlines in recent years as the result of its cozy relationship with the for-profit prison industry. Such controversies have included the role of private prison corporations in SB 1070 and similar anti-immigrant legislation disseminated in other states; a 2010 private prison escape that resulted in two murders and a nationwide manhunt; and a failed bid to privatize nearly the entire Arizona prison system.
-
Censorship
-
Google has fought in courtrooms around the world in recent years, arguing that it is not responsible for the content in its search results, and this month it lost a battle in Australia. The Supreme Court of Victoria ruled on November 12th that Google is responsible for having published search results leading to a defamatory page which contained rumors that Michael Trkulja, a music promoter, was linked to murder and organized crime. Google argued, as it has in the past, that it’s not responsible for offensive material that other people host on the web — a defense that’s been met with mixed results internationally. In January, a French court fined Google and ordered it to change unfavorable search results that linked a French insurance company to the words “crook” and “con man” in autocomplete results.
-
Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the Italian Senate’s approval of a contradictory amendment to a bill designed to decriminalize defamation. Under the Senate’s amendment, reporters would continue to be exposed to the possibility of imprisonment.
-
A 36-year-old financial worker who helps his daughter with her homework every night was taken away by Chinese security forces after he made a quip about the Communist Party’s recently concluded leadership conclave on Twitter.
Four days before the Party’s 18th Congress, when a new set of Chinese leaders was sworn in to rule China, Zhai Xiaobing mocked the event by suggesting it was the latest installment in the Final Destination film franchise. The 2000 supernatural horror movie depicts a teenager whose plane explodes, killing all but a few survivors, who then begin mysteriously dying.
-
-
-
Privacy
-
Irish regulators are seeking “urgent” clarifications from Facebook Inc. (FB) after the social media company informed users of changes to its privacy policy overnight.
Facebook, which is overseen by Irish data protection regulators in the European Union, said that it recently proposed changes to its data-use policy and its statement of rights and responsibilities. The changes give users more detailed information about shared data including “reminders about what’s visible to other people on Facebook.”
-
Facebook moved last week to eliminate the ability of users to vote on data use and privacy policy changes, according to posts in several languages on its site governance page on November 21. Both the timing (immediately before the Thanksgiving holiday in America) and the content changes have raised eyebrows with the entities who have worked to keep Facebook in check, but the company may have a point in eliminating its voting mechanisms. Does this simply give users the democracy they deserve—that is, none at all?
-
-
The Internet has become one of the most important resources in the world in just a few decades, but the governance mechanism for such an important international resource is still dominated by a private sector organization and a single country.
The U.S. government said in a statement on July 1, 2005 that its Commerce Department would continue to support the work of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet’s 13 root servers.
-
-
Civil Rights
-
-
The report also details allegations that U.S. officials physically and mentally abused the suspects in Kampala, and that the United Kingdom also took part in their interrogations.
-
-
Even if ECPA is tweaked to protect email privacy, does that mean if you use Tor, with an IP that appears as if you are on foreign soil, that your real-time communications are being spied upon also by the NSA thanks to FISA?
-
Can using privacy-enhancing tools (such as Tor or a Virtual Private Network) actually expose you to warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency? This week, the ACLU sent off four FOIA requests to federal agencies in order to try and answer this question.
To understand why we think that may be the case, we have to go back to the passage of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008. That act was not a high-point for civil liberties or the rule of law. It included a provision giving immunity to the telecom companies that violated the law by assisting the NSA with its warrantless wiretapping program. Although the get-out-of-jail-free card given to the phone companies is the most well-known aspect to the FAA, there is much more to the law, and many other things that give privacy advocates reason to worry.
Under the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government was required to provide specific, targeted requests aimed at foreign powers or their agents before lawful surveillance was permissible. But the FAA created an additional, broader surveillance system, enabling the government to conduct surveillance without particularized suspicion where a “significant purpose” is to obtain “foreign intelligence” and where the surveillance is targeted against persons “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”
Although the FAA defined several key terms, it did not provide a definition for a person “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” In that ambiguity lies the source of our concern.
-
Possible promotions for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and acting CIA Director Michael Morell remain in jeopardy after the two officials met Tuesday with three of their Republican critics regarding how the Obama administration responded to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya.
-
More than 50 years ago, my resignation from the Central Intelligence Agency was effectuated. The Company, as it had always been known, had become a bit too militarized and was not what some of its founders such as Allan Dulles envisioned.
Intelligence was collected but rarely analyzed coherently so as to contribute to enlightened policies. Much of what was collected by the Company lay unused, some of us feeling it is too expensive to collect this data, not to mention the risk involved.
-
-
-
A US government scientist was drugged by CIA agents and then thrown to his death from the 13th floor of a Manhattan hotel after he learned about secret torture sites in Europe, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.
-
Nearly 60 years after the death of a government scientist who had been given LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency without his knowledge, his family says it plans to sue the government, alleging that he was murdered and did not commit suicide as the C.I.A. has long maintained.
-
The family of a US government scientist who reportedly jumped to his death nearly 60 years ago now plans to sue the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that secretly gave him hallucinogenic drugs, claiming the man was murdered and that the CIA has long covered up the truth about his death, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
-
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Today, the European Parliament passed a resolution that condemns the upcoming attempt from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to assert control over the Internet, and instructed its 27 Member States to act accordingly. This follows an attempt from the ITU to assert itself as the governing body and control the Internet. The Pirate Party was one of the parties drafting the resolution.
-
The EU Parliament recently joined the US government in speaking out against the ITU’s upcoming WCIT event, which we’ve been discussing. This is where the ITU — an ancient organization designed to deal with telegraphs, and whose relevance today has been widely questioned — is seeking to take over certain aspects of internet governance, well outside its mandate. Certain countries — Russia and China in particular — and certain large telcos (including many EU ones) are looking at this as a way to advance very specific interests, either for increased control and censorship over the internet, or in forcing successful internet companies to fork over money to telcos who have failed to innovate
-
The meeting is still a week away, yet the U.N.’s 11-day World Conference on International Communications in Dubai has been seeing opposition for months already. Among thousands of proposals on the table are those that tech companies, some governments and advocates for a free, open Internet think could lead to broad U.N. authority over Internet regulations.
-
In its latest effort to bring attention to government action it considers threatening to the open web, Google is warning German citizens and lawmakers of the potential dangers posed by copyright changes being considered in Germany’s parliament.
The campaign and petition is called Verteidige Dein Netz, German for “Defend Your Net.” Its target? A proposed law which would allow German publishers to charge Google for the short excerpts seen on sites such as Google News or remove content from the search engine entirely.
-
A commercial and ideological clash is set for next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.
-
Tim covered the story of ICE doing its annual censorship binge in seizing domain names without adversarial hearings (as we still believe is required under the law). However, there were a couple of additional points worthy of a followup. First off, if you remember, one of the key reasons why we were told SOPA was needed was that for all of ICE’s previous domain takedowns it was “impossible” for it to take down foreign domains. Except… as ICE’s own announcement here shows that was completely untrue. It seems to have had no difficulty finding willing law enforcement partners around the globe to seize websites without any due process:
-
DRM
-
DRM rears its ugly, malformed, malignant, cross-eyed head again. Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic “anti-piracy” schemes.
-
Darrell Issa Wants a Dumb Two-Year Ban on New Internet Laws Today in things that will never happen, Republican Representative Darrell Issa has proposed a new bill called the Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA) that would put a stop to any internet-related lawmaking for the next two years.
-
-
Another day, another story of DRM gone wrong. Just recently, Tim Geigner posted a story about a rather expensive dictionary app that hijacked users’ Twitter accounts to shame them as pirates — even if the inadvertent tweeters had shelled out $25 for the program.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Given what is at stake, there needs to be an open debate and consultation before an agreement is reached (which is no longer a certainty) and Canada should be considering whether a scaled down version of CETA – one that focuses primarily on a reduction of tariffs for trade in goods – is a better model. A closer look at the some of the remaining issues is posted below.
-
The House of Commons Committee on Industry, Science and Technology has spent the past few months hearing from a myriad of companies on the Canadian intellectual property system. With few public interest groups invited to appear, one of the primary themes has been the call for more extensive patent protections, as witnesses link the patent system to innovation and economic growth.
-
There has been much talk about the government’s apparent willingness to bring an end to supply management for dairy products as a (pre?) condition of negotiation of a trade agreement with the European Community or access to the trans-Pacific Partnership. If only it were so simple.
-
New Zealand will not sign a Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement unless it removes tariffs on dairy products and allows the state-owned drug-buying agency to stay, Prime Minister John Key said yesterday.
“We are not prepared to see dairy excluded,” he said.
“In the end, New Zealand can’t sign up to the TPP if it excludes our biggest export.”
Mr Key said it was standard in free trade deals to have a phasing out of tariffs but he wouldn’t comment on the timeframe.
He was commenting ahead of the 15th round of TPP negotiations, in Auckland next week, when hundreds of negotiators from 11 countries will continue talks.
-
Trademarks
-
Remember outdoor clothing company The North Face’s ridiculously counterproductive war against The South Butt parody line of clothes? That involved a bogus lawsuit with a variety of twists and turns, eventually leading to a settlement. There was an epilogue, however, as the guy who had started The South Butt reformed as Butt Face. And, of course, all this did was make The North Face look silly and unable to take a joke.
It appears that the company has not developed a sense of humor yet. Jake Rome points us to a story of how The North Face has filed takedown notices to Flickr/Yahoo, because a guy had posted some photos of parody patches for “Hey Fuck Face.” You can see the main image here.
-
Copyrights
-
Following an important court ruling last week, thousands of Canadians are now at risk of being exposed to mass BitTorrent lawsuits. That’s the message from the boss an anti-piracy outfit who says is company has been monitoring BitTorrent networks for infringements and has amassed data on millions of users. The court ruling involved just 50 Canadians but another case on the horizon involves thousands of alleged pirates.
-
-
-
Brussels, 27 November – La Quadrature du Net is distributing to each Member of the European Parliament a “datalove USB drive”, loaded with music, movies and books urging them to adapt copyright to our cultural practices. After the historic victory against ACTA, it is now time to break away from the repressive logic that harms our freedoms and the way we build and share culture, and reform copyright.
-
Over the past couple of days, there have been multiple reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, it is important to note that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less – perhaps as little as $100 – if the case went to court as even the government’s FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians “will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement.”
-
Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing — UK regulatory body Ofcom has come out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).
-
-
Copyright issues don’t often become “mainstream” stories. SOPA was the exception, not the rule, and it only really went fully mainstream at the very end with the January 18th blackouts. But it’s always nice to see when big copyright issues get some mainstream love. Stephen Colbert actually has covered copyright (and other IP) issues a few times on his show (perhaps because his brother is an IP lawyer).
-
Three of the bigger porn copyright trolls out there, Patrick Collins, Malibu Media and Third Degree Films, have teamed up to make a court filing arguing that Verizon should be held in contempt of court for failing to cough up the names of account holders based on the trolls’ list of IP addresses. As you’re probably aware by now, hundreds of thousands of people have been “sued” by copyright trolls, but not actually taken to court. The strategy is just to file a lawsuit and force ISPs to identify account holders, then bombard those account holders with threatening letters (and calls and emails) saying that they will be sued if they don’t pay up (often a few thousand dollars). Verizon, like many other ISPs, has fought back against these demands for info on a variety of grounds — including improper joinder (i.e., that the cases improperly lump together multiple people who had nothing to do with one another in an attempt to keep costs to the trolls down). These claims of improper joinder have been somewhat effective in getting a lot of these cases thrown out — but usually those claims are raised by the account holders themselves, rather than the ISPs.
-
For a few years now, we’ve been following attempts in Germany — mainly driven by newspaper publishers — to create a bizarre new copyright-like right (specifically a “neighbor right”) in “linking” such that a site like Google would have to pay sites that it links to. The bizarre and nonsensical argument is that because a site like Google makes some of its money by linking to sites, those sites “deserve” part of the money. This is problematic for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is it’s fundamentally backwards economically. If sites like Google are making money from directing people to other sites, they’re making money because they provide a valuable service in helping people find the content, not because of the content itself. It’s up to the sites themselves to figure out how to monetize the traffic — not to run to the government to force others to pay. And, if you think this is just a Google issue, you’re wrong. Among the proposals was one that would impact many others, including people posting links on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
-
A student facing trial and possible imprisonment in the United States has struck a deal to avoid extradition, the High Court has been told.
-
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.27.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
10% of desktop PCs being thin clients seems small but it is not. They last three times as long as thick PCs and they can run GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. That’s huge, a potential 30% loss of share for Wintel. That’s right; thin clients don’t need to be x86. They can be ARMed as well.
-
For those Linux users hoping to do PC upgrades this holiday season, a number of interesting Linux hardware benchmarks are imminent to help you with your buying decisions.
-
In the tech news in the last couple of weeks, there was an announcement of an intel branded mini-pc. There have been many of these small desktop machines in the last few years. Very small footprints, low power consumption, most are silent due to a fanless design.
The appeal of such small machines is obvious. Taking negligible desk space, they can sit out of the way, or even be hidden. They can be mounted to the back of a monitor for use as industrial signage, or a pseudo all-in-one design for the desktop. They are ideal for limited space installations like in mobile homes, or a small collage dorm room.
-
Do you depend on your computer for your living? If so, I’m sure you’ve thought long and hard about which hardware and software to use. I’d like to explain why I use generic “white boxes” running open source software. These give me a platform I rely on for 100% availability. They also provide a low-cost solution with excellent security and privacy.
-
Desktop
-
Alternative, Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu haven’t historically carried much weight with PC gamers. Very few PC games have been made for Linux, over the years, ever since the company that was porting AAA gaming titles to Linux (Loki Games) went bankrupt in 2001. And while it’s possible to use a “compatibility layer” such as Wine to run Windows PC games in Linux, the results are mixed at best and require a lot of technical tweaking, sometimes even in between updates.
Colorado-based indie PC hardware company System76, however, clearly expects that not only are there PC gamers on Linux out there, but that some of them are willing to pay $1,499 for a tricked-out gaming laptop — the 17.3-inch Bonobo Extreme. Like all of System76′s machines, it runs the Ubuntu flavor of Linux; and its actual price tag is $1,599, but it’s gotten a $100 discount for the holidays.
-
Is Google preparing to release a Chromebook device with a touchscreen? That concept was reported in a Taiwanese newspaper and discussed by DigiTimes and CNet. The idea isn’t out of the realm of possibility. After all, Google has been exploring the touchscreen arena with its Nexus tablets, and Chrome OS includes a touchscreen keyboard. Furthermore, new, low-cost Chromebooks such as Acer’s $199 entry (seen here) are arriving at a fast clip. Touchscreen Chromebooks aren’t a great new opportunity for Google, though.
-
Google is committed to the Chromebook and a report out of China indicates a Google-branded model is on its way. If true, this is a smart move and would help the fledgling desktop platform gain traction. The sellout success of recent Nexus products shows Google finally knows how to do hardware.
China Times reports Google intends to launch Chrome OS netbooks equipped with touchscreens. Compal, a Taiwan-based ODM, is tasked with the manufacturing. Per this report, Google placed the order itself rather than relying on a 3rd party like Acer or Asus as with the Nexus products. Internal components will begin shipping to Compal this month, a sign that China Times takes to mean the product itself will ship yet in 2012.
-
Server
-
The AWS Marketplace, which is generally used by software companies to market their commercial appliances and software for use in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), now also lists free basic images of the Debian Linux 6.0.6, CentOS 6.3 and FreeBSD 9.0-Release operating systems.
-
Kernel Space
-
While no future generation Geode processors are coming out of AMD, the open-source community still continues to maintain the Geode X.Org graphics driver. Released on Sunday was the xf86-video-geode 2.11.14 driver.
-
systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts that provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, is now at version 196.
-
-
The highlight of the latest xf86-video-intel 2.20.14 point release is improving the Intel “Gen4″ support, which spans Intel hardware from the i965G chipset through the GM45 chipset.
-
NVIDIA has published initial patches for providing open-source 2D hardware acceleration support on their NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs. This work is based upon the experimental open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver to be merged into the Linux 3.8 kernel.
Times are great with NVIDIA dabbling with more open-source code and Imagination looking at some level of open-source PowerVR support. This weekend I wrote about NVIDIA working on open-source support for their Tegra graphics while this morning new open-source patches arrived from the NVIDIA Finland office.
-
In this article is a large OpenGL performance comparison looking at the frame-rates in different Linux games for different AMD Radeon Linux graphics cards when running the stock Ubuntu 12.10 operating system (Mesa 9.0 + Linux 3.5), the Catalyst Linux driver (fglrx 9.0.2) as found in the Ubuntu Quantal archive, and then when running the very latest Radeon Git code: The Linux 3.7 kernel, Mesa 9.1-devel, and xf86-video-ati 7.0.99 Git.
-
Whether or not you know Jon a little or a lot, we hope you learn something new about him in this profile, from how he ended up in Boulder, Colorado to the ski run named after his father, to what he’s running on his desktop and how he suggests Linux newbies get involved in the community.
-
Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including a look at the features being merged for the upcoming 3.7 release
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
With the Linux 3.8 kernel in early 2013 there is going to be an open-source NVIDIA Tegra 2 DRM driver. NVIDIA is currently working out initial patches for applying 2D acceleration atop this mainline Linux kernel driver.
-
It seems the binary curtain among ARM graphics vendors may finally be falling. Aside from NVIDIA contributing to the open-source Tegra DRM driver and other interesting actions recently in the ARM Linux space, Imagination Technologies may finally becoming more open. It’s looking like there may be a surprise open-source play out of Imagination for PowerVR graphics in the near future.
In recent days I have heard from two independent sources about Imagination Technologies likely having a “modestly open” reference driver to deliver for PowerVR graphics processors in the near future. It seems thanks to greater competition in the ARM graphics space (e.g. ARM’s Mali), more openness among SoC vendors, Intel switching to in-house HD graphics on future Atom SoCs, the continued success of Linux/Android in the mobile space, and new requirements being presented on the Linux desktop (i.e. Wayland), we are finally on the verge of seeing a fundamental shift out of Imagination Technologies.
-
There’s just a few weeks to go until the release of LLVM 3.2, but AMD is still trying to get its “R600″ GPU back-end merged into this next compiler infrastructure release.
Going back to March, AMD has been trying to merge its R600 GPU back-end that is optionally used by their open-source graphics driver stack and is a requirement for the Radeon OpenCL support with the open-source driver. The LLVM back-end can be used as part of the R600 Gallium3D shader compiler. (See benchmarks of the R600 LLVM compiler back-end from several months ago.)
-
Applications
-
Orca, a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via speech and refreshable Braille, is now at version 3.7.2.
-
GIMP developer Nicolas Robidoux seeks to leverage a freedom-based crowd-funding solution to bank-roll completion of the Nohalo/Lohalo/Lojaggy/Loblur suite of image resamplers for GEGL. The idea started back on Nov. 11th in the GIMP mailing list. Robidoux answers whether or not he plans to create a project on Kickstarter or not.
-
-
Proprietary
-
I have only recently discovered Netflix and signed up without thinking there may be issues playing back the streaming media on Linux. I have done many searches on the subject and found some interesting discussions and the only solution that seems to work.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
When writing earlier this week about the poor state of the open-source id Tech 4 / Doom 3 community even after one year of the id Software game engine being GPL licensed, several readers wrote in and tweeted about “The Dark Mod” having not been mentioned.
For those not familiar with The Dark Mod, it’s a total conversion mod of Doom 3 that seeks to remake Doom 3 as a game inspired by Looking Glass Studios’ Thief game series. This Doom 3 mod brings in new game-play functionality, unique AI characteristics, new maps, and custom art assets.
-
-
There’s more good open-source news today besides NVIDIA publishing open-source 2D acceleration code for Tegra. id Software has just released the source-code to their new Doom 3 BFG game under the GPL license!
Nearly one year to the day since releasing the original Doom 3 source-code, a.k.a. the id Tech 4 game engine, and one month after the Doom 3 BFG source-code was approved for release under the GPL, id Software has finally carried out the code drop.
-
One you may find interesting: We switched from SDL to GLFW, a HUGE change that will eventually allow Scrumble to function on Macs and on the open source opengl drivers. This affects how I deal with display initialization and input, among other things.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
After the successful developer sprint in Berlin in 2010, the Kate and KDevelop teams met for the second time from the 23rd to the 29th of October. This time, the developer sprint was held in the beautiful city of Vienna. In total, 13 contributors discussed and collaborated on the future of Kate and KDevelop for a whole week.
-
-
The Qt Developer Days conference took place earlier this month in Berlin, Germany. For those not in attendance at this open-source development conference, the slides for many of the Qt talks have been uploaded with coverage on Qt Quick, KDE Frameworks 5, and other interesting areas surrounding this tool-kit soon to finally reach its major 5.0 milestone.
Slides for the different 2012 Qt Developer Days talks can be found on this KDAB Qt Conference page. At the time of publishing there aren’t slides available for all of the talks, but a large number of them.
-
If you are someone like me who missed the icon resize feature you can rejoice as the feature is “coming back” with Dolphin 2.2. Well, it’s not coming back in sense the way it was but the developers are adding an option to the context menu of Places Panel, similar to the one found in the context menu of tool bar where you can resize the icon. So, while icons in the side panel won’t resize automatically, you can use the context menu to manually resize them.
-
-
The ITTIA DB SQL embedded database is now available as a plugin for the Qt application and UI development framework from Digia. The combination of ITTIA DB SQL and Qt enables rapid development of user-friendly data-driven applications with a level of performance that is only possible with native code.
Qt is a cross-platform C++ application and UI framework that is widely used to develop software with a graphical user interface (GUI), as well as non-GUI programs. Non-GUI features include SQL database access, which can both execute arbitrary queries and map results to lists and fields in the user interface.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Once upon a time, GNOME, along with KDE, ruled the Linux desktop. Then, in 2010, GNOME’s designers decided to ignore their users’ wishes and introduced a radically new desktop interface: GNOME 3.
Many users hated it. Not even two years later, even GNOME’s programmers were wondering if their interface was “staring into the abyss?” Now, GNOME developers have woken up and are offering a way for GNOME users to go back to a GNOME 2.x style interface.
But is it too little, too late? Will GNOME actually be offering a real, return-to-the-past desktop interface?
-
-
Yet the good news is they finally responded on this one issue in some form, at least in theory. Perhaps.
-
The GNOME Project has been working hard to evolve and improve GNOME 3 since it was initially released in April 2011. We’ve made substantial progress, introducing new features, like GNOME Online Accounts, the lock screen and integrated input sources. We’ve also adjusted and refined many parts of the core UX, including improvements to the Activities Overview, the new-look Message Tray and ongoing work on System Settings. This is important work, and there is more that still needs to be done.
-
Switching between Applications is one of the core functionality for every Desktop. While Gnome3 does this perfectly with choosing Apps through Overview, some complains have raised against the (Alt+Tab/Key Above Tab) functionality.
-
The GNOME 3.7.2 development release was made available today. The two major changes with this latest GNOME 3.8 pre-release is the elimination of the GNOME Fallback (non-Shell) mode and now depending exclusively upon GStreamer 1.0.
-
-
-
Hard on the heels of the news that the old GNOME 2 desktop is coming back by popular demand, the Cinnarch project late last week announced that its new Linux distribution combining Arch Linux with the alternative Cinnamon desktop environment has now reached beta.
-
-
-
-
Every now and again a project springs forth to tout the advantages of a generic or all-distribution package manager. A one-size-fits-all approach was the Holy Grail of Linux for a while and several ideas came and went silent. However, hope springs again and Guix is its name.
-
GNU Guix is a new free software project that aspires to be a package manager and associated free software distribution for the GNU system.
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat is putting the final touches on the next major release of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.1 platform.
-
West Point’s motto is “Duty, Honor, Country.” I graduated in 1993. Why did a former Army Officer end up at Red Hat?
Red Hat is an “Open Source Software Company”. In order to work here, you have to understand those four words.
Software. The world is run on Software now. There are more computers in your life than you are aware of. You carry one in your pocket. One wakes you up in the morning. One runs your coffee maker, another your oven. Your car has multiple computers in them. But computers do nothing without software. Without software, a computer is a corpse. Software makes things happen, things that were not even dreamt of in our parents time. Software is the magic we dreamed of after seeing the Magicians Apprentice. Software is the Force we wanted to control after seeing Star Wars. It is that incantation that makes the world conform to better suit our mood.
-
Fedora
-
Debian Family
-
* Help your language reach 100% support in the Debian Installer
* Debian Installer 7.0 Beta4 released
* Debian newcomer experience survey
* Interviews
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
Microsoft’s Windows 8 dominated countless headlines in the weeks leading up to its launch late last month, but October saw the debut of another major operating system as well.
Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” arrived a week ahead of its competitor, in fact, accompanied by a challenge: “Avoid the pain of Windows 8.” That slogan appeared on the Ubuntu home page for the first few hours after the OS’s official launch, and attracted considerable attention.
-
The Nintendo Wii U in-store demo booths maybe running a modified version of the Ubuntu operating system instead of the Wii U itself.
One user on Reddit obtained a snapshot of one of the systems that hadn’t booted correctly because it was missing a “USB key”. Instead of showing the games available to try out, in this case Rayman Legends, it displayed a screen for the Ubuntu OS.
-
Believe it or not, this isn’t meant to be inflamatory. This is an honest reminder of showstoppers that persistently prevent Ubuntu from becoming what I really do want it to become, and what I think it has a chance of achieving: a complete replacement of Windows or OSX.
In fact, I will confess that I like the user interface on Ubuntu more than one on Windows, and find it almost on par with the one in OSX. You might even find me proclaiming Ubuntu as the OSX of the PC world. It at least could have the potential of becoming that.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
-
In Mint 14, MATE and Cinnamon have both received major enhancements. The release features MATE 1.4, which according to Mint developers “not only strengthens the quality and stability of the desktop but goes beyond GNOME 2,” on which MATE is based, ” by fixing bugs which were in GNOME 2 for years and by providing new features which were previously missing.” The full list of MATE enhancements is available online.
-
However, they both have different approach towards it. Linux Mint has become a distribution which is keeping people in center and building UI and technologies around them, whereas Ubuntu is putting technology or UI in the center and people outside it. None of the two approaches are right or wrong, chose what you like. Unlike Windows 8 or Mac at least here you have choices.
-
-
Perhaps the most well-known and/or notorious derivative of Ubuntu: Linux Mint, has released its fourteenth version, codenamed: “Nadia”.
-
-
There has been a ton on news in the open source world revolving around the Raspberry Pi. It was one of the first low cost, ARM computers to be targeted at the hobbyist and educational markets. I’ve owned a Raspberry Pi for many months now and while it does an alright job at playing media files and acting as a small server – for most computing tasks it simply didn’t have enough resources available to be useful.
-
I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the Free Software Foundation’s office. More specifically, we are using Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, which features the free-software-supported Atheros AR9132 chipset with 32MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM.
-
The Raspberry Pi, an ARM-powered £20 computer sold as the educationalists’ dream, is finding its place as a media player in many tech-aware homes, but installing media player XBMC and plugging in a TV is hardly the spirit in which the Pi was conceived, especially when one can get one’s hands good and dirty with the minimum of effort.
-
The camera for the Raspberry Pi that was announced back in May is now taking shape. A prototype of the Pi Cam was presented at Electronica 2012. It offers a 5 megapixel sensor and can record 1080p H.264 video at 30 frames per second. The camera connects to the Pi’s free CSI pins and is controlled via the I2C bus. Potential fields of application include low-cost surveillance camera systems and robotics. The camera is set to cost $25.
-
-
Over the last 18 months, the $35, Linux-powered, education-oriented Raspberry Pi credit-card-sized computer has experienced an almost-unabated success story. The 700MHz ARMv6-powered computer has sold tens of thousands of units to beardies and educational establishments alike, is still on back order, and has attracted hundreds of hackers who have contributed alternative operating systems, software packages, supplementary hardware daughterboards, and more. Today, we’re happy to announce that Raspberry Pi has made perhaps the biggest step towards mainstream adoption: Notch and his Mojangstas have unveiled Minecraft: Pi Edition.
-
It’s incredible to see how Linux runs on devices of various sizes, power and built for diverse purposes. Linux is, like technology itself, deeply integrated in our daily lives and we don’t seem to even realize it! While looking into supercomputers I was pleasantly surprised to find different/weird devices that run on Linux: Weird, in a sense that they run on Linux and we never expected them to do so!
We expect that you already know that Linux is running on 94% supercomputers and on various high-end computers and devices in science centers for research purposes. Also the popular Android operating system too is based on Linux kernel. This implies all the Android handsets (currently claiming major share in smartphone market) and tablets are in turn employing Linux at heart! Now let’s investigate some places you might not have expected to be running on Linux.
-
Phones
-
Just in case you missed it, the Tizen project just launched a brand new site at tizen.org. It’s been substantially redesigned and updated to make it easier to find project information, and reflects the new look and feel of Tizen.
-
Android
-
That’s what Facebook’s calling it, at least – a clever play on the word “dogfooding,” which is itself a term used to describe when a company tests or uses the very products it’s trying to push out into the consumer market. In other words, the notion that, “our product is so good, we’ll use it ourselves.”
In Facebook’s case, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine has pulled up some pictures of just how dramatically the company is hoping to get its own employees on board with Facebook apps on the Android platform.
-
At the start of this month Samsung announced that channel sales of its mini-tablet-sized smartphone, the Galaxy Note II, had passed three million unit sales in 37 days on sale. Now the Korean mobile maker has announced that cumulative global channel sales of the device have exceeded five million after around two months since launch.
Samsung does not typically break out device sales to consumers but its channel sales measure provides an indication of how much end-user demand its sales channels are experiencing.
-
-
-
The online newsgroup for OpenJDK, the official open source Java implementation, has been airing discussion of a Java version for Android. Such an option would allow Java developers to work directly within the most widespread mobile operating system.
-
Android is surging, their remains no questions about it. Android is a proven platform now and that is particularly showing in the burgeoning apps market. Google Play Store is now home to nearly 900,000 applications and games. More than 25 billion apps and games have already been downloaded from Google Play Store. About an year ago, we did a brief round up detailing 10 must-have games for Android. But things have drastically improved over a one year period. Here’s our “take two”. 30 must have games for Android in 2012.
-
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
-
Intel is killing the desktop, but not quite as soon as people expect it to, there will be one last gasp, but that is irrelevant. Word is finally leaking there won’t be a desktop PC chip in a bit over a year.
In a story that SemiAccurate has been following for several months, Broadwell will not come in an LGA package, so no removable CPU. The news was first publicly broken by the ever sharp PC Watch, english version here, but the news has been floating in the backchannel for a bit now. The problem? This information wasn’t floating around the OEMs or the majority of the PC ecosystem, they had no clue. What does all of this mean? Quite a bit.
-
This was shocking news. Sitting across from a doctor holding a clinical folder with your name on it, and hearing him say the words “low-grade glioma,” “language and comprehension areas of your brain,” “surgery” and “chemotherapy” is a very weird experience.
My first idea was to seek other opinions. Maybe this hospital is wrong. Maybe there are other places that wouldn’t need to do surgery. Maybe there is a laser, a chemical, an ancient tradition, a shaman, a scientist, a nanorobot.
I felt incomplete about the way that the medical system was handling my situation.
-
DreamWorks has released its OpenVDB open source C++ library for general community consumption and adaption.
The animation studio has used the technology itself on its “Rise of the Guardians” fantasy film that features a whole group of childhood legends including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
This in effect means that DreamWorks has spent millions of dollars developing specialised technology to make one of the most expensive animated movies ever produced only to now give it away free of charge on the openvdb.org/ website.
-
We don’t condone shopping when you should be working, but everybody needs a break, right? When you’re out shopping for the online deals today, here are a few Cyber Monday specials we like:
-
More camera support, similarity matching, geotagging, image grouping and a Facebook exporter are among the top new features in darktable 1.1, the latest release of the open source photography workflow application. The Canon EOS M is now supported and Samsung NX support is fixed in the new release. The ability to match images that look alike with similarity matching is now a standard feature.
-
-
Over the past few years, enterprises, particularly in the financial services industry, have had to cut costs while simultaneously enhancing innovation. While this may sound contradictory, it has been possible with the strategic use of open source software (OSS).
-
After some time in preparation, Oracle has now proposed a new project for OpenJDK called Nashorn. The Nashorn project sets out to implement a lightweight high-performance JavaScript runtime in Java which runs on the JVM. Under the direction of Jim Laskey, Multi-language Lead at Oracle, and John Coomes, OpenJDK HotSpot Group Lead, the proposal is to create a JavaScript implementation that can run standalone JavaScript applications or be called via the JSR 223 APIs by Java applications. Nashorn, German for Rhino, will be designed to take advantage of newer JVM technologies such as MethodHandles and InvokeDynamic APIs, which were introduced to make dynamic languages operate faster on the JVM.
-
Events
-
-
I gave a presentation yesterday in Malaysia on the forces driving change in open source; here are the slides.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
-
-
Mozilla on Monday announced the release of Firefox 18 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it now from Mozilla.org/Firefox/Beta.
The biggest addition in this update is significant JavaScript improvements, courtesy of Mozilla’s new JavaScript JIT compiler called IonMonkey. The company promises the performance bump should be noticeable whenever Firefox is displaing Web apps, games, and other JavaScript-heavy pages.Firefox 18 beta out: Faster JavaScript via IonMonkey, PDF viewer, Retina Display support for Macs
-
Mozilla’s Firefox 18 Beta web-browser released on Monday. New to this development release that’s coming just one week after Firefox 17 is integrating the new IonMonkey JavaScript engine.
-
SaaS
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Oracle presented a new project in recent names that is named Nashorn. The Nashorn Project comes down to a high-performance JavaScript run-time for OpenJDK and can be used so developers can embed JavaScript within Java code.
-
Business
-
Semi-Open Source
-
Denis Dorval, Vice President, EMEA & APAC, Alfresco, articulates the distinctive proposition as a preferred ECM vendor in the Indian market.
-
Funding
-
ownCloud Inc., the company behind the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software, announced today the closing of a second seed round, led by current investor General Catalyst Partners, a growth equity and venture capital firm investing in exceptional entrepreneurs.
The Lexington, Mass.-based company will use the funds to further expand its more than 70-partner strong channel, aggressively expand its large enterprise and education customer base and support service providers who implement file sync and share based on ownCloud.
-
-
-
BSD
-
The FreeBSD Security Team has announced that on 11 November two servers as part of the FreeBSD.org hosting infrastructure have been compromised.
The compromise is believed to have occurred due to the leak of an SSH key from a developer who legitimately had access to the machines in question, and was not due to any vulnerability or code exploit within FreeBSD.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Project Releases
-
The OpenELEC Linux distribution that aspires to be a leading multimedia OS within an entertainment center is nearing its 3.0 release. The OpenELEC 3.0 Beta was released and now it’s based upon XBMC 12.0 Frodo.
-
Public Services/Government
-
That compares with just £218,000 that has been spent on the free software-based solution using the city’s own LiMux distro. As well as zero costs for software upgrades, the open source approach also saved money because it was not necessary to upgrade hardware, unlike for Windows – something that is worth remembering.
-
Four more years. This happened because of you. Thank you,” Obama tweeted soon after he defeated his Republican rival Mitt Romney in a closely contested 2012 US presidential poll.
Well, we are aware of the fact that the President of the United States of America and his tech team were all over the Internet embracing different kind of tools -may be from social media or from different online campaigns – to win the 2012 presidential elections, but many of us are not aware that open source software also played an important role during the US elections.
-
Licensing
-
“This is a hard one,” Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. mused. “The development of FLOSS in such a capitalist and competitive world demands solidarity, talent, idealism and passion. So when it comes to discussing the inclusion (without malice) of not-FLOSS code inside Linux, things get very hot — that’s when the passion comes in.”
[...]
RTS OS is a unified storage operating system from RisingTide, which is a Red Hat competitor.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: time to give open source presents. The opensource.com team gathered ten of our favorite gadgets to help you pick out that perfect present for that special (open source) someone.
-
Salvatore Iaconesi’s essay on his decision to post his medical records on the Internet in hopes of finding a crowd-sourced cure for his brain tumor has sparked a lively conversation on CNN.com.
-
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) collaborative initiative to develop low-cost drugs for infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB) is all set to become a success.
-
Open Hardware
-
Scanlime’s Beth modded a remote control vibrator, replacing the interface with an Arduino-based sonar controller that she can activate with any part of her body, playing it like a theremin. The result is pretty cool — it “closes the feedback loop” between the vibrator’s intensity and the user’s physical response. The post includes a detailed technical breakdown of the reverse-engineering steps that she used to work out how to hijack the control mechanism, and the steps that went into building the remote, including a 3D printed chassis. The plans are open source hardware (CC-BY-SA), and posted to Github.
-
For your postprandial pleasure I present the an open-source vibrator that you (or your partner) can play like a theremin. The story of how it came to be is pretty amazing and involves FCC chip lookups, bit-tracing, and lots of assembly code. In short, it’s an amazing effort in DIY hardware hacking that serves the dual purpose of education and giving pleasure.
-
Programming
-
In addition to featuring an auto-vectorizer, Polly optimizations, and countless other improvements, the forthcoming release of LLVM 3.2 brings numerous improvements to its PowerPC back-end.
The PowerPC back-end target with LLVM 3.2 and accompanying Clang 3.2 C/C++ compiler feature many improvements for this compiler infrastructure that’s due to be released in mid-December.
-
In case you didn’t know it, Google is one of the largest contributors of open source projects in the world, and runs a number of programs focused on open source development. One of the more fun programs that the company runs each year is Google Code-In, through which pre-university students (13-17 years old) can create open source software for community use, and win prizes for their efforts. This year’s Code-In event starts today, and will run for 50 days.
-
Are you one among them, who wants to know what exactly is open source, who has thirst to learn new in open source technologies, a novice developer and doesn’t know anything about development and thinking to involve yourself in open source software development?
-
-
Standards/Consortia
-
KDE developers are currently contemplating the idea of allowing a subset of the C++11 language to be used within the KDevelop code-base. This C++11 change would happen for the KDevelop 4.6 integrated development environment release. Reasons are shared in this article for why one should consider using C++11 code.
Milian Wolff, a developer on the KDevelop IDE, has proposed to their development community that a subset of the C++11 language be permitted following the KDevelop 4.5 branching in a few weeks.
-
My son Fallon, who is six and still hasn’t lost any teeth, has a beef with Apple, iTunes, and the iOS App Store. “Apple is greedy,” Fallon says. But he has come up with a way for Cupertino to improve its manners through a revised business model.
[...]
“So it’s like renting to own?” I asked.
-
A firefighter claims Grampian Fire & Rescue Service (GFRS) chiefs have removed the Saltire from two new appliances after complaints which branded the use of the national flag “offensive”.
-
South Korea is to relieve a US woman embroiled in the scandal that felled CIA director David Petraeus of an honorary position, officials say.
-
A Wall St analyst performed an comparative report at the iconic mega-retail palace Mall of America, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He found that on on 23 November, shoppers at Apple’s store in the famous mall bought an average of 17.2 items per hour, versus the 3.5 items that were purchased at Microsoft’s store, located just opposite the Apple shop.
-
Hardware
-
People talk about Moore’s Law as if server chip manufacturers had to obey it like some kind of cosmic speed limit. In reality, Moore’s Law is an idealized goal, and one that is increasingly difficult to attain year after year for server microprocessors.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
-
-
-
The New York Times reports that there is internal strife within the administration about the willy-nilly use of drones to kill people abroad (2,500 since President Obama took office) and, fearing defeat at the polls, the Obama administration was working overtime to lay down a set of rules governing robotic assassination.
-
As a rule, junior or mid-level officers and officials, particularly spokesmen, prefer to stay behind the wall of anonymity of their office. They are termed “IDF spokesman” or an “officer in the Southern Command.” They are rarely mentioned by name. However, as part of the IDF Spokesman’s victory lap after Operation Cast Ballot, in which it tries to convince the natives it won the hard battles in the burning-of-consciousness theater, it exposed some of the people in its New Media unit in an article in Tablet. One of them, New Media Department Chief Lt. Sacha Dratwa, then became the focus of a cheap item in Gawker, of the kind we have become accustomed used to: he’s a sensitive man, he’s a normal guy, he likes macchiatos, he posts pictures to Facebook. The people in the IDF Spokesman unit probably thought this was good for showing the human side of their hasbara warriors; good for scoring a few points, if not with their target audience, then with the dying breed of kind Hadassah aunts from the United States.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
(Beirut) – Egyptian police and military officers have arrested and detained over 300 children during protests in Cairo over the past year, in some cases beating or torturing them, Human Rights Watch said today. Frequently, these children were illegally jailed with adult prisoners, tried in adult courts, and denied their rights to counsel and notification of their families.
-
At first, the latest awful news from the Democratic Republic of Congo sounds like just another installment of an ongoing saga common in the Western media, “Vicious African Tribal Factions Hate Each Other.” Several thousand armed predators who call themselves the M23 Movement and are inappropriately described as “rebels” have just seized control of Goma, a regional capital, and the renewed fighting is adding to a death toll that has already risen above 5 million since the Second Congo War started in 1998.
-
In 2010, the Belarussian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov took part in the country’s presidential election. He was under no illusions he might “win”.
-
-
The British government has already spent £2 billion on the development of drones and they are about to commit another £2 billion on a new armed drone.
-
Battlefield drones and robots capable of choosing their targets and firing without any human oversight won’t arrive for a few decades, experts say. But a new Human Rights Watch report calls for an international ban on fully autonomous “killer robots” before they ever become a part of military arsenals around the world.
-
-
The president’s flattering view of himself reflects the political sentiments in his party and the citizenry generally
-
The federal government is rushing to open America’s skies to tens of thousands of the drones — pushed to do so by a law championed by manufacturers of the unmanned aircraft.
-
-
-
Cablegate
-
-
A soldier charged with giving US secrets to the WikiLeaks website is due to return to court for pre-trial proceedings.
The hearing for Private Bradley Manning is scheduled to begin in Fort Meade, Maryland, on Tuesday afternoon and run until Sunday.
Manning is expected to give evidence in a defence motion seeking dismissal of all charges.
-
-
Sweden’s ambassador to Australia took an Australian columnist to task for defending WikiLeaks-founder Julian Assange against rape allegations, documents recently released by the whistleblower website reveal.
-
-
An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history is trying to avoid trial by claiming he has already been punished enough by being locked up alone in a small cell and having to sleep naked for several nights.
A United Nations investigator called the conditions cruel, inhuman and degrading, but stopped short of calling it torture.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
-
Greenhouse gas emissions are hot news these days — especially in the lead up to an election when candidates, at least those who claim to believe in climate science, vow to do something about the biggest environmental crisis facing our little blue planet: climate change.
-
-
-
-
Finance
-
Responding to a letter by 80 CEOs published in the Wall Street Journal calling for budget cuts to reduce the deficit, 350 economists published a letter calling for job stimulus and growth instead. CEOs Wrong To Promote Dangerous Budget Cuts, 350 Economists Say. These economist warn that cutting government spending during a downturn is the opposite of what should be done, pointing to examples such as the economy of Greece which collapsed immediately after deep austerity cuts which made unemployment worse. Instead we should be focusing on boosting employment.
-
By 2020, more than one-quarter of U.S. workers will be working low-wage jobs, not making enough money to keep a family of four out of poverty. The corporations that employ the most low-wage workers, meanwhile, “have largely recovered from the recession and most are in strong financial positions.” 92 percent of them were profitable last year, while three-quarters are making more in revenues than they were before the recession.
-
The government’s welfare reform minister has suggested lone parents, sickness claimants and other people on benefits are too comfortable not having to work for their income, saying they are able to “have a lifestyle” on the state.
In an interview with House Magazine, Lord Freud is reported to have said the benefits system is “dreadful” and discourages poor people from taking the risks he implied they should be willing to bear to change their circumstances.
-
As the eviction row rumbles on, a number of Spanish mayors are taking matters into their own hands when it comes to their citizens being thrown out onto the street for mortgage non-payment. City leaders across the country are warning they will close their accounts with banks that continue a policy of carrying out eviction orders without giving those affected an alternative.
-
-
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein urged Congress and President Barack Obama to cut Social Security, arguing that the program cannot “afford” to keep funding longer modern retirements. He left out that Social Security currently has a $2.7 trillion surplus and could strengthen its financial footing further by simply taxing more of the income of wealthy executives like Blankfein himself.
-
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — The shadow banking industry has grown to about $67 trillion, $6 trillion bigger than previously thought, leading global regulators to seek more oversight of financial transactions that fall outside traditional oversight.
The size of the shadow banking system, which includes the activities of money market funds, monoline insurers and off- balance sheet investment vehicles, “can create systemic risks” and “amplify market reactions when market liquidity is scarce,” the Financial Stability Board said in a report, which utilized more data than last year’s probe into the sector.
-
Censorship
-
The evolution of the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask from a clever element in a comic book and film to a meme and a global symbol of online and offline resistance has been quite remarkable. A highlight of that trend was earlier this year when MPs in the Polish parliament donned the masks in protest against ACTA, spurred on by massive street demonstrations against the treaty that had recently been held across Poland.
-
-
-
Italian journalists plan to strike next week in protest against a law that would send them to jail for defamation but would let editors off with a fine, the journalists’ union said on Thursday.
The senate earlier passed an amendment to a bill that would set a maximum sentence of a year in jail for anyone convicted of defamation, while editors-in-chief and managing editors face a maximum fine of 50,000 euros ($64,400) or 20,000 euros respectively.
The measure must be approved by the Chamber of Deputies to become law. Italy has more than 20,000 full-time reporters, according to the Journalists’ Guild.
-
I welcome changes in the Hungarian Media Legislation that have been proposed or already made by Hungary. However, these changes do not address all the outstanding substantial concerns I have. My concerns remain serious, and I expect Hungary to not only continue its dialogue with the Council of Europe but to take rapid further action. In other words, it is not enough for the government to say it is in talks with the Council of Europe.
-
The past week’s violence in Gaza has rekindled calls for Twitter to shutter the accounts of U.S.-labeled terror groups such as Hamas.
Seven House Republicans asked the FBI in September to demand that Twitter take down the accounts of U.S.-designated terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Somalia’s al Shabaab. The letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller was spearheaded by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who said Wednesday that the recent events vindicated the request.
-
-
Privacy
-
One of the technology-related civil liberties battles that ACLU affiliates around the country have been fighting in recent years involves defending students’ rights to privacy and free expression in the new electronic media that are becoming such a large part of their lives. For some reason many school officials seem to believe that when it comes to online communications, students have no such rights
-
A Texas high school student is being suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip.
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.
-
Civil Rights
-
hacking networks and writing viruses to planting tracking devices and rifling through trash
-
Ex-Muslim atheists are becoming more outspoken, but tolerance is still rare
-
Recently I wrote about an ACLU of Michigan report that highlighted the problem of police cameras being installed outside of people’s private homes. Last week I learned from my colleague Doug Bonney of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri about an even more egregious incident involving video surveillance of a private home in Missouri.
-
We’ve written a few times about the urgent need to reform ECPA — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is woefully outdated, having passed in 1986. Of course, every time there’s an attempt to reform it, it seems to fail, often because folks in law enforcement like the outdated law that lets them easily spy on others without a warrant. The latest attempt at ECPA reform is a mostly good proposal from Senator Leahy that (as expected) has law enforcement types livid. The crux of the reform is that law enforcement would need to get a warrant for most situations if they wanted to peer into your electronic lives. That seems entirely consistent with that quaint concept sometimes referred to as the Fourth Amendment.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Some things change, but others stay the same. While the types of threats facing Internet users worldwide have diversified over the past few years, from targeted malware to distributed denial of service attacks, one thing has remained constant: governments seeking to exert control over their populations still remain the biggest threat to the open Internet.
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
-
Organic farmers and allies have slammed a USDA committee report for kowtowing to the interests of genetically modified crop growers and the biotechnology industry.
-
In a massive blow to multinational agribiz corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, and Dow, Peru has officially passed a law banning genetically modified ingredients anywhere within the country for a full decade before coming up for another review.
Peru’s Plenary Session of the Congress made the decision 3 years after the decree was written despite previous governmental pushes for GM legalization due largely to the pressure from farmers that together form the Parque de la Papa in Cusco, a farming community of 6,000 people that represent six communities.
-
-
Trademarks
-
You might recall that way back during the Oatmeal/Funnyjunk saga, Charles Carreon — the villainous attorney defeated in that story — went after an anonymous blogger, Satirical Charles.
After forcing Register.com to give up the blogger’s name (by threatening to add Register.com as a defendant in a lawsuit to be filed the next day – a lawsuit Carreon never filed), Charles Carreon promised legal fire and brimstone, asserting a ridiculous theory of trademark liability (because Carreon trademarked his own name). Carreon warned that he would pursue the blogger to the ends of both earth and statute of limitations.
-
It’s only been a few months since webcomic artist Matthew Inman, operating under the name The Oatmeal, was able to put his bizarre legal clash with competing humor website FunnyJunk to rest.
-
Copyrights
-
A new paper suggests that box office revenues were negatively impacted after the shutdown of Megaupload. The dip in revenues was most visible for average size and smaller films. According to the researchers this may have been caused by the loss of word-of-mouth promotion by people who used the popular file-hosting site to share movies. For blockbuster movies the Megaupload shutdown had the opposite effect.
-
A few years ago we wrote about how UCLA professors were barred from continuing an existing program in which they had streamed properly licensed DVDs to students. The lawsuit came from the Association for Information Media and Equipment (AIME). We noted that one of the key aspects of “fair use” is supposed to be that it allows for educational use, and it seemed ridiculous that any such streaming wasn’t fair use. After thinking it over, UCLA decided to stand up for itself and put the videos back online. AIME sat on this for eight or nine months and finally sued, arguing that its contract with the University meant that UCLA had given up its fair use rights, and that even if it was fair use, it was a breach of contract. A year ago, the judge dismissed the case, mostly focusing on the question of whether or not AIME even had standing to sue and whether or not, as a state university, UCLA could hide behind a sovereign immunity claim.
-
-
Toshiba just took down one of the most popular sources of repair information for their laptops, Tim Hicks’ laptop repair manual repository at Future Proof. Tim’s site is one of the only places online to get ad- and malware-free, manufacturer-authorized manuals. Check out the full editorial I wrote on the situation for Wired.
We’re not surprised by Toshiba’s actions: we’ve known about manufacturers’ iron grip on repair documentation for a long time. We’ve known about the infuriating and elaborate ways manufacturers will keep users out of their own hardware. We’ve known about the unfortunate extension of copyright law to repair documentation—that’s a big part of why we got started, after all.
But we are upset. Taking repair information away from users means less repair: only the very brave, very experienced, or very stupid will try to service a laptop without a manual. And less repair means more disposable culture, more toxic mining and manufacturing, and fewer jobs in independent repair shops.
-
-
-
This kind of early-morning raid would be more appropriate for dealing with serious and dangerous criminals than 9-year-old girls (barely even mentioning that the girl’s father claims her attempts at downloading failed, leading them to go purchase the music legally anyway). Similarly, the fact that for such a trivial case the account-holder’s name and address were obtained from the ISP, and a search warrant issued, shows how out of control the law has become in this area.
-
The Open Rights Group has been given leave to intervene in an important court case, signalling a growth step for the organisation – and signalling their need for your support.
[...]
ORG has also applied to the courts for leave to act on behalf of a large group of people who could be “speculatively invoiced” by a company claiming to act on behalf of pornographers who believe their work has been downloaded without a license. Speculative invoicing is now a well-know ploy where, based on ISP data obtained using a court order, a law firm tells its victims they have been identified as downloaders and that they can escape prosecution by paying a large fee to the lawyers. It’s a legal shake-down long overdue for a legislative fix.
-
Republicans have historically been strong supporters of copyright protections—and not because of big money special interests, because most of Hollywood’s and the recording industry’s political money flows in the other direction.
Rather, it’s because, as a property right, copyright is a critical element within the GOP’s market-orientation. Markets simply don’t work without property rights. You can’t have contracts, or licensing, if you don’t have clear and enforceable property rights. ALL business models, not just “new” business models, rest on property rights.
-
-
In this paper we make use of a quasi-experiment in the market for illegal downloading to study movie box office revenues. Exogenous variation comes from the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com on January 19, 2012. The estimation strategy is based on a quasi difference-in-differences approach. We compare box office revenues before and after the shutdown to a matched control group of movies unaffected by the shutdown.
-
A few folks sent over the following story of how Disney is being sued for copyright infringement. Seems a bit ironic, given just how strict Disney has been over the years in enforcing its copyright and being at the forefront of efforts to expand copyright law — even as it tend to build some of its greatest works by copying works in the public domain. In this case, a design company produced a graphic that consists of drawings of dozens of dogs, each with a little signature under their names:
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA