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03.02.11

Links 2/3/2011: Linux Everywhere, GIMP 2.8 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Powered by Linux

    Linux Everywhere

    Do you Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)? You use Linux! Do you do shop at Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN)? You use Linux! Do you have a router for your home network? Do you have NAS (Network Attached Storage) on your home network for shared backups? Do you own a Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) Squeezebox? Do you Tivo your shows?

  • Desktop

    • Windows shuts door on user, Linux welcomes the guest!

      It happened a few nights ago. My sister pulled out her laptop & was all set to do her work on it. As the login screen on her windows vista laptop prompted, she religiously entered her credentials only to be shown the door out by windows.

      [...]

      Linux came to the rescue when Windows seem to have shut its door on its loyal user.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Is Linus’ Law still valid?

      But I wonder if that Linus’ Law is really as effective today as it was 10 years ago. Today Free Software is much richer and more complex than it was in the 90s.

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.38 (Part 4) – Storage

      Expected in March, the forthcoming kernel will contain the new LIO target framework for implementing Storage Area Networks (SANs). Also new are a kernel-side media presence polling feature for disk drives and various Device Mapper optimisations that are relevant for desktop systems.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Dropbox for KDE

        A question I have been coming across a lot lately has been, “How do I get Dropbox to work with KDE?” Most have probably noticed that when you go to the Dropbox website and go to download it, it is for GNOME and the Nautilus file manager. Unfortunately for us KDE users, we don’t use Nautilus. Or I could say fortunately for us KDE users, but I am sure that will start all kinds of flame wars in the comments. Instead, KDE utilizes Dolphin as its file manager. I will use this post to show you how to quickly get Dropbox installed and up-and-running in KDE, without the use of the terminal or command line.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Why Did They Take My GNOME Buttons Away?

        To answer this, Allan Day, GNOME Marketing Contractor, has offered his explanation. For him, there are a number of factors for the removals. First he says that the minimize button is no longer of any use in GNOME 3 as there is no dock or window list. Where would a window minimize to? GNOME wants to focus on the new rather than trying to make the old work in some logical manner. Overall, he thinks this makes for a more streamlined experience.

  • Distributions

    • Getting Started With Linux: Pick The Right Linux Flavour For You

      Don’t try to set up Arch Linux during a lunch break. Do dig into Arch Linux if you want to learn way more about Linux, get a system at just the right size and configuration for your needs, and want a crash course in how to tweak a Linux system for better performance.

      Want some detailed guidance on the process? Whitson already showed us a step-by-step Arch installation, ending up with a system he’s still digging into today.

      As noted, we couldn’t possibly cover all the distributions out there, or even give full due to some of the more popular varieties: openSUSE, Debian, Sabayon, and the adorable and teeny-tiny Puppy. No slight intended, but we just don’t have as much experience with them. If you think a particular distribution is very friendly to beginners, whether yourself or another first-timer you know, give us the scoop on it in the comments.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Scientific Linux 6 RC2 is released| with screenshots

        Scientific Linux (SL) is a Linux distribution produced by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is a free and open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and aims to be 100% compatible with and based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      • U.S. Government Configuration Baseline for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

        On February 28, 2011, the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released. The long awaited Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) content is the next phase in supplanting the legacy Bourne shell scripts collectively known as the System Readiness Review (SRR) scripts.

        In 2010, the USGCB replaced the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) which has always been associated with Microsoft® software. The USGCB initiative is to create security configuration baselines for Information Technology products widely deployed across the federal agencies.

      • Controversy surrounds Red Hat’s “obfuscated” source code release

        Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat’s source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Removing the visibility of information about which patches have, or have not, been applied will be difficult for companies like Oracle who use the patch information so they know what state the Red Hat kernel is in before applying their own patches.

      • Fedora

        • Defaulting to open.

          One of the fundamental principles I think our community expects from Fedora is that we default to open wherever possible. In other words, unless carrying out a process in an open and transparent way would be impossible (legal reasons, for example), we should do it. And by and large, we really do.

          [...]

          This post was prompted by a couple instances recently where I saw teams not reaching out for each other to ask questions or give information. I haven’t seen evidence of any widespread trends; in general, Fedora team members do a great job of communicating across teams. These instances were exceptions to the rule, but it would be fantastic if those exceptions never happened at all. (Zero may be an unattainable goal, but that doesn’t make it the wrong goal.) I’m not calling out specifics simply because they wouldn’t change the value of the ideas and practices discussed here.

    • Debian Family

      • Testing SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Beta 2 again, then antiX core and aptosid

        I used the version of SimplyMEPIS, Version 11.0 Beta 2 that I had already installed on my Gateway 2000 series portable 17″ PA6A system, but when I moved on to antiX core and aptosid, I ran both of these systems directly from DVDs that I had recently created. But I did something else; I loaded their images completely into memory.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Wayland snapshot available for Ubuntu 11.04

          A snapshot of the Wayland display server has been uploaded to the Ubuntu 11.04 Universe repository. Canonical developer Bryce Harrington says in his announcement that this has little relevance to end users and is experimental code intended to act as a foundation and starting point for packaging and further development work.

        • Canonical: Hardened corporate or community leader?

          Open Source is starting to become a very lucrative business model these days and I think we have Google to thank for that. However, this means money is coming in for people who didn’t get much before and who feel that it’s long overdue.

        • Ubuntu fast becoming Linux pariah

          Bruce Byfield said that political manipulation of the various software projects has miffed a lot of Open Saucers. They feel that Ubuntu is choosing projects on the basis the ability to dominate the projects that dominate its software stack.

          Shuttleworth got miffed at the glacial pace that Gnome was making interface improvements and he moved to beef up interface software called Unity and this meant that many Canonical developers were suddenly not supporting Gnome.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • froglogic Confident of the Qt Platform’s Future

          froglogic announces its continued support for, and confidence in, the Qt platform. After making significant investments in Qt and MeeGo, Nokia recently announced that it will use Windows Phone as the operating system for its smartphones. As a result many questions about the future of the Qt Platform have been raised. froglogic would like to share its take on the situation and on Qt’s future.

Free Software/Open Source

  • It’s the Free Software, stupid!

    Heated discussions are going on in the KDE community in the aftermath of the announcement of Nokia’s platform strategy change. Rationality often goes out of the window when people feel such a change goes against their personal values or beliefs. In the past days, I worked on an analysis of the impact of the changes on KDAB, Qt and the Free Software communities we work with, especially KDE. KDAB is rooted deeply in the KDE community, and many of our developers work with Qt and KDE for years now. We are sharing the same worries and hopes, so the results may be interesting for others as well. This post is about Qt, KDE, Free Software, politics, devices, markets, strategies – it does not get much better than that. Read on.

  • Open Source Software is not Free

    I believe this statement to be true for a number of reasons. The important thing to recognize is that I believe the “free” in this quote and the “free” in FOSS are two different types of “free”. In the quote the “free” refers to a monetary value. Even if you pay no monetary value for software – that software cost someone, somewhere, something. Whether that something is a paycheck for the software developer coming from a company backing the project or it is simply a dedicated individual hacking at code during his spare moments – that “free” software comes at a cost to someone.

  • The Ins and Outs of Open Source Audits: Part One

    No matter what industry your business is in, you’re almost certainly using open source software. The question is whether you know how you’re using open source, what licenses are in play, and whether you’re meeting all of your license requirements. If you can’t answer all of these questions — and most businesses can’t — you may want to perform an open source audit as a starting point. Why? An audit can answer the question of what Open Source Software (OSS) is present in your code and what licenses that OSS falls under.

  • Open Source Junction: cross-platform mobile apps

    The open source mobile app space is getting increasingly crowded. The recent opportunities for developers to produce and distribute mobile apps through a range of app stores is taking the developer world by storm. If, as the saying goes, all people dream of writing a poem at least once in a lifetime, then perhaps there aren’t many developers out there either who haven’t dreamed of building a great mobile app themselves.

  • thebigword Goes Open-Source as Lisa Shuts Down

    The global language services company, thebigword, has announced it will open-source part of its language technology software in order to support industry standards.

  • Events

    • SCALE 9X: It’s a wrap

      More people: SCALE had been flirting with overwhelming success all weekend. Friday’s “problem” at registration was that the folks in that department faced a lot more people than normally come on a Friday, to the point of where 800 of the attendees for the weekend came on Friday. The final tally — 1,802. So 1,002 folks came over the weekend to make this a record year for SCALE, and as a result, it makes the outlook for FOSS this year really robust. So get out there and FOSS it up, folks.

    • Scale 9x: Day 3

      The final day of SCALE 9x arrived far too early, since the Gentoo developers were still recovering from the merriment the previous evening/morning. We congregated in the hotel room Mike & I shared. You know you’re having some good times when hotel security places a call to your room, asking you to keep the noise down.

  • Funding

    • Boxee Gets $16 Million in Funding for its Media Center Platform

      New frontiers lie ahead for open source media center platform, Boxee, which we’ve covered ever since it was born. Today, the company is announcing a very healthy infusion of $16.5 million in venture funding, featuring some heavy-hitting new investors, and ones that had already invested. Boxee’s previous round of funding was only $6 million and came when the company had only 12 employees.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Exciting developments in GNU Radio

      GNU Radio had a pretty good year in 2010, and we are already on track for an even more productive year in 2011. While we only produced one release in 2010, a large amount of work went into our source repository to improve the quality and stability of the project, and we are on track for a new release soon that incorporates many of these fixes into a new stable release. From here, we have been implementing some major improvements and additions to GNU Radio that will be part of the releases in 2011, so 2010 was an important year for getting us to the next major milestones.

      [...]

      We are directly pursuing this by hosting the first GNU Radio conference in September of 2011.

  • Government

    • Open Source Tool Helps US DoD Eye in the Sky To See

      The US Department of Defense is awash in digital images and videos taken by a variety of sources including satellites, manned airplanes and unmanned drones. Going through all of that imagery by hand would take untold resources that the DoD just doesn’t have. Instead the DoD has turned to a computer vision program to help sort through the imagery. The programs they use are supplied by Kitware and get ready for this – are open source! That’s right the US Department of Defense is using open source computer vision solutions to help identify potential threats.

    • Death, taxes and open source software certainties

      Open source software gets a lot of positive press. Along with death and taxes we can say that this is a fair certainty. But are there hidden and very blatant flaws that we should be looking out for and be aware of?

      The Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report was launched at the end of last year to examine open source software integrity and was originally initiated between the company itself and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

  • Programming

    • Origins (Part 01)

      It may seem odd to people today, but programming came around long before the computer. Actually, it came about so much earlier that it wasn’t really recognizable as such. The three earliest examples I can think of are the Antikythera Mechanism, the Castle Clock, and the Jacquard Loom. The Antikythera Mechanism was a mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It is estimated to be from about 150 BCE, and is thought to be of Greek origin. Much later The “castle clock” of Al-Jazari (1206 CE) displayed the orbits of the Sun and Moon, along with the Zodiac. On the Castle Clock, one could change the length of day and night, important for the seasons. The first largely reprogrammable (something more than day and night on the Castle Clock) device that I found anything about was the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard loom used punch cards to change the pattern of weaves going through the device. This was so profound a revelation that our early computers used these cards as well. These three innovations are by no means the limit of pre-computer programming, but they were important achievements. They show the want of mankind to automate tasks before significant means to do so had been made available.

Leftovers

  • Mayor Ford would aim to privatize TCHC

    Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he would “absolutely” consider privatizing the Toronto Community Housing Corporation in the wake of revelations of wasteful spending and untendered contracts at the agency.

    Ford made the comment in a Wednesday morning interview with Toronto radio station Newstalk 1010.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Fox News uses fake footage to make Wisconsin protests seem violent

      Doesn’t seem to get much lower than this. Remember the peaceful protests for worker’s rights in Wisconsin that Vanessa wrote about last week? Via Amanda Marcotte, it looks like ever-trustworthy Fox News is using fake footage to make it seem as if the Wisconsin protests are violent.

    • UK: Stop Rupert Murdoch!

      Murdoch has exploited his vast media empire to push war in Iraq, elect George W Bush, spread resentment of muslims and immigrants, and block global action on climate change. And he has interfered with our democracy — determining our election results, bolstering political careers in exchange for influence and destroying others with media smears when they refuse to do his bidding.

Clip of the Day

Gigabyte M528 MID, Ubuntu Mobile UI


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 2/3/2011: Early Look at GNOME 3.0, Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2 Screenshots

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • GNU/Linux in Turkey

    Here is a country where you can buy GNU/Linux and that other OS on PCs side by side. Turkey has its own GNU/Linux distribution, Pardus.

  • Getting Started With Linux: Why Install Linux?

    Curious about Linux, but not ready to dive in head first without a little background? We’re on it. As part of our our Night School series, we’ll be detailing, troubleshooting, and taking a deeper swim into the open-source OS this week. Today, we’re offering some encouragement for the hesitant.

  • Splashtop: Linux for Windows users

    Ever just want to turn on your laptop and get right to work on the Web without any delay? If that’s you, even if you’d never consider switching from Windows to Linux, you might want to give the new release of Splashtop a try.

    Indeed many Windows users, especially those with newer laptops have already been using the Linux-based Splashtop-they just haven’t known it. On Dell laptops, it’s called Latitude ON; on HP laptops, it’s known as QuickWeb; and on Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks, its Quick Start 2. Whatever the name, it’s actually an embedded Splashtop Linux variation designed for quick and easy access to the Web. On each of these laptop lines, and many others, Splashtop is there to make it fast and easy for “Windows” users to check their Web-based e-mail; look up information, write a document in Google Docs, etc., etc. without waiting for Windows to boot up.”

  • On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web

    Great programming is an art form. When you see it, the first thing you ask yourself is this: Why didn’t I think of that? Just four lines of code can match and outperform 200. When we read a great passage from Shakespeare or Keats, the effect can be the same. They can make the poetry look effortless and inevitable. The same could be said for music. Johann Sebastian Bach, my favorite composer, (in another time and place) would have been a programmer of unrivaled genius. He sets forth his musical ideas with precision and develops them with such a sense of simple inevitability that one could be forgiven for thinking that his music wrote itself. Bach was God’s sewing machine and his cloth was sound.

    What’s so unique about the Linux ecology (and without getting too specific) is the licensing under which the software is circulated.

  • Ballnux

    • Mobilecity puts LG G-Slate 4G pre-order at $699

      Mobilecity has put up a pre-order page for the LG G-Slate with a listed “Retail Price” of $799, but their price at $699.?Of course, this is not an official price announcement by LG or T-Mobile, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it verified in the coming weeks.

      Just about everyone has been balking at the price of the Motorola Xoom, which is selling for $799 for the 3G model (upgradeable to 4G) off-contract. Luckily, T-Mobile loves to undercut Verizon, so I’m willing to bet this price will hold. Interestingly, the pre-order page doesn’t have a release date listed, even though we’ve seen leaked T-Mobile documents which put the G-Slate release date at March 23rd, just about 3 weeks away.

  • Kernel Space

    • 2.6.32.30-longterm review
    • OpenBenchmarking.org Launch Statistics

      OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland” were released over the weekend (press release) from the Southern California Linux Expo during our talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. Here’s some statistics as of this morning that OpenBenchmarking.org has been public for a few days.

    • Kernel prepatch 2.6.38-rc7

      Linus has released the 2.6.38-rc7 prepatch. “There really isn’t a lot to report here. Driver updates (random one-liners and some sound soc codec and smaller dri updates) and a few filesystem updates (in particular btrfs fiemap and ENOSPC handling), but most of it really is pretty tiny. Regressions fixed, hopefully none introduced.” Full details can be found in the long-format changelog.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Nouveau Driver Is Moving Along Slowly But Surely

        The Nouveau Companion, the newsletter by the Nouveau driver developers about the progress on their NVIDIA reverse-engineering challenge for creating an open-source NVIDIA Linux driver, has its first new issue in nearly two years.

        It Is Nouveau Companion 44 and can be found on the Nouveau Wiki. Sadly it’s not too overly exciting if you pay attention to the Phoronix news posts pertaining to this community project

      • A Glide State Tracker For Gallium3D Is Talked About

        A student developer has written to the Mesa3D development mailing list about creating a Gallium3D state tracker for the Glide API. Yes, the 3Dfx that hasn’t been used in more than a decade.

        Blaž Tomažič has expressed interest (mailing list message) in creating a Glide state tracker for Gallium3D so that any ancient applications still relying upon this once proprietary graphics API intended for 3Dfx Voodoo hardware can seamlessly run with a modern open-source Linux graphics stack. But there is barely any major software around that still uses Glide, let alone Linux software.

      • X.Org Server 1.11 Release Planned For Mid-August

        It seems as if the X.Org project has finally formed a habit of wanting to release on time. In years past, even point releases have been more than 200 days late and there hasn’t been much to their release schedules that were actually executed on time. It’s something I had long pointed out and have received jabs back in turn, but the past few X.Org Server releases have been tagged on time, plus or minus a few days. It looks like X.Org Server 1.11 may be another on-time release, it’s at least being planned right out of the starting gate.

      • A Restart For The Botched RandR 1.4

        Besides laying out the plans for releasing X.Org Server 1.11 in August, Keith Packard has restarted the discussion surrounding RandR 1.4 so that it will hopefully be readied for integration into this next X Server release. It was part of X.Org Server 1.10 until the last minute when it was pulled from the server and caused a last minute video ABI break.

  • Applications

    • The other apps

      MANY people still don’t realize it, but Linux has long been a viable free alternative to desktop operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X. The version of Linux that I use, Ubuntu, has improved dramatically in both features and ease of use since it was introduced in 2004, but many other distributions are well suited, too, for everyday home and office use.

      One of the best things about Linux is that it already comes with many of the applications you need installed, such as OpenOffice, which gives you word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database software that’s compatible with MS Office. There’s also Gimp, a sophisticated image editing program (though Ubuntu has stopped including it as an installed program, which means you’ll need to download and install it on your own, if you want it). Like the operating system, the applications are free, too.

    • Audacity: The Free Dimensional Sound Editor, Part One

      Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform sound recorder and editor program that allows you to perform simple and advanced sound recording and editing tasks. If you’re into recording, sound effects, mixing, or editing, Audacity takes you there and beyond. Audacity offers a huge (and growing) list of features found in expensive and proprietary sound software. Can you imagine the audacity of developers who would create and maintain software of this caliber? Alas, that is but one of free software’s primary pillars.

    • Sanity Check

      Running your scanner from the command line offers greater control of tasks. We show you how to get started.

    • Proprietary

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The Humble Indie Bundle: Leaving no customer behind

        Linux users seemed particularly grateful for the support — when the first bundle concluded after racking up $1,273,613, Linux users had spent the most with $14.44 on average. “If you reach out to them, they want to take care of you too,” John Graham said.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Bogdan Vatra

        We had heard something about it but few people took it seriously. Yet last week we were surprised by a very nice announcement: the Qt SDK has been ported to Android and the first release is available. We were immediately interested in knowing more.

        This time, in the Behind KDE Platforms series, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks about Qt on Android with Bogdan Vatra, the lead developer behind it.

        [...]

        What do you do these days in Qt Android?

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Where did the buttons go?

        Minimise and maximise buttons were recently removed from the window titlebars in GNOME 3. Discussions of the change have been ongoing for some time, but the decision only just happened, and the change came as a surprise to many. Personally speaking, I think the removal of the buttons is a definite improvement, and it’s a move that I’ve been in favour of for a while. Though Owen gave a really excellent account of his reasoning for the decision, some people are still wondering why the buttons have been removed, so I thought I’d try and explain why I think it’s a positive change. As with most major design decisions, the removal of the buttons is an attempt to balance a number of factors: there isn’t a single reason that you can point to.

      • An Early Look at GNOME 3.0

        GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April. The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world feedback to the project before the final code gets released into the wild.

        To test GNOME 3 for yourself, you can download 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images built by Frederic Crozat. Crozat updated the first builds for FOSDEM, and said he plans to do so periodically; the underlying system is based on openSUSE. The images can be burned onto a bootable CD or DVD, but if you install them onto a USB flash memory stick instead, you can take advantage of persistence to preserve changes, documents, and additional packages you install. There are also Fedora-based images created by the distribution, and Ubuntu repository packages for GNOME Shell, the desktop user interface, although it is not clear how often either of the latter are updated.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2 Released, Screenshot Tour

        Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced on the last day of February the immediate availability for testing of the second Alpha version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system.

        Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2 is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.37.2, it features an up-to-date NetworkManager, the iBus input framework replaced the old SCIM one, lots of updates and bug fixes.

      • March 2011 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Close to Support

        Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $39.42 with current price action closing at just $41.28 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Mistakes made, lessons learned, a principle clarified and upheld

          Money is particularly contentious in a community that mixes volunteer and paid effort, we should have anticipated and been extra careful to have the difficult conversations that were inevitable up front and in public, at UDS, when we were talking about the possibility of Banshee being the default media player in Ubuntu. We didn’t, and I apologise for the consequential confusion and upset caused.

          The principles from which we derive our policy are straightforward:

          The bulk of the direct cost in creating the audience of Ubuntu users is carried by Canonical. There are many, many indirect costs and contributions that are carried by others, both inside the Ubuntu community and in other communities, without which Ubuntu would not be possible. But that doesn’t diminish the substantial investment made by Canonical in a product that is in turn made available free of charge to millions of users and developers.

        • Righthaven Sues Radio Giant For Hosting Caption Contest On Denver Post Photo

          (standard junk: this is my personal opinion and i’m possibly ethically compromised because i’m currently on contract working for canonical, etc. etc. blah)

          canonical does a lot of things that i would classify as pretty boneheaded in terms of their relationship to various free software communities. they have an interesting and colourful history with quite a lot of projects and our project is pretty close to the top of that list.

          it’s my opinion that canonical takes a more pragmatic approach than most free software projects have. they have a bit more of a “…and damn the consequences” attitude. they’ve made a lot of decisions that have put them at odds with a lot of people. i’ve found myself on both sides — defending their choices when i agree and calling them out when i don’t.

          binary drivers so that it “just works”? win. copyright assignment? not such a win. this mess with banshee? ya. that’s pretty lame.

        • Welcome to Righthaven Lawsuits

          This website is dedicated to gathering together and posting for Righthaven Defendants and the public information about Righthaven LLC — the Las Vegas “technology company” that has been filing copyright infringement lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada (and South Carolina and Colorado) against numerous unsuspecting website owners (almost always without notice) for copyright infringement of news articles originally published in the Las Vegas Review Journal (and Denver Post) and purportedly assigned to Righthaven (sample assignment here) which subsequently registers the copyright to such articles with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to then file suit in federal court.

        • Ubuntu Live CD Will Let You Upgrade To Newer Ubuntu Versions [Ubuntu 11.04 Development]

          Because this has just landed in Ubuntu 11.04 (and because Ubuntu 11.04 is still in alpha!), it’s best not to try this feature yet as it may break stuff (I didn’t tested it).

        • UDW: Day 1 over, day 2 to come

          I simply love Ubuntu Developer Weeks. They’re sometimes a tad hectic, but they’re just so full of energy, it’s awesome! Yesterday we had 320+ people attending, which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone for bringing so much fun to the sessions and thanks to all the speakers and helpers. You all ROCK!

        • First Ever Ubuntu Cloud Day

          I am very excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Cloud Days! UCD is an online event that is designed for everyone interested in cloud computing, as well as someone who is already using Ubuntu server and who’s thinking about “that cloud thing” everyone is talking about. If the words “virtualization”, “cloud”, “server”, “scalability” or “automation” intrigue and amuse you, then you should definitely attend! It’s a chance to learn a lot, get your questions answered as well as share your experiences and have fun with the rest of the cloud community!

        • Unity 3.6.0 Comes With Option To Maximize Dash, Lots Of Bug Fixes [Ubuntu 11.04 Updates]

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • China Unicom plans to dominate China with its own mobile OS

        The Wall Street Journal reported that the wireless operator is developing a new mobile operating system known as “WoPhone.” The new platform is based on Linux and is aimed at smartphones and tablets. Phone manufacturers that are on-board include China’s ZTE, Huawei Technologies and TCL, as well as South Korea’s Samsung, US’ Motorola and Taiwan’s HTC. There’s no official release date yet but the company said that it is “imminent.”

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Qt Creator 2.1.0 released

          Today we release Qt Creator 2.1.0 as well as the Qt SDK 1.1 beta and Qt 4.7.2 .

          [...]

          So grab the Qt SDK 1.1 beta release (includes Qt Creator 2.1.0) or get the Qt Creator-only binary packages from our download server.

      • Android

        • BlackBerry’s Android?

          In the Mirror, Mirror universe, Research in Motion (RIM) uses Android instead of QNX for its next generation of BlackBerry smartphones and its PlayBook Tablet. Now, there’s a rumor that RIM may well add support for Android applications to its BlackBerry line on top of its forthcoming QNX operating system.

        • Bringing Qt applications to Android – a quickstart video

          If you want to try it out, first note that Necessitas currently supports only Linux. Also, you currently need to install Necessitas into /opt/necessitas. More information can be found in the Necessitas Wiki. If you encounter technical issues with Necessitas or just want to send the well deserved kudos to the team, just visit the android-qt Google Groups.

        • Atrix 4G cranks up Android with Tegra 2, HSPA+, says review

          Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone provides a solid AT&T answer to Verizon Wireless’ Droid lineup and the various Samsung Galaxy S Android handsets, says this eWEEK review. With features like a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and HSPA+ support, the Atrix 4G is dubbed the best Android phone from AT&T yet.

        • Things overheard on the WiFi from my Android smartphone

          What options do Android users have, today, to protect themselves against eavesdroppers? Android does support several VPN configurations which you could configure before you hit the road. That won’t stop the unnecessary transmission of your fine GPS coordinates, which, to my mind, neither SoundHound nor ShopSaavy have any business knowing. If that’s an issue for you, you could turn off your GPS altogether, but you’d have to turn it on again later when you want to use maps or whatever else. Ideally, I’d like the Market installer to give me the opportunity to revoke GPS privileges for apps like these.

        • Motorola Working on 7-inch Tablet to Compliment XOOM

          Among the many other tidbits Sanjay Jha dropped during today’s talk with Stanley Morgan investors was the revelation that Motorola is already working on a 7-inch Android tablet for release by the end of the year. The company just released their first tablet, the Motorola XOOM, during the final week of February, but Jha sees exploring various size options as beneficial.

        • Honeycomb statue arrives at Google, immediately rooted

          For those of you who may have grown tired with proper news, analysis, and commentary, you’re in luck, because we have a fluff piece! The Honeycomb statue has finally made it to the Google campus. You can all stop holding your breath now.

          Google tradition had informally been that the new statue for each Android version would be planted in the yard before the official release of the OS SDK. The Froyo statue was unveiled five days before the SDK release. The Gingerbread statue landed a full six weeks before the SDK, which made quite a few people anxious. Perhaps it is in response to that anxiety, Google has planted the Honeycomb statue six days after the Honeycomb SDK release. Although even that plan had its flaws in that there was a small number of people who were worried that the Honeycomb statue hadn’t arrived.

        • Android 2.3.3 supports screen shot apps on non-rooted devices

          That Android doesn’t support screen shot apps might have come as a surprise to some people when they first started using Google’s OS, since other smartphone platforms feature such utilities. Android users with root access have enjoyed the option to take screen grabs with applications such as the excellent ShootMe, but so far we haven’t been able to capture screens directly from an Android without rooting it first.

          However, users of Android have always been able to capture its UI with a PC and the SDK. By enabling USB debugging from Settings > Applications > Development, installing the Android SDK, connecting your Android device to a computer, and then launching ddms.bat from the android-sdk/tools folder, you can quite conveniently capture your phone’s user-interface in action. And some custom ROMs, such as MIUI, let you take screen shots just by pressing a hardware key combination.n

        • F4A [Freedom 4 Android] 1.4 released

          The new F4A version comes with the spring and includes a new wizard for newbies, a nice wallpaper for your viewing pleasure, some internal tweaks and increased USB and virtual disk images size (to 512 MB) – so you can have lots of persistent data between reboots.

        • Android Honeycomb Sculpture Arrives at Google Building 44 | Android Community

    • OLPC

      • VIA DRM Kernel Mode-Setting On The OLPC

        While the group behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) child ended up writing their own VIA Linux graphics driver, which is further fragmenting VIA’s nasty Linux situation, James Simmons now has his OpenChrome-based VIA DRM kernel mode-setting driver working from the OLPC hardware.

    • Tablets

      • ECS 7 and 10 inch tablets launched at CeBIT

        Elitegroup Computer Systems or just ECS is making a splash at the CeBIT in Germany with quite a few tablet PCs. The tablet from ECS can be classified into two broad categories – 7 and 10 inch displays with both Android and Windows coming in as the operating system of choice. Further, when it is about the core of the tablet PCs, it’s both the Intel Atom Oak Trail as well as ARM-based chips from Marvell that comes into the picture.

        Coming to the larger tablets with 10.1 inch display, the tablets comes with either 1366 x 768 or 1024 x 600 pixel resolution. With an Intel Atom Z670 Lincroft heart, the tablets run Windows 7 Home Premium and are able to support up to 2 GB of RAM and solid disk drives or 1.8 inch hard drives. The tablet will have WiFi, Bluetooth, as well as 3G as an optional extra and are expected to weigh around 1.8 pounds.

Free Software/Open Source

  • 10 terms and concepts related to open source

    Despite the proliferation of open source projects, some people are still fuzzy on the terminology and basic open source concepts. Susan Harkins put together this list to help clear up some of the confusion.

  • Implementing Open Standards in Open Source

    Industry standards morph into functional computer software. I use the word “morph” on purpose to avoid any term that can be found in US copyright or patent law. Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animation to turn one image into another through a seamless transition. Wikipedia shows an image of George W. Bush morphing into Arnold Schwarzenegger, and so too the morphing of an industry standard into software can result in something that looks entirely different at an expressive level and that potentially does useful things.

    In the case of software industry standards, morphing transforms a written specification into working code through a mental process conducted internally by programmers and engineers. The end result – functional software – is a created outcome of human intellect that starts with a written specification and ends with a working implementation.

  • Wanted – Open Source Organisations

    Google’s is now in the process of recruiting mentoring organisations for its 2011 Summer of Code. Sign up now to get help with your open source project.

    Google’s Summer of Code is a global program in which student developers are paid stipends to write code for open source software projects over a three month period.

  • 10 industries that would benefit from using open source

    Open source solutions are gaining popularity across a wide spectrum of businesses — but its adoption is slow in some sectors. Jack Wallen lists the industries he thinks should be using (or using more) open source software.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird 3.1.8 Update is Now Available
      • What’s New in Thunderbird 3.1.8
      • Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.8, Firefox 3.6.14, 3.5.17 Updates Released

        Mozilla Messaging has released a new version of the desktop email client Thunderbird. Thunderbird 3.1.8. is a security, stability and performance upgrade for the stable version of the email software. Not all pages have been updated yet to reflect the new release.

        Bugzilla lists a total of 56 bug fixes of which 13 have a severity rating of critical. Among the critical fixes are memory leaks, crashes and security issues.

        The download link at the official release notes page links already to the newest version of the browser. Existing Thunderbird 3.1.x users should receive update notifications in the email client shortly. Those who do not want to wait can download the new version and install it manually instead.

      • Tumucumaque Park

        While you’re enjoying the web like you never have before with Firefox 4, you can also help protect the diversity of Tumucumaque with your donation to World Wildlife Fund today. The Mozilla community is raising $25,000 to support WWF’s conservation efforts in the Amazon, and to help them harness open web technology to keep places like Tumucumaque protected and diverse. Do your part today.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The first LibreOffice Conference will be in Paris!

      First, apologies should be made here: The choice of Paris for this conference is a story in itself, and the real issue here is that there was minimal community discussion on this. It all started with yours truly announcing that the OOoCON 2011 would take place in Paris…

    • LibreOffice Conference to be held in Paris this October – First annual project meeting from October 12th to 15th

      The Document Foundation today announced the first annual LibreOffice Conference, which will be held in Paris from October 12th to 15th. Carrying on the tradition of previous OOoCon conferences, the LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally.

    • The Death Of Hudson? Oracle Shows Its True Colors

      As PJ says, “It’s all about the money, honey.” Oracle has just admitted that all of the excuses that they’ve provided up till this point have been a smoke screen. It doesn’t matter that Kohsuke Kawaguchi founded the Hudson project. It doesn’t matter that the Hudson project has done well under his leadership, gaining an 80% share of the continuous integration market for Java (whatever that is).

      What matters is that Oracle thinks it can make more money, and since Oracle managed to trademark the project name, it thinks it can control it. Thought. Kohsuke Kawaguchi has already proved that Oracle can’t control the project by forking it, and naming his fork Jenkins.

      So Oracle ends up with little of value, and probably won’t be able to keep up with the Jenkins release schedule, any more than they’ve been able to keep up with the Libre Office release schedule.

    • Who Contributes the Most to LibreOffice?

      Red Hat, who also contributed to OpenOffice.org, has chipped in as well. With usually two contributions per week, Red Hat developers have provided 39 patches since the fork.

      The newest known name to join the contributors list is Canonical. They contributed the Human theme and a later fix, but more Ubuntu integration code is likely. Björn Michaelsen contributed 2 patches in the last few weeks so far.

      Bosdonnat says there are 133 new coders and 55 localizers since the fork. There seemed to be a slight dip at the end of last year according the graph and Bosdonnat attributes that to the festivities of the holiday season.

  • Education

    • Education reform wars: Caricaturization, not disagreement, is the problem

      Wake County Public School System is the eighth largest school district in the United States, and one of the mostly highly regarded. But lately it’s not been our graduation rate or test scores that make the headlines. It’s the school board’s decision to end a highly regarded socioeconomic integration program.

      One of the few urban school districts in the United States that is truly racially and socioeconomically integrated, Wake County is also an extremely fast-growing area with residents largely adverse to paying taxes for the local infrastructure.

      As you may imagine, this has created a rather untenable situation for the public schools, as many are bursting at the seams with children packed into classroom trailers. Oh, and let’s not forget the economic recession, which has further reduced funding for building new schools.

  • Healthcare

    • Whitehall to launch son-of-NPfIT scheme within weeks

      No mention of the Cloud, open source or innovation

      There is no mention in the CfH procurement plans of open source software, open data standards, G-Cloud or data centre rationalisation. There are no references to the announcements by Downing Street and the Cabinet Office on new open standards and procurement rules for IT.

      There is no mention either of the government “skunkworks” that Downing Street has announced to “assess and develop faster and cheaper ways of using ICT in government”.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Is Elementary, My Dear Watson.

      I’ve watched the game show, Jeopardy!, regularly since its Trebek-hosted relaunch on 1984-09-10. I even remember distinctly the Final Jeopardy question that night as “This date is the first day of the new millennium”. At the age of 11, I got the answer wrong, falling for the incorrect “What is 2000-01-01?”, but I recalled this memory eleven years ago during the debates regarding when the millennium turnover happened.

      I had periods of life where I watched Jeopardy! only rarely, but in recent years (as I’ve become more of a student of games (in part, because of poker)), I’ve watched Jeopardy! almost nightly over dinner with my wife. I’ve learned that I’m unlikely to excel as a Jeopardy! player myself because (a) I read slow and (b) my recall of facts, while reasonably strong, is not instantaneous. I thus haven’t tried out for the show, but I’m nevertheless a fan of strong players.

      Jeopardy! isn’t my only spectator game. Right after college, even though I’m a worse-than-mediocre chess player, I watched with excitement as Deep Blue played and defeated Kasparov. Kasparov has disputed the results and how much humans were actually involved, but even so, such interference was minimal (between matches) and the demonstration still showed computer algorithmic mastery of chess.

      [...]

      I don’t think I’m going to convince IBM to release Watson’s sources as Free Software.

  • Government

    • EU Governments United Against the Knowledge Society?

      With the upcoming revision of the 2004 “Intellectual Property Rights” Enforcement Directive (IPRED), the European Union is getting ready to toughen up the war on sharing of culture in the digital environment. The Member States, gathered in the EU Council, have set up a working group to work on the revision of IPRED. An internal document dated February 4th clearly suggests that the Council is also taking the side of the patent, trademark and copyright lobbies, who want to push for even more extremist measures to deal with online copyright infringements. If nothing is done to stop them, freedom of communication on the Internet, the right to privacy and access to culture will be durably undermined in the name of baseless policies.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • What would you do with Open.org?

      That was the question put forth by members of the Linux Fund organization last night during a Birds of a Feather session at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 9X).

      The domain name was recently acquired by Linux Fund from the City of Salem, Oregon for an undisclosed amount. Salem’s public library was using the domain for a kids-to-Internet program entitled the Oregon Public Education Network. The Linux Fund purchased the domain at public auction.

    • Santhosh gets a seat in Wikipedia Language Committee
    • This one goes out to the fence painters

      It seems like many people approach community strategy with this Tom Sawyer thinking (see: crowdsourcing). How can I get people to paint my fence for me?

      Why is the default reaction of most people and organizations usually to create a new community with them at the center? Why instead don’t more people look for and join a community that already exists with a purpose or goal similar to their own?

      I’ve even seen this Tom Sawyer thinking creeping into the business book world. How many times have you read a great new book, only to be greeted at the end with a plea like this one: “If you like the ideas in my book, please come join the discussion on my website, [yetanotherbookcommunity.com]”? (Sidebar: I have a new book coming out this fall. It’s called The Ad-free Brand. I mention this because, instead of starting Yet Another Community around my book and asking you to come join, I’m going to try my best to use my ideas to help paint fences that already exist. Promise.)

    • Neighbors helping NeighborGoods

      Since we launched 6 months ago, NeighborGoods has quickly become the leading online community for local resource sharing. With NeighborGoods, neighbors can borrow, lend and rent anything from bicycles to camping gear to baby clothes in a safe and fun community. By working together to share resources, neighbors save money, live more sustainably and strengthen their local communities in the process.

    • Learn how to get your Creative Commons project funded

      If you are serious about a Creative Commons project idea, you may be interested in the free, online course, “Getting your CC project funded,” set to run in April. The course consists of a series of workshops and seminars that will take you through the steps from an initial idea to having a finished project proposal for submission, including assistance in identifying and finding funding bodies and collaborations relevant for your project. You provide the idea; the course provides the guidance to turn it into a proposal that can’t be refused.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Canada is lone bidder for 2015 Women’s World Cup

    FIFA says Zimbabwe has withdrawn its bid to host the Women’s World Cup in 2015, leaving Canada as the only candidate.

  • German Defence Minister Guttenberg resigns over thesis

    German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has stepped down after he was found to have copied large parts of his 2006 university doctorate thesis.

  • Perfectionism in the “Tiger Mom” and “The King’s Speech”

    You’ve probably heard about Amy Chua, the so-called Tiger Mom. A few weeks ago she had a firestorm of publicity around her book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she boasts of her authoritarian and coercive parenting methods, which include not only insisting that her daughters follow a narrow course of “success-oriented” classes and activities, but punishing them harshly – via withholding, threats and insults – when they don’t toe the line or achieve top-level success. (For instance, she deprives them of bathroom breaks, threatens to burn their toys, and calls them “garbage.”) She got a major boost when conservative bastion The Wall Street Journal featured her in an admiring article. No surprise there – conservatism and authoritarianism go hand in hand.

  • Ebay – Paypal relationship scrutinized by MEP

    Obviously that does not answer the question of the MEP and seems to contradict the single market objective. It is odd to watch the protectionism of the Luxembourg company from competition enforcement and their borderline consumer relations and service practices without sanctions by the Luxembourg authorities. All this in the context that the European Union says they want to tighten rules on financial services. At least this provider of cross-border services seems to receive special treatment which enables them to contravene the usual modes of operation.

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages

    Last June, we introduced the ability to upload documents into Google Docs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR analyzes images and PDF files, typically produced by a scanner (or the camera of a mobile phone), extracts text and some formatting and allows you to edit the document in Google Docs.

  • The Reputation Economy is Coming – Are You Prepared?

    Last week, I hit a nerve when I wrote about how your online presence will replace your resume in the future. I believe that in order to compete in the global economy, you have to have an online personal brand. After you create that presence, you have to maintain it throughout the course of your entire life, before someone else does it for you. We are living in a world now where visibility creates opportunities and reputation builds trust. Submitting a resume to a job board, or cold calling randomly, will increasingly become ineffective until it simply doesn’t work at all. On the other hand, building an online presence and managing your reputation (like a brand) will become increasing effective and yield strong results.

  • The best fail compilation in existence

    When a video reduces us to tears, we bring it to you. What follows below is a solid 8 minutes of slips, falls, mistakes, poor decisions, crashes, burns, and of course, fails

  • Schoolgirl strip-searched by principal

    “The wheels of justice have flat tyres. But sometimes, they do turn, as they did for Savana Redding, who, when she was a 13-year-old honours student at the Safford Middle School in Arizona, was strip-searched.

    “But it took six years for SCOTUS, the Supreme Court of the US, to rule the school was, in effect, guilty of serious misbehaviour.”

    The above quotes from a 2009 p2pnet story centering on Savana Redding, strip-searched for presumed possession of Advil.

  • Science

    • The Positive Balance of Technology
    • Facebook Linked To One In Five Divorces in the United States

      If you’re single, Facebook and other social networking sites can help you meet that special someone. However, for those in even the healthiest of marriages, improper use can quickly devolve into a marital disaster.

      A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that Facebook is cited in one in five divorces in the United States. Also, more than 80 percent of divorce lawyers reported a rising number of people are using social media to engage in extramarital affairs.

    • Plague scientist dies of… the plague

      It must be a recurrent nightmare for researchers who work with deadly microbes: being killed by your own research subjects. Microbe hunters know better than anyone else just how nasty infectious disease can be, and they spend much of their professional lives wielding bleach and maintaining stringent lab protocols to keep the objects of their fascination at bay. But sometimes one jumps the fence. Just such a tragedy caused the death in 2009 of Malcolm Casadaban, aged 60, a respected plague researcher at the University of Chicago. But how it did so was a mystery, until now.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Healthcare for People, Not Profit

      If you think you’re covered by health insurance, think again. According to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Medicine, illness and medical bills caused 62% of all bankruptcies and most of those people were insured and middle class. Meanwhile, “the five largest health-insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion, up 56 percent over 2008”, according to a report by Health Care for American Now based on SEC filings.

      In CNN’s analysis of the Fortune 500, “The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector’s earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion. Health-care earnings rose by $23 billion, or 33%…from two groups, one surprising — medical insurers — and the other more predictable, pharmaceuticals. For the drug industry, it’s as if the recession never happened. The sector’s earnings surged by one-third to $64 billion.”

  • Security

    • Undercover agent slips through TSA naked body scanner multiple times with handgun

      The “enhanced” screening procedures now used by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at the nation’s airports has once again been demonstrated as a total failure, this time at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). According to a high-ranking, inside source at TSA, an undercover agent was successfully able to smuggle a handgun through the naked body scanner — and she did so not only once, but several times.

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • After dealing with Anonymous, HBGary Federal’s CEO resigns
    • Aaron Barr Falls On His Sword – Anything To Protect The Company!
    • HBGary Federal’s Aaron Barr Resigns After Anonymous Hack Scandal

      “I need to focus on taking care of my family and rebuilding my reputation,” Barr told Threatpost. “It’s been a challenge to do that and run a company. And, given that I’ve been the focus of much of bad press, I hope that, by leaving, HBGary and HBGary Federal can get away from some of that. I’m confident they’ll be able to weather this storm.”

    • Morgan Stanley hit by same attackers that breached Google

      Morgan Stanley was hit by a “very sensitive” breach to its network by the same attackers who penetrated computer systems maintained by Google and dozens of other companies, according to leaked emails reviewed by Bloomberg News.

      The emails came from California-based HBGary, which suffered a major compromise of its own at the hands of hackers from Anonymous. After being hired by Morgan Stanley in 2010, HBGary members found that the world’s top merger adviser fell prey to the so-called Aurora hacks, which siphoned source code and other sensitive data from the victim companies over a period of many months.

    • 19 vulnerabilities – Chrome 9 update proves expensive for Google

      Google has released version 9.0.597.107 of its Chrome browser, which fixes a total of 19 security vulnerabilities, 16 of them rated as high risk. It was, for example, possible to crash the browser using JavaScript dialogues and SVG files, or to use the address bar for URL spoofing. Also fixed is an integer overflow when handling textareas. As ever, Google is keeping full details of the vulnerabilities under wraps until the bulk of users have switched to the new version.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Aid crisis on Libya’s west border

      The situation on Libya’s border with Tunisia has reached crisis point, as tens of thousands of foreigners flee unrest in the country, the UN says.

      Aid staff are battling to cope with an exodus that has seen some 140,000 people crossing into Tunisia and Egypt.

    • Sometimes One Picture Says It All
    • How Egypt Can Help Libya

      The Libyan people deserve help in their fight against Gaddafi’s butchers, but direct U.S. or European military intervention would have several drawbacks. Western troops, not speaking Arabic, would make deadly mistakes. Even if successful, this intervention would diminish the sense of local and Arab ownership of the revolt.

      I suggest that the UN Security Council invite Egypt to intervene, if Libyans approve. A small part of Egypt’s army would dwarf Gaddafi’s forces. Without even having to fight, it could join and support the Libyan rebel forces that have already liberated eastern and southern Libya. This would change the situation completely.

    • Libyans in “Liberated” Eastern Cities Balance Self-Government with Supporting Tripoli Resistance: Anjali Kamat Reports

      As anti-government rebels close in on the Libyan capital city of Tripoli, we get the latest from Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat. She has just returned to Egypt after spending five days in eastern Libya, where popular uprisings have liberated the area from pro-Gaddafi forces. “There’s a sense that Gaddafi can do anything to people [in Tripoli], and there’s a real sense of fear,” Kamat says, “but I think people are also trying to see what they can do to manage their city and to also support their friends and families in Tripoli, who continue to be under siege.”

    • Nelly Furtado To Donate $1 Million Received From Gadhafi

      Things are falling apart in many ways for longtime Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. With his countrymen in uproar and demanding that he step down after more than 40 years in power as part of the freedom wave rushing through the Middle East, the dictator is also getting push back from one of the pop stars who’ve performed for his family over the years.

    • In U.S.-Libya nuclear deal, a Qadhafi threat faded away

      In late 2009 the Obama administration was leaning on Col. Muammar el-Qadhafi and his son, Seif, to allow the removal from Libya of the remnants of the country’s nuclear weapons programme: casks of highly enriched uranium.

      Meeting with the American Ambassador, Gene A. Kretz, the younger Qadhafi complained that the United States had retained “an embargo on the purchase of lethal equipment” even though Libya had turned over more than $100 million in bomb-making technology in 2003. Libya was “fed up,” he told Mr. Kretz, at Washington’s slowness in doling out rewards for Libya’s cooperation, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

    • Dictators and their sons: Col Gaddafi’s billionaire children

      Seen as the natural successor to his father before the wave of protests across the north African nation, the 38 year old Saif al-Islam presented himself as a reformer. He was welcomed in the West as the acceptable face of the regime, and claims the Duke of York, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair among his “good friends”.

      In 1995, he received his degree in architecture and engineering at Tripoli’s al-Fateh University, and then went on to obtain a management degree from the International Business School in Vienna before gaining a doctorate at Britain’s London School of Economics (LSE).

    • UN: Libyan refugee ‘crisis’ tops 140,000

      Violence and chaos in Libya have triggered an exodus of more than 140,000 refugees to Tunisia and Egypt, a U.N. official said, as aid workers warned the situation at the Tunisian border has reached crisis point.

      Officials say the situation has been made even more volatile by humanitarian aid workers being blocked from reaching western Libya, patients reportedly being executed in hospitals, or shot by gunmen hiding in ambulances

      At the Libya-Tunisian border – where authorities say up to 75,000 people have gathered in just nine days – “the situation is reaching crisis point,” U.N. refugee agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming warned Tuesday.

    • NATO’s Afghan night raids come with high civilian cost

      A few minutes and a few bullets were enough to turn Abdullah from an 11th grade student with dreams of becoming a translator to the despairing head of a family of more than a dozen.

      His father and oldest brother were shot dead last August at the start of a midnight assault by NATO-led troops on their house in Afghanistan’s east. Abdullah himself was hooded, handcuffed and flown to prison, where he was detained for questioning and then released.

    • Thuraya satellite telecom says jammed by Libya

      Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co’s services are being jammed by Libya, the UAE-based firm’s chief executive said on Thursday, as a revolt continued against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

      “Unfortunately there is deliberate jamming by Libya … which is illegal,” CEO Samer Halawi told Al Arabiya television.

    • Tunisian prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi resigns amid unrest

      Tunisia was thrown into turmoil once more after Mohamed Ghannouchi resigned as prime minister of the post-revolution government amid further clashes between police and protestors. The interim president, Fouad Mebazaa, named the former government minister Beji Caid-Essebsi as Ghannouchi’s replacement.

    • Rebels’ gains threaten return to all-out war in Ivory Coast

      Rebels controlling northern Ivory Coast have seized a town in government territory and said yesterday they were still advancing, raising the prospects of a return to open war.

      Forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, who is still clinging to power after an election most of the world says he lost, confirmed the fall of Zouan-Hounien in an overnight attack and said they would fight to take it back.

    • Mass arrests stopped further Djibouti protests

      The planned resumption of mass protests in Djibouti this weekend was hindered by massive police presence in the capital and arrests of about 300 opposition and civil society leaders.

      Friday 18 February saw an estimated 30,000 Djiboutians protesting in central Djibouti City. Their main demand was for President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh to step down, or at least refrain from standing candidate in the upcoming April elections.

    • Urgent: Mousavi is in Jail

      Shame on Mousavi’s webstie, kaleme.com, that we should receive Mousavi’s news form the CNN. The CNN has said : Iran’s two opposition leaders, their wives are placed in ‘safe house’ they have added: “Moussavi, Karrubi and their wives were placed in a “safe house” for their own welfare !!!!!!!!!!! , but they have not been arrested !!!!!!!!, Iranian government sources told CNN Saturday !!!!!! …. The human rights organization also pointed out that “a ‘safe house’ is considered a place for the secret detention of high security-value detainees, which is not under the control of the judiciary or any other monitoring mechanisms.

    • 2011-03-01 French, English and US Special Forces Enter Libya to Reinforce Uprising

      10:00 PM The Pakistan Observer reports that French, British and US special forces have entered Libya, to train and assist rebel groups to overthrow Gaddafi. The article also outlines how naval vessels from India are underway for deployment in defense of the Libyan uprising. The vessels will presumably join the USS Enterprise, which is also on its way into the Mediterranean via the Suez canal. This follows US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission on 28th February that preparations for military assistance for the Libyan pro-democracy movement were underway.

    • Olivia Chow in Question Period: Call a public inquiry now

      Ms. Olivia Chow (Trinity—Spadina, NDP): Mr. Speaker, it is unbelievable.

      When free speech is denied in the only designated free speech zone, when women are aggressively strip-searched in a warehouse, and when an amputee is dragged off without his leg, Canadians know there is something desperately wrong.

    • Violent suppression of protest at Toronto’s G20 – CBC documentary
    • (FULL MOVIE) G20 -CBC The Fifth Estate ‘You Should’ve Stayed at Home’
    • G20 RE-EXPOSED: Toronto Inquiry Now (Documentary)

  • Cablegate

    • Raila’s family was involved in maize scandal, claim US cables

      Wikileaks claim Prime Minister Raila Odinga attempted to suspend former Agriculture Minister William Ruto to divert attention from his family’s involvement in the Sh2 billion maize scam.

      Secret cables sent by US Ambassador, Michael Ranneberger, to Washington and now released by WikiLeaks allege Raila wanted to create confusion when he said he was suspending Ruto and Education Minister Sam Ongeri. It claims Raila wanted public debate to focus on the two, and not his family’s role in the scandal.

    • Kenyan president’s mistress linked to mercenaries

      In 2006, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Kenya’s current vice president and an opposition leader at the time, told U.S. Embassy officials in Nairobi about an unfolding political scandal in which he was involved, according to a State Department cable released yesterday by WikiLeaks. Although the story itself is a bit banal — involving a rivalry between Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s first and second wives — Musyoka’s allegations against the Kenyan president’s family are serious, including an accusation of links to “Eastern European” mercenaries used in a 2006 media crackdown.

      The story goes something like this: In 2006, the Standard Media company, one of the country’s largest, published a story alleging that Musyoka, as opposition leader, had cut a deal with Kibaki. The story, which Musyoka denied to embassy officials, was a bigger blow to his political prospects than to the sitting president’s. But the government unleashed a wave of raids against the Standard Media group anyway.

    • 07NAIROBI4246, KENYA – DOING BUSINESS THE CHINESE WAY

      Chinese firms selling into Kenya’s information
      and communications technologies (ICT) sector are throwing a lot of
      money around, according to industry contacts. Indeed, Chinese
      influence may be so great that it is distorting important investment
      decisions in the country. Putting aside corruption, Chinese ICT
      vendors are difficult to beat on price and quality, and therefore
      often win government procurement tenders. However, companies that
      buy Chinese equipment often find that they end up paying the piper
      later due to poor after-sales service.

    • Julian Assange™ applies to trademark himself
    • Divided With No Clear Aim While the World Is Burning
    • WikiLeaks, Internet in record Nobel Peace field

      Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, the Internet and a Russian human rights activist are among a record 241 nominations for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

      The Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Tuesday that the 2011 field includes 53 organizations and tops last year’s 237 nominees.

      Known nominees also include Afghan rights advocate Sima Samar, the European Union, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, Russian rights group Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina.

    • WikiLeaks Shames the Old News Media

      If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is “a real journalist,” recent events should erase all those doubts. Indeed, they should put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

    • WikiLeaks at the Forefront of 21st-Century Journalism

      If there was ever doubts about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is a journalist, recent events erase those doubts and put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

      The U.S. Department of Justice is still trying to find a way to prosecute Assange and others associated with WikiLeaks. A key to their prosecution is claiming he is not a journalist, but that weak premise has been made laughable by recent events.

      The list of WikiLeaks revelations has become astounding. During the North African and Middle East revolts, WikiLeaks published documents that provided people with critical information. The traditional media has relied on WikiLeaks publications and is now also emulating WikiLeaks.

    • Wikileaks Cables on Raila And Uhuru
    • In 2006 State agents and hirelings raided Standard but…

      According to the classified embassy cables, former US ambassador William Bellamy claims that Gichugu MP Martha Karua, then the Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister, told him “Kenya had a rogue press and something had to be done to bring press practices into line with laws and regulations.”

    • 10NAIROBI11, Kenya: Inadequate Witness Protection Poses Painful Dilemma

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 100,000 oil disaster claims may never be paid by BP

      Not that it comes as much of a surprise. Louisiana officials thought they had an agreement with BP to pre-fund critical projects to rebuild the fishing industry but the terms there have also changed.

    • BP reneges on deal to rebuild oyster beds, repair wetlands, Louisiana officials say

      Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves and Department of Wildlife & Fisheries director Robert Barham said the state will instead scramble to find millions of dollars to begin the work itself, then bill BP for the costs.

    • What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water

      A controversial new method of natural-gas drilling, embraced rapidly across the US, has contaminated water supplies with radioactive waste, according to an investigation by the New York Times. The paper said internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators showed that the dangers to the public from the drilling method – hydraulic fracturing – were greater than previously understood.

      Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses huge volumes of water, chemicals and sand injected into rock at high pressure to release natural gas. Its development has unleashed a natural gas boom in the US and around the world. But the NYT said the waste water contained dangerously high levels of radioactivity. It was being sent to treatment plants that were not designed to deal with or being discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.

    • Thick foam found in Mobile Bay — Orange substance in many areas (PHOTOS)
    • The dogs who listen to children reading

      Danny received five months of training to become a Read dog. Greyhounds are particularly well-suited because they do not bark and their short coat is less likely to trigger allergies.

    • Government attacks EU fishing rules

      The government has launched a new attack on controversial EU fishing rules which force fishermen to throw millions of dead fish back into the sea.

      Fisheries minister Richard Benyon, attending a special EU summit to tackle the problem, said: “Everybody wants to see an end to the disgraceful waste of huge amounts of fish having to be dumped back overboard, and the UK is leading the way in efforts to tackle the problem.

    • BP fund lawyer to refuse 100,000 Gulf spill disaster claims

      Upwards of 100,000 claims arising from the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may never be paid, the beleaguered administrator of the oil company’s compensation fund has acknowledged.

      A defensive Ken Feinberg, under fire from the Obama administration, Gulf leaders and local business for the slow pace of payouts for losses due to the BP spill, said the vast majority of the 130,000 unsettled claims did not have adequate documentation.

      “Here is the problem that I continually have to address … roughly 80% of the claims that we now have in the queue lack proof,” Feinberg told foreign reporters in Washington. “That is a huge number.”

      Feinberg did not rule out settling claims in the future, but he added: “The claims that were denied had woeful, inadequate or no documentation to speak of.”

      He indicated that BP is unlikely to pay out more than the initial $20bn (£12.3bn)agreed for the compensation fund in a meeting at the White House last summer. “I am cautiously optimistic that $20bn will be enough,” he said.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs’s Adam Storch

      In the Scribd. document embedded below entitled, How Goldman Sachs Made Tens of Billions of Dollars From the Economic collapse of America In Four Easy Steps, Adam Storch is mentioned in the third step (on page 4), as one of the “[e]x-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the US government….”

    • Will banksters get away with it?

      Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

      “Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”

      True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.

    • Fine Gael banking strategy in meltdown

      Our masters have now gone off to high ground and are shouting at us through a loudhailer to keep that finger in the hole. We’re tired and cold and starving and we don’t want to do it any more. So how do we get this message across? There’s only one way – threaten to pull our finger out of the dyke. Nothing else will get more than a few cosmetic concessions.

      Fine Gael is now on course to form a single-party government. Voters need to know whether the party is at all serious about facing up to the immorality and impossibility of the official approach since September 2008. (The money still at stake is €75 billion of debt securities held by Irish banks, including €7.3 billion in subordinated bonds and €17 billion in senior unsecured bonds.)

    • It’s the Inequality, Stupid
    • The Real Cause of High Budget Deficits: Corporate Tax Dodgers

      The protests in Wisconsin over workers’ rights and state budget cuts are sparking national action. While not every governor will recklessly attack collective bargaining, all states are facing major budget constraints.

      Now is the strategic moment to dramatically juxtapose the pain of local budget cuts with the scandal of corporate tax dodging. While states must close combined budget gaps of over $102 billion, U.S.-based corporate tax dodgers are costing us over $100 billion a year. Every time a politician complains that “there is no money” or “we must make these cuts,” we should be pointing to the corporate tax dodging that could immediately close our budget gaps.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Leading article: A dishonest campaign that deserves to lose

      The organisation making the case for a No vote in May’s referendum on voting reform has launched a series of adverts that are desperate and cynical in equal measure. These adverts focus on the supposed cost of the transition to the Alternative Vote system. The campaign asserts that the bill would be £250m and that “our country can’t afford it”.

      Yet that figure is entirely spurious. It apparently includes the £82m that will be spent on the referendum regardless of the outcome and £130m for the purchase of electronic vote-counting machines. The problem with this line of argument is that no new vote-counting machines will, in fact, be needed. Votes would continue to be counted by hand, as they are at present. It displays a staggering disregard for honesty for the No campaign to rely so heavily on this confected figure.

    • Democrats call for an investigation of law firm, 3 tech companies

      A group of House Democrats is calling on Republican leaders to investigate a prominent Washington law firm and three federal technology contractors, who have been shown in hacked e-mails discussing a “disinformation campaign” against foes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

      In a letter to be released Tuesday, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and more than a dozen other lawmakers wrote that the e-mails appear “to reveal a conspiracy to use subversive techniques to target Chamber critics,” including “possible illegal actions against citizens engaged in free speech.”

    • SCOTUS: Corporations Not People (at least with respect to one FOIA provision)

      Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in FCC v. AT&T (decision here [PDF]) in which the Court decided that corporations do not have “personal privacy” for the purposes of FOIA exemption 7(C). Our former law clerk wrote about this case earlier this year.

  • Privacy

    • Supreme Court Says AT&T Has No Right To ‘Personal Privacy’

      Last year, we wrote about an important case in which AT&T bizarrely claimed that it had personal privacy rights over information the FCC collected in an investigation concerning AT&T overbilling the government. An organization had made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the info, but AT&T protested that, as a corporation, it had a personal right to privacy. As we noted, that seemed like a pretty ridiculous claim, but the appeals court accepted it.

  • Civil Rights

    • The folly of CCTV in schools

      There has been much concern recently about CCTV inside schools. As ever BBW has been at the forefront of the issue with articles such as “Rising number of CCTV cameras in schools”, “CCTV in York Schools (and new research which says it’s a total waste of time)” and others. One school has 113 cameras, and several have them in the pupils toilets.

    • Analysis: DHS plans on scanning DNA at checkpoints

      Just when you think the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has enough wonderful toys to keep them busy, they go out and add another. Get ready to have your DNA screened by the DHS.

      According to The Daily, DHS has plans to begin testing a portable DNA scanner. The device has not been revealed, but it reportedly resembles a desktop printer. It is expected to make genetic tests far more common, especially in cases related to refugees, human trafficking and immigration. Experts think it will soon make its way into everyday medical and law enforcement usage.

    • Euro court slaps down insurers over gender risks

      Euro court slaps down insurers over gender riskszThe European Court of Justice has ruled that insurers should not treat gender as a risk factor when assessing premiums, clearing the way for higher costs for women. And probably men.

      A Belgian consumer organisation had brought the case, which centred on exemptions from the EU’s anti-discrimination directive that allowed insurance companies to take gender into account when setting premiums.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • ICANN: No government veto over controversial top-level domains

      Less than two weeks away from ICANN’s conference in San Francisco, representatives from the organization’s Government Advisory Committee have rejected a US Department of Commerce proposal that would give GAC members veto power over new domain endings.

      The Department of Commerce plan would have allowed governments to object to a generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) “for any reason.” On top of that, “if it is the consensus position of the GAC not to oppose objection[s] raised by a GAC member or members, ICANN shall reject the application,” the proposal added.

    • House plans first vote to overturn Net neutrality rules

      The Federal Communications Commission’s controversial Net neutrality regulations may soon vanish.

      A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee is planning a vote Wednesday morning on whether to rescind the agency’s Internet regulations that it adopted by a 3-2 vote in December.

  • DRM

    • Tell Sony to stop harassing hackers

      This month we’re focusing our attention on Sony. Sony has been in the news a lot recently: suing developers for figuring out how to run free software on their PlayStation 3 consoles.

      Both George Hotz (geohot) and more recently, Graf Chokolo — operator of the PS3 Hypervisor Reverse Engineering blog have been harrassed by Sony, with Graf Chokolo having his home raided on Feb 23rd.

    • Forensic Analysis Of Geohot’s Hard Drives In Dispute

      Earlier this month, we reported that the court hearing Sony’s case versus Geohot, had ordered the New Jersey based hacker to turn over all of his hard drives to a third party. According to Geohot’s attorney, the court did not allow Sony or the third party to make copies of the hard drives, but only store them. The company holding them, known as TIG, is now recommending to Sony that backups of Geohot’s hard drives should be allowed by the court. Sony has submitted that request to the court and also is demanding that Geohot turns over any keys or p***words used in decrypting the drives.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • New Legislation ‘To Protect Farmer IP’ Would Make It A Felony To Photograph Farms

      An awful lot of you sent in this story about a proposed law in Florida that could put people in jail for taking a photograph of a farm without permission. Seriously. Not surprisingly, the “excuse” for this is that it is “needed to protect the property rights of farmers and the “intellectual property” involving farm operations.”

    • Copyrights

      • Warner Music Mutes MP Angus’ Radio Documentary On Youtube

        In recent years, Warner Music has become infamous for “muting” the sound on hundreds of YouTube videos that include music over which they hold copyright. While takedowns of full copies of songs is their prerogative, the effect of muting user-generated content that may have a snippet of a song as background for a non-commercial work is precisely why the Canadian government introduced the so-called YouTube exception into Bill C-32.

      • CRIA Continues Fight Against Industry Canada Sponsored P2P Study

        Ever since Industry Canada released an independent study it sponsored on the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing in late 2007, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has worked overtime to try to discredit it.

      • Pandora founder decries Canadian barriers to entry

        The industry group steadfastly believes their proposed rates represent the fair market value of their content. However, Pandora has argued those rates are actually several multiples of the standard licensing rates set by the United States and the United Kingdom.

      • Righthaven Sues Radio Giant For Hosting Caption Contest On Denver Post Photo

        For the most part, Righthaven has been careful to sue individuals and smaller sites who would have a much tougher time fighting back. However, in its mad dash to sue a ton of websites for using a viral photograph of a TSA agent searching a passenger, it appears to have gone after Citadel Broadcasting, a radio giant, for running a “caption contest” on the photo.

      • U.S. Government Stings Chinese Websites Baidu.com, Taobao.com As “Notorious Markets”

        Chinese search engine Baidu.com and an e-commerce subsidiary of Alibaba, Taobao.com, have just been placed on the United States Trade Representative’s “Notorious Markets List”.

        USTR states: “The Notorious Markets List identifies selected markets, including those on the Internet, which exemplify the problem of marketplaces dealing in infringing goods and helping to sustain global piracy and counterfeiting. These are marketplaces that have been the subject of enforcement action or that may merit further investigation for possible intellectual property rights infringements.”

        No official response from either Taobao.com or Baidu.com has yet been issued via their respective websites.

      • U.S. Government Targets Large BitTorrent Sites And Trackers

        The US Government has classified some of the largest players in the BitTorrent scene as examples of sites which sustain global piracy. Indexing and search engines The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt, Kickasstorrents and BTjunkie all make appearances, with Demonoid, OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT described as trackers which have become “notorious for infringing activities.”

        In its “Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets”, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has listed more than 30 Internet and offline physical ‘markets’ which it says exemplify “key challenges” in the fight against piracy and counterfeiting.

      • ICE Boss: It’s Okay To Ignore The Constitution If It’s To Protect Companies

        While the folks at Homeland Security keep telling me that they simply cannot speak publicly about the seizure of various domain names — and specifically the numerous mistakes they’ve made that appear to clearly violate both the First Amendment and Due Process rules — it seems they have no problem talking about the domain seizures to folks in the press who don’t bother to ask tough questions.

        ICE boss John Morton did an interview with Politico, where he trots out a bunch of highly questionable statements about the domain seizures, including claiming that it’s all okay for them to do this because they’re trying to “protect U.S. industry” rather than “regulate the internet.” But that’s not the role of Homeland Security or ICE. And there are limits on what ICE is actually allowed to do, and Morton’s technically clueless agents seem to have ignored many of those rules.

      • Rosetta Stone Says Google Is A ‘Gateway For Criminals’; Urges Congress To Make Google Liable For Infringement Via COICA

        However, we noticed that Rosetta Stone was one of the companies that had signed a letter in support of COICA, and assumed it was just about trying to stop sites from offering unauthorized versions. However, it appears that Rosetta Stone actually would like the censorship law to go much further, specifically suggesting that COICA include making Google liable for any infringement found via the site.

        [...]

        Google correctly responded that Rosetta Stone’s “exaggeration doesn’t belong in a serious conversation.” Of course, it really makes me wonder what the folks at Rosetta Stone are doing and thinking. Promoting and supporting censorship and blaming third parties for infringement is no way to run a business.

      • Massachusetts Apparently The First State To Let You Officially Register As A Pirate Party Member

        I’m not a member of any political party. I even hate the term “independent.” When I was first eligible to register to vote, oh so many years ago, the voter registration form told me to check off “Democrat,” “Republican” or “Independent.”

      • Kill Copyright, Create Jobs

        The copyright industry’s lobby has — again — claimed that unless strong measures are taken to enforce copyright, jobs will be lost across Europe. This claim is false, deceptive and misleading, as it only focuses on copyright-dependent sectors while ignoring the copyright-inhibited sectors. It turns out the latter account for ten times more of the economy.

        Executive summary: for every job lost (or killed) in the copyright industry due to nonenforcement of copyright, 11.8 jobs are created in electronics wholesale, electronics manufacturing, IT, or telecom industries — or even the copyright-inhibited part of the creative industries.

      • ACTA

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

        • ORG files Judicial Review intervention

          Early last week Open Rights Group filed and served its intervention into the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. You can read our intervention here.

          It is an important step for us to be intervening in the Judicial Review. We are aiming to contribute an important bank of expertise and evidence to the considerations of the court that might otherwise not be heard. This is not just a ‘me too’ exercise – we believe we have information that can be useful to the court. And we haven’t said everything we could have, focusing on what we saw as the gaps in the arguments being put forward that we could help fill. Our perspective is one of the likely impact on individuals of legislation about digital issues, which is informed by an understanding of the relationship between technology, human rights and civil liberties.

Clip of the Day

Boron (open source REBOL clone) OpenGL 3D demo – Karl Robillard (by proxy done by Kaj de Vos)


Credit: TinyOgg

03.01.11

Links 1/3/2011: Mandriva 2011 Second Alpha, Red Hat “Obfuscates” Linux Code

Posted in News Roundup at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Linux-based Anti-virus rescue CDs – and the alternatives!

      And that’s it. Please, let me repeat the main message of this article once again: You do not need anti-virus software, honestly. But you should have a Linux live CD handy. Any one will do, since they all pack the mighty toolbox that you can use to fix your operating system, regardless of what caused the mess. Security wise, you should aim for a whitelisting approaching, with a strategy that spans pinpoint tactical solutions relevant only for specific operating systems and go with a generic formula that always works.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Pearls before swine..

      I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.

      Not so.

      I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it’s a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.

      So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days – mostly telling people “do it like this” rather than actually writing real code), that’s about the most exciting part of the day.

    • Graphics Stack

      • ATI R600 Gallium3D Driver Does Instanced Drawing

        Instanced drawing support is not new to Mesa in general but last month there was instanced-draw support merged into Mesa for the GL_ARB_draw_instanced and GL_ARB_instanced_arrays support as part of the (slow) OpenGL 3.0 support upbringing. With the commits over the weekend, Christian König implements instanced drawing support in the R600g driver.

      • An Open-Source Intel GMA 500 Driver Appears

        If you’re an owner of a netbook or other hardware containing an Intel Poulsbo / GMA 500, the Linux 2.6.39 kernel should be rather exciting. Entering the Linux kernel’s staging tree is an initial open-source driver for this notorious Intel graphics processor derived from Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX graphics core.

        Intel’s Alan Cox has pushed forward an Intel GMA 500 DRM driver for mainline kernel inclusion that already has been pushed into the staging-next tree. It’s been a few days since the actual patch/driver was proposed, but for some reason it slipped under my radar until now when it was mentioned in the forums.

      • NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Tool-Kit Released

        NVIDIA has announced the release of the CUDA 4.0 Tool-Kit this morning, which continues to be fully supported under Linux. NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture 4.0 focuses upon GPUDirect 2.0 Technology, Unified Virtual Addressing, and Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitive Libraries.

        GPUDirect 2.0 is geared to provide peer-to-peer communication between multiple GPUs in a single server/workstation, Unified Virtual Addressing provides a single memory address space for system memory and GPU memory, and the Thrust C++ Template Performance Libraries ramp-up the GPGPU computing performance via an open-source C++ library with parallel sorting abilities that are 5~100x faster than the Standard Template Library or Intel’s Threaded Building Blocks.

      • Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Is Using X.Org Server 1.9

        Jeremy keeps pushing out new X.Org Server 1.9 stable updates to bring XQuartz fixes for Apple and various other bug-fixes for users of the xorg-server under Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems. With the Mac OS X 10.7 developer preview that Apple began seeding to developers last week, X.Org Server 1.9 can in fact be found.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Fluxbox 1.3.1 on Fedora 14, 13 or 12

      If you’re looking for Fluxbox 1.3.1 on Fedora 14, then you’re in luck. I’ve gone through the .spec and cleaned it up a bit, along with a version bump, and have built the 1.3.1 packages in SUSE Build Service under my home directory.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • [GNOME Shell] Re: The logic behind remove “Restart” and hide “Power Off” in User menu.
      • Why I Think Gnome 3 Is a Dead End

        In short because it’s cat-dog. What I mean is – what is the new gnome target audience? To me it seems like it tries to satisfy everyone which obviously cannot work. Let’s look at the potential users who might want to use it.

        [...]

        Still from the design it seems like these people were thought of as well when making gnome shell. But that’s the problem. It stopped halfway. It tries to be both for power users and newbies and ends up neither. Sorry, but I really can’t see a way to satisfy both camps and that’s why I think gnome 3 is bound to fail. And it’s going to drag Fedora 15 down with it (being the default DE). But only time will show whether I’m right or wrong.

      • GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu Unity: Which desktop wins?

        Both GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity are looming on the horizon. Both of these desktop replacements will incite a lot of reactions from users — some good, some bad.But when it all boils down, one of these two takes on the desktop will rise above the other. Which one? I’m going to compare the two and offer up a conclusion on the future of both GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity.

      • My new favorite GNOME Patch

        For those of us without a disability, understanding the challenge users may experience when trying to use a computer can be a foreign concept. (Or at least it is for me.)

        Browsing Reddit, of all places, this weekend I came across this story of a user with ALS who created a patch for Eye of GNOME. The patch contributor’s son added a comment to the bug report (and a link to a picture) that is a must read. Go read it. Now.

  • Distributions

    • Hanthana Linux for all ~

      Hanthana Linux is an easy to use operating system in a environment with less or no internet facility. A lot of applications to be used to aid in school curriculum are included. Applications to study periodic table, planetary behaviour and astronomy as well as to generate 2D and 3D graphs, to solve equations are there in Hanthana Linux. Nevertheless, educational games, applications to design and simulate circuits, GNUoctave which is an alternative to MathLab for statistics and wine in case to run a .exe file and many more comes by default.

    • Reviews

      • Frugalware 1.4 Nexon

        Frugalware is not as well known as other distros like Ubuntu, etc. So I’ve included some background information below to get you up to speed if this is the first time you’ve heard of Frugalware. Yes, we do get some folks here on DLR coming from other platforms that sometimes aren’t familiar with various distros. So I like to include a bit of background links & information to help give them an overview of what the distro is all about. If you’re a Frugalware veteran you can skip down to the What’s New section of this page.

    • Arch

      • Arch’s Dirty Little Not-So-Secret

        A reader of my blog recently made a comment about Arch’s lack of package signing, and this got me looking into the issue more carefully. What I found has left me deeply concerned with a number of aspects of Arch.

        Most distributions, even Windows, sign their packages so that when the computer downloads and installs them, it can check the signature to make sure the package is authentic – it hasn’t been tampered with on the server, or anywhere between the server and the local system. This mechanism has been around for many years and works well – the tools to implement it are available and simple to use. Yet for some reason I can’t understand, Arch Linux has never had package signing. Arch packages are simple tarballs – they can be opened, modified, and retarred, and the updating system has no way to detect this. This tampering can take place on one of the many mirrors that host Arch packages, yet it can also take place elsewhere – in network proxies and misdirection, in intranet caches, and on local systems. Package signing gives admins a way to verify that the packages they’re using to update their system are authentic, regardless of how those packages have been delivered or stored, or who has access to the data.

      • Mirror Mirror

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s “obfuscated” kernel source
      • Red Hat’s “obfuscated” kernel source

        I tracked down and interrogated several Red Hat engineers on this issue, and while they were very reticent to speak about it, I discovered the following things:

        - It is not about Centos.

        - The primary motivation was to make it harder for Oracle Enterprise Linux to repackage the work that Red Hat do.

        - The kernel tarball inside the srpm is created from a git tree that is only accessible to Red Hat engineers.

        - This change to the way that kernels are dealt with inside Red Hat has angered and frustrated engineers who work on the product. Employees of the company are Not Happy.

        - The orders to do this, to make it harder to rebuild the kernel with and without patches, and to make it harder to extract specific patches from the Red Hat kernel came from the top. This is with the knowledge of, and by the order of, the CEO: Jim Whitehurst.

        - There is a web interface (somewhere!) that is available that will allow you to specifically omit specific patches and download a new kernel. This is a clunky web front end to the git tree.

        - An Oracle engineer I interviewed on this matter greeted this news with in-credulousness, and quickly got out his notebook so he could provide me with links to the various public git trees that oracle maintains of their kernels, and showed me where I could download them from.

      • Red Hat Announces Extended Lifecycle Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

        Today, Red Hat announced the availability of Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, in line with the one-year notification of the end-of-life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which is scheduled to occur on February 29, 2012. ELS, an optional Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extends an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for an additional three years over its standard seven year life-cycle. As a result, subscription customers have a choice of purchasing ELS to extend their use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, or to upgrade to a more recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 version.

      • Fedora

        • Btrfs May Be The Default File-System For Fedora 16

          This news is a few days old, but not many people seem to have caught it while I was busy finishing up Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org: Btrfs may be the default file-system in Fedora 16.

          Brought up on the Fedora development list are the plans for Btrfs in Fedora, which provides a target of Fedora 16 when EXT4 will be replaced by Btrfs as the default Linux file-system on new installations.

        • Internationalization and localization Test Week this week!

          After the highly successful Graphics Test Week last week (thanks to everyone who came out! A full recap will be posted soon), it’s another Test Week this week: this time for internationalization and localization. This is a hugely important area (the majority of Fedora users pick something other than English with a US keyboard layout) which we don’t always test very comprehensively, so I’d like to say a huge ‘thanks!’ to Rui He, Igor Soares, and Aman Alam for their hard work in putting together these events.

    • Debian Family

      • MP3 files in Debian

        A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

      • Debian Project News – February 28th, 2011

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 10.04.2 released

          The second maintenance update of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has been released.

          Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be supported with routine maintenance updates until April 2013 on desktops and April 2015 on servers.

        • Legally open, socially closed

          By releasing Banshee under the terms of the MIT license (as was pointed out to me in the comments), it’s developers have given Canonical and anybody else the legal ability to change it however they want. Canonical would have been legally within their rights to keep 100% of all Amazon sales commission. I haven’t seen anybody arguing otherwise, even the detractors of the decision make it clear that the problem is not a legal one, but a moral and ethical one. Discussions about the legal (copyright/trademark/etc) options and implications I’m going to leave for other posts. I mention this only to get it out of the way so we can focus entirely on the moral question.

        • Legally open, socially closed: part 2
        • Faster ‘help’ browser lands in Ubuntu 11.04

          So you accidentally hit the F1 key and wince. Why? You know what’s coming.

          For the next few minutes your hard drive will churn and your patience will burn as GNOME’s built-in ‘Help’ browser loads on your screen like a 100KB .jpg arriving piecemeal through a 52k modem.

        • Ubuntu Developer Week kicks off today

          Today is a very special day. I’m sure that if you live in the Northern hemisphere you can feel it already: Spring is right around the corner. In addition to that it’s one of the most awesome weeks of the release cycle: It’s Ubuntu Developer Week!

        • Ubuntu Mascots Wallpaper
        • Jono Bacon Defends Ubuntu: An Insider’s Perspective

          “I want to do everything I can to bring free software to everybody,” Bacon says. “And that’s why I’m passionate about Ubuntu. Canonical as a company is incredibly committed to that goal. But you know what? With the best intentions in the world, people make mistakes.”

          Bacon suggests that there is currently a “natural tension” in FOSS between those who want the configurability and full set of options that is part of the traditional philosophy and those who emphasize usability.

          He personally favors focusing on usability first on the grounds that it “is additive and the other isn’t. If you take Ubuntu and design it around end-users, so it’s really simple, really easy, and there’s no unnecessary clutter — if you make some opinionated decisions, which we’ve always done — it’s easier to then build configurability on top of that. Giving my Mom and Dad an incredibly configurable distribution for Linux enthusiasts and trying to make that easier is harder. So that’s why I think the approach we’ve taken Ubuntu is a good one.”

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Infibeam Launches Pi2, EBook Reader With Wi-Fi Connectivity and Touchscreen

      # OS: Linux2.6.28

    • Further adventures in mobile Linux

      I picked up a couple of cheap Linux devices at the weekend. First of all, a $99 Android tablet from CVS, made by Craig. It’s a generic RK2818 device and of course it’s lacking any kind of GPL offer in the documentation. As far as I know the only company that’s released any Rockchip source so far has been Archos, and even then they haven’t released the tools you need to actually build an image – they seem to be floating around the internet anyway.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Android

        • Google Nexus S with Android 2.3 (‘Gingerbread’): the 60-day internment review

          Pros: excellent functionality in operating system; press-and-hold (“long press”) adds contextual elements; very good integration with Google services; future-proofed if NFC becomes effective.
          Cons: keyboard can be extremely frustrating; Market still lacks apps from many big organisations; lack of markings on phone makes it hard to figure out which way you’ve got it up.

          Basically, Gingerbread is arguably the best smartphone operating system you can get at the moment – if you can live with the keyboard. (If we had a more subtle star system, I’d give it 9/10.)

        • Further evidence that RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook will support Android apps

          A few days ago, Andrew reported that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet might be able to run Android apps when it’s released. Anonymous sources claimed RIM was working on a virtual machine that would enable this, and later the developer ShopSavvy discovered something curious in its logs: a series of old BlackBerry devices had been running the company’s Android app.

        • Turn your Android Into a Keyboard and Mouse for Your Playstation 3 or PC

          Another reason we all love technology, thanks to some clever development by XDA member berserker_devel, you can now use your rooted Android device as a keyboard or mouse on your Playstation 3.

        • Android Likely to Crush Nokia-Microsoft, Analyst Says

          With the rise of Android, the number of handset OEMs with significant smartphone market share increased in 2010. This competitive landscape is forcing handset OEMs to consider their device and portfolio strategies carefully as they jockey for position.

          Senior Analyst Michael Morgan elaborates: “Motorola has pinned its entire turnaround strategy on Android. As competitors flood the Android ecosystem, Motorola wants to become known as the OEM that brings Android devices to business.

        • Android phone to replace shop till

          Alcatel-Lucent has demonstrated Google’s Nexus S being used to accept a Near Field Communications (NFC) payment, showing that NFC can do more than replace a customer’s wallet.

          Mobile phones are going to replace physical wallets, but for taking payments, merchants still use expensive readers bought (or hired) from the banks. Alcatel-Lucent reckons that becomes unnecessary as its software will use a standard Android handset to enable Near Field Communications transactions.

        • Android Fragmentation is so last year. Processor fragmentation is the real issue [OPINION]

          Everyone discussing Android OS fragmentation should take a seat. You’ve have had more than a year to discuss the differences among Donuts and Froyo ad nauseam. The new source of headache for developers and end users will not be whether a device is running Android 2.2. It will be whether that device runs the right processor.

          MadFinger Games today released Samurai II: Vengeance, an excellent adventure game in which players slash their way through multiple levels of blood and bad guys. I played it briefly at Mobile World Congress, and that will probably be the only time I get to play Samurai II until I purchase a new device. According to its Android Market listing, Samurai II: Vengeance “is optimized for use on NVIDIA Tegra based Android devices only.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • Contribute FOSS with Summer internship at IIT Bombay – FOSSEE project

    The FOSSEE textbook companion project is part of the FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay. This project is handled by the following professors at IIT Bombay…

  • Support Free and Open Source Software Community as a candidate for the Prince of Asturias Awards 2011 in the International Cooperation category

    Prince of Asturias Foundation has invited CENATIC to nominate a candidate for the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award. During the last weeks CENATIC Foundation has been evaluating potential candidates, intending to find the one with the biggest chances of winning the award, which would, at the same time, represent the interests of all the agents of the Free and Open Source Software sector in Spain.

  • Events

    • FSFE at ODF Plugfest and Pirate Party Conference

      On Wednesday night I travelled from Manchester to London to attend the ODF Plugfest event, located in nearby Maidenhead the following day. Just before catching the train from Manchester Picadilly, I collected a new 2m tall self-supporting FSFE banner, for use at the booth that I would be running a few days later at the Pirate Party Conference.

      I stayed with British FSFE team member Chris Woolfrey in his London flat, and on Thursday morning I took the train to Maidenhead, and headed to the town hall, where the ODF Plugfest was being hosted. During the day there were several talks on various technical aspects of Open Document Format, including new solutions in KOffice to old interoperability problems between desktop ODF editors.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Who Did The Most For X.Org Server 1.10? Oracle?

      Oracle’s (former Sun engineer) Alan Coopersmith led with the most change-sets, sign-offs, and reviews. Overall this put Oracle in first place for the most change-set contributions by employer, even beating out Red Hat, Nokia, and Intel.

      There were 70 employers involved during this process. When it came to the most changes lines overall, coming in first was actually Matthew Dew, who has been working on cleaning up and organizing the X documentation.

    • Sun’s Scott McNealy Recalls Triumphs, Near Misses

      The former Sun Microsystems CEO recollects brilliant innovations, hiring Bill Joy, and almost acquiring Apple, but talks little about missteps in a conversation with former Sun president Ed Zander at Silicon Valley’s Churchill Club.

    • New: OpenOffice.org 3.4 Alpha Release (build DEV300m101) available

      OpenOffice.org 3.4 Alpha Release is available for download as Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m101.

      If you find issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system BugZilla.

  • Healthcare

    • The Real Fight for Government Control is Open Source

      In the contracting model that dominates the boom town of modern Washington created by the Bush Administration (the Iraq War was almost all done by contract, and the Administration’s “privatization” efforts mainly involved contracting) this doesn’t compute. If you do switch to open source (and some contractors have) the savings are all the contractors’, both now and later.

      For government to get the most value from open source, it has to hire its own programmers whose time can be spent capturing that value on behalf of their employer, namely you and me.

      This is not necessarily a partisan issue. The Conservative government of the U.K. is pushing open source heavily, to the delight of the industry.

      But it’s moving ahead slowly, and there is little indication the government has accepted the move’s implications. They seem to think it relates to standards and interoperability.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • No matter what you call it, a rat is still a rat…

        In the past few months, as success of open source in several markets has sunk in, a number of players in those markets have started to behave very badly.

        I am not talking about the old, everyday proprietary vendor FUD – that’s an old story, and has become painfully cliché by now. FUD has been part of the software game for a long time, but it has certainly lost a lot of efficiency against open source – only the most laggard still dare to call open source “trialware for non-strategic projects”. Maybe the numerous deals they’ve lost in the past 18 months to enterprise open source vendors have forced everyone else to revise their position…?

        I am actually talking about several categories of rats:

        * those who have adopted “faux-pen source” strategies (from the French “faux” which means fake, and “open source”, which means… great!) after attacking open source
        * those who continue to attack open source for their own benefit
        * and – how could we forget? – those who walk away from open source

        In the first category (faux-pen source), you find the “rats” who have spent years claiming that “free stuff” provides no value and is a mere copy of traditional software. They mocked users of open source software who were “getting what they paid for”. Now, all of a sudden, “free” is the new great thing, and they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and released free versions of their own.

  • Government

    • Lend some code to your local representative

      There was a bit of news coming out the European Parliament recently that could be easily overlooked. MEP Indrek Tarand (of Estonia no less), along with some non-MEP partners, started the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG).

      With goals like “assist people in using Free Software in the European Parliament” and planned sessions like “making your laptop free” it’s largely internal focused and not geared toward policy making. The acronym doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, in English at least, and the website leaves much to be desired, but there’s still something interesting here.

    • Zaragoza: ‘Spain’s public sector major driver open source desktop’

      Spain’s public administrations are an important driver for the advance of open source software on desktop computers. That is one of the conclusions of a desktop migration guide published by the IT department of the city of Zaragoza.

      Many Spanish public administrations have already adopted a free and open source desktop system, the report notes, listing implementations done by the administrations of Extremadura, Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Cataluña, Zaragoza, Valenciana and Madrid. Most of the larger city administrations are interested in this type of software, the IT department writes, based on research by Cenatic, the national resource centre for open source.

    • True Open Standards; Open Source Next?

      That stark contrast between the watered-down version adopted at the European level, and the real openness now being promulgated in the UK is one reason why this is an important move. It shows that despite the European Commission’s pusillanimity in the face of lobbyists, national bodies are setting higher standards because they understand that anything less would be pointless if openness is the aim.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • “Like,” “share,” and “recommend”: How the warring verbs of social media will influence the news’ future

      But I’m less interested in the details of the implementation than the verbs: sharing (tonally neutral, but explicitly social) has clearly lost to liking (with its ring of a personal endorsement).

      There’s actually a third verb, “Recommend.” Unlike “Share,” it’s not its own separate action within FacebookWorld; it’s just “Like” renamed, with a less forceful endorsement. But it lives deep in the shadow of “Like” everywhere — except on traditional news sites, which have tended to stay far away from “Like.” I just did a quick scan of some of the web’s most popular news sites to see what metaphor they use to integrate with Facebook on their story pages.

    • Open Data

      • U.S. Public Sector Information as an Engine of Growth

        Vollmer ends with an uplifting Carl-Malamudism that underscores the positive, economic externalities. “Public data is “the raw material of innovation, creating a wealth of business opportunities that drive our economy forward. Government information is a form of infrastructure no less important to our modern life than our roads, electrical grid, or water systems.”

    • Open Access/Content

      • BMJOpen launched

        BMJ Open – BMJ’s new online-only, open access journal – has been launched. The journal will publish “all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low-impact studies”.

        In a move to promote greater transparency in the peer review process, all published articles include the reviewers reports, responses from the author and (where necessary) a further commentary by the reviewers. All reviewer reports include details of who has undertaken the review (name, affiliation, and contact details.)

  • Programming

    • Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code!

      Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in our Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

      Now in its 7th year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academia, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 4,500 students from 85 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 300 mentoring organizations. Students earn a stipend for their work during the program, allowing students to gain exposure to real-world software development and an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects and these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

Leftovers

  • Mallick: We’ve found Gadhafi’s replacement — Charlie Sheen

    He’s a strange piece of famous, a mottled cheese, a hyper-haired man given to making jaw-dropping statements while people nod sycophantically and stare at the phalanx of tall beautiful salaried women who surround him under the palm trees. And the things he says! “I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time — and this includes naps — I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.”

    Frankly, I’m amazed they let him speak to the UN Security Council with those military threats and that level of ludicrous bombast, I think the Israelis were quite right to object. Not to mention the costuming … What? I’m sorry, I’m being told that wasn’t a quote from Moammar Gadhafi. That was Charlie Sheen giving the radio interview that finally got him fired Thursday.

    Well, six of one, half a dozen of the other, I’ll check the transcript.

  • Emergent Religions

    Emergent religions are primarily reflections of society. They are a collective attempt to understand and make meaning. In places like China where there is currently a vacuum of meaning — no scriptures, no constitution, just the little red book of Mao, and rampant Darwinian pressure to make money — it should be no surprise that vehicles of something larger to believe in will appear. In Russia, a belief in science mixes with a resident mysticism producing new religions. In Africa, the dire lack of health care summons all kinds of new faith healing churches. And in the west, the need to make sense of technology and our own mutating human identity will breed new religions.

  • IT graduates not ‘well-trained, ready-to-go’

    There is a disconnect between students getting high-tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates.

    Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as “well-trained, ready-to-go,” according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers.

  • London’s “King of the Looky-lous” top Baidu charts

    Paul offered his personal statement during a one-on-one interview: “I’m here, this is me. I am sorry I don’t have a suit, and I am not slender. I am always the one being neglected simply because I’m overweight. Maybe I have something great to say about a particular matter, but the microphone is always passed to those beside me. The more I am neglected, the harder I will try to make others notice me. I want to change the media’s belief that ugly fat people like me are an eyesore to the viewers!”

  • McLuhan on the future of newspapers

    Despite finding much of McLuhan absurd, this leapt out at me last night:

    The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.

    Is this a case of even a blind pig finding an occasional acorn? Or of prescience bordering on genius?

  • Canadian developer to RIM: ‘I concede defeat.’
  • Olympic Logo Is ‘Racist’, Claims Iran
  • Anti-gay Christian couple lose foster care case

    A Pentecostal Christian couple have lost their high court claim that they were discriminated against by a local authority because they insisted on their right to tell young foster children that homosexuality is morally wrong.

  • Suffer the Little Children

    The state legislature of Oregon is debating a real step forward for human rights for their constituents: removing the special legal protection that shields faith healing parents from charges of homicide after the preventable death of their children. There is widespread support from the public, state prosecutors, and legislators for House Bill 2721. Clackamas County District Attorney, John Foote, said the measure will “make it easier to hold parents accountable who don’t protect their children.”

    According to the Oregonian, Oregon “is the only state that provides immunity from prosecution for murder by neglect and first-degree manslaughter to those who provide care or treatment to minors ‘solely by spiritual means pursuant to (their) religious beliefs.’” This is likely because any measure designed to protect children has, in the past, faced serious opposition from groups that encourage faith healing like Christian Scientists. This article of faith has caused dozens of preventable deaths in the last twenty years in the state of Oregon alone, and in a Pediatrics article, “Child fatalities from religion motivated medical neglect,” authors Asser and Swan found 172 U.S. deaths of children when medical care was withheld on religious grounds.

  • Science

    • Biology Nobelist: Natural selection will destroy us

      The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

    • No proof of P=NP after all (yet?)

      Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his published “proof” of P=NP is flawed and requires further work.

    • Planet Earth valued at $4,800 trillion

      Such is the state of global capitalism, TechEye can confirm that everything has its price.

      This time it’s not a marketing exec who would have undoubtedly recieved both barrels from the late Bill Hicks, it is astrophysicist Greg Laughlin who reckons he’s worked out the monetary value of the earth itself.

      The price for our blue planet? Laughlin’s recommended retail comes in at an impressive £3,000 ($4,800) trillion, dwarfing even Manchester City’s 2011 wage bill.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Shifts All Liability For Damages Caused By Its GM Crops to Farmers, Now and For Perpetuity

      I’ll say it bluntly and blanketedly: I can’t stand Monsanto, even separate from my disdain for GM crops–they are a perfect example of the worst excesses of opaque corporate shenanigans that, alongside outright political dictatorship and oppression, are direct threats to true democracy.

      Here’s the source of that brief rant: As TruthOut highlighted earlier in the week, the Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement (the name itself is Orwellian in it’s use of language to obscure and not illuminate) indemnifies Monsanto against “any and all losses, injury or damages resulting from the use or handling of seed (including claims based in contract, negligence, product liability, strict liability, tort, or otherwise)…in no event shall Monsanto or any seller be liable for any incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages.”

      Which would be bad enough, but even if you terminate your contract with Monsanto, “Grower’s responsibilities and the other terms herein shall survive.”

      If a Monsanto GM Crop Causes Damage, Monsanto Off the Hook

  • Security

    • Monday’s security advisories
    • Vodafone’s UK network taken down by a break-in (update: some services restored)

      No further details have been provided, though work is naturally underway to repair the damage done and we’re assured customers’ private data has remained so. We can’t imagine quite such a service disruption being caused by a random act of vandalism or burglary, perhaps a disgruntled employee felt the need to vent his or her frustrations in grand style? Or has O2 gone gangster on the competition?

    • Anonymous vs HBGary

      In cyberspace, the balance of power is on the side of the attacker. Attacking a network is much easier than defending a network. That may change eventually — there might someday be the cyberspace equivalent of trench warfare, where the defender has the natural advantage — but not anytime soon.

    • That Soldier Wooing You Over Facebook Probably Isn’t Real

      Is a handsome young soldier currently professing his love to you on Facebook? He might be real! But probably, he’s not. Especially if he’s asking you to send him money. The AP reports that the fake-Facebook-soldier (or whatever the snappy conman name is) is “becoming an all-too-common ruse,” in one case costing a victim $25,000.

    • British Airways IT worker found guilty of plotting terror attack

      An IT expert for British Airways has been found guilty of using his position to plan a terrorist attack on behalf of the Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, according to news reports.

      Rajib Karim, 31, of Newcastle, used his job as a software engineer for the UK airline to aid attacks being planned by Awlaki, who is accused of having links to the to the attempted shoe-bombing of a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009. The plot came to light after experts from the Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command spent nine months cracking 300 encrypted emails found on Karim’s hard drive.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • U.S. silent as Iraqi regime cracks down

      We saw it with Yemen, and now we’re seeing it again with Iraq: The Obama administration is conspicuously quiet when friendly Middle East regimes use ugly tactics — including violence and imprisoning peaceful demonstrators — to quell growing protest movements in their countries.

      That’s in marked contrast to the administration’s tough stand when similar tactics are employed by unfriendly governments like the one in Iran. In a statement yesterday, the White House “strongly condemn[ed] the Iranian government’s organized intimidation campaign and arrests of political figures, human rights defenders, political activists, student leaders, journalists and bloggers.”

    • Report calls for in-depth public inquiry into ‘shocking’ abuses at G20 summit

      A full-scale public inquiry is needed in light of the widespread and violent trampling of civil rights by police at last summer’s $1-billion G20 summit in Toronto, a new report concludes.

      The call for an inquiry is among recommendations in the report – by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and National Union of Public and General Employees – which is aimed at holding governments accountable and avoiding a recurrence.

    • G20 Report: Whose peace breached?
    • Qaddafi’s Private Jet Just Dropped Someone Off In Minsk

      Muammar el-Qaddafi’s private Dassault Falcon jet 5A-DCN dropped someone off in Minsk on Friday, according to reports in Haaretz and Malta Today.

      It is believed to have been someone in Qaddafi’s family. That person could be his daughter Aisha, who was denied entry to Malta last week, according to Al Jazeera.

      Qaddafi is friendly with Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.

    • U.S. continues Bush policy of opposing ICC prosecutions

      It has been widely documented that many of the worst atrocities on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi have been committed by foreign mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia. Despite that, the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions Resolution aimed at Libya, which was just enacted last week, includes a strange clause that specifically forbids international war crimes prosecutions against mercenaries from nations which are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which protects many of the mercenaries Gadaffi is using.

    • ICE detainee passes away at Lock Haven Hospital

      A Chinese national in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Feb. 14 passed away on Feb. 23 at the Lock Haven Hospital in Lock Haven, Pa., of an apparent suicide.

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks Goes After The Saudi Royal Family

      Wikileaks just released a motherload of info on the taboo subject of Saudi Arabian royal rents.

      The 1996 cable — entitled “Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?” — describes legal and illegal ways that royals grab money, according to Reuters.

    • “If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange”
    • “If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange”
    • How US choppers ended up in Colombian money-laundering hands

      To get a sense of just how interconnected the formal and illicit dimensions of international political economy are, take a peek at this brief cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota published by WikiLeaks Sunday.

      The cable details then-Ambassador William Woods’ hunt for two missing helicopters that had originally been sold to the Israeli military by the United States government, but had somehow ended up in the hands of multimillionaire Enilse Lopez, a businesswoman who was suspected of close ties to Colombian paramilitaries.

    • Julian Assange and Raymond A. Davis

      America wants them both – who should be released?

      The US desperately wants to extradite both Julian Assange and Raymond A. Davis but for different reasons.

    • The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Monday, Day 93

      2:05 New Chomsky interview. Asked about whether U.S. knew truth about Tunisia, he replies: “In the case of Tunisia, which is kind of an interesting case, Tunisia was held as (the) very beacon of democracy and progress in the region. Some of the articles that appear kind of embarrassing to read now. But they knew. In fact one of the interesting WikiLeaks disclosures was series of cables by the American ambassador in Tunisia who said, very straight out, look this is a police state, there is no freedom of speech or association, the public is extremely angry at the corruption of the ruling family. So they knew but the … doctrine prevailed. It was quiet so everything was fine.” 9h/t Kevin Gosztola)

      2:00 Thanks to all for helping make my e-book The Age of WIkiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate become the top-selling book on this subject (even topping the big boys at NYT and Guardian –and Daniel Domsheit-Berg, too) at Amazon. Print edition here. Hailed by Dan Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, and more.

      12:45 New summary with links on Wikileaks cables impact from OpEdNews.

      12:15 Chris Hedges in new Truthout piece focuses on antiwar demos coming up in March, but also mentions protest to support Bradley Manning on March 20 — and the importance of earlier WikiLeaks docs on Iraq and Afghan torture and civilian casualties.

    • Musyoka: Lies, Lovers, and Mercenaries in Kenya’s Politics
    • 06NAIROBI3217, CHARTERHOUSE WHISTLEBLOWER DETAILS MONEY

      Summary: Kenyan auditor Peter Odhiambo exposed
      billions of shillings of tax evasion and money laundering at
      his former employer, Charterhouse Bank, by a group of major
      companies partly owned by notorious businessman John Mwau and
      MP William Kabogo. On July 20, Odhiambo briefed Emboffs on
      the details of the scam, and explained he had experienced
      death threats and a frightening attempt by some policemen to
      serve him with a bogus warrant. Because the people
      implicated in the scandal are dangerous and appear to have
      bought influence and protection from the GOK, Odhiambo
      requested refuge in the U.S. Refugee Officer is prepared to
      write an Embassy referral for Odhiambo to DHS for processing
      his application for refugee status, and DHS is willing to
      interview him.

    • 06NAIROBI1114, AN UNSETTLED KENYA AWAITS NEXT SHOE TO DROP

      President Kibaki publicly stands firm behind
      the Kenyan Police raid on the Standard Media Group.
      Meanwhile, Standard journalists and others privately say the
      raids were prompted by a State House belief that the paper
      possesses documents implicating the President’s family in
      grand-scale corruption, possibly including narcotics
      trafficking. First Lady Lucy Kibaki has reportedly
      personally threatened to “burn down the Standard” unless the
      information on her is relinquished. Even as the government
      ridicules claims of “foreign mercenaries” in the country,
      political opponents and journalists believe unofficial Second
      Wife Mary Wambui is behind the foreigners — and the cocaine
      trafficking. Opposition leaders say they are being
      blackmailed to keep quiet; shocked by the steps already
      taken, they privately fear a cornered government will move to
      arrest them, with or without charges. And they worry about
      the possible use of lethal force.

    • 10NAIROBI181, Chinese Engagement in Kenya

      China’s engagement in Kenya continues to grow exponentially. China enjoys a large trade surplus with Kenya; exports increased by more than 25 percent a year from 2004 to 2008. The China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) is drilling for oil in the Isiolo region. China may be a potential partner in the development of the new mega-port at Lamu. In addition, China is heavily involved in various infrastructure projects across Kenya primarily with roads. China is also providing weapons to the GOK in support of its Somalia policies and increasing their involvement with the Kenyan National Security and Intelligence Service (NSIS) by providing telecommunications and computer equipment. Recently, China signed an economic and technical cooperation agreement with the GOK providing new development grants. To date, China and the U.S. do not collaborate on development projects in Kenya.

    • 09NAIROBI1938, VISAS DONKEY: CORRUPTION 212(F) VISA DENIAL

      Embassy is seeking a security advisory opinion under
      Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act,
      Proclamation 7750, suspending the entry into the United
      States of Aaron Gitonga Ringera and members of his family.
      Ringera was born in Meru, Kenya on June 20, 1950. Post
      strongly believes Mr. Ringera has engaged in and benefited
      from public corruption in his capacity as Director/Chief
      Executive of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) for
      the last five years by interference with judicial and other
      public processes, and that this corruption has had a serious
      adverse impact on U.S. national interest in the stability of
      democratic institutions in Kenya, U.S. foreign assistance
      goals and the international economic activities of U.S.
      businesses. Ringera travels frequently to the U.S. He is
      expected shortly to apply for a U.S. visa. The following
      provides information requested in ref a, paragraphs 26-28.

    • Julian Assange: At the Forefront of 21st Century Journalism

      If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is a journalist, recent events erase all those doubts and put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.

      The U.S. Department of Justice is still trying to find a way to prosecute Assange and others associated with WikiLeaks. A key to their prosecution is claiming he is not a journalist, but that weak premise has been made laughable by recent events.

      The list of WikiLeaks revelations has become astounding . During the North African and Middle East revolts WikiLeaks published documents that provided people with critical information. The traditional media has relied on WikiLeaks publications and is now also emulating WikiLeaks.

    • Equitorial Guinea ruler’s son ‘ordered superyacht’

      The son of Equatorial Guinea ruler Teodoro Obiang Nguema has commissioned plans to build one of the world’s most expensive yachts, a rights group claimed on Monday.

      President Obiang’s son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, has commissioned plans for a yacht costing 288 million euros ($400 million), said Global Witness, which works to break the links between resource exploitation and bad governance.

    • What US cables reveal about France and the Ben Ali regime

      “Tunisia is not a dictatorship.” That was the analysis made in August 2007 by the then-French ambassador to Tunis, Serge Degallaix. Revealed by WikiLeaks in a series of cables published here by Mediapart, it succinctly sums up France’s position towards the regime of now-deposed ruler.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Vancouver Island Bald Eagles Are “Falling From the Sky”

      It was one thing when starlings, robins, and turtledoves were falling dead from the sky in places like Kentucky, Italy, and Arkansas. Those places are far from the Pacific Northwest, and the birds are just common species that no one cares about anyway. Well, now bizarre bird deaths have finally made their way to the PNW, and it’s eagles that are falling from the sky. That’s right, bald freaking eagles.

      The Vancouver Sun reports that Maj Birch, manager of the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, is currently caring for seven injured eagles that were starving and fell out of the sky. Several others didn’t make it.

    • Coal Is Cheap – Because We Pay $345 Billion Of Their Annual Costs

      Earlier today, we looked at the constantly rising price of dirty energy: both direct costs (extraction from the ground, transport, etc.) and the externalities, that is, costs or opportunities shifted to other sectors of the economy.

      The classic example of a negative externality (a cost shifted to another part of the economy) is pollution. If a chemical company forgoes proper disposal of its waste, and dumps it into a reservoir, they’re abdicating their responsibility to pay for that pollution, and shunting the cost on to the folks downstream.

    • The Great Climate Change Conspiracy

      Gotta love it. There’s so much money in Climate Science, that every climate scientist in the world is willing to lie about it. In fact they are not only willing to lie, they are willing to try and mess up scientists from other disciplines so that they can keep on enjoying the gravy train…

      It’s rather scary actually listening to the True Believers who know the truth about Climate Change. According to them we’ll never run out of oil. Oil is a renewable resource! Yes, isn’t it wonderful? Curiously none of them are capable of telling us exactly how it’s going to become renewable.

      Let’s take a look at some of the points that have been made:

      Lots of scientists don’t believe in Climate Change either – while this is true, the scientists who don’t believe in it aren’t Climate experts. When I pointed out that most of the scientists who disagreed with Climate Change were actually mathematicians, I was accused of hating mathematicians.

    • The Cove director sends dolphin slaughter DVDs to whole fishing town

      The director of The Cove, an Oscar-winning film about the annual slaughter of dolphins in Taiji on Japan’s Pacific coast, has sent free DVDs of the movie to the town’s residents.

      Louie Psihoyos said he was concerned that the film had not been given enough exposure in Japan, particularly among the 3,500 residents of Taiji.

      The American director said Japanese-language copies of the movie, which last year won the Oscar for best documentary, had been delivered to every household in Taiji over the weekend with the help of a local ocean conservation group.

    • If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong

      You can’t make a bundle pushing the consensus

      So, are there big bucks to be had in climate science? Since it doesn’t have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department’s salary information available. It’s easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

    • Republicans recycle an old idea: the foam plastic coffee cup

      A bit like the Republican party, they are white, seemingly indestructible and bad for the environment. But after an absence of four years, foam plastic coffee cups have made a comeback in the basement coffee shop of the United States Congress building after Republicans began reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats.

      The about-turn was announced by a press aide to John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who tweeted on Monday morning: “The new majority – plasticware is back”.

  • Anonymous/Wisconsin/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Anonymous Joins The Wisconsin Protests By Taking Out Americans For Prosperity

      The cyber protest group Anonymous has joined the protesters of Wisconsin and Americans all across this country in the battle against what they described as the “Koch brothers attempt usurp democracy.” The opening salvo in Anon’s OpWisconsin occurred today when the Koch brothers funded Americans for Prosperity was knocked offline in an attempt to take a small slice of the Internet back from the liberty stealing propagandists.

      In a press release Anonymous put the Koch brothers on notice, “It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.”

    • ‘Anonymous’ targets the brothers Koch, claiming attempts ‘to usurp American Democracy’

      The decentralized protest group “Anonymous” has a new target: no, it’s not a middle eastern dictator, a major bank or even a bit player in the military-industrial complex.

      It’s none other than tea party financiers Charles and David Koch, who were being targeted, an open letter stated, for their attempts “to usurp American Democracy.”

    • Anonymous versus Fox News’ Dan Gainor

      That’s Anon News in what a post on the site describes as a “Twitter Bitch-fight with FoxNews.com Columnist Dan Gainor”.

      Anon News is fast becoming a distribution and media centre for Anonymous and “THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY, AND TOOK PLACE ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 27″, says an Anon who’d engaged in a lengthy ‘discussion’ with Fux’s Gainor.

    • Making the world go around

      Now it’s become clear the explosions of citizen anger first manifested in Tunisia following a determined Anonymous campaign aren’t just examples of temporary “student unrest”.

      They’re the new paradigm in which people around the world take control of their lives, reversing the way things used to be when those who were supposed to serve us served only themselves.

    • Anonymous makes a laughing stock of HBGary

      Following a failed attempt at mediation on IRC, Anonymous published both the alleged identities of its leading figures and HBGary’s entire email archive online. And whilst the allegedly explosive data on Anonymous proved to be almost entirely without substance, the email archive painted a very detailed picture of the US security company’s leading figures and their business dealings. Whilst it’s worth bearing in mind that these emails could have been ‘interfered with’, plausibility checks offer no indication that this is the case.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Newspaper does not have to identify anonymous commenters, rules High Court

      The Daily Mail does not have to identify the people behind two anonymously posted comments on its website because to do so would breach their rights to privacy, the High Court has said.

      The subject of a news story had demanded information from the Daily Mail that would help her to identify the two commenters so that she could sue them for defamation, but the Court said that identification of those people would be disproportionate.

    • Europe’s highest court to rule on Google privacy battle in Spain

      Europe’s highest court looks set to decide whether Google should remove links to articles in newspapers, including El País, from its online search engine following a Spanish demand about invasion of privacy.

      Google was ordered to remove almost 100 online articles from its search results by Spain’s data protection authority earlier this year. The articles, some of which appeared in official gazettes, were subject to privacy complaints by their subjects.

  • Civil Rights

    • When does life mean life?

      Three convicted murderers are challenging their sentences in the European Court of Human Rights. They claim that the rare “whole life” tariffs which have been imposed in their cases is contrary to their human rights.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • The Right to Information in Brazil– Censorship, Fines for Sharing Wi-Fi

      Following up on several other related posts, two recent news items give us reason to wonder about freedom of information in Brazil. First, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, ANATEL, confiscated the computer equipment of three young people and fined them $3000R (about $2000US) for sharing an internet signal among their three dwellings in an effort to save money. Second, news has surfaced that in the first half of last year, Brazil asked Google to remove more news articles from the internet than any other country in the world, a total of 398, of which 177 requests involved a Judicial order [postscript: this was misinformed news-- based on false reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists, please see correction, next post.]. Brazil’s efforts to censure information were more intense than Libya’s, which came in second.

  • DRM

    • Geohot: We Built Your PS3. We Built This World.
    • Limits on library e-books stir controversy

      Some librarians are “appalled” by a new HarperCollins policy that would allow library e-books to circulate only 26 times before their license expires. Others, however, note that some major publishers don’t allow their e-books to circulate in libraries at all.

    • The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

      Every eBook user should have the following rights:

      * the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
      * the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
      * the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
      * the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

    • The Debate Over Copyright Gets Loud At Digital Music Forum

      Not surprisingly, there was a fair amount of disagreement on some of the issues, with Bengloff doing the usual song and dance about “piracy” destroying the music industry. Julie Samuels, correctly, pointed out that Bengloff was being misleading, and it was the recording industry that was having trouble adapting, not the music industry. Bengloff insisted this wasn’t true, and insisted (contrary to every single study we’ve seen) that every other aspect of the music business was in massive decline. Petricone then responded by bringing things around to a key point: copyright law was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to act as an incentive to create content. And, if you look at the market today, you’d have to be delusional to say that the market is having any problem in that area whatsoever. More music is being created today than ever before. More people are spending more money on music and music related goods than ever before. There’s a massive variety of music available today. Basically, the content space is absolutely thriving. So, arguing that there’s a problem in the market seems misguided.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Major Second Life Content Theft Lawsuit Against Linden Settled With Promise of Better Protection, Says Ex-Plaintiff

      A major lawsuit against Linden Lab filed by its own users in late 2009 has been settled. That news was recently announced by one of the plaintiffs, virtual adult entertainment impresario Stroker Serpentine, during the taping of Metaverse TV’s “Grumpy Old Avatars” show. The lawsuit alleged that the company was allowing and enabling content theft of the plaintiff’s material by other Residents. Last week, however, Mr. Serpentine (Kevin Alderman IRL) said the dispute had been resolved out of court:

      “We settled the lawsuit with Linden Lab,” he told the “Grumpy” hosts, “we settled amicably, and reasonably, and we’re anticipating a concerted effort on Linden’s behalf going forward towards content protection and the rights of content creators and at least being aware of the fact that there is a lot of content theft going on out there.”

    • Female Artists of Second Life: Stanford Libraries and Lynn Hershman Want Your Art!

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Google looking to launch YouTube movie service in UK

        Google is actively looking to begin an unlimited streaming subscription service, one that will rival Netflix and Amazon, and may launch it first in the UK.

      • Righthaven defendant threatens to seek settlement refunds

        A South Carolina woman sued by Las Vegas copyright enforcer Righthaven LLC escalated her counter-attack on Sunday, arguing Righthaven should refund hundreds of thousands of dollars it has obtained in dozens of lawsuit settlements worldwide since May.

        Attorneys for the woman, Dana Eiser, based their refund claim on charges that Righthaven in its lawsuits regularly threatens to seize the website domain names of defendants — and that this demand is improper and is used to coerce defendants into settling.

      • Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age

        We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies to defend and extend the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.

      • Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services

        “Piracy is the Future of Television” is Abigail De Kosnik’s Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these advantages are related to price — it may be hard to compete with free, but it’s impossible to compete with free when you offer something worse than the free option. De Kosnik finishes the paper with a series of incredibly sensible recommendations for producing a commercial marketplace that’s as good or better than the illicit one.

      • Securing a right doesn’t mean granting a monopoly

        Such an assumption of power was unconstitutional.

        Securing a right does not require annulling another right, as Thomas Paine makes clear.

        1. Abolish copyright.
        2. Secure the author’s exclusive right to their writings, for a time limited to that of their natural lifespan.

        Securing a right does not require the grant of a monopoly.

      • Hollywood Gone Mad: Complaining That Oscar Nominated Films Downloaded More

        The article also highlights, as we’ve discussed at great lengths, how the producer, Nicolas Chartier of Voltage Films, of last year’s Oscar winner for best picture, Hurt Locker chose to sue 5,000 fans of his film for unauthorized downloading. Of course, it leaves out the part where he also called someone a “moron” and a “thief” for explaining to him, quite politely, why such a strategy might backfire. The reporter asks Chartier about the backlash, and he suggests that nobody knows who produces what films, so he doesn’t care if he gets a bad reputation: “I don’t think anyone is waking up saying, ‘Let’s boycott movies made by Voltage.’” Apparently Chartier doesn’t use the internet much. There are, in fact, efforts by people to get everyone to boycott Voltage films because of his actions.

      • Falling off the edge of a flat world?

        This blog challenges an attempt by entertainment industry stakeholders to discredit the Andersen-Frenz report (2007): The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada.

        Findings from the report have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and used as expert evidence in two British landmark court-cases dealing with P2P filesharing (Oink’s Pink Palace and one other). It also plays a central role in the debate on copyright reforms internationally.

      • The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada

        Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which music downloads over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, for which the sound recording industry receives no remuneration, affect music purchasing activity in Canada.

      • 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable

        A recent study on moral standards and whether some law breaking is socially acceptable has revealed an interesting stance on file-sharing among the public. Of those questioned in the study, 70% said that downloading illicit material from the Internet is acceptable. Three out four, however, felt it was completely unacceptable to then sell that product for profit.

      • ACTA

        • Dutch trade minister: ACTA not superior to European or national law

          Will ACTA be binding on the US, EU, France, Romania, the Netherlands and Singapore? Confusion over whether the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is binding is mounting. On 1 December 2010, Dutch Trade Minister Verhagen said in a parliamentary commission meeting: “It has never come up to implement ACTA in the Netherlands. It so happens that ACTA is not superior to European or national law.”

          This is a remarkable statement. It is in direct conflict with an EU Commission’s answer to a European Parliament question. It is also in conflict with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which was ratified by the Netherlands. The minister misinformed parliament.

          A group of prominent European academics state that ACTA will directly or indirectly require additional action on the EU level. ACTA goes beyond current EU law. ACTA is legislation by the back door.

Clip of the Day

Muammar Gaddafi – Zenga Zenga Song – Noy Alooshe Remix + Download


Credit: TinyOgg

02.28.11

Links 28/2/2011: LiMo 4 Arriving, 4 HTC Devices Will Get Gingerbread

Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Five ideas for escaping the Blu-Ray blues

    Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I’ve been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it’s a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here’s five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

  • Desktop

    • reason i love my wife

      Then one day. Danny (my wife) says to me.

      “Ahh I hate windows. I have to do too much crap just to do something. Install ubuntu.”

      [...]

      And now that ubuntu is up and running. My wife feels at home. And it is running way better then our last computer. I am in heaven ^_^

  • Server

    • Who Owns Your Datacenter?

      It is surprising how fast some proprietary software vendors can turn hostile towards their customers. Anyone who’s been in the IT field for the past decade or so should be familiar with the term “licensing audit”, and how it runs shivers up and down the spine of the entire organization. Those vendors can perform the audit on your company because they own your datacenter, and they know it. They can come in anytime they want and, probably, demand more money for the continued use of their product.

    • London Stock Exchange in crisis meeting with market data vendors

  • Google

    • Google’s CR-48: An adventure in brickdom

      Scanning for something easier, I located this little guide. Easy way to install Ubuntu? Sold.

      The instructions are ridiculously easy to follow and straightforward. Bear in mind it’s a rather large download (52 100MB files), so give it some time, especially if you’re rocking a slow connection. I did test to see if the script will pick up where it left off by battery pulling the unit mid-download and it absolutely does, so don’t worry about it being flakey in that regard.

  • Ballnux

    • Why all Symbian developers should become Bada Developers

      You might be aware about the news that Nokia will no longer using Symbian as their smartphone OS. They are going to use Windows Mobile and Meego. All the loyal Symbian Developers are now under the pressure to choose another platform. Few days ago, I asked prominent voices in Bada universe why these developers should choose bada as their next developing platform.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Upstream projects vs. Distributions

      You can globally split open source projects into two broad categories. Upstream projects develop and publish source code for various applications and features. Downstream projects are consumers of this source code. The most common type of downstream projects are distributions, which release ready-to-use binary packages of these upstream applications, make sure they integrate well with the rest of the system, and release security and bugfix updates according to their maintenance policies.

    • Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name?

      Have you ever wondered what “XP” stands for or where “Ubuntu” comes from? Some operating systems get their names from obvious places, but others need some explaining. Read on to find out where your favorite OS got its name.

    • Reviews

      • A look at Wolfer Linux 2

        If you have already settled into the Linux scene and have gained some comfort with the operating system, Wolfer probably won’t give you anything new. But if you’re standing outside the Linux community and considering which distro to try, Wolfer is one option that will make the transition easier.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Making the most of the planet.

          With a title like that, I could go two ways with this blog post, right? One way would be to encourage people to do stuff that’s good for the Earth, like recycling and so forth. There are probably lots of people who could do that better than me. Instead, this post is going to be about making the most of the Fedora Planet, which carries information about contributors and their work to each other and to audiences outside the Fedora Project.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Unity keyboard shortcuts have a distinct Windows 7 flavor
        • Legally open, socially closed

          Much has been said lately about the revenue sharing decision made by Canonical in regards to the Banshee music store sales, starting with the announcement on Jono Bacon’s blog. This was soon followed by posts questioning how the decision and announcements were handled. Sense Hofstede followed up with an excellent post discussing the value of Ubuntu as a distribution channel complimenting the value of Banshee as a product.

          What I haven’t seen discussed, and what I would like to bring up, is this often cited but never quite defined notion of the moral or ethical restrictions on the use of FLOSS.

        • Best Ubuntu 10.10 Feature

          Doing an install of Natty alpha in VirtualBox, I remembered what I love most about 10.10: The installation. Whoever decided to add the Download updates checkbox, brilliant.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Datalight Releases First Full-featured File System for Embedded Linux

      Datalight announced today that it has released Reliance Nitro 2.0, the first full-featured file system for embedded Linux. The new file system combines strong read and write performance with fast and consistent mount time, rock-solid reliability, a comprehensive tool set, and support by a dedicated team of in-house engineers.

    • Phones

      • LiMo hits version 4, reminds us why consumers don’t care

        Once considered a possible Android competitor, the LiMo Foundation has since dug in its heels as a carrier- and manufacturer-facing group rather than a consumer-facing one. To put that in more direct, un-politically correct terms: if you’re an end user, you probably don’t care that LiMo version 4 was just announced (though it’s possible that your carrier might). In fact, the announcement actually happened a few days back during MWC in Barcelona, but it was a quiet affair — the Foundation has yet to finalize device specs, the code won’t be available to the public until July, and commercial hardware isn’t expected until the second half.

      • Android

        • 4 HTC Devices to Get Gingerbread in Q2

          Good ol’ HTC has confirmed that the Desire Z, Desire HD, Desire, and the newly announced Incredible S will all be getting some Gingerbread love soon enough. While they didn’t give an exact date, they’re promising a Q2 release. This is one reason I always buy HTC: they’re reliable. They don’t promise an update and then delay or cancel it 2 months after the deadline. Of course, we can’t really say that until after Q2. But when it’s all said and done, I have no doubt that the 4 devices mentioned above will have some 2.3 goodness.

        • 40 best free Android apps
        • HTC tips Android global roaming phone

          HTC announced it will launch an Android-based “world phone,” including both CDMA and GSM. Due this spring, the HTC Merge features Android 2.2, a 3.8-inch display, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a five-megapixel camera, and appears likely to be heading for Verizon Wireless.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Ubuntu gives new, speedier life to Netbooks

        For one, opening, closing and arranging windows and folders will throw off new users at first because they can’t be moved with total freedom. For example, the Ubuntu 10.10 operating system won’t let you drag and drop files on the desktop — you have to put them in a folder titled desktop. Another thing that sets Ubuntu apart from Windows and Mac is that the program and folder list is docked on the left side of the screen. But these are minor and inconsequential differences.

        Ubuntu boasts plenty of perks, mainly its software center that instantly connects you to thousands of free applications, including art and photo editing programs, word processors, games, video players and more. It’s like the app marketplace on most smartphones. And, like Ubuntu itself, it’s pretty much all free.

    • Tablets

      • Emergence of the Tablets

        Android phones are everywhere. Even on prepaid packages. Everyone can have them. This is where the open OS shines.

      • Odd One Out: My 5 Minutes With the Motorola Xoom

        Concluding, I didn’t hate the Xoom. Motorola did a great job (for the most part) of making a killer device to compete with the iPad. Google made a pretty awesome version of Android to run on said device. While both have their faults, they go well together. Does this mean I would buy a Xoom if I had the money? No, it doesn’t. Does that mean it’s a terrible device? No, it doesn’t. The Xoom just felt like it was released before it was finished. Whether this is Google’s fault, or Moto’s fault is irrelevant. The Xoom just isn’t ready for primetime yet. So, with all of this being said, bring on the agreeing or disagreeing (more likely the latter of the two) comments!

      • Freescale spins Cortex-A8 SoCs, tablet design, and $149 dev board

        Freescale Semiconductor announced two new members of its i.MX53 family of Cortex-A8 system-on-chips: an industrial-focused, 800MHz i.MX37 and the consumer-oriented, 1GHz i.MX538. Also unveiled were a $149 “Quick Start” development board for the original i.MX535 SoC, as well as a 10.1-inch, $1,499 “SABRE” tablet reference design, both compatible with Android, Linux, and Windows Embedded Compact 7.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Ning Galaxy deployment management system open sourced

    Ning, provider of the social web site platform of the same name, has released its internal deployment management system, Galaxy, as open source. For the past four years Ning has used Galaxy to manage the various services its engineering produces.

  • Events

    • SCALE 9x: Day 2

      We’ve had a pretty successful day at SCALE. We’re all out of LiveDVDs. The fifty-disc spindle was gone by the end of the day, as was nearly half of the 100-disc spindle of minimal LiveCDs.

    • Day one at SCALE9x

      As I mentioned in my previous post, I am at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles this weekend. What I failed to mention in my previous post was massive showing from the openSUSE community at the exposition.

    • SCALE 9x lifts off on Saturday; Leigh Honeywell kicks off Day 2 as attendance numbers rise

      The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo started its second day on Saturday with a keynote by Leigh Honeywell as the attendance numbers showed a significant increase over last year. Honeywell, who spoke on the topic “Hackerspaces and Free Software,” headlined a wide variety of sessions that included a standing-room only crowd for Owen De Long’s “IPv6 Basics for Linux Adminstrators” and various education-related talks in the Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) track.

    • FOSDEM: Icing the robot

      Anybody who looks at an Android system knows that, while Android is certainly based on the Linux kernel, it is not a traditional Linux system by any stretch. But Android is free software; might it be possible to create a more “normal” Android while preserving the aspects that make Android interesting? Developers Mario Torre and David Fu think so; they also plan to soon have the code to back it up. Their well-attended FOSDEM talk covered why they would want to do such a thing and how they plan to get there.

  • SaaS

    • The Man Behind Swiss Federal Mapping Discusses What’s in His Cloud Stack

      Recently, we at OStatic launched our “What’s in Your Cloud Stack?” series, where we discuss components and processes that power some of the most sophisticated cloud computing deployments with people who know a whole lot about the cloud. The series began with our conversation with PHP Fog founder Lucas Carlson, where he provided many insights into a smart cloud stack.

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

      The OpenSSL license, which is BSD-style with an advertising clause, has been a source of problems in the past because it is rather unclear whether projects using it can also include GPL-licensed code. Most distributions seem to be comfortable that OpenSSL can be considered a “system library”, so that linking to it does not require OpenSSL to have a GPL-compatible license, but the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and, unsurprisingly, Debian are not on board with that interpretation. This licensing issue recently reared its head again in a thread on the pgsql-hackers (PostgreSQL development) mailing list.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice software is here to stay

      If there was any doubt as to long-term ability of LibreOffice to sprint ahead of Oracle-backed OpenOffice.org, those concerns pretty much just flew out the window. In a wildly successful fundraising effort, the Document Foundation has succeeded in collecting $68,800 (50,000 euros) in just eight days, effectively ensuring a future for the open-source productivity software suite.

      Some 2000 donors from all over the world contributed the funds, which will serve as the capital stock necessary to set up the Document Foundation as a legal entity in Germany.

    • Made by the people, for the people

      Perhaps even more incredibly, we were not just busy at raising funds all this time. Not only did we release LibreOffice 3.3.1 and its brand new icons, we are also busy deploying our community processes. For instance we are almost done completing our trademark policy as well as offering a general, third party purpose logo with practical guidelines. We are also in the process of deploying a full set of automated testing tools for our QA teams, as to make it possible to everyone to help improve the quality of our software. Yes, you read well, everyone. Because LibreOffice is a software that is made by the people, for the people, an old principle that is coming back in force quickly these days and a principle the Document Foundation has been based on from day one.

    • LibreOffice gives OpenOffice a run for its Money

      OpenOffice and its curiously similarly named counterpart LibreOffice are officially neck-in-neck. Despite Oracle’s backing of OpenOffice, LibreOffice is still kicking, and recently received over $68,000 in funding — in just eight days.

      The fundraising effort from LibreOffice maker Ubuntu was short, sweet, and everything they need for now. Their over 2,000 donors raised enough money to serve as capitol for setting up the Document Foundation, a goal to become a legal entity in Germany.

    • Sudbury

      However the result of studies made was to migrate everyone to Office 2007 and “lowering costs”. It turns out that OpenOffice.org did work reasonably well that folks were using it instead of Office to do their document conversions… However, to get stuff/information in and out of the ERP system, Office was chosen as it was well integrated.

  • Healthcare

    • VA, DOD will decide on common EHR method in March

      At the same time, VA must proceed in revamping its VistA system. To that end, VA has been considering open source software with a request for information to gauge industry approaches.

      “No matter what happens in the joint session with the DOD, we have to increase the pace of modernizing VistA,” he said. “That’s why we’re exploring the open source avenue.”

      DOD has also been considering industry ideas for modernizing its AHLTA electronic health record with a Web-based system.

      As it examines the open source model, VA will be influenced by both the work it’s doing with the DOD for a joint electronic health record and also by substantial industry input in order to most easily integrate private sector technologies into the next version of VistA. Even in its updated form, VistA will still rely on its aging MUMPS code.

    • VA plans for an open source VistA

  • Business

    • Openbravo Emphasizes Modularity In New Release Of Open-Source ERP Suite

      Open-source ERP application vendor Openbravo unveiled a new release of its flagship software this week, offering a more modular system the company said is easier to implement than traditional ERP systems and is more adaptable to changing business conditions.

    • More than half of businesses have adopted ‘some’ open source
    • 3 Reasons Why Open Source Brings Better ROI for Businesses

      Quite often businesses view alternatives if products or services offer better Return on Investment. Open Source is one such option that is often debated in terms of better returns, lower operational costs and of course minimum breakeven time depending on the size of your organization etc. However, delving a little deeper into open source capabilities reveals great returns far beyond the initial investment in terms of time, investments etc and migrating to greener Open Source makes great practical sense. Some of these returns are subtle, some paradigm shifts from propriety sources but all effective and productive to every business. Here is a look at some of the top returns.

  • BSD

    • The Coding Studio OS Screenshots: PCBSD 8.2 Screenshots

      “PC-BSD has as its goals to be an easy-to-install-and-use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. To accomplish this, it currently has a graphical installation, which will enable even UNIX novices to easily install and get it running. It will also come with KDE pre-built, so that the desktop can be used immediately. Currently in development is a graphical software installation program, which will make installing pre-built software as easy as other popular operating systems.” – read more at Distrowatch

    • PC-BSD 9-current
    • FreeBSD 8.2 Expands ZFS Support — Without Oracle

      When one door closes, sometimes another one opens.

      The open source FreeBSD operating systems is out this week with a new release expanding support for the ZFS filesystem and improving disk encryption performance.

      The FreeBSD 8.2 release is the first FreeBSD release in 2011 and follows the 8.1 release, which debuted in July of 2010. Alongside the 8.2 release, FreeBSD 7.4 is also being released, marking the final release in the FreeBSD 7.x branch.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • When You Are Born To Be Great!

      By now, you may wonder, what makes me talk about this book and the hero, in a blog post, which is supposed to be dedicated for free and open source movement! Well, I don’t know why but I think, (Boray Qaplan) and Richard Stallman are so much alike.

  • Government

    • Satish Babu to head ICFOSS

      Trivandrum, Kerala, India, February 28, 2011 – The President of InApp, Mr. Satish Babu, has been appointed as the Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source software (ICFOSS) by the Government of Kerala.

    • Procurement environment ‘discourages open source technology’

      According to Computer Weekly, chief engineer at Atos Origin UK Darren Austin said standard government contracts and enterprise software licences have proved a barrier to the desire for greater use of open source in the public sector.

    • RO: ‘Romanian government not against, nor in favour of open source’

      The government of Romania is not opposed to but also not in favour of using open source software in public administration IT systems, ICT minister, Valerian Vreme, recently remarked in public. However, advocates of free and open source software in the country fear this means the public administration will continue to rely on the usual proprietary IT vendors.

    • Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source

      The government’s deputy chief information officer has told suppliers that it wants to open source technology to feature in its ICT strategy.

    • Whitehall open source plan heralds a behaviour change for suppliers

      This time, says the Cabinet Office, it’s going to be different. This time, open government means open standards and open source. But will it?

    • Interoperability And Open Standards Would Drive Government ICT Procurment – Deputy CIO Tells Suppliers

      The Government wants large IT suppliers to provide open source and inter operable standards, the Deputy Government CIO Bill McCluggage told assembled system operators in a meeting last week.

      While there has been similar announcements in the past, this time the push for open source is being driven from the very top – No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. The government has even appointed an open source team within the cabinet office led by a Director and has laid out a clear strategy to implement the vision.

    • New federal deputy CTO chosen

      Vein worked on San Francisco’s open source and government 2.0 initiatives.

    • Land Registry deploys open source data management

      The UK Land Registry, the government agency that maintains land property records, has recently deployed an open source data management from Talend to support its business intelligence.

    • SI: Slovenian public administrations moving to open source desktops

      Public administrations in Slovenia are to increase their use of free and open source software on their desktop computers. Around 2015, 80 percent of the government’s offices should be using this type of desktop software, according to a plan published by the Ministry of Public Administration in January.

      The open source software stack to be implemented includes open source office suites, open source web browser and open source operating systems. The ministry is setting-up a task force for the migration project, including representatives from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • DOTKLOK Is A Hackable, Open-Source, Arduino Clock. Also Neat Looking

        Sick of telling time the old way? Spice up your time-telling time with the open-source, hackable and Arduino-based DOTKLOK. Basically, you can get a bunch of different ways to tell time. Different customizable animations will make you proud to show off your hard work the next time someone asks for the time. Speaking of time, it passes in a unique way with numbers and abstract/geometric patterns. It also has classic video games like Pong, Tetris and Pacman, that pretty much makes it sweet in our book.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Webstock: Facebook leads the way with HTML5

      Recordon was in New Zealand for the recent Webstock conference in Wellington, where he spoke about the use of HTML5 at Facebook and later spoke exclusively to Computerworld.

      Two video codecs, H.264 and WebM, have been advanced as candidates for inclusion in HTML5. Each has its pros and cons, says Recordon and the debate has become somewhat heated, “about freedom and what does freedom mean, in terms of can I implement it in open source and is it royalty free, or is it an industry standard and can we collaborate freely on developing it?”

    • China hopes to take lead in int’l hi-tech standards

      China has announced its ambition at the National Standardization Conference held on Feb.24 to take the lead in high-tech international standards. China’s Standardization Administration (SAC) will launch the promotion and applications of some national technologies standards within key countries and regions.

Leftovers

  • Former president of MADD arrested on DUI charge

    A former president of the defunct local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving was arrested recently by the Gainesville Police Department on a DUI charge.

  • Consumers Buy Less Tech Stuff, Keep It Longer
  • How to: Uyghur Homestay in Xinjiang

    One of the most asked questions I receive from travelers who will be heading to Xinjiang this next travel season has to do with homestays. Is it possible to do a Uyghur homestay in Xinjiang?

    The answer, thankfully, is YES! There are many places where homestays are offered, including Tuyoq (near Turpan) as well as outside Kashgar. Don’t mistake this with an overnight stay at a Kyrgyz yurt, which is also an incredible experience but not quite the same.

  • Google whacks link farms

    Free whitepaper – The benefits of choosing a Hosted Security Solution

    Google has made a major change to its search algorithms in order to try to scrub more link farm results from appearing near the top of search results.

    The search and advertising giant tweaks results all the time, but said these changes would hit 11.8 per cent of results, and so it wanted people to know what is going on.

  • Dear US gov: Stay the hell out of Silicon Valley

    It will come as no surprise to the largely libertarian technology industry that big government has done little to advance the interests of Silicon Valley. But you might raise your eyebrows at the degree to which the US government is hurting the very people it tries to help.

    As a general rule, Silicon Valley has been happiest when the bureaucrats in Washington, DC stay far away from tech and mostly uninvolved. Ever since the US Justice Department inserted itself into Microsoft’s business practices, however, the tech world has been forced to invest in lobbying federal lawmakers. Just last year, Google increased such spending by 29 percent over 2009.

  • Craigslist A ‘Cesspool Of Crime’? Or Are Bad Reporters A Cesspool Of Repeating Dubious Research?

    Slashdot points us to an article at the “International Business Times,” that reports on a study from the AIM Group which claims that Craigslist is ‘a cesspool of crime.’ Interesting claim. What seems to be totally missing from the IBTimes report is the fact that AIM Group works for Craigslist competitors and, in this case, the “research” was funded by Craigslist wannabe-Oodle. That’s not mentioned in the IBTimes report at all. In fact, the only mention of Oodle in the article is a quote by the CEO of Oodle mocking Craigslis and playing up Oodle… but never mentioning that he paid for the research in question.

  • Security

    • HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down

      Embattled CEO Aaron Barr says he is stepping down from his post at HBGary Federal to allow the company to move on after an embarassing data breach.

      The announcement comes three weeks after Barr became the target of a coordinated attack by members of the online mischief making group Anonymous, which hacked into HBGary Federal’s computer network and published tens of thousands of company e-mail messages on the Internet. HBGary did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comments on Barr’s resignation.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Sometimes The Twitter Stream Makes A Funny
    • Zimbabwe Prof Arrested, Tortured for Watching Viral Vids

      Munyaradzi Gwisai, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s law school, was showing internet videos about the tumult sweeping across North Africa to students and activists last Saturday, when state security agents burst into his office.

    • Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue

      When narcotics officers appeared at a Castro home shortly after 7 a.m. on Jan. 11, they had permission from a judge to search for “proceeds” from an illegal marijuana grow.

    • Possible Actions in Libya

      Al Jazeera reports that “conservatives” in USA are recommending “military intervention”. The concern seems to be that this could be a repeat of Iraq.

      There are some similarities but also a lot of differences between Iraq and Libya. In Iraq popular uprisings were dealt harsh blows and were no threat to the Baathist regime. In Libya, opponents to Gaddafi have control of most of the country and are cooperating and it would not be necessary to occupy the country in order to bring down Gaddafi’s regime.

    • US neo-cons urge Libya intervention

      In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

    • The Coast Road Past Sirte in Libya

      A blogger reports that anti-Gaddafi forces in Benghazi are heading to Tripoli by avoiding the stronghold of Sirte which guards the coast road along the Mediterranean Sea by travelling hundreds of kilometres to the south. This might be the easiest strategy for forward observers or emergency relief supplies but for a lengthy campaign it would be much wiser to follow the coast road and detour around Sirte much closer to the town.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Data Diving and the Federal Reserve: The Politics of Food and Energy Inflation

      The Federal Reserve has come under strong attack recently for the outbreak in global food and energy price inflation. The ensuing discussion has drawn commentary from Paul Krugman, who favors climate-change and crop failure to explain recent food commodity prices, to various commentary such as today’s WSJ Op-Ed, The Federal Reserve Is Causing Turmoil Abroad. Krugman is a consistent defender of FED policy, and remains sanguine on inflation. The financial community more generally, despite its enthusiasm for the effects of reflationary policy on the stock market, suffers from normalcy bias with regard to commodity prices and is more persuaded by monetary policy’s role in prices.

    • What we need to do to stop the pointless waste of discarded fish

      Discards are disgusting. No-one with any sense can support the catching, killing, and throwing away of fish. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight – which Greenpeace has supported from the outset – has at long last made the waste of perfectly good fish a national outrage. It is a pointless waste of life, and potential resources. It’s abhorrent whether you eat fish or don’t.

  • Wisconsin and Finance

    • Wisconsin Protests, Friday, February 25, 2011
    • Cheeseheads Have Never Been So Chic

      In Washington D.C.: Protesters warn, “What’s happening in Wisconsin will hurt us all.”

    • “We Shall Not Be Moved”

      A large, multi-union coalition gathered near the “Fighting” Bob LaFollette bust on the first floor of the East Gallery in the Wisconsin State Capitol this afternoon. Wearing grey T-shirts with the words “Wisconsin United for Worker’s Rights,” printed in red across an outline of the state sat down and started to sing, “We shall not be moved,” just after the official building shut-down at 4 p.m.

      “We know we have a right to peaceful protest,” said Candice Owley, a Milwaukee nurse with the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. “We don’t believe they should be removing us from the State Capitol.”

      Owley said those in her group planned to follow directions outlined by a grass-root group inside the capitol that this week has been preparing those for today. The goal: to keep the protest peaceful, and allow those who wish to continue to keep vigil in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill to remain in the building.

    • Wisconsin Protests, Saturday, February 26, 2011

      In addition to drumming and dancing, civil disobedience training continued Saturday night as people prepare to be asked to leave the building at 4:00 p.m. Sunday.

    • Prank Koch Call Prompts More Legal Questions

      The section of the tape that has come under the most scrutiny involved Walker’s comments that he considered planting “troublemakers” into the crowd. People on the ground here in Madison were quite aware that the first five days of protests were packed with children. The Madison school district and many surrounding districts were closed. Thousands of elementary school children and their parents marched at the capitol in support of local teachers. On the first day and second days, thousands of high school students walked out on their classes and headed to the capitol. The atmosphere was festive and fun, popcorn stands on the corner and thousands of homemade signs.

      When fake Koch says “We’ll back you any way we can. But what we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.” Walker says: “We thought about that,” but he rejected the idea in case it backfired, but not in the way one might think. He didn’t want to create a ruckus that would “scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems.”

    • Boaters baffled by new federal rules, fee

      Many canoeists and kayakers are confused and worried about new federal regulations that re-classify their boats as commercial vessels.

      The Transport Canada regulations, brought in last fall, will require everyone from professional outfitters to people leading recreational boat trips to fill out five separate forms, measure their boat and pay a $50 fee.

      Federal Transport Minister Chuck Strahl’s office told CBC News in an email that the department is reviewing the policy, and that “common sense would prevail.” But boaters are still concerned it could affect their summer paddling plans.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Today’s News, Brought to You by Your Friends at the CIA

      Now that the revolution is over, Egypt’s newly free press will make a fascinating read—if you happen to know Arabic. How the Libyan crisis plays in the newspapers of oil-rich Azerbaijan might be intriguing, too—if your Azeri is up to snuff.

      If it isn’t—and if your Urdu is as rusty as your Mandarin—you might check out the biggest news service in the U.S. that almost nobody has ever heard of. It’s called World News Connection.

  • Civil Rights

    • Inspiring manifesto from China’s Jasmine revolution

      As Bruce Sterling notes, this manifesto of the Chinese Jasmine revolution (translated by Human Rights in China), “sounds almost identical to the gripes that the impoverished American populace might make to their own leaders. There’s nothing specifically Chinese about these demands.”

    • DOJ gets reporter’s phone, credit card records in leak probe

      A court filing in the case of a former CIA officer accused of spilling secrets about Iran’s nuclear program provides new details about the extraordinary measures Justice Department prosecutors are using to identify government leakers.

      The former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted in December on charges that he disclosed “national defense information” to New York Times reporter James Risen.

    • US citizen recalls ‘humiliating’ post-9/11 arrest

      Handcuffed and marched through Washington’s Dulles International Airport in his Muslim clothing, the man with the long, dark beard could only imagine what people were thinking.

      That scene unfolded in March 2003, a year and a half after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. One of the four planes hijacked in 2001 took off from Dulles. “I could only assume that they thought I was a terrorist,” Abdullah al-Kidd recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Julian Assange applies for a trademark on his own name

        WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has applied to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office for a trademark on his own name.

        The application, submitted by Assange’s London law firm two weeks ago, covers use of his name in the fields of “Public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services.”

        It’s not uncommon for those in the public eye to protect their image with such a trademark to help ensure their financial stake in any commercial use of their name or likeness. Given Assange’s high profile in recent months, both as the frontman for WikiLeaks and for the drama surrounding his personal life, this seems like a smart move.

      • Hulk Hogan Sues Car Dealership for Stealing His Catchphrases

        Hogan is suing Southland Imports and Suntrup Automotive Group over a commercial that warns unwary car buyers of getting “body slammed” over bad deals and that invites customers “tired of wrestling for a good deal.” The lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Florida District Court alleges that the defendant violated Hogan’s likeness and implied an endorsement by imitating his voice and using his catch phrases.

    • Copyrights

      • Three Pirate Rule

        There are only three exceptions to the Three Pirate Rule:

        1. Don’t do anything illegal.
        2. You can’t allocate party funds (although you can ask for them).
        3. You can’t do anything in Northern Ireland, due to current law. If you’re interested in doing stuff in Northern Ireland, please contact the NEC for more info.

        The NEC receives a lot of requests from members to grant some sort of Official Stamp of Officialness to various initiatives. Hopefully, adopting this rule will make it unnecessary for people to make this sort of request.

      • Court Drops FileSoup BitTorrent Case, Administrators Walk Free

        Two administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today. The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case. Following the trial of OiNK BitTorrent tracker operator Alan Ellis, the FileSoup case marks the second where UK-based BitTorrent site operators have walked free.

      • 40,000 P2P lawsuits dismissed – bad week for copyright trolls
      • Hollywood Studios Kill ‘Family-Friendly’ DVD Service (Exclusive)

        A coalition of Hollywood studios has scored a victory against a company that has been marketing and distributing films stripped of objectionable content.

      • Roundup: Developments in Righthaven copyright suits

        Has Righthaven been so busy filing and settling lawsuits that it forgot to renew its state business license?

        Its status with the Nevada Secretary of State as of Monday was listed as “default” after the license expired Jan. 31. Net Sortie Systems LLC, Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson’s company that co-owns Righthaven, is also listed as in default.

      • Consumer group wants to tax Netflix to pay for rural broadband

        Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), says Netflix should have to pay into the Universal Service Fund.

        “The Internet is not an infant industry anymore. It can certainly bear the burden of making sure that wires and the communications mediums are there,” Cooper said.

Clip of the Day

Electing a US President in Plain English


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 28/2/2011: Android Tablets Get a Lot Cheaper

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Linux Outlaws 193 – Comments Are Off

      This week on Linux Outlaws: Canonical wants Banshee’s donations to Gnome, German Defense Minister steals his PhD together, FSF says Debian not free enough, Nokia has no taste, Alan Cox releases a graphics driver, Microsoft hates copyleft, more about our netbook competition and a lot of other stuff…

  • Ballnux

    • Galaxy Tab slashed to $300 on Xoom’s heels

      A funny thing happens when there’s a bigger and better Android tablet on the market – the one that previously had a stranglehold on the entire industry gets dropped radically in price.

      The Samsung Galaxy Tab, which originally launched at $600 after a mobile service contract subsidy, is now only $300 at Verizon. The timing comes immediately after Motorola’s Xoom tablet came out at nearly the same price as the Galaxy Tab’s initial cost.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.38 EXT4, Btrfs File-System Benchmarks

      Along with finally delivering Intel Gallium3D driver benchmarks comparing this unofficial, proof-of-concept i915/945 Gallium3D driver to Intel’s official classic Mesa driver, there’s also our benchmarks of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems from the Linux 2.6.38 kernel. These exclusive tests are coming this weekend as part of OpenBenchmarking.org being publicly available for the first day.

    • Go Benchmark, OpenBenchmarking.org Is Here

      In case you didn’t figure it out from two exclusive benchmarks appearing on a Saturday morning — Intel Gallium3D benchmarks and EXT4/Btrfs on the Linux 2.6.38 kernel — this is to celebrate the availability of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org

    • The OpenBenchmarking.org SCALE Video
    • Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices

      Matthew Tippett and I talked this weekend at the Southern California Linux Expo on the matter of making more informed Linux hardware choices. While Linux hardware support has come along way, it is not perfect and there are still shortcomings. However, with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org, which were released in Los Angeles, we believe there are now the capabilities to dramatically enhance the Linux hardware and software experience. These freely available tools are not only a game-changer for Linux, but have the capabilities to impact how projects and organizations handle their Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Solaris testing as well.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Overview of Xrandr
      • AMD Opens Up XvBA! Their Catalyst Linux Video API

        Back in 2008 we were the first to thoroughly talk about AMD’s X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) API found in their Catalyst Linux driver to expose their UVD2 video engine now under non-Windows operating systems. However, when the XvBA library was made available, it was next to useless since they hadn’t published the documentation or any header files describing this video playback acceleration interface. A year later, in November of 2009, AMD and Splitted Desktop Systems released a VA-API front-end to XvBA so that VA-API multi-media applications could seamlessly use XvBA with the Catalyst driver.

      • Mesa Can Now Be Smaller, Build Faster

        As something of value to more users than Mesa receiving EXT_texture_compression_RGTC support is that the shared DRI core patch has been merged. This results in a significantly smaller package size for Mesa (circa 30MB savings) and results in Mesa building about 13% faster.

      • Intel Gallium3D Graphics Driver Performance

        While Intel remains to be the only major graphics vendor standing strong behind their classic Mesa driver on Linux for open-source support rather than drawing up plans to move to the Gallium3D driver architecture, there is actually available a Gallium3D driver available for Intel hardware. This Intel Gallium3D driver has been around since close to Gallium3D’s inception, but it targets the older generations of Intel IGPs and was developed by VMware as a proof of concept. The driver is incomplete, but our testing shows that for those with Intel 945 netbooks and other hardware, the “i915g” driver is usable. In this article are benchmarks showing how this Intel Gallium3D driver compares to Intel’s officially supported classic Mesa DRI driver.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Slax Community Remix Renamed to Porteus Portable Linux

      Last December I reviewed the Slax Community Remix for Distrowatch. At the time of writing the latest release of this dedicated community of Slax enthusiasts was v09. This now seems to have become the stepping stone on the way to the first official release 1.0 of the new Porteus Project and an updated v09 was released on 13th January. A website has been launched with documentation, FAQ’s and download section as well as a forum. A module library similar to the one Slax is offering is apparently planned to go live in about two weeks from now. Thus the split from Slax, which is dormant at the moment and has not had an official release or update since August 2009, is complete.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Preparing for Fedora’s SXSW Debut

          Fedora is going to have a booth at the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) music, film, and interface conference expo in Austin, TX in just a little over a couple of weeks now.

          Why are we going? Well, our plan is on the Fedora wiki, but my main goal in attending is to promote free software to all of the designers (and developers, too!) that will be attending for the interactive conference, and hopefully even drum up in them some interest in getting involved themselves and help them get started.

        • Firefox in a sandbox with Fedora

          There is a really cool utility from the selinux folks called sandbox. It’s lets you run an application inside a sandbox which has limited permissions on the system. The idea being that you could run an untrusted process which shouldn’t be able to cause any real damage. I dare say these days the most untrusted process is a web browser. I know Chrome uses a technology similar to this where each tab gets its own sandbox, but I don’t run Chrome, so my goal is to make Firefox as safe as possible. Plus I’m a paranoid nut, so this sort of thing I find really interesting.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Software Center validating packages quality

          Today I have found bug 712377, it seems that Software Center is going to check packages quality and refuse to install them.

        • The latest Ubuntu Unity: Good or bad?

          It’s almost here. Ubuntu 11.04 will be arriving in less than two months and when it does, there will be reactions. Big reactions. Some of those reactions will not be so great. I took the time to install the latest Ubuntu Unity and thought I should give my reaction to how this new desktop is going to effect the crowds. My overall reaction really surprised even me.

        • G’MIC For GIMP Ubuntu PPA

          G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) is a tool that comes with a lot (more than 190) of pre-defined image filters and effects for GIMP and is available for Window, Linux and Mac OSX.

          The G’MIC Sourceforge page offers .deb files for download, but because new G’MIC versions are released very frequently, it’s a good idea to use a PPA to stay up to date with the latest versions in Ubuntu. Roberto @ LFFL has created such a PPA so you can easily stay up to date with the latest G’MIC for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • IcedRobot or Cool Android/Linux

      Either way you slice it, all kinds of Linux-based systems will be running on PCs of all kinds.

    • Navisurfer II brings Ubuntu to your car

      As in-car entertainment systems get increasingly complex, the line between an entertainment and navigation system and a fully-fledged PC blur – and the Navisurfer II UBU-3G destroys the line utterly.

      The latest product from Vic Ltd., the Navisurfer II is a double-DIN (so it takes up two car audio head units) in-car entertainment system that packs an entire PC into the dashboard, powered by the popular open-source Ubuntu Linux distribution.

    • Overthinking Embedded Systems

      I wonder sometimes if we are making things too complex. This is especially important in embedded systems where code size and execution size still matter. The trend has always been to get further away from the hardware, of course. People lamented the introduction of C and then C++ into embedded systems. I myself have railed against using Java as a one-size-fits-all solution. Yet even with these, its often not the tool itself, but bad use of the tool that is the real problem.

      But it does seem to be getting worse. Linux and Unix have long been bastions of combining simple things into beautiful and possibly complex forms. But the community is moving away from that. I use a KDE desktop every day. But the idea that adding metadata tags to my files requires two separate database servers an indexing engine that seems to gobble memory with no constraint and software to manage the ontologies seems a bit much. Worse, its all poorly documented and just kind of “black magic.” To me that was always an advantage of Linux and Unix over more mainstream operating systems was the transparency of what they do, but this isn’t a good example of that being true.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Meego: Can it survive?

          The future for Meego now looks distinctly uncertain, even though Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini insists that nothing has changed. “I don’t see that Nokia changing its strategy changes the industry strategy,” said Otellini during the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

          Otellini said that he fully expects to see Meego in tablet PCs later this year and in other automotive and mobile devices soon after that. He may well believe that a Meego tablet is viable this year but who will provide the hardware? Nokia is now in partnership with Microsoft, HP is forging ahead with its new WebOS strategy, HTC and Samsung have both just introduced Android-based tablet PCs.

          Perhaps Asus or Acer will be the ones to ship Meego devices? Both have previously expressed interest in Meego, but that was in mid-2010 and n

        • How the Nokia-Microsoft Deal Could Boost Linux

          The LiMo Foundation on Monday released LiMo 4, a new release of the platform that offers a number of enhancements.

          Included in LiMo 4 are a flexible and powerful user interface, extended widget libraries, 3D window effects, advanced multimedia, social networking and location-based service frameworks, sensor frameworks, multitasking and multitouch capabilities. With support for scalable screen resolution and consistent APIs, meanwhile, the platform can deliver a consistent user experience across a broad range of device types and form factors, LiMo says.

      • Android

        • Xoom/Honeycomb launch impressions (spoilers: it’s not all goodness and light)

          Like many tech geeks out there who has yet to climb the ranks of tech journalism enough to get to go fancy places, I walked over to my local Verizon store on Xoom launch day to check out the Xoom tablet. It was my first experience with the tablet, and my first experience with Honeycomb.

        • Android Market Listed in the Android Market, Paradox Ensues

          Take a minute to mosey on over to the Androidify page at the Android Market website. Peak under at the “More from Developer” heading. Notice anything strange? A link to an Android Market page for the Android Market. Alas, clicking that link brings us to a “Not Found” page. We won’t be downloading the Android Market from the Android Market anytime soon.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Linux Workshop Scheduled At OU-Z

      ZANESVILLE — Linux is a free operating system developed by volunteers across the world who think users should be able to view and modify the source code of their software, as well as share improvements with one another.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome alone?

        One of the most interesting projects announced last year, for my money at least, was Google Chrome OS. This was, as you probably know, Google’s signal of intent that it was going head first into the operating system market, having found a niche in which it figured it could make an impact.

        Its thinking was smart, too. It targeted the then burgeoning netbook market, coming up with a fast, quick-booting operating system that stored everything you needed in the cloud. When it was first demonstrated, and Google showed a portable machine booting to a working desktop in under ten seconds, I wanted to get cracking with the OS right there and then.

    • Mozilla

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Wikimedia presents its five-year strategic plan

      I am very pleased to present the summary report of the Wikimedia Foundation’s five-year strategic plan: our first-ever such plan, developed through a transparent collaborative process involving more than a thousand participants during 2009 and 2010.

    • Open Data

      • Open information

        Although «open data» and iRail are often mentioned in the same sentence, they are no synonyms. In fact, we don’t even want to provide open data! It’s not a goal of the non profit organisation (NPO) to provide datadumps or sublicense data that might be copyrighted. We are also not going to redistribute already available datasets. Let’s get this misconception out of the way…

      • Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?

        In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was thrown into Oakland jail. The heavy-handedness sparked further unrest and, a month later, the university administration backed down. The protest was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement and marked Berkeley as a haven of free thinking and fierce independence.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No.16 Sept-Dec 2010

        Welcome to the sixteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 16 – on our main okfn-announce list.

      • 80 Open Education Resource (OER) Tools for Publishing and Development Initiatives

        Many Open Education Resources (OER) that have been introduced by governments, universities, and individuals within the past few years. OERs provide teaching and learning materials that are freely available and offered online for anyone to use. Whether you’re an instructor, student, or self-learner, you have access to full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, assignments, quizzes, activities, games, simulations, and tools to create these components.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • World Blind Union withdraws participation

    The feeling at the WBU seems to be that they get talked to death by the diplomates…

  • WBU suspends participation in WIPO & EU Stakeholder discussions, pending agreement at WIPO on legal framework

    On February 26, 2011, the World Blind Union issued a statement announcing it would “suspend participation in the WIPO Stakeholder Platform and EU Stakeholder Dialogue projects, pending agreement at WIPO on a proper binding legal framework.” [See full statement below]. The WBU statement is expected to dramatically change the environment for considering a new WIPO treaty for persons who are blind or have other disabilities.

    KEI welcomes the WBU suspension of its participation in the WIPO and EU Stakeholder projects. In our opinion, the publishers have used the private stakeholder discussions to undermine work on a treaty, and to shrink the rights of persons with disabilities. Now scarce time, attention, resources and ambitions can be focused on the more important historic effort to obtain a treaty to protect the rights of persons with disabilities.

  • Publishers Slowly Warm to Library E-lending

    Can libraries continue their role as lenders when books are in digital form? While library executives are set on the idea, at least some book publishers seem to still be wary of having libraries circulate electronic copies of their books to multiple parties, even with controls in place.

    As sales figures of electronic books and periodicals start to approach those of their print counterparts, the question arises: should libraries lend electronic books out for the Amazon Kindle, the Apple iPad and Barnes & Noble’s Nook? Digital books are overwhelmingly easy to purchase — the reader need not leave the comfort of an armchair to do so. So does the world still need libraries?

  • Missouri Legislator Wants to Increase Child Labor

    Missouri state senator Jane Cunningham is making an unusual plea for parents’ rights in the face of a supposed nanny state: she says the state’s “so over the top” child labor laws are preventing parents from teaching their kids a decent work ethic of the type that helped her sons work and buy cars as teens.

  • A Fifteenth Century Technopanic About The Horrors Of The Printing Press

    Honestly, it sounds like a near perfect 15th century version of Nick Carr. Carr loves books, but frets about what the internet is doing to our appreciation of books. But, of course, this all seems to come back to Douglas Adams’ famous saying, which I’ll paraphrase: everything that exists before you were born is just normal, the way things should be. Everything that is invented from your birth until you’re about thirty is cool and neat and innovative. And everything invented after you’re thirty is “against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.”

  • Cloud Wars Baffle Simmering Cyber Lawyers

    Like their celestial counterparts, cyber clouds are unpredictable and ever-changing. The Motorola Xoom tablet arrived on Tuesday. The Apple iPad II arrives next week. Just as Verizon finally boasts its own iPhone, AT&T turns the tables with the Motorola Atrix running on the even faster growing Google Android platform. Meanwhile, Nokia declares its once-mighty Symbian platform ablaze and abandons ship for a new mobile partnership with Microsoft.

  • Court Ruling Opens Up Terrorism to International Prosecution

    The UN tribunal investigating the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has ruled that acts of terrorism can be prosecuted under international law. The decision will have far-reaching legal implications, but could also increase political turmoil in Lebanon and cause the Hariri case to collapse.

    Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity can already be prosecuted in an international court. Now terrorism is set to be added to the list of crimes which can be prosecuted under international law, thanks to a groundbreaking new court ruling.

  • The facebook problem

    Facebook has obtained more than $500M from investors to grow facebook.com to the size it is today, and has not taken a single penny from any of its users. In order to pay back the investors for their extraordinary risky investment, the investors must be looking for something like 10x cash back. That’s more than $5 billion! Of course it’s currently valued at over $50B. Just hold that thought for a second.

    Now a second thought: billions of people can use email and not have to be part of one, single, organisation. How can that be?

    Email is essentially a protocol. It’s called SMTP and is described by various RFCs. Any server that supports the SMTP protocol can advertise its MX record via DNS and receive email for that domain. Any client that ‘talks’ SMTP can send email to any SMTP server (it can reach). In fact, the SMTP client (or email client) can talk to its local SMTP server which will then forward on the email to its final destination.

    This is, of course, a distributed system. Due to an open protocol anybody can set up an email server and play in the big email ecosystem. Of course, the original inventors of the SMTP protocol didn’t envisage SPAM as we know it, and thus it was designed for a naive, friendly, co-operative world, where email users wouldn’t spam each other. i.e. academia.

  • Science

    • Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey

      Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that moves faster than any human and is agile enough to “chase and evade.”

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • What the Libyans Want

      UK flew in a military transport to pick up oil-workers without formal authorization. More countries need to demonstrate that kind of initiative. If you are going to fly in a transport, ship in some supplies while you’re at it. Properly supplied, the Libyans can deal with Gaddafi.

    • Protesters say Egypt military used force to disperse them

      Egyptian soldiers fired in the air and used batons in the early hours of Saturday to disperse activists demanding the cabinet appointed by Hosni Mubarak be purged by the country’s new military leaders, protesters said.

      Thousands had gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate two weeks since Mubarak’s removal and remind the country’s new rulers, who have promised to guard against “counter revolution” of the people’s power.

    • Bangladeshi MP ‘tortured’ by British-trained paramilitary unit

      A Bangladeshi MP who has been been behind bars for more than two months after allegedly being detained and tortured by a paramilitary unit trained by the British government has given a harrowing account of his mistreatment in a letter from prison.

    • As Libya uprising reaches Tripoli Gaddafi vows to ‘open up the arsenals’

      Libyan exiles said that a reported rebellion by military personnel at Tripoli’s Mitiga air base was linked to calls by air force officers in the liberated eastern city of Benghazi to come out against the regime. Analysts believe defections from the military are likely to prove more decisive than actual fighting as the nine-day uprising enters what may be its final phase.

    • 46 arrested in Zimbabwe for ‘planning uprising’

      Lawyers for 46 people facing treason charges for allegedly plotting an Egyptian-style uprising said yesterday that some of the group’s members were tortured by police.

      Alec Muchadehama, a defence lawyer, told a Harare court that 12 suspects said they were beaten with broomsticks.

      Magistrate Munamato Mutevedzi ordered the suspects be given medical examinations before a hearing on Monday.

    • Most charges dropped against G20 accused in jail since last June

      A computer security expert arrested on G20-related charges has had all but two of the charges against him dropped.

      Byron Sonne, who appeared in court at Old City Hall on Feb. 22, has been in jail since last June.

    • G20: The Untold Stories

      They were the most unlikely of troublemakers. There were thousands of ordinary citizens on the streets at Toronto G20 Summit marching peacefully until the police closed in and shut them down. Many had gone downtown simply to see what was going on, only to find themselves forcibly dragged away by police and locked up for hours in a makeshift detention center without timely access to lawyers or medical treatment.

    • Majority of G20 charges against security consultant Byron Sonne dropped

      The majority of the charges against security consultant Byron Sonne, whose arrest garnered national attention in the days before last summer’s G20 summit, have been dropped.

      After eight days of a preliminary hearing that ended this week, the presiding judge saw fit to proceed with just one of the six initial charges against Mr. Sonne, along with one additional charge recommended by the Crown.

    • Same old story — eight months later

      Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair told the CBC’s the fifth estate Friday his officers were not given orders during the G20 to change the original stand down approach to become more aggressive after their police cars were set ablaze.

      “Not that I’m aware of, and certainly not that I gave,” Blair told reporter Gillian Findlay, adding, though, “I think there certainly was a change in the police response.”

      We still don’t know who gave them?

    • Spain to probe Guantanamo torture claims

      A Spanish court Friday agreed to investigate a complaint by a Moroccan who said he was tortured while in the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, judicial sources said.

      The National Court said it was competent to take the case as the complainant, Lahcen Ikassrien, has been living in Spain for 13 years.

    • Major Yemen tribes join protesters

      Pressure on Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, to resign has increased after the leaders of two of the country’s most important tribes abandoned the president and joined the anti-government movement.

      Tribal leaders, including those of the Hashid and Baqil, pledged on Saturday to join protests against Saleh at a gathering north of Sanaa, the capital.

      “I have announced my resignation from the General People’s Congress in protest at the repression of peaceful demonstrators in Sanaa, Taez and Aden,” said Hashid tribal chief Sheikh Hussein bin Abdullah al-Ahmar, in reference to the ruling party.

    • Lawmaker condemns question about shooting Obama

      A Georgia Republican said Friday he didn’t immediately condemn a constituent who asked about assassinating President Barack Obama because he was stunned by the question and didn’t want to dignify it with a response.

      Rep. Paul Broun, a conservative who has harshly criticized the president, confirmed that at a town hall event in Oglethorpe County, Ga., on Tuesday a man asked, “Who’s going to shoot Obama?”

    • Freedom protests spread to North Korea

      Popular protests launched by Anonynmous in Tunisia and which have since spread across North Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula have now reach North Korea.

    • No Protesters, but Beijing Police Sweep Streets of Bystanders, Journalists

      While effective, the Chinese government didn’t leave crowd control solely in the hands of the Department of Public Works. I was there for an hour and I haven’t seen that many police in one place since the Olympics in 2008.

      Most of the cops seemed alternately bored and annoyed, and with little else to do they started clashing with the other group well-represented this afternoon: the foreign press corps.

    • Fake Western Media Coverage Of Jasmine Revolution In China

      The website anti-CNN came into being because of the western media reporting about the Lhasa riots. Here is a post from the anti-CNN BBS about some western media coverage of the so-called Jasmine Revolution in China. It is actually not difficult to find these fake photos. You being with a suspicious-looking photo (e.g. people marching down on a major thoroughfare when it is known that the Jasmine Revolution demonstrations were sparsely attended gatherings in front of McDonald’s or Starbucks), you use a photo-identification site such as TinEye and you’ve scored again!

    • China’s jasmine revolution: police but no protesters line streets of Beijing

      Police in Beijing and other cities mounted a major show of force following an anonymous call for protests inspired by the Middle East uprisings.

      A US journalist was punched and kicked in the face and more than a dozen other journalists manhandled, detained or delayed as they covered the events which revealed official anxiety over similar protests against authoritarian rule in China.

    • Tyler Durden and the Anonymous uprisings

      I’ve been quoting him lately in respect to the Anonymous-inspired uprisings which are shaking the world, particularly in the Middle East.

      There’s a great post in Digital Trends which relates how an Anonymous V for Vendetta mask was mysteriously superimposed over Stephen Colbert’s face during a Colbert Report.

    • Guest Report: Return of the Saudi King!

      In Saudi, the most troublesome case has been Bahrain, because of its geographical proximity and close family ties and above all because most of the protesters are Shiites whereas the Power Regime in Bahrain is Sunni. The Shiites are an important part of the population in the Eastern Region of Saudi (on the Arabian/Persian Gulf facing Iran) and the Saudis (dominated by the Sunni branch of Islam) have much sensitivity about Iranian influences through Shiism translating itself into anti-Sunni unrest. Bahrain seemed to have the potential to quickly tip off a proxy battle between Iran and Saudi in the region, in the same way that Shiite/Sunni contests have vexed the development of a new government infrastructure in Iraq. Most Saudis I know point to Iran as the source of the problems in Bahrain: apparently Iranian sympathizers (who are also Shiites) have been the main instigators for the demonstrations.

    • BREAKING: Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol

      From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, RAN ally Ryan Harvey reports:

      “Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.”

      Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today:

      “Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”

    • Wisconsin cops for the win

      Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of cops marched into the Wisconsin Capitol Building, where Wisconsinites have spent more than a week protesting their governor’s plan to eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees.

    • Libya unravels — and the Brits suddenly discover an evil dictator

      It has been a busy month for Britons, with Foreign Secretary William Hague’s whirlwind three-day tour of Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, UAE and Bahrain (Feb. 8 to 10, with Mubarak not gone yet) and Prime Minister David Cameron’s just-concluded tour of Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. The ramifications of thinking behind these self-conscious diplomatic exercises in a region vital to their interests seem strange indeed, to the uninitiated.

    • Truth hard to find in US-Pakistan war of words over Raymond Davis

      A storm of media speculation has enveloped the case of Raymond Davis, the CIA official charged with murder in Pakistan, as officials from both countries seek to shape public opinion in an increasingly fraught diplomatic and legal standoff.

      Since it emerged this week that Davis, who shot two people on a busy street last month, was a working spy, Pakistan’s media has been gripped by lurid stories portraying him as a dangerous provocateur.

    • Why Is TeleSur a Flop? Look No Farther than Its Libya Coverage

      As a student of rebellion and resistance, when people rise up I pay attention, study and try to learn as much as possible. Humans are at our most creative when we rebel and the moments when many do it all at once are the great engines of innovation, invention and evolution. Any man, woman or child of any age who participates in a grand and successful revolt is forever changed and liberated by the experience. He and she are no longer so easily enslaved or cowered by fear. Rebellions against injustice and tyranny are the single best catalyst through which people become our better selves and fulfill our most human of destinies. For eighteen days in January and February 2011 the Egyptian people, especially its youths, treated the world to a lesson in civics. Their successful toppling of the thirty year dictator Hosni Mubarak was the very best kind of rebellion because it was disciplined, it was strategically and tactically executed, and the population understood that the justice and freedom it craved would not be found in bloody retribution against the sectors (most demonstrably in Egypt, the Armed Forces) that had propped up the regime, but in peeling those sectors’ support away from it.

    • Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking

      In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to “think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it”. By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to an end. The sort of history that ordinary people might make was to fade away within a “new world order”, a world in which a narrow set of elites would control all the main levers of power.

    • This is an Arab 1848. But US hegemony is only dented

      The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire.

  • Cablegate

    • Julian Assange plea after extradition defeat: ‘Make this case bigger than me’

      In an impassioned denunciation of a mechanism that “drags people off to an uncertain destiny” on the basis of no more than “a two-page form filled out by a member of the bureaucracy”, Assange appealed to his supporters to challenge the system of European arrest warrants (EAWs), by which extradition requests are fast-tracked between EU member states.

    • Assange Extradition Reveals Total Hypocrisy & Political Bias Of British Justice
    • Wikileaks Peru: US feared Indigenous power

      Wikileaks releases from Peru once again reveal the pro-copper mining and anti-Indigenous sentiment of the US Embassy in Lima.

      Former US Ambassador Curtis Struble in Peru expresses fear that Indigenous may once again govern Peru. Struble is again on the look-out for Venezuela’s “meddling,” and again is tracking Indigenous activists.
      This time, on the US watch list, is Aymara activist Felipe Quispe of Bolivia, leader of Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, according to the June 19, 2007 cable.
      In one of six cables released Friday, Feb. 25, from Lima, Ambassador Struble writes of the regions of Peru. He said the southern highland province of Puno has an “affinity for far-left radicalism.” Struble fears Venezuela is involved here and fears the movement of Bolivarism.

    • Openleaks: Timid in the face of power?

      WikiLeaks has announced it will pursue legal action against disgruntled former employee Daniel Domscheit-Berg whose recently released book, Inside WikiLeaks, slams Julian Assange’s leadership and character in a series of allegations.

      Some of the allegations appear serious. Others are hopelessly trivial.

      Domscheit-Berg told AFP that Assange would “boast about how many children he had fathered in various parts of the world” and that Assange’s “main criterion for a woman was simple. She had to be young. Preferably younger than 22.” He also accuses Assange as being power-obsessed.

    • The Julian Assange Conspiracy – Networks, power and activism

      The object of Wikileaks is to dismantle the conspiracies that, according to its founder, rule the world. But what is a conspiracy and are you part of one? According to Assange, it’s possible to be a member of conspiracy without even knowing that you are. This week, we look at Julian Assange’s political philosophy and his view of the world as a network of conspiracies.

    • Glenn Greenwald on the Assange Extradition Ruling, the Jailing of Bradley Manning, and the Campaign to Target WikiLeaks Supporters

      A British judge ruled today that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden to face questioning on allegations of sexual crimes. Assange plans to appeal within 10 days. His defense team had argued against the extradition, in part by citing the potential he could wind up being extradited to the United States and prosecuted for publishing classified government documents, a crime that could result in the death penalty.

    • WikiLeaks: Cat’s Cradle in Colombia

      To get a sense of just how inter­con­nected the for­mal and illicit dimen­sions of inter­na­tional polit­i­cal econ­omy are, take a peek at this brief cable from the US embassy in Bogota pub­lished by Wik­iLeaks Sunday.

      The cable details then-Ambassador William Woods’ hunt for two miss­ing heli­copters that had orig­i­nally been sold to the Israeli mil­i­tary by the United States gov­ern­ment, but had some­how ended up in the hands of mul­ti­mil­lion­aire Enilse Lopez, a busi­ness­woman that was sus­pected of close ties to Colom­bian paramilitaries.

      The curi­ous his­tory of the heli­copters is in itself instruc­tive. The two Hughes 500 mil­i­tary grade chop­pers were sold to the Israeli gov­ern­ment in the early 1980s, but grounded about fif­teen years later when they were con­verted for civil­ian use. The heli­copters were then sold in 2002 to the Cana­dian multi­na­tional media firm CANWEST, which strangely never had the air­craft moved out­side Israeli ter­ri­tory. The next year, the cor­po­ra­tion sold the heli­copters to a Mex­i­can aero­nau­ti­cal com­pany, that shipped the pair to Miami under phony export and air­wor­thi­ness doc­u­men­ta­tion sup­pos­edly issued by the Israeli government.

    • No transparency over nukes, China tells US

      China will not accept limits put on its defence capabilities and has rejected United States overtures to become more transparent about its nuclear arsenal, Wikileaks data reveals.

      Fairfax newspapers say data in secret defence consultations between the US and China shows high ranking officials in the Asian nation have said there can be no limit to Beijing’s nuclear arsenal.

      In June 2008 the deputy chief of China’s People’s Liberation Army General Staff, Ma Xiaotian, told the US: “It is impossible for (China) to change its decades-old way of doing business to become transparent using the US model.

    • The WikiLeaks Threat

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • It’s time to end Canada’s billion-dollar handout to big oil and coal

      After two years of stimulus spending and years of tax cuts, Canada’s debt has ballooned to $56 billion. Now the Harper government is sharpening the axe. Who will feel the cut? Given the Conservative’s position on social spending, they will likely focus on provincial transfers that support healthcare and social welfare.

      Meanwhile, the federal government subsidizes oil companies to the tune of $1.4 billion every year, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). It’s more if you factor in other fossil fuels such as coal. If the government is looking for ways to pay down the debt, ending fossil fuel subsidies in the 2011-12 budget is a good place to start.

    • Chimpanzee meat discovered in British restaurants and market stalls as officials uncover illegal bushmeat

      Chimpanzee meat is for sale in restaurants and market stalls in Britain, it has emerged.

      Trading standards officials uncovered the illegal bushmeat from the endangered species whilst testing samples believed to be seized from vendors in the Midlands.

    • Maybe no one cares about climate change because we’re wired for extinction

      In my unending (and thus far, I have to confess, largely fruitless) attempts to figure out why Americans aren’t more alarmed about climate change, one of the more intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently was put to me by a psychologist named Andrew Shatté.

      Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona, is best known for his work on resilience — the ability of humans to deal with adversity. His thesis on climate change, in a nutshell, is that we are hardwired for extinction. He compares us to the Irish elk, which went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The male of that species evolved to grow big antlers — I mean really gargantuan antlers, racks up to 12 feet wide, designed for the usual reasons of aggression, defense, and sexual display. Over time, the antlers got so big that the elk couldn’t consume enough calories to sustain their growth, so instead the antlers began to feed in auto-parasitic fashion on the calcium in the animals’ bones. If galloping osteoporosis didn’t kill them, they got their antlers impossibly tangled up in the overhead branches and starved to death.

    • Obama’s $36 Billion Nuke Giveaway

      Barack Obama’s 2012 budget marks a major escalation in the nuclear war against a green-powered future, whose advocates are already fighting back.

      Amidst massive budget cuts for social and environmental programs, Obama wants $36 billion in loan guarantees for a reactor industry that cannot secure sufficient private “marketplace” financing for new construction.

    • Climate change halves Peru glacier: official

      A glacier on Peru’s Huaytapallana Moutain shed half its surface ice in just 23 years, officials said Wednesday, reinforcing concerns of climate change’s growing threat to fresh water resources.

      “Recent scientific studies indicate that between June 1983 and August 2006, the glacier has lost 50 percent of its surface ice,” Erasmo Meza, manager of natural resources and the environment in the central Andean region of Junin, told the official Andina news agency.

    • ‘Zero-carbon’ homes can still emit CO2

      Newly built houses will be allowed to emit tons of CO2 every year and still be called “zero carbon” under new rules being considered by ministers.

      In five years time, all new homes built in the UK were expected to be carbon neutral, using technology such as wind turbines, solar panels and ground-source heat pumps. But guidance drawn up for the Housing minister, Grant Shapps, now suggests that some developments will only have to achieve 50 per cent carbon reductions from present rules to qualify.

    • Australia unveils plans for a fixed carbon price

      Australia’s government launched a third attempt on Thursday to make carbon polluters pay for their emissions, unveiling plans for a fixed-price scheme from 2012 and vowing not to surrender this time in the face of fierce opposition.

      Prime minister Julia Gillard, whose predecessor, Kevin Rudd, stood down last year after two failed attempts to address climate change, said polluters would pay a yet-to-be-determined fixed price from July 2012, then move to a market-based system within five years.

    • Must-Read NY Times Story On Gas Fracking Reveals Radioactive Wastewater Threat

      An incredible piece just broke in the New York Times showing that hydraulic fracking in the Marcellus Shale is drawing huge amounts of radioactivity up from the earth with the fracking fluids, often going straight through a municipal waste water treatment plant and then dumped into rivers — above public drinking water intake locations. The piece proves that EPA knows this is going on, and that it is likely illegal.

    • “Growth can’t go on”

      To have any hope of protecting Earth’s resources, we must first abandon our obsession with economic expansion, argues Viki Johnson.

    • Top medical groups warn Americans of health risks posed by climate change

      The following top health and medical experts came together Thursday to alert us of the serious health threats posed by carbon pollution and to remind us of the necessity of the EPA in protecting our air, water, and health, on a briefing call hosted by the American Public Health Association (APHA)

  • Finance

    • Why are America’s largest corporations paying no tax?

      Inspired by the UK Uncut movement, Americans are taking to the street, asking why they’re being asked to tighten their belts when the largest corporations in the country are paying no tax at all…

    • How Timidity in Washington Wrecked the Economy

      We now have even more evidence that inept policies from Washington are causing enormous suffering across the country. It is not quite the line that the right-wingers are pushing. The new evidence is that the stimulus worked and was in fact more effective than had been predicted.

      The new evidence comes in the form of a study by two Dartmouth professors, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote. Past estimates of the impact of the stimulus on jobs and the economy relied on simply plugging the tax breaks and spending into standard macro models and reporting the predicted effect. In this sense, the impact of the stimulus was actually built into the model. However this new study directly measures the impact of stimulus spending on employment across states, comparing the number of jobs created to the amount of spending.

    • The NO2AV campaign lies about AV and is a front for the Conservative Party and big business

      There is not one true claim about AV on the NO2AV website – see below for their four biggest lies about AV and to find out how AV works. While we know 95% of the ‘Yes to Fairer Votes’ campaign funding comes from the Electoral Reform Society and the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, the NO2AV campaign refuse to say who funds them.

      There are some pretty obvious clues though. The head of the NO2AV campaign Matthew Elliot, doubled as founder of the ‘Taxpayers’ Alliance (which he’ll probably return to after the AV referendum is over). The Taxpayers’ Alliance is funded by the same wealthy business-people who fund the Conservative party and has a director who doesn’t pay any tax in the UK.

    • Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps

      There are, of course, concerns about public safety and competition with government or private workers. Professor Horn estimates that only 20 percent of inmates present a low enough security threat to work in public. And in some places, even financially struggling governments are not willing to take the risk of employing prisoners.

    • UK Uncut inspires US groups to attack cuts and tax avoidance

      Hundreds of activists in the US are planning to take part in a day of direct action in a move inspired by Britain’s fast growing protest group.

      US Uncut groups have sprung up from New York to Hawaii in the last three weeks and activists will demonstrate against government cuts and corporate tax avoidance in more than 50 cities on Saturday.

    • Cost of living crisis pushes ‘squeezed middle’ off the housing ladder

      People on low to middle incomes are facing a “perfect economic storm”, which is cutting their living standards and dramatically reducing their ability to buy their own homes, new research will show this week.

      The independent Resolution Foundation is to launch a major inquiry into living standards among the so-called “squeezed middle”, having identified economic trends – in existence since the 1970s – that have led wages for this income group to grow at a slower rate than the economy.

      The foundation, which aims to improve the lot of 11.1 million people, will reveal evidence that home ownership is slipping out of the reach of those living in households with below-median earnings.

    • Tell Democratic Leadership: Don’t cave to Republican extremists on the budget.

      It’s breathtaking to think that the Republicans would risk a government shutdown because Democrats won’t unilaterally capitulate to their demands for concessions in some of the most intractable ideological wars of our time.

      But last week the House passed and sent to the Senate for consideration an extremist’s wish list under the guise of the “Continuing Resolution.” The Continuing Resolution (CR) is a must-pass bill that is necessary to maintain funding for the federal government while Congress debates the 2011 budget.

    • Pay Down the Deficit with Inheritance Taxes

      The solution to America’s budget deficit is obvious; make the dead pay. Afterall, the dead are dead and they don’t care.

      Think about it. Who caused the budget deficit? Who voted for these outrageous entitlements? Who milked social security and Medicare while they were alive? The dead, of course.

      The current inheritance tax is outside down. It exempts the first $5 million of a dead person’s estate and then taxes the excess. Instead, the government should be recovering the dead person’s share of the budget deficit first.

    • BP claim threatens to reignite corporate tax row

      The oil company wants repayment of £300m stamp duty tax it paid when it took over Atlantic Richfield in 1999

    • Disgraced MP Eric Illsley ‘coping’ in jail, says wife

      The wife of former Barnsley Central MP Eric Illsley has said her husband is “coping” in prison after being jailed for a year for expenses fraud.

      Illsley was sentenced earlier this month after admitting falsely claiming £14,000 for his second home.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sarah Palin Has Secret ‘Lou Sarah’ Facebook Account To Praise Other Sarah Palin Facebook Account

      Sarah Palin has apparently created a second Facebook account with her Gmail address so that this fake “Lou Sarah” person can praise the other Sarah Palin on Facebook. The Gmail address is available for anyone to see in this leaked manuscript about Sarah Palin, and the Facebook page for “Lou Sarah” — Sarah Palin’s middle name is “Louise” — is just a bunch of praise and “Likes” for the things Sarah Palin likes and writes on her other Sarah Palin Facebook page. “Lou Sarah” even says “amen” to Facebook posts by Sarah Sarah. UPDATE (2/23): The “Lou Sarah” account has been taken down.

    • Tobacco firms accused of funding campaign to keep cigarettes on display

      A shopkeepers’ trade body that has helped to persuade scores of MPs to oppose a ban on cigarette displays has been accused by its members of being a puppet of the tobacco industry.

      The National Federation of Retail Newsagents, which represents 16,500 shopkeepers, has emerged as an important player in the debate over whether “power walls” – behind-the-counter displays of cigarettes – should be banned.

  • Censorship

    • New Mortal Kombat banned in Australia

      Australia’s content classification regulator has banned the highly anticipate remake of the classic Mortal Kombat video game series from being sold in Australia, deeming the game’s violence outside the boundaries of the highest MA15+ rating which video games can fall under.

    • How The Indian Government Plans To Regulate Online Content & Blogs

      As a part of the rules being finalized to supplement India’s Information Technology Amendment Act 2008, rules are being included that will indirectly allow the Indian government to control content being published on the Internet. This is hardly surprising: last week, at the CII Content Summit, three government functionaries – Information & Broadcasting (I&B) Minister Ambika Soni, TRAI Chief JS Sarma and I&B Secretary Raghu Menon, had all mentioned concerns about content on the Internet, even as they tried to downplay content regulation:

      - Sarma said that “How do you control the Internet? That is baffling and challenging, and it is fraught with issues of freedom and security. Security in terms of physical security and others. This will have to be studied over the course of next few months or the next year or so.”

    • WikiLeaks: Mario Montoya and Colombian False Positives

      When Major Gen­eral Mario Mon­toya Uribe was appointed com­man­der of the Colom­bian army in March of 2006, the US embassy in Bogota was largely unaware of his back­ground and bona fides. The Amer­i­can ambas­sador to Colom­bia at the time, William Wood, reported in a cable Wik­iLeaked on Fri­day, that rel­a­tively lit­tle was known about Mon­toya aside from his many dec­o­ra­tions as a career mil­i­tary man, his close per­sonal rela­tion­ship with then-president Alvaro Uribe, and per­sis­tent but as yet unsub­stan­ti­ated rumors that the com­man­der was cor­rupt and tied to con­ser­v­a­tive para­mil­i­tary forces through­out the country.

      Lit­tle was Wood aware that Montoya’s cor­rup­tion and para­mil­i­tary ties would prove to be the least of his offenses. By the time he was relieved of his com­mand eigh­teen months later, Mon­toya was widely per­ceived to be a dri­ving force behind the breath­tak­ingly hor­rific deal­ings of mil­i­tary per­son­nel in the fight against drug– and guerilla-related inter­nal disturbances.

  • Privacy

    • Swiss Officials Order Citizens to Wear Masks in Public – Ban Tourists Posting Photos on Web

      In a bold move to demonstrate that the Swiss government is as serious about privacy for its citizens as it has historically been regarding the protection of illicit foreign assets in Swiss bank accounts, the head of the newly created Switzerland Federal Department of Facial Anonymity, Nicolas J. Biellmann, today issued a preliminary order requiring that all Swiss citizens wear “full head coverage” masks at all times when outside their homes or places of business within the borders of Switzerland.

      This groundbreaking move, being enthusiastically supported by radical pro-privacy groups in Switzerland and around the world, comes on the heels of previous Swiss orders that search giant Google must obscure every single human face — even if this must be done manually — that appears in their “Street View” images, or else potentially terminate Street View services for Switzerland.

    • Google-Unique Names

      My name is not. According to the database How Many of Me, which calculates the likely incidence of first/last name combinations, 1,000 other guys in the US have my name, Kevin Kelly. I think that is a major undercount because I personally have met dozens of others with my name, surely only a fraction of those born with it. A website set up as a clearing house for all the Kevin Kellys on the web lists nearly one hundred people with my name, which can’t possibly be one tenth of those named.

  • Civil Rights

    • Iran’s Green Movement Died

      When we look at the first backlashes to the Charter of Green Movement we simply realize that Iran’s Green Movement has died . In fact, a new movement was born after Feb 14th. We could call this new movement “Real Change Movement” or “Civil Revolutionary Movement” or simply “Iranian Movement”. The outside world should stop using of ‘Green Movement’ term for referring to ‘Iranian Movement’. What Mousavi and his team have said in the Charter of Green Movement was totally unacceptable for many Iranians and showed the end and death of the Green Movement.

    • Iran used Tear Gas or Poison Gas?

      According to the three individuals, when they returned home after exposure to the tear gas, they suffered symptoms such as severe nausea, vomiting blood, and loss of voice and their symptoms have not yet subsided … I know of three people who are suffering from pains which were unprecedented as compared to the previous occasions. One of them had severe nausea and vomited blood, to the point where he was seen by a doctor and has had to take tests. One of them continues to have no voice through today and cannot be heard even 10 centimeters away. All three are suffering from severe muscular pains and cramps.

    • The Media and Iranian Protests

      Today many Iranians say: ‘We are so abandoned and isolated. The world has ignored us.’ Compared to the Egyptian protests, the media, especially Western mass media, have took different approach to the Iranian protests. Some of them deliberately ignored the Iranian protests, some of them had not access to the Iranian news, and some of them wanted to obey the regime’s orders. As Wall Street Journal approved, the regime’s Ministry of Information has sent a letter to foreign media offices in Tehran warning that their bureaus would be shut down and their reporters deported if they wrote ‘negative articles’ surrounding the opposition protests.

    • HamedNour-Mohammadi, a student of Shiraz University, slain in popular uprising in Shiraz by the mullahs’ regime

      NCRI – HamedNour-Mohammadi, aBiology student in Shiraz University, was murdered by the criminal agents of the Iranian regime on Sunday, February 20 during the valiant uprising of people of Shiraz only because of his protest against the religious dictatorship ruling Iran. The mullahs’ murderers threw down this young student from the pedestrian bridge causing his death due to being hit by a car.

    • Habeas hell: How the Great Writ was gutted at Guantánamo

      Andy Worthington analyzes how the Guantanamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions have been rendered meaningless by judges and the Obama administration.

    • On Wisconsin and America

      Right now, the flashpoint in this controversy is Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of people are demonstrating every day in an effort to block Governor Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining rights for public employees.

    • Koch Brothers “Prank” No Laughing Matter

      As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, the Koch PAC not only spent $43,000 directly on Walker’s race, but Koch personally donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association which spent $5 million in the state. Besides the Governor, the Koch brothers have other “vested interests” in the state.

    • Reporter’s phone, bank and travel records seized as hunt for whistleblowers is stepped up

      As the fallout from the Wikileaks revelations rumble on, new details have emerged of the extraordinary lengths prosecutors will go to identify leakers.

      Court papers in the case of a former CIA officer accused of spilling secrets show that prosecutors got hold of a reporter’s phone, credit and bank records, his credit report from three different agencies and records of his airline travel.

      Ex-CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted in December on charges that he disclosed ‘national defense information’ to New York Times reporter James Risen.

    • Humans Are The Routers

      On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, “Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.” That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton’s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010.

  • DRM

    • HarperCollins to libraries: we will nuke your ebooks after 26 checkouts

      LibraryGoblin sez, “HarperCollins has decided to change their agreement with e-book distributor OverDrive. They forced OverDrive, which is a main e-book distributor for libraries, to agree to terms so that HarperCollins e-books will only be licensed for checkout 26 times. Librarians have blown up over this, calling for a boycott of HarperCollins, breaking the DRM on e-books–basically doing anything to let HarperCollins and other publishers know they consider this abuse.”

    • German PS3 Hacker Lashes Out at Sony Over €1 Million Lawsuit

      Alexander Egorenkov, better known as by his Graf_chokolo handle, is under fire once again by Sony and its legal team. Egorenkov, whose home was raided under court order, is now being sued for what he did in retaliation to Sony’s seizure. He released all his tools for hacking the PS3 known collectively as the Hypervisor Bible, and the proverbial shitstorm commenced as Sony slapped him with a large lawsuit.

    • Sony hires anti-piracy team

      Places job ads seeking staff to “develop and implement an anti-piracy program”

      Sony is hiring new members for an anti-piracy team following a spate of PS3 hacking and security breaches.

      SCEA placed job listings on its recruitment page – which have now been removed – reports IGN. These were for a senior corporate counsel and senior paralegal to “develop and implement an anti-piracy and brand protection program”.

    • Sony’s Neverending War Against The Freedom To Tinker And Innovate
    • Publishing Industry Forces OverDrive and Other Library eBook Vendors to Take a Giant Step Back

      The first bit – ownership of ebooks will now expire after a certain number of check outs to patrons.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Hanafin has no plan for copyright legislation

        MINISTER FOR Enterprise Mary Hanafin yesterday quashed rumours that she was planning to rush through a statutory instrument relating to copyright issues before leaving office.

        Earlier, former minister for communication Eamon Ryan said he believed a “new law on internet downloads” was awaiting Ms Hanafin’s signature.

      • The Debate Over Copyright Gets Loud At Digital Music Forum

        I attended that excellent Digital Music Forum: East conference yesterday in Manhattan, where I appeared on stage to interview Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of the (really excellent) new book The Comeback. It’s really worth reading, and I think a ton of Techdirt readers would enjoy it, as it hits on a ton of points we regularly discuss, concerning innovation, policy and intellectual property. That discussion was fun, and Gary made some great points about trying to look towards the future, and avoiding mistakes like the recording industry suing its own customers.

      • Random defendant outlawyers P2P attorney, gets lawsuit tossed

        You know it’s tough out there for a P2P lawyer when even some random, anonymous, non-lawyer defendant is the more convincing party. That strange scenario unfolded yesterday in Illinois, where divorce-attorney-turned-porn-copyright-lawyer John Steele had his entire case against 300 defendants thrown out completely.

        The case involved CP Productions, “a leading producer of adult entertainment content within the amateur Latina niche.” The company ran a site called “Chica’s Place” from which a bit of material referred to as “Cowgirl Creampie” was allegedly downloaded illegally by 300 people. Though based in Arizona, CP Productions signed up with Steele, a Chicago lawyer, to bring the case.

      • Evil Pirates: Movie Industry Tops $30 Billion Box Office Record

        The MPAA has made it very clear that hundreds of thousands of jobs are under threat and the economy is losing billions due to piracy. Illegal downloads, they say, are slowly killing their creative industry.

        [...]

        Does the MPAA chief truly believe that a shaky camcorded version of a movie is somehow depriving movie theaters of visitors? Are there millions of people who prefer watching a low quality camcorded version of a movie over a theater visit simply because they can save a few bucks?

      • Hosting Company: Anti-Pirates Stole $138,000 In Kit & Hijacked Our Email

        After seizing back equipment wrongfully seized by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, the owner of the servers which previously housed a huge warez topsite has spoken out. With claims that BREIN ruined his business, the man from Costa Rica says that the anti-piracy group stole $138,000 of his equipment and hijacked his email accounts. He will now pursue the matter with the police.

        In January, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN targeted one of the Internet’s largest warez piracy topsites. The site, known as Swan, was taken down by hosting provider WorldStream and in a cosy arrangement the company handed over the servers to the anti-piracy group with no legal oversight.

      • Should Piracy Punishments Scale To The Quality Of The Copy?

        In a case involving the administrator of a BitTorrent tracker this week, a judge felt that punishments should reduce if low quality movies were being shared. On the other hand the plaintiffs argued that since their product was being devalued with poor quality reproduction, compensation should actually increase. In a separate case in Argentina, seven pirates just walked because their copies were poor, and the public knew it.

      • Startup Claims It Can Sell Your Used MP3s Legally

        While not quite a truism, it’s pretty widely accepted that a music startup is a bad idea. The record industry is at best unsupportive and at worst litigious when it comes to digital music sales and sharing and when it comes to welcoming (or crushing or suing) new companies and technologies.

      • Swedish MFA Cracking Down On Net

Clip of the Day

Compiling with GCC


Credit: TinyOgg

02.27.11

Links 27/2/2011: X Server 1.10, Last Firefox 4 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 2:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Dissecting the New SGI’s Plan for Profitability

      In fact, Barrenechea told me about half of SGI’s business comes still comes from the public sector, including the Department of Energy laboratories, intelligence agencies and NSF-funded universities. “It’s a great market for us,” he noted, adding that SGI systems for these types of customers, as well as for large enterprise customers, typically pack between 50 and 100 teraflops per cabinet. SGI Altix systems accounted for 22 of the 500 fastest computers in the world according to November’s Top500 list, and, going forward, SGI also expects to be “squarely in the middle” of the race to exascale computers. The Obama administration is proposing $126 million for exascale research in its congressional budget.

    • Turning Cell Phones into Urban Supercomputers

      The possibilities are endless. “Consider what could be done with an API for addressing clusters of mobile sensors,” he writes.

      The idea reminds me of Open Sailing’s SwarmOS, which aims to help individuals make decisions based on the collective intelligence reported by “swarms” of users with mobile phones. Adding sensors to that mix is a powerful notion.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Bend to the will of the universe: freesweep

      There are powerful forces at work in nature. There are things about life I just don’t understand or comprehend, and one of them is the appeal of Minesweeper.

    • Games

      • The Humble Indie Bundle Reviewed – Part 1

        World of Goo, Lugaru and Overture alone each justify the Bundle purchase. As it is, you get these, as well as several other games. Now, Aquaria, Gish and Samorost2 are less fully featured, but still very decent titles. Personally, my taste leans away from them, but you will still find them quite lovely. Moreover, the games all ran well on Linux, with very simple and quick installations, no errors, no problems.

        Overall, the first Humble Bundle is a package of good fun and action. It’s definitely worth its money, whatever you may have decided to invest. In fact, if you’ve paid any less than the total sum of their standard prices, you’ve made yourself one hell of a bargain. Next week, we’ll review the second half, with five more games. For the time being, have fun.

  • Distributions

    • Debian Family

      • Squeeze, Debian, and the FSF

        Historically, the relationships among Debian and the FSF have gone through mixed fortune (and that’s quite an euphemism). On the one hand, Debian is committed to 100% Free Software, is an open project explicitly inspired by “the spirit of GNU”, has been sponsored by FSF in its infancy, and properly calls itself “GNU/Linux” (or even “GNU/kFreeBSD”). On the other hand, Debian is the project who considers the GNU FDL license to be only conditionally free and which is not considered to be an entirely Free system according to FSF.
        So much for the history corner.

        [...]

        Furthermore, I’m more and more convinced that Debian nowadays enjoys a rather privileged position among Free Software vendors.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What do you see when you think of Natty?

          The greater artwork community reached out to Ubuntu and answered the question above with their illustrations.

          Words of inspiration included metaphors like “Entertaining, Simple, Carefree, Steady, Handy, and Quick”.

        • Unity Keyboard Shortcuts List
        • Ubuntu 11.04 – My Experience So Far

          I’m sure people are probably fed up of reading these by now. I know there’s several threads on this topic over on the Ubuntu Forums, for example. Nonetheless, what I have experienced so far is this (don’t worry, it’s short):

          Crashing. Lots of it, mainly compiz it seems. Yes, I know we’re only on Alpha 2 and yes, I expect alpha releases (of anything) to contain bugs. But still, I don’t even have to have done anything for compiz to crash! Admittedly, it could be my video driver (I have an Nvidia 9800GT) that’s the cause, I just don’t know.

        • Full Circle #46 out NOW!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Quickie Conference Report: Day One – SCALE 9x

      Yesterday marked the opening of the Southern California Linux Expo, otherwise known as SCALE. SCALE’s venue this year is the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, just a stone’s throw from LAX Airport. SCALE opened strong with lots of technical content, much of it about the “DevOps” movement and how you can bring its benefits to your place of business.

  • Web Browsers

  • Business

    • Portland software developers ratchet up their open source ambitions

      The Reed College alum was 29 when he created an open source software tool called Puppet for managing data centers and other big computer networks. His project took off, winning adoption from a community of like-minded enthusiasts who deployed it at Twitter, Google, the New York Stock Exchange and many other organizations.

  • BSD

    • Dru Lavigne: Confessions of a community manager

      Dru Lavigne has been contributing to BSD since late 90s and is now the community manager for PC-BSD. At SCALE9x, which continues in LA through this weekend, she spoke about being a community manager and how to decide whether your project is ready to have one.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program

      The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.

      The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. “As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

Leftovers

  • YouTube Video Satirizes Court Tech Project

    The YouTube cartoon starts with a cartoon judge who looks a bit like Betty Boop and a thuggish looking man in a track suit who says, “Just put the money in the bag.” What follows is a satire of the IT system for California’s courts now predicted to cost $3 billion. While the cartoon has been viewed only 700 times, it is likely the cognoscenti who are watching, those who are in a position to influence the fate of the oft-maligned system.

    The title to the vignette suggests why it’s viewership is likely to stay small: “Case Mismanagement: A Chat about CCMS.”

    “I need $150 million,” says the thug.

    “Why?” the judge questions.

    “For my case management system.”

  • Law Profs Urge Ethics Rules for Supreme Court Justices

    More than 100 law professors have signed on to a letter released today that proposes congressional hearings and legislation aimed at fashioning “mandatory and enforceable” ethics rules for Supreme Court justices for the first time. The effort, coordinated by the liberal Alliance for Justice, was triggered by “recent media reports,” the letter said, apparently referring to stories of meetings and other potential conflicts of interest involving Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas among others.

  • Executives at Alibaba resign amid fraud investigation

    Alibaba.com Ltd., China’s largest e-commerce website, announced the resignation of two of its most senior leaders Monday after an internal investigation found more than 2,000 fraudulent virtual storefronts had been set up with the help of company salespeople.

    In a company statement, Alibaba.com said Chief Executive David Wei and Chief Operating Officer Elvis Lee were not involved in the scams but wanted to shoulder responsibility for the “systemic break-down” in Alibaba.com’s “culture of integrity.”

  • Google’s war on content farms begins with algorithm update

    Google took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would “noticeably impact” 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned.

  • Can dreams predict the future?

    Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide. Barker had a longstanding interest in the paranormal and wondered whether the extreme nature of events in Aberfan might have caused large numbers of people to experience a premonition about the tragedy. To find out, Barker arranged for a newspaper to ask any readers who thought they had foreseen the Aberfan disaster to get in touch. He received 60 letters from across England and Wales, with over half of the respondents claiming that their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • US man gets 25 years for South Park threats

      A US man was Thursday sentenced to 25 years in prison on terror charges, including threatening the creators of the animated series “South Park” for portraying the Prophet Mohammed in a bear suit.

      Zachary Adam Chesser, 21, who grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, had pleaded guilty in October to providing material support to a terror group and inciting violence against the South Park creators.

    • Tunisia, Egypt, Libya…. Why Eritrea won’t be next

      Internet penetration is also pretty low. Only about 4% of the Eritrean population has access to the internet. (In places like Egypt and Tunisia it’s much higher – between 20 and 35%.) So there’s no need for Isaias to close down Twitter or Facebook – but he could if he wanted to, because he controls the monopoly telecoms provider.

    • Tribes’ support ‘legitimises’ uprising

      In Libya, several tribal chiefs have lent support to the anti-government movement. France24.com spoke to Hasni Abidi, director of the Study and Research Centre for the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva, about the role of tribes in the events.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Scientists Are Cleared of Misuse of Data

      An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.

      [...]

      Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.

      In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”

    • Coral reefs report warns of mass loss threat

      Three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs are at risk from overfishing, pollution and climate change, according to a report.

      By 2050 virtually all of the world’s coral reefs – from the waters of the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean to Australia – will be in danger, the report warns. The consequences – especially for countries such as the Philippines or Haiti which depend on the reefs for food – will be severe.

    • China’s weather forecasters reluctant to confirm rumours of rain

      Word has it that China’s weather forecasters expect rain in the next few days, but they are too skittish to make an official prediction. That is understandable, given the stakes. Gripped by its worst drought for 60 years, the world’s biggest wheat producer is desperate for a downpour to avoid a crop failure that would have an impact on food prices around the world.

      The challenge is evident from the burst of recent reports in the Chinese media about food, water and the environment.

    • Dead Baby Dolphins and Oil Wash in on the Gulf Coast

      In the Gulf, the temperature is rising. The magical spring season should soon bring warm waters teeming with life back to the region’s marshy bayous and sandy shores.

  • Finance

    • Big bankruptcies, big legal fees

      It’s been a good time to be a bankruptcy lawyer. Though it’s been almost three years since the economy began its meltdown, several massive bankruptcies are continuing to generate big fees for attorneys.

      Take, for instance, the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy, which — as widely reported by major news outlets — crossed the $1 billion fee threshold several months ago. Lawyers are earning more in the Lehman bankruptcy because the largest-ever Chapter 11 case involves restructuring $639 billion in assets and $613 billion in debt.

    • Irving Picard hits Securities and Exchange Commission’s top lawyer with Bernie Madoff lawsuit

      The family of the top lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission invested with Bernie Madoff and earned more than $1.5 million in ill-gained profits, according to trustee Irving Picard, who has named the lawyer, David M. Becker, as a defendant in a clawback lawsuit, a Daily News investigation has found.

      The apparent conflict of interest raises significant questions about the watchdog commission’s failure to stop Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, despite repeated red flags and investigations into his operations.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • David Koch and Scott Walker really click.

      First, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker spent the day denying he’d ever heard of billionaire David Koch.

      Really. A man who gives your political campaign almost $50,000 and you don’t know who he is?

      Har-har-hardy-har-har.

      Believe it or not, Walker has presidential aspirations but the prank revealed him to be less a leader than a dog willing to don the leash of his masters. In other words, a good Republican.

    • The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent

      The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?

  • Censorship

    • Iran forces ‘raid Karroubi homes, arrest son’

      Iranian security forces swept through the homes of opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi and his family, arresting one of his sons and confiscating several documents, his website reported on Tuesday.

      A top judiciary official meanwhile warned that those who back the opposition movement will not be tolerated and will be considered as “anti-revolutionary.”

  • Privacy

    • Google’s Snowmobile Hits Swiss Slopes as Street View Faces Legal Challenge

      A Google Inc. camera-equipped snowmobile is setting out to chart Swiss ski slopes on the internet even as the company’s Street View service faces a court challenge over privacy concerns.

    • Patients’ privacy threatened in NHS shake-up confidentiality under threat, say doctors

      The association says new legislation will give the Government, quangos and local authorities the power to access sensitive medical details without the patient’s permission. It fears that the change will lead to patients withholding information from doctors. The doctor’s union raised its concerns in a letter to Simon Burns, the health minister, on Monday. It is calling for the legislation to be redrafted so that proper safeguards are in place.

      Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the head of science and ethics at the BMA, said: “If this legislation is enacted then doctors will not be able to guarantee patient confidentiality. It would undermine the bond of trust between doctors and their patients and could have appalling consequences.

  • Civil Rights

    • Airport scanners useless

      So, not only are these body scanners overly intrusive and potentially dangerous – they also don’t actually do anything to enhance the safety of airline passengers.

    • Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP’s War on Women
    • Ga. Law Could Give Death Penalty for Miscarriages

      It’s only February, but this year has been a tough one for women’s health and reproductive rights. There’s a new bill on the block that may have reached the apex (I hope) of woman-hating craziness. Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin—who last year proposed making rape and domestic violence “victims” into “accusers”—has introduced a 10-page bill that would criminalize miscarriages and make abortion in Georgia completely illegal.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • How To Remain Connected If Your Internet Gets Shut Off

      Turn to FidoNet, a networking system that can be used for communication between bulletin board systems. Mail and files can be exchanged via modems using a proprietary protocol. You must meet the technical requirements to join FidoNet.

      Check out Daihinia, an app that extends the range of a network of devices that aren’t connected to the larger internet but are connected to each other. Adding a chat client, like Pidgin, to this allows activists to talk to one another.

      Look into how you might be able to harness other chat clients as well. On a Mac you can use the “Rendezvous” feature in iChat to communicate with anyone on the network. In Windows use a third party app like Trillian, and Linux has a bunch of 3rd party apps you can use – note that this does require some technical knowledge, which is why it is all the more important to prepare in advance.

      Packet radio is a radio communications protocol that lets you create long distance wireless networks between devices like ham radios – if you look into this option before hand, you might be able to create a network using radios.

      Get involved with OPENMESH, a new project launched by investor Shervin Pishevar. So far, the forum is working as a place for engineers to offer solutions for building a mesh network in Egypt.

    • Congress zeroes in on FCC’s Net neutrality rules

      The new Republican members of both the House and Senate wasted no time following up on promises to undo the Federal Communications Commission’s December vote to apply new “Net neutrality” rules to some broadband Internet access providers.

  • DRM

    • SCEE Sues Graf_Chokolo For 1 Million Euros And He is Still Hacking

      I received a legal notice from SCEE lawyers requesting me to remove the coolstuff links that graf_chokolo has distributed on grafchokolo.com as well as the links at this blog. What i found interesting in the legal notice is that the lawyers are suing graf_chokolo for 1 million euros. That is quite a number, but graf_chokolo doesn’t seem to care.

      He still want to hack the PS3, where he said he cannot sleep knowing that he cannot touch the hypervisor of the PS3. Man, i never see someone like graf, he is an extraordinary genius hacker that Sony wasting it by making a lawsuit against him.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Intellectual Property’s Great Fallacy

      Intellectual property law has long been justified on the belief that external incentives are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations that are easily copied. This Essay argues that this foundational premise of the economic theory of intellectual property is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, it is now possible to show that there are natural and intrinsic motivations that will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights and patents.

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Appellate briefs filed in SONY v Tenenbaum

        SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, where the RIAA appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, despite being awarded $2250 for each download, for a total of $67,500, and where Tenenbaum cross appealed on the ground that the $67,500 was excessive, in view of the actual damages being less than a dollar per download, the parties have filed their respective appellate briefs.

      • Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases

        These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed “John Does” in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en mass. These rulings may have a significant impact on the copyright trolls’ business model, which relies on being able to sue thousands of Does at once with a minimum of administrative expense. The cost of filing suit against each Doe may prove prohibitively expensive to plaintiffs’ attorneys who are primarily interested in extracting quick, low-hassle settlements.

      • STUDIO SHAME! Even Harry Potter Pic Loses Money Because Of Warner Bros’ Phony Baloney Net Profit Accounting

        And yet Warner Bros isn’t doing anything differently here than is done by every other studio. Clearly, nothing has changed since Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount over the 1988 hit Coming to America when the subject of net participation was scrutinized, and a judge called studio accounting methods “unconscionable”.

Clip of the Day

Grep and Regex – BASH – Linux


Credit: TinyOgg

02.26.11

Links 26/2/2011: More GNU/Linux in Schools, Including Punjab’s

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • SCALE: The Best Little-Big Open Source Conference

      The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That’s $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

    • 2010 FLOSS Workshop Aftershock: An Unexpected Invitation

      1. How to install Ubuntu/Mandriva (I’d like to add Mepis, Pardus and Mint, haha)
      2. How to work with open word processors, spreadsheets, electronic presentations
      3. How to save documents in compatibility mode (This one is funny. People still fail to see that incompatibility issues spring from Microsoft, not from open documents)
      4. How to dual boot Linux/Windows.

      This hands-on workshop is again addressed to professors. They chose us, it turns out, because both Megatotoro and I are not technical users, which proves that ANYONE can use Linux.

    • Are you ready for SCALE 9X?

      The flights have been confirmed for some time and they’re now being boarded. Speakers are packing and heading to Los Angeles, ready to rehearse their presentations before they go on sometime between Friday and Sunday. Exhibitors prepare to set up their booths. Registrations for the expo continue to roll in. Are you ready for some Linux The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo is set to start tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 25, at the Hllton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

    • What are you doing Friday? We’re Building a Cloud with Cloud.com, Openstack, and Opscode

      Heading to Southern California Linux Expo, SCaLE 9x? If so, join us this Friday, along with Cloud.com, Opscode, and Openstack, for a free Cloud building event in Los Angeles.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 10: Lean and mean

        Google released a stable version of Chrome 9 earlier this month but now the company has also pushed out a beta version of Chrome 10. As usual, there are many speed enhancements as well as changes in synchronisation and some of the dialog boxes.

      • Google updates Chrome developer tools
      • Run Google Chrome Apps In Background

        What do you prefer, keeping your Chrome browser open to get notifications about incoming mails, calender and chat or close the browser yet let these services run in the background? There can be many such service which will become more useful if they run in the background and notify a user if there is any update.

        There are many useful hosted apps, extensions available from Google’s Chrome Webstore which will become more useful if they get the capability of running in the background.

  • Sun/Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Joomla 1.6 – A detailed review from a user

      Joomla has been one of my favourite CMS’s for a while but I left it behind when WordPress answered the last questions I had with version 3. Secretly however, I have been waiting for J1.6 to come out in the hope that it also answered some of the questions I had about the last versions.

      Frankly speaking I always thought that Joomla had a better Content Management interface than WordPress, it was just easier to find stuff with bigger sites in Joomla. The massive draw back was the imposed Information Architecture due to Joomla’s content hierarchy.

    • Tiny blogs: When WordPress is too damn big

      So … FlatPress is mostly PHP, Blosxom and Ode are Perl, PyBlosxom is Python, NanoBlogger is a collection of Bash scripts.

      No databases. All “flat” files. You can see the code. It’s definitely non-commercial.

  • Funding

  • Government

    • Government IT suppliers claim procurement system excludes open source

      Systems integrators took on a disapproving audience of open source advocates this week after the government told its biggest suppliers to explain why its open source policy has been thwarted for so long.

      Five executives braved public censure to tell a meeting of the BCS Open Source Group that the fault was an industry ecosystem built over 20 years on principles inimical to the open source model. The hostile ecosystem sustained itself – they merely operated within it, they said.

    • Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source

      Bill McCluggage met with suppliers this week to make clear that the Cabinet Office, which leads on ICT policy, wishes to increase the deployment of open source across government.

      He emphasised that the government wishes to see the industry offer more solutions based on open source, and listed a number of approaches that it expects it to follow. These include: evaluating open source solutions in all future proposals; including open standards and interoperability as key components in IT systems; and moving towards the use of open source as normal practice.

    • UK finally moves on Open Standards

      This is one of the stronger policies that we’ve seen from European governments. It certainly is a leap ahead for the UK, which until now has lagged behind many other European countries in terms of Free Software adoption in the public sector. We’d like to see similarly well-considered steps from more European governments.

      The policy note is refreshingly clear on what constitutes an Open Standard. The requirement that patents which are included in Open Standards should be made available royalty-free is a welcome improvement over the fudged compromise in the new European Interoperability Framework. It’s good to see the UK government take leadership on this important issue, in its own interest and that of its citizens.

      As the lamentable OOXML charade has shown, it’s important that standards are developed in a process that’s independent of any particular vendor, and open to all competitors and third parties. We commend the UK government for making this an explicit requirement. The definition of Open Standards could have been even further improved by demanding a reference implementation in Free Software.

    • Government pushes for open standards

      Open standards should be sought in all government IT procurement specifications, the Cabinet Office has said in a policy note.

      When purchasing software, ICT infrastructure, security and other ICT goods and services, where possible government departments should deploy open standards, according to the note published with little fanfare on the department’s web site last week.

      Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses, said the Cabinet Office.

    • NL: Three nominees for the ‘Open call for tenders of the year’

      The programme office of ‘Netherlands in Open Connection’ (NoiV), the Dutch government resource centre on open standards and open source, announced the nomination of three authorities for the ‘Open call for tenders of the year’.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • How public is public data? With Public Engines v. ReportSee, new access standards could emerge

        In the settlement between the two websites, a new question arises: Just what constitutes publicly available data? Is it raw statistics or refined numbers presented by a third party? Governments regularly farm out their data to companies that prepare and package records, but what stands out in this case is that Public Engines effectively laid claimed to the information provided to it by law enforcement. This could be problematic to news organizations, developers, and citizens looking to get their hands on data. While still open and available to the public, the information (and the timing of its release) could potentially be dictated by a private company.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Converting ODF documents to PDF with WebODF

      It is quite common that one wants to send ODF files to people that lack the software to display ODF. One workaround is to convert the ODF to PDF. Most office suites that support ODF can export to PDF. To compare how different office suites do this conversion one can use the website OfficeShots. This website offers the ability to perform this conversion in many office suites at once and to compare the results.

Leftovers

  • Two Latino Leaders Arrested for Showing Up To The Senate Building. Yes, In Arizona.

    Details the events of that lead to the arrests of to Latino leaders who tried to enter the Senate building in Arizona. They were blacklisted from entering the building by senate leader, Russell Pearce. That’s right. Blacklisted. Without trail or notice.

  • The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies

    The video is called “The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies” and was created by FeministFrequency. It describes a test for all movies with three simple qualifications:

    1. Is there more than one woman in the movie who has a name?
    2. Do the women talk to each other?
    3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

  • When The Net Was Young

    His and the other bureaucrats and politicians who supported the plan tried to assert that, like the Interstate Highway system has always been justified, long-distance data networks for use by the public are just too expensive for “private” efforts to successfully build. The backbone would have to be so big that only the Federal Government could successfully build it.

    Since I was working graveyard, then evening shift (graveyard and I don’t get along), I don’t recall the exact date that the change occurred, but here’s what it was: The National Science Foundation released control of the routing tables and eliminated the rules against commercial use. In fact and effect, they threw open the “Internet” to anyone and everyone that agreed to use the Internet protocols as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

  • How Apple Dodged a Sun Buyout: Former CEOs McNealy, Zander Tell All

    At a Churchill Club dinner, former Sun CEOs Scott McNealy and Ed Zander discuss why the company didn’t buy Apple in 1996, the real beginnings of cloud computing and why Linux should never have come into existence.

  • Hardware

    • All this has happened before: NVIDIA 3.0, ARM, and the fate of x86

      At a dinner this week with members of the press, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang laid out his view of NVIDIA’s past, present, and future in light of recent developments in the processor market. Jen-Hsun’s remarks are worth looking at in some detail, as much for what they say about Intel as what they say about NVIDIA. We’ll recap Jen-Hsun’s take on the processor and GPU markets, followed by a look at the implications of the trends he references for the future of Intel, the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), ARM, and the CPU market as a whole. Ultimately, we could even see Intel get back into the ARM market, a market where it had considerable success with its XScale line before betting the farm on x86.

    • Godson: China shuns US silicon with faux x86 superchip

      If the Chinese government is scaring the world with its hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, what do you think the reaction will be when Chinese supercomputers shun American-made x64 processors and GPU co-processors and start using their own energy-efficient, MIPS-derived, x86-emulating Godson line of 64-bit processors?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Don’t Buy Insurance Industry’s “Objective Analysis”

      There are two things lawmakers can be certain of. One, “the study” they will get from AHIP, which was behind the successful effort to keep the federal government from creating a public option, will be anything but objective. And two, it will be the centerpiece of a multi-pronged strategic effort to scare people into believing, erroneously, that SustiNet will cost jobs, lead to higher taxes and bring to an abrupt halt the “market-based solutions” AHIP maintains insurers have brought to Connecticut.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Injustice Everywhere: The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project
    • Sex Crimes, Cell Phones and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

      If anyone deserves a longer sentence, it is a sex offender who victimizes minors. But no one would ever have anticipated that a sex offender would receive extra prison time for using a basic cell phone in the furtherance of his crime. Last week the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the enhanced sentence of the defendant Neil Kramer who pleaded guilty to transporting a female minor in interstate commerce with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, Title 18, U.S.C. § 2423(a). Kramer’s prison sentence was increased by an extra 2 1/3 years because he had used his cell phone to make calls and text messages to the victim for a six-month period leading up to the offense. U.S. v. Kramer, 2011 WL 383710 (8th Cir. Feb. 8, 2011). In total Kramer was sentenced to over 13 years in prison.

  • Cablegate

    • Bush nixes Denver visit, citing invite to Assange

      George W. Bush said Friday he will not visit Denver this weekend as planned because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was invited to attend one of the same events as the former president.

      Bush planned to be at a Young Presidents’ Organization “Global Leadership Summit” Saturday but backed out when he learned Assange was invited, Bush spokesman David Sherzer said.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Who is Caving to Pressure Against Josh Fox’s Oscar-Nominated Documentary, GASLAND?

      Something bizarre just happened at the Wall St. Journal. At 6pm I was reading a home page story on WSJ.com called “Oscar’s Attention Irks Gas Industry” by Ben Casselman which contained perhaps the most honest and revealing quote from the gas industry that I have read to date about their obsession with attacking my film GASLAND. The quote reads “We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” said Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp. Just thirty minutes later the quote mysteriously disappears, edited out and in its place is a far more typical spin controlled statement from Tom Price of Chesapeake energy saying, “We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately.” Sounds like a robot at a PR agency, more than a person.

  • Finance

    • How Wall Street and Wisconsin Officials Blew Up the State’s Pension Fund

      Wisconsin state employees fighting for their jobs should ask Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein for their money back.

      What’s the connection? During the dog days of the financial crisis in 2008, the investment bank advised clients to bet that Wisconsin and 10 other U.S. states would go broke by purchasing credit default swaps against their debt. For Goldman and other Wall Street firms that used this ploy, the beauty part was that they had also previously earned millions in fees by helping most of those states sell municipal bonds.

    • How Public Employees and Taxpayers Got Scammed

      Public employees have been cramming the Wisconsin state Capitol to protest the governor’s plan to cut their take-home pay and gut their collective bargaining rights. You can’t blame them for objecting when the state reneges on a deal. But they should have been protesting years ago, when politicians and union leaders struck a bargain that was too good to be true.

    • Politicians Slash Budget of Watchdog Agencies … Guaranteeing that Financial Fraud Won’t Be Investigated or Prosecuted

      It is very telling that we have enough money to extend the Bush tax cuts, to throw boatloads of cash at the big banks so that they can give lavish bonuses, and to continue fighting never-ending wars on multiple fronts giving no-bid contracts to favored contractors, but we can’t scrape together a little spare change to fund the regulators and prosecutors.

  • Wisconsin/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Caller posing as major GOP contributor dupes Walker

      Scott Walker took a prank phone call Tuesday, and Wisconsin learned a lot about its new governor.

      A recording of the call released Wednesday spelled out Walker’s strategies for dealing with protesting union workers and trying to lure Democrats boycotting the state Senate back to Wisconsin.

      Speaking with whom he believed to be billionaire conservative activist David Koch, Walker said he considered – but rejected – planting troublemakers amid protesters who have rocked the Capitol for a week.

    • What’s Really Going on in Wisconsin?

      But now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, conservative, anti-labor politicians like Governor Walker are trying out a new and potentially more potent anti-union argument: We can no longer afford collective bargaining. The wages, health benefits, and pensions of government workers, these opponents say, are driving states into deep and dangerous deficits.

    • Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Violates Reagan’s Legacy

      In his attack on workers’ right to bargain collectively, Scott Walker is diametrically opposing the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan — the same conservative figure Walker idolized in his prank phone call with a blogger posing as “David Koch.”

    • CMD Submits Open Records Requests to Governor’s Office

      Before news broke of the prank call from a David Koch impersonator to Governor Walker’s office, CMD had submitted the below open records request to the Wisconsin Department of Administration for all phone calls to-and-from the governor’s office since January 1. CMD confirmed receipt of the request via telephone on February 18 and expects a reply promptly. We have also submitted open records requests directly to the governor’s office for copies of all email and visitor log records.

    • The Mighty Mighty Teamsters Lend Support

      On the first day protesters occupied the Wisconsin Capitol building a young man held a sign, “Where is Jimmy Hoffa when you need him?” Well, International Brotherhood of the Teamsters President James Hoffa rolled into town today with a group of Wisconsin Teamster members to lend support to the Capitol protesters. Three members I spoke to were UPS drivers, private sector workers lending support to public sector nurses and teachers. I asked Hoffa about the news this morning that Governor Scott Walker had been caught on tape with a blogger who he thought was David Koch, of Koch Industries, specifically about Walker’s comments that he would “crank up” pressure on the workers with layoff notices. “We’ll announce Thursday, they’ll go out early next week and we’ll probably get five to six thousand state workers will get at-risk notices for layoffs. We might ratchet that up a little bit too,” says Walker on the call.

    • Billionaire Right-Wing Koch Brothers Fund Wisconsin Governor Campaign and Anti-Union Push

      In Madison, Wisconsin, record numbers of protesters have entered the 11th day of their fight to preserve union rights and collective bargaining for public employees, inspiring similar protests in the states of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. The protests have also helped expose the close ties between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who helped bankroll the Tea Party movement. On Wednesday, blogger Ian Murphy revealed he had impersonated David Koch in a recorded phone conversation with an unsuspecting Walker. We play highlights of the recording and discuss the Koch brothers’ influence in Wisconsin with Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy.

    • Koch Lobbying Office Draws Protest; Building Employees Gawk From Windows

      Cars, SUVs and buses whoosh down Madison’s King Street Thursday afternoon, honking, windows rolled down, thumbs up in solidarity as neon-vested police officers direct traffic.

      “Stay strong!” shouted a man out the driver’s-side window of a State Employee Vanpool van. A Madison Metro bus driver drives by, honking and cheering.

    • Wisconsin Protests, Tuesday, February 22, 2011

      News reports indicate that legislators in Indiana have crossed state lines to protest votes on legislation that would savage the right of working people to collectively bargain. McClatchy Newspapers summarizes the rustbelt rebellion: “In Wisconsin, where the state Senate has been paralyzed because Democrats fled to block Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from government workers, the governor warned he would send 1,500 layoff notices unless his proposal passes. In Indiana, Democrats in the state Assembly vanished, depriving that body of the quorum needed to pass a right-to-work law and limit government unions’ powers. And in Ohio, an estimated 5,500 protesters stood elbow to elbow in and outside the Capitol chanting “Kill the bill!” as a legislative committee took up a proposal that would similarly neuter government unions.”

    • Transcript of prank call to Walker

      Here’s a complete transcript of the Buffalo Beast prank conversation with Gov. Scott Walker Tuesday, from recordings by the Beast. Ian Murphy of the Beast poses in the call as David Koch, a billionaire contributor of Walker’s.

    • Full Transcript of Walker-”Koch” Call
    • 50 Rallies in 50 State Capitols to Support Wisconsin

      In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich—and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response, and vital human services.

    • Wisconsin Protests, Thursday, February 24, 2011
    • Walker’s Budget Plan Is a Three-Part Roadmap for the Right

      There’s a three-prong approach in Governor Walker’s plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist situations.

    • What Else is in Walker’s Bill?

      While most news coverage has focused on how Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill attacks the state’s 200,000 public sector workers (and by extension, the entire middle class), the law is increasingly recognized as an attack on the poor. It curtails (and perhaps eliminates) access to the Medicaid programs relied upon by 1.2 million Wisconsinites, limits access to public transportation, and hinders rural community access to broadband internet. The bill keeps the poor sick, stranded, and stupid.

    • Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White

      Outside of services offered during crises and protests, the street medic ethic is one of “community medicine” where medical providers reach out to the community, build trust, and participate in education. In Madison, he said, street medics offer free clinics in the summer months, and free meals on Sundays as part of the “savory Sundays” program. The latter is aimed at the poor and homeless, and includes medical care and education; foot care, Brian says, is particularly important. These community events aimed at the most vulnerable populations also build relationships and allow the medics to better connect the disadvantaged with available resources.

  • Civil Rights

    • Feds Appeal Warrantless-Wiretapping Defeat

      The Obama administration is appealing the first — and likely only — lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless-surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

      A San Francisco federal judge in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their attorneys $2.5 million for the costs of litigating the case for more than four years.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • DRM

    • Sony’s PS3 Lawsuit Is About Control, Not Piracy

      We actually wrote about Sony’s response to AIBO hacks a decade ago, and it’s absolutely true. Copyright is supposed to be about incentives to create. But it’s generally been twisted into a tool for control against “stuff we don’t like.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Chilean and NZ Proposals for TPP IP Chapter: Counter IP Abuse, Support Public Domain

      The Chilean and New Zealand proposals for the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership have leaked (Canada has been excluded from the talks so far). The leaks demonstrate how much different many other countries view the inclusion of IP in trade agreements when compared to the U.S. and Europe.

    • Copyright Interlude: What is the Public Domain?

      Ironically (and without comment from the district court), the particular identifiable traits of the characters identified here (apart from the portraying actors) were all derived directly from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel that is now out of copyright.

    • Copyrights

      • MP3.com’s Robertson Has A New Startup—And He Might Not Get Sued This Time

        Michael Robertson, an online music entrepreneur who has been something of a lawsuit-magnet for record labels, has launched his newest venture, DAR.fm, and has high hopes that it will stay litigation-free. DAR.fm is a “digital audio recorder” that allows users to record their favorite internet radio shows and store them in a cloud-based service. In an interview with paidContent, Robertson explained that the legal path for such a service should be perfectly clear now, since an appeals court already ruled in 2008 that it’s not a copyright violation to offer users remote, cloud-based DVR services.

      • iiNet fights off AFACT’s piracy appeal

        The trial has been viewed by Australia’s ISP industry as a major landmark case to help determine how ISPs will react in future to users using their networks to download copyrighted material. iiNet had not been forwarding email communication from AFACT to users who AFACT had alleged had breached copyright, whereas some other ISPs have been complying with the request.

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

        Last week, I reported on a major Canadian lawsuit filed by 26 record labels against isoHunt. The legal action, filed in May 2010 without any press releases or public disclosure by CRIA, seeks millions in damages and an order shutting down the controversial website. At the same time as the labels filed the statement of claim, the four major labels responded to isoHunt’s effort to obtain a declaration that it operating lawfully in Canada. Their Statement of Defence (posted here – excuse the poor scan) also makes the case that isoHunt currently violates Canadian copyright law.

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

        The McTeague comments – along with his positions at the C-32 committee – raise important questions about how the Liberal Opposition Critic for Consumer and Consular Affairs has emerged as the most anti-consumer MP on the committee from any party (a point noted in a follow-up letter to the editor). Even more troubling is evidence to suggest that McTeague’s comments are being actively fed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, with McTeague using his platform on the committee to effectively become an unofficial spokesperson.

      • Re:Sound Proposed Tariff for Use of Soundtracks in Theatres & TV Nixed (Again)

        Presumably, very few copyright lawyers will be surprised to learn that the Federal Court of Appeal has just decisively (three days after the hearing) dismissed the application for judicial review brought by the collective Re:Sound (formerly NRCC) in its attempt to impose tariffs when a published sound recording is part of the soundtrack that accompanies a motion picture that is performed in public (i.e. movie theatres) or a television program that is communicated to the public by telecommunication (i.e. on TV).

      • Piracy Once Again Fails To Get In Way Of Record Box Office

        The movie business has — yet again — run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up eight percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren’t affecting box office receipts.

      • Google is still fighting the Belgian copyright cops

        The firm is responding to a court ruling from 2007 that found it in breach of copyright laws by reproducing some of the exciting and groundbreaking news that comes out of Belgium.

        Google is arguing that there is nothing wrong with what it does, which is to take something that someone else has written and use it on its own webpages, and in a bullish statement Google rejected everything that the Belgian courts had said about it.

      • Is Copying The Idea For A Magazine Cover Infringement?

        We’re always told by copyright system defenders that there’s an “idea/expression dichotomy” in copyright law that prevents copyright from really getting in the way of free speech. This is supposed to mean that it’s perfectly fine to copy the idea, so long as you don’t copy the fixed expression of that idea. In practice, this gets a lot trickier, with courts seeming to find all sorts of copied “ideas” infringing, even if they don’t copy specific expression. So where is the line?

      • Musician Sues Summit Entertainment For Taking Down His Song In Twilight Dispute

        This one is a bit confusing, but an artist named Matthew Smith apparently wrote a song back in 2002, but late last year he tried to re-market the song by trying to associate it with the Twilight Saga movies. He did so by doing some sort of deal with the company that sells pre-movie ads to promote the song in various theaters… and by getting an image designed as the “cover” image for the song that was inspired by the Twilight Saga — using a moon and a similar font to the movie’s advertisement. Summit — who has shown itself to be ridiculously overprotective of its trademarks and copyrights issued a takedown to YouTube, where the song was hosted. This part isn’t clear, because I’m not sure where the song image was included on the YouTube page. I guess in the video, but the article linked above doesn’t say.

      • Florida Court Realizes Its Mistake, Reverses Order For Ripoff Report To Take Down Content

        At the beginning of January, we wrote about a troubling court ruling in Florida, where a judge ordered XCentric, the operators of Ripoff Report, to remove some content from their website, despite the company’s policy against such removals and the clear and well-established safe harbors for Ripoff Report from Section 230. There were some serious problems with this ruling beyond just the Section 230 questions, including the prior restraint issue, whereby content was ordered taken offline despite the lack of a full evidentiary hearing on the merits.

      • Smarter Copyright Shills, Please

        In a Feb. 15 op-ed for the New York Times, three representatives of the Authors Guild — Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro — raise the question “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?”

        In my opinion they have it just about backward. They’d have been better off asking whether the Bard would have survived copyright.

        In the course of this piece, the authors manage to recycle just about every pro-copyright cliche and strawman known to humankind.

        Their central focus is on the novel potential for making money through paid performances in Shakespeare’s day (“for the first time ever it was possible to earn a living writing for the public”), and the role of that development in the literary explosion of the English Renaissance.

      • Great Artists Steal

Clip of the Day

Android/iPhone/iPad Development with Corona-sound effects


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 26/2/2011: Linux 2.6.37.2, GNOME 3 User Day

Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The mighty Linux spreads its wings

    Getting ready for a new competition, it’s time for another themed post. How about a Linux-based Gadget Master roundup?

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Watson? Commercial – not super – computer

      First of all, it’s not a supercomputer. It’s a commercial system – or rather, a bunch of commercial systems lashed together for parallel processing purposes. The hardware is readily available POWER-based gear that can run either IBM’s AIX Unix operating system or Linux.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 391
    • Podcast Season 3 Episode 4

      In this episode: Microsoft and Nokia form an alliance and the GPLv3 might not be welcome on Windows Phone. Canonical gets controversial with Banshee while openSUSE and Fedora users might have to wait for Unity. Hear our discoveries, our limited success with the challenge, and your own opinions in our Open Ballot.

  • Ballnux

  • Kernel Space

    • Geek Time with Jim Zemlin

      Jim Zemlin is the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, and earlier this month he sat down with the Open Source Programs Office’s Jeremy Allison for a chat about the future of Linux. In addition to talking about the future, Jim shares insights on the history and significance of Linux.

    • Stable kernel 2.6.37.2
    • Linux 2.6.37.2

      I’m announcing the release of the 2.6.37.2 kernel.

    • Intel announces a BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS)

      Intel is pleased to announce the BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel’s official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you
      can use to override your BIOS’s hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.

    • Intel Releases BIOS Implementation Test Suite
    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.38 (Part 3) – Network drivers and infrastructure

      Kernel version 38 will offer a new meshing implementation, loads of new and improved LAN and Wi-Fi drivers, plus various minor changes that promise to improve the network subsystem’s performance.

    • The debloat-testing kernel tree

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Is Still Working On G45 VA-API Video Acceleration

        This is nice to see Intel is actually working on support still for these older-generations of Intel graphics processors, but it’s already long overdue. This quarter we do know Intel is expected to deliver VA-API accelerated video encoding support for Sandy Bridge, which should be quite interesting, if it is delivered on time.

      • Scheiße! RandR 1.4 Gets Yanked From X Server 1.10

        Only a few days have passed since the release of X.Org Server 1.10 RC2, but another release candidate has now arrived. Given the short turnaround time since the previous release candidate and now being days away from the final release, it’s a mundane release candidate, right? Actually, no. RandR 1.4 was just pulled in its entirety from xorg-server 1.10, which also caused the server’s video ABI to now be bumped again.

      • Mesa Can Do EXT_texture_compression_RGTC

        In Mesa’s quest to catch up to the proprietary Linux drivers (and the graphics drivers available under Windows), they are now a tiny bit closer. David Airlie has announced on the Mesa mailing list that he has implemented support for the EXT_texture_compression_RGTC extension into Mesa.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • 88 watts per hour

        Surprisingly enough, it seems that GNOME Power Manager does not handle time paradoxes properly. If you run GNOME on a DeLorean or have your computer clock go back in time, it seems that g-p-m’s statistics does not take this into account, and draws… interesting graphs

      • The first GNOME 3 User Day

        The first GNOME 3 User Day was held last week. Thanks to everyone who helped out, the event was a real success. Enthusiastic GNOME users from all over the world packed into the #gnome IRC channel to discuss the new release and to ask questions. Attendance was excellent, to the extent that it was almost too busy to keep track of the conversation at times.

  • Distributions

    • How to Protect an Entire Network with Untangle

      As you’re likely aware, guarding your PCs from malware – viruses, trojans, spyware – and hacking is crucial for protecting your files and data. However, don’t forget about your mobile devices. Malware and hacking will be becoming more prevalent on smartphones, pads, and tablets. This makes network-wide security protection even more beneficial. It can cover your entire network, giving you protection for your mobile devices and adding a second layer of protection for your PCs.

      There are several ways to implement network-wide security. Today we’ll be discussing the Untangle platform, which you can install on a dedicated PC or run as a virtual machine (VM). It can also serve as your network’s router and firewall, plus can give you many more additional features. As Figure 1 shows, it features a user-friendly GUI to configure and manage all the components.

    • Lightweight Splashtop Linux-based OS Available for Download

      According to the folks at Splashtop, adjunct Linux versions have been pre-installed on over 60 million computers, which means that these operating systems are a significant part of the overall Linux ecosystem. Splashtop is now based on the open source Chromium code that underlies Google’s Chrome browser.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Mepis 11 Says Yes to LibreOffice

        Apparently, Mepis 11, that is, the new version of Mepis (currently on beta stage) has joined all the other Linux distributions that support LibreOffice.

      • Debian is dying, oh my word!

        Ever since the release of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, there’s an ongoing debate about whether Debian is still relevant or whether the project is going to die.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Natty Feature Freeze now in effect; Alpha 3 freeze 2/27 2300 UTC

          The Feature Freeze is now in effect for Natty. The focus from here until release is on fixing bugs and polishing.

        • Banshee In Natty To Ship Multiple Stores And Contribute To GNOME Foundation

          Recently the Canonical Online Services team, led by Cristian Parrino, has been in discussions with the Banshee project to coordinate a suitable revenue share for the built-in Amazon store. Unfortunately, there were a few crossed wires, but a call today helped to clarify the position.

        • Unity Update (3.4.6) Brings New “Super” Shortcuts For The Launcher [Ubuntu 11.04 Development]

          A new Compiz-based Unity version (3.4.6) was uploaded to the Ubuntu 11.04 repositories minutes ago, getting one of the features you’ve just seen in the Unity 2D video we’ve posted earlier: when pressing and holding the Super key, a number is displayed for each application in the Unity launcher and pressing that number will launch / raise that app. However, in the Compiz Unity you also have a shortcut for the application/file places, expo and trash as you’ll see in the video below (this isn’t available in Unity 2D yet).

        • Wayland Is Now Available In Ubuntu 11.04

          Canonical’s Bryce Harrington has just announced he has uploaded a snapshot of the Wayland Display Server to the Universe repository for Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. the upcoming “Natty Narwhal” Linux release.

        • Russia Today Report Thu24Feb11 on extradition of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange from London to Sweden
        • A few minor Unity Updates from yesterday…

          If you’re a fan of incremental progress then do carry on reading. If, however, you find minor ‘updates’ to be trivial you might want to read something else.

          The following small but noteworthy changes landed in yesterdays update to Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. You won’t see anything too startling but where you will find is solid, dependable progress in evidence.

        • Now we can rock this…

          Please note that this is new and I’m really just trying to sucker you into banging on it so you can file bugs and update documentation.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • What He Thinks, He Becomes

            Another episode from your friendly neighborhood Ubuntu Studio project lead discussing more Fun Facts, future plans for Ubuntu Studio, and more Meet the Team. Let’s rock it…

            Oh, also I’m going to try to rock some new headings that I hope play better with Planet Ubuntu. Blogger likes to set the font-size for headings, but I’m going to use HTML h1 tags.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Qt Is Exploring A Google V8 JavaScript Engine

          This V8 engine isn’t living in the mainline Qt tree but in a separate Git repository for now. “The status of the V8-based back-end is that we still have some QtScript API that’s not implemented, and there are autotests failing (QTBUG-17640), but several of the QtScript and QML examples and demos run. Aside from behavorial compatibility with current Qt, we also need to ensure that there aren’t any performance gaps in the C++/JS layer before a V8-powered Qt can become a viable solution. As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re simultaneously looking to trim the fat of our current APIs to make a switch feasible.”

        • Why I believe Microsoft will buy Nokia

          Unfortunately for Nokia, developers are not jumping from the platform towards the same boat. They are going to miss the Microsoft boat because it is just a raft, right now. However, they will not miss the Android cruise ship, because it is enormous, it has a pool and a casino on it (check this fantastic video, it is amazing to see how fast Android grew).

          Giving up on Symbian, waiting for a Windows Phone to appear (at the end of the year), means wasting a long year, probably even two. If you consider where Android was two years ago (nowhere, check the video above for February 2009) and where they are now, you know what I am talking about. This market is moving at Silicon Valley speed, if you miss two years, you are history.

          That’s why I think Nokia is doomed as an independent company. Before the announcement, their market cap was $43B, now it is $32B (yep, eleven billions jumped off the platform too). That means today Microsoft has 7 times Nokia market cap (they are at $224B).

          With the devastation of the Symbian story (and the grow of low-cost devices from MediaTek and Android), I can only see the stock go south from here. In a year, I bet their market cap will be around $20B, just half of what it was before the announcement.

          Put yourself in Steve Ballmer’s shoes. At that time, your market cap will be ten times Nokia’s. Their company will be $20B cheaper. Apple will be out with iPad 2, iPhone 5 and maybe even an iPhone Mini, with the highest margins ever. Android will be over 80% of market share in mobile, with Google making billions in mobile ads. Where can you go? You can’t beat Android, because it is open source and it sells for zero dollars (and it has a momentum that cannot be stopped). But you can chase Apple.

        • Nokia asks users what excites them about the Microsoft deal

          That’s pretty embarrassing for a company that has a desperate need to be big in the mobile phone market and it is hardly reassuring for Nokia’s customers and shareholders.

          Still, the writing was always on the cards, even if Elop could never see it. However to the outsider the clues to failure were there, and perhaps most tellingly in the Elop crisis email.

        • import QtQuick 1.1

          For those who have been following QML , you might remember that we changed the imports to QtQuick 1.0 to allow us minor revisions of the Qt Quick module in minor revisions of Qt. One of those minor revisions is nearly done, and will soon be waiting in the 4.7 branch of Qt. There’s a bunch of good stuff there and one area in particular I’d like to focus on is the improvements we’ve made to versioning.

        • Qt Earth Team Mix Feb 2011

          During the month of January, my team decided to start releasing our working Qt version to the public once a month. We set 25th of February 2011 as the first release date, and as a “release process” we decided that we were not going to produce packages or anything like that but we would simply tag our repository and announce it to the world.

        • Not just another tablet. The first MeeGo tablet.

          It’s true. There are MeeGo devices being commercially distributed and they are built on Qt. The guys at WeTab GmbH have been shipping their MeeGo tablet, WeTab, since the third quarter of 2010.

        • AppUp developer meetup @ GDC

          Rhonda & I will be hosting a meetup at GDC at the Bin 55 lounge in the Marriott Marquis. We’d like any developers who will be attending GDC to come by and meet us and other AppUp developers. Drop us a note if you’re attending. This will be a good opportunity to chat, share stories and have some down time before the Application Lab starts at noon.

      • Android

        • Android apps running on BlackBerry devices? It may already be happening

          Bloomberg news reported earlier this month that RIM was working to make its BlackBerry Playbook tablet compatible with Android apps. The report cited only unnamed sources and seemed to be a strange development.

        • Animation in Honeycomb

          One of the new features ushered in with the Honeycomb release is a new animation system, a set of APIs in a whole new package (android.animation) that makes animating objects and properties much easier than it was before.

        • Motorola XOOM gets the root treatment in just two hours

          Forget taking the Motorola XOOM home to put it through its paces and experience the delight of Google’s Android Honeycomb operating system, it’s now a matter of how quickly you can install your own ClockworkMod recovery image and ROM Manager, rooting your tablet as soon as humanly possible.

          That’s what Koush did with his XOOM, installing the recovery image and ROM manager, obtaining SuperUser priviledges on the device, just two hours after purchasing the tablet. Whilst we haven’t heard of any ROMs in existence, it will mean that developers and Android hackers will be able to install custom Honeycomb ROMs on their Motorola XOOM.

        • Make Your Clock Widget lets you make your own Android clock [App Reviews]

          There’s a new popular clock widget every week, but what if you want more control over how you tell time? How do you make my own clock widget on Android? You download Make Your Clock Widget, of course.

          Make Your Clock Widget doesn’t give you the ability to build the same amazing widgets that we’ve covered in the past, but it does offer the ability to customize your clock with nice results. The app comes with a set of five pre-made templates, and several more designs available for download, that can be used as starting points to build a widget. Users can adjust font size, positioning, background color, and style to get the right look for their widgets of varying sizes.

        • Google releases manual 2.3.3 updates for Nexus One and Nexus S [Updated]

          Waiting up to a few weeks for the Android 2.3.3 OTA update to roll out may not be your style, so rather than dialing *#*#checkin#*#* in hopes that the update comes to you, Google has not released the zip file updates so you can manually update your phone.

        • Sony Ericsson could soon permit rooting of its Android handsets

          The rooting of Android handsets could soon be encouraged at Sony Ericsson after a tweet from Simon Walker, Head of Developer Program and Partner Engagement for Sony Ericsson Mobile said he was “in favour of rooting if it was done right”.

        • Things overheard on the WiFi from my Android smartphone

          What options do Android users have, today, to protect themselves against eavesdroppers? Android does support several VPN configurations which you could configure before you hit the road. That won’t stop the unnecessary transmission of your fine GPS coordinates, which, to my mind, neither SoundHound nor ShopSaavy have any business knowing. If that’s an issue for you, you could turn off your GPS altogether, but you’d have to turn it on again later when you want to use maps or whatever else. Ideally, I’d like the Market installer to give me the opportunity to revoke GPS privileges for apps like these.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Making community software sustainable

    At Gettysburg Abraham Lincoln dated this nation’s founding to the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate July 4 as our national day.

    [...]

    So far, I’m glad to say, the drive is doing a lot better than either the American Republic or the Confederacy. Over 40,000 Euros came in during just one week. “Your are our rockstars,” Florian wrote.

  • ☆ OBR Progress Report

    The Open-By-Rule Benchmark I talked about recently has now had several workouts, and there are a number more under review ready for future posting. So far, it seems to be working out well, with projects receiving scores that (to my eyes at least) are an accurate reflection of the openness. It’s been clear that every project has it’s strengths and weaknesses and that there’s no perfect model. I like the way the benchmark allows for this; as the dial I’m displaying suggests, I think an overall score below -2 suggests a closed project, a score over +2 suggests an open project and in between is a twilight zone.

  • Amateurism

    One of the false charges that anti-FLOSS protestors hurl at FLOSS is that FLOSS is run by amateurs. Begging that question, they conclude that FLOSS cannot be as good as their favourite non-free software.

  • Kerala launches International Centre for Free and Open Source Software

    The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) was inaugurated today by Chief Minister Shri V S Achuthanandan in Thiruvananthapuram. The Technopark based ICFOSS will focus on providing technical assistance for using FOSS to implement various government projects in Kerala in an endeavour to promote open source software.

    In his inaugural speech, the CM said, “As per the IT policy of the Government we will support the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all projects, especially those for governance and education. Kerala was one of the first states in the country to adapt to free software. Today, other states are following our footsteps and we should ensure that we maintain the leadership position. ICFOSS is a step in this direction.” He also added that major projects of national importance like Aadhaar should have been developed on FOSS.

  • Liberation by software

    For the last half-thousand years, ever since there has been a press, the press has had a tendency to marry itself to power, willingly or otherwise. The existence of the printing press in western Europe destroyed the unity of Christendom, in the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Reformation. But the European states learned as the primary lesson of the Reformation the necessity of censorship: power controlled the press almost everywhere for hundreds of years.

    In the few places where the European press was not so controlled, it fuelled the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which taught us to believe, as Thomas Jefferson said, “When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

    But in the world liberal capitalism made, as AJ Liebling declared, freedom of the press belonged to him who owned one. Venality, vanity, fear, lust for profit and other forces brought the owner, slowly or rapidly as character determined, into power’s embrace. In the 20th century, the press – and its progeny, broadcast – became industrial enterprises, which married power and money far more incestuously than any megalomaniac press lord ever could, which is why the few remaining corporeal examples, nor matter how semi-corporate their vileness, retained a certain quaint, freebooting flavour.

    Now, the vast interconnection of humanity we call the internet promises to divorce the press and power forever, by dissolving the press. Now, every mobile phone, every document scanner, every camera, every laptop, are part of an immense network in which everything we see, we think, we know, can be transmitted to everyone else, everywhere, immediately. Democracy in its deepest sense follows. Ignorance ceases to be the inevitable lot of the vast majority of humanity.

  • The Idea is create FOSS KIT for on Intro to FOSS/Linux/OpenStandards for mass advocacy

    Even If we unable to create workshop by whatsoever reason, I will be able to distribute to 10000+ college in India via IIT and MHRD but we need this FOSS KIT as this stage. I am asking for contribution. please come forward as this contribution will help lakh of student to use FOSS.

  • Events

    • Scott McNealy, in Conversation with Ed Zander (Premier Event)

      Speakers:
      Scott McNealy, Co-Founder, Former Chairman & CEO, Sun Microsystems
      Ed Zander, Former Chairman & CEO, Motorola; Former President, Sun Microsystems

    • Unfortunately, there will be no eLiberatica 2011

      I feel that I have to give a public and official response regarding eLiberatica conference. I tried to delay it in the hope that, some kind of miracle will happen – which is not the case. We cannot do this conference this time. There is as very slight chance to do it in autumn. Very light, I would not count on it.

      Unfortunately, there will be no eLiberatica 2011.

    • Talking Linux Hardware Tomorrow At SCALE

      OpenBenchmarking.org will be going public over the night and for those not in Las Angeles, slides and recordings from this presentation will be published on Monday.

  • Web Browsers

    • 3D Modeling in Your Web Browser

      Benjamin Nortier of London is our hero. Why? He’s taken on a huge challenge: create a 3D modelling program that everyone can use. He’s performed an analysis of available 3D modeling tools and came to pretty much the same conclusion we did: tools are too hard, too expensive or not usable for solid modeling. What’s he doing about it? He’s creating a fully functional, easy-to-use, browser-based 3D modeling tool: “I’m building a WebGL modelling tool for 3D printing”.

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Developer Tools: Back to Basics

        It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existing ones to respond to your feedback.

    • Mozilla

      • Another Beta: Mozilla Preps Firefox 4 Beta 13

        It’s the end of February and it appears as if Mozilla will miss yet another important target: It is unlikely at this time that Firefox 4 RC will become available this month, as the next beta is frozen, another beta is planned and 20 blocking bugs remain.

      • Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs Talks Firefox 4 and Chrome

        BoomTown spoke with Gary Kovacs, the relatively new CEO of Mozilla, about the near-to-official launch of Firefox 4, the increasing competition with Google and its Chrome efforts and where Mozilla goes next

      • Game On Spotlight: Far7

        Three boys decided to create a start-up. We were all into gaming, web development and space, so it was small wonder our project ended up as a browser-based space simulation game. Right from the beginning, we chose to employ only technology that would enable us to create a virtual world free from any limitations, be it platform, bandwidth or gameplay.

      • Mozilla F1 Updated

        A new version of Mozilla F1 is available. This is a bug fix/small enhancement release that builds on last week’s release.

      • Finding harmony in web development – a talk at London Web

        Last week I spoke at the London Web Meetup in London, England about a topic that is close to my heart: finding harmony as a group of professionals in web development. If you come from the outside of our little echo chamber and you see how developers communicate with each other and how we get incredibly agitated about certain subjects you get a very strange impression.

      • Customizing Home Dash with Snapshots

        One of Home Dash‘s goals is to create a browse interface where users can discover interesting websites. Home Dash 6 moves closer by adding some initial support for customizing the snapshots of these websites in the dashboard.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle and Google Tell the Court the Claim Constructions They Agree and Disagree On

      Oracle and Google have filed a joint claim construction statement [PDF]. This is a standard thing that you have to do in all patent infringement cases in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It’s a statement where the parties let the judge know how they each construe the words in the patents allegedly infringed.

    • Oracle’s share of server market cut in half

      Despite the bravado of chief executive Larry Ellison, Oracle continued to take a pounding in the EMEA server market during Q4 2010.

      Figures from Gartner reveal global server revenues in 2010′s closing quarter rose 16.4 per cent on the corresponding period last year to $14.7bn (£9.1bn). Across the full year, server sales rose 13.2 per cent to $48.8bn.

      In EMEA, Q4 server sales were up 10.4 per cent annually to $4.3bn, while unit shipments increased 4.4 per cent to 706,202.

    • The Document Foundation achieves its fundraising goal

      Thousands of donors contribute €50,000 in just eight days to The Document Foundation

  • Healthcare

    • FSFE welcomes paper calling for Free Software in the NHS

      Research programme publishes damning report of public health ICT, and recommends Free Software and Open Standards.

      Professor John Chelsom, founder of the Centre for Health Informatics at City University London (CUL), published a paper this week calling for the NHS to stop investing in proprietary software, and eliminate “once and for all, the product-centric culture” that has “held back” British healthcare. Arguing that the NHS is “just emerging from a decade of wasted opportunity”, the paper states that the National programme for IT (NPfIT) is a failure.

    • Bringing information sharing to healthcare

      The Direct Project took a page from the open source community by bringing together several dozen organizations to collaborate to create “a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet.” The group is working to establish standards and documentation to support simple scenarios of pushing data from where it is to where it’s needed.

  • BSD

  • Government

    • Roundup: Open source in the DOD

      The February issue of DACS’ (Data and Analysis Center for Software) Software Tech News focuses entirely on the U.S. Department of Defense and open source software. However, even if you aren’t interested in the use of open source in the military, there are still some gems that apply to all U.S. government agencies that you might want to check out.

    • ☆ The Open Source Procurement Challenge

      I am speaking at the ODF Plugfest here in the UK this morning, on the subject of the challenges facing the procurement of open source software by traditional enterprises (including the public sector). Based on a selection of experiences from ForgeRock’s first year, my talk considers procurement challenges that legacy procurement rules raise for introducing true open source solutions

    • U.K. Comes out for Royalty-Free Standards for Government Procurement

      The U.K. has become the latest country to conclude that for information and communications technology (ICT) procurement purposes, “open standards” means “royalty free standards.” While apparently falling short of a legal requirement, a Cabinet Office Procurement Policy Note recommends that all departments, agencies, non-departmental bodies and “any other bodies for which they are responsible” should specify open standards in their procurement activities, unless there are “clear business reasons why this is inappropriate.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Engaging on the Digital Commons

      We at the Centre for Internet and Society are very glad to be able to participate in the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). Our interest in the conference arises mainly from our work in the areas of intellectual property rights reform and promotion of different forms of ‘opennesses’ that have cropped up as a response to perceived problems with our present-day regime of intellectual property rights, including open content, open standards, free and open source software, open government data, open access to scholarly research and data, open access to law, etc., our emerging work on telecom policy with respect to open/shared spectrum, and the very important questions around Internet governance. The article by Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash was published in the journal Common Voices, Issue 4.

Leftovers

  • Professor Pablo Boczkowski on news consumption — and how when you read affects what you read

    It’s an intriguing phenomenon, but it’s not the only one Boczkowski is studying. Another fascinating aspect of the professor’s research — the aspect, in fact, for which the book is named — is the study he conducted of the environments in which people consume their news. People tend to read the news at work; and that, in turn, skews the news content they consume. (For more on that idea — and for the broader trends it suggests about information consumption and civic life — check out the talk Boczkowski will be giving this evening, with the Lab’s own Josh Benton, as part of MIT’s Communications Forum. If you’re in the Cambridge area, the discussion will take place from 5 to 7 on the MIT campus; it’ll also be recorded and archived.)

  • Paris-on-Thames

    The French influx to London suggests what governments can and can’t do to boost their cities’ allure

  • Alternative search engine’s

    DDG (DuckDuckGo) is great for a number of reasons:

    * DDG doesn’t track your searches (Google does)
    * Uses a cool !bang syntax to make searching faster (example: ‘!w linux’ will take you directly to the Wikipedia page for linux, hundreds of !bang shortcuts are available for many popular sites and topics)
    * Almost as good search results as Google, there have only been a tiny handful of searches that havent been very good
    * Fast and minimal
    * The API is open source

  • Daily Show: American Workforce Makeover

    The American workforce needs a third world makeover if it wants first world corporations to find it attractive.

  • Craigslist ‘a cesspool of crime’: study

    “To be fair, Craigslist as an entity can’t be blamed for the things that happen among its users. It’s merely a facilitator of commerce, after all,” says Zollman in a blog post. “And we understand thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions happen safely between Craigslist aficionados. Long before Craigslist, even, robberies were linked to newspaper classifieds from time to time.”

  • Cherokee teacher pleads guilty to duct-taping autistic student

    A Cherokee County teacher who duct-taped an autistic boy to a chair and confined a blind girl under a desk pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and was sentenced to six years of probation and $2,000 in fines.

  • Science

    • Rare Alan Turing papers bought by Bletchley Park Trust

      A collection of Max Newman’s hand-annotated offprints from sixteen of Alan Turing’s eighteen books have been purchased by the Bletchley Park Trust with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and a USD100,000 donation from Google.

    • Eleventh Hour Rescue of Turing Collection

      Almost nothing tangible remains of genius Bletchley Park codebreaker, Alan Turing; so when an extremely rare collection of offprints* relating to his life and work was set to go to auction last year, an ambitious campaign was launched to raise funds to purchase them for the Bletchley Park Trust and its Museum. The Trust is today delighted to announce that the collection has been saved for the nation as the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) has stepped in quickly to provide £213,437, the final piece of funding required.

    • Enigma code breaker Alan Turing’s papers have been saved

      According to the BBC, the final tally of public donations was still £200,000 short. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t part with any of the £60 billion cash pile it’s sitting on and that other cash rich information technology companies didn’t donated something. Turing was, after all, a founding father of modern computing.

    • Adding a twist to radio technology

      The bandwidth available to mobile phones, digital television and other communication technologies could be expanded enormously by exploiting the twistedness as well as wavelength of radio waves. That is the claim being made by a group of scientists in Italy and Sweden, who have shown how a radio beam can be twisted, and the resulting vortex detected with distant antennas.

      The simplest kind of electromagnetic beam has a plane wavefront, which means that the peaks or troughs of the beam can be connected by an imaginary plane at right angles to the beam’s direction of travel. But if a beam is twisted, then the wavefront rotates around the beam’s direction of propagation in a spiral, creating a vortex and leaving the beam with zero intensity at its centre.

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security advisories
    • Security updates for Friday
    • RSA 2011: Winning the War But Losing Our Soul

      There was lots of noise and distraction on the crowded Expo floor of the RSA Security Conference this year. After a grueling couple of years, vendors were back in force with big booths, big news and plenty of entertainment designed to attract visitor traffic. Wandering the floor, I saw – variously – magic tricks, a man walking on stilts, a whack-a-mole game, a man dressed in a full suit of armor and a 15 foot long racetrack that I would have killed for when I was 10.

      The most telling display, however, may have been the one in Booth 556, where malware forensics firm HBGary displayed a simple sign saying that it had decided to remove its booth and cancel scheduled talks by its executives. This, after the online mischief making group Anonymous broke into the computer systems of the HBGary Federal subsidiary and stole proprietary and confidential information. The HBGary sign stayed up for a couple days, got defaced by someone at the show and was later removed. When I swung by HBGary’s booth on Thursday, it was a forlorn and empty patch of brown carpet where a couple marketing types where holding an impromptu bull session.

    • Credit cards at the turnstile across London by 2013

      Transport for London has confirmed that by the end of 2012 it will accept contactless credit and debit cards at the tube turnstiles, just after the Olympic tourists leave.

      Those tourists will be able to pay for bus journeys, as London’s 8,000 buses will be equipped to accept PayWave, PayPass and ExpressPay before the July kick-off, but upgrading the underground network will take a little longer so Londoners will have to wait until the end of 2012 before being able to cut up their Oyster cards.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Filmmaker To Create Egypt Documentary Through Social Media

      This was a particularly interesting to Mehta, who is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and former New York Times video journalist currently working on ways to develop what he calls “participatory reporting.” After the initial celebration, he developed a project that he hopes will result in a crowd-sourced interactive documentary about the 18 days of protests that led up to the revolution.

      The project, #18DaysInEgypt, asks people who witnessed the protests to label what they recorded of them on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube with specific tags. Eventually, Mehta will put the entries together to create an interactive narrative. He hasn’t decided whether that narrative will involve a timeline, place the viewer at a specific location to observe what is going on, create a customized video depending on what the user wants to experience (Arcade Fire-style) or something else. For now, the biggest hurdle is collecting the content, a project for which he is soliciting help from partners in Egypt.

    • South Korea leaflets tell North of Egypt, but change unlikely

      South Korea’s military has been dropping leaflets into North Korea about democracy protests in Egypt, a legislator said on Friday, but doubts lingered it would trigger calls for change in the tightly controlled country.

      As part of a psychological campaign, the South Korean military also sent food, medicines and radios for residents in a bid to encourage North Koreans to think about change, a conservative South Korean parliament member, Song Young-sun, said.

    • Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators

      The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

    • Lieutenant General William Caldwell illegally ‘psyched’ bigwigs

      A US general in Afghanistan illegally ordered a military psychological operations team to manipulate visiting US dignitaries into supporting their calls for further troops and funding, it was reported yesterday.

    • Libya in turmoil – live updates

      9.46am – North Korea: In the comments thread Benghazi217 reports that North Korea has seen protests in the past few weeks, while the economic and food situation is deteriorating. Earlier we heard reports that South Korea is dropping leaflets into its northern neighbour documenting the revolutions in Egypt and Libya.

    • CNN’s Brian Todd reports on WikiLeaks cables detailing excessive spending, violence of Gadhafi’s children.
    • Old Friend AndNew Deals, Ignoring Democracy

      Mubarak and Berlusconi are cheerful. After dinner, they chat and laugh about “their meetings with that madcap Qaddafi.” Who knows, they may even have talked about “bunga bunga” (think steamy frolics), a phrase invented by the Libyan leader. And there was much good cheer too during a private lunch not so long ago between the Cavaliere (Berlusconi’s nickname) and the Tunisian president Ben Alì at the latter’s Hollywood-style villa in Carthage. “Old friends, new deals” is how the US ambassador summed it up. But when the subject of the Mediterranean comes up, Italy’s foreign policy always goes off on two different paths: Berlusconi deals with the “sexier portfolio”, in other words special deals and the like, while foreign minister Frattini handles down-to-earth matters. The US diplomatic documents – obtained from WikiLeaks and published exclusively by “L’Espresso” – show how the regimes of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia were a personal question for Silvio Berlusconi. After all, his style is to embrace the world’s dictators, from Putin to Lukashenko, from Chavez to Assad, while ignoring warnings from his ministers and allies. Not to mention the fact that he welcomes the sudden influx of “non- transparent” Libyan capital into the Italian bank Unicredit. With the risk that very private and hastily concocted deals will now carry a high price for the whole of Italy. While North Africa’s Maghreb region is undergoing dramatic changes affecting Italy’s future – refugees seeking asylum, energy cutbacks and stock exchange tremors – the government seems unable to come up with an appropriate response. And the WikiLeaks cables show how Italy’s executive is split from top to bottom – ministers with no compunction about trampling on their colleagues, a marked inability to find a single voice on major problems, bitter feuds amongst party factions, clashes with Bankitalia and with the President of Italy. For months the US ambassador David Thorne has been filing reports to Washington D.C. about the all-out fighting in the government coalition “while waiting to find out who will take over from Berlusconi.”

    • Libya’s ‘Love Revolution’: Muslim Dating Site Seeds Protest

      When Omar Shibliy Mahmoudi exchanged sweet nothings on the Muslim dating site Mawada, it wasn’t for love but for liberty.

  • Cablegate

    • The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG for Thursday, Day 89

      5:05 Wired: Pay Pal denies anything political about it freezing that Bradley Manning support fund. “Asked why, if the Courage to Resist account was opened in 2006, PayPal hadn’t raised the issue of linking it to a bank account earlier, Nayar did not have an immediate response. He said only that nonprofit organizations are allowed to open accounts easily and quickly.”

    • Clinton and the freedom to connect

      I’m disappointed that she used this speech to once more attack Wikileaks (even as she praised other nations’ citizens’ efforts to use the net to bring transparency to their governments) and that the Administration has not taken the opportunity of Wikileaks to examine its own level of classification and opacity. They could still disapprove of Wikileaks while also learning a lesson about being more open. By not doing that, some of the high-minded words in a speech such as this come off as at least inconsistent if not hypocritical.

    • There are many who fear exposure of Libya’s secrets

      For years his regime has given the west nothing but grief but been kept sweet for reasons of oil, trade and on the spurious notion that the “Great Leader” might be a useful ally in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Earlier this week a fresh batch of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks again revealed the true nature of the corrupt and lavish lifestyles of the Gaddafi family. In what amounts to a personal fiefdom, his oldest son, Muhammad, dominated telecommunications, while another like Muatassim, was National Security Adviser, Hannibal was influential in maritime shipping, Khamis commanded a top military unit, and Saadi was given the job of setting up an Export Free Trade Zone in western Libya.

    • PayPal Lifts Ban on Fundraising Account for WikiLeaks Source Bradley Manning

      PayPal has lifted its ban on the account of Courage to Resist, an organization that has raised a substantial portion of the funds needed for the legal defense of Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old former U.S. army private accused of leaking classified U.S. information to WikiLeaks in 2010.

    • Glenn Greenwald explains WikiLeaks to Stephen Colbert

      Anonymous recently revealed internal emails and documents from security firm HBGary that showed how it proposed targeting WikiLeaks and journalists, expecially Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of Bank of America.

    • “What has Wikileaks ever taught us?”

      Since 2006, the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks has published a mass of information we would otherwise not have known. The leaks have exposed dubious procedures at Guantanamo Bay and detailed meticulously the Iraq War’s unprecedented civilian death-toll. They have highlighted the dumping of toxic waste in Africa as well as revealed America’s clandestine military actions in Yemen and Pakistan.

    • Demand open justice for Julian Assange

      Julian Assange will, according to the judge’s finding of fact, be held in prison in solitary confinement when he is returned to Sweden and will then be interrogated, held without bail and later subjected to a secret trial on accusations that have been bruited around the world, not least by this newspaper. He has a complete answer to these charges, which he considers false and baseless. Even if acquitted, however, the mud will stick and, if convicted, the public will never be able to able to assess whether justice has miscarried. This country, which has given to the world the most basic principles of a fair trial – that justice must be seen to be done – denies that basic liberty for those that are extradited to Sweden.

    • Is WikiLeaks Driving Unrest in the Middle East and North Africa?

      Though the media may attack WikiLeaks on their editorial pages, Mitchell says many outlets depend on the cables for juicy details about Libya. Where else could we learn that US diplomats consider Qaddafi and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez “revolutionary brothers”?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling

      There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it.

      The drill bit spun, whining against the alluvial mud and rock that folds beneath the Wind River Range foothills. It ploughed to 160 feet, but the water that spurted to the surface smelled foul, like a parking lot puddle drenched in motor oil. It was no better — yet — than the water Meeks needed to replace.

      Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.

      But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

    • The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?

      I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy as I made clear made clear during the last food crisis (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“). In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.

      I was glad to see former Pres. Bill Clinton start talking about this in a Washington Post piece headlined, “Clinton: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots” — though I tend to see the world’s increasing use of crops for fuel as an underlying cause for growing food insecurity, something that makes the whole food system more brittle and thus more vulnerable to triggering events, like once in 1000 100 year droughts and once in 500 year floods, which is to say climate instability (see WashPost, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

    • Real Climate faces libel suit

      Real Climate, a prominent blog run by climate scientists, may be sued by a controversial journal in response to allegations that the its peer review process is “shoddy.”

      Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and Real Climate member based at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has claimed that Energy & Environment (E&E) has “effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor’s political line.” The journal denies the claim, and, according to Schmidt, has threatened to take further action unless he retracts it.

      “This is an insult, and what’s more it’s not true,” says Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, the editor of E&E and an emeritus reader at the University of Hull’s department of geography. Every paper that is submitted to the journal is vetted by a number of experts, she said. But she did not deny that she allows her political agenda to influence which papers are published in the journal. “I’m not ashamed to say that I deliberately encourage the publication of papers that are sceptical of climate change,” said Boehmer-Christiansen, who does not believe in man-made climate change.

  • Finance

    • Libya Placed Billions of Dollars at US Banks: WikiLeaks

      Libya’s secretive sovereign wealth fund has $32 billion in cash with several U.S. banks each managing up to $500 million, and it has primary investments in London, a confidential diplomatic cable shows.

    • Amidst Rumors That Gadhafi’s Been Shot, Swiss and Brits Freeze His Assets

      While rumors that Libyan ruler Muammar Gadhafi had been shot surfaced, the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs announced it would freeze any and all assets held by Gaddafi or his “environment” to avoid any “misuse of state funds.”

    • Tell Kaplan & The Washington Post: Stop Cashing In On Low-Income Students

      Kaplan University Online promises convenient college degrees paid for with easy federal aid. But for many students, all they deliver is debt, unethical practices and misleading claims. Who cashes in? The Washington Post Company, which owns the lucrative chain of colleges and lends its stellar reputation to a scam for low-income students.

      Shannon Croteau was 11 classes away from a degree from Kaplan University Online when she learned she was out of financial aid, owed $30,000 and that the degree would be worthless in her state of New Hampshire.

      Croteau had been told by Kaplan — a lucrative chain of “for-profit” colleges owned by the Washington Post Company — that she could make more than $65,000 a year as a paralegal. Getting financial aid from the government was easy, they said, and earning a degree would be a snap.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • [Parody] Embarrassed Republicans Admit They’ve Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They’ve Been Praising Reagan

      At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years.

    • Celebrity names swamp News of the World phone-hacking inquiry

      So many messages are being examined by Scotland Yard’s phone-hacking inquiry that it is difficult to identify every mention of a celebrity’s name among “hundreds of intercepts”, lawyers for the police have claimed.

      The proliferation of legal actions generated by complaints against the News of the World is also in danger of congesting the courts with “parallel claims”, the judge hearing applications for disclosure in three cases has implied.

    • Seriously, Timothy Johnson, Your Idea Of How To Do PR For Clients Is A Joke

      The culprit in this case is Mr. Timothy Johnson, who just went off on my extremely sweet and mild-mannered colleague Leena Rao because she declined to cover some tidbit of news about a company he represents.

    • The best influence money can buy – the 10 Worst Corporate Lobbyists

      Getting politicians to bend policy to your company’s will is a fine art – requiring a combination of charm, dogged persistence, threats and bushels of cash. But corporate lobbyists know just which buttons to press in order to get politicians to stuff human rights, public health and the dear old environment – and put business interests first.

      Much as they shrink from the limelight, we feel they deserve a bit of exposure. So here’s why we think these 10 lobby groups have earned their place in the hall of shame.

    • Why nobody trusts the mainstream media

      Is it a problem that the top six media corporations dominate the information flow to most of the developed world?

      I think so.

  • Censorship

    • Letter from China

      The Chinese Communist Party can move like a gazelle when it senses that its grip on social stability might be at stake. Within days of Mubarak’s downfall, Beijing had rounded up liberal activists, slowed the Web to a crawl, and poured security forces into areas that it thought could be used for the kind of online organizing that is sweeping the Middle East. Smack in the middle of that, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on “Internet freedom” last week, and she singled out China and other authoritarian countries for facing a “dictator’s dilemma” in their attempts to control the Internet. For analysis, I turned to Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows as much as anyone about the Internet in China. She is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices Online, an international citizen media project. (Her book “Consent of the Networked” will be published next year by Basic Books.)

    • China calls for renewed fight against Dalai Lama

      A senior Chinese leader says Beijing should launch a fresh struggle against the influence of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.

      The comments were made by Jia Qinglin, who sits on the standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s powerful politburo.

      He said China also needed to raise the living standards of Tibetan people.

      The call comes nearly three years after riots and unrest in Tibetan areas which China blamed on the Dalai Lama.

    • LinkedIn hit as China clamps down on dissident talk

      Business networking site LinkedIn appeared to have been blocked in some parts of China, the company said.

      No explanation was given for the move, which LinkedIn is still investigating.

  • Privacy

    • HIPAA Bares Its Teeth: $4.3m Fine For Privacy Violation

      The health care industry’s toothless tiger finally bared its teeth, as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a $4.3 m fine to a Maryland health care provider for violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The action is the first monetary fine issued since the Act was passed in 1996.

      The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a Notice of Final Determination to Cignet Health care of Temple Hills, Maryland on February 4. The notice followed a finding by HHS’s Office of Civil Rights that Cignet failed to provide 41 patients with copies of their medical records and for failing to respond to requests from HHS’s Office of Civil Rights for information related to the complaints.

  • Civil Rights

    • Deconstructing the CALEA hearing

      US law is surprisingly clear on the topic of encryption — companies are free to build it into their products, and if they don’t have the decryption key, they can’t be forced to deliver their customers’ unencrypted communications or data to law enforcement agencies.

      While Skype uses some form of proprietary end-to-end encryption (although it should be noted that the security experts I’ve spoken to don’t trust it), and RIM uses encryption for its Enterprise Blackberry messaging suite, the vast majority of services that consumers use today are not encrypted. Those few services that do use encryption, such as Google’s Gmail, only use it to protect the data in transit from the user’s browser to Google’s servers. Once Google receives it, the data is stored in the clear.

      [...]

      Building encryption into products, turning it on by default, and using it to protect all data is the ultimate form of privacy by design. While the FTC is encouraging firms to embrace this philosophy, the FBI is betting that poor security will remain the default. Sure, a few individuals will know how to encrypt their data, but the vast majority will not. It is because of this that the FBI can avoid a fight over encryption. Why bother, when so little data is encrypted?

    • Our human rights vs. The Others

      You know what else Human Rights Watch vehemently condemns as human rights abuses? Guantanamo, military commissions, denial of civilian trials, indefinite detention, America’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” renditions, and a whole slew of other practices that are far more severe than the conditions in Haiti about which Lopez complains and yet which have been vocally supported by National Review. In fact, Lopez’s plea for Allen is surrounded at National Review by multiple and increasingly strident attacks on the Obama administration by former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino for (allegedly) abandoning those very policies, as well as countless posts from former Bush speechwriter (and the newest Washington Post columnist) Marc Thiessen promoting his new book defending torture. Lopez herself has repeatedly cheerled for Guantanamo and related policies, hailing Mitt Romney’s call in a GOP debate that we “double Guantanamo” as his “best answer” and saying she disagrees with John McCain’s anti-torture views, while mocking human rights concerns with the term “Club Gitmo.” And National Review itself has led an endless attack on the credibility of Human Rights Watch, accusing it of anti-Israel and anti-American bias for daring to point out the human rights abuses perpetrated by those countries.

    • The Big Pornography BBS Raids & Byron Sonne

      On Identi.ca this morning we’ve been discussing the criminal charges against Byron Sonne, and the other people who were charged in the G8/G20 witch hunt. And of course someone reposted the link to the Gawker interview with one of the people that the FBI raided for being a member of Anonymous.

      All of which reminded me of another witch hunt…

      I used to run a BBS called ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ Hey, I’m a creature of habit :)

      It was a private board. You got invited to join if you were interesting. You had to be able to communicate. There was a posting requirement – you have to keep your ratio of posts above a certain level, or I’d kick you out.

      Quite frankly it was a lot of fun. We had a great bunch of people, and held brisk discussions about a wide range of topics. There were only 30 members, so everyone knew everyone quite well. It was a private club style setup, you didn’t even get considered for an invite unless someone who was already a member recommended you – and they were careful about who they recommended because we were all having so much fun.

      And then a MORAL PANIC hit southern Ontario. Some brainless cretin realized that Electronic Bulletin Board Systems could be used to distribute child pornography.

    • WI Assembly GOP Passes Walker Budget In Surprise Vote — Dems Chant “Shame!”

      The Wisconsin State Assembly has just passed Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, including its controversial provisions to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for public employee unions as well as many other provisions to weaken union organizing.

    • Why I Support the People of Thompson, Canada — And You Should Too

      To people down here in the U.S., Thompson, Canada and its fight with the Brazilian mining giant Vale may seem very far away.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • How India’s Draft Cybercafe Rules Could Strangle Public Internet Access

      - Definition of Cybercafe: According to the IT Act, “Cyber Cafe means any facility from where access to the Internet is offered by any person on the ordinary course of business to the members of the public,” and this is where a large part of the problem lies. By saying that the rules are applicable to any facility, it could refer to all WiFi hotspots, whether run by Aircel, Tata Indicom, or even small cafes and restaurants that want to offer patrons free WiFi access. And I’m not sure if those who framed these rules are aware, but today you can use an Android phone to set up a WiFi connection, and offer public Internet Access.

    • China Mobile CEO says Wi-Fi should be default data connection

      Sadly, the last point is what municipal wireless networks in the United States never got a chance to achieve. Municipalities in the US were trying to roll out these networks, a few years too early, before launch of the iPhone and the tsunami of Android phones.

      In life, timing is everything: the massive demand from mobile users had not yet occurred and there was (and perhaps still is) not enough wired backhaul in the form of fiber networks. There are a few successful muni WiFi networks in the US, but I believe that most of them will be deployed outside the United States.

  • DRM

    • Sony Sends Cops to PS3 Hacker’s Home

      PS3 hacking community member graf_chokolo says that Sony and the police raided his home and warns others to “be careful from now on.”

      A member of the PS3 hacking community known as graf_chokolo is learning the hard way that Sony means business when it comes to preventing people from circumventing the gaming consoles DRM protection scheme.

    • Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

      Two weeks ago I proclaimed a winner in the microcontroller dev board arena with “Why the Arduino Won, and Why It’s Here to Stay.” There’s still lots of great debate going on, and conversations that still haven’t ended. Is my prediction right? We’ll see what happens in the upcoming months and years.

      This week I’m going to switch gears a little and declare an enemy for all makers, hackers, and innovators — it’s in a very different space: the consumer electronics industry. And who is this slayer of progress? Sony.

    • Microsoft Shows Sony a Better Way

      I don’t think even Sony believes it can be successful at producing hack-proof PlayStations. If they did, they wouldn’t be hiring lawyers and raiding people’s homes and grabbing their computers and PlayStation 3s, leading The Inquirer to call Sony the “overbearing Japanese company”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Court Drops FileSoup BitTorrent Case, Administrators Walk Free

        Two administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today. The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case. Following the trial of OiNK BitTorrent tracker operator Alan Ellis, the FileSoup case marks the second where UK-based BitTorrent site operators have walked free.

      • Battle Over Limewire Damages Drags Google And MySpace Into The Fray

        Limewire wants to know all about the deals that the record labels have struck with online services in the past. That’s likely because Limewire wants to show that the actual deals done by the record companies don’t justify their outsize damage demands. The record labels have said in the past that their damage demands against Limewire could be hundreds of millions of dollars, or even top $1 billion. There’s no way Limewire ever made that kind of cash, but the labels are hoping to force founder Mark Gorton, who also owns and manages a hedge fund, to pay up out of his personal fortune.

      • iiTrial: A green light to disconnect pirates

        Today’s judgment by the Full Bench of the Federal Court could clear the way for internet service providers to disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement.

        The majority ruling in the split judgment handed down today gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers.

      • So Much For The Big Guns’ Online Music Plans

        But this sounds mostly like merely a hard drive in the sky – a new place for existing customers to store files they already “own”.

      • BitTorrent Admin ‘Fined’, Despite Anti-Piracy Group Law-Breaking and Blunders

        Despite an anti-piracy group blundering through an investigation and breaking the law in the process, the administrator of a BitTorrent site has been ordered to pay compensation to rights holders. Jonas Laeborg, the operator of the EliteBits private tracker, was found liable for contributory infringement and ordered to settle to the tune of $18,500.

      • Amicus Brief Calls Into Question The Legality Of Righthaven’s Entire Business Model

        We’ve seen some of the defenses to Righthaven suits raise some of these issues, but never in such a detailed manner. And it’s especially interesting in this case, where the filing comes as an amicus brief, rather than lawyers for the defendant. In fact the defendant in the case, Bill Hyatt, did not reply. As we’ve discussed in the past, normally when that happens, the court will make a default judgment — basically giving the plaintiff everything requested. However, they don’t have to and Randazza points out that Righthaven’s claims reach far beyond reasonable. Among other things, it also challenges Righthaven’s ridiculous standard demand that those sued hand over their entire domain name, noting that copyright law does not allow such a remedy.

      • Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming

        Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication.

      • Pirate Bay Documentary Gets Government Funding

        TPB-AFK is an upcoming documentary about The Pirate Bay and its founders, expected to be released later this year. To complete the project, Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose has now received over $30,000 in funding from the Swedish Government. This money will be added to the $50,000 that was already donated by peers through a successful Kickstarter project.

      • RIAA Defends $1.5 Million Thomas File-Sharing Verdict

        RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth defended the verdict as necessary to address her “blatant disrespect for artists, the legal system, and the law,” but doesn’t acknowledge that the amount is still so high – $1.5 mln – that the only message it’s sending is that the RIAA is completely removed from reality.

      • Random defendant outlawyers P2P attorney, gets lawsuit tossed

        You know it’s tough out there for a P2P lawyer when even some random, anonymous, non-lawyer defendant is the more convincing party. That strange scenario unfolded yesterday in Illinois, where divorce-attorney-turned-porn-copyright-lawyer John Steele had his entire case against 300 defendants thrown out completely.

        The case involved CP Productions, “a leading producer of adult entertainment content within the amateur Latina niche.” The company ran a site called “Chica’s Place” from which a bit of material referred to as “Cowgirl Creampie” was allegedly downloaded illegally by 300 people. Though based in Arizona, CP Productions signed up with Steele, a Chicago lawyer, to bring the case.

      • Karmic Punishment

        A story on TechDirt caught my imagination, about a P2P law firm who were sending out extortion letters after a judge had dismissed the defendants. It seems that you have to get pretty low to be less ethical than lawyers in some rackets these days. It seems that nothing stands in the way as a deterrent for them. I have a suggestion.

        Since their business model is about mass mailing extortion “pay up or else” threats, knowing that a significant number will pay out the $5000 or whatever the settlement fee is, than go to court with the intentionally inflated “$100,000′s” in fines and costs, why not fine them $5000 for EVERY letter they’ve sent illegally in addition to refunding everyone who’s paid up double?

      • ACTA

        • Japan Wanted Canada Out of Initial ACTA Group

          Another cable includes commentary on specifically excluding other international organizations, with the USTR stressing that the G8 or OECD “might make it more difficult to construct a high-standards agreement.”

          From a Canadian perspective it is worth noting that the Japanese proposed keeping Canada out of the initial negotiating group.

Clip of the Day

Richard Stallman w Polsce – AGH Kraków 14 styczeń 2009 [part 1/4]


Credit: TinyOgg

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