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11.27.10

IRC Proceedings: November 26th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 12:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

11.26.10

Links 26/11/2010: KDE SC 4.6 Features and Minor News (Happy Thanksgiving)

Posted in News Roundup at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The quest for more – when $20 billion isn’t enough

    Simon Brew wonders if there are 20 billion reasons why the spirit of open source is being distorted…

  • LPC: Michael Meeks on LibreOffice and code ownership

    Back when the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference was looking for presentations, the LibreOffice project had not yet announced its existence. So Michael Meeks put in a vague proposal for a talk having to do with OpenOffice.org and promised the organizers it would be worth their time. Fortunately, they believed him; in an energetic closing keynote, Michael talked at length about what is going on with LibreOffice – and with the free software development community as a whole. According to Michael, both good and bad things are afoot. (Michael’s slides [PDF] are available for those who would like to follow along).

    Naturally enough, LibreOffice is one of the good things; it’s going to be “awesome.” It seems that there are some widely diverging views on the awesomeness of OpenOffice.org; those who are based near Hamburg (where StarDivision was based) think it is a wonderful tool. People in the rest of the world tend to have a rather less enthusiastic view. The purpose of the new LibreOffice project is to produce a system that we can all be proud of.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 Minefield Now With Improved Add-Ons Manager

        One of the design elements that I did not like in the development builds of Firefox 4 until now was the add-ons manager. I have reviewed it in detail in the article How To Uninstall Add-ons In Firefox 4. Basically, what I did not like was that it looked kinda messy, hard to read and out of place.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Non digital commons a lot more complicated than Free Software

      In September 2010 I went to the Open World Forum to present some first results of my research about local impacts of Open Data. The Forum was an interesting and varied event, that gave space to very interesting talks, keynotes and comments about freedom, education and gender diversity in software. Another great moment for me was the contribution to the final panel by John Wilbank, Vice-President for Science Creative Commons.

    • Open Hardware

      • Extend your Arduino

        The Arduino is a small programmable device that can hold a small program and perform tasks such as reading temperature sensors, turning on or off switches, and can even serve as the ‘brain’ for a robot. I have used the Arduino (actually freeduino) for projects related to HVAC and hydroponics automation.

Leftovers

  • Oracle whacked by DoJ complaint

    An industry group of 130 hardware maintenance providers has complained to the Department of Justice that they’ve been unfairly squeezed since Larry Ellison bought Sun Microsystems.

    The Service Industry Association has been complaining about Oracle’s tactics for some time, but has now written to the DoJ.

  • Eat a Bagel, Lose Your Baby
  • Mother, shall I put you to sleep?

    Young family members of this district in southern Tamil Nadu have been pushing their infirm, elderly dependents to death because they cannot afford to take care of them.

  • Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs

  • Health/Nutrition

    • US response to cholera in Haiti, fund exclusive elections

      In the face of a cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of over 1000 people, infected many thousands and is feared to intensify due to widespread flooding in the wake of Hurricane Tomas, officials have stated that the elections scheduled for November 28 will go ahead as planned. While some candidates have questioned the wisdom of holding elections during such turmoil, a rising chorus of critics is disputing the elections’ very legitimacy and is urging the US, a primary funder, to take responsibility in guaranteeing a truly democratic process.

    • CDC Says Haiti’s Cholera Due to “One Event”

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Twenty-First Century Blowback?

      From 2001 to 2010, the US military spent about $32 million on construction projects in Oman. In September, the Army upped the ante by awarding an $8.6 million contract to refurbish the Royal Air Force of Oman’s air field at Thumrait Air Base.

      US efforts in Bahrain are on a grander scale. This year, the US Navy broke ground on a mega-construction project to develop 70 acres of waterfront at the port at Mina Salman. Scheduled for completion in 2015, the complex is slated to include new port facilities, barracks for troops, administrative buildings, a dining facility, and a recreation center, among other amenities, with a price tag of $580 million.

    • Barack Obama’s hopes for a nuclear-free world fading fast

      Barack Obama’s hopes of reshaping US foreign policy stand on the brink of failure tonight, after two of his most cherished initiatives — nuclear disarmament and better relations with Moscow — were dealt serious setbacks.

    • Guantánamo Bay prisoner payouts a first step to ending legacy of torture

      The government insisted today that it had started to draw a line under the legacy of complicity in rendition and torture that it inherited from the Labour administration by settling claims brought by 16 former Guantánamo inmates.

    • Guantánamo: security services must be protected, says Ken Clarke
    • Do Airport Screenings Really Make Us Safer?

      TSA’s activities provide substantial fodder for both citizen and professional journalists. YouTube is full of citizen-made videos of TSA agents engaging in questionable activities, like aggressively patting down a three year old child or pulling the pants off a wheelchair-bound, 71 year-old man to examine his knee implant.

    • Silvio Berlusconi ally was link to Sicilian mafia, judges rule

      he man who spearheaded Silvio Berlusconi’s entry into politics was also an intermediary between the media magnate and the Sicilian mafia, judges in Palermo ruled last night.

      In a lengthy written judgment on one of the Italian prime minister’s closest associates, the judges said that before entering politics Berlusconi paid “enormous sums of money” to Cosa Nostra for protection and later handed over funds to safeguard his network’s relay stations on Sicily.

    • Vox Taxi – Vox Dei

      I am not prepared to subscribe to such an anti-democratic statement. But if we want to move towards peace, we undoubtedly have to remove this huge rock blocking the road. We must infuse the public with another belief – the belief that peace is possible, that it is essential for the future of Israel, that it depends mainly on us.

    • Who’s correct about human nature, the left or the right?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Pants on Fire: the Whoppers of the 2010 Elections

      Throughout the course of the 2010 Congressional midterm campaigns, candidates threw out countless fibs, questionable assertions, whoppers and half-truths. These are our candidates for the most misleading campaign ads of 2010, what are yours?
      Big Lie #1: Health Care Reform Guts Medicare

    • Capitol Hill’s Top 75 Corporate Sponsors

      Want to follow the money? Below, the 75 heaviest hitters in corporate campaign cash, 1989-2010.

      1 AT&T

      2 National Association of Realtors

      3 Goldman Sachs

      4 American Association for Justice

      5 Citigroup

      6 American Medical Association

      7 National Automobile Dealers Association

      [...]

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Egypt blogger out after 4-yrs in jail

      An Egyptian blogger has been released after serving four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and the president, a human rights group said on Wednesday.

      The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 26, known as Kareem Amer, was in bad health and was beaten by security officers before his release on Tuesday.

      The Interior Ministry was not immediately available for comment.

      Amer, a student at the state-run religious al-Azhar University, was arrested in 2006 on charges of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak in his blog posts. He was sentenced to four years in prison and expelled from the university.

    • Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel peace prize may not be given out at December ceremony
    • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted by Interpol over rape case

      An international arrest warrant is being issued for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, after Swedish prosecutors were today granted permission to detain him for questioning in a rape case.

    • BlackBerry to ‘allow Indian government to monitor messages’

      BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) is ready to allow Indian authorities access to the emails and messages of its most high-profile corporate customers, according to a ministry official in the country.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • ISPs should be free to abandon net neutrality, says Ed Vaizey

      Internet service providers such as BT should be allowed to abandon net neutrality and prioritise users’ access to certain content providers, the communications minister Ed Vaizey said in a speech today.

    • Oregon Senator Wyden effectively kills Internet censorship bill

      It’s too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet.

      A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the measure and will not be able to proceed until the next Congress convenes.

Clip of the Day

Nokia X7 00 Symbian^3 Nokiasaga com


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 25/11/2010: KDE SC 4.6 Beta1, Wayland Ease

Posted in News Roundup at 2:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel Log: Fast response times via process groups

      The automatic creation of process groups should keep the desktop interface responsive even when a large number of processes are making the CPU sweat. Meanwhile, the development of 2.6.37 is in full swing, and new stable kernels replace their predecessors; 2.6.35, on the other hand, has reached the end of its life.

      Last week, a small patch of only about 200 lines, designed to significantly increase the interactivity of desktop applications in some situations where a CPU works to capacity, sparked considerable debate in Linux circles. The discussions about the code modification had already started a month ago; a reworked version of the patch subsequently received extra attention when Linus Torvalds gave it a lot of praise last week, commenting that his system was clearly more interactive when compiling a kernel.

    • Finland’s brand strategy builds on the ideas of free software

      Finland’s national brand strategy project released their report today on the Tehtävä Suomelle website. The basic idea is to promote the Finnish capability for getting things done, and the communal approach to problem solving.

    • Graphics Stack

      • It’s Becoming Very Easy To Run Wayland

        When Wayland started out in 2008 it was very difficult to build and run this lightweight, next-generation display server. Wayland leverages the very latest Linux graphics technologies and at that time all of Wayland’s dependencies had to be patched or built from branched sources and Wayland even had its own EGL implementation at the time (Eagle) rather than Mesa and overall it was just a high barrier to entry. Wayland at that time also worked with only the open-source Intel driver, while now it can work with most any KMS / GEM / Mesa driver. It was not until recently that it became possible to build Wayland from mainline components beginning to ship in new Linux distributions, thereby making it much easier to experiment with the open-source display server. Now it’s to a point where you can just run a simple script and be up and running with a Wayland Display Server in just minutes.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • 4.6 Beta1 Brings Improved Search, Activities and Mobile Device Support

        KDE releases 4.6 beta1 of Workspaces, Applications and Development Frameworks, bringing significant improvements to desktop search, a revamped activity system and a significant performance boost to window management and desktop effects. Efforts all across the KDE codebase pay off by making KDE’s frameworks more suitable for usage on all devices. The release provides a testing base for a stable release in January 2011.

  • Distributions

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Watch Unity People Place in action [Video]
        • Here come the Ninjas

          We also want to make it easier for new members to start working on Ubuntu. When a new member is interested in helping Ubuntu, they would like to help fix bugs in Ubuntu but are often lost.They do not dissociate Ubuntu from Upstream packages or projects. They just want to help Ubuntu and fix bugs. As a new member interested in fixing bugs in Ubuntu, where do they ask? Where do they start?

        • Rolling Releases Make no Sense for a Linux Distribution Like Ubuntu

          It seems reasonable to assume that Mark Shuttleworth’s comments were targeted more in the direction of mobile devices. The leap by online authors to equate this with a total change of the Ubuntu development infrastructure seems rather foolish and let’s one wonder if this was one of those “Oops I did it again – let’s bash Ubuntu” attitudes again. In particular since such news could potentially confuse lots of partners, developers, and users of Ubuntu and could undermine its current strong position.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • John Lilly at Mozilla

        John is not leaving Mozilla per se, although he won’t be around the office day-to-day anymore. As he joins Mozilla’s Board of Directors, his influence and guidance will continue.

  • Databases

    • Leaving MariaDB/Monty Program

      When I joined the company over a year ago I was immediately involved in drafting a project plan for the Open Database Alliance and its relation to MariaDB. We wanted to imitate the model of the Linux Foundation and Linux project, where the MariaDB project would be hosted by a non-profit organization where multiple vendors would collaborate and contribute. We wanted MariaDB to be a true community project, like most successful open source projects are – such as all other parts of the LAMP stack.

      So we went ahead and told about this vision when we promoted MariaDB and recruited users and contributors or customers to our company:

      * In Monty’s keynote at this year’s MySQL conference we positioned MariaDB as a unifying force in the universe of competing MySQL forks.
      * I have personally spoken abou this in public places, such as when Drupal was adding MariaDB support, using it as an obvious argument in favor of MariaDB.
      * Most recently I defended MariaDB’s status as a community project vigorously on Brian Aker’s blog. Little did I know that while I was doing so, the plan had already been changed…

      I’m sure there are other occasions too that I wasn’t involved in, like convincing Linux distributions that MariaDB is preferable to MySQL, or that we should get a free booth in the dot-org pavilion at a conference.

  • Oracle

    • Hudson java.net migration status update

      Even worse, there’s no ETA — it’ll definitely take a week, but since this is a Thanksgiving weekend, it can take longer, Oracle said.

      I find this situation plain unacceptable, and e-mails from the earlier migration effort made me doubt if the new infrastructure is any better. I also had a pleasure of working closely with CollabNet folks over the past years and I was also involved in some earlier conversation and experiments about the new java.net infrastructure, and when it comes to performance and monitoring, CollabNet folks really knew what they are doing. So I had multiple reasons to worry if the new infrastructure can handle the load of java.net, which the old CollabNet-hosted one couldn’t handle.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • What the new government transparency website could mean for journalists and media

      The government yesterday launched a searchable database of business plans, structures, salaries and other data for its departments. The launch of the online transparency database is the latest move by government to shift power away from central government and increase its accountability to the public.

      “We’re going to smash open state monopolies. We’re going to invite new providers in. And in one of the biggest blows for people power, we’re shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does. Because each of these Business Plans does not just specify the actions we will take. It also sets out the information we will publish so that people can hold us to account… Plain-English details about the progress of the reforms and the results they are achieving,” said Prime Minister David Cameron in a speech yesterday.

    • Sony chooses open

      Phrases I considered for this post’s title ranged from “surprising choice” to “sign of the apocalypse.” More than a few years ago, I remember buying my first piece of Sony hardware–a video camera. It was one of the first that also let you take digital stills, which it saved to a tiny, purple, proprietary Sony memory stick that was an expensive pain to replace or get a spare of. And that was how I first learned that Sony was mostly only interested in Sony.

      [...]

      Of course this isn’t the first surprise turn to openness from Sony. They launched their first Android-based handset just over a year ago, and rumors are that the “Playstation phone” likely to be announced December 9 will be Android-based as well. Interestingly enough, Android 3.0 (“Gingerbread”) will be released three days earlier on December 6. If all the rumors add up to be true, it could be a game-changer for gaming on Android.

    • Making it easier to share

    • Open Data

      • International Open Data Hackathon – 63 cities, 25 countries, 5 continents

        …and counting. Never could any of us have imagined that there would be so many stepping forward to organize an event in their cities.

        The clear implication is that Open Data matters. To a lot of people.

        To a lot of us.

        If you are in the media, a politician or the civil service: pay attention. There are a growing number of people – not just computer programmers and hackers, but ordinary citizens – who’ve come to love and want to help build sites and applications like fixmystreet, wheredoesmymoneygo, emitter.ca or datamasher.

      • A simple change in the law could open up online access to the BBC’s archives

        In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country’s great archives of radio and television programmes.

        Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC’s archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.

    • Open Access/Content

Leftovers

  • UK net migration climbs to 215,000
  • Government ‘cites national security to suppress embarrassing information’

    The government was today accused of increasingly citing national security in court cases in order to justify suppressing potentially embarrassing information.

    The charge was made in a letter to the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, from Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights group Liberty.

    The letter followed many cases in which Chakrabarti said ministers and their lawyers abused their position by demanding unwarranted secrecy.

  • America’s Thanksgiving – the historical foundation

  • Science

    • The Insanity Virus

      Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.

    • Scientists attach barcodes to mouse embryos – human ones coming soon

      Fans of the film Blade Runner may remember a scene in which the maker of an artificial snake is identified by a microscopic serial number on one of its scales. Well, in a rare case of present-day technology actually surpassing that predicted in a movie, we’ve now gone one better – bar codes on embryos. Scientists from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Haiti: Ground Truthing Cholera in Mirebalais

      In very worrisome news Tuesday, the Haitian Health Ministry estimated that the cholera outbreak in Haiti is resulting in an average of 32 deaths every 24 hours since the epidemic began on October 20.

    • McDonald’s and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy

      The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald’s and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • The ‘Safe Haven’ Myth

      Richard Holbrooke, America’s special envoy to South Asia, maintains that if the Taliban succeed in Afghanistan, “without any shadow of a doubt, Al Qaeda would move back into Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and pursue its objectives against the United States even more aggressively.” That, he insisted, is “the only justification for what we’re doing.” This is an especially ardent presentation of the “base camp,” or “safe haven,” myth. Stressed by virtually all promoters of the war, this key justification–indeed, the only one, according to Holbrooke–has gone almost entirely unexamined.

    • Ex-Transit Officer Sentenced To Two Years In Shooting Death Of Unarmed Man

      A Los Angeles judge sentenced a former transit officer convicted of shooting an unarmed man on an Oakland train platform to two years in prison.

    • Stephen Fry leads protest tweets against Twitter joke verdict

      Stephen Fry took just minutes to reiterate his offer to pay the fine of Paul Chambers, the 27-year-old man convicted of “menace” after making a Twitter joke about blowing up an airport.

      Chambers today lost his appeal against the conviction and £1,000 fine, Judge Jacqueline Davies dismissing his case on every count. The former accountant’s offending tweet – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” – sent publicly to a Northern Ireland mother he met online, was found to be a menacing threat to security.

    • Twitter jokes: free speech on trial

      Thursday was a bad day for free speech. It came to light that a plastic surgeon has been threatened with a libel action for expressing concerns and scepticism about a breast enhancement cream (no, really!) and we read reports of the RSPB being sued for libel by two people for criticisms one of its scientists made of a study they carried out on baby grouse in Wales (yes, seriously!).

      But also in the crown court in Doncaster, Paul Chambers lost his appeal over a Twitter joke. The facts of this case have been well narrated by David Allen Green among others. His message, which appears on the screens of his 600 followers if they are watching, said: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!!”

    • British deny George Bush’s claims that torture helped foil terror plots

      British officials say there is no evidence that waterboarding saved lives of UK citizens, as Bush claimed in his memoirs

    • George Bush accused of borrowing from other books in his memoirs

      Now it appears that Decision Points is not so much the former president’s memoirs as other people’s cut and pasted memories.

      Bush’s account is littered with anecdotes seemingly ripped off from other books and articles, even borrowing without attribution – some might say plagiarising – from critical accounts the White House had previously denounced as inaccurate.

      The Huffington Post noted a remarkable similarity between previously published writings and Bush’s colourful anecdotes from events at which he had not been present.

    • Cameron in China: What does Beijing think of us? Let’s start with hypocrisy
    • China court jails father of ‘tainted milk’ child

      A Chinese court has handed down a two-and-a-half year jail sentence to a man who organised a website for parents of children who became ill from drinking tainted milk after his own son became sick.

      The court found Zhao Lianhai guilty of “inciting social disorder”, his wife Li Xuemei told Reuters.

    • Bombs Away: Afghan Air War Peaks With 1,000 Strikes in October

      The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.

    • No charges for destroyed CIA tapes

      A special prosecutor cleared the CIA’s former top clandestine officer and others Tuesday of any charges for destroying agency videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects, but he continued an investigation into whether the harsh questioning went beyond legal boundaries.

      The decision not to prosecute anyone in the videotape destruction came five years to the day after the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being subjected to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. The deadline for prosecuting someone under most federal laws is five years.

    • Nato summit to outline Afghanistan withdrawal plan
    • Stop and search plans are ‘discriminatory’, watchdog warns
    • TSA Administrative Directive: Opt-Outters To Be Considered “Domestic Extremists”

      If the information recently acquired by Doug Hagmann of Northeast Intelligence Network is accurate, then something really big is happening in America right now – and it’s most certainly not a step towards individual liberty.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • World’s forests can adapt to climate change, study says

      It is generally acknowledged that a warming world will harm the world’s forests. Higher temperatures mean water becomes more scarce, spelling death for plants – or perhaps not always.

    • Arctic oil spill clean-up plans are ‘thoroughly inadequate’, industry warned

      The next big offshore oil disaster could take place in the remote Arctic seas where hurricane-force winds, 30ft seas, sub-zero temperatures and winter darkness would overwhelm any clean-up attempts, a new report warns.

      With the ban on offshore drilling lifted in the Gulf of Mexico, big oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell are pressing hard for the Obama administration to grant final approval to Arctic drilling. Shell has invested more than $2bn to drill off Alaska’s north coast, and is campaigning to begin next summer.

    • Greenland wants $2bn bond from oil firms keen to drill in its Arctic waters
    • Tony Hayward: Public saw us as ‘fumbling and incompetent’

      The former boss of BP admitted last night that the oil giant had been completely unprepared for the Gulf of Mexico accident that nearly sank it financially.

      When the crisis hit, BP was forced to make up its oil spill disaster response as it went along, something that made it look “fumbling” and “incompetent” in the eyes of the public, said Tony Hayward.

    • Dispersants’ Toxic Legacy

      In the weeks after BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf, a number of environmental groups and scientists began raising concerns about the huge volume of chemical dispersants the company was spreading in the water. These chemicals are used to break the oil into smaller globs, which causes them to sink and supposedly biodegrade faster.

    • Royal Society: “There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record.”

      Prior to this year, I wrote about extinction only occasionally — since the direct impact of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on humanity seemed to me more than reason enough to act. But the mass extinctions we are causing will directly harm our children and grandchildren as much as sea level rise. In particular, I believe scientists have not been talking enough about the devastation we are causing to marine life (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

    • Dear Stewart Brand: If we can’t trust your claims on DDT, why should we trust you on anything else?
    • Rise in number of sunburnt whales

      An increase in the number of whales with sunburnt skin has been documented by scientists after they took photographs and tissue samples of the animals.

      In the worst-hit species – the blue whale – researchers found that the numbers affected rose by 56 per cent between 2007 and 2009, which they said has “worrying” implications for their health.

    • Climate change: science’s fresh fight to win over the sceptics

      Vicky Pope, head of climate-change advice at the UK Met Office, agreed. “We are currently collecting vast sets of data for our studies of the climate and we are going to have make these available in forms that can be used by interested groups. They can then see for themselves that our analyses are sound and correct. It means a lot of extra work but if that is the price for making sure we demonstrate the dangers posed by climate change then we will have to pay it.”

    • Indonesia eyeing $1bn climate aid to cut down forests, says Greenpeace

      Indonesia plans to class large areas of its remaining natural forests as “degraded” land in order to cut them down and receive nearly $1bn of climate aid for replanting them with palm trees and biofuel crops, according to Greenpeace International.

  • Finance

    • Nothing Grows Forever

      PETER VICTOR is an economist who has been asking a heretical question: Can the Earth support endless growth?

    • Rich Vail Fund Manager Hits Cyclist And Runs, Gets Off Because Charges Might “Jeopardize His Job”

      The rich are different from you and me; they get to hit and run, almost killing a cyclist, but get off without serious charges because it is hard to be money manager for Smith Barney if you have a record. District Attorney Mark Hurlbert is not charging Martin Joel Erzinger with a felony, because “Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession,” which is managing billions for rich people.

    • Johann Hari: Clegg – the man who betrayed us all

      Clegg 2.0 promised to protect the poor. Clegg 3.0 throws the poor out of their homes and makes it harder for them to go to university

    • Is the Deficit Commission Serious?

      I’ve been trying to figure out whether I have anything to say about the “chairman’s mark” of the deficit commission report that was released today. In a sense, I don’t. This is not a piece of legislation, after all. Or a proposed piece of legislation. Or even a report from the deficit commission itself. It’s just a draft presentation put together by two guys. Do you know how many deficit reduction proposals are out there that have the backing of two guys? Thousands. Another one just doesn’t matter.

    • Ireland resists calls to seek EU financial aid
    • DeLay Is Convicted in Texas Donation Case

      Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful and divisive Republican lawmakers ever to come out of Texas, was convicted Wednesday of money-laundering charges in a state trial, five years after his indictment here forced him to resign as majority leader in the House of Representatives.

    • EU gives green light for Russia joining WTO

      Russia and the European Union struck a deal yesterday (24 November) to phase out Russian export tariffs on raw materials, paving the way for Moscow to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said.

    • Thanksgiving: A Time to Think about Gift Economies?

      This post was published earlier. But Thanksgiving (in the US) seemed like a good time to think about the ideas again.

      When I sat down to research this post, I thought I would write a post about barter, since it seemed like if our current financial system failed, barter would be one possible form of back-up. But when I started to research barter, the first thing I came across was this statement:

      Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.

      So I decided to step back a bit, and look into gift economies.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Search and Surveillance Bill: causes for concern

      The Search and Surveillance Bill, currently being considered by the Justice and Electoral Select Committee, has been presented as bringing together and modernising the laws surrounding state powers to search people and property, and conduct surveillance.

      While there are some procedural improvements when state agencies conduct surveillance, with time limits and reporting procedures, the Bill as a whole is concerning. It extends state powers beyond Police and intelligence agencies to an array of other state agencies. This page aims to explains the problems presented by the Bill.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Is There Some Reason That Barry Sookman Refuses To Quote The WIPO Treaty?

      In his article Separating copyright fiction from facts about C-32’s TPM provisions, Barry Sookman once again avoids the issue. Curiously, the target of his tirade, Michael Geist also avoids the issue.

      As I pointed out earlier this month in my article The TPM Provisions in Bill C-32 Are Not In Compliance With The WIPO Internet Treaties, neither of them seems willing to actually quote the clear wording of the treaty. Mihaly Ficsor, who supposedly was involved in drafting the treaty, never gets around to quoting it either, even when I blasted back at him three times (here, here, and here).

      In fact the three of them have a record for inaccuracies that is totally unbelievable. I rather expect that most regular readers have noticed this by now. I don’t like lies of omission. Talking about a treaty, without quoting the treaty is a lie of omission in my eyes.

    • Patent Office Agrees To Facebook’s “Face” Trademark

      Facebook is just a payment away from trademarking the word “Face.” As of today the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office has sent the social networking site a Notice of Allowance, which means they have agreed to grant the “Face” trademark to Facebook under certain conditions.

      All Facebook needs to do is pay the issue fee within three months of today and the “Face” trademark will be issued and be published in the official USPTO gazette and everything.

    • Copyrights

      • Open Letter to ‘Operation:Payback’
      • UPDATED: Industry Execs Call Out PC Mag For Encouraging Piracy

        Irked by an article published in PC Mag listing a number of alternative P2P services in the wake of the LimeWire shutdown, a number of music industry executive earlier this month sent the news outlet an angry letter that all but accused the publication of encouraging copyright infringement.

      • How Do You Measure The ‘Benefits’ Of Copyright?

        One of the major problems we have with the way copyright law today is developed is how much of it is faith-based — with supporters insisting that more stringent copyright law is obviously “better,” without presenting any evidence to support that. The history of copyright law is filled with examples of this sort of argumentation in favor of stronger copyrights.

      • ACTA

        • How ACTA Will Increase Copyright Infringement

          Every so often, we get copyright system supporters here in the comments who, when they run out of arguments, go with something along the lines of “but it’s the law, and it’s your duty to respect the law.” It’s a rather authoritarian point of view and there are all sorts of reasons why that makes little sense. We don’t need to go into the full philosophical arguments, but one key one is that you should never respect something just because someone says you should — only because it has earned the respect. Glyn Moody has a fascinating post highlighting a new paper about ACTA that suggests the process by which ACTA was agreed upon has all sorts of problems. Moody calls out one paragraph in particular that I think is quite important:

          there is the question of public perceptions as to the value and fairness of the agreement. A perception that it is fair as between stakeholders is important to IP law, which it is not readily self-enforcing. By this I mean that IP law requires people to self-consciously refrain from behaviours that are common, easy, and enjoyable: infringement is so easy to do and observing IP rights, particularly copyright, involves, particularly these days, some self-denial. IP law therefore needs support from the public in order to be effective, and in order to receive any such support IP law needs to address the needs of all stakeholders. 135 Treaties that strengthen enforcement without addressing the needs of users look unfair and will bring IP law further into disrepute.

        • Why ACTA is Doomed (Part 2)

          What’s really fascinating for me here is that it clearly describes the trend towards owning *every* piece of music and *every* film ever recorded. The concept of owning a few songs or films will become meaningless as people have routine access to everything. Against that background, the idea of “stopping” filesharing just misses the point completely: few will be swapping files – they will be swapping an entire corpus.

Clip of the Day

Woman Wears Bikini At TSA Airport Security


Credit: TinyOgg

11.25.10

IRC Proceedings: November 25th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 11:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted in Site News at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Techrights cake

Summary: A quick message and site forecast for Techrights readers

AS THE US holiday comes knocking and many of our readers are American we decided to slow down a bit and in the coming days the plan is to dedicate a special moment to Novell/AttachMSFT coverage. We also have many posts about software patents in the pipeline, but we’ll wait with those. In the mean time, please enjoy our daily summaries of links (nothing to get riled up about) and enjoy the holiday if you celebrate it.

Thank you for supporting Techrights. █

Thanking Microsoft for Another Product Cut

Posted in GNU/Linux, Servers, Windows at 3:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Autumn wildlife

Summary: Windows Home Server keeps having features stripped off and its very existence — let alone poor performance — becomes suppressed or marginalised (GNU/Linux reigns this segment)

TECHRIGHTS no longer tracks Microsoft as closely as it used to. With around 60 dead products (probably more by now), it is clear that Microsoft’s days as a technology company are coming to an end; as a patent agitator Microsoft would not win, either.

It only seemed reasonable to post a quick update about a Microsoft candidate for deletion (bad market performer [1, 2]). That would be Windows Home Server, whose “major feature” predictably “Fails even before launch”:

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Microsoft has managed to do a good job of all but destroying Windows Home Server (WHS) by removing one of its main features.

The Vole announced its impending removal of the drive extender feature from the upcoming version of WHS, codenamed Vail. This has led to widespread condemnation from current users, as drive extender was one of those rare things from Microsoft, a feature that was not really a bug.

Drive extender allows users to plug in additional hard drives with WHS automatically expanding a logical disk volume to make use of the new drive. This in itself isn’t exactly cutting edge technology but it worked well and for many users it offered an easy way to expand storage capacity. Well not any longer, thanks to Microsoft’s bewildering and ultimately incorrect analysis of customer feedback.

Here is the corresponding message from Microsoft. It’s worth remembering that it’s not the first “major feature” of Windows Home Server that gets axed. It might not take long before the whole product meets the cliff because Linux competition is more reliable, affordable, and often boasts more features. Microsoft should have never entered this area. It no longer spends much money marketing Windows Home Server. Like a cornered animal it just clings onto attacking its rivals (or trying to buy their means of attack). █

Microsoft Cannot Thank Vista Phony 7 for Returns

Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

[Note: decreased posting pace due to Thanksgiving]

Wild turkey

Summary: Windows Phone 7 is apparently doing badly enough to make it worth dumping

ANYONE who remembers the “KIN trajectory” already knows that dumping them at half price or at nearly no cost is what Microsoft did just weeks after the official launch because very few people bought the product. Vista Phony 7 [sic] is already expensive to mainstream because of Silver Lie, which is one of many dead products that Microsoft just happens to maintain because it has no other choice. OpenBytes has just noticed that Microsoft is ‘pulling a KIN’ on Vista Phony 7 [sic]; it is said to be given away for free (after Microsoft spent around half a billion dollars marketing this hilarious dud).

Is Windows Phone 7 already going the way of the Kin? Is this the only way they can think of to generate interest in WP7? But more importantly who knows anyone waiting for the right time to purchase a Windows Phone 7? Last time I looked people wanted to buy Android phones or Apples iPhone.

This “deal” also raises an important question, will the “two for one” deals count as two sales so that Microsoft can boost their figures? I’ll let you decide.

Another reader of ours sent this link earlier in the afternoon. It sheds light on market distribution but does not estimate absolute numbers:

At the time most would have thought HTC’s dominance in the Windows Mobile segment would not see this repeated in the Windows Phone 7 segment, but a poll run yesterday on WMPoweruser.com for current Windows Phone 7 owners, which collected over 1500 votes, revealed that Samsung already owns 51% of the Windows phone 7 market, well ahead of HTC’s 37%.

The rear is brought up by LG with 9%, and Dell with 3%.

Microsoft still refuses to give away numbers and it also declines to comment on numbers that unintentionally got out. This almost certainty means that Microsoft fails here very badly, so Novell/Microsoft patents — along with other software patents in Microsoft’s possession — are probably the only ‘product’ to survive for Microsoft in this space. As we wrote yesterday (quoting Groklaw for example), Microsoft hopes to monetise the mobile space only by taxing more of it, using software patents. Ideally and originally, Microsoft wanted to make real products, but it’s coming to grips with the fact that it arrived too late. Becoming a patent troll is symptom of a company’s unstoppable decline. Vista Phony 7 [sic] was Microsoft’s final stab at this market and it’s said to possibly lead to Steve Ballmer’s ejection. █

Links 25/11/2010: LPC, Happypenguin.org Back Online

Posted in News Roundup at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Boxee Box Review

      The Boxee has been built with a simple goal in mind. Its creators say that “a lot of your favorite shows and movies are already available on the Internet. Boxee is a device that finds them and puts them on your TV. It’s easy to use and even better, there’s no monthly fee”. That’s the phrase that can be found on Boxee’s homepage. Boxee has been an early player that has generated a lot of buzz in the “Media Center” circle. The project has started as a software platform that can be installed on a PC, Mac or Linux computer. The main downside of that is that this becomes a fairly expensive proposition. The Boxee Box was brought to market to provide a hardware platform capable of running the Boxee software – for $199. Try to beat that by building your own computer. Now the question is: how does it perform, and how can it help you today? Let’s take a look.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • LPC: Life after X

        Keith Packard has probably done more work to put the X Window System onto our desks than just about anybody else. With some 25 years of history, X has had a good run, but nothing is forever. Is that run coming to an end, and what might come after? In his Linux Plumbers Conference talk, Keith claimed to have no control over how things might go, but he did have some ideas. Those ideas add up to an interesting vision of our graphical future.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Trinity Like Whoa

        Packages are offered for Ubuntu, and as such I decided to grab the Ubuntu Minimal ISO. Booting the CD, I chose to go with a command line installation. The installer finished without fuss. Rebooting into my minimalistic environment, I went ahead and grabbed my favorite editor (ne – the nice editor; apt-get install ne). You need to add the Trinity Ubuntu repositories to your sources.list, which isn’t difficult at all.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 24th October 2010

        Migrating the WYSIWYG Editor to WebKit in Blogilo. Twitter Lists support in Choqok. More work on KAccessible. KTorrent gains support for the Magnet protocol. Work in KRFB to allow more than one RFB server run at once. Better Valgrind 3.6.0 compatibility in KCacheGrind. Important progress on the Perl KDE bindings.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Being US-centric does not serve GNOME Foundation well

        The GNOME Foundation has been forced to change the rules for a design contest it is holding after one of its members objected to the exclusion of certain countries.

        The contest, to design a new T-shirt, initially excluded people living in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma).

        Those living in areas which are restricted by US export controls and sanctions were also not allowed to participate.

        Developer Baptiste Mille-Mathias pointed out the hypocrisy of these rules, stating, “GNOME being based on people and openness, I wonder how a Free Software & Non-profit organisation would comply with such US embargo related laws.

      • 7like GNoMenu theme: Ambiance meets windows

        Whilst I’m not traditionally a GnoMenu fan even I can’t help but drool over ~Blitz-Bomb‘s 7Like theme for it.

        Fusing elements of Ambiance with well-worn aspects of Windows 7′s start menu the theme has a whole lot to like in it.

      • Faenza Icon Theme Undergoes Major Upgrade, Tons of New Icons Included

        Beloved Faenza icon theme undergoes a major upgrade. Lots of new icons are included and improved Firefox and Google Chrome icons are absolutely beautiful IMO.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Watch for Shares of Red Hat (RHT) to Approach Resistance at $43.87

        SmarTrend has detected shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) have bullishly opened above the pivot of $42.50 today and have reached the first resistance level of $43.05.

      • Fedora

        • Fuduntu 14.5 – Subtle improvements

          A lot of refinements have been put into place behind the scenes including adding the BFS scheduler, and making the deadline IO scheduler default. I have also added a recent tweak that should improve availability and response time of a Fuduntu computer while users are compiling software, or doing other CPU intensive tasks in terminals.

        • Xen Dom0 Support May Come Back To Fedora

          Besides the kernel side of things, there’s also work to be done in ensuring Fedora’s virtualization utilities (libvirt, virt-manager, etc) are still in good shape for Xen and that there’s an easy way to enable the Xen kernel support from GRUB without manually editing the boot-loader’s configuration file.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • My current “What to do after installing Ubuntu?” script

          This script is obviously a work in progress. I already have some ideas to enhance it, but since it has already saved me significant hassle (and typing!) when installing new Ubuntu instances, I thought I’d share it.

        • Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu makes like Space Shuttle

          It looks like astronaut and tech magnate Mark Shuttleworth’s investment in the Ubuntu commercial Linux distribution is about to pay off. Ubuntu is taking off like a rocket, and the sale of Novell to Attachmate plus the higher prices Red Hat is charging for its Enterprise Linux 6 are probably going to fuel Ubuntu’s adoption even more in the data centers of the world.

          The third Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 10.04, came out in April and seems to have been a turning point for the Ubuntu distribution. With that release, Canonical demonstrated that it could tame the Debian variant of Linux and put together a polished desktop and server operating system with commercial-grade support options like those available through Red Hat and Novell. On the server front, the server variant of the 10.04 LTS release had all of the new or impending x64 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices baked into it as well as a fully integrated variant of the Eucalyptus cloud framework for creating cloudy infrastructure for applications to romp around.

        • Ubuntu One — good or bad?

          But ok, I installed all required packages and it connected. Synced Tomboy notes from desktop and Conboy ones from my Nokia N900 so now I have them in sync (without a way to select which one I want where but that’s limit of apps). Then I decided to make use from synchronization of contacts. And here the fun begins… My phone is not supported by Funambol (syncml backend used by Ubuntu One) so sorry — all I can use is one bug on LaunchPad.

        • Ubuntu sticking to six-month development cycle

          While Google has successfully (so far) moved to a rapid release cycle for its Chrome browser, it’s hard to see this working very well for an entire Linux distribution. It might work for some packages that sit on top of the distro (like Firefox) but it just won’t work for the whole OS. This is especially true in the enterprise market where Canonical is trying to get a foothold. A rolling release cycle would not go over well on the server side. It wouldn’t work too well for OEMs, either. A rolling cycle for development is one thing, but as Canonical tries to capture bigger deals it’s a non-starter for any of the OEMs and ISVs that Canonical works with.

        • Canonical welcomes new partners following latest Ubuntu 10.10 release

          Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today the signing of several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • New Linux Mint 10 – Will you be lured into trying it?

            Battling to be classified as the most reliable open source operating system is the Linux Mint team, which apparently has put its plans to action by leveraging its existing and most popular product the Linux Mint and in turn has brought out a new and updated version of the same – Linux Mint 10 a.k.a. “Julia”. Considered the 2nd runner-up in the open source OS industry, Linux Mint 10 follows the lead of Ubuntu and Fedora who have dominated the open source market with products like Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora Project.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny module includes 1.2GHz CPU, Wi-Fi

      Anders Electronics announced a diminutive COM (computer on module) featuring Marvell’s 1.2GHz Armada 510 CPU. The Linux-ready CM-A510 offers functionality including 1GB of DDR3 memory, up to 512MB of flash storage, a camera interface, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, and onboard Wi-Fi, the company says.

    • Tablets

      • Seven- and 10-inch tablets run Android 2.1 on 1GHz chips

        Internet Connectivity and Networking (ICAN) has launched both a seven-inch and a 10-inch tablet running Android 2.1 on a 1GHz processor. The $400 ICAN! 7 and $500 ICAN! 10 ship with 16GB of internal storage, plus SD expansion, Wi-Fi, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, dual USB 2.0 ports, and HDMI ports, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome Toolbox Places Useful Features At Your Fingertips

      Have you ever encountered the situation where you have plenty of tabs open in your browser and one of them is blasting out loud advertisement video? Yes, I know, it is very irritating, especially when you don’t know which tab contains the annoying video and you have to flick through all the tabs to locate (and stop) the ad. With Chrome Toolbox, you can now easily mute all the tabs with a single click.

  • SaaS

    • To the Clouds with Linux — But Who Controls It?

      According to my research, Google Docs is considered proprietary software even though saved items are kept on Linux-based storage. This demonstrates that Google is all too happy to utilize Linux for storage, yet it’s also not against using proprietary software when it meets its needs.

      The odd part to this is that Google happens to be a huge supporter of various open source projects, often with no direct benefit for itself. The reasoning can go either way. One possibility is that Google wants to legitimately give back to the open source ecosystem that enabled it to succeed in the first place. The other possibility is that Google simply loves the great PR of being seen as the good guys.

    • 50 Open Source Apps You Can Use in the Cloud

      The cloud computing boom has brought a surge of opportunity to the open source world. Open source developers and users are taking advantage of these opportunities in three key ways.

      First, many open source applications are now available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis. For open source project owners, hosting apps in the cloud offers a new revenue stream. And for users, it means access to excellent programs and support without the need to maintain their own hardware or hire additional support personnel.

  • Databases

    • French social security now run on PostgreSQL and Red Hat Linux

      According to a report from the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations (OSOR), France’s social security system, the Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF), is now using the open source PostgreSQL database management system (DBMS). The IT firm Bull is assisting CNAF and says that the PostgreSQL system is currently running nearly one billion SQL queries each day on Red Hat Linux servers.

  • CMS

    • The 6 Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress

      Social media: love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore it. During the past few years, social media — along with Facebook and Twitter — have grown by leaps and bounds in popularity. If you have a personal or professional blog, you are already part of the social media universe. A great way to increase the popularity of your blog is by using other forms of social media to promote it. WordPress has many plugins to help you with this endeavor.

  • Business

  • Government

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Doctors’ Orders

      The government’s war on medical “price fixing” squelches speech without helping consumers.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • View from America: We do not consent

      In new efforts to protect citisens against domestic and international terrorism, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has implemented body scanners at airports nationwide. In addition to metal detectors, these machines capture 3-D images of potential passengers and transmit the photos to agents responsible for analytics. Originally, the TSA claimed the “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded” but this claim has since been debunked.

    • Strip search with a difference: passenger arrested after stripping to avoid pat down

      Amid the furore over airport security, Sam Wolanyk had a plan to avoid his second intrusive pat down in a week … he stripped off.

      But Mr Wolanyk, who had previously campaigned for the right to openly carry guns, was arrested.

      He stripped to his underwear at San Diego International Airport but refused a body scan and pat-down search because “it was obvious that my underwear left nothing to the imagination.”.

    • Busybodies down the ages
    • Your risks and rights with TSA’s ‘enhanced’ screening (FAQ)
    • Traveller re-enters USA without passing through a pornoscanner or having his genitals touched

      Matt returned from Paris to Cincinnati, where he was given the choice of a pornoscanner or a bit of the old nutsack-fondling from the TSA. Instead, Matt insisted that it was his right as an American with a passport who was n ot suspected of any wrongdoing to enter his country. The TSA told him the airport cops would arrest him if he didn’t comply. The airport cops told him it was up to the TSA and clearly didn’t appreciate being made to do someone else’s dirty work. In the end, he was escorted out of the airport without having to submit to either procedure. He recorded much of the encounter on with his iPhone’s audio recorder, too.

    • TSA Chief Apologizes to Airline Passenger Soaked in Urine After Pat-Down

      An airline passenger outfitted with a urine bag for medical reasons had to sit through his flight soaked in urine after a TSA agent dislodged his bag during an aggressive security pat-down. Nearly a month later, he finally received an apology from TSA chief John Pistole.

    • Newspapers Say: Shut Up And Get Scanned And Groped

      Matt Welch has a nice post over at Reason, highlighting numerous editorials from some big time newspapers mocking people who are concerned about the TSA’s naked scans and/or groping procedures, beginning with the LA Times’ perfectly obnoxious shut up and be scanned. Most of the editorials take on the typical apologists’ line that “this is what we need to do to be secure.” This can be summarized by the claim in the Spokesman-Review, entitled “Discomfort a small price for security on airplanes.”

    • Audit Faults TSA’s Training of Airport Screeners as Rushed, Poorly Supervised

      Flying for Thanksgiving? Whether you plan to submit patriotically to a naked body scan, or opt instead for the full security grope, you can at least rest assured that the 43,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) handling airport screening have benefited from the most rigorous and up-to-date training the U.S. government can provide.

    • What John Pistole means when he talks about “enhanced” TSA checkpoints

      In this video, YouTube user SpinRemover adds subtitles to TSA boss John Pistole’s now-infamous Anderson Cooper interview, translating bureaucratese into plain English.

    • Viral ‘pornoscan’ protest challenges TSA
    • Protect Your Data During U.S. Border Searches
    • Are Air Travelers Criminal Suspects?

      The growing revolt against invasive TSA practices is encouraging to Americans who are fed up with federal government encroachment in their lives. In the case of air travelers, this encroachment is quite literally physical. But a deep-seated libertarian impulse still exists within the American people, and opposition to the new TSA full body scanner and groping searches is gathering momentum.

      I introduced legislation last week that is based on a very simple principle: federal agents should be subject to the same laws as ordinary citizens. If you would face criminal prosecution or a lawsuit for groping someone, exposing them to unwelcome radiation, causing them emotional distress, or violating indecency laws, then TSA agents should similarly face sanctions for their actions.

    • Does the TSA Ever Catch Terrorists?

      It’s hard to say. The TSA was unable to provide any comprehensive data covering all nine years of its existence on short notice, but it does publicize incidents on a weekly basis: From Nov. 8 to Nov. 14, for example, agents found six “artfully concealed prohibited items” and 11 firearms at checkpoints, and they arrested six passengers after investigations of suspicious behavior or fraudulent travel documents. (Those figures are close to the weekly average.) It’s not clear, however, whether any of these incidents represent attempted acts of terrorism or whether they were honest accidents. (Whoops, forgot I had that meat cleaver on me! Or, I had no idea flares weren’t allowed!)

    • Pilot Sues TSA Over Intrusive Searches
    • Pilot Sues TSA Over Intrusive Searches

      We already discussed Pistole’s testimony and why he’s actually lying. Contrary to what Pistole claims (and Altman bought without checking), the vast majority of people getting on planes in US airports are going through neither full body scans or “an uncomfortably thorough pat-down.” Most people are still just going through traditional metal detectors. Even in the airports that have the backscatter naked image scanners, most passengers still just go through traditional metal detectors. Claiming that all passengers now go through either the backscatter scans or get a thorough pat-down is a lie.

      [...]

      Altman may be right that people are overreacting but he didn’t help by simply repeating the claims of Pistole and a weak poll, when both have already been proven to be misleading at best and downright false at worst. Perhaps instead of rushing to mock “the internet” and its mythical “ephemeral obsessions,” Altman could have taken some time to actually research the issue and to inform people of the details rather than just repeating the misleading claims from the TSA. That’s the kind of thing that would actually build up trust in the press, rather than disdain for the press.

    • TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers’ nail-clippers
    • Revolt: Orlando airport to drop TSA as security screeners

      The bad news: It’s not Orlando International but the much smaller Orlando Sanford International, which serves such popular destinations as Allentown, Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio, and of course Iceland. So if you’re thinking about taking your next vacation in Reykjavik, rest easy — hopefully there’ll be no junk-touching for you.

    • California official warns against inappropriate pat-downs

      This comes on the heels of word – as shared in Alan Levin’s story in USA TODAY – that TSA Administrator John Pistole has told a Senate committee in Washington that more invasive pat-downs are necessary. The developments come in the wake of public outcry over the search techniques.

    • TSA Enhanced Pat Downs : The Screeners Point Of View
    • ‘It only cost $4,200 and was run by less than six brothers’: Al Qaeda’s gloats at ‘bargain’ printer bomb plane plot

      ‘This branch of Al Qaeda is very lethal and I believe them — in terms of what they say they’re trying to do (to attack the United States),’ Mullen told CNN television’s State of the Union programme.

      The United States already stepped up airline passenger security after a Nigerian man tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit last December. AQAP had also claimed responsibility for that.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Police to get greater web censorship powers

      Police will effectively get more powers to censor websites under proposals being developed by Nominet, the company that controls the .uk domain registry.

      Following lobbying by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Nominet wants to change the terms and conditions under which domain names are owned so that it can revoke them more easily in response to requests from law enforcement agencies.

    • Why Voting For COICA Is A Vote For Censorship

      While I have no illusion that most of those who made such comments will ever come back and read this, it is important to make this point clearly, for those who are interested. There are many, many serious problems with the way COICA is written, but this post will highlight why it is a bill for censorship, and how it opens the door to wider censorship of speech online.

    • Why Didn’t Google Or Comcast Protect The Identity Of Anonymous Church Blogger Who Was Outed?

      Paul Levy wanted to know the answer to another question: why did both Google and Comcast cough up this guy’s identifying information without even giving him a chance to quash the subpoenas. He asked both companies and the answer he got is, basically, that they immediately cough up info if it’s a criminal subpoena rather than a civil one…

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • FCC boss: net neutrality “will happen”… someday… really

      “I have heard a lot of ‘chatter’ from the communications bar, Wall Street analysts and reporters, just in the past 72 hours,” noted Federal Communications Commissioner Robert M. McDowell during a talk before the Federalist Society on Monday. “This morning, speculation abounds.”

      McDowell was referring to the ample quantity of buzz out in Capitol Hill-land over whether the FCC is actually going to issue net neutrality rules in the near future.

      “Let me say at the outset that, as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, appointed by two presidents and unanimously confirmed by the Senate each time,” he added. “I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen… or when… or even if.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • SAP ordered to pay Oracle $1.3bn
    • London Underground Told To Cut Back Legal Expenses… So It’s Suing A Restaurant Called The Underground

      Via Annie Mole (actually via IanVisits), we find this fun juxtaposition of two recent stories about the London Underground. Apparently, the organization that runs the famed London subway system has massively increased its legal spending — tripling it in the last five years.

    • Copycat logos are pitting high schools and colleges in a trademark turf war

      During the 2008 presidential campaign, CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs hosted his evening broadcast from the gymnasium of Freedom-South Riding High in Loudoun County. Painted on the wall was the school’s official logo – a black and gold eagle with wings spread open and flashing its talons.

    • Gibson Sues Everyone Over Paper Jamz Paper Guitars, Specifically Goes After eBay

      Eric Goldman points us to the news that the (notoriously litigious) Gibson guitar company is suing a whole bunch of companies for selling the new “Paper Jamz” paper multi-touch guitars. If you haven’t seen these things, they’re basically a “paper” (really plastic) guitar with a capacitive multi-touch surface that plays music in response to your touch. Here’s a video demonstrating the thing in action:

    • The Well-Pilfered Clavier

      This punkish intellectual property scofflaw was Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the baroque style, spiritual father of modern Western music, literal father of a family of musicians, and inspiration to working creators everywhere. He was also —maybe not coincidentally—a serial user of other people’s work. According to one legend, as a child Bach would jailbreak and copy music his family had locked away. Later, he came into his own as a composer in part by taking a large body of work by Antonio Vivaldi and transposing it for the keyboard.

    • Wyden Threatens To Block Online IP Bill

      Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Thursday threatened to block legislation aimed at curbing piracy and counterfeiting on foreign Web sites, saying the bill is a heavy-handed solution to the problem.

      “It seems to me the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act as written today, is the wrong medicine,” Wyden, the chairman of the Finance International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness Subcommittee, said during a hearing on international trade and the digital economy. “Deploying this statute to combat online copyright and infringement seems almost like a bunker buster cluster bomb when really what you need is a precision-guided missile.”

      Wyden said that unless changes are made to the bill, introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to ensure it “no longer makes the global online marketplace more hazardous to consumers and American Internet companies, I’m going to do everything I can to take the necessary steps to stop it from passing the U.S. Senate.”

    • United Brands sues Anheuser-Busch for too-similar can design

      United Brands Co., maker of Joose flavored malt beverage and beer products, has filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement, copyright infringement, unfair competition and related claims, against Anheuser-Busch Inc. and its competing flavored malt beverage called Tilt. United Brands has sold Joose since 2006 and is seeking to protect the brand integrity of Dragon Joose, one of its popular versions of Joose.

    • US Risks Not Getting FIFA World Cup… Because It Won’t Give FIFA Special Copyright Powers

      The US bid committee hasn’t secured a commitment from the US government that it will give FIFA the right to act as its own copyright cops and takeover the legal system so it can do things like criminalize wearing orange clothes. As the full FIFA report (PDF) puts it: “However, as the required guarantees, undertakings and confirmations are not given as part of Government Guarantee No. 6 (Protection and Exploitation of Commercial Rights) and mere reference is made to existing general intellectual property laws in the USA, FIFA’s rights protection programme cannot be ensured.”

    • Copyrights

      • EMI Seeks to Bar EFF From Cloud-Music Case

        Billion-dollar record label EMI has asked a New York City federal judge to bar a non-profit legal rights group from filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a closely watched internet copyright case that could have broad implications for the future of cloud computing.

        EMI says the brief filed last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups supporting MP3tunes’s argument that it’s not responsible for what music its users store on its servers should be barred because it is “a pure advocacy piece, not a ‘friend of the court.’” Amicus curiae briefs are often filed by interest groups and the government in cases that could set major precedents, in order to illustrate the broader ramifications of the case.

      • “Copyright owners better off in a regime that allows downloading from illegal sources”

        This striking headline comes from a note received from Vivien Rörsch (De Brauw), on two recent and equally striking Dutch decisions handed down last week by the Court of Appeal of The Hague: in the two separate cases the court ruled that, since downloading from illegal sources for private use was permitted under Dutch law, this was to the copyright owner’s advantage.

      • Broadcasters take live streaming sites to court

        Major broadcast networks are taking two online video streaming services to court in order to keep them from streaming free over-the-air broadcasts to customers. Both companies, FilmOn and Ivi, contend they should have the right to stream the content under a compulsory license attached to some forms of content in the US Copyright Act. The networks contend that the companies are “unjustly profiting” off of networks’ programming.

        ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC filed separate suits against FilmOn and Ivi in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York. A judge is considering a temporary restraining order against FilmOn while a similar hearing for a restraining order against Ivi is expected in the next few weeks.

      • Solicitors face tribunal over internet copyright claims

        Two lawyers who chased people over illegally copied porn films and computer games are to appear before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for trying to use their positions of trust to take “unfair advantage of other persons”.

        Davenport Lyons partners David Gore (who has represented Sting and Jonathan Dimbleby) and Brian Millar (who has since left the London firm), allegedly sent more than 6,000 letters to web users threatening legal action in what critics called a “bounty hunter” operation. But the data used by Davenport Lyons showed only who paid the internet bills, not who downloaded the content. On an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, that could be anyone.

      • Threatened by a copyright lawyer?

        So far the US Copyright Group (USCG) has sued more than 16,000 people this year for sharing movies online. It has sued them anonymously based on their IP addresses, but has not managed to get most of their names and addresses yet.

        However as Ars Technica points out, it has yet to take anyone to court.

        Apparently when an ISP looks up the subscriber name associated with an IP address, USCG doesn’t immediately add their name to a lawsuit. Instead, like other law firms trying the same trick, it sends out a settlement letter, asking the person to pay a few thousand dollars in order not to be sued.

      • eMusic’s Rift With Indie Labels

        As eMusic prepares to add 250,000 songs from Universal Music Group’s catalogue to its sizeable online music store—and make a major overhaul to its subscription pricing scheme—it appears to be having a falling-out with a large group of independent record labels. Those failed negotiations suggest that the digital-music service may not be able to strike licensing deals that satisfy both large and small music labels.

      • Lawyer wants “Goliath verdict” against RIAA in abuse trial

        While the RIAA has stopped its mass litigation campaign against file-swappers, cases in progress persist. Tanya Andersen’s is one of the oddest and most intriguing, and it’s set to proceed to trial against the RIAA next year on charges of “abuse of the judicial process.”

      • Judge In Porn Piracy Case Is Keeping a Big Secret

        Earlier this month, adult entertainment studio West Coast Prods sued 9,729 anonymous individuals for allegedly pirating the porn film Teen Anal Nightmare 2—setting an unofficial record for lumping numerous copyright defendants into a single case.

        In the past year, targeting John Does en masse has become a popular technique in the war against piracy, and we’ll have more insight on the porn industry’s adoption of these mass lawsuits in an upcoming print issue of THR. But the West Coast Prods case is noteworthy for a reason other than its sheer size — those who want to see the legal documents are out of luck.

      • MPAA Boss Defends Censorships With Blatantly False Claims

        Lovely misleading way to open the piece. In fact, many of the sites the MPAA has declared as “rogue” are nothing more than online forums. Some of them, yes, do involve people pointing each other to where they might obtain unauthorized copies of movies, but it’s overly dramatic (though, hardly Oscar-worthy) to claim that the only purpose they serve is to profit from “the stolen and counterfeited goods and ideas of others.”

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