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11.18.11

IRC Proceedings: November 17th, 2011

Posted in News Roundup at 12:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

MOSAID, Microsoft, and Antitrust

Posted in Microsoft at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mosaid homepage
Screenshot of the homepage of the patent troll Microsoft is feeding

Summary: MOSAID, which we wrote about many times before, is now a subject of more calls for antitrust/regulatory action

FOR over a month or two Techrights has foreseen Microsoft using MOSAID as a patent troll and proxy against Linux not just because of anti-Red Hat lawsuits but also because of the Nokia (versus Android) plot. We have begun building a wiki page about MOSAID and we shall keep it updated as long as Microsoft and its mole at Nokia try using this troll as a proxy. According to this article, MOSAID is coming under fire for being part of anti-competitive abuses:

Quinn Emanuel, another fabulous law firm, has joined the team representing Barnes & Noble before the ITC. And Google is in the mix too, filing an objection to Microsoft’s request for a shortened time for Google to respond to its motion. This is getting good. Barnes & Noble has filed a truly hilarious compilation of prior art, in a supplemental notice of prior art, which shows me that it’s still not too late to keep finding more, if you happen to know of any. And it has asked for a letter rogatory to go after evidence regarding MOSAID, a Canadian firm, and its deal with Microsoft and Nokia via documents and a deposition of the CEO. MOSAID doesn’t wish to voluntarily turn over anything.

MOSAID is one heck of a rancid thing and so is Microsoft, which pulls MOSAID’s strings to distort competition. We are now seeing just how ridiculous the USPTO is and the extent to which Microsoft exploits this malfunction based on Microsoft boosters who write: [via]

It almost seems that way based on a newly surfaced patent application from the Redmond company. The filing describes a computer system that would monitor behavior in the workplace with the goal of getting workers to stop each other people off during meetings, and convincing bosses to stop bugging their direct reports on their lunch breaks, among many other bad workplace habits — but at no small cost to workplace privacy.

Microsoft: is it a patent troll or a company that produces things? The truth may be somewhere in between. █

5 Years After Microsoft Deal OpenSUSE Releases Hardly Celebrated

Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Christmas

Summary: Another quick look at coverage of OpenSUSE 12.1

OPENSUSE 12.1 has been out for a couple of days and it still does not receive coverage from the corporate press. There is review of the distribution by Swapnil Bhartiya at Muktware and few more reviews in Linux sites. There are benchmarks from Michael Larabel over at Phoronix (including boot performance) and some blog posts that qualify as news even though they are informal. A lot of the coverage comes from existing or former Novell staff (OpenSUSE community manager in this case) or Linux advocates such as Scott Merrill at TechCrunch, Sean at Server Watch, and staff at OS News.

SoftPedia just posts some screenshots and the OpenSUSE site moves on to other topics such as WebYaST. To quote:

So the benefit is to login on a target linux machine from a computer which

* has not to be a unix machine and
* is without any VPN configuration stuff.

In summary, OpenSUSE enjoys none of the mainstream coverage it used to get. The OpenSUSE Boosters may not like to hear it, but it’s true. █

Apple- and Microsoft-backed Front Group Lobbies for Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Posted in Apple, Microsoft at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Business Software Alliance thinks of the children (who are “pirates”)!!!

Kids playing

Summary: SOPA threatens the internet as we know it and the BSA is among those pushing for it (at the behest of the usual suspects)

A DEAR reader and occasional contributor told us that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is doing its work again, acting as a front for Microsoft et al.

Brian Proffitt wrote something related to this when he said that “[a]s the U.S. House Judiciary Committee prepares for its hearing the morning on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), hundreds of web sites and activists are trying to bring attention to the bill with American Censorship Day.

“Protestors of SOPA have a long uphill battle, if the testimony in today’s committee meeting is any indication. The witness list for the hearing on SOPA, scheduled for this morning at 10 a.m. EST, seems decidedly comprised of witnesses in favor of the new bill. Of the witnesses, only Katherine Oyama, Policy Counsel from Google seems likely to testify against the bill.”

With that in mind, our reader and contributor notes that she found connection between Microsoft, BSA & SOPA. She explained this as follows: “I’m often late in reading news/information that everyone else in the world has already seen, but I just found this article about Microsoft’s support for SOPA, and Apple’s support. Thought I’d send it to you.”

Here’s the link that she sent and here’s a short excerpt: “…So we have Microsoft supporting the intellectual ancestor of SOPA, but that’s certainly not enough to say that the company supports SOPA outright.

“We can, however, show that it does. And somewhat disingenuously, if I may. You see, Microsoft is a major player in the Business Software Alliance, along with Apple and 27 other companies. And the BSA supports SOPA. This is from a recent BSA bulletin: ‘The Business Software Alliance today commended House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) for introducing the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (H.R. 3261) to curb the growing rash of software piracy and other forms of intellectual property theft that are being perpetrated by illicit websites.’”

“In short,” explains our reader and contributor, “Microsoft is using a front group to throw its support behind SOPA, while publicly saying and doing nothing, thus avoiding our rancor and displeasure. Well, no, that won’t do at all.”

It is worth throwing in this other bit of news:

House Judiciary Committee SOPA Hearings Stacked 5 To 1 In Favor Of Censoring The Internet

[...]

Apparently the folks behind SOPA are really scared to hear from the opposition. We all expected that the Judiciary Committee hearings wouldn’t be a fair fight. In Congress, they rarely are fair fights. But most people expected the typical “three in favor, one against” weighted hearings. That’s already childish, but it seems that the Judiciary Committee has decided to take the ridiculousness to new heights. We’d already mentioned last week that the Committee had rejected the request of NetCoalition to take part in the hearings. At the time, we’d heard that the hearings were going to be stacked four-to-one in favor of SOPA. However, the latest report coming out of the Committee is that they’re so afraid to actually hear about the real opposition that they’ve lined up five pro-SOPA speakers and only one “against.”

Since it has made the news quite a lot recently (especially the latest links roundup), it is worth noting which corporations (aka campaign funders) are behind it. █

Microsoft ‘Secure Boot’ Cracked

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Alone

Summary: The mechanism which secures Microsoft from Linux growth is not delivering whatever ‘features’ Microsoft alleged that it would

MICROSOFT has been marketing as “security” a mechanism that complicates or blocks GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] . Well, via Slashdot we found this report which defeats Microsoft’s excuse:

At the upcoming MalCon security conference in Mumbai, Austrian independent developer and security analyst Peter Kleissner is scheduled to release the first known “bootkit” for Windows 8—an exploit that is able to load from a hard drive’s master boot record and reside in memory all the way through the startup of the operating system, providing root access to the system. The exploit allegedly defeats the security features of Windows 8′s new Boot Loader. However, Kleissner said in a message exchange with Ars Technica that the exploit did not currently target the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), but instead went after legacy BIOS. Kleissner said he has shared his research and paper and the paper he plans to present, “The Art of Bootkit Development,” with Microsoft.

So, what’s the point of it then? People have predicted this all along. █

Defeats for Microsoft on the Web

Posted in Site News at 10:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

This is the beginning of the end

Film

Summary: Microsoft is killing its Big Data project and perhaps also killing Commerce Server

BY ITS OWN admission, Microsoft loses billions of dollars per year on the Web. Had it been a separate company, it would have declared bankruptcy long ago.

According to unofficial Microsoft PR sources, Microsoft may be planning to axe another product. To quote:

It’s been a while since I blogged about another of my (not so) crazy Microsoft rumors. Here’s the latest, plus the ground rules for those weighing how believable this information may or may not be.

As part of my job as a full-time Microsoft watcher, I get a lot of tips about Microsoft from customers, competitors, partners and even some Softies themselves. However, ever since I worked for PCWeek as a reporter close to 20 years ago, I had it drilled into my head that until I could get three independent sources to corroborate a tip — none of whom was repeating something s/he heard in an echo chamber — I couldn’t run it as a story.

Maybe she could not run it as a story because Microsoft retaliates against people who write negative stories about Microsoft, at least based on what she once told me. The story she was so reluctant to tell is that Microsoft’s server efforts are feeble enough to merit another shutdown (we covered some more before) and Wired has this new article about Microsoft killing its Big Data project:

Microsoft is not only putting its weight behind Hadoop, the open source platform for crunching large amounts of data across thousands of servers. It’s abandoning the proprietary platform it built to do much the same thing.

Last last week, a blog post from Redmond announced that the company would stop development on LINQ to HPC, aka Dryad, a distributed number-crunching platform developed in Microsoft’s Research Lab. Instead, the company will focus on its effort to port Hadoop to its Windows Server operating system and Windows Azure, its online service for building and deploying applications.

To put it in simple terms, Microsoft failed to develop its own software, so it took some from somewhere else. Very typical. █

Links – SOPA round up.

Posted in Site News at 3:47 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • Google vs. Microsoft: Not All Clouds Are Created Equal

    According to Google, all this has led over 4 million businesses to adopt Google Apps, with 5,000 jumping aboard each day, and during his Monday morning speech, Singh made a point of saying that “thousands” of these daily converts summarily switch off servers running Microsoft software.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Congress Declares War on the Global Internet – Internet Replies “Bring It On!”

      It’s certain that this war could bring with it many causalities. Network fragmentation in various forms is an obvious example, since the rest of the world seems unwilling (surprise!) to allow the U.S. to keep dictating Internet policy forever … All manner of “workarounds” to such censorship are being proposed, many extremely intriguing, most of which would actually be illicit under the anti-circumvention provisions of SOPA. … [Congress] will be setting loose the technological dogs of war in ways that are beyond the scope of their darkest nightmares, and that make “Anonymous” and the “Occupy” movement look like fleas on an elephant by comparison.

    • At Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for “pro-pirate” Google

      The House Judiciary Committee today held an important hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act with a hugely stacked deck of witnesses—Google’s lawyer was the only one of the six to object to the bill in a meaningful way. … This wasn’t a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with “the pirates.”

    • Issa back peddles SOPA

      “This is a very broad coalition from far left to far right who realize this will hurt innovation, something we can’t afford to do. And there are other ways to accomplish what they say is their goal” … Issa said he believes the bill can’t be fixed, and argued it doesn’t use the best tools for settling disputes regarding foreign sites. … the bill’s sponsors didn’t want to hear from opponents, but argued those lawmakers must now accept that there is real opposition to their bill.

      The problem was not the method and unintended consequences, it was the goal and how transparent it was.

    • RIAA submits a “hit list” of sites for the US to shut down.

      This last example shows that the definition of infringing sites can become very subjective down the line. It only requires a little creative writing to make half of the websites on the Internet appear as a rogue site, and thus eligible to be shut down.

    • Why SOPA Censorship Is Actually Aimed at Google

      A simple thought experiment reveals why SOPA’s model will fail to control piracy as its proponents wish, and why calls for its vast expansion — primarily aimed at censoring Google — can be anticipated. … let’s imagine that a large number of sites unrelated to “pirated” files, but sympathetic to free speech concerns, decided that they’d each list (on a sort of “by the way” basis) just a few — perhaps even one each — IP address links to “forbidden” material … The reaction of censorship proponents would seem predictable — they would demand that Google and other search engines remove pages/sites from search results even if there’s a single mention … search engines are crucial agents toward helping to assure free speech on the Net, and so will be under constant attack by those forces who wish to restrict speech

    • EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

      The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.”

    • Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT

      Microsoft did not sign but Yahoo and Facebook proxies did. Will there be chair throwing?

  • Privacy

    • Facebook tracking of members and non members is finally noticed by mainstream US press.

      I have intentionally not linked to the article because it is poorly written, light on technical details and smears Google as equivalent to Facebook, Adobe and Microsoft.

11.17.11

Links 17/11/2011: AMD Catalyst 11.11, Memcached 1.4.10

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Benefits of Migrating to Linux

    One of the biggest issues facing IT is finding ways to reduce cost and complexity, particularly in an increasingly competitive environment in which upper management demands justification for every expense. Gone are the days of the CFO signing big cheques for projects just “because the IT guys say we have to have it.” Harvard Research Group (HRG) conducted a survey of professionals involved in migrations to Linux, especially as the migrations relate to initiatives to reduce cost and complexity.

  • Server

    • IBM pushes BlueGene/Q to 100 petaflops

      In February 2009, IBM announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the US Department of Energy’s supercomputing centers, was shelling big bucks to build a 20 petaflops machine that is now known as BlueGene/Q.

    • Aruba Advances Instant Enterprise WLAN

      Big enterprises typically deploy Wireless LAN (WLAN) with Access Points (APs) managed by a central controller. But not everyone needs the power and complexity of a controller-based WLAN, which is why Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) has its Aruba Instant portfolio of products.

      Aruba Instant is a controller-less architecture for WLAN, enabling enterprises both large and small to more rapidly deploy wireless networks. The system includes a virtual controller embedded into the access point, providing administrators with some of the same features that are available on physical hardware controllers.

  • Kernel Space

    • Download Linux Kernel 3.2 RC2 Now

      Linus Torvalds proudly announced last evening, November 15th, that Linux kernel 3.2 RC2 is now available for download and testing as a tar archive, from the kernel.org website.

    • AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, Turbo Core Impact On Linux

      For those wondering about the impact that AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet and Turbo Core technologies have under Linux for the latest-generation Bulldozer processors, here are some tests illustrating the changes in performance, power consumption, and operating temperature.

    • AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, Turbo Core Impact On Linux

    • Graphics Stack

      • OpenCL ratchets up to version 1.2

        OpenCL, the open-source standard for programming heterogeneous computing systems – aka CPU/GPU mashups – has reached version 1.2 with the ratification and public release of its latest specification documentation.

      • AMD Catalyst 11.11 Brings Critical Linux Changes

        What’s good about Catalyst 11.11 over previous releases? Well, AMD has still discontinued their tradition of publishing release notes for the public for their Catalyst Linux driver build, but Phoronix has you covered. Some of what’s noteworthy about the Catalyst 11.11 binary blob for Linux is:

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Future of UI Design

      Let me start this off by sharing a cute “futuristic” video about possible future of the mobile technology. Please keep in mind that this was created by folks at Microsoft so you won’t actually see any innovative ideas or ground shattering paradigm shifts in there. Microsoft basically created a vision of future which is safe – one which it understands.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Amarok 2.5 Beta 1 Released, Integrates Amazon Music Store

        Amarok is one of the most popular music player for GNU/Linux based operating systems. Recently the player has gone through some UI changes and has upset some long-time users. A group of developers forked Amarok and created Clementine. But, Amarok is still kicking and alive.

      • Stop me please!

        In a couple of weeks, I will need to deliver yet another default wallpaper for KDE’s 4.8-49 desktop editions.
        So my brain wile starting to go in to “crazy” mode to try to find that specif edge, design pattern, blue, that will make me happy and hopefully our users happy as well… decided to have a look at what we have done over that 4.x series and, I saw a pattern alright.

  • Distributions

    • Roundup of Linux Distributions for the Schools

      An important field where GNU/Linux is gaining ground is that of schools, both primary and secondary.

      I think it’s important to teach children and young people that there is a whole world of open source software to explore, and that not everything that is connected to a computer means Windows and/or proprietary systems.

    • New Releases

      • PHP 5.4 Hits RC1
      • Memcached 1.4.10 improves performance

        Memcached logo In a release focused on improving thread scalability and performance, the developers of Memcached, the distributed memory object caching system, say that version 1.4.10 can now “feed data back faster than any network card can support”. The performance enhancements saw developers report batched multiple key fetches per second rising from 1.6 million keys/second to “around 3.7 million keys/sec” on a quad core system with between 3 and 6 worker threads; more than six worker threads reduced speed, while a system with more cores was able to reach six million keys/second.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2011 PowerPack: A quick image tour

        As I promised, I bought the PowerPack version of Mandriva to test it. I installed it to a virtual machine because my main goal is not to check for performance, but to see what Mandriva 2011 PowerPack offers that you do not get in Mandriva Desktop 2011.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Drupal and Red Hat webcast on open source

        Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, and Opensource.com, the community building initiative of Red Hat Inc. are presenting a webcast on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 2330 hrs Indian time. The theme of the webcast would explore how Linux and Drupal have evolved to become open source communities by themselves and also compete in the enterprise world.

        The speakers at the event include Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, and Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Acquia. They will address the audience on their personal learnings and experiences and how they lead Open Source Affairs and Drupal, respectively.

      • Red Hat: 52-Week High Recently Eclipsed (RHT)

        Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded at a new 52-week high today of $53.42. Approximately 1.2 million shares have changed hands today, as compared to an average 30-day volume of 2.2 million shares.

      • Red Hat (RHT) Showing Bullish Technicals With Resistance At $54.99
      • Taking oVirt for a Spin

        The new open-source project is focused on delivering an openly developed and freely licensed virtualization system.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu, we all should thank you, however its time to move on..

            There are a lot of reasons why Ubuntu has become the byword for Linux over the last few years. It had a promise, a simple one really “Linux for Human beings” and as an Operating system Ubuntu has more than delivered on that promise.

          • 4 Simple Tools For Tweaking Ubuntu’s Look & Feel [Linux]

            Do you like Ubuntu, but wish it behaved differently? Don’t worry, there are a variety of ways to tweak Ubuntu to your liking.

            It’s been a key criticism since the launch of Unity, that Ubuntu is now impossible to configure. Ubuntu 11.10, the latest version of Ubuntu, is a mixed bag on this front. Some things, like automated backup, are easier to configure than ever before. Other things, like screensavers, are seemingly completely missing.

          • 5 Things I Would Like to See Improved in Ubuntu Software Center

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 12 Mini Review

              Once again Linux Mint developers released their release candidate for Lisa and, as is often the case, made it available with no expected date for the final release. Fine by me… Mint RCs are usually very good in quality, very mature and stable, so I rarely wait for the final version to get to grips with it. Those who read my Linux Mint 11 REVIEW probably remember that I was not particularly surprised with it. It felt like a conservative step forward that didn’t include that many surprises. In a sense, Katia was probably a safe bet to stay away from the brand new (and heavily unstable) Ubuntu’s Unity interface and also to ensure the move to GNOME3 happened at the right moment. In that sense, Mint 11 was a great release and one of the best implementations of GNOME 2.32, with a very personal caracter and carefully designed aesthetics. Linux Mint 12 is probably the opposite, for it represents the transition to GNOME3 and GNOME Shell, the developers first attempt to swim in these cold, unexplored waters. How does it do, you ask?

            • Mint 12: Just what the doctor ordered

              If you’ve been following Linux news lately, you know that on November 14, Mint 12 RC1 was released. This isn’t the final version (which is due at the end of November), but it’s unlikely that anything significant will change in the next couple of weeks. The most important aspect of Mint 12 is that it includes GNOME 3.2 as opposed to Unity Desktop, which is used by Ubuntu 11.10, the Linux distribution that Mint 12 is based on.

            • Lubuntu 11.10 review – a cure to Ubuntu’s Unity blues?

              Could Lubuntu 11.10 prove to be the perfect cure Ubuntu’s Unity backlash? Russell Barnes tests the latest LXDE spin to see how it has progressed in the last six months…

              Firstly, congratulations need to go to the Lubuntu project – it’s their first release as a fully subscribed member of the official Ubuntu family since Mark Shuttleworth welcomed the project to its ranks around the release of 11.04. It joins Xubuntu and Kubuntu among others, and slots rather neatly into the pack, each member bringing a slightly different slant to our beloved Linux desktop while staying true to the mainline software on offer from the core Ubuntu repositories.

            • Is Linux Mint the Most Popular Distro?

              It’s never been an easy thing to measure the popularity of a Linux distribution. Downloads alone are not an accurate measure, and distributions don’t always know how many people have actually downloaded their distro.

              Others, like Fedora, try to take stab at usage by counting how many servers contact the main repositories for updates.

            • Is Linux Mint the Most Popular Distro?
            • One Year with Bodhi Linux

              Today marks the one year point from our first Bodhi Linux “0.1.0″ release. I feel we have come a long way in such a short time and I am happy with everything the team has accomplished thus far. Would you believe that I first started Bodhi simply because I was tired of having to recompile E on each of my half dozen systems every week?

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • PandaBoard demo’d running Android 4.0

          PandaBoard.org’s community-driven PandaBoard is the first device to run Android 4.0, according to Texas Instruments (TI) and the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). Based on TI’s dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4430 processor — similar to the OMAP4460 available in the soon-to-ship Samsung Galaxy Nexus — the PandaBoard has been demonstrated on YouTube running an experimental build of “Ice Cream Sandwich.”

        • PandaBoard demo’d running Android 4.0
        • Turkish company builds 65-inch Android ‘tablet’ with Honeycomb, 1080p support (video)

          Want Honeycomb on your TV? You can take your chances with a Google TV-enabled set from Sony, or you can get the full Android experience by adding a connected tablet to your HD mix — if Istanbul-based Ardic gets its solution out the door, at least. The Turkish company’s prototype uses a 10-inch Android Honeycomb-based tablet to power a 65-inch LCD with 1080p support for basic gestures, like pinch and zoom. The display currently has two touch sensors, but a version with four sensors is on the way, which will bring multi-touch support. The tablet is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC, and includes 1GB of RAM, 16GB of flash memory, dual cameras, HDMI, USB, microSD and 3G and WiFi connectivity. A dock enables instant connectivity with the OEM TV, including HDMI for video and audio, and USB for touch input (a wireless version is in the works as well).

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Review: Amazon’s Kindle Fire isn’t really a tablet

        Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the world’s smallest vending machine disguised as a tablet. In other words, according to this eWEEK review, it’s really a dedicated media device, not something you should expect to use for work.

      • Amazon Kindle Fire sales could top 5 million in two months: report

        Amazon Kindle Fire is poised to be a retail blockbuster, according to one analyst. What makes the Amazon Kindle Fire different from the steady success of the Nook Color?

      • A day with my XO

        I am writing from the Airport of La Rioja, with my blue XO, waiting for my delayed plane to Buenos Aires. I spent this morning with the Minister of Education, professor Walter Flores and his team, visiting two elementary public schools. Today the whole province is celebrating a significant event, every child and teacher is showing their work on their XO, more than 50,000 have been already distributed. Un día con mi XO, is the title of this very peculiar Journey. A very impressive experience indeed, a massive celebration, the first ever, I think, in the OLPC world. An incredible feat for this Argentine province, the first in Argentina to have saturated the whole educational system, in elementary and special schools with the XO laptops, private and public, and also the secondary and technological schools with the Intel netbooks. A detail, the XO were bought by the province and the netbooks by the nation. A perfect solution.

      • Using a Tablet as a Portable Management Console

        With the dozen or so tablet computers on the market, surely you have one by now. If not, you really must buy one. Tablets are not only lightweight, ultra-portable, and capable of performing any remote administrative tasks, but they also give you that freedom that you never had before. But, that freedom that you so desperately seek might also bring along a lengthier chain attached to it. How can you have both freedom and a chain attached? System administrators understand the concept like no other technology professional.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Adobe donates Flex to foundation in community-friendly exit strategy

    Adobe and the Open Spoon Foundation are preparing to open up development of the Flex SDK. They plan to donate the technology to “an established open source foundation” so that the Flex community and other stakeholders can participate in developing future versions of the SDK.

    Flex is a development framework for building conventional applications with Flash. It’s especially targeted at the enterprise space and has some specialized capabilities for creating data-driven software. The core components of Flex were released as open source under the Mozilla Public License in 2007.

  • Haiku – Open-source recreation of BeOS

    The above title is so full of puns. Firstly, there’s Haiku, which is a wicked form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 5-7-5 morae, somewhat similar to the traditional European eight or ten syllable limericks. Then, recreation could be either recreation, as in we’re going to Ibiza, or recreation as we’re reforging anew the Sword of Whatever. Got it?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Early Mockups Emerge for Firefox’s Upcoming New Tab Page

        Google’s New Tab Page, which got a revamp last month has a new competitor. Oh and it’s not Speed Dial 2 which we talked about earlier, it’s the upcoming New Tab Page for Firefox. For Firefox 11, Mozilla is planning to replace the time-honored blank page with a spiffy new New Tab page. Here are some early mockups of how the page might look when it’s done.

      • Mozilla Releases Firefox 8.0.1

        Mozilla is about to release an update for the latest stable version of Firefox. Firefox 8.0.1 will be released less than two weeks after the release of Firefox 8, the latest stable version of the popular Internet browser.

      • Mozilla censors itself as part of American Censorship Day

        Mozilla has joined with other leading Internet organisations such as AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga and public interest groups in opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Also known as H.R.3261, SOPA was introduced in the US House of Representatives in October. The organisations have sent Congressional leaders a joint letterPDF expressing their concern with the legislative measures that are being introduced.

      • Introducing Mozilla Conductors
      • Firefox not to become fully multiprocess in the near future

        Mozilla has announced today that the Electrolysis project, which aims to make Firefox a multiprocess application, will be put in pause for the foreseeable future.

        The reason, the amount of changes required at the architectural level are so deep that it will require a large amount of resources to make this happen. At the same time, it is possible to get some important responsiveness improvements with much smaller investments.

      • Mozilla Builds a 1 Megawatt Data Center
      • How Mozilla Intents To Speed Up Firefox’s Update Process
      • Firefox 8 grabs 35% of traffic in just one week

        Mozilla’s latest version of it’s popular Firefox web browser saw rapid adoption following its release last week. Firefox 8, the fifth major release of the Mozilla browser so far this year, became available for download on November 9th. Within one day, the new iteration had already grown to account for 7% of all Firefox traffic across Chitika’s ad network, the company reported on Tuesday. By the end of the browser’s first week of availability, Firefox 8 claimed 35% of all Firefox traffic.

  • SaaS

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

    • VC funding for Hadoop and NoSQL tops $350m

      451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but below is a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding.

      According to our figures, between the beginning of 2008 and the end of 2010 $95.8m had been invested in the various Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors. That figure now stands at more than $350.8m, up 266%.

    • Index Provides Hortonworks With “Substantial” B Round
    • Vyatta Secures $12 Million in Funding Led by HighBAR Partners

      Vyatta, the leader in software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, announced today it has completed a funding round of $12 million led by HighBAR Partners. Also participating in this round of funding are existing investors JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems.

      HighBAR Partners specializes in infrastructure software and solutions companies, and Vyatta will leverage HighBAR’s broad network and operational experience to accelerate customer adoption and acquisition worldwide.

    • Network Infrastructure Startup Vyatta Raises $12M

      Network infrastructure startup Vyatta has raised $12 million in new funding led by HighBAR Partners with JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems participating. This brings Vyatta’s total funding to more than $45 million.

      Founded in 2005, Vyatta allows enterprises to segment and secure virtualized environments. The company offers an enterprise-focused network routing, security, and traffic management software that enables network administrators to leverage the performance of Intel/AMD hardware, as well as run in VMWare, Xen, and Hyper-V virtual environments.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Indian Government To Popularise Use Of Open Source

      India may not be a huge contributor to the development of Open Source and Linux, despite being and IT force, it is definitely becoming a big user of Open Source. Emerging economies like Brazil already champion the adoption of Open Source and India is not far behind.

      The Indian government recently prepared a draft for the “Policy on Device Drivers for Procurement of Hardware for e-Governance”. The goal of the policy was to ensure that computers must be capable of running on all general purpose operating systems including GNU/Linux and not just Microsoft Windows.

    • : System to display zoning permits online available as open source

      Software that combines geographic information systems (GIS) with zoning regulations and other country wide sources of information on land use, and offered online as an interactive map, was made available as open source software by the Dutch ministry of the Interior last week. The tool, titled Geozet, is hosted on the OSOR Forge since 1 November.

    • Open source serves as linchpin to modernization: Justice

      The use of open-source software is making a difference on the ground in combat zones, and it’s proving increasingly necessary to keep up with rapidly evolving technology and requirements, Maj. Gen. Nick Justice, commanding general of the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command said Nov. 16.

      Using open source, the Army can integrate technologies tailored to mission requirements on essentially an as-needed basis, and at a lower cost than traditional approaches, Justice said at the Red Hat Government Symposium in Washington.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Steve Jobs wanted an Iphone only network

    THE LATE FOUNDER of Apple, Steve Jobs had aspirations to build Apple’s own wireless network using unallocated bands of radio spectrum, for Iphones only.

    According to Network World, Jobs was going to use unlicensed parts of the spectrum for WiFi rather than work with existing mobile operators.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime

      Starting in the mid-1990s, major American cities began a radical transformation. Years of high violent crime rates, thefts, robberies, and inner-city decay suddenly started to turn around. Crime rates didn’t just hold steady, they began falling faster than they went up. This trend appeared in practically every post-industrial American city, simultaneously.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Selling the Oil Illusion, American Style

      US production of crude oil peaked in 1970 at 9.637 mbpd (million barrels per day) and has been in a downtrend for 40 years. Recently, however, there’s been a tremendous amount of excitement at the prospect of a “new era” in domestic oil production. The narratives currently being offered come in the following three forms: 1) the US has more oil than Saudi Arabia; 2) the US need only to remove regulatory barriers to significantly increase production; and 3) the US can once again become self-sufficient in oil production, dropping all imported oil to zero.

    • Oil Soars and Natural Gas Withers: But the Energy Singularity is Not Forthcoming

      If you firmly believe higher oil prices will drive energy transition, and the adoption of alternative sources, then do (by all means) feel excited today. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has sold for as much as a 25% discount to Brent oil over the past 9 months, has been slowly filling that gap recently. And, with the announcement today that a major pipeline would further relieve the surplus of WTI at Cushing (taking it away to the Gulf Coast), the discount has closed further. As of this morning, WTI soared to $102.00 as Brent has fallen closer to $110.00. Accordingly, the full impact of the higher global price of oil is now about to be visited upon North America. Is that bad news, or good news?

  • Finance

    • Occupy Wall Street: Crafting A Constitutional Amendment To Stop The 1%

      I’m very sympathetic to the cause of reducing the power of big business corporations to control our government, our economy, our consumer culture, our society, and our lives. We can’t have democracy without a major shift of power into the hands of the people.

      But would an amendment to remove all rights of corporations from the US Constitution accomplish that? Would there be unintended consequences?

      There are two problems with a constitutional amendment that abolishes corporate personhood. One, it does too much, and two, it does too little.

  • Censorship

    • Speaking up for media freedom

      Media freedom and freedom of expression have been big topics in 2011 – just look at what the heroes of North Africa and the Mediterranean have been prepared to do to win or defend these rights. Travelling back from the European Parliament in Strasbourg this morning, it occurred to me that I haven’t written about these issues on my blog. Let me correct that today – because media freedom is high on the EU agenda. We support this in law, through debate and through research. We support it online and offline. So I want you to know we will not waver in that support, and in fact I’ve just finished another important discussion about it.

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UBB ruling will put government in crosshairs

      The CRTC is set to announce the results of its usage-based internet billing proceeding Tuesday afternoon. Far from being one of the regulator’s many dull procedural announcements, this one is surely the most anticipated, at least in recent memory. I’ll have an analysis on Wednesday (my posts generally go live at midnight, Eastern time) and probably some knee-jerk reactions on Twitter beforehand, if you want to check those out. In the meantime’s here a primer of what the ruling will involve and why it’s so important.

    • Stop US online Censorship before ACTA brings it to Europe!

      The European Parliament today massively adopted its resolution on Net neutrality, calling on the EU Commission to protect the open Internet, which is put at risk by an increasing number of restrictions imposed by telecoms operators. This overall positive resolution urges EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes to depart from her failed wait-and-see approach by rapidly assessing the need for further regulation to keep the Internet open and free. This votes represent a political commitment by the European Parliament to protecting the Internet from any form of restriction or censorship.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Does copyright protect something useful?

        Nick Bilton poses an interesting question in the New York Times on whether you can copy physical objects without violating copyright link here. His answer is yes and he found intellectual property lawyers who supported that view. He gives several examples, based on 3-D printers actually producing copies of a cup and other useful physical objects, either from the object or from photographs of the object. He asserts that copyright does not cover things that are useful.

      • ACTA

        • Stop US online Censorship before ACTA brings it to Europe!

          Paris, November 16th, 2011 – In a letter sent to the United States House of Representatives, La Quadrature du Net joins leading civil society organisations from across the world to denounce the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill. SOPA aims to create global censorship of the Internet in the name of an obsolete copyright regime. If this dangerous piece of legislation were to pass in the US, it would become the global norm in the war on culture sharing, with the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as a vehicle. As the European Union starts debating the ratification of ACTA, citizens must mobilize to defend their freedoms by calling for the rejection of such ruthless online repression.

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