Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• A Linux Client at Work

  He had been listening to Clark Howard, and Clark had mentioned Linux on his show. This peaked the man’s interest. His thought was “if I can run my computer without Microsoft’s products, that’s what I want to do.” I then had the pleasure of telling him that I am both the Linux and Macintosh departments of the business. I proceeded to tell the man what the differences are and he became even more thrilled. No viruses? Really? No cost, really? Over 10,000 programs free for download? Oh boy! So, I pulled out the Mandriva 2010 disc, and went to town. In one hour, he was ready to go. He has told many people about the system, and the phone doesn’t seem to stop ringing. Awesome for me, and for my boss. Their revenues saw a slight rise, and I now have some reasonable job security. How cool is that?

• Linux Consulting: Seeing the Bigger Picture

  Recently we had a Linux consulting opportunity to install and configure a Postfix mail server for a small company. The company wanted “secure” email for their users. One aspect of the request was to create an encrypted login and communication from the client to the mail server for IMAP using Squirrelmail and providing secure connections to the local client Thunderbird or Outlook. This process is straightforward however there is an issue with the word “secure”.

• Freedom movement

  With over 1,200 students participating, the conference exhibited the language of free software while not losing sight of the purely technical aspects of GNU/Linux. Coding sessions, handled by experts in GNU/Linux-based programming, exposed students to the free software culture that thrives in the Linux User Groups – popularly called Lugs, these form the basic units of the free software movement – in academic institutions and among software professionals across the country.

• Audiocasts

  • Linux Outlaws 147 – Where’s the ‘kin Phone?

    This week on Linux Outlaws: Ash clouds, new DPL elected, Google doing good things for Linux and open source, Apache attacked, Microsoft’s new phone and Fab is annyoing everyone with hockey talk again…

• Kernel Space

  • Software SSD Cache Implementation For Linux?

    With the bottom dropping out of the magnetic disk market and SSD prices still over $3/GB, I want to know if there is a way to to get the best of both worlds. Ideally, a caching algorithm would store frequently used sectors, or sectors used during boot or application launches (hot sectors), to the SSD.

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 2) – File Systems

    Version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be the first to support the Ceph and LogFS file systems. A number of changes to the Btrfs and XFS code promise improved performance. The kernel should now be better at working with drives with 4 KB logical sectors.

    On Tuesday morning, Linus Torvalds released the fifth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.34. One feature highlighted in Torvalds’ release e-mail was a fix for a problem in the ACPI subsystem which had afflicted several testers.

• Applications

  • Pino – GNOME client for Twitter

  • Linux NetworkManager a Solid Tool with New Features

    Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org get all the glory. They’re highly visible as cornerstone applications of the free desktop. But what about the background apps that do the grunt work and sit silently in the background, ignored unless we run into a bug? One of the vital, yet unsung, applications Linux users depend on is NetworkManager.

  • Trying to switch to Empathy

    I try to dogfood as much as possible. I try to use the actual applications Ubuntu ships by default for everyday things like web browsing, email and IM. I believe this is the best way for applications to get tested properly, fixed, and improved. If developers don’t use the default applications because they are buggy, or don’t contain necessary features, how can we expect them to be appropriate for regular users?

  • Four tools for graphics applications in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

  • New Download Manager for Linux

    RoxBird is a Advanced and Graphical download manager written in Python and C based GTK+ GUI.. It can accelerate your download speed upto 40% then normal. This is my first personal project for Linux and also in PC softwares.

  • Avaneya – More Than Just A Game

    This reminds me of other developers who developed AstroMenace, the GNU/Linux version is free and the source code is available under the GPLv2, but the Windows version costs money.

  • CHIRP – A first look

  • Minitube

    • The Minitube Developer Is Working On A New Music Player For Linux Called Minitunes

      The developer of Minitube, a Linux and Mac OS X YouTube player that doesn’t require flash is working on another project called Minitunes – a music player.

    • Minitube, a YouTube Desktop Client for Linux

  • Wine

    • How to switch your small or home office to Linux

      We’re getting ahead of ouseselves a little here: while it’s good to know that things will still work, you’ll find that maintaining Windows compatibility becomes less of an issue as you get used to the new set of tools that Linux offers.

    • CrossOver 9.0 Linux Review A finely packaged Wine

    • World Wine News Issue 361

  • Instructionals

    • Comparison: Ubuntu update manager and 2clickUpdate

    • Encrypt your files quick n’ dirty

    • Bash: Handling Command Not Found

    • Check your unread messages in Gmail, from terminal

    • How to Install Vuze 4.4.0 on Ubuntu Karmic Koala

    • Linux System Information Decoded

    • 7zip File: How to Uncompress 7z files on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora

    • How to Install and configure Pandora Flexible Monitoring System in ubuntu and other debian based systems

    • Analyzing I/O performance in Linux

    • 10 Linux commands for beginners

    • View, Control, Instruct with iTalc

    • Creating Encrypted FTP Backups With duplicity And ftplicity On Debian Lenny

    • A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris and AIX

    • Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive

    • As Platforms Go Mobile, So Will Documentation

  • Games

    • Valve Updates Its Unreleased Steam Linux Client

      For those still not believing the situation and thinking this is just some hacked-up client in a back-room at Valve Corporation, their Steam Linux libraries were just updated in the past hours. From their Steam Linux client file that hosts the checksums, their Linux libraries file was bumped from bins_linux.zip.dc36f31374267ad4a740762a6cf1925ed30bcab9 to bins_linux.zip.232c70b3e732009cab1858499ca4f1c92ffd7367. Running a strings check against the shared objects on the two versions, there are multiple string changes to be found (particularly within linux32/steamclient.so). In other words, the Steam Linux client is still actively being worked on. This is Linux-specific work and not generic Steam platform bits, which are hosted in other files.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Kaudiocreator Returns in KDE4

      Thanks to Apachelogger, the KaudioCreator package is now available at https://edge.launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa/+archive/beta. This is the BEST cd-ripper I’ve ever used, and I hope the wonderfulness came across to KDE4.

    • Finally! The first Gluon alpha released!

      For those who don’t want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Nautilus-Elementary 2.30 For Lucid gets a PPA, will wow you

      Nautilus-Elementary developer – and by developer I mean super hard working superhero developer – ammonkey has just pushed Nautilus-Elementary 2.30 into the Nautilus-Elementary PPA.

• Distributions

  • Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Linux Distro Review: PCLinuxOS 2010

      Overall, the PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE and Gnome versions are a very good choice, but I would not call them ‘radically simple’. It’s bloated with too many programs I will never use. New users should definitely avoid the KDE version and opt first for Gnome.

      My thanks go to PCLinuxOS for allowing us all the opportunity to make our own decision about their software. I am thankful to the Linux community at large for supplying such a wealth of distributions.

  • Red Hat Family

    • The future of open source is in the middle

      Open-source software is likely to remain in certain niches, former Red Hat VP Erik Troan says, but open source is increasingly becoming a necessary foundation.

      [...]

      What people are really paying for in open source is editing, said Troan, channeling his grandfather, who was a newspaper editor for decades. They’re relying on other people to pick out the bits of code and pieces of software that do what they need to get done once they’re put together.

    • Red Hat (and KVM) are still RHEL-evant

      I started to read with a bipartisan mindset about “Xen and Theory of RHEL-evance” posted in the Citrix community blog by Simon Crosby. What appears to be a great title at first seems to be mostly FUD on why KVM is doomed for failure especially in the enterprise marketplace and Red Hat will drown with it. It did not have enough facts, just FUD most of the time. I would to counter his so called “facts” here as its been a long time anyway since I last updated my blog.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora elections coming up

        Per Paul’s announcement on Elections, Fedora will be holding Elections for FESCo and the Fedora Board starting with nominations opening tomorrow.

        I am going to throw my hat back in the ring for FESCo again. I hope folks will consider voting for me.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Squeeze Bug Count

      Wow! the 900 developers and friends of Debian GNU/Linux are really eating up the bugs. They are down below 700 bugs now and they are not yet at package-freeze. If they keep this up, they will release this year.

    • Ubuntu

      • Frugal Tech Show: Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical (Ubuntu Linux)

      • Ubuntu Shipit Opens Again: Get Free Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx CD

      • Ubuntu Lucid in final stretch

        Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx release is one step away from final release.

        Lucid Lynx, otherwise known as Ubuntu 10.04, is now in the final stretch.

        Yesterday the Ubuntu Developers announced the Release Candidate, the penultimate release before its final April 29 release.

        The desktop version of the release includes cloud computing updates, Music Store improvements and tighter social networking integration. Changes to the server version of the release are mostly focused on improving its cloud computing capabilities.

      • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx Release Candidate Is Out [See What's New]

      • Ubuntu wants Adobe, even if Apple doesn’t

        I recently suggested that, given Apple and Adobe’s growing war over iPad and iPhone applications, it would make sense for Adobe to move not only its end-user applications, but its Creative Suite development stack, to Linux. While I don’t know if Adobe is considering it, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, would welcome Adobe.

        Canonical marketing manager Gerry Carr told me that “in a recent survey we did of the Ubuntu User base where we got 32,000 plus responses, Adobe Photoshop as a potential application for Ubuntu got a 3.52 rating out of 5 being the second most popular potential app after Skype.”

      • Open Source Communities: Canonical, Ubuntu and Jono Bacon

        Recently I read that Ubuntu devs are were debating about desktop color scheme, and someone was arguing that in the meantime Fedora devs are debating about update policy. I’d like to get your opinion about what is important at Ubuntu, and why.

        Jono, what are key issues at Ubuntu nowadays?

        Ubuntu as project invests it’s time and effort in a wide and diverse range of area including documentation, translations, development, testing, advocacy and more. In each of these areas we have sought to build a strong a vibrant community to help volunteers be productive and have fun at the same time.

        One particular focus we have been growing has been in the area of design. We are keen to apply the same ethos to the design community as the rest of the community: rewarding good work with great reputation, and looking to our top contributors to help guide and contribute to Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu Discards System Tray

        Ubuntu, the open source operating system, is ditching the system tray, the bar at the bottom of most browsers that is supposed to act as a notification area. The rationale for the change, according to Matthew Paul Thomas, an Ubuntu contributor, was “its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior.”

      • Ubuntu 10.04 Overview

        For those running XP, not impressed with either buying a new OS for a couple of hundred or buying a new PC, Ubuntu is an option. But you will want to make sure you buy a book like Ubuntu for non-Geeks before taking the plunge. This will save you a lot of confusion as this is NOT Windows.

      • 5 Recommended things to do before upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

      • Ubuntu Power Users Community

        The benefit of this kind of community is that it would provide a home for those people who desire more configurability of Ubuntu beyond it’s default installation, and provide a fantastic way of supporting this community of users.

      • Canonical open sources Launchpad and Ubuntu Single Sign On code

        More details about the Canonical Identity Provider can be found on the project’s Launchpad page (login required). Canonical Identity Provider code is released under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).

      • Server

        • Will 12,000 Cloud Computing Deployments Lead to Profit?

          The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) has been available since the Jaunty Jackalope release in April 2009. UEC is now poised to be included for the first time in next week’s Long Term Support (LTS) release with Lucid, which could further improve Ubuntu’s cloud position.

        • New Ubuntu Server Release Aims for the Cloud

        • Ubuntu Server primed for the bigtime

          Next Thursday, Canonical will open the internet floodgates and allow end user downloads of Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition, the latest and perhaps most significant release for servers in the British company’s six year history.

        • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition promises broad vendor support

        • Ubuntu Web Server on Cloud Computing, Hosting

      • Variants

        • Xubuntu Lucid

          So just for giggles I got the newest version of Seamonkey and installed it. Hey! The mail client is almost exactly like Thunderbird 2.0, and the browser, omygoodness – it’s faster than Firefox! Heheh. I got a bonus! I’m a happy boy again, and my inner geek can just find something else to go do with himself. I dunno, go watch Star Trek or something. I got a life to live, and an operating system that fits the bill.

        • Upcoming Artwork for Linux Mint 9

          Clement Lefebvre proudly announced two days ago (April 21st) the plans for the artwork of the upcoming Linux Mint 9 operating system. Dubbed Isadora, Linux Mint 9 will be based on the unreleased Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system and will include some new and beautiful artwork. The most important thing to mention is the fact that the window buttons in the title bar will remain on the right side!

• Devices/Embedded

  • Android

    • browse the web with your android powered e-reader

      This is what I was looking for, an E-reader with a E-ink screen so it’s easy on the eyes, but also a full color 3.5” touchscreen LCD screen ideal for web browsing. The 6” EPD screen displays like a printed page and text is adjustable for easy extended reading.

    • Dell Android Mobile Device Trio: Thunder, Flash, Smoke Smartphones

      Dell’s first attempt at an Android smartphone never made it out of the gate, according to one analyst, after the phones failed to impress the wireless carriers. But the second time may prove the charm as Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has some stylish new Android phones in the works.

    • Dell preps bevy of Android devices

      Dell is planning to release a bevy of ARM-based mobile devices, according to what Engadget says are leaked company documents.

    • Automatic App Updating Coming in Android 2.2

      One Android feature that our readers have been asking for is the ability to update all applications and games to the latest release. It’s not uncommon for the average user to see 15 or more notifications a day indicating new versions of downloaded apps.

    • Flash and Air Developers Finding it Easy to Port to Android.

      Androidpolice.com is reporting that with the recent huge push from Adobe, application and game developers are having a breeze of a time porting over their Air and Flash apps to Android. Most of the feedback of the process has been positive from devs, some even saying that their apps are porting over in 10 minutes!

    • Will Google Go After Flash Developers Next?

      For all I know Google has been going around secretly working to bring some Adobe applications to Android. Whether that involves giving away free phones or not is hard to say. I’d like to think that some of these developers would love nothing more than a chance to stand on stage at Google I/O and demonstrate their apps and games to the thousands in attendance.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • OLPC in Paraguay educates both little kids and teenagers

      Stop: How do the hackfest meetings work?

      Bernie: The participants have different software programming skills and the teaching method is very informal. Right now I have about ten students from 12 to 50 years old, and only two of them speak english. As you can imagine we have some problem to communicate with each other, but everybody’s enthusiasm overcomes the limits of my uncertain spanish. The best students right now are Benedicto one of the Scratcheros, who’s only 12 years old, and two older guys, Kenny Meyer and Gabriel. Kenny already knows well Python and Linux and also fixed a bug in one of our programs. Gabriel is very serious and motivated, wants to learn about everything and could help us with reporting bugs from the field.

      Stop: It looks like the OLPC in Paraguay isn’t helping just the younger children. The project can also offer an excellent opportunity to older boys and girls to use ICT to do something useful for their peers (sometimes it also happens in Italy, as Stop! readers know from our JumPC and ITIS Linux stories). Congratulations to Bernie and we wish to him and all his teen hackers success!

  • Tablets

    • Asustek Eee Pad to hit channel in July

      To compete against Apple’s iPad, Asustek has strengthened the Eee Pad’s industrial design and has cooperated with Google to adopt its Android platform. Asustek will also add features that iPad currently does not support such as USB, integrated webcam, and Adobe Flash, Shih noted.

Free Software/Open Source

• Become a lord of the diamond with NetStats Baseball

  You may never get to manage in the major leagues, but with NetStats Baseball, you can get an idea of what it’s like. NetStats is a simulation of Major League Baseball that uses statistics from players and games from 1901 through 2009 as input to gameplay. You can play a game between any two MLB teams from those years, create your own teams from real-life players across various years, play a whole season game by game, or watch AI managers play an entire season in seconds.

• Datacenter Barometer: Cfengine Revs Up Configuration Management

  What I found interesting about Cfengine is that Burgess originally started Cfengine as a scientific research project, and even though he founded a commercial company in 2008 to develop and support commercial extensions for Cfengine, that same level of academic rigor still pervades through the project. Burgess still does research on systems management, and has developed the Promise Theory, “model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises,” from his work on Cfengine.

• Neufbox4 and OpenWrt [French ISP SFR releases source code of its OpenWrt based DSL router]

  The Neufbox4 is a BRCM63xx based DSL router the french ISP SFR (www.sfr.fr) provides to its customers, and more than 3 million units are currently in use. The device is developed by Efixo (www.efixo.net) and the OpenWrt based sources are available through a subversion repository and documentation is placed in a Trac wiki (http://dev.efixo.net).

• Metasploit Goes Commercial in New Express Edition

  The Metasploit Framework is an open source vulnerability testing framework and is currently at version 3.3. Rapid7, the lead vendor supporting Metasploit, is now aiming to make Metasploit easier to use and manage — and that’s where Metasploit Express, set for release in May, fits in.

• Mozilla

  • High performance Theora codec for Firefox on OMAP3 previewed

    On his blog, Matthew Gregan reports that there has been some success in shifting the major part of the processing load caused by decoding Theora videos into the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core of Texas Instruments’ OMAP 3 processor. This family of processors is used in the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900 and Palm Pre smartphones as well as the Beagle Board. Gregan is employed by Mozilla and is currently working on improving video and audio support in Firefox. It is not currently known when the development work previewed will be incorporated into a future release of Mozilla’s mobile browser.

• Databases

  • VMware’s Database Play: Will Red Hat Follow?

• CMS

  • Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia

• BSD

  • FreeBSD Status Report January-March, 2010

  • FreeBSD/CLANG compiler ready for testing

    Currently FreeBSD uses GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its system compiler. Since the GCC project has moved to the GPLv3 license, the FreeBSD Project is forced to use version 4.2.1 or earlier.

  • Clang, Chromium, ZFS Improve On FreeBSD

    Daniel Gerzo with the FreeBSD project has issued a status report concerning work going on within FreeBSD and related projects for the first quarter of this year. Catching our interest in particular were the updates surrounding LLVM/Clang as the compiler for FreeBSD’s base, the Chromium web browser porting efforts to FreeBSD, and ZFS file-system enhancements.

  • BSDTalk interview with Dru Lavigne

    Dru and Will talk about her new book, The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD, and also about the new BSD Professional Certification exam.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Reasons Why You Don’t Contribute To Open-Source Software

    GCC on the other hand tends to have a higher standard with regard to code quality and documentation with requiring patches comply with the GNU style.

  • Freedom, the Marathon, Open Source Software and Beer

    So too do both facets of the word “free” apply to the open source world. GNU.org maintains a definition of free software that begins by taking the distinction on directly as follows: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

  • Free vs open: What’s the difference?

    The phrase ‘Free Software’ is used by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in its older meaning: it’s software that comes with no restrictions for you to modify it and distribute it.

    The FSF defines these freedoms as: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, commercial or otherwise; the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do something else the freedom to redistribute copies; the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements.

    That much makes sense: we share our software and everyone benefits. But it does confuse many people because you are quite within your rights to sell that software if you want it – Free Software can have a non-free price tag.

• Releases

  • VLC media player version 1.0.6 release – vulnerabilities removed, stability improved

    Version 1.0.6 (part of the ‘Goldeneye’ branch) of the free media player and streamer – VLC media player – eliminates nine security vulnerabilities and offers increased stability. The vulnerabilities were discovered by the developers while working on the code for the upcoming version 1.1.0 and include heap overflows in the audio decoders for DTS, MPEG and A/52, and memory access errors in the AVI, ASF and Matroska demultiplexers.

• Europe

  • How the UK government can follow Obama’s open source revolution

    The Obama White House is releasing custom open source code that it developed itself back to the Drupal community.

    The White House said that by releasing some of its code it will get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it.

  • EU: open standards and interoperable systems for e-government

    EU governments should use open standards and interoperable systems to deliver electronic government services, EU ministers and the European Commission agreed earlier this week. They also stated they would promote the reuse of public sector information.

    The ministers declared to “embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems, development of EU wide e-authentication schemes and proactive development of e-invoicing, e-procurement and pre-commercial procurement.”

  • Cenatic: ‘Using open source is key for e-government’

    Using open source is a key element for delivering electronic government services, argues Cenatic, Spain’s national competence centre on open source. In a paper published on 5 April, the centre lists nine other reasons why public administrations should be using open source.

    According to Cenatic, open source software conforms to European rules and recommendations in interoperability. “The European Union and the Spanish Government have decided that the use of open source software is a key element for the development of e-government and open government.”

  • Final version of Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline published

    The final version of the Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline has been published on OSOR.eu. The study, commissioned by the European Commission as part of the “Dissemination of good practice in Open Source Software (GPOSS)” measure under the IDABC programme, gives guidelines for public administration on how and why publicly acquire open source software.

• Licensing

  • Cherry-Picking Open Source Licenses

    The widespread creation and reuse of open source software by commercial companies has introduced a whole new level of complexity to the legal challenges related to software licenses. Companies distributing open source software must draft or choose an appropriate license for their original code and they must understand and comply with the license obligations imposed on them with the use of third-party code, including open source. Deciding what open source license to distribute software is a key element in building an ecosystem of users, partners, supporters, and advocates.

    [...]

    Whether an author or business model demands restrictive or permissive licensing terms, there is likely to be an OSI-approved license that supports the goals of the individual or organization. So you may not need to create your own license or pay an attorney to create one for you. Authors need to weigh their objectives against the various types and popularity of licenses. Users need to understand the license obligations of open source software they are considering, evaluate them for their particular use case, and be sure they can abide by them. There is an abundance of open source available. It’s a valuable and powerful resource that many companies employ to improve the efficiency and speed of their development process.

• Open Access/Content

  • Urban Forest Map: Wikipedia + Google maps, but for Trees

    Since everything’s open source, if someone else has a good idea of something to do with all this tree-info, they’re free to go ahead and build their project. “The data, the software source code, and the website html/css code are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL)”

• Standards/Consortia

  • Best of HTML5

    Until recently web-based video relied on Flash, Adobe’s rich media language. But HTML could put an end to that with its own native video tag. In HTML 5 it is not only as easy to embed a video in a website as it has been to embed an image – using just one tag – but it also opens the way for a host of additional features. Using the HTML5 video tag developers can embed videos without third-party codes and manipulate the videos in real-time. A demonstration of HTML5′s video capabilities can be found here.

  • Invasion of the .docs

    The biggest worry in the transition was my wife’s school-work. She’s working on some degrees right now, and she has to write an awful lot of papers. She also has to read a lot of .doc files. As a former Ubuntu user, she also had some old ODF files lying around.

Leftovers

• Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes

  After Amazon notices rubbishing peers’ work were spotted, esteemed Russianist initially denied all connection, then said his wife had written them. He has now conceded the ‘foolish errors’ were his own

• Is Google Appifying Email a Good Thing?

  It’s Google’s Internet, we just use it. Well, maybe not, but some days it seems that way. Google’s gone from searching the Internet to being a big chunk of it. The latest moves from Mountain View include adding OAuth and contextual gadgets to email. Good on the surface for Google users, but what do they mean for everybody else?

• Security/Aggression

  • Local computer security expert investigates police practices

    Eric Rachner sits in the back of a police car the night he was arrested for obstructing an officer. This image is taken from video footage recorded by a camera inside the vehicle — footage that Seattle police long maintained had been erased.

  • NSA’s boot camp for cyberdefense

    If you’re the kind of person who worries about the security of computer networks, you should know that the National Security Agency is worrying about it too.

    Since Tuesday, the NSA has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other–and against the competition’s leaders at NSA–in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To “build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team.”

• Environment

  • Climate scientist sues newspaper for ‘poisoning’ global warming debate

    Climate modeller Andrew Weaver launches libel action in Canada for publishing ‘grossly irresponsible falsehoods’

  • Buying carbon offsets may ease eco-guilt but not global warming

    Voluntary carbon offsets are a ‘Wild West’ market ripe for fraud, exaggeration, and poorly run projects that probably do little to ease global warming.

  • Stop this Coral Reef (and marine mammal) from becoming a landing strip

• Finance

  • “High Frequency” Financial Trading, High-tech Highway Robbery on Wall Street

    If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it’s that the system is NOT self-correcting. And it takes more than just rules. It takes regulators who are willing to regulate.

  • IMF proposes two taxes for world’s banks

    It is payback time for the banks. Widely blamed for causing the worst recession in the global economy since the 1930s, castigated for using taxpayer bailouts to fund big bonuses, and accused of starving businesses and households of credit, the message from the International Monetary Fund is clear: the day of reckoning is at hand.

  • Don’t Cry for Wall Street

    More than that, reform actually should hurt the bankers. A growing body of analysis suggests that an oversized financial industry is hurting the broader economy. Shrinking that oversized industry won’t make Wall Street happy, but what’s bad for Wall Street would be good for America.

  • Big Bank Breakup Time Gets Boost From Goldman: Simon Johnson

    Much of the discussion around the Securities and Exchange Commission case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has focused on the legal issues. To the extent there has been analysis of the political dimensions, the focus has been mostly on how this may affect the fate of Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial overhaul bill.

  • David Letterman – Goldman Sachs Top Ten

  • Exclusive: Abacus might have had other benefits for Goldman

    Goldman Sachs Group (GS.N) may have used a subprime mortgage-linked security that is the focus of a U.S. civil fraud lawsuit against the bank to unload other complex bonds it created, according to a deal document obtained by Reuters.

  • Shareholder sues Goldman Sachs board: report

  • Goldman director in focus on Berkshire deal: report

    According to the Wall Street Journal article, federal prosecutors notified Goldman director Rajat Gupta in a letter that they had intercepted his phone conversations with Rajaratnam.

    The founder of Galleon Group hedge fund was arrested last October 16. He is fighting criminal charges, based largely on wiretap evidence, that he traded illegally in 12 stocks. He is free on bail.

  • As Long As We’re Investigating Goldman Sachs Directors For Insider Trading…

    Basically what happened is that Friedman suddenly more than doubled his personal stake in Goldman in the middle of the financial crisis.

  • Goldman Sachs: A Fraudulent history repeats itself – The Legacy of Ashanti Gold

    Prosecution of Goldman Sachs and Regulation of the Financial Industry is not evidence of “Big Government,” “Socialism,” or more “Washington Take-over.”

    It is an appropriate – and overdue – safeguard against Fraud and Theft, which, the last time I looked, was not antithetical to the principles of liberals, moderates, conservatives, or libertarians.

  • Goldman Sachs Now Gambling With Its Own Future, Say Experts

  • Obama Needs to Turn His Back on Goldman’s Support

    In the wake of the historic fraud suit against Goldman Sachs, it was unclear whether the bank would have any presence at President Obama’s financial reform speech yesterday. But CEO Lloyd Blankfein chose to attend, along with his number two, Gary Cohn. Why? The President invited them. Instead of getting a tongue-lashing for their fraudulent ways, the President asked them to join him in the fight for financial reform.

  • Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, Confronted By Reporters At Obama’s New York Speech

  • In Minnesota, both parties benefit from Goldman Sachs contributions

    Campaign contributions from Goldman have become toxic in a contentious campaign cycle that focuses on Wall Street and bailouts.

  • Goldman Sachs and the Left

    The relationship between the government and Goldman is fluid and open. Frank’s staff, for one, is a training ground for big-banking lobbyists, and Goldman remains a soft landing spot for supportive ex-officials and former policymakers. Peter Roberson, who worked on the Boston congressman’s capital-markets team, recently left the House Finance Committee’s staff to join the world’s top clearinghouse for over-the-counter derivatives. Frank himself admits that the revolving door is unseemly. After Roberson quit, Frank publicly criticized him, a little tantrum to hide bigger problems.

  • ‘Goldman Sachs Has A Greater Responsibility Than You Can Possibly Fathom’

  • Goldman Sachs: What Hath Fraud Wrought?

    Goldman Sachs is the Blackwater of finance, the latest in a long line of companies you love to hate, like AIG and the Dallas Cowboys.

  • Brown Says If Goldman Did Wrong, Britain Should Be Compensated

    Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that if Goldman Sachs Group Inc. broke the law then compensation will be owed to British banks and the U.K. government.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June

    Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it.

  • Facebook: Privacy Enemy Number One?

    Facebook’s notable announcements this week range from a holistic vision of a seamless, semantically-enabled Web of human relationships, to a simple “Like” button, which will soon be omnipresent on the Internet. The moves are ambitious, giving even fast-moving rivals like Twitter reason to worry. Still, the simple fact that gets lost in the rush towards ubiquitous social connectivity is that Facebook users still don’t know what they are sharing, with whom, or why it matters. In short: Facebook remains a privacy minefield.

  • Burma’s hip-hop resistance spreads message of freedom

    Thxa Soe’s music gives country’s youth a focus for dissatisfaction with the junta despite strict censorship

  • Chinese artist’s work removed from Paris gallery in censorship row

    A British curator has accused France’s most prestigious art school of “unambiguous censorship” after a work satirising one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign slogans was taken down hours after going on display.

    Clare Carolin, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, who was working on the ill-fated project at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, condemned the decision to remove the work, which was deemed “too explosive”.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Nina Paley: My Decision To Turn Down Netflix Due To DRM

    Sita Sings the Blues has a few Endorsed DVD distributors. In addition to QuestionCopyright.org and myself, there’s FilmKaravan, a distribution collective that handles “downstream” deals with VistaIndia and IndiePix. Their distributions are on amazon.com (I get a much smaller percentage from those than from my DVDs, but they reach a much wider market) and Netflix.

    [...]

    In the last few years DRM has grown increasingly pervasive, with little-to-no press coverage. Consumers passively accept it, as proven by Apple’s new “everything-DRM” device, the iPad.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • India’s copyright proposals are un-American (and that’s bad)

      India’s copyright office website is “best viewed in 1024 x 768 true colors, Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above.”

      That might sound a bit dated, but it has nothing on the country’s copyright law, which was last overhauled completely in 1957. Although it was updated five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the law does not comply with numerous international treaties such as the WIPO Internet Treaties of 1996.

      On April 19, another major set of Copyright Act amendments (PDF) was introduced with the explicit goal of bringing India into compliance “with the provisions of the two WIPO Internet Treaties, to the extent considered necessary and desirable.” (Note that final clause; we’ll return to it in a bit.)

      [...]

      The US has these laws in place already, and these provisions are also being pushed as part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which hopes to bring the wonder of $1.92 million statutory judgments against individual file-sharers to the rest of the world.

  • ACTA and Digital Economy Bill

    • ✍ Explaining Freedom

      I looked through all the major party manifestos and found almost no mention of:

      * the Digital Economy Act and its consequences for WiFi availability and internet filtering,
      * the consequences of widespread data triangulation precipitated by surveillance,
      * the need for open data formats and not just “open data”,
      * the reasons why the publication of the ACTA draft doesn’t clear up many concerns despite the people behind it claiming there are no problems.