• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The HeliOS Project Gets Stoned

My deep thanks to Jeff Hoogland, Steve Rosenberg and the great folks at OMG Ubuntu.

SCOny

• Norway to probe Sony’s PS3 Linux ‘downgrade’

  A government agency in Norway has reported Sony to the Consumer Ombudsman after floods of complaints over removal of “Other OS” functionality from PlayStation 3 consoles.

• Judge Denies Sony’s (SCEA) Motion to Shorten Time

• Twitter user tricks Sony into posting “secret” PS3 code

  Sony is having a rough time trying to keep the PlayStation 3 secure, and the company seems intent on policing the entirety of the Internet to stop the spread of the tools and information needed to hack the device. This can be hard to do when your own faux spokesperson decides to retweet one of the offending series of letters and numbers in their entirety online.

Applications

• Streamie- An Open Source Twitter Web App Worth Trying

  Streamie is a simple web based application for accessing and managing your Twitter account. It is real time just like Identi.Ca with updates flowing in as they are posted by your contacts.

• Twimgo- An Awesome Twitter Client For Nokia Devices

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Using msmtp as a Lightweight SMTP Client

  • 5 Free Computer Science Resources for Beginners

  • Suspend/resume in Debian Squeeze with the 2.6.37 Liquorix kernel on the Lenovo G555

    Suspend/resume. Or in words that non-geeks can understand, sleeping/waking up. It’s one of those things that not just Linux but also BSD and even Windows have been trying to get right for years.

• Wine

  • Wineskin 2.0 released

    Wineskin 2.0 wrappers are made from Wineskin Winery, which is also being released in a 1.0 form today!

    Download Wineskin Winery, and it will handle downloading updates, engines, and even let you use Wine source to make custom engines, as well as creating Wineskin 2.0 wrappers!

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Activity Journal: Not a Big History Buff

    Activity Journal is a tool for browsing and finding files on your computer. I like the potential that the application has for tracking and opening files I use. It is certainly a better option than looking through a file manager window filtered by date. But the app fails in some key points that lead me to question its overall usefulness.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Beyond FUDCon: Faces, Features and Future of Fedora

      The North American Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) was held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe Arizona from January 29 -31, 2011 and proved to be the largest FUDCon to date with over 200 people pre-registered to attend and final attendance numbers estimated around 175 people.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Canonical and Autonomic Resources Partner to Bring Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to the U.S. Federal Government

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android 2.4 ships in April with dual-core support, report claims

      Viewsonic’s upcoming 4.1-inch ViewPad 4 smartphone will run Android 2.4, says an industry report. Due in April, this operating system upgrade will add dual-core support, and will have the same Gingerbread” nickname as the apparently short-lived Android 2.3, according to the U.K. website Pocket Lint.

• Tablets

  • Tread Carefully in Shopping for Early Android Tablets

    If you are looking for an Android tablet, you can get them for price points lower than the iPad’s, but take a look at PCMag’s hands-on tests before you buy. They give the Samsung Galaxy Tab the best marks among Android tablets, and that lines up with a lot of other hands-on reviews.

Did Open Source Companies Miss Their Channel Opportunity?

First, what went wrong? Let’s rewind to 2009, when Synnex and Red Hat launched the Open Source Channel Alliance (OSCA) and Tech Data launched the Open Tech effort. The situation looked so darn promising, especially as open source ERP, CRM and groupware companies worked to promote their wares through the OSCA and Open Tech.

Events

• LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

  Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. His frank linux.conf.au 2011 keynote took a rather different tack than Vint Cerf’s talk did the day before. According to Geoff, Vint is “a professional optimist.” Geoff was not even slightly optimistic; he sees a difficult period coming for the net; unless things happen impossibly quickly, the open net that we often take for granted may be gone forevermore.

• Introduction to Forensics – A Report from Southwest Drupal Summit

  Kyle argued that the best first step is to immediately pull the plug on the box. Do not diagnose the situation and do not shut the machine down gracefully. We use journaling file systems for a reason and the machine will probably be rebuilt from scratch, so the danger of corrupted data from killing the power is small. Once the machine is off, you should image the compromised drive with something like ‘dd’ and make a copy of the image to do your work on to protect you from accidentally contaminating the evidence.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• IBM/Oracle To Share Java Leadership: More Bylaws to Read

  I know bylaws are boring, but let me show you just a couple of highlights that, to me, show that while Oracle and IBM will be sharing leadership, albeit not equally weighted, the community isn’t inside the real loop, not yet anyway. This is draft 7 of the bylaws, so it’s not carved in stone. That doesn’t happen until March 3, after which it gets voted on by “OpenJDK Community members for ratification via an appropriate democratic process”, according to Mark Reinhold, the OpenJDK Lead. So please allow me to point out some bugs.

• Oracle Opposes Google’s Motion to Compel

  I’m thinking what Oracle will argue at the hearing is that all Androids of necessity do infringe and that Google is guilty of “active and willful” inducement, and so for that reason it doesn’t have to point to a specific instance of direct infringement. In any case, this is what it looks like the hearing will be about on the topic of requirements for Oracle to disclose specific acts. Everything will depend, I would say, on whether Google can demonstrate that some Android products are so different from the others that they can’t possibly infringe or that if they do infringe, they do so in such a variety of different ways that they can’t prepare a defense unless Oracle gives them a map with at least some X’s on it, or that the patents represent an insignificant part of the products even if they are infringing and Androids have lots of noninfringing uses, that Oracle is, in effect, trying to shut down the wheels of commerce. And the one weakness that really could matter is whether Gingerbread doesn’t turn out to be like the others. If that is what Oracle determines, then its entire argument falls, I think. Then the 7 Android products are representative of nothing except Oracle’s need to get specific about all seven, distinguished from Gingerbread. All means all, and if Gingerbread doesn’t infringe, there is no ‘all’ in this picture.

• Oracle and IBM to share open-source Java leadership

  Oracle has agreed to share governance of the OpenJDK Java community with IBM, in a move that demonstrates considerable good will, according to one analyst.

  The company has created a series of bylaws outlining the way the governance will be structured, with Oracle appointing itself chairman and the OpenJDK lead, and IBM taking the role of vice chairman.

• Oracle and Java: Mobile dev FAIL dooms Ellison’s future

  Nor is Java helped any by the political infighting that has plagued its development over the last few years. Sun had its share of detractors for its (mis)management of Java, but the ire reserved for Oracle’s manhandling of Java and its Java Community Process takes the criticism to a new level.

Government

• European Patent: FSFE urges European Parliament to wait for legal advice

  Free Software Foundation Europe is asking the Members of the European Parliament to wait for legal advice before voting on a unitary patent for Europe. While a proposal is on the Parliament’s agenda for the coming week, a legal opinion by the European Court of Justice is expected later this month.

  “Software patents hurt innovation and are an unnecessary burden on European software developers,” says Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. “Legislators need to take charge and make sure the patent system contributes to the public good. As the European Patent Organisation has acknowledged, this is a decision that cannot be left to bureaucrats and the judiciary.”

Openness/Sharing

• WSF: Open Letter to Brazilian President: Continue the most progressive culture policy in the world!

  The Commons Strategies Group with a little help from some friends has drafted an open letter to Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff to be signed by international organizations, academics and activists in support of the work of the Brazilian society and government for the cultural commons. The Open Letter is to be issued at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, this week.

Ghana- Of Port Corruption and the Use of Technology

There’s a lot of talk in Ghana about the latest release by the nation’s most famous underground investigative reporter about massive corruption at the state port in Tema. Personally, I am not so much interested in the story as I am about why we allow such things to happen easily in this day and age.

A cursory look at procedures at the harbor, and indeed in almost all spheres of our public institutions, one thing that stands out is how lagging behind we are in terms of automation. Shuffling papers about, moving from office to office, signature after signature, all means one thing- more human involvement.

Fiat Has Big Hopes for its Tiny Car

Fifty-four years ago, Italy’s Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino produced a car the size of a large coffee table. It was three meters long, powered by a 479-cc engine and about as quick off the line as a riding lawnmower. It produced 13 horsepower, or roughly as much as a modern portable electric generator. America laughed — you could cram a 500 into the trunk of a ‘57 Cadillac, and crashing one was certain death — but the rest of the world just went ahead and bought the silly thing. Three-and-a-half million times.

Silvio Berlusconi threatens constitutional war over sex trial moves

Silvio Berlusconi has raised the spectre of a full-scale constitutional showdown in Italy after prosecutors in Milan asked for him to be put on trial immediately, charged with sex-related offences.

Italy’s prime minister accused them of breaking the law and going against parliament. Soon afterwards his chief ally, Umberto Bossi of the Northern League, said the indictment request marked the start of a “total war” between Italy’s judiciary and its legislature.

Open Letter To PC Makers: Ditch The Bloatware, Now!

This is the final straw. This is the line in the sand. This is the year that companies have to wise up and realize that they’re destroying the experience of the very machines that they try to market so vigorously over their competitor’s products. We’re talking about bloatware, and it’s an issue that we simply cannot remain silent on any longer. It’s a very, very real problem, and it has been for years. But we always assumed that things would improve as the “fad” faded. Sadly, we assumed wrong. The fad hasn’t faded, and dare we say, things have become even less bearable over time.

Colorado Springs school bans kid who takes THC lozenges for neuro condition from attending because of “internal possession”

Will Governments Get To Veto New Web Domains Like .Gay?

The non-profit organization that assigns IP addresses and related internet names, ICANN, will be rolling out a system offering new “top-level domains” over the course of 2011 and 2012. That means web sites could end in almost anything—from brand names like .coke or .ford to place names like .chicago or .nyc. And the Obama administration is pushing for giving the world’s governments veto powers over those new top-level domains which could create flash points over new domain names such as .gay. The proposal by the U.S. government, which comes as the Egyptian government was able to essentially shut off internet access for several days, has gotten some negative reaction.

Science

• Now George W. Bush Wants to “Miseducate” Public School Principals

  The Bush/Obama plan of blaming teachers and principals for economic injustice will not improve education.

  As BuzzFlash has noted before, certainly there are public schoolteachers and principals who probably are not up to snuff. But we’ve also criticized the notion that public schools in poor urban and rural areas should miraculously be able to compensate for chronic conditions of communities with poverty and violence – and very few jobs.

  Because, as we’ve observed, there is not a national educational crisis. There is a problem with schools that are located in areas of limited economic means.

  Blaming principals and teachers in a war on public education in poor areas is a diversionary tactic from addressing the real problem: economic injustice and inequality.

• Shuttle operator may propose commercial flights

  Starting as soon as 2013, after construction of a new external tank, the lead operator of NASA’s shuttle fleet proposes to fly twice a year with Atlantis and Endeavour at a cost of under $1.5 billion a year.

• NASA’s Ares 1 to Be Reborn as the Liberty Commercial Launcher

  When President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation space exploration program, it was thought the Ares 1, the much-maligned planned rocket that would have launched the Orion into low Earth orbit, was dead and gone.

  However, it looks like ATK, the aerospace firm that manufactures solid rocket boosters for NASA, has entered into a joint venture with Astrium, the European firm that builds the Ariane V to build a commercial version of the Ares 1.

Health/Nutrition

• The Environmental Causes of Cancer

  idea that most cancer is caused by environmental factors is becoming mainstream.

  A report by the President’s Cancer Panel, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now was published in April 2010 This latest annual report, for 2008–2009, was written by Suzanne H. Reuben for the cancer panel and published by the National Cancer Institute.

  The facts about cancer are dismal. As the report says, about 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some time in their lives, and some 21 percent will die of it. In 2009 approximately 1.5 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed, and about 562,000 died of it.

• China’s poor treated to fake rice made from plastic: report

  China’s history with food safety is a rocky one, but even in the annals of robbery and abuse, this will go down in infamy.

  Various reports in Singapore media have said that Chinese companies are mass producing fake rice made, in part, out of plastic, according to one online publication Very Vietnam.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Egyptian Protests Expose Fraudulent U.S. “Spreading Democracy” Meme

  The Egyptian people have exposed the great myth that prevails in the sphere of United States’ foreign policy, namely that U.S. foreign policy elites are concerned with “spreading democracy.”

  That is because, as Hampshire College’s Michael Klare has written, since 1945, the United States has maintained a foreign policy that is centered around “blood and oil.” The foreign policy establishment often uses “democracy spreading” as a public relations platitude because it sounds much better than saying, “We went to war for oil.” But caring about democracy goes out the window when one truly scrutinizes U.S. foreign policy through a critical lens. Sourcewatch calls this phenomenon Big Oil, Big Lies.

• Rumsfeld’s Memoir: Known and Unknown and Untrue

  In his new book, deftly titled Known and Unknown, former Defense Secreatry Donald Rumsfeld insists that he and the Bush-Cheney crew did not purposefully misrepresent the WMD case for the Iraq war: “The President did not lie. The Vice President did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.” He does acknowledge that he made a “few misstatements,” referring specifically only to one: when he declared early in the war, “We know where they [the WMDs] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

• Nixon and Bob Haldeman on Donald Rumsfeld

  President Nixon and Bob Haldeman∇ discuss Donald Rumsfeld, observing admiringly that he’s “tough enough” and a “ruthless little bastard.”

• Feds investigating Church of Scientology for human trafficking: report

  The FBI has reportedly launched a sweeping probe into the controversial Church of Scientology for allegedly being involved in human trafficking.

  The investigation includes the cult’s mysterious leader David Miscavige, a close friend of actor Tom Cruise who was also best man at his wedding.

  The allegations are that Miscavige allegedly doled out regular beatings to members, The New Yorker reported in its current issue, which hit newsstands this morning.

• The Reagan Myth Continues to Grow

  Many people forget that Reagan was divisive for the country and won almost no support among African-Americans. Conservatives also fail to acknowledge that Reagan raised taxes throughout his presidency, including one tax hike that at the time was the biggest in American history. Reagan’s legacy is one of unprecedented federal budget deficits fueled by tax cuts made at the same time the federal budget grew due to massive increases in military spending.

• Funny How None Of The Bills About Extending The Patriot Act Seem To Kill Off The Pieces So Regularly Abused

  We’ve already discussed how it appears that Congress is set to extend the Patriot Act with little debate yet again, despite the growing evidence of rather massive abuses of the law by law enforcement officials, with little to no evidence that the law has actually helped. As it stands now, in the Senate there are apparently three competing versions of the extension, and not a single proposal that would actually cut off the highly controversial sections that allow for spying on Americans with little to no oversight.

  The three Senate bills kick off with one from Senator Patrick Leahy, which would extend the various provisions until the end of 2013, but would also include a tiny bit more oversight.

• Robot X-47B stealth bomber test flight

• Surprise: House Did NOT Automatically Extend The Patriot Act

  Turns out the conventional wisdom was wrong. The House could not conjure up enough votes to pass the extension. While a majority did vote for it, the rules required a 2/3 vote to pass and supporters of the extension fell 13 votes short — getting 277 in favor and 148 against. You can check out the roll call for the 148 Reps who didn’t just roll over.

• Trial begins in shooting that started as trash-talking

  “He was struggling,” DeLuca testified. “He kept saying, ‘I have a permit to carry.’ “

Cablegate

• Brit Perspectives on the Way Forward in Afghanistan

  In October 1 and 2 meetings with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) Admiral Stavridis, and ISAF Commander General McChrystal, Prime Minister Brown, Foreign Secretary Miliband and other senior UK officials underscored HMG’s commitment to the allied mission in Afghanistan. They are eager for U.S. leadership to chart a clear course of future strategy in Afghanistan, including a desired end state, as soon as possible. In the British view, U.S. leadership is essential to keeping the coalition in place. Empowering the Afghan security forces to play a greater role is a top British priority. The British interlocutors stressed that continued willingness of the UK public to tolerate casualties depends upon the perception that the coalition has a strategy for success Afghanistan. They agreed that the fight against extremism in Pakistan is closely linked to the outcome in Afghanistan. In his meeting with McChrystal, Conservative Party leader David Cameron similarly stressed the importance of U.S. leadership and expressed support for continued, sustained effort.

• U.S. Chamber Attacks FCIC as “Job-Killing” Wikileakers

  This is what the Chamber fears most of all, the FCIC’s planned release of those reckless, imprudent and downright ugly emails from the masters of the universe crowing about how well they do their jobs — fleecing America.

• Times Editor Alarmed By Prospect of WikiLeaks Prosecution

  New York Times executive editor Bill Keller may not regard Julian Assange as a journalistic peer, but he made clear Thursday that he doesn’t think the WikiLeaks founder should face criminal prosecution in the United States.

  Keller joined his counterpart from Britain’s Guardian newspaper and a prominent Harvard Law School professor on a panel at Columbia University to discuss WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling website that has been publishing U.S. diplomatic cables and battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.

  “It’s very hard to conceive of a prosecution of Julian Assange that wouldn’t stretch the law in a way that would be applicable to us,” said Keller. “Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange, certainly American journalists, and other journalists, should feel a sense of alarm at any legal action that tends to punish Assange for doing essentially what journalists do. That is to say, any use of the law to criminalize the publication of secrets.”

• WikiLeaks: Suleiman told Israel he would ‘cleanse’ Sinai of arms runners to Gaza

  The news is more evidence of the close ties between Israel, the United States and Mr Suleiman, who is tipped to replace Hosni Mubarak as Egypt’s president.

  The close relationship has emerged from American diplomatic cables leaked to the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph.

• WikiLeaks: Egyptian ‘torturers’ trained by FBI

  The US provided officers from the Egyptian secret police with training at the FBI, despite allegations that they routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• EU Parliament wants stricter rules for recycling electro-waste

  The European Parliament announced Thursday a proposal for stricter rules on regulating electronic waste, as it grapples with the problems its reliance on imported commodities presents to member economies.

  Millions of tons of electronic devices are discarded each year, and many contain one or more of the 14 elements the European Union has said are in critical supply. Those elements include magnesium, graphite, cobalt, gallium and germanium.

• Scientists Found Chemical Dispersants Lingering in Gulf Long After Oil Flow Stopped

  Chemical compounds from the oil dispersants applied to the Gulf of Mexico didn’t break down as expected, according to a study released this week. Scientists found the compounds lingering for months in the deep waters of the Gulf, long after BP’s oil had stopped spewing.

  “The results indicate that an important component of the chemical dispersant injected into the oil in the deep ocean remained there, and resisted rapid biodegradation,” said scientist David Valentine of U.C. Santa Barbara, one of the investigators in the study.

• Fracking Companies Injected 32M Gallons of Diesel, House Probe Finds

  Drilling service companies have injected at least 32 million gallons of diesel fuel underground as part of a controversial drilling technique, a Democratic congressional investigation has found.

• New drilling method opens vast oil fields in US

  A new drilling technique is opening up vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States, helping reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude.

  Companies are investing billions of dollars to get at oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day – more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now.

• The Kochs’ Climate Change Denial Media Machine

  A network of bloggers, pundits, think tanks and foundations get funding from the Kochs, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received over $700,000, and the libertarian Cato Institute, which has received $13 million from the Kochs since 1998. The Manhattan Institute received $1.5 million, Americans for Prosperity has gotten $5.5 million, the Pacific Research Institute has gotten $1.2 million and the Federalist Society $2 million.

• 7.5 million ha of Indonesian forest slated for clearing

  7.5 million hectares of natural forest will escape Indonesia’s planned moratorium on new forestry concessions, according to a new report from Greenomics Indonesia, an activist group.

  Under its billion dollar forest conservation partnership with Norway, Indonesia committed to establish a moratorium on new concessions in forest areas and peatlands beginning January 1, 2011. But Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has yet to sign the decree due to debate over the details of what types of forest will be exempted. Presently two versions of the decree are circulating. The one drafted by the country’s REDD+ Taskforce, chaired by Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, is considerably stronger than one prepared by the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Hatta Rajasa.

• WikiLeaks cable: Saudi oil estimates may have been exaggerated

  Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves may have been grossly overestimated and its capacity to continue pumping at current capacity exaggerated, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable sent from the kingdom in 2007.

  The cable, obtained by WikiLeaks and published in the British newspaper The Guardian, cited the views of Sadad al-Husseini, who had been in charge of exploration and production at the Saudi state-owned company Aramco for 12 years until 2004.

• Activist Communique: Save the Beaver Pond Forest

  With the rising of the morning sun on February 8, 2011, activists held what could be described as a ceremony of protection for the Beaver Pond Forest as they encircled the cutting machines that have been tearing into the South Marsh Highlands to protect the land from developers; and in turn, protecting we two-legged (humans) from having to commit such destruction.

• Young Activist Faces 10 Years in Prison After Trying to Save Public Lands From Oil and Gas Companies

  On Friday, December 19, 2008, Tim DeChristopher participated in a public auction. As the Bush administration moved to auction off 77 parcels of federal land totaling 150,000 acres for oil and gas drilling, DeChristopher, a student at the University of Utah at the time, bid $1.7 million for 14 parcels totaling 22,000 acres of land, although he did not have the funds to pay for it.

Finance

• Effort Afoot in Vermont to Abolish Corporate Personhood

  One year after the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations have the same rights as people, movements are underway around the U.S. to reverse the new protections granted by the country’s highest court. Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons has introduced the country’s first anti-corporate personhood resolution which proposes amending the U.S. Constitution to specify that “corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States.”

• Crack Down On Fraudclosure!

• Fraudclosure: Will State AGs Step Up to Their Moment in History?

  Rumor has it that the 50-state attorneys general investigation into the Fraudclosure scandal is wrapping up. It’s time for a backbone check. Will the state attorneys general just ask the big banks and service providers to turn over a chunk of change from seemingly bottomless pockets? (This strategy was pursued by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) with little impact). Or will Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller take the lead in wrestling a real settlement out of the banks, so that families hammered by unemployment and underemployment can stay in their homes?

• Elizabeth Warren 2.0

• Banksters Back in the Black: JPMorgan Chase

  Earnings and bonus reports are rolling in and the big, bailed-out banks are back in the black. In 2010, total compensation and benefits at publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record of $135 billion — up almost six percent from 2009 according to the Wall Street Journal. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon may take home the biggest bonus check, an eye-popping $17 million.

• Revealed: Banks to profit from Big Society

  In the latest attempt to save the floundering Big Society, David Cameron announced today that “the big society bank will be taking £200m from Britain’s banks to put into the voluntary sector.”

• Biggest Scam in World History Exposed

  The greatest scam in history has been exposed — and has largely been ignored by the media. In fact, it’s still going on.

  The specifics of a secret taxpayer funded “backdoor bailout” organized by unelected bankers have been revealed. The data release revealed “emergency lending programs” that doled out $12.3 trillion in taxpayer money ($16 trillion according to Dr. Ron Paul) — and Congress didn’t know any of the details.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• India’s Biggest Press Scandal Censored by India’s Press Barons

  The year 2010 saw Indian journalists, their associations and unions hold more conferences and seminars on one professional issue than any other. And it wasn’t the Wage Board or the Radia tapes. Hundreds of journalists across the country attended these meetings. Dozens stood up and spoke of their own experiences of the subject. Of how it demoralized them and ruined their profession. Yet, the main topic of their discussion found no mention the next day in the very newspapers, magazines or channels they work for.

  Sometimes, the fact of the meeting being held, perhaps as an event attended by a High Court judge, was reported. But the subject discussed was not. In newspapers and channels choking with stories on corruption, this is the one you’re least likely to see. The media are their own worst censors when it comes to reporting on ‘Paid News.’

• Taco Bell fights beef charges with ‘truth’ ads, may countersue

  Back in 2006, an E.coli outbreak at Taco Bells sickened dozens of people in six states. Then, in early 2007, a videotape of rats running rampant at a Taco Bell/KFC in New York City went viral. It took Taco Bell months to recover from this one-two image punch.

• Anti-Abortion Groups Step Up Campaign Against Planned Parenthood

  “We were profoundly shocked when we viewed the videotape,” Phyllis Kinsler, chief executive of the agency’s central New Jersey branch, said in a statement. Ms. Kinsler said the tape “depicted an employee of one of our health centers behaving in a repugnant manner that is inconsistent with our standards of care and is completely unacceptable.”

  Stuart Schear, vice president for communications of the national federation, said in an interview on Wednesday that Planned Parenthood had “zero tolerance” for unethical behavior and that the behavior filmed in the video was “very isolated.”

• Ad Change Underlines Influence of N.F.L.

  Unveiled by Toyota in November, the television commercial highlighted the carmaker’s decision to share crash research with scientists studying football concussions, and was an explicit reminder of football’s recent controversies regarding concussions.

  So explicit, it turns out, that the N.F.L. demanded that Toyota alter the 30 second commercial, and Toyota promptly did.

Censorship

• Judge’s order bans jury pamphlets, sparking free-speech debate

  os-court-jury-pamphlet-ban-20110204

  A court order signed this week prohibits the distribution of pamphlets or leaflets meant to influence jurors outside the Orange and Osceola courthouses.

  The administrative order, signed by Chief Judge Belvin Perry on Monday, has sparked a fresh free-speech debate that could lead to legal challenges, questioning whether the order amounts to a “prior restraint” or a form of censorship.

• ‘The King’s Speech’ Threatened With Legal Action Over ‘No Animals Harmed’ Claim (Updated)

  The King’s Speech may have a new speech impediment on its path to the Academy Awards.

  The American Humane Association has contacted producers of the film and is threatening legal action over the use of phrase, “No animals were harmed,” in the end credits.

  The public advocacy group has a trademark on this phrase and over the years, has leveraged its rights so as to be involved in film productions and certify that no “animal actors” get harmed or killed in studio films. The organization typically demands advanced copies of scripts and daily call sheets to review and also requires on-set access whenever animals are used.

  The AHA says it was never invited to monitor The King’s Speech, however, and so it demands that The Weinstein Co., which is distributing the highly-praised film, remove the assurance to movie-goers that no animals were harmed during the production.

Privacy

• In Europe, a Right to Be Forgotten Trumps the Memory of the Internet

  A quarter-century after coming to the United States, Franz Werro still thinks like a European. The 54-year-old Georgetown law professor, born and raised in Switzerland, is troubled when ads in French automatically pop up on his American laptop. The computer assumes that’s what he wants. We live naked on the Internet, Werro knows, in a brave new world where our data lives forever. Google your name, and you’ll stumble onto drunken photos from college, a misguided quote given to a reporter five years ago, court records, ancient 1 a.m. blog comments, that outdated Friendster profile … the list goes on, a river of data creating a profile of who you are for anyone searching online: friend, merchant, or potential future employer. Werro’s American students rarely mind.

• Facebook Faces Privacy Questions From Congressmen

  Two Congressmen have sent a letter to Facebook requesting information about plans to share users’ mobile phone and address information with developers.

Civil Rights

• EFF, ACLU Challenge Feds’ WikiLeaks Twitter Probe

  Two civil liberties groups representing a former WikiLeaks associate have filed a motion challenging the government’s attempt to obtain her Twitter records, as well as the records of two others associated with the secret-spilling website. The groups also filed motions to unseal records in the case.

  The case involves Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament, as well as WikiLeaks’ U.S. representative Jacob Appelbaum, and Dutch businessman and activist Rop Gonggrijp. Jonsdottir and Gonggrijp helped WikiLeaks prepare a classified U.S. Army video that the site published last April.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• FCC Net Neutrality is a Regulatory ‘Trojan Horse,’ EFF Says

  The Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality decision opens the FCC to “boundless authority to regulate the internet for whatever it sees fit,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning.

  The civil rights group says the FCC’s action in December, which was based on shaky legal authority, creates a paradox of epic proportions. The EFF favors net neutrality but worries whether the means justify the ends.

  “We’re wholly in favor of net neutrality in practice, but a finding of ancillary jurisdiction here would give the FCC pretty much boundless authority to regulate the internet for whatever it sees fit. And that kind of unrestrained authority makes us nervous about follow-on initiatives like broadcast flags and indecency campaigns,” Abigail Phillips, an EFF staff attorney, wrote on the group’s blog Thursday.

  And the paradox grows.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog Copyright Claim: A Dog That Wouldn’t Hunt

  Today, balloon dogs everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief: SF’s Park Life store/gallery announced that artist Jeff Koons has dropped legal action against the sale of its balloon dog-shaped bookends.

  In a story that migrated from The Bay Citizen to the New York Times, eventually reaching the San Francisco Chronicle, the NY-based artist, famous for his appropriation of pop culture, was roundly mocked for sending a cease-and-desist to the Richmond District store and the Toronto manufacturer of the bookends.

• The Justice Department and the RIAA/MPAA

• Sarah Palin, daughter Bristol seek to register trademarks on their names

• Copyrights

  • MPAA threatens to disconnect Google from the Internet

    Over the last few months, Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios: most are directed at users of Google’s public Wi-Fi service but others are meant for Google employees. The MPAA is thus warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet.

    “Copyright infringement also violates your ISP’s terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities,” the movie companies write in various letters, according to TorrentFreak. Although the copyright holders use strong language, these notices are nothing simply warnings, and typically do not lead to legal action.

  • Lessons from the Texas Downloading Dismissal – Why Due Process Matters

    Apparently out of the blue, a copyright lawsuit filed in federal court in Dallas by a German pornographer against 670 anonymous Internet users, who were charged with infringing the copyright in the film by making it available for download, has been dismissed. The back story holds lessons for judges confronted with demands to discover the identify of anonymous Internet users.

  • Music Publisher Discovers A Song In Its Catalog Has Been Heavily Sampled For Decades… Sues Everyone

    Rather than just suing those behind the Heavy’s song, Drive In has basically gone on a legal rampage. It sued pretty much everyone even loosely connected with the song. So, it sued the label… but also the ad agency that put together the ad, the NFL for having the commercial during the Super Bowl and CBS for airing the ad. Apparently that lawsuit was settled, which is too bad, as it seems like many of those parties could push back on the claims.

  • Homeland Security Tries And Fails To Explain Why Seized Domains Are Different From Google

    Moe then asks Hayes if he links to a site that has infringing content from his Public Radio blog, will ICE shut down the site. And Hayes makes a really weird remark that makes no sense, sayings that if Moe “gets advertising funds from a site that provides unauthorized content” then he might have to shut them down. But that’s something new. We’ve seen no assertions or evidence that the sites that have been take down received ads from the other sites that were hosting the content. Is Hayes totally making stuff up now? It sounds like Hayes doesn’t even understand what he’s talking about.

    Finally, Moe asks: if a site links and embeds to all the same content, but does not profit from it (i.e., does not have advertising), is it criminal? Hayes totally punts and says he’d have to check the law. Yes, really. So the guy is not an expert on the technology and admits he’s not an expert on the law in question. So what is he an expert in and why is he leading these questionable seizures?

    On a separate note, it’s nice to see that Homeland Security is willing to chat with the press again after telling us that it will not speak about these issues because it’s an “ongoing investigation before court.” Apparently, Homeland Security was also lying to me (though, we knew that already).

  • Star Wars Is A Remix

  • Meet Evan Stone, P2P pirate hunter

    Evan Stone is not the devil; indeed, the antipiracy lawyer sees himself on the side of the angels. But his crusade against the Satanic forces of BitTorrent has been, by his own admission, a pitched battle in which he is vastly outnumbered. He describes his work as “charging hell with a bucket of water.”

  • Righthaven Goes After Pajamas Media, Despite DMCA Agent & Strong Fair Use Case

    It’s been a little while since we covered what newspaper copyright troll Righthaven was up to, but Eric Goldman alerts us to one recent legal filing from the operation that raises some questions. Historically, Righthaven has been careful to avoid websites that have registered a DMCA agent, knowing that under the DMCA it’s supposed to issue a takedown notice before suing. However, this case, in going after the successful blog network Pajamas Media, appears to ignore the fact that Pajamas Media has registered.

  • In Praise Of Piracy

    Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don’t make me say it again.

  • MPAA sues Hotfile, battle for cloud begins

    File-hosting service Hotfile has made a business out of offering a stash box for people to store their pirated movies, the Motion Picture Association of America claims in its suit against Hotfile.

  • MPAA Files Surprisingly Weak Billion Dollar Lawsuit Against Hotfile

    Hotfile, one of a number of cyberlockers out there, has been in the news increasingly lately, as various entertainment industry firms have been attacking it as one of the more popular cyberlockers. It appears that the MPAA and its whole content protection staff finally decided to go beyond complaining and actually sue Hotfile, asking (of course) for the maximum $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringing file it found on Hotfile.

  • IP Czar Report Hits On All The Lobbyist Talking Points; Warns Of More Draconian Copyright Laws To Come

    We had serious questions from the beginning about Senator Patrick Leahy’s “ProIP” bill, which was pushed very strongly by the lobbying group, the US Chamber of Commerce, using widely debunked stats to claim that there needed to be an “IP Enforcement Coordinator” in the White House. Yet, as we explained, such a position makes absolutely no sense. Even “pro intellectual property” folks noted that the law was anything but “pro intellectual property.” Instead it was pro-legacy business structure. So giving a role in the White House to someone whose sole job is to protect legacy business models is the very definition of regulatory capture. And while the IP Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel, has been kind enough to personally reach out to us multiple times since taking on the job, in the end she still sees her role to be protecting legacy industry jobs, rather than (as the Constitution requires) making sure that intellectual property promotes the progress.

  • Russian media combats false piracy prosecutions

    Some good news out of Samara. As we’ve reported previously, trumped-up piracy accusations have been frequently used in Russia to intimidate independent media. Sergei Kurt-Adzhiyev, a Russian editor, has spent years fighting piracy prosecutions against himself and his publications in the region. This week, he was declared not guilty. Russia’s Finance Ministry was ordered to pay him 450,000 rubles or $15,200 for the false charge of using pirated software.

  • Copyright in a Free (gratis) World

    The big idea: I’m spending 628% more time on copyrighted content that is being given away than content I’m paying for. Much of it is ad-supported, but much of that ad money never ends up in the pocket of the artist: most content creators on youtube, reddit, 9gag, devour, or blogs never profit off of their creations.

  • Digital Economy (UK)/ACS:OutLaw

    • ACS:Law Judgment Has Serious Implications for Digital Economy Act

      Yesterday, Judge Birss QC at the Patents County Court delivered his judgment in the copyright infringement hearing which featured ACS:Law, copyright troll client MediaCAT and 27 alleged file-sharers. While Birss was damning of the process from start to finish, some of key issues he raised could have serious implications for the UK’s Digital Economy Act.

      The battle against ACS:Law, MediaCAT and other companies previously involved in developing the so-called Speculative Invoicing model in the UK, has been fought on many fronts. A key group that has championed the rights of the innocent caught in the dragnet, and indeed introduced the term ‘Speculative Invoicing’ to the legal landscape, is BeingThreatened.com. This compact and highly resourceful team have worked tirelessly to protect innocent members of the public from the predatory tactics we have read so much about lately.

    • With ACS:Law And MediaCAT Shutting Down, What Does It Mean For US Copyright Group?

      It certainly looks like DGW has been a bit more careful with its strategy than ACS:Law (where it really seemed like Andrew Crossley got in way over his head), but it certainly should be a warning sign to all those law firms who think this sort of shakedown play is easy money.

    • ACS:Law and overstated proof

      Yesterday afternoon saw the latest twist in the protracted story of ACS:Law. They have been engaged in a campaign to intimidate and extort money from thousands of people with little evidence and even less proper due process. Last week, with their flimsy cases facing scrutiny in court, ACS:Law wound themselves up, disappearing in a puff of smoke like cartoon villains. But Judge Birss, of the Patents County Court, insisted that the cases must continue.

      And so the case drags on. But aside from one law firm’s nefarious practice, it offers us important lessons for the way copyright enforcement works. In particular there are implications for that flagship but very flawed legislation aimed at reducing file-sharing in the UK, the Digital Economy Act. It is important to say that these lessons have nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of copyright infringement. They have everything to do with basic principles of justice and due process. If you are accused of doing something wrong, you are presumed innocent until proven otherwise by sufficient evidence. You would expect there to be reasonable ways to defend yourself. Punishments should follow this kind of process.

    • ACS:Law told file-sharing case must continue by court

      Now a judge had criticised the firm for its methods.

      “I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in court,” said Judge Colin Birss at the Patents County Court in London.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

2010 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

Server Distribution of the Year – Debian (29.35%)
Desktop Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (28.56%)
Security/Forensic/Rescue Distribution of the Year – BackTrack (36.87%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year – Android (76.82%)
Database of the Year – MySQL (51.76%)
NoSQL Database of the Year – Cassandra (27.40%)
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (55.74%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (55.52%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – Gnome (45.06%)
Window Manager of the Year – Compiz (26.43%)
Messaging App of the Year – Pidgin (43.85%)
Virtualization Product of the Year – VirtualBox (59.16%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year – Amarok (28.34%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year – Audacity (74.58%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year – VLC (58.79%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year – FFmpeg (26.70%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year – GStreamer (31.95%)
Graphics Application of the Year – GIMP (66.98%)
Network Security Application of the Year – Wireshark (32.90%)
Host Security Application of the Year – SELinux (38.46%)
Network Monitoring Application of the Year – Nagios (61.76%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year – Eclipse (24.55%)
Text Editor of the Year – vim (35.88%)
File Manager of the Year – Nautilus (31.42%)
Open Source Game of the Year – Battle for Wesnoth (22.70%)
Programming Language of the Year – Python (26.56%)
Revision Control System of the Year – git (50.56%)
Backup Application of the Year – rsync (47.42%)
Open Source CMS/Blogging platform – WordPress (45.18%)
Configuration Management Tool of the Year – Puppet (46.67%)
Open Source Web Framework of the Year – Django (33.33%)

Samsung’s Cool Cameras For Linux Users

When you plug the camera or insert the memory stick into the PC running GNU/Linux operating systems like Ubuntu, it gives you the option to open it with Shotwell, a built-in image viewer. You can also edit your images using powerful software like GIMP.

Desktop

• Desktop Virtualization

  LTSP is available in Debian GNU/Linux and several other distros.

  X has limitations in video throughput and security but it is the lowest cost solution where these issues are minor as in many libraries and computer labs.

• Confessions of a Linux user

Server

• U.S. commissions beefy IBM supercomputer

  The 10-petaflop performance far outstrips what is commonly thought of as today’s most powerful supercomputer, the recently built Tianjin National Supercomputer Center’s Tianhe-1A system, which benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops for the last Top500 twice-annual ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Ballnux

• Dual-screen Android phone offers multiple viewing modes

  Sprint and Kyocera Communications are readying the first dual-touchscreen Android smartphone. Equipped with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor running Android 2.2, the Kyocera Echo offers dual 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreens that can be combined to form a single 4.7-inch display, or can be split — with apps running either independently or in an “optimized” mode with complementary functions.

Kernel Space

• Linux 2.6.38-rc4

• Kernel prepatch 2.6.38-rc4

• Linux 2.6.38-rc4

• Linux 2.6.38-rc4 Kernel Released

  The Linux 2.6.38 kernel already has a lot of exciting new features and so far it appears to be in good shape.

• Linus Torvalds: looking back, looking forward

  So there’s been times when it wasn’t as much fun, but never really a “walk away” moment, no.

• Video: LCA 2011 – The Kernel Report

  Jonathan Corbet also gave his traditional The Kernel Report presentation at LCA 2011. I’ve embedded it below in webm format using the HTML 5 video tag.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Releases Cayman Documentation, Open Driver Is Close

    This is good news so it looks like we may see Radeon HD 6900 series open-source support land for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel with the DRM/KMS Radeon bits and then in Mesa 7.11 for the user-space Gallium3D driver support with OpenGL acceleration. The 3D support is expected to be tacked onto the “R600g” Mesa driver.

Applications

• 6 of the Best Free Linux Dictionary Tools

  So, let’s explore the 6 dictionary tools at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

• Unovyx on Kickstarter! RapidDisk, a new type of RAM Disk for Linux.

  Unovyx, LLC would like to announce that it is currently on Kickstarter.com attempting to seek funding for the development and testing of a large software-based project. The project is called RapidDisk (abbreviated to rxdsk) and is currently trying to raise $2,500 to help purchase all necessary equipment to not only develop the device driver and management application but also to ensure that it has been tested and stabilized before releasing it to the world under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) open source license with the hopes of one day getting it integrated into the Linux kernel.

• Minitube 1.4 (Plays YouTube Videos Without Flash) Released, Available In The WebUpd8 PPA

  Minitube is a native YouTube client for Linux (as well as Windows and Mac OS X) which you can use to watch videos without Flash Player. Further more, Minitube can also be used to download videos from YouTube.

• Native Youtube Client ‘Minitube’ Adds Channel Search Feature

  Minitube is a native Youtube client for Linux that can play and download Youtube videos without any use of Flash.

• Auteur Is A New Non-Linear Video Editor For Linux

  Auteur is a new non-linear video editor for Linux. The application is currently in alpha but seems to advance pretty fast, with 6 releases in just one week (the first alpha preview release was published on 31 January 2011).

• Shutter 0.87 Can Capture Rounded Window Corners, Export To Postscript, Automatically Resize Windows And Much More

  Shutter, an amazing, dare I say “the best” Linux screenshot tool was updated to version 0.87 today…

• Linux screenshot tool ‘Shutter’ updates with auto-resize snapping, rounded corners, more

• What I would like to See in AppStream, the “Linux App Store”

  Add a donation option tab. This tab could be turned off in preferences, and should be unobtrusive, no asking or reminders to donate.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Create A LAMP Setup (Apache2, PHP, MySQL) On CentOS 5.x In An Amazon Linux AMI 32bits Or 64bits

  • Detail Memory Reporting Tool for Linux System – smem

  • Command Line | Compare File To Another Using cmp

  • How to Save Tweet Links for Later Reading from Your Desktop and Phone

  • Using Apache Web Server’s UserDir Directive To Provide Personalized Web Pages

  • How can i configure Debian Squeeze to work behind a proxy?| FAQs

  • CUPS and Sun

  • Back in the Day

  • How to Create and Restore Backups of Your Ubuntu PC

  • How to overcome emerge lock file hindrance

  • How To Change the Default Theme in Slim (Login Manager)

  • Five tips for migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

  • UNIX / Linux: 3 Ways to Send Signal to Processes

• Games

  • Open source games: It’s a team effort

    I’ve been involved with a fair share of open source activities, game-related and otherwise, and by and large I have thoroughly enjoyed the ride. It all started with an overly ambitious open source game. It never went anywhere, yet I treasure the time I spent working on it. This project sent me head first into the marvels of collaborative open source–and game development, without any training wheels. It’s an experience and an education that comes highly recommended, but is not without its hits and misses. Getting it right the first time ultimately comes down to chance, but if nothing else, sharing my experience might improve your odds.

  • Our hands on preview of Unigine’s upcoming Oil Rush

    The game is a self-described naval real time strategy with stunning graphics and an interesting take on the original RTS feel with the majority of gameplay taking place over water.

    The preview weighed in at around 250MB, but had most of the content there already. There are three missions in the preview campaign, two tutorials and one tower defense scenario that I will talk about later.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Debian Linux 6 and the Trinity Desktop

    One very good thing about the TrinityDE Kmail, trash compaction WORKS! For all the YEARS I have been using Kmail, I had to delete the /bob/Mail/trash file by hand, “touch trash” to recreate it, just because every time I would try “compact trash folder” Kmail would give the awful message, “for security reasons, compaction has been turned off for trash.”

    Several months of spam, attachments, family photographs and Debian-User mailing list digests can create multi-hundred-megabyte trash files. The fact that compacting the trash file has been enabled is the first new thing in TrinityDE that I am exceedingly happy about.

    Let’s hope that the continued development of TrinityDE, as shown by that seemingly small change, is on an evolutionary basis, rather than the revolutionary fervor that caused the need for TrinityDE to be founded in the first place.

  • Software Review: The KDE 4.6 Desktop Environment

    New for 4.6 is a window decoration called Oxygen-GTK, which is designed to make apps created using the GTK toolkit look better in the Qt-based KDE environment. Not something I’m likely to use, but a nice touch that a lot of folks have been waiting for.

  • What is Kamoso

    A lot of people has been asking me (or complaining) what is Kamoso and what we intend to do with it, so I’ve decided to use a blog post to explain it.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.91.6 released!

  • Gnome 3: tab scrolling, and some other remarks

    In general, things are shaping up nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that I had no 3D driver issues any more on either of my two laptops (using the free intel and radeon drivers). Some things are not ready for prime time, such as dconf-editor that doesn’t provide a search option and doesn’t wrap long description labels, thereby forcing the window width to ridiculous proportions (bug 641292).

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Sabayon Linux 5.5 SpinBase and CoreCDX Released

  • Sabayon Linux 5.5 CoreCDX and SpinBase Editions Released

    After the release of Sabayon Linux 5.5, the development team proudly announced today, February 8th, the immediate availability for download of the CoreCDX and SpinBase editions of their popular Sabayon Linux operating system.

    Sabayon Linux 5.5 SpinBase and CoreCDX editions are designed for Linux experts and advanced users that want to set up a home server or create their very own operating system, based on Sabayon.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Linux 2011TP (Tech Preview) – Quick Look

    Again, to my surprise, as Mandriva’s 2011 Alpha 1 release approaches, I find it to be remarkably stable, fluid, and capable from the KDE side.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Opens Call for Nominations for Fifth Annual Innovation Awards

    Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that nominations are open for its fifth annual Red Hat Innovation awards, which will be presented at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, taking place May 3-6, in Boston.

  • Nominations Open For Red Hat Certified Professional Of The Year Awards

  • Stocks Rumor Of The Day: LORL, RHT, JNPR and HTZ

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares have came off day’s low on Tuesday on rumors that the company could be an acquisition target. RHT calls are seeing interest following renewed M&A speculation. So far today 7.6K total calls have traded vs 220 total puts.

  • Options Brief: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

    Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) are higher on the session by 1.16%, trading at $44.62.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Performance Leadership

    Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization made solid progress during 2010. We delivered Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 and the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops. We announced that several enterprise clouds, such as IBM’s, would be built on our virtualization platform. And we announced a string of customer wins. Along with these advances came widespread acknowledgment from the press and analyst communities that Red Hat’s virtualization portfolio was becoming established as a potent force in the market. Now, keeping up the momentum, we’re kicking off 2011 with a pair of leading virtualization performance results.

  • Fedora

    • On Ownership

• Debian Family

  • Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” released

    The installation process for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 has been improved in various ways, including easier selection of language and keyboard settings, and partitioning of logical volumes, RAID and encrypted systems. Support has also been added for the ext4 and Btrfs filesystems and — on the kFreeBSD architecture — the Zettabyte filesystem (ZFS). The installation system for Debian GNU/Linux is now available in 70 languages.

  • Upgrade Debian Lenny To Squeeze In A Few Simple Steps

    One rather old laptop and one server were the test objects for this howto. Both systems do not have any RAID devices and use a simple partition scheme from a default basic Lenny install. If your setup deviates much from this, it’s highly recommended to read all details of the Debian Release Notes before you continue. Be warned. All commands are run as root and Debian recommends to use apt-get for the Squeeze upgrade process.

  • Debian Is No Longer Just A Linux Distribution

    Did you know that Debian supports diverse hardware ranging from Intel 32-bit and 64-bit architecture, Motorola/IBM PowerPC, Sun/Oracle Sparc, MIPS (big-endian & little-endian), Intel Itanium, IBM S/390, and ARM EABI ? That is a total of 9 architectures.

  • Debian “Squeeze” makes key progress toward being a fully free distribution

    With last Saturday’s “Squeeze” release, Debian took an important step towards being a fully free distribution and ensuring freedom for its users.

    Most GNU/Linux distributions directly or virtually include proprietary software. To promote development and use of totally free distros, the FSF publishes precise criteria for GNU/Linux distributions to fully respect users’ freedom.

  • Debian Cleanup Tip #2: Get rid of obsolete packages

    Last week, we learned to remove useless configuration files. This week, we’re going to take care of obsolete packages.

  • 5 Key Things to Know About Debian 6.0 ‘Squeeze’

    Squeeze is the nickname of the latest Debian release (version 6.0). A new release of the well known and widely used Linux distro is a big deal. Ubuntu fans may be used to installing a new version what seems like every few minutes, but Debian moves to an altogether slower beat. Everything in a new release is thoroughly tried and tested, which explains why the last version — Debian 5.0 “Lenny” — debuted almost exactly two years ago.

  • CrunchBang 10 “Statler” r20110207

    Unless you have been living under a rock, you will almost certainly be aware that Debian 6 “Squeeze” was released over the weekend of the 5th & 6th of February ’11. This is great news for Debian and great news for CrunchBang.

    CrunchBang 10 “Statler” has been in development since early last year. The first alpha release came out in March ’10 and several development builds have followed whilst Debian Squeeze remained in testing. Now that Squeeze has migrated from testing to stable, CrunchBang Statler will also adopt the stable moniker.

  • Distribution Release: CrunchBang Linux 10 R20110207

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • You’re Invited: This Week’s Ubuntu Bug Day – LibreOffice and OpenOffice

      Robert Roth announces this week’s Ubuntu Bug Day on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list. If you are interested in helping “squash” some LibreOffice and OpenOffice bugs in Ubuntu then you are invited to help the Ubuntu BugSquad.

    • Next Ubuntu Developer Summit to be held in Budapest, Hungary

      Once every 6 months the Ubuntu developers meet at a summit to discuss and plan the upcoming release of Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Developer Summit hence attracts a large number of developers, enthusiasts and users every time it is conducted.

    • 5 New Features in Ubuntu 11.04

      On April 2011 , Canonical is going to release the latest avatar of Ubuntu , 11.04,codenamed ‘Natty Narwhal’ .Last release of ubuntu was ubuntu 10.10,codenamed ‘Maverick Meerkat’.There are lots of visible improvement in ubuntu 11.04 Alpha I.Lets see the new changes which are going to happen in ubuntu 11.04.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Amicable Antidisestablishmentarianism

        Ubuntu Studio Fun Fact #0:
        Ubuntu Studio shares the same repository as vanilla Ubuntu. Crazy, huh?

        Ubuntu Studio Fun Fact #1:
        The Ubuntu Studio developers don’t general code much. This means you don’t have to have mad coding skills to help with Ubuntu Studio development; generally I suggest that tenacity, inquisitiveness, and initiative will serve you well.

      • Lubuntu Screencast: Metapackages in detail

        In this screencast I show metapackages in more detail and explain the differences between them and normal packages.

      • Lubuntu 11.04 Alpha 2 Released, Removes Cheese And Xarchive

        Lubuntu 11.04 alpha 2 was released today with a bit of a delay due to some issues with the hardware on the computer that generates the ISO.

        There aren’t major changes since alpha 1 except for two default packages which have been removed: Cheese is no longer in the default Lubuntu 11.04 install and Xarchive has been replaced with file-roller.

      • Pinguy OS 10.10.1 quick review – even more mainstream than Mint?

        Pros: Pinguy’s maker has scoured the open source world to find amazing apps and tweaks. It’s one of the sexiest and most functional desktops we’ve seen
        Cons: The desktop and application drop-downs are ultra busy, which risks confounding the less tech-savvy user. The ISO is well over 1GB

      • Review: Peppermint Ice Linux

        These days, if a desktop-focussed Linux distribution wants to stand out from the pack of Ubuntu-wannabes it either needs to be especially slick or offer something a little bit different to the norm. Peppermint Ice falls into the latter category: It’s a Debian-derived (via Ubuntu), lightweight Linux distro that’s designed for netbooks and has a strong focus on Web applications.

        Peppermint Ice’s main claim to fame is its use of a ‘site-specific browser’ (SSB), dubbed Ice, which is based on Google’s Chromium browser. Peppermint One, a fraternal distro from the same developers, uses Mozilla’s Prism (a project that, according Mozilla Labs’ projects page, is now not being actively developed). An SSB is a stripped-down browser that lets Web-based applications and services be treated in a somewhat similar fashion to a standard application: instead of navigating to a site using your browser, you can simply click on an icon on your desktop/applications menu/taskbar and an independent browser session is launched for that application (with none of the usual toolbars and menus you find in a normal browser session).

        [...]

        Kernel: 2.6.35-22-generic
        Window manager: Openbox
        Desktop: LXDE
        Based on: Ubuntu
        System requirements: i386 or derivative processor; 192MB RAM, 4GB hard drive space
        Package management: APT

      • Linux Mint 10 And My Experiment With Oracle VM VirtualBox

        My overall experience with Linux Mint 10 continues to be positive.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Smartphones ‘out sell’ PCs for first time

    Linux has taken off like crazy on smartphones in the form of Android.

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Dalvik ported to MeeGo, promising instant Android app compatibility

      Myriad Group AG today announced a Dalvik virtual machine claimed to let Android apps run on non-Android platforms. Myriad posted a video showing “Myriad Alien Dalvik” running Android apps on a Nokia N900, and said the software will be available for MeeGo later this year.

    • Intels MWC ‘Media Alert’ Gives us Clues on MeeGo Activities.

      I’ve already posted about what I think will and won’t be part of Intels activity at Mobile World Congress next week and a recent ‘media alert’ sent to me by email confirms my thoughts that this is largely a software event for Intel. It’s all about completing the MeeGo stack from hardware to app store and that means:

      * Moorestown platform – Demonstrating MeeGo and battery life advances.
      * MeeGo 1.2 – Demonstrating multi-touch and other core components.
      * UI layers written in Qt – Compelling demonstrations (probably created by Wind River)
      * AppUp store (probably Beta) launch.

    • NewsFlow Moves to Dark Side with 1.1 Beta Release

      Taking a small break from coding TwimGo and adding some features to NewsFlow application. NewsFlow is a Google Reader client written in QML and JavaScript. It runs on Nokia N900 and Symbian^3 devices such as N8 or E7.

    • kojacker

    • Myriad Announce Alien Dalvik enabling Android Apps to Run on MeeGo / Maemo

      Myriad this morning announced ‘Alien Dalvik’ bringing Android applications to non-Android devices, allowing OEMs, operators and application stores to leverage the Android eco-system across a much wider range of mobile devices. Android applications run completely unmodified and with no loss of performance on non- Android platforms. This launch opens up the Android experience to new audiences as it enables them to deploy Android applications across multiple device operating systems, all without compromising performance which is made possible by a very tight integration of the Android runtime and the use of Myriad Dalvik Turbo technology. Myriad is a member of the Open Handset Alliance.

    • A TouchArea for QML

      For the last few weeks we have been working on a comfortable way to expose raw touch data to QML. The solution we came up with is called TouchArea and is a QML plugin that should be usable from Qt 4.7. The TouchArea is useful whenever you want to track touch points directly in QML, either by using property bindings or trough javascript event functions. This might for example be useful for touch input based games and for recognizing very basic custom gestures directly in javascript.

    • Linpus to Showcase MeeGo-Based Tablet Solution at MWC. Our Sneak Peek Video Now!

      Linpus, a company that has been working on Linux distributions for netbooks for a number of years under their ‘Linpus Lite’ brand have been invited to MWC to demonstrate their current offering in the MeeGo and Qt booths. The solution is targeted at manufacturers of netbooks and tablets based on MeeGo. Like MeeGo, the Linpus solution will be a ‘base’ on which to build on through contractual work by Linpus. We’ve seen a tablet UI before but this is more than that.

  • Android

    • Dalvik Spreads Android Apps

      The Dalvik virtual machine is being ported to other platforms other than Android/Linux. This makes it trivial for Android apps to run on GNU/Linux and to spread to x86 systems. I love it.

    • Dell Streak 7 needs Android 3, better battery, says review

      Dell’s seven-inch Dell Streak 7 tablet boasts a fairly affordable price, plus a powerful dual-core Tegra 2 processor that delivers zippy performance. However, it needs Android 3.0, better battery life, and an improved screen and camera to keep up with the fast-running competition, says this eWEEK review.

    • The Case for Android on Linux

      Like most office workers, my day is generally split up into two phases. The second phase, where I spend 90% of my time, is spent switching between the 3 or 4 primary applications I need to use to get my work done.

      For this kind of activity Linux (and indeed any GUI based OS created in the last decade) works well, because the focus of desktop operating systems is on allowing you simultaneously to run a small number of monolithic applications that perform a specific job.

    • INSIDE Secure Brings True NFC Hardware Independence to Google Android “Gingerbread”

• Sub-notebooks

  • Netbooks all set to begin a new innings with Chrome OS

    The original netbook concept was that of sub 100 laptop running Linux providing quick access to web apps. The Linux based 7-inch Asus Eee PC was the first mainstream of that type, which shot to fame in 2007. Subsequently Intel and Microsoft intervened with tailored processors and trimmed-down Windows, which blurred the distinction between a notebook and a netbook. Although manufacturers have added more features, the netbook has gradually lost its meaning, size, function and price point, and is now losing its popularity as well.

• Tablets

  • Preview of Linpus Linux OS for touchscreen tablets

    Linpus has been developing light-weight Linux-based operating systems for netbooks and tablets for the last few years. Now the company is getting ready to show off its latest tablet solution at Mobile World Congress, and Chippy from CarryPad has posted a preview video.

    The OS is based on MeeGo Linux, but this version has been optimized for touchscreen tablets, with a nice big on-screen keyboard, rather speedy screen rotation, and an Android-like home screen with support for animated desktop backgrounds, widgets, and easy access to an app launcher.

    The software is designed to play well with low power Intel Atom chips, and in the demo video you can see the OS boot in just 14 seconds on a tablet with an Atom processor.

  • Linpus Lite tablet-optimized Linux OS gets hands-on treatment (video)

    While tablet hardware is capable of running a full desktop OS, the experience often leaves something to be desired. Most desktop OSes are still designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse, and you’re not likely to attach either to a tablet while you’re riding a bus to work.

The Ada Initiative launches

Ada Initiative Supports Women in Open Source, Counters Sexism

Both Aurora and Gardiner have been active in FOSS women’s groups for over a decade. However, the catalyst for the Ada Initiative was the hostile responses to Noirin Shirley’s account of being sexually assaulted at ApacheCon in November 2010. The incident led to Aurora, Gardiner, and other members of the Geek Feminism blog to draft sample anti-harassment policies for conferences, and eventually to Aurora quitting her work as a full-time kernel developer at Red Hat to focus on the issues involved.

The Ada Initiative launch announcement

The Ada Initiative is a new non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media. Co-founders Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora have 10 years experience in open source software, open social media, and women in computing activism with groups like Geek Feminism, Systers, and LinuxChix.

Is Open Source Good For Security?

I still regularly hear people asking about open source and security. The usual question goes along the lines of “surely if the source is out in the open bad guys can do bad things”. The implication is that keeping the source code secret aids security and having it public degrades security.

Now, I’d not suggest that open source possesses some form of magic that always delivers more security – Alec Muffett recently debunked that idea here on CWUK. But I’ve two stories I watched unfold that support the assertion it can help make security better, in the context of a properly-functioning community.

[...]

The world of open source is full of cases where openness of information and process allow properly-functioning open-by-rule communities to address security issues fast. This is the real meaning of the idea that open source is good for security; no magic, just symbiosis.

Events

• Open Ballot: will you attend a Linux event this year?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Tries to Help News Media Figure Out the Web

    Newspapers and other traditional media outlets get a lot of flak for not being more forward-thinking when it comes to what they do on the web or on mobile devices. And it’s true that many are stuck in the past — happy to continue plastering their websites with content shoveled from their print or offline operations. But even those who would like to be more creative often don’t have the resources to do so, since they usually have few (if any) staff with the programming and technology chops. Now the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation have joined forces to try and give media outlets some help in that area, by creating a fellowship program that will “embed” data and web-oriented journalists and developers in newsrooms as a way of sparking some creativity.

  • Introducing Wiki Wednesdays

    The Mozilla Developer Network web site has a ton of documentation. A lot of it is really good. However, we have a significant number of articles that could use some help from the experts. To that end, we’re introducing Wiki Wednesday. Each Wednesday, we’ll post a very short list of articles that need technical help. The list will be posted here on the Hacks blog, as well as to the relevant Mozilla developer mailing lists.

  • Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta, now including “Do Not Track” capabilities

    The latest Firefox 4 Beta is now available to download and test. We’ve continued our work to improve performance and stability, while also implementing a “Do Not Track” privacy feature to provide more control over online behavioral tracking.

SaaS

• The Internet kill switch idea is already hurting cloud computing

  Pending federal legislation called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, aka Senate bill 3480, would grant the president of the United States the power to cut Internet access in a declared emergency, including blocking the Web for as many as 30 days, through a new agency to be called the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications. This concept was introduced last year, and it returned to the forefront this week when the S.3480 bill passed in its committee on the same day Egypt’s Internet connection was shut down to curtail widespread government protests.

• VMware preps link between public, private clouds

  Providing a vital link between internal and external clouds, VMware plans to release in March an adapter for moving virtual machines between a hosted service offering and an organization’s own internal systems, the company announced Tuesday.

• The Diaspora that wasn’t, and the way into the walled gardens.

  Just about every person involved with Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (referred from here-on as FLOSS) recognizes the problems with Facebook: it’s a walled garden, sharing of personal information is opt-out (assuming you can find it), questionable practices regarding tracking for advertisements, questions of ownership of data, and so on. Even more folks recognize that Facebook is the 800lb gorilla in the room (What does an 800lb gorilla do? Anything it wants). What is less apparent is what the appropriate FLOSS response to Facebook should be.

  Diaspora is one of those responses. They’re not necessarily the only response (there are others) but I think it’s indicative of the wrong sort of response to this problem. The biggest problem with Diaspora today is it solves the wrong problem. Diaspora is essentially a clone of Facebook with all of the privacy controls brought to the forefront. While this is indeed one of the problems with Facebook, the solution in Diaspora is misguided in thinking this is the only problem with Facebook. If Facebook were to adopt Diaspora’s privacy controls, there would still be problems with Facebook. Diaspora’s approach is fundamentally flawed. Unfortunately, they have enough mindshare from their campaign to get started that folks may think this is the best that the FLOSS community can do. They may settle for what Diaspora offers. That is absolutely not what FLOSS should do.

  One thing that FLOSS gets right is open protocols. Identi.ca, for all of it’s warts as a community, gets that the problem with Twitter isn’t that we need to have access to the code (although that is one problem). The problem with Twitter is that it too is a walled garden. In order to communicate with anyone on Twitter, I must have an account on Twitter. Identi.ca (and the underlying software, Status.net) gets this right by allowing federation using OStatus. Federation via OStatus allows me to set up a Status.net instance wherever I choose, and allows me to follow folks on other Status.net instances. It’s a brilliant approach, and I hope it gains more momentum. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have enough momentum right now to make Twitter adopt it. And why should Twitter expend their energies to adopt OStatus? After all, they’re the ones with the larger community.

Databases

• CouchOne and Membase merge as Couchbase

  NoSQL specialists CouchOne and Membase Inc have announced that they are merging to create a company that offes a more comprehensive range of NoSQL technology, named Couchbase. CouchOne’s expertise lies in CouchDB, the database created by CouchOne’s founder, Damien Katz. CouchDB is a widely deployed open source distributed/synchronising document database used by the BBC, CERN and Apple. Membase’s speciality is the distributed key-value memory cached database of the same name which offers high throughput for many web applications; it is used by companies such as AOL and Zynga.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Google open sources Contracts for Java

  Google has announced the open sourcing, under the LGPL, of Contracts for Java (cofoja), which implements a technique popularised by the Eiffel programming language. Design, or Programming, by Contract is a technique where the interfaces of software modules include contracts consisting of preconditions, postconditions and invariant expressions.

• More ratings, please

  Given the interest in my earlier article about a scorecard for open source and my own rough-and-ready benchmark proposal, I’d be interested in seeing how well the benchmark works at rating a variety of open source projects. If you’re familiar enough with a project to be willing to have your name associated with rating it, please complete the table below in the same style as my own evaluation of OpenJDK.

• Oracle and IBM to share open-source Java leadership

  Oracle has agreed to share governance of the OpenJDK Java community with IBM, in a move that demonstrates considerable good will, according to one analyst.

  The company has created a series of bylaws outlining the way the governance will be structured, with Oracle appointing itself chairman and the OpenJDK lead, and IBM taking the role of vice chairman.

CMS

• Tesla Motors using Drupal

  Tesla went public last year; it is the first American automaker to go public since Ford Motor’s IPO more than 50 years ago.

Business

• Competitive Benefits Drive Businesses to Open Source

  Vendors of proprietary software are fond of warning potential customers that open source software isn’t ready for business, typically citing subpar features or a higher total cost of ownership (TCO).

• Semi-Open Source

  • Openwashing – Press Pass

    Having worked with many companies over the years on going open source (see our report “Going Open Source”), many of them are just not cognizant ahead of time of the missteps that can be made. There’s so much arm-chair lawyering in open source (trade mark, assigning IP, patents, etc.) that it’s easy to overlook or simply not realize how much legal-thinking going open source requires. And if you do something wrong there, then once someone wants to accuse you of not being “real open source,” they can go after that fine print. Of course, as Oracle’s recent trade mark based flap over Hudson shows, those fears can be real: just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, as they say.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Interview with Richard Stallman (2011)

  Stallman: To qualify as a free distribution, Debian would have to remove the references to its nonfree and contrib sections from its free packages and from its servers. (Many contrib packages serve solely to help install nonfree programs distributed separately from Debian.)

Project Releases

• VMware releases Zimbra 7

  VMware has released the Zimbra Collaboration Server 7.0, the email and groupware solution spun out of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite after VMware took over Zimbra from Yahoo a year ago. This is the first product in the Zimbra 7 family; customers can now also download beta versions of Zimbra Desktop 7 and Zimbra Appliance 7.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • New Hampshire Opens its State’s Legislative Data

    In the past few days, New Hampshire’s General Court, as the state legislature is officially known, started releasing data on legislation and legislators in nerd-friendly, “pipe-separated” files, uploaded daily. In non-geek speak, this means the data is presented in a way that any competent web developer can easily process for use in an application or a researcher can feed into a database system to explore.

Juror will appeal order to turn over Facebook posts

A California attorney representing a juror required to divulge the contents of his Facebook account says he will file an appeal of the court order tomorrow.

Ken Rosenfeld, a Sacramento criminal defense attorney, told CNET that forcing jurors to turn over private correspondence in the form of Facebook posts “would be catastrophic in terms of free speech, justice, and the jury system itself.”

HP accuses Cisco of diverting data center standard

Networking rivals HP and Cisco have abandoned their common ground in data center switching, with HP accusing Cisco of diverting an IEEE standard and Cisco insisting that customers drove the change.

At issue are two as-yet unratified standards in the IEEE for data center switching that were being defined in concert but are now diverging. IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh were intended to work closely together to enable physical switches to offload much of the network-intensive processing from virtual switches on blade servers and NICs. A year ago, Cisco and HP were driving the effort in a rare show of unity.

Rediscovering WWII’s female ‘computers’

In all the interviews and conversations, it hadn’t come up. To the sisters, it was just a job they’d held a long time ago, when they were teens with a talent for numbers.

To filmmaker LeAnn Erickson, it was history rediscovered.

It was 2003 and Erickson was interviewing sisters Shirley Blumberg Melvin and Doris Blumberg Polsky for her documentary, “Neighbor Ladies,” about a woman-owned real estate agency that helped to peacefully integrate a Philadelphia neighborhood. The twins, long-retired by then, reluctantly mentioned a different sort of job they’d held during World War II: Female “computers.”

HuffPo Blogger Revolt!

It’s not exactly upheaval, but there are rumblings at The Huffington Post. Now that HuffPo bloggers know how much the liberal’s Drudge Report is worth—$315 M.—and how much cash their boss Arianna Huffington made off its sale to AOL—~$100 M.

ReactOS – Open-Source Windows Clone Software To Seriously Look Forward To

ReactOS is an effort to provide a Windows NT-like architecture that is compatible with existing drivers and applications. An easy way to look at it would be to say that it is a clone of the Windows OS (which is closed-source so it’s not possible to really clone it), when in reality, it’s an alternative to the Windows OS, with the difference that it’s a collaborative open-source project and it’s in its infancy. While the team behind ReactOS has been heavily developing this young operating system for over a decade, it is still in the alpha stage. However, there is a number of reasons that make ReactOS worth a look.

5 Things I Love Most About MS Windows

numero cinco – I love MS Windows because it has more users than Charlie Sheen has drunken girlfriends; which serves to paint a LARGE target on it rather than on my actual operating system (Linux). Hackers and spammers are wise. They use Linux on their own systems and target the operating system that gives them the biggest bang for the byte. Thanks to Microsoft for being my shield.

Science

• A Scientific Dating Insight: Create Uncertainty

• Meat-Eating Furniture

  You’re not going to like this. I didn’t. Nobody I’ve shown it to has. But the designers who thought it up, James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, are provocateurs, so they don’t mind if you hate what they’ve done.

• FYI: What Does Space Smell Like?

  The final frontier smells a lot like a Nascar race—a bouquet of hot metal, diesel fumes and barbecue. The source? Dying stars, mostly.

Hardware

• Texas Instruments shows off a 2GHz dual-core ARM chip

  CHIPMAKER Texas Instruments (TI) has unveiled the OMAP 5 system that includes dual core ARM Cortex-A15 processors running at 2GHz.

Health/Nutrition

• Egypt Protests – Cellphone Radiation – Ken Nordine

  Cellphone Radiation – In our Middle Hour; a documentary called A Precautionary Tale.

  We’ve all seen them, those ubiquitous cell phone towers atop, office buildings schools, apartments.

  We know they emit a certain kind of radiation but are they dangerous?

  In an apartment in the west end of Toronto, tenants living with the towers began complaining about health problems.

  Were the towers to blame?

  Producer John Chipman in a special one-hour report looks at both sides of a heated and controversial subject.

Security

• Security updates for Tuesday

• Anonymous v. Computer Insecurity Expert Aaron Barr – Part 2

• Anonymous to security firm working with FBI: “You’ve angered the hive”

  Internet vigilante group Anonymous turned its sights on security firm HBGary on Sunday evening in an attempt to “teach [HBGary] a lesson you’ll never forget.” The firm had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to unmask members of Anonymous following the group’s pro-WikiLeaks attacks on financial services companies, and was prepared to release its findings next week.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Egypt: End-Game

  Apparently possible foreign medical treatment may be involved in the end-game in Egypt, “What to do with Mubarak?”. The protestors want him out ASAP and medical treatment may be a good cover for exile. It is much less likely that a dictator can tweak the strings of power remotely. The end-game may morph into “What to do with the vice-president?”

  Apparently, much of the leadership of the current regime are filthy-rich and have domiciles around the world. They may all leave one night and Egypt could wake up to an Animal Farm situation. In spite of the protestors’ apparent lack of a leader/point-man, the regime could implode if the current leadership leaves. Most opinions are that the military can ensure stability while Egypt reorganizes itself.

• Egypt: 2011-2-8

  #
  # 20 lawyers have drawn up charges claiming corruption/conversion of money by Mubarak’s buddies ($billions),
  # Mubarak has ordered a committee formed to revise the constitution he wrote,
  # the Google guy who started a page on Facebook that may have been the catalyst for a lot of the protests was freed,
  # the government has promised not to prosecute the millions of protestors, and
  # the numbers and kinds of protestors keeps growing.

• US Patriot Act is unconstitutional

  The US Congress is moving to renew the USA PATRIOT Act, a controversial anti-terrorism law. The major provisions of the bill will expire soon, forcing the Congress to entertain the measure once again.

  The US Senate is in a hurry extend the extension of the Act, so much so many want to dismiss any discuss and debate on the topic. Similarly, the US House is set to vote at any time to extend the law’s provisions until December 8, 2011.

• Brutal Beating Reveals Ongoing Reign of Terror in L.A. County Jails

  The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department today launched an internal investigation after Esther Lim, a jail monitor for the ACLU of Southern California, submitted a sworn statement in federal court yesterday recounting the details of a brutal beating she witnessed of an inmate in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy. Twin Towers is one of the several facilities that make up the Los Angeles County jail system.

• Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) Highlights

  During last Tuesday’s ‘Million Man March’ and Friday’s ‘Day of Departure’ rallies, the swirling clamour of car horns, famously characteristic of Liberation Square’s soundscape, fell silent, as human cries for freedom, change and justice floated through the air.

• Will Cuba Be The Next Egypt?

  Developments in Egypt over the last two weeks brought Cuba to my mind. Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? Part of the answer is in the relationship between the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—and the generals. The rest is explained by the regime’s significantly more repressive model. In the art of dictatorship, Hosni Mubarak is a piker.

• Cubans Are Neither Arabs Nor Muslims

  This isn’t to reject or alienate those who, from abroad, across the internet and social networks are calling for a people’s uprising or a general strike in Cuba. It’s a question of reality.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices

  The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

  The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

• Dinner with Julian

  On Wednesday the 9th of February 2011 from 6.30pm GMT people from all around the world will commence dining with their friends in a unified effort to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of speech.

Finance

• IMF raises spectre of civil wars as global inequalities worsen

  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that “dangerous” imbalances have emerged that threaten to derail global recovery and stoke tensions that may ultimately set off civil wars in deeply unequal countries.

• Donors pledge $120 million aid for Belarus opposition

  Poland — which has been accused by Lukashenko of trying to topple him — announced it was doubling its aid to groups including the independent media, earmarking some 10 million euros.

  The funds cover the operating costs of the Warsaw-based Belast TV, the only Belarussian-language station broadcasting in Belarus which is not controlled by the authorities there.

  US officials said Washington was increasing aid by a third to 15 million dollars, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt announced seven million euros for independent Belarussian media, and Germany pledged 6.6 million euros.

  The Warsaw meeting came just days after the EU and United States slapped a new raft of sanctions — including a travel ban and asset freeze — on Lukashenko and 157 associates.

  Belarus has been defiant, with its foreign ministry on Tuesday calling the moves against its leaders “unjustified” and threatening to take reciprocal steps.

• Corruption and Inequality Begin at Home

  The U.S. media seems to have found a new language for the economy. There’s been talk of “solidarity” and even “class war,” and a focus on corruption and inequality like we haven’t seen in who knows how long.

  The only problem? They’re talking about Egypt.

  “It’s quite clear that entire domains in the economy were dominated by a few people,” a British professor of Middle Eastern Studies told the New York Times Monday. The reporter notes “Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Journalist’s spoof exposes Romanian MPs’ greed

  More than a hundred Romanian parliamentarians responded to an SMS invitation from a fake businessman from the United Arab Emirates who proposed them “a deal”. Only later did they realise they had been fooled by a journalist.

  Daily newspaper ‘Romania Libera’, which set up the spoof, has published a full list of the greedy parliamentarians.

Privacy

• CTRL+ALT+DEL on Privacy/DRM

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Don’t fear the foreign reaper

  When Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, a U.S. private equity firm, thought about buying Bell Canada a few years ago, someone – I can’t remember who – criticized the deal by saying he didn’t want decisions about Canadian telecom made in Manhattan board rooms. That’s about as dumb an argument as I’ve ever heard because when it comes to telecom companies, we’re talking about the pipes – whether they’re wires or wireless – that stuff travels through. It’s like complaining about how the decisions regarding the computers we use or the televisions we watch are being made in California and Tokyo board rooms. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who owns the pipes the stuff goes through. All that’s important is that we get the stuff, preferably faster and cheaper.

• CRTC to review billing practices for wholesale Internet services

  The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today launched, of its own initiative, a proceeding to review its decisions on billing practices that would have applied to the residential customers of Small Internet service providers (Small ISPs).

• No Cap on UBB Reading: Lots of Coverage of Caps and Competition

  The current controversy over usage based billing, the CRTC, and Internet data caps has generated a wide range of commentary and articles over the past few days.

• Internet usage debate, Part 2: $8B to keep pace

  The controversy around usage-based billing (UBB) continues to swirl, and at the centre are third-party wholesale Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are driving the debate — and very often the myths as well.

• Bell’s Sunny Broadband Claims

  The NetIndex report ranks Canada 36th in the world for residential speed. Moreover, the shift away from the OECD to the G20 has the effect of excluding many developed countries with faster and cheaper broadband than Canada (while bringing in large, developing world economies that unsurprisingly rank below Canada on these issues). While there is probably a report somewhere that validates the claim, the consensus is that Canada is not a leader.

• Bell admits errors tracking clients’ Internet usage

  Bell Canada has admitted to problems tracking Internet use for some customers.

  This is embarrassing, given the company’s insistence on usage-based billing for its own clients and for other clients of other Internet service providers that rent its network.

DRM

• Sony Lawyers Expand Dragnet, Targeting Anybody Posting PlayStation 3 Hack

  Sony is threatening to sue anybody posting or “distributing” the first full-fledged jailbreak code for the 4-year-old PlayStation 3 gaming console.

  What’s more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying information (.pdf) of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on a private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.

• Sony lawyers now targeting anyone who posts PlayStation 3 hack

  Sony is threatening to sue anybody posting or “distributing” the first full-fledged jailbreak code for the 4-year-old PlayStation 3 gaming console.

  What’s more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying information (PDF) of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on a private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.

Intellectual Monopolies

• EU trade deal could cost Canadian drug plans billions

  Generics cost roughly 25 to 50 per cent of the equivalent brand-name drug.

• If You Don’t Offer Legit Versions, Is It That Big A Surprise That People Want Unauthorized Copies?

  Sage Freehaven points us to an amusing, but telling, customer service chat between a guy in the UK who wanted to buy the latest version of RosettaStone’s Vietnamese language program, and a RosettaStone customer service rep. The guy’s main concern is that it appears an older version is available in the UK, but he wants the newer version, which the company refuses to ship to the UK, even though it’s been out elsewhere for a long time. He then asks if the company will give a free upgrade when it finally launches the newer version in the UK, and the customer service rep has no idea.

• Copyrights

  • White House will propose new digital copyright laws

    The Obama administration has drafted new proposals to curb Internet piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement that it says it will send to the U.S. Congress “in the very near future.”

    It’s also applauding a controversial copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, saying it will “aid right-holders and the U.S. government to combat infringement” once it enters into effect.

  • The Future of UK Copyright

    As you may have noticed, the topic of “IP” – “intellectual property” – seems increasingly to the fore these days. Actually, that’s not really a new trend: as this helpful ngram shows, there has been a really rapid uptake of the term since the 1980s. But promoting the supposed virtues and use of “IP” ever-more widely has turned into something of a bandwagon for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something, and for those who want to assert their intellectual monopolies more strongly.

    On the patent front, there is a simplistic assumption that more of them being filed and granted means more innovation, so by increasing the number of patents, innovation, too, will magically be boosted and everyone will be better-off (the EU is the latest to espouse this Innovation for Idiots approach.)

    But it’s not just patents where maximalists are pushing the “more is better” line. The term of copyright, too, has been extended again and again over the last few decades, even though there is no evidence that this massive withholding of content from the immediate public domain does anything to inspire greater production of new material (which is what copyright is supposed to encourage.)

  • Music Royalty Society Collects Money For Fake Artists, Bathroom Equipment and Food

    Music royalty outfits are experts at not only gathering funds from anyone who dares to play music in public, but also at generating adverse publicity. Known for pressurizing anyone from charities to the police, their activities are often viewed with disbelief. Now a Belgian TV show has had a closer look at one of them, and ended up paying royalties for a whole host of artists that don’t exist, bathroom equipment and chinese food.

    If you play music in public, sometimes even if you play it in relative privacy, music royalty societies want you to pay them money. It’s big business. The UK’s Performing Right Society (PRS) collects around £650 million every year and isn’t scared to flex its muscles when people aren’t paying. Got a business where staff listen to radio and a passing member of the public hears it? You owe them money. PRS have even taken the police to court for playing music in police stations.

  • Slammed By Judge, ACS:Law Not Allowed To Drop File-Sharing Cases

    Today, despite the apparent closure of both anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law and its copyright troll partner MediaCAT, the Patents Country Court began yet another hearing to announce how more than two dozen previously filed cases should be handled. Judge Birss QC slammed the scheme operated by the pair and denied them the opportunity to drop the cases.

    In a statement read out in the Patents County Court earlier this month, ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley announced that he had quit the file-sharing claims business. Last week TorrentFreak discovered that he had completely closed down his business, along with his client MediaCAT who had also ceased trading. Nevertheless, the companies still have unfinished business – they can’t run away that easily.

  • Spotify To Launch in the US Soon, For Real This Time

    It feels like we’ve been hearing the same song and dance regarding Spotify’s US launch for months now. It’s always just over the horizon. An email sent to All Things D is at least tacit confirmation that a launch is imminent. The message was sent to the few Us users of Spotify test accounts to let them know they’re going to have to start paying up. The email also said that a US launch was coming “over the coming months”. Well, at least they didn’t say years.

  • ACTA

    • Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) Highlights

      ACTA is an international agreement hammered out by a handful of countries (led by the US, including Canada) that requires signatories to create civil and criminal law to give force and effect to ACTA.
      ACTA is intended as a global standard to ‘protect’ against intellectual property and counterfeit products, containing very specific discussion about digital information.