03.17.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Pogson Thoughts/Advocacy

  • April, 2011 – The Month The Desktop Changes

    CompuLab/Trim Slice plans to ship a desktop PC that fits in your hand with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

  • HP: In a Race to be the King of the Linux Desktop etc.

    Now, HP is becoming a part of my career as Linux advocate. They intend to push WebOS/Linux everywhere:

  • Growth of GNU/Linux on the Desktop

    Wikipedia which gets the vast majority of its clicks from English-speaking countries, shows that other OS with 82% share in February 2011 but 87% in February 2010, a -5% share change in one year. Wikipedia counts ARMed visits. In the same period Linux jumped from 1.65% to 2.47% share, a growth rate of 50%. We see now that iPad2 has sold out so the ramp in ARMed clients will continue. People who want Internet access Now! on a tablet will not be willing to wait weeks for their fix.

  • How The Mighty Art Fallen

  • Kerala Continues to Exploit FLOSS

    Kerala, India, has deployed GNU/Linux widely in schools. Now it’s the turn of the politicians. They have supplied themselves with laptops loaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux and saved thousands of dollars in licensing fees. They gave back some of that for training/familiarization but the end result is that they are happy with the choice.

  • Munich’s Migration To GNU/Linux – Latest

    This shows an interesting feature of GNU/Linux. While the migration from that other OS to GNU/Linux took years and is still not finished, the migration from Debian GNU/Linux to Ubuntu happens immediately. That says something for compatibility and open standards. It also helps that the migration is not just a migration of clients but the whole system of managing clients has improved. At this rate the job will be complete some time in 2012.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 2 6 38

    Summary: This release adds support for a automatic process grouping (called “the wonder patch” in the news), significant scalability improvements in the VFS, Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots, support for the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol (which helps to provide network connectivity in the presence of natural disasters, military conflicts or Internet censorship), transparent Huge Page support (without using hugetblfs), automatic spreading of outcoming network traffic across multiple CPUs, support for the AMD Fusion APUs, many drivers and other changes.

  • 2.6.38: making things Just Work

• Applications

  • Create To-do Lists and Organize Notes With myTinyTodo

  • Getting Things Gnome Keeps Linux Users Organized

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • find Basics

    • Virtualization With KVM On A Debian Squeeze Server

    • Protecting Nagios From Zero-Day Exploits with ModSecurity

    • How to Access Your MySQL Server Remotely Over SSH

    • Generate A Random Password

    • Proactive Spam Fighting with Akonadi

    • Inkscape resources to take you from newbie to power user

      The vector editor Inkscape is what some might call a best-kept-secret among open source projects — in part, because few people outside the graphic design community have any experience working with vector artwork; also, in part, because it’s so powerful that it can seem intimidating at first blush. Here are a collection of Inkscape resources you may find helpful in learning Inkscape and in expanding your skill set.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • conf.kde.in: Project Neon Returns With Bleeding Edge KDE Software

      Announced today at conf.kde.in in Bengaluru, Project Neon is back, new and ambitious. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old incarnation, which provided nightly builds of Amarok. Now the new generation of talented young Kubuntu developers announce that Project Neon is open for business!

    • conf.kde.in Opens in Bengaluru

    • Schedule announcement for Camp KDE 2011

    • conf.kde.in Talks Close With KDE Legend Sirtaj

      Our closing keynote for the second day had Eugine Trounev showing us some art he had made on the aeroplane to India. Open source drawing tools are often the best available now and the impressive pictures of temples and dragons he had done in a short time impressed on the audience how true this was.

    • 9th Annual PIM Meeting Renews Commitment to Innovation

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Linux Leaders, Part II: Fedora and Red Hat Derivative Distros

      Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are the most influential distributions that use the Red Hat Package Manager. Although their influence lags behind that of Debian and Ubuntu, it is still strong enough that Fedora remains consistently in the top three most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch, and is the ultimate source of 50 (15%) of the 323 active distributions listed.

      Fedora, the successor to Red Hat Linux and perhaps the most influential distribution prior to 2000, is consciously produced as the source for other distributions. In many of its releases, it is among the most innovative distros, releasing new software developed in co-operation with upstream projects. Development is more or less continuous within its Rawhide repository, with stable releases produced every six months.

    • Red Hat Announces Availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1

      Red Hat , Inc., the provider of open source solutions, announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, with new extensions for data services integration.

    • Red Hat Partners with Rochester Institute of Technology; Students Develop Open Source Video Chat to Enhance Communication for Deaf Children

    • NY’s Jennison ups its stake in Red Hat

      New York City-based Jennison Associates bought a major stake in Red Hat Inc. during the fourth quarter and is now the Raleigh software firm’s third largest institutional shareholder, according to LionShares.com.

    • Red Hat turns on Oracle and other Red Hat Linux clone-makers

      Red Hat has decided it’s no going to be Mr. Nice Linux anymore for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone makers such as Oracle and CentOS . Sure, in open-source, you share the code. That’s rule one. But, that doesn’t mean you need to make it easy for your rivals.

    • Fedora

      • Fusion 14 Thorium

  • Debian Family

    • Back to the Basics with Debian

      It feels good to be stable. It feels good to not have to worry about programs crashing, the net disconnecting, or not being able to install programs.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • “Copygate” Fiasco Exposes the Ugly Side of Ubuntu

        But, incredibly, it gets even worse. Next we had the “Peanutgate” scandal, in which Jono Bacon (full time Windows evangelist, and part time Ubuntu Community Manager) described detractors’ complaints about this misappropriation as the “views of the peanut gallery”. It should be noted that the members of this “peanut gallery” included Banshee developers, Gnome developers and various highly respected Linux luminaries, such as Jef Spaleta and Chuck Frain, the latter of whom has just quit in protest, from his position as leader of the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team. In his own words, it was his “tipping point”. I can’t say I blame him.

        And to think, it seems like only yesterday that Jono Bacon was lecturing all those nasty Open Sauce people about showing some Open Respect®.

        Hmm, Bacon could do with learning some Open Respect® himself.

        In the midst of all this scandal, it would have been easy to miss the furore, which I hereby dub “Copygate”, kicking-off over in Ubuntu’s proprietary new and improved Open Sauce Launchpad®, as fanboys ranted like mad ranty things about the evils of X.org, that stalwart of the Linux desktop, which Canonical has condemned to death for the crime of “Not Invented Here”, to make way for their shiny new toy, Wayland.

      • Ubuntu Linux and GNOME: The Disputes continue

        Linux is the supercomputer operating system of choice; thanks to Android, Linux is becoming the most popular smartphone operating system of them all;and Linux continues to make gains in the server market. But, when it comes to the desktop, no matter how you measure it, Linux has never how more than a tiny share of the desktop market. Why? Well, I can give you lots of reasons, but one that Mark Shuttleworth founder of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has pointed out that there’s a lot of disorganization and disorder in Linux desktop developer circles.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 10 LXDE released!

          New features at a glance:

          * Software manager
          o Application icons
          o Better categorization
          * Update manager
          o Ignore updates
          o Download size
          * Upload manager
          o UI, speed, ETA
          o Connection test
          o Cancel / Run in background
          * System improvements

        • Spotlight On Linux: CrunchBang

          CrunchBang is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian. It comes in OpenBox and XFCE editions, and a very dark visual theme. It’s the OpenBox version that I took a look at.

          Being based on Debian is a point is its favor as it means that standard trouble shooting and standard packages work on the system. The documentation on the website assures that CrunchBang is, essentially, a standard Debian installation with a few additional custom packages.

          Installation takes a familiar path. It’s a usable system when booted from the CD image, and hard disk installation is invoked by running a program from the desktop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Nokia spreading FUD?

        At the moment this very much looks like FUD to sell the proprietary Qt licenses. But perhaps Nokia knows about specific problems for Free Software, so I have sent this question to Knut Yrvin, Open Source Community Manager at Nokia, and will wait for his reply.

      • Don’t write off Nokia and Qt yet

        Even though I understood that this was not going to be some sort of fork, and that Nokia said they were committed to Qt development, I could not understand how or why Nokia would continue to remain involved in Qt development for the long-term. Commercial revenue from Qt would presumably be shared with Digia now (and therefore decreased), and Symbian and MeeGo’s (the two Nokia platforms that use the Qt libraries) respective prominence in Nokia is also expected to decrease, as the prominence of Windows Mobile 7 devices rises.

      • Save the Date – Qt Contributors’ Summit

        As we move forward with our Open Governance project, we believe that by summer it will be about time to put people together in one location. There are many topics to discuss for us, developers already contributing today and those sitting on patches for tomorrow.

    • Android

      • Android apps get terminated

        What’s the difference between a cyborg and an Android? I believe one represents a more human form than the other, putting that aside though, it appears that certain apps on the Android marketplace are being terminated due to being of an alleged malicious nature.

      • Intel works with notebook makers to push into Android tablet PC market

        Intel has already invited 6-8 notebook makers to work on devices featuring the new Intel/Android platform and is expected to showcase models at IDF Beijing, which will be hosted in China on April 12-13, at the earliest if related R&D goes smoothly, otherwise the company will announce the related models at Computex Taipei 2011 at the latest, the sources noted.

      • Steer clear of Android Market and its DRM

        Google recently made headlines after they identified some malware being distributed through the Android Market. Not only did they stop distributing those apps, but they used their “remote kill switch” to remove the apps from phones where they were already downloaded. This is a kind of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) that all computer users should avoid.

  • Tablets

    • The Problem with Tablets: 10 Things They Can’t Do

    • Still talking about desktops … haven’t we moved on?

      The desktop computer remains a fixture in just about every business – a fixture that still needs to be maintained, secured and eventually, refreshed. At the same time, the pressures to provide more flexible, cost-effective access to corporate systems is leading organisations to look at mobile and cloud computing desktop alternatives.

      So why are we still talking about desktops?

    • Netbooks vs. Tablets

      - Size and Weight. This is supposed to be one of the ultimate advantages, and I will admit that tablets are in general thinner and lighter than netbooks. But, how much of an advantage is that in practical terms? It still doesn’t fit in your pocket, you still have to either put it in your bag, backpack, briefcase or whatever, or have a special cover/case for it, don’t you?

Free Software/Open Source

• What does Community really mean? (Part 1)

  So how does the notion of community get into the mix? That is not an easy one to answer. Let’s just say that because Free and Open Source Software conveys certain freedoms and mandates the availability of the code in its source form, anyone can hack it.

• What the heck is FreeDOS?

  I went to the PIKOM PC Fair yesterday and I noticed several brands sold with “FreeDOS”. These brands include Acer, Asus, HP, and (I’m told) Dell. None of the sellers seem to know what FreeDOS is, and when asked about it most of them offer to install an unlicensed (illegal) copy of Windows 7 for free with the purchase of the computer. Some even claim that FreeDOS is no operating system and that users need to install Windows.

  In the article title, I’m being slightly disingenuous. I know exactly what FreeDOS is. I’ve used it and I like it. It’s an excellent and active free software project, similar in it’s licensing and (lack of) restrictions to most Linux distributions, but that’s where the similarities stop.

• Site Gives Students Web Access to Open Source Computation Tools

  A small UK company has launched a set of free open source computation utilities for college students. The Bamboo Toolbox includes access to software developed by open source communities that runs in a Web browser hosted by Hughes Bennett Education. If a student wishes to save computations, he or she can subscribe to a “personal notebook” for a small monthly fee.

• Events

  • Open Education 2011

    Open Education encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices: open educational resources, open learning support, open credentialing, open access, open scholarship, open teaching, and others. Sometimes open education is enacted by a national government or as an institutional initiative, other times an open education practitioner can feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. There is terrific diversity in the field of Open Education, and this diversity is one of the field’s greatest sources of strength.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 4 launch presages tougher browser battle for Mozilla

      The completion of Firefox 4 Release Candidate 1 yesterday — on March 9, as advertised — sets the stage for a big battle of the browsers in 2011.

      RC1, posted late yesterday, is available on Windows, Macintosh and Linux, and its stability and performance metrics suggest that the final Firefox 4 code should ship sometime this month.

    • Firefox 4, It Is Done

      At today’s Firefox planning meeting, we found no issues that would cause us to create a second release candidate. That means, in all likelihood, that the Firefox 4 RC that you’re using now *is* Firefox 4.

    • Thunderbird To Get Ubuntu One Integration

      Yesterday we wrote about Thunderbird being integrated to Ubuntu’s new user interface, Unity. However Thunderbird’s integration into Ubuntu is not about to end at that.

    • Mozilla CEO: Firefox Faced Advertiser Backlash Over “Do Not Track” Feature

      In January, Mozilla announced plans to add a “Do Not Track” feature to Firefox, a tool that would allow users to opt out from having advertisers and other sites track their web-surfing habits. As Mozilla has readily admitted, the feature is far from perfect: Backwardly, tracking companies would actually have to agree not to monitor a user’s browsing patterns, even once he or she opts out.

      However, according to Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, that hasn’t stopped the feature from ruffling the feathers of advertisers, who, despite serious public concerns over privacy, depend on personal user data to boost the value of their ads.

• SaaS

  • Eben Moglen Explains the FreedomBox on CBS News

    This past weekend CBS News aired a segment on the FreedomBox featuring an interview with Eben Moglen.

• Databases

  • Internet databases MongoDB, Drizzle upgraded

    Two performance-minded databases created for supporting Internet services and cloud computing have been revised: MongoDB has been updated and Drizzle has reached its first production-ready release.

    10gen has released version 1.8 of its open-source non-relational database MongoDB.

  • Oracle’s MySQL plans take aim at Red Hat and Microsoft

    Oracle threw its own punches at Red Hat and Microsoft today by detailing expanding integration of its MySQL with Windows and Oracle’s heftier databases in the 2011-12 timeframe.

• Education

  • Free Software University

    Marrying technology, innovation and this curious internet thing of giving stuff away for free, consultant and Cong-base Englishman, Lloyd Hardy, is hoping to kick start an online learning revolution.

    Hardy proposes to deliver university courses for free over the internet using an “open source” model. Open source has revolutionised the delivery of technology since the late 1990s. Famous examples include the Linux operating system, the Firefox browser, the Apache web server and the OpenOffice suite. These and thousands of other products are available at the equally famous price of zero euro.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Free Call Announced

    GNU Free Call is a new project to develop and deploy secure self-organized communication services worldwide for private use and for public administration. We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured peer-to-peer mesh calling networks, and we welcome all participation in our effort.

  • Cell phones are ‘Stalin’s dream,’ says free software movement founder

    Nearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones.

    “I don’t have a cell phone. I won’t carry a cell phone,” says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. “It’s Stalin’s dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I’m not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I’m not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.”

  • please Donate to Gnash

    To make a long story short it’s really hard to develop Gnash. basically the rules in the reverse engineering of Flash make it so that to work on the project you can never have used a version of Adobe flash for your own personal use to begin with. Now there are not a whole lot of computer users or developers for that matter who have never installed some version of adobe flash player so this greatly limits the number of developers that can work on this project. What is more is the project has gone broke at the moment. So in order to develop anything they need to pick up some regular funding. At the moment you can send one time donations to them through this website: Open Media Now . I have sent an email to rob saying that they should turn to a monthly donation model.

  • FSF announces new executive director

    The appointment follows the departure of Peter T. Brown, who has been the Foundation’s executive director since 2005.

  • FSFE Newsletter – March 2011

  • Let’s Play With GNU Screen

• Project Releases

  • KTorrent 4.1 is out

    After many months of work, new major releases for ktorrent and libktorrent are available.

  • XBMC 10.1 is released ! PPA Ubuntu and LinuxMint

    XBMC 10.1 is released, The main focus of this release is to address a bug that could cause XBMC to freeze when updating a skin. To increase stability, it is adviced to update to this new release.

• Licensing

  • Copyright assignment is killing the “free” in free software

    Now, many others could benefit of such an improvement, and we don’t want to maintain a forked version of CUPS, so we forwarded it upstream, who looked interested. But upstream now being Apple, they requested a stupid copyright assignment agreement.

  • Cloud Computing (SaaS) Licenses – Is AGPL the solution?

    It is supported by many that the AGPL license for network services which run in a cloud brings back the fairness provision that the original GPL intended and returns the freedom that FLOSS promises to all users and developers. But does the APGL license really provide all that?

    The AGPL license tries to bring software that works as a service closer to the PC based model for FLOSS licensing by linking the source provision requirement to the modification of the underlying code and its user interaction over a network . Copyright remains in derivative works and provides the potential users with the right to have access to source code. Moreover, with the use of AGPL the vendor is being “watched” somehow so he can not start behaving badly. But there is something that is concerning in all these. Data is the primary challenge of FLOSS in cloud computing so it is easily understood that access on the source code does not help if the data from a service in the cloud are still inaccessible.

Leftovers

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Florida State Lawmaker Takes Heat For Bill That Would Require Teaching Of ‘Non-Evolution’

    Florida GOP State Senator Stephen Wise is drawing fire with a legislative proposal that would require schools in the Sunshine State to dramatically change the way evolution is addressed in the classroom, primarily by requiring the teaching of an alternative he calls “non-evolution.”

    According to his legislation, public school teachers would have to “teach a thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” to students.

• Finance

  • The Final Hearing of the FCIC

    The debate and witnesses at the “TROUBLED ASSET RELIEF PROGRAM CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT PANEL HOLDS A HEARING ON THE IMPACT OF THE TARP ON FINANCIAL STABILITY“ (their caps, not mine!) is today’s MUST reading.

  • Live Reporting from the Wisconsin Protests

    Since Monday, February 14, tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents have been flooding the State Capitol in Madison in protest of Governor Walker’s proposed budget “repair” bill that would end 50 years of collective bargaining for Wisconsin workers. CMD reporters are out providing live coverage of these historic events. Send your stories, photos and videos to us at: PR Watch Editor!

  • For Hedge Fund Baron, Trial Poses a Steep Risk

    A decade later, Mr. Rajaratnam is taking the biggest calculated risk of his life. Beginning Tuesday, he will be seated at the defense table in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. In the biggest insider trading trial in a generation, Mr. Rajaratnam, 53, is fighting charges that he made $45 million trading on illegal stock tips.

  • Where the Proposed Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Falls Short

    You may know by now that American Banker has uncovered the 27-page term sheet that could form part of a global settlement between state and federal regulators and mortgage servicers. The term sheet describes a host of actions to which the servicers would have to conform, most of which reflect current law with a couple that go a little bit further.

    I’m a slight bit late to discussing this term sheet, so I’ll refer you to some other worthy commentators and analysts for the details. Cheyenne Hopkins at American Banker has a nice synopsis of the terms, as does HuffPo’s Shahien Nasiripour. Georgetown Law Professor Adam Levitin finds the terms to be strong, while Felix Salmon finds any settlement of this type to be doomed, mainly because of the lack of strong enforcement for non-compliance.

  • Mortgage Settlement Term Sheet: Bailout as Reward for Institutionalized Fraud

    American Banker posted the 27 page term sheet presented by the 50 state attorneys general and Federal banking regulators to banks with major servicing operations.

    Whether they recognize it or not, this deal is a suicide pact for the attorneys general in states that are suffering serious economic damage as a result of the foreclosure crisis. Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney who is serving as lead negotiator for this travesty, is in a state whose unemployment was a mere 6.2% last December. In addition he is reportedly jockeying to become the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So the AGs who are in the firing line and need a tough deal have a leader whose interests are not aligned with theirs.

  • Republicans Seek to Slow Agency’s Work on Derivatives Regulation

    Federal regulators are running out of time to write hundreds of new rules for Wall Street. Yet Republican lawmakers — and even some regulators — want to slow the pace.

    Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey is the latest prominent Republican to rebuke the speed at which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is writing rules. In a letter dated March 3 to the agency chairman, Gary Gensler, Mr. Garrett complained that a “rapid pace” prevented the financial industry from fully digesting proposed rules for derivatives trading.

  • Banks Like Proposed Fraudclosure Settlement

    Today’s bank rally lets you know exactly what the Street thinks about the proposed mortgage settlement. The big up could reflect the belief that it is a giveaway/bailout, and lets the banks get off scott-free from their criminality.

  • Banking Mammoths – Top 10 U.S. banks have $11 trillion of the $13 trillion in total banking assets. The problem? We have over 7,650 banks. The banking oligopoly leads to a concentration of wealth at the top.

    The too big to fail problem is still an issue that needs to be dealt with even though many would like to ignore it like a big dark secret. The FDIC is holding up a system with $5.4 trillion in deposits and no deposit insurance fund. I know a lot of Americans have a hard time believing this but this is a cold hard fact. The entire banking edifice of our nation is held up on pure faith combined with the backing of our largest banks and government. This wouldn’t be such an issue if banks operated as responsible stewards of the economy but instead they have used the taxpayer wallet as some kind of endless buffet piggybank. What is even more troubling is based on the latest data, the top 10 bank holding companies in the United States are reporting $11 trillion dollars in assets. Now why is this a problem? The FDIC insures 7,657 banks with $13 trillion in assets. In other words, over 84 percent of all banking assets are in the hands of the big ten banks

  • Another Sign the Market Is Rigged? Ex-Goldman Board Member Charged With Insider Trading

    Yesterday, the SEC charged a former board member of Goldman Sachs, Rajat Gupta, with insider trading.

    Gupta allegedly passed confidential information about Goldman and Procter & Gamble, where Gupta was also a board-member, to a hedge-fund friend named Raj Rajaratnam. Rajaratnam, who has already been charged with insider tradin

  • Goldman’s Pariah Status Fades With BoE’s Broadbent Appointment

    The Bank of England’s appointment of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) Senior European Economist Ben Broadbent to its Monetary Policy Committee shows governments are again looking to the firm for top decision makers, less than a year after it settled U.S. fraud claims.

    Broadbent, who has worked at Goldman Sachs since 2000, will replace Andrew Sentance at the end of May, the Treasury in London said yesterday. He joins a panel that has split four ways on policy for the first time since the central bank’s independence in 1997.

  • How Goldman Sachs Speculates and Avoids Tax

  • Goldman Sachs Weighs Competing Lehman Liquidation Plan, Creditors Say

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) may propose a liquidation plan for bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. that would give it more money and compete with two rival plans for the defunct company, two creditors said.

    Goldman Sachs, which owns claims against a Lehman derivatives unit, is considering proposing its own plan to pay creditors, said John Beiers, chief deputy county counsel for San Mateo County in California, and another creditor familiar with the matter. The county has joined hedge fund Paulson & Co. and other bondholders to push a plan that would pay them more than one filed by Lehman.

  • Why Isn’t Wall Street Behind Bars?

    “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”

    That was what filmmaker Charles Ferguson said at the Academy Awards last week, as he accepted an Oscar for his documentary Inside Job. It got us wondering the same thing…

    So we thought we’d talk to a couple of people inside the world of international finance.

  • Jamie Dimon And Lloyd Blankfein Are Now Advising The Kremlin

    The Kremlin is desperate to turn Moscow into a throbbing global financial center, but they need some help to do it.

    Right now Moscow is ranked 68th out of 75 cities in the Global Financial Centers Index, says Bloomberg.

    So who have they asked for some help? Pretty much every bank chief from another global financial center: Wall Street.

    Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and Vikram Pandit have all just been recruited by the Kremlin to advise Russia on how to turn Moscow into a finance hub, Bloomberg reports.

  • Bill Daley, White House Chief Of Staff, Pressed About Lack Of Jail Time For Wall Street Culprits

    White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley declined on Sunday to bring the president into the debate over why no major player in the collapse of the financial system in 2008 has gone to jail.

    Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Daley, who worked as an executive at JP Morgan prior to joining the White House, said it wasn’t the role of a politician, let alone a president, to weigh in on judicial matters. Besides that, he added, the reforms that Obama instituted years after the crash occurred were indicative of his dissatisfaction with the financial sector.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees (update)

    Ladies and gentlemen, the days of unlimited broadband may be numbered in the United States, and we’re not talking wireless this time — AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out — in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you’ll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.

  • Kroes’ No disconnect strategy

    In a similar fashion the digital rights group EDRI is pushing for a smart human rights provision inside the consumer directive to allow for checks and balances in the context of internet disconnection. But it looks like all observers lost sight what the consumer directive under Schwab is about to achieve or cover. For anti-circumvention purposes unlicensed access to radio spectrum seems key. I also remember the techniques used by German journalists in Tunesia during the World Summit of the Information Society to fence off the intimidating Tunesian authorities and communicate their news reports back home. It always concerned me that our governments were not providing the technical assistance they were able to provide.

• DRM/SCOny

  • The Sony PS3 Class File An Amended Complaint

  • Subpoenas in SCEA v. Hotz Issue, Subject to Motions to Quash

  • The Sony Class Action’s First Amended Complaint, as text – Updated

  • Sign-up! May 4th, 2011 Day Against DRM

    The Day Against DRM is an opportunity to unite a wide range of projects, public interest organizations, web sites and individuals in an effort to raise public awareness to the danger of technology that requires users to give-up control of their computers or that restricts access to digital data and media. This year, we’ll be helping individuals and groups work together to create local actions in their communities — actions will range from protesting an unfriendly hardware vendor to handing out informative fliers at local public libraries!

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Police Return Seized Hardware to Victorious BitTorrent Admin, Trashed

      Last month the second case against a UK-based BitTorrent site came to an end. Two administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the authorities and were free men once again. This week, personal belongings that were seized during the house raids were released and returned, but what should have been a celebration turned out to be a great disappointment.

      When FileSoup administrator Geeker had his home raided in the summer of 2009, police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) literally trashed his place. In a previous interview Geeker vividly recalled the events.

    • ACTA

      • US Proposals For Secret TPP ‘Son Of ACTA’ Treaty Leaked; Chock Full Of Awful Ideas

        The early reports on TPP was that the USTR would only consider ratcheting up intellectual property laws to more draconian states. It would not even consider the idea of decreasing the already too strict levels of intellectual property laws. It also would not bother with increasing consumer protections or important exceptions to stronger intellectual property law — even if it’s been shown that those exceptions have a much greater impact on the economy than the IP laws themselves.