Linux today is a far more appealing solution than Microsoft Windows [...]
Apparently Microsoft was " protecting" me from having my movie watched on two screens at the same time, but frankly it should have allowed me to switch to the one large LCD. Instead, even running just the one large screen showed a black box where my movie should have been.
I was later told this was part of the new protections enabled in the operating system to ensure DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was addressed.
As a demand for Linux-related jobs has jumped unexpectedly high in the last couple of years, LinuxCareer.com as a new Linux related job portal attempts to compensate for this sudden surge in demand for Linux skilled professionals and will surely accommodate both employers and job seekers. LinuxCareer.com is not affiliated with any local or international company, nor is it a recruitment or employment agency and it is specialising only in Linux based careers and closely related Information Technology fields.
LinuxCareer.com offers tools such as application tracking, job alerts, login and syncing resumes with facebook.com and linkedin.com accounts as well as screening questionnaires for employers and resume uploads for job seekers.
The final problem, and in general the biggest problem, is the one I wrote about two weeks ago, when I was preparing this system for my class. This is the Windows 7 installation which insists on scribbling on the MBR when I have GRUB installed. I never did figure out how or why it is doing that, or how to stop it. In the end I had to take the advice offered by Moley and a couple of others, and set the system up to multi-boot with the Windows bootloader. Ugh. What a nasty, ugly bunch of garbage. Gosh, I know, this is only 2011 and it is asking a lot for Microsoft to have something that is a bit more appealing than what they developed over 15 years ago for Windows NT, but honestly... a text-only, white font on a black background... oh, please. Anyway, setting that up to multi-boot Win7 or openSuSE, and then using my normal Legacy GRUB configuration to further multi-boot the various other Linux distributions I have installed at least works, and it has stopped the system from self-corrupting. I can't even tell you how many times I reinstalled Windows and various Linux distributions while trying to get something else - anything else - to work. Bleah.
We are proud to announce today, May 19th, the immediate release of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 2.6.39.
Among the new features included in Linux kernel 2.6.39 we can mention new drivers for high-end AMD graphics cards, ipsets to simplify firewall maintenance and implementation, improved EXT4 file system, new drivers for better hardware support, and lots of bug fixes.
"So it's delayed a few days, and I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it could easily have made more sense to just do an -rc8."
The rapid release cycle of the Linux kernel shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Linux founder Linus Torvalds this week released the new Linux 2.6.39 kernel, barely three months after the 2.6.38 kernel came out. The 2.6.39 kernel is the third major kernel release so far in 2011.
The 2.6.38 kernel release cycle included seven release candidates and Torvalds noted in a mailing list posting that he had debated whether or not to issue another candidate to provide more testing time.
"I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it could easily have made more sense to just do an -rc8," Torvalds wrote.
With the very latest open-source Linux driver code for the AMD Fusion E-350, the support is finally stable and comparable to that of other recent Radeon HD graphics processors with the open-source driver stack.
It was relatively common in the 1990s to hear that the command line’s days were numbered. Both claims of its obsolescence and rumors of its impending demise were greatly exaggerated.
While many people use Skype for its free voice over IP (VoIP) services, Linux users have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, Skype will run on some versions of Linux, but it doesn't run on all of them, and the Linux version (2.2-beta) lags far behind the Windows version (Skype 5.3). That's three major generations behind. Need I say more?
Much as I dislike Microsoft's recent purchase of Skype and even though I think Skype's technology is held together by bailing wire and duct tape, maybe Skype will become better for Linux with Microsoft. After all, it couldn't be much worse!
What I love about Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular, is that if you want some software, you can normally find it, install and use it within minutes.
A case in point is my search for podcast software. I typed podcast software ubuntu into Google, second item down is gPodder, fire up the Synaptic package manager, quick search for gPodder, mark, apply, job done.
# Microblogging client for Twitter and Identi.ca, it’s not possible (at the moment) to use 2 accounts in the same windows, so to see both microblogging provider (or 2 twitter accounts) you need to run 2 instances of Turpial.
A few years ago, when I was evaluating one of the lightweight distros -- I think it was Damn Small Linux -- I was delighted to see that it placed a CPU-and-memory monitor on the desktop. When you're using a box with 64 MB or 128 MB of RAM, that's vital information; and the tool that displays that information must be lightweight itself. But when I wanted to install it on Debian, all I could remember was that it had a five letter name beginning with "C".
DNASTAR€® announced the release of SeqMan NGen software for the Linux operating system today. This powerful DNA sequence assembly tool is now available on Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
Alien Arena is a free first person shooter. It has a 1950's science fiction atmosphere. You can play online deathmatch or play single player mode against bots. The game engine is open source but other content is proprietary. There are over 50 maps that you can choose from and 9 different weapons. If you are playing online you can choose from deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, deathball, team core assault and cattle prod. There are also powerups to collect. The game features nice graphics and fast gameplay. Check out a video of the game here. To download the game go to their website.
I'm here to talk about my GSoC project (\m/), the plasma components. As you may know, QML is a declarative language to build rich interfaces introduced in Qt 4.7 by providing simple primitives. As it is a powerful way to develop interfaces and it's the future of UI development for Qt was necessary to make the plasma support it.
I have just started using Kubuntu a week ago. Being a new user of the KDE desktop, I admit that I am have difficulty getting used to its terms. One of the thing I am always confuse is the difference between plasmoids and widgets. The two terms are used interchangeably and it took some googling to discover that plasmoids are actually widgets.
erhaps it's the fact that GNOME has undertaken meaningless change in the past, justifying it through the use of buzzwords, and ended up with a morass that really does not find favour with too many users.
Perhaps it's the fact that the GNOME developers still have the attitude that they are building things for themselves and the rest of the world can use it as it is or else take a walk.
Whatever it is, when there is talk of change in GNOME, people sit up and get agitated. But this time, someone has bitten off a lot more than they can chew, suffered from indigestion and then passed a lot of misinformation around.
Let's get specific. The OMG!Ubuntu site, a site for Ubuntu fanbois, published a little article a few days ago, titled "GNOME to drop support for BSD, Solaris, Unix?"
This was based on a post to Reddit. The OMG Ubuntu employee who wrote the post for the site, Joey Sneddon, did not bother to read the email that began the discussion that led to this amazing claim.
In the past days I’ve been packaging and fixing some issues on Unity 2D for inclusion on the GNOME:Ayatana repository in the openSUSE Build Service.
This gave me an excellent opportunity to test a few components share by both, Unity and Unity 2D, which is the case of ‘unity-place-applications’ and ‘unity-place-files’, both using Zeitgeist which is already in Factory for the upcoming openSUSE 12.1. We thank the integration of this packages to Federico Quintero. Thanks Fred.
RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat, Inc., open source solution provider has recently announced the availability of OpenShift, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developers who build on open source.
If it weren't for RedHat Linux, I might not have ever found PostgreSQL. In early 2001, I was running the tech side of a company with an ISP component to it. After starting with RedHat 4.2 in 1997, we'd standardized all the servers by then on RedHat 7.0, refusing to upgrade from its 2.2 kernel even when new versions with 2.4 appeared. (We needed VPN Masquerade and it didn't work on those crazy bleeding edge 2.4 kernels) Into the business came a new product that needed a database embedded into it. As a former Progress DBA of some reknown (seriously!), I got the job of figuring out which to use. After poking around at the open-source database options that were a simple rpm install away, I found PostgreSQL 7.0. It seemed completely sensible for a small but important database. BerkleyDB was too simple for the queries I wanted to write, MySQL 3.23 was frighteningly loose with its data to me, and I was still pissed at Oracle for killing off my previous database career--even if I had wanted to budget for it. I got a copy of Bruce's PostgreSQL book, hot off the presses, built an app with RedHat 7.0 plus PostgreSQL 7.0 plus Perl-DBI, and the database part of it worked great.
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I'm writing this as my first Scientific Linux install executes, and I have my first SL6 work for a customer also fed up with waiting on CentOS6 to start on when it's finished. CentOS isn't the first group to run an open-source development project without what I'd consider a really open development community, they're just the latest to show how dangerous that is.
RHEL 6.1 features optimized KVM virtualization, new hardware support, improved operational efficiency, and high availability (HA) improvements. It also includes improved development and monitoring tools such as an updated Eclipse development environment includes enhanced breakpoint and code generation for C/C++ and Java.
BMC Software, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE have partnered to create the Open Virtualization Alliance to promote the adoption of open virtualization technologies such as KVM. What does it mean for you, the VAR? Simply put: exposure.
VARs working with any of the open virtualization standards no doubt have run up against customers who are either wary about open source technology, or just simply don’t know about the potential. Promoting awareness about technology is a good way to spread it, and that’s what the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) plans on doing.
Yesterday with some help from smooge and nb, I set up a Danbooru-style image board to test out, and I am hoping that Fedora artists and designers might play with it and see if it’d be a useful resource. It’s an application called Shimmie.
What is an imageboard? It’s a bulletin board or forum type of website that focuses much more heavily on images rather than text. You can read more about them in Wikipedia’s article. Traditionally they are used for ‘found’ images, and I don’t know if they are used much by folks who are generating original artwork, but it seems as if they would be a useful tool for collaborative image production, as they would keep discussion focused on visuals.
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Some folks understandably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mysterious haze of incense smoke without much logic or reason involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – discussions about art works sometimes get a bad reputation for being anywhere from fussy, to bizarre, to completely pointless.
Fedora is in the process of retiring our old "Individual Contributor License Agreement"...
After I installed SimplyMEPIS 11.0 and restarted the virtual machine, I was greeted by a session almost identical to the live session, which is only to be expected. The big thing that I wanted to make sure here was whether installing packages would work given that it didn't in the live session due to weird settings, and thankfully, it did work. And that's where my time with SimplyMEPIS 11.0 ended.
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I don't think SimplyMEPIS is a good distribution for users who are new to Linux, though that is its target audience.
This review has been written over the period of a few days and one of the successes of Unity for me was that my wife immediately felt comfortable with it. My initial reservations have melted away with the realization that a different way of working can, until accustomed to, be a frightening place. Now that I’ve settled with Unity over the last few days, I will be keeping 11.04 on my main rig, I had intended to return to Sabayon, but now that I’ve got accustomed to Unity, there really is no reason for me to switch back at the present time.
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This review has been written over the period of a few days and one of the successes of Unity for me was that my wife immediately felt comfortable with it. My initial reservations have melted away with the realization that a different way of working can, until accustomed to, be a frightening place. Now that I’ve settled with Unity over the last few days, I will be keeping 11.04 on my main rig, I had intended to return to Sabayon, but now that I’ve got accustomed to Unity, there really is no reason for me to switch back at the present time.
If you look at Unity, some of it’s customization potential is exposed in the Unity user interface itself, but much of it is hidden (so as to provide a sleek and uncluttered experience for end-users), but you can still access this functionality under the covers. Tools such as Simple CCSM, and more recently Gunity and Confity are providing tools to access these lower-level configuration options. Of course, this is exactly the kind of awesome that power users love! Trouble is…there is one problem…
We have already featured a series of articles dealing with various aspects of the brand new Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal starting with the thorough review of Ubuntu 11.04. Now its time for some extensive customization of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal's look and feel through a bunch of cool looking themes. Following is a collection of some of my favorite GTK themes for Ubuntu 11.04/GNOME 2.0 based desktops. Take a look.
The dedicated MeeGo team has announced the release of MeeGo 1.2.
MeeGo is a promising mobile operating system which can run on a number of devices including smartphones, MIDs, Tablets, Netbooks and In-Vehicle systems.
The latest release gives device vendors and developers yet another GNU/Linux based operating system to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI), defender of the open-source faith, will soon expand its reach, embracing representatives from other open-source groups and the world of business.
If you’re at the Open Source Business Conference, OSBC, in San Francisco today and tomorrow, you have three opportunities to hear me speak (or three sessions to scrupulously avoid, depending on your taste). They are:
* Why You Need an Open Cloud Platform to Build a SaaS, Monday 11:40-12:30 On this large panel, I’ll be commenting on the fact that there’s no way you can guarantee that you’ll not be locked in with a cloud solution today. Just as with other software solutions where your software freedoms are threatened, that doesn’t mean avoid them blindly, but it’s important to look for suppliers who actively protect the four freedoms in addition to promoting data freedom. This is also a context where community sentinels may be useful.
Solutions Linux 2011 is now over ! The last day was again full of various meetings, including a very interesting one with Charles Schulz (The Document Foundation) where I learnt a lot around LibreOffice future that I can not disclose ;-) or maybe later on. And I lead the System Administration track, which was extremely successfull this year with more than 130 people in the room !! I’m glad to see that the new model of free conferences is allowig the event to have more attendees.
Over the weekend of May 14th and 15th, the Open Collaboration Services Next sprint took place at the Physics Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Seven experienced developers participated in this event--some of them coming directly from Linux Tag--in order to meet face to face, create new bonds, and discuss current and future issues around Open Collaboration Services.
Following Oracle's announcement that it plans to unify the two Java Virtual Machines it owns, Hotspot and JRockit, into a single virtual machine, Oracle has now made the JRockit virtual machine available for no charge for "development and internal production use". The blog announcement by Henrik StÃÂ¥hl, the JRockit product manager, notes that the developers are currently taking ideas and features from JRockit and porting them over to OpenJDK, but now Oracle wants to converge the licensing of the two virtual machines ahead of the actual converged virtual machine. While the current JRockit implementation will remain proprietary, the move is designed to to simplify the progress to a single JVM by getting more feedback on any regressions between the future converged JVM and the current JRockit.
The new POS Retail Module extends Openbravo ERP by integrating POS and store management capabilities.
Openbravo has announced a new commercial offering that extends its web-based open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The new POS Retail Module, based on Openbravo's popular POS open source project, delivers integrated Point-of-Sale and store management capabilities to the Openbravo ERP solution.
This year, it was given to Rob Savoye. Savoye is a long-time free software hacker, who has worked on GNU and other free software for over 20 years. He has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, multiple major GNU/Linux distributions, and One Laptop Per Child. Savoye has led the effort to produce a free software Flash player, Gnash. This work has enabled free software users to avoid dependency on a pervasive piece of proprietary software. Rob is also CTO and founder of Open Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to producing a freely licensed media infrastructure.
GPRS is a technology used by mobile phones to transmit data. If you have internet access on your cellphone, it's likely that you are using GPRS.
At the moment, 6200 desktops have been migrated and they intend to have a total of 8500 Linux desktops by the end of the year.
"Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify, or upgrade that rifle," they wrote in the document.
I'm grateful to Brian Proffitt for clarifying some of these confusions about Android licensing. In particular, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has cleared up the confusions that Edward J. Naughton keeps spreading regarding the GPL.
I noted that Naughton even commented on Proffitt's article; the comments spreads even more confusion about the GPL. In particular, Naughton claims that most BusyBox GPL violations are on unmodified versions of BusyBox. That's just absolutely false, if for no other reason that a binary is a modified version of the source code in the first place, and nearly all BusyBox GPL violations involve a binary-only version distributed without any source (nor an offer therefor).
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Of course, Naughton hasn't contacted me because he isn't really interested in software freedom. He's interested in getting press for himself, and writing vague reports about Android copyrights and licensing is a way to get lots of press. I put out now a public call to anyone who believes they haven't received source code that they were required to get under GPL or LGPL to get in touch with me and I'll try to help, or at the very least put you in touch with a copyright holder who can help do some enforcement with you. I don't, however, expect to see a message in my inbox from Naughton any time soon, nor do I expect him to actually write about the wide-spread GPL violations related to Android/Linux that Matthew Garrett has been finding. Garrett's findings are the real story about Android/Linux compliance, but it's presumably not headline-getting enough for Naughton to even care.
At the Technology Alliance annual luncheon in Seattle earlier this month, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra explained how the open government movement was “collapsing a lot of the complexity” that had previously made federal, state and local collaboration difficult. In particular, Chopra called out the efforts of Seattle startup Socrata, which is helping bring transparency to government information through data.gov. And now Socrata has introduced a new data.gov Web site designed to help government agencies publish and distribute data in new ways, including interactive charts, maps and lists.
Socrata wants to make access to government data as easy to filter, sort and analyze as a pair of loafers on Zappos.com.
“It is now as easy to analyze data as it is to buy a pair of shoes or a TV online,” according to an introductory video describing the new data.gov service.
We accepted 1,115 students from 68 countries. The ten countries with the highest number of accepted students are represented in the pie chart below.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with partner Divya Narendra, have one last card to play in their legal battle with Facebook.
The twins' attorneys announced yesterday that they intend to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the high court to hear their case against Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The petition stems from a settlement the Winklevosses and Narendra signed with the world's largest social network in 2008 after claiming Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social-networking site they called ConnectU. At that time, they were awarded $65 million from Facebook and Zuckerberg in exchange for dropping all further litigation against the site.
Over the years I’ve had many conversations with IT Managers on why they should be regularly running system updates. Sometimes they would take my advice but typically it just fell on deaf ears. This was usually due to complacency and the it will never happen to me attitude.
Along with "rescinding" (cancelling) the policies of individuals who become seriously ill, purging small businesses that employ workers who get sick is a tried-and-true way of meeting Wall Street's expectations. All it takes is one illness or accident among employees at a small business to prompt an insurance company to hike the next year's premiums so high that the employer has to cut benefits ... purging of less-profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has been declining for several years and why the number of Americans without coverage reached a record high of nearly 51 million last year.
A FAIRFAX journalist was arrested by Queensland Police yesterday after an article he wrote about vulnerabilities in Facebook's privacy controls was published on smh.com.au.
He was later released without charge but police retained custody of his iPad.
Ben Grubb, the deputy technology editor of the Herald website, was attending an IT security conference at a resort on the Gold Coast where a security expert, Christian Heinrich, demonstrated how he had gained access to the privacy-protected Facebook photos of the wife of the HackLabs director, Chris Gatford.
ASIO will be able to engage in industrial and economic espionage as well as spy on groups such as WikiLeaks on behalf of Australia's two foreign spy outfits, under one of the most significant widening of its powers in a decade.
According to the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, the changes are being made to allow ASIO to work better with Australia's two overseas spy agencies, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Defence Signals Directorate.
But legal experts and the Greens have expressed concerns that the changes are not needed and fundamentally change the way Australia's main domestic spy outfit operates.
Diplomatic cables of the US embassy in Sofia have been revealed on WikiLeaks and provided to the project for investigative journalism www.bivol.bg, bringing out new details about the way Bulgaria's far-right, nationalist Ataka party and its leader, Volen Siderov, are viewed by American diplomats.
The text in English has also been published at the Balkanleaks site, an analogue of the notorious whistle-blowing WikiLeaks.
It was the beginning of the last week of April when I received a call from the Editor Dawn asking me to come in for a meeting. “There`s a project I think you might be interested in working on but we can`t discuss it over the phone.” Intrigued, I went in for the meeting the next day and learnt what I and the project team would willingly give up our waking hours and days off for the next month or so.
Then Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the sabotage of Iran's nuclear programme in 2006, according to WikiLeaks documents published by Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on Thursday.
The leaked documents, which were not immediately available on either the Yediot or Wikileaks websites, purportedly detail talks between the head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission and then-US ambassador to Israel Richard Jones.
The series looked at the reports of health problems among cleanup workers and coastal residents, and it examined how the current regulatory system failed to prevent harmful exposures. ... the energy industry's impact on community health in the Gulf, the political power wielded by oil companies and other industry interests to thwart regulatory reform, and how the emerging health crisis has turned ordinary citizens into grassroots activists.
When it is not busy ordering high school cheerleaders to pay $45,000 because they sued the school district that required them to cheer for their alleged rapist, the Fifth Circuit's judges have cozied up tightly with the oil industry.
[in three years], Koch Industries' facilities emitted over 5.4 million pounds of toxic discharges into Wisconsin's air and water. Of these discharges, nearly 100,000 pounds were of substances known or suspected to cause cancer. Michael Ash, an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coauthor of the "Toxic 100 Air Polluters," says the numbers indicate that Koch Industries is a "major polluter" in Wisconsin.
Of the many asset classes to be victimized by the end of cheap energy, residential real estate is perhaps the most vulnerable. A call option on future wage growth, and, leveraged to our liquid-fuel based transport system, housing in North America is currently making its way back to the stable, but barely appreciating asset it once was. However, having started this journey only recently there is still a long way to go. A long way in price that is, for housing to fall.
The housing crash is currently in the midst of its next leg down. In similar fashion to those who missed the initial crash, the past year has seen a number of observers calling for a bottom. One of my favorite calls came last year from Karl Case in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. In A Dream House for All, Mr Case made the following argument: because house prices had fallen so much already, housing was now more affordable. But of course that wasn’t true at all. Not then, and not now.
Los Angeles County food stamp users are now on track to reach the 1,000,000 mark by later this year. After the California housing market cracked in 2006, and leading into the financial crisis of 2007-2008, LA County food stamp recipients were registering at the 625,000 level in the Spring of 2008. March 2011 shows that 967,301 persons are now in the program in LA County.
Adding to the intrigue, in an earlier round of bidding, Vestar Capital Partners, a PE firm with loads of experience in the canned food business, made the highest offer. In the second round, Barclays paired Vestar with KKR, in violation of the “no teaming” provisions of earlier agreements the firms had entered into with Del Monte, and had them submit a joint bid. Problem was, Barclays didn’t let the Del Monte board know it had taken this step, leading the board to believe that Vestar had dropped out. Vice Chancellor Laster found that this shady business alone “materially reduced the prospect of price competition for Del Monte”.
Facebook's recent admission that it hired a public relations firm to spread the word about privacy issues at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has left both companies looking foolish.
A Facebook spokesman confirmed that Facebook hired public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller to “encourage” media outlets to write anti-Google stories, specifically urging them to look in to claims that Google is invading people's privacy.
Facebook gave two reasons for why it decided to play the Richard Nixon role in this modern version of Watergate: The Musical. First, Facebook believes that Google is engaging in some social networking practices that are violating the privacy of its users. Second, Facebook dislikes (to say it mildly) that Google is trying to use Facebook's data in its own, competing social-networking service.
Baidu Inc was sued on Wednesday by eight New York residents who accused China's biggest search engine of conspiring with the country's government to censor pro-democracy speech.
The lawsuit claims violations of the U.S. Constitution and according to the plaintiffs' lawyer is the first of its type.
It was filed more than a year after Google Inc declared it would no longer censor search results in China, and rerouted Internet users to its Hong Kong website.
[the "Like" and "tweet" buttons notify] Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal. - Wall St. Journal
With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.
A leading senator, angry that Facebook Inc. failed to stop millions of preteens from using its social networking site, accused co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of lacking "social values" and being more concerned with building the company than with children's privacy.
Ultimately, your best protection is to be able to rehost your service elsewhere. This is where traditional views of software freedom become important. If the whole solution is open source, if there are no dependencies on meta-control points outside your control and if the existing data can be exported live and whole, you have the ultimate protection for your freedoms.
There are some issues that advocacy groups and big companies have come to agree on, and one is the main federal wiretapping law is in serious need of an update. Now it looks like the update may actually be coming. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced a bill today that would update the law known as the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, or ECPA.
The main problem with the ECPA is that it’s been interpreted by courts to allow cops to snoop on email without a warrant. That development has been disturbing to public interest groups, but has also begun to bother large corporations that the government has begun to treat as an easy source for evidence, even without a court order.
The organisers really seem to have included everyone, just as they say: "All stakeholders involved in creative industries - creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content." Well, everyone except one: The Public....This huge and insulting asymmetry is perhaps the perfect symbol of all that is wrong with industries based around copyright today: they sincerely believe that the "respect" involved is all one-way... This conference, then, is the perfect expression of an industry talking to itself, reinforcing its own prejudices and delusions, and unwilling to accept that the world has changed utterly
the recording industry is pushing California's lawmakers to approve legislation that would allow warrantless searches of companies that press copies of compact discs and DVDs. The Recording Industry Assn. of America, in effect, wants to give law enforcement officials the power to enter manufacturing plants without notice or court orders to check that discs are legitimate and carry legally required identification marks.
Yale is making high-resolution images from its cultural collections available on a free, open access basis. They've started by uploading 250,000 images, with lots more to follow. The collection includes "a small limestone stela with hieroglyphic inscription from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, a Mozart sonata in the composer's own hand from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a 15th-century Javanese gold kris handle from the Indo-Pacific collection of Yale University Art Gallery and a watercolor by William Blake."
In an attempt to educate its users about copyright law, YouTube has debuted "Copyright School," a video that explains why videos are removed from YouTube. While "Copyright School" does a great job of telling you what you can't do with copyrighted content, it does a very poor job of telling you what you can do with copyrighted content--namely, remix, reuse and repurpose it without permission from the rightsholder as allowed under the doctirine of fair use.
One of the website operators accused of copyright infringement by Righthaven LLC has retaliated, hitting the Las Vegas company with a class-action counterclaim seeking to represent defendants in all 57 Righthaven cases in Colorado.
While the counterclaim mentions all 275 Righthaven lawsuits, it covers only those filed in Colorado.
It charges defendants in all the Righthaven lawsuits "are victims of extortion litigation by Righthaven, which has made such extortion litigation a part of its, if not its entire, business model."
Amputee Patrick demonstrates his new worlds first bionic hand - BBC