I do not think the troll gets GNU/Linux. FLOSS is about sharing and trust. Debian GNU/Linux has a well-defined social contract in addition to the GPL and other Free Software licences used in the distribution. If, after all that a person does not trust a CD marked “Official Debian GNU/Linux” (”Official images are built by a member of the Debian CD team and have undergone some testing to ensure they work. Once they have been released, the images never change - if they turn out to be broken, a new set with a different version number is released..“) one can check the md5sums of individual packages or whole images. If you want to go past that, you can examine all the sources and build your own installation CDs. That is a huge job… Give thanks that Debian GNU/Linux takes care of it.
There are many alternatives to VMware’s expensive and proprietary software. Join us as we investigate four of the most prolific tools kickstarting the revolution in open source virtualisation…
I know I should strip the whole thing down and start again, but my other half has the wildly popular Evince PDF reader installed on it, which we need for testing Adobe CS4 pre-flight rendering of InDesign files before they go to print on a project that we shoulder together. Our client is a Linux purist and wants to ensure people can use Evince as nobody uses Acrobat, right?
Minimal Linux is a blog for people who like simplicity and freedom: "This site focuses on ways to streamline your Linux-powered life, making it lighter, faster, and easier. More of what you need, less of what you don't."
The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest continues with this entry from Brian, a database administrator (DBA) in a mostly Windows world by day, but off hours a musician/Linux geek. He says that he is also doing some freelance IT work and development for his wife's company, which gives him more of an opportunity to focus on Linux in a professional capacity.
Virgin America CIO, open source legal pioneer Eben Moglen and Forrester Research analyst are among the keynotes confirmed for this year’s premier Linux conference; new mini-summits extend developer collaboration
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that managed hosting provider ServInt is its newest member.
ServInt is joining The Linux Foundation to take advantage of exclusive networking events and online and face-to-face workgroup collaboration on Virtualization and Green Linux.
Anyone who knows me will have heard me rant about the poor state of music software, particularly for Linux. There seem to be two types of music players out there: the tiny ones that don’t get in your way but often lack important playlist features or format support, and the monstrous software beasts that drag your system to a halt and insist on “importing” the files you’ve already organized. I had been stewing over this for years, and nearing the point of writing my own, when I found Exaile – a GTK music program originally modeled after KDE’s Amarok. This may be the first music player since Winamp 2.95 that I don’t despise, and here’s why.
Opera 10.53 beta for Linux and FreeBSD is the first Unix beta of Evenes, the browser built atop the company's new Carakan JavaScript engine. "If you've been waiting [for] Opera 10.5 to stabilize before trying it on your Linux or FreeBSD system, now is your chance," writes Opera's Arjan van Leeuwen in a blog post.
Wolfiregames the developers of the Lugaru that are currently working on Overgrowth have posted about The Humble Indie Bundle – Pay What You Want Program !
In the long history of computer-based chess games, one of the earliest open source applications was Shane’s Chess Information Database, better known as Scid. Last year Steven Atkinson, a Unix graduate and hobby programmer from Brisbane, Australia, used the Scid code to create a usability and bug-fix fork called Scid Vs. PC. With it you can play chess online or against numerous chess engines, browse tournaments downloaded in PGN format, and create chess databases.
DVD tools are more important on Linux than on most operating systems. While Windows or OSX users rarely burn CDs or DVDs except for an occasional backup, for many Linux users, burning a Live CD to investigate a distribution is a common task.
Similarly, although the users of other operating systems may extract audio or visuals from a CD, all the really large local content libraries I have seen tend to be on Linux. What is an occasional convenience to others are standard tools in the free and open source lifestyle.
For this reason, DVD tools are well-represented in both KDE and GNOME. On both desktops, earlier tools like X-CD-Roast that are formidable in their options have been replaced with more user-friendly default tools: K3b for KDE, and Brasero for burning and Sound Juicer for audio ripping for GNOME.
All these tools perform their basic tasks well enough for most users. However, what is striking is how clearly each of them demonstrates the design philosophies of the desktops with which they are associated.
Nepomuk is being used more and more to track, coordinate / orchestrate and index non-"files on my disk" data. Let's take two examples: Akonadi and the Plasma Desktop.
Akonadi is using it to provide search for email, contacts, events, etc. which is one step away from the "file indexing" idea. Instead of building its own search database (and all the overhead that implies), Akonadi is able to lean on Nepomuk for that and, as a bonus, be able to not only index but map the correlations between those sets of data which, as a human being, we'd expect to be there and have at our fingertips.
The Plasma Desktop is going even further with Activities. We now have the ability to store, retrieve and mark as "active" which desktop activity you are working on. There is no file anywhere that maps to this. KWin will be gaining the ability to map windows to these activities, and any other application (KDE or not!) can also choose to map internal data and settings to activities and take appropriate action when the Activity context changes. The mechanism that ties this together? Nepomuk. Since we're using Nepomuk, we get the ability to tie documents and other URL based locations together with Activities as well .. for free.
Pauliea writes "UK-based open source software consultancy Collabora is joining the GNOME Foundation advisory board today. A long time supporter of GNOME and member of the GNOME community, Collabora contributes directly to GNOME projects like Empathy, PiTiVi, Totem and Epiphany."
The first development milestone for GNOME 3.0 is expected to be reached tomorrow with the release of the unstable GNOME 2.31.1 package set. While Zeitgeist, the GNOME Shell, and Mutter are among the most talked about changes for the GNOME 3.0 desktop, many mature packages are receiving new features and work too. GNOME's Movie Player, Totem, is one of these packages receiving some attention.
As was mentioned this morning GNOME's Totem Movie Player is preparing for GNOME 3.0 by picking up de-interlacing support and a-synchronous play-list loading, among other improvements. Other packages are also being checked-in this week for the first GNOME 3.0 development release known as GNOME 2.31.1. Besides the updates to Totem and the major work going on to the GNOME Shell / Mutter / Zeitgeist, there is some other interesting new features too.
I fired up SystemRescueCD to a usable GUI - 1m 30s. Yep. It has a 512 MB cache so is Vista-Incapable. I have seen Celerons with 1MB cache do pretty well with it. hdparm shows 700+ MB/s from the buffers and 58 MB/s from the surface so this thing will be a rocket with GNU/Linux.
The other day I decided to give a try at Funtoo (for those that do not know it yet, a variant of Gentoo). I am very impressed with the improvements that Daniel Robbins has done so far.
OFB’s Ed Hurst continues his quest for the perfect UNIX or Linux operating system by looking at a recently released beta of Red Hat’s upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Is it the Linux nirvana? Read on to find out.
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For the non-profit computer ministry I'm running, I would say the new CentOS 6 is going to become one of our flagship distros based on what I've seen in RHEL 6 Beta. Give it a test drive!
Sitting at the heart of every Linux OS distribution is a Linux kernel. When it comes to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, the issue of which kernel is being used is not a cut and dried answer, however.
RHEL 6 is currently in its first beta release, with a feature freeze now in place. Currently, the mainline Linux kernel is nearing its 2.6.34 release, while the most recent stable release is the 2.6.33 release, which came out in February. But instead of either sticking with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel or holding out for 2.6.34, Red Hat is taking a different approach.
I have been following the KDE 4 release with interest for quite some time now. When KDE 4.0 was first released, it was quite clear that it was a development-only snapshot. When KDE 4.1 was released, it was somewhat improved, but until KDE 4.1.4, it was still really only a development snapshot at best.
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As far as other applications, the OpenOffice suite is also significantly faster and has stronger compatibility than any release in recent memory with Microsoft Office, so it is a true, capable alternative to MS Office.
After waiting until after a weekend in the Isle of Man, I got to upgrading my main home PC to Ubuntu 10.04. Before the weekend away, I had been updating a 10.04 installation on an old spare PC and that worked fine so the prospects were good for a similar changeover on the main box. That may have been so but breaking a computer hardly is the perfect complement to a getaway.
I like the brand spanking new Ubuntu 10.04 a lot. But while I like its GNOME 2.30 interface, I also like other interfaces such as KDE. It would be nice if Ubuntu could also play MP3s, common video formats and Flash from the get-go. You could install all these and other extras from the Ubuntu repositories, but there's also a wide-variety of Ubuntu spin-offs that come ready to give you the functionality you want right out of the box.
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Kubuntu 10.04. Like the name suggests, the big difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is that the K-Ubuntu runs KDE 4.4.2 instead of GNOME 2.30 for its desktop. But Kubuntu isn't just Ubuntu with KDE. Instead of KDE's default Konqueror Web browser, Kubuntu defaults to using Firefox 3.6.3.
New features at a glance:
* New Software Manager o 30,000 packages o Review applications straight from the Software Manager o APT daemon o Visual improvements
A couple of weeks ago, we talked a little about the upcoming artwork of Linux Mint 9 (codename Isadora) and the plans Clement Lefebvre had for this next major version of the Linux Mint operating system. However, today, we are proud to present a few screenshots and introduce you guys to the main features of Linux Mint 9 (Isadora). First of all, you should know that Linux Mint 9 RC is a development release and it shouldn't be used on production machines. The final release may be available in a few weeks!
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Linux Mint is and will always be an elegant, easy-to-use, up-to-date, 100% free and comfortable Linux operating system based on the very popular Ubuntu OS. It offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Also, free community support is available from the forums and the IRC channel.
EasyPeasy 1.6. is released, the new version comes with many new features...
TomTom users downloading the voice can also get their hands on free start up screen wallpaper and a Lord Vader map icon.
Sometimes the creation of the contact chooser used on the N900 can be slow so, using callgrind and kcachegrind, I tried to understand what is the source of the slowness. This lead me to find some unexpected, and apparently undocumented, differences between upstream GTK and the Maemo version.
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he results seem quite good; now the contact list is fast, scrolling is smooth and the delayed loading of avatars should not be visible in normal cases.
My wife thinks it’s significant that the Nexis One is thinner and lighter than the G-1. I don’t, really, but then I have larger hands and larger pockets than she does. She’s probably right that this difference will matter more to the average mass-market consumer than it does to me.
The biggest surprise to me about the Nexus One is that I’m missing the physical keyboard on the G-1 far less than I thought I would. I found the soft keyboard on the G-1 annoying and difficult to use, but something about the Nexus One version makes it significantly easier. This could be a consequence of the larger display size, or possibly the touch-recognition software has improved, or perhaps it’s both. The effectiveness of the Nexus One’s voice-to-text feature helps here.
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Overall, however, the Nexus is indeed a clear improvement on the G-1. It points the way Android is going pretty unambiguously – towards head-to-head competition with the iPhone, rather than simply vacuuming up the market share of dumb phones and lesser competitors such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.
In at least one respect – the voice-to-text capabilty – Android is already ahead of anything iPhone offers or is ever likely to be able to support. There’s a huge infrastructure of statistical pattern-matching engines in the Google-cloud behind it that Apple won’t be able to replicate easily, if at all.
Watch out Apple iPhone, Google's mobile operating system, Android continues to increase its popularity at a growth rate of 32 percent year over year, according to a recent report.
A new report by mobile ad company AdMob measures the amount of ad traffic sent from different smartphones in March -- and the Droid's blinking red eye is going to be very pleased with what it found.
This is according to the latest research out of AdMob, a mobile advertising network in the process of being acquired by chief Android proponent Google. AdMob bases its stats on requests for access to the 18,000-plus Websites and applications in its network.
Late last night, T-Mobile officially announced their next Android-powered handset, the myTouch 3G Slide. Is this just the next release in a line of Android smart phones or does it offer something new? Let's take a look at some of the features that help the myTouch 3G Slide stand out from T-Mobile's other offerings.
Google gives the finger to Apple by building support for Flash video into Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’, due to debut next month.
Flash is coming to Android smartphones, with support for the Web video format to be baked into the forthcoming Android OS 2.2 update.
In purchasing Palm, HP intends to build and sell not only a new collection of phones based on Palm's critically-acclaimed webOS, but a line of webOS tablets as well.
Sun's UNIX ecosystem was thrown into turmoil following the company's acquisition by Oracle. A big question mark remains over the future of Solaris and OpenSolaris server operating systems. In contrast, IBM and HP, the other two big enterprise UNIX players, have been plodding along steadily, hoping all the while to pick up disaffected Sun customers quicker than they lose their own to Linux implementations.
Let's focus on HP (NYSE: HPQ). Linux leaves the company in a rather tricky situation. That's because HP is a big fan of the open source server software -- it's a phenomenon too big to ignore. But it also sells UNIX, so it has to be careful not to cannibalize its UNIX sales by promoting Linux too hard. In other words, HP's UNIX and Linux staff must push their respective lines of business without unduly dissing their opposite numbers.
Nothing I have pointed out is meant to detract from the genuine service that FOSS-oriented companies have done for the community. Besides the frequent addition of code, FOSS-oriented companies have made free software better known that it ever was before their involvement. Furthermore, Canonical in particular has dragged the community collectively screaming into discussions of usability that the community had previously ignored.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) –-the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of 143 Open Source projects and initiatives-- today announced the creation of six new Top-Level Projects (TLPs), setting an all-time record of the most new TLPs launched in a single month.
The Apache Software Foundation, developer of open source software, on Tuesday is announcing the creation of six Top-Level Projects, including the Apache Traffic Server for caching and Apache Mahout, implementing machine-learning algorithms atop the Apache Hadoop distributed computing platform.
The opensource.com team is excited to announce our first-ever live event, the Open Your World Forum. The forum, held via webinar on Thursday, May 27, 2010, will feature presentations by leading open source thinkers in the fields of business, education, law, government, healthcare, and music. The event is free and entirely online--so join us for the whole day or any part that interests you, from your desk, your sofa, or anywhere you like.
If you’re looking for a friendly community of geeks, tech weinees, and all-round great folks, stop on by for a visit. Tell ‘em Urmas sent you. Heh! I’m not getting involved.
Firefox is the most popular and widely used free software application and boasts more than a billion downloads and more than 350 million users. The H discusses its history, present and future with Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Although Java founder James Gosling has left Oracle apparently under less-than-cordial circumstances, he still can be found championing Java technologies now sponsored by Oracle.
Ever wanted to instantly have Drupal, Moodle, OTRS, MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra, Bugzilla, phpBB or a slew of other open source software packages up an running in a hassle-free manner to try out or available for rapid deployment? TurnKey Linux gives you just that.
Finally, on January 8th, we were ready to roll. The first class was a bootcamp-style introduction to Inkscape - we went through various essential basic Inkscape tasks one-by-one, such as panning the canvas and grouping objects, and then had the students immediately try them out through small exercises. Walter came in and talked about T-shirt printing technologies at the second class, and we also taught the students about vector paths and how to work with the pen tool. By the time we got to the 4th class, the students were coming up with band names and starting to develop logotypes for their bands. Class sessions #5-7 were primarily work periods for the students, with only the first 10 minutes of the class devoted to explaining a new technique. At the end of session #7, we had designs ready to go for Walter to produce, and we handed out the T-shirts at the final session, #8. After the excitement of the new shirts died down a bit, we took the rest of the last class period as a fun exploratory time: we introduced the students to OpenClipArt.org and we also showed them how to convert photos taken with their webcams into 'cartoon' versions via the Inkscape trace bitmap tool (a technique that proved to be very popular!)
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today announced the results of the second phase of his first-in-the-nation free Digital Textbook Initiative to provide California’s students and teachers with free, high-quality open educational resources. Seventeen free digital textbooks for high school history, science and higher-level math were reviewed against California’s rigorous academic content standards and are now available for use in California’s classrooms.
I’m sure there are others. Still, the future to me in this area seems clear: we’re going to see transformation of datasets incorporated into the marketplaces. As the demand for public data increases, the market will demand higher quality, easier to work with data. With that demand will come supply, one way or another. There’s little sense in having each individual consumer of the data replicate the same steps to make it usable. The question will be which one of the marketplaces learns from Github and its brethren first.
Big news from the Australian Federal Government on the issue of access to public sector information (PSI).
CCau followers will remember the Government 2.0 Taskforce report released in December last year, which gave Creative Commons a very big tick as the licensing model of choice for Australian PSI. The Federal Government's official response to the report was released yesterday and is generally positive, with the Federal Government agreeing (at least substantially) to 12 of the 13 recommendations to come out of the report.
Government 2.0 or the use of the new collaborative tools and approaches of Web 2.0 offers an unprecedented opportunity to achieve more open, accountable, responsive and efficient government.
Towards the end of 2009, the office of the DoD CIO issued a memo clarifying their position on open source software. There were some misconceptions, misunderstandings, and just plain FUD surrounding their stance previously, and they wanted to make it clear that they considered open source just as viable for development as any other type of software.
For anyone looking to get a handle on all of their personal data, there are several products on the market right now aimed at the average home-or-desktop user. This wide range of new products available offer excellent storage density, management and performance — and Linux compatibility. While a good friend always tells me, “technology is meant to be owned” sometimes the bank account doesn’t always support that philosophy. So the products discussed in this article are for a range of prices from $20 to thousands of dollars. But the focus is on products and technologies that can be used in desktops to really boost performance or ease storage management.
The former president of Chi Mei Optoelectronics has agreed to pay a fine and go to jail for his role in a scheme to fix prices for TFT-LCDs (thin-film transistor-liquid crystal displays), the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.
Google's practice of channeling its revenues through Ireland is getting the company into trouble yet again. This time, onlookers in Australia have taken note, and although no government officials have become involved, people are definitely unhappy that Google may be shirking its tax obligations.
Google scored a big win today, and by all accounts, the state of Oregon made out well, too. This is because the Oregon school system will begin using Google Apps for Education, saving it a boatload of cash while allowing Google to increase its market share.
Ethiopia is one of the main targets in the current global farmland grab. The government has stated publicly that it wants to sell off three million hectares of farmland in the country to foreign investors, and around one million hectares have already been signed away. Much of the land that these investors have acquired is in the province of Gambella, a fertile area that is home to the Anuak nation. The Anuak are indigenous people who have always lived in Gambella and who practise farming, pastoralism, hunting and gathering. Nyikaw Ochalla, an Anuak living in exile in the United Kingdom, is trying to understand what this new wave of land deals will mean for the Anuak and other local communities in Ethiopia.
These images are featured in the stunning new book Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time by Edward J. Weiler, published by Abrams in collaboration with NASA. All images: Courtesy NASA.
Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.
But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
The former Central Intelligence Agency employee was wanted on a federal charge of Sexual Deviance in connection with offenses he supposedly committed while serving in Algiers.
Critics question why so much money was spent promoting controversial Contactpoint children's database
A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install "useless" imaging machines at airports across the country.
"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.
I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a heavily censored copy of one of my telegrams from Tashkent protesting at the use by the UK government of intelligence obtained under torture.
The Metropolitan Police said it had received 10 separate allegations passed to it by Tower Hamlets Borough Council that addresses in closely-fought wards had acquired multiple new occupants shortly before the electoral register closed last month. Four of the claims are now the subject of a police inquiry.
The chemicals BP is now relying on to break up the steady flow of leaking oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico could create a new set of environmental problems.
Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world’s supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out.
A "setback" for offshore-oil drilling advocates, a profound opportunity to say "we told you so" for environmentalists, the Deepwater Horizons oil spill is above all a big huge mess. If you are searching for the perfect metaphor to describe humanity's 21st century plight -- an energy-hungry and energy-dependent civilization occupying a resource-constrained planet -- then you need look no further than at a satellite photo of the giant spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. That massive hydrocarbon stain is our collective scarlet letter, the price we pay for a lifestyle of extraordinary affluence and comfort -- at least as compared to most of the humans who have ever lived.
There were a few of us academics as well. At this retreat, I introduced ideas relating to peak net energy, and the possibility of major changes in the years ahead. I found industry leaders much more open than I had expected to listening to and understanding our energy predicament, and talking about what may be ahead. In this post, I would like to tell you about my experience.
Implicit in the article, and the headline (which focuses on lower revenues for RWE) is the worry that wind power will bring down the stock market value of the big utilities - which is what the readers of Bloomberg et al. care about.
We need to support the Maldivian pole-and-line fishery. We need to develop similar operations elsewhere too. Many of the Pacific Island Countries are in prime position to limit foreign fishing operations and develop locally owned and operated sustainable pole and line fisheries instead. And we need to clean up purse-seining, and support those who are leading the charge on that, too. Illegal fishing needs to be totally stamped out, and bycatch needs to be eliminated. With the UK’s evident appetite for guilt-free fish, it’s clear that these are things we care about.
We are destroying our oceans: around 75-80 percent of the world’s fish stocks are already at dangerously low levels. And without urgent action, we may experience a future without fish.
Europe faces a major overhaul in the way it deals with genetically modified (GM) crops, after the European Commission sparked controversy with new plans to circumvent its cumbersome legislative review process.
Commentary: What other 'business' practices does the Oracle want to defend?
Why is Warren Buffett sticking his neck out so far in defense of Goldman Sachs?
As the Senate dives into the details of far-reaching legislation to overhaul financial regulations this week, lobbyists who represent some of the nation's biggest banks are feeling on edge.
The financial reform package now on the Senate floor puts surprisingly little constraint on the activities of our largest banks going forward – preferring instead to defer to regulators to tweak the rules down the road (despite the fact that this approach has gone badly over the past 20-30 years).
In that paper, he and his co-authors showed that testosterone, despite its reputation as a promoter of aggressive behaviour, actually made people more cooperative when playing economic games. They used female volunteers since previous studies have indicated that women are more likely than men to show behavioural changes if given very low doses of the hormone. "In the end we had six referees. Some had legitimate points, but one was really irrational and emotional," Fehr says. "The referee suggested that maybe we had done a more general study and then decided only to report the effects in women, basically accusing us of being dishonest."
Goldman Sachs said Monday that six private lawsuits alleging "breach of fiduciary duty, corporate waste, abuse of control, mismanagement and unjust enrichment" have been filed against the bank since the government charged it last month with committing fraud.
The disclosure of the Justice Department’s inquiry into Goldman Sachs substantially alters the calculus for how the firm and its employees should approach the civil fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Even though a criminal investigation is only in its earliest stages at this point, the mere revelation that the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan is involved shows the powerful impact such information has on the firm, as Goldman’s shares dropped almost 10 percent in response to the news.
Regulators have fined Goldman Sachs $450,000 and censured the firm's market-making division for violating rules governing short sales in the wake of Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008.
The company clears an average of 3 million trades a day, said Canaday, who added that an automated system began in May 2009.
NYSE said that from around Dec. 9, 2008, to Jan. 22, 2009, the Goldman Sachs unit failed about 68 times to close out positions after short sales had failed to settle. Goldman Sachs also didn’t notify customers that short sales in particular stocks had failed to settle on time, the exchange said.
Goldman Sachs International, the European unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., paid its 5,500 employees average compensation of about $670,000 last year.
They're greedy. They're unethical. They're clever in a borderline nefarious way.
Gretchen Morgenson, who covers the world financial markets for The New York Times, discusses the investigations into Goldman Sachs by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and a Senate subcommittee — and reflects on the role Goldman Sachs played in the financial crisis.
Louise Story, one of the two New York Times reporters who broke the news on April 16 about the S.E.C. suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, has joined Bloomberg TV as a contributing editor.
In 2002-04, Meg Whitman was the poster child for a fraudulent practice known as "spinning." She received preferential allocations of scarce IPO shares in technology and other hot stock issuances, very likely to shoot up in price after the offering, assuring that profit making for stock recipients would be identical to shooting fish in a barrel. New York investment bankers, particularly those at Goldman Sachs, hopeful of receiving eBay's future investment banking business, controlled those hot issues and made the allocations to Whitman. Ms. Whitman has denied any knowledge of the wrongdoing although Goldman bankers funneled shares to her accounts in over 100 instances. After being sued, Ms. Whitman disgorged several million dollars, tacitly admitting that any opportunity in being awarded favorable treatment by investment banks belonged to the corporation (eBay), not to the CEO.
Other suits pile the new problems with the SEC on top of previous complaints against the company. A union pension fund filed an amended complaint to an earlier lawsuit complaining about the structure and size of Goldman’s executive bonuses, alleging now that those bonuses led to unethical behavior at the company.
Will Goldman survive the assault? Will the threat of criminal charges being pursued against the world's leading investment bank spill over onto others on Wall Street? Is the criminalization of the crisis underway, or is all this just a maneuver?
angladeshi chest doctor Kazi Saifuddin Bennoor has seen many misleading cigarette advertisements, but the one that suggested smoking could make childbirth easier plumbed new depths.
Advertisements telling smokers they are smarter, more energetic and better lovers than their non-smoking counterparts are a familiar sight across Bangladesh -- something unimaginable in most other countries.
As the pill turns 50 this May, it is worth remembering the positive impact this tiny pill has had on women's advancement out of the domestic sphere. It is also worth noting the history of campaigns that attempted to block women's access to it, and the continuing efforts to block women's access to contraceptives.
In Wisconsin, a prosecutor in the Juneau County District Attorney's office is urging schools not to follow a new state law that requires school sex education programs to tell students about the proper use of contraceptives. He warned that teachers face “possible criminal liability” for teaching youths how to use contraceptives. Only about half of Missouri hospitals have a written policy requiring rape victims to be counseled about emergency contraception -- the so-called "morning-after pill."
Analyzing the quarrel between Google and China raises questions of how the Web helps an oppressed country develop democracy, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology panel discussion.
Last month, during the main annual session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN Watch worked with a global coalition of 25 human rights groups to organize a conference focused on the countries that rank as the world’s worst violators. Our Geneva Summit for Human Rights featured leading dissidents, attracted hundreds of activists, and was covered in the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and La Stampa. Internet freedom for human rights defenders was a key theme. Below is an edited transcript of the most news-making speech.
According to EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.com, Microsoft, which has appeared to stay out of the net neutrality fray until now, took advantage of every last second to formulate its response, filing it just before the comment period ended. And apparently, the company has changed its tune at least a little since the early days. Even though Microsoft stands to be significantly affected however the FCC acts, the company did not recommend either extreme. Instead, Microsoft recommended a third approach - a middle ground, if you will.
From the filing:[B]roadband is a powerful engine for innovation and investment in America in part because the Internet is an open platform...At the same time, the adoption of unnecessary or insufficiently tailored regulations, such as a prohibition on all types of discrimination, could have the unintended consequence of limiting innovation and investment going forward.
Today is about taking time out of your usual routine to speak out in favor of a DRM-free society. We do not have to accept a future where our interactions with computers and published works are monitored and controlled by corporations or governments.
YOUR plane crashes and you find yourself stranded in the middle of a vast jungle. How would you work out which fruits are safe to eat and where to find clean water? You could muddle along on your own for a while, but you would probably end up sick and very hungry. Far better to find some friendly locals and learn how they do things.
News agency Dow Jones Newswires is suing an online news distributor based on US law's controversial 'hot news' doctrine. The court-created right came into being in 1918 and has recently been revived in internet cases.
Fox News, a prominent media outlet owned by copyright evangelist Rupert Murdoch, is blatantly infringing on the rights of an individual photographer. The irony, or hypocrisy, is that Murdoch himself is going after Google, the BBC and many other companies that he believes are infringing on the rights of his news empire.
RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users, a German court ruled yesterday. The Dusseldorf Court of Appeals overturned the earlier decision of a local district court in a case brought by the movie outfit Capelight Pictures.
In analog times, one sign that it was time to retreat was if a big talker, having declared himself an author, produced his “book” and something about the book just wasn’t . . . booky. Maybe the pages carried a whiff of the Xerox or mimeograph machine. Or maybe the volume — about Atlantis or Easter Island — looked too good, with engraved letters, staid cover, no dust jacket. After a casual examination of the spine or the title page, realization would dawn: self-published.
Considering that he has a criminal conviction hanging over his head, he didn’t seem so bad, the Pirate, even though we all condemn what he was part of. He didn’t seem like a malicious human being out to subvert the very moral framework of our lives. He seems like a nice, well-educated middle class tecchy, with some impish delight and without much sympathy for an industry so fragile that he could deflate its balloon with his tiny needle.
A new buyer for the domain name thepiratebay.org has come forward, even as the legality of a previous attempt to buy the name is still in dispute.
The Songwriters Guild of America has a message for the government: start prosecuting file-sharers, both criminally and civilly, because file-sharing is much worse than bank robbery.
Drawing on a major study of Dutch file-sharers, Prof. Nico van Eijk of the University of Amsterdam concludes, "These figures show that there is no sharp divide between file sharers and others in their buying behaviour. On the contrary, when it comes to attending concerts, and expenses on DVDs and games, file sharers are the industry's largest customers... There does not appear to be a clear relationship between the decline in sales and file sharing."
Since his appointment as Canadian Heritage minister in 2008, James Moore has carefully crafted an image as "Canada's iPod Minister." Young, bilingual, and tech-savvy, Moore has expressed regular support for the benefits of the Internet and is always ready with a quick "tweet" for his many followers. Yet as my op-ed in the Hill Times notes (HT version (sub required), homepage version), according to the scuttlebutt throughout the copyright community, Moore may be less iPod and more iPadlock. As the government readies its much-anticipated copyright package, Moore is said to be pressing for a virtual repeat of Bill C-61, the most anti-consumer copyright proposal in Canadian history.
As Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube inches through the US judicial system, YouTube's chief counsel, Zahavah Levine, posted a bombshell to the company's weblog: writing after the release of previously sealed documents, he said that even as Viacom was suing YouTube for allowing infringing copies of its content to be posted by YouTube users, Viacom was also using at least 18 marketing agencies to secretly upload its videos to YouTube. It even had the agencies "rough up" the clips before uploading, wrote Levine, so that they'd appear to be illegitimate, smuggled copies, imbued with forbidden sexiness. He claimed that in a moment of Pythonesque petard-hoisting, Viacom even sent copyright complaints to YouTube over some of these videos, which it subsequently followed up with sheepish retractions when it became clear that the infringer in question was another arm of Viacom.
In this sense the pertinent parallel is not with music or films but with newspapers and magazines. These days print piracy is a trivial issue, since most general news articles are given away free. If newspapers and magazines begin charging people to read their output, the pirates are likely to turn up, and quickly. So it may be with television.
An interesting case of art ownership and moral rights is taking place in Costa Rica at the moment. The new 2,000 colones bill will enter into circulation soon. However, there has been a dispute because the author of the portrait of educator Mauro Fernández (pictured) has claimed that he was never asked for permission to use his painting in the bills.
Anime music videos (AMVs) are remix videos made by overseas fans of Japanese animation. This paper describes the organization of the AMV scene in order to illuminate some of the key characteristics of a robust networked subculture centered on the production of transformative works. Fan production that appropriates commercial culture occupies a unique niche within our creative cultural landscape. Unlike professional production and many other forms of amateur media production, transformative fan production is non–commercial, and centered on appropriating, commenting on, and celebrating commercial popular culture.
Last month we reported on the media announcement by Bulgarian police that they would shut down the country’s two largest BitTorrent trackers, Zamunda.net and ArenaBG. As with any story, there always two sides. TorrentFreak caught up with someone with inside knowledge of the trackers and the scene in general, for their take on the situation.
All the “noble announcements” made by EU and US officials about respect for the Doha Declaration on intellectual property trade and public health when negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) does not match the ACTA text, warned Ashutosh Jindal, adviser at the Embassy of India to the EU at a hearing organised by the Green Party Group in Brussels yesterday. The much-debated agreement that has only recently been made public would be very hard on countries like India that are trying to balance competing public policy issues, IPR protection and public health. Jindal pointed to provisions like ex-officio actions by border personnel on all types of IP rights infringements, including not only trademark infringement. The bar for searches and seizures is proposed to be lowered to a mere suspect of counterfeiting. ACTA seems to be an attempt to force developing countries to much harsher IPR protection measures, he said.
The Written declaration 12/2010 was initiated by the Members of European Parliament Françoise Castex (S&D, FR), Alexander Alvaro (ALDE, DE), Stavros Lambrinidis (S&D, GR) and Zuzana Roithová (EPP, CZ). It expresses concern about ACTA by declaring that the negotiated agreement must respect freedom of expression, privacy and Net neutrality (by protecting Internet actors against excessive legal liability). It calls on the Commission to publish all the texts under negotiation.
The French audio-visual collecting society, SACD, says the dispute over ACTA transparency is “ a dialogue of the deaf”. The SACD, which lobbied heavily for the copyright enforcement provisions in the Telecoms Package, now seems to be suggesting that there is no point to ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We should ask why they might say this?