09.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In essence all Linux systems are the same. They all have the same tools, they all pretty much have the same desktops and they all can be configured, adjusted, tweeked or modified to look and operate in just about any manner. The only real difference is the ease of which this can be done.
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It was circa 1999 (and we were partying like it was). I was new to the whole tech-reporting gig, but not so new to Linux. I, along with every early adopter, thought, nay KNEW, Linux was bound for world domination. It wasn’t a matter of if it was a matter of when. Even though, in the early days, the fledgling operating system struggled with hardware support and couldn’t seem to keep pace with the competition. Even with its faults, we all still knew it was destined for greatness on a level no proprietary system could ever dream of.
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Here are three reasons to use Linux for your home use:
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Arch Linux is great. I can run Ubuntu but I rather keep that in my Macbook Pro where I can run it inside of VirtualBox.
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Leading recruitment specialists, GCS, have moved their GRIP Recruitment Software infrastructure from a Microsoft Windows Server to a Linux Server platform to enable greater performance, flexibility and cost savings.
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Server
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NSA’s label-based approach to security resembles another open source project NSA developed and released in 2000, called Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux). With SE Linux, administrators can create policies that dictate, in fine-grained detail, what actions each program on a computer can execute. Red Hat has integrated SE Linux into its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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There is less than one week to go until the 2011 X.Org Developers’ Conference begins in Chicago, United States. The tentative schedule has been published on the X.Org Wiki. Among the topics to be discussed are the Nouveau driver, GPGPU computing, OpenGL 3.0 support, the Low-Level Virtual Machine within Mesa, and much more.
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In preparing for XDC2011 Chicago, the X.Org developers’ summit that begins in just ten days that I have organized, the schedule is being worked out at the moment. One of the items that is set to be talked about at XDC2011 during the Nouveau driver discussion is TimeGraph. This is an open-source GPU command scheduler that sounds fairly interesting.
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Next week at XDC2011 Chicago there will be a rather unique discussion taking place that’s quite different from what normally goes on at this annual X.Org Developers’ Conference. There is going to be a moderated panel discussion (tentatively titled “Contributing to X.Org and Open-Source”) about contributing to X.Org, the Linux kernel, Mesa, and open-source software in general. For those not residents of the Chicago area, this session will be broadcast on the Internet.
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Applications
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There was a time when I, like many, covered my Linux desktop in all manner of Screenlets, gDesklets and widgets. I grew out of this, but ‘PlexyDesk‘ – a new widget-toting project, may just light those creative fires on my desktop once more…
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One popular question many new programmers such as myself, and old programmers a-like have, is what IDE should I use? The result is of course a different recommendation from different people as you would expect. You often will hear some of the following: “Netbeans, Eclipse etc…”
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Different Linux distros build in favorite cleaning products. For instance, Ubuntu has Computer Janitor. CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Linux use Yum Clean to remove cached package data. But BleachBit goes beyond such distro-specific cleaning services to accomplish a more complete spit-and-polish session to Linux’s file structure in any distro.
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Linux is a superior audio production platform, and one of its shining stars is the Hydrogen Drum Machine. Hydrogen is an advanced software drum synthesizer that is easy to learn, and yet packed full of great features.
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The worlds of open source and freeware both include many outstanding applications for working with graphics and photos. These include standard fare such as image editors, but it’s also worth looking into more unusual graphics tools that you can work with for free. Whether you want to produce splashy graphical documents, enhance graphics on a blog or web site, create eye-catching logos, or more, check out this collection of five great, free graphics apps.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine/Windows/OnLive
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Nearly every day I hear about people who express interest in taking the leap into the Linux space. What would-be Linux users fail to realize is that there’s software that makes switching between the Linux and Windows worlds almost effortless.
So in the interest of sharing this knowledge, I’ve put together this article to share different applications and technologies that can be helpful to blur the lines between the two platforms.
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We’ve been sitting on this a few days, and have put its author through extensive testing and re-writes in order to bring this to you. We’re fairly certain that the following instructions brought to you by OnLiveInformer community member: Dephyre will really excite those of you who have an affection for penguins.
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Games
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Nemesys, a game studio run out of Budapest, is porting their game titles to Linux. The studio’s current titles include Fortix 2, A.C.S, and Ignite. Nemesys Ignite, in particular, is a very promising racing game that will surely roar things up for Linux.
Nemesys is not to be confused with Namesys, the former company of Hans Reiser that developed the ReiserFS and Reiser4 file-systems.
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Desktop Environments
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Twice a year, the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch host secretive retreats for an exclusive list of corporate America’s rich and powerful to strategize and raise money for their right-wing political agenda. Mother Jones has obtained exclusive audio recordings that shed some light on the brothers’ latest retreat, held at a resort near Vail, Colorado, in late June.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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When the Apache Software Foundation was born back in 1999, its sole purpose was to support the development of the Apache HTTP server. One foundation, one project, more or less like the KDE eV and KDE until very recently.
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It looks like with Qt 5.0, V8 will become the JavaScript Engine for the Qt tool-kit as well as for Qt Script and Qt Quick.
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If you’re a regular Linux User reader – and if you’re not, you should correct that forthwith – you’ll be familiar with Parted Magic as one of the utilities we include on our cover disc each month. The chances are good that you’ve never actually tried it, however – and if that’s the case, you’re missing a real treat.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We have already posted some time ago about Nice Ubuntu themes for Maverick Users and this is updated for Natty users now.
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In case you are still not aware, Canonical (the team behind Ubuntu) has released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. There are several new additions to the family, notably the revamp of the Ubuntu Software Center and the replacement of the Evolution with Thunderbird. Follow us for the full review and screenshots tour of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Beta 1.
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While the first beta of 11.10, called Oneiric Ocelot, is also a little rough at the edges and features some curious design decisions, the version of Unity here is more stable and it is faster than the version that shipped with 11.04. In other words, Unity is making progress, albeit slower than many would like.
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Seems Jono Bacon just can’t understand why users are still complaining about the drastic changes that came with Ubuntu 11.04 and the Unity desktop. He begins by stating emphatically that he’s no interface designer, but the problem isn’t the overall design so much. The issue for The Distro for Human Beings is that it actually doesn’t understand human beings.
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Flavours and Variants
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While Mandriva decided to simplify their offering by keeping only the KDE version alive in the latest release, the Ubuntu family has officialy grown yet again. LXDE – Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment – is here to rescue old computers through Lubuntu. My aging Evo n800c Compaq laptop was craving for some attention and what better way to make its wish come true other than starring it in a Distro Hoppin` episode?
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Phones
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Rumor has it that Samsung is planning to buy Nokia’s MeeGo operating system, a week after Intel reportedly said it would back off development of the platform.
Citing anonymous sources, German blog NetbookNews reported that Samsung was looking to buy the Linux-based, open source OS, which Nokia and Intel co-launched in February 2010.
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Android
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At Baidu World 2011, Baidu, the company behind China’s largest search engine, has announced that it will produce its own fork of the Android 2.x open source mobile operating system. The new Baidu Yi (Chinese language) mobile application system is expected as early as November on a range of mobile phones and tablets that Baidu will develop with hardware vendor Dell, according to a report from Reuters.
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Yes, Android has a forking problem. Google forked its mobile, open-source operating system into two versions: Android 2.x for smartphones and Android 3.x for tablets earlier this year. It also doesn’t help Android any that there are so many different supported versions out in the market. But, what Amazon and Baidu are doing with their forthcoming tablets has nothing to do with forking Android.
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Amazon’s Android tablet is a seven-inch, Kindle-branded device that will feature a customized operating system and sell for $250, according to a TechCrunch reporter who claims to have spent an hour with the device. In other Android tablet news, Samsung pulled its freshly announced Galaxy Tab 7.7 from the IFA show in Berlin after Apple won a preliminary injunction against the tablet from a German court.
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Acer subsidiary Gateway has begun shipping a rebranded “A60″ version of Acer’s 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 Honeycomb tablet. Meanwhile Vodafone announced Smart Tab 7 and Smart Tab 10 Android 3.2 tablets, and Medion unveiled both a Lifetab P9514 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet and an unnamed 4.3-inch Android smartphone.
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BGR has obtained photographs of the still-unannounced HTC Holiday Android phone, which may be AT&T’s first 4G LTE-enabled smartphone.
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VIZIO has announced a software update for their 8-inch VTAB1008 tablet today which includes improvements to battery life, overall speed, and universal remote compatibility. According to the press release, the update enables faster scrolling and UI gestures and improved graphics performance and comes quickly on the heels of the Hulu Plus announcement.
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We’re happy to announce a new open source resources section. To kick things off, we’ve added pages that highlight open source conferences and events, organizations, and projects and applications. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We have lots of ideas, and want to make this more robust and improve functionality. But for now, let’s see if this idea catches on.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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New versions of Firefox (6.0.2 and 3.6.22) and Thunderbird (6.0.2, 7.0 beta, and 3.1.14) are out. These releases remove trust exceptions for certificates issued by Staat der Nederlanden.
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SaaS
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In February 2011, Eben Moglen gave a landmark speech to the Internet Society titled “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which he unpacked the problem. In the beginning, he said, the Internet was designed as “a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control, and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it”.
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Databases
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NoSQL is the talk of the town. And we have already covered what it is for in one of our previous blogs. Today I would like to share the NoSQL benchmark test results we have recently conducted. It will help you to understand if the soon to develop system is compatible to NoSQL, and which NoSQL product to select.
In this article we will reveal the characteristics of Cassandra, HBase and MongoDB identified through multiple workloads.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Not being stopped by that knowledge, LibreOffice developers take a strong bite deep in the code base for improvements now and even better future LibreOffice development. I’m not only impressed, but also get more and more confident in the future of this project.
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CMS
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Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.
Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff’s excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The people and companies … who disregard the Internet “don’t be a dick” rule … need more incentive to comply. However, even they don’t lose the right to use the code permanently unless they decide to “be a dick” permanently. In those cases, it doesn’t matter how many copies of the code they get — each new license for each new copy would be terminated as soon as they attempted distribution outside the terms of the license.
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Public Services/Government
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The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia, a document management system developed in-house by the court. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon.
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“There is a need for a flexible, high performance distributed key/value store that provides expressive, fine-grained access labels,” the developers stated on the proposal page submitted to Apache. “We have made much progress in developing this project over the past [three] years and believe both the project and the interested communities would benefit from this work being openly available and having open development.”
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Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The Declaration has been approved by Cabinet, and directs all Public Service departments, the New Zealand Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service; encourages other State Services agencies; and invites State Sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. More information on this statement can be found at the CC Aotearoa New Zealand blog.
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This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.
This article was previously published in the Journal of Software Technology (aka Software Tech News), Vol.14, No.1, February 2011. It is part of “Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software”, and thus is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) License. A one-page summary of this paper is available from MIL-OSS, and the MIL-OSS 2011 conference had a presentation on releasing OSS.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work – the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols – was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.
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Security
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Cablegate
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Negotiations over the natural gas deal between Egypt and Israel dragged out over 10 years because of “political concerns in Egypt,” a recently revealed Wikileaks cable said.
A partial extract from cable number 05CAIRO4972 of a confidential document prepared by the US embassy in Cairo one day before the deal was signed said the US described the deal as “the most lucrative ever.”
On July 1, 2005, then Egyptian Petroleum Minister Sameh Fahmy and Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure Benjamin Ben-Eliezer signed the agreement to supply 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) starting October 2006.
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In online discussions attributed to PFC Bradley Manning, he says that he hopes his actions will spur “discussion, debates, and reforms” and that he “want[s] people to know the truth, no matter who they are, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” This is the classic definition of a whistle-blower (a person who tells the public about alleged dishonest or illegal activities/misconduct occurring in a government department).
Unfortunately, the government is charging PFC Bradley Manning with “knowingly [giving] intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means,” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — an allegation of treason and a capital offense. By this rational, scores of service-person-posted blogs, photos, and videos, would now be punishable by death—simply because they are accessible on the Internet. The charge against Bradley Manning appears to be about sending a message to other would-be whistle-blowers.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Wikileaks has its share of critics – the organisation is too centred around Julian Assange and a personality-type cult exists – but surely the vast bulk of information the group has released since 2006 makes it a major force for good (not least because it’s forced governments and many journalists on the defensive about their insider tactics)…
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Dave the dolphin whistles, and his friend Alan whistles back. We can’t yet decipher their calls, but some of the time Dave may be calling: “Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!”
Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.
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Even by Romanian standards, the plot beggars belief. A hot-blooded young seductress masquerading as a journalist is order- ed by her masters in the Romanian Intelligence Service to lure the Swiss ambassador into bed.
Once there, her task is to find out anything and everything she can about “Ceausescu’s Gold” – the millions of dollars Romania’s late dictator is believed to have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts just before his fall.
Afternoons of passion in the Bucharest penthouse she would persuade him to buy her were to be followed by gentle probing as to the real intentions of ex-King Michael, the former Romanian monarch now exiled in the ambassador’s Swiss homeland.
And far from keeping the affair discreet, the agent is to make sure that she and her consort – a married man with two children – are frequently seen together wining and dining in public and at diplomatic functions. Just for good measure, the exercise will be called “Operation William Tell”.
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Finance
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The New York Department of Financial Services and Banking Department is including several stipulations with its approval of Goldman Sachs’ sale of its Litton Loan Servicing, LP, to special servicer Ocwen Financial Corp.
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ON A BRIGHT SPRING DAY in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled “on the side.” It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.
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Copyrights
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In the wake of a proposed fee increase, universities across Canada have opted to leave contracts with once-popular copyright licenser Access Copyright.
Many schools, including York University, the University of British Columbia and almost every school in the prairie region have abandoned their contracts with Access Copyright in favour of steering the waters of copyright legislation on their own.
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Hid Behind Scenes to Avoid Impression of Being a Bully
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09.06.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.
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With his characteristically dry British humor, Matthew Garrett outlined the current situation with x86 platform drivers at LinuxCon. These drivers are needed to handle various “extra” hardware devices, like special keys, backlight control, extended battery information, fans, and so on. There are a wide range of control mechanisms that hardware vendors use for these devices, and, even when the controller hardware is the same, different vendors will choose different mechanisms to talk to the devices. It is a complicated situation that seems to require humor—and perhaps alcohol—to master.
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Last year I talked about how there were open-source Linux drivers for Roccat gaming mice. Not only was there open-source support available, but it was living in the mainline Linux kernel. This great Linux support comes from an experienced developer working with Roccat to improve their Linux support. This developer, Stefan Achatz, has written the kernel drivers plus open-source user-space utilities.
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Linux drivers (open or closed-source) for gaming peripherals like these mice and keyboards with various extra functionality is rather rare.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Penguin Tribe rejoice! A Linux version of OnLive is apparently on the way but while the clock ticks on that, one of your own has figured out a way to make it work on your OS of choice right freakin’ now. With no small about of dicking around, of course, but if you’re such a diehard Linux nut that you’d rather do without OnLive than tolerate Windows on your PC, that’s probably second nature for you anyway.
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Bitfighter is a free multi-player 2-D space combat game with Robotron-like controls. It’s a team-based strategy game featuring retro vector graphics and customizable ships. It’s fast, fun, and frenetic.
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Desktop Environments
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Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack has a desktop, a laptop, an HTC Desire Z cellphone and a work-provided Galaxy Tab. “Care to guess which one I use the most?” he asked. “It’s the desktop. My desktop has more power than the rest of my devices put together, the keyboard is at the proper typing height, and the monitors are on an ergonomic stand to keep my neck from being
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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OK, with that out of the way I just wanted to talk about menus a little. Recently we released Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 and there was the requisite review on OMG! Ubuntu! and the conversation rather unsurprisingly descended into a debate about the menus and window controls in Ubuntu 11.10.
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WHEN I read that the first beta version of the new Ubuntu release (11.10 a.k.a. Oneiric Ocelot) was available for downloading, I knew it was time to break out my trusty Acer AspireOne netbook again. For the last couple of Ubuntu releases, this notebook—with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB memory, 40GB hard drive—has been my test machine for some of the radical changes that my favorite Linux distribution was introducing.
Mostly, I’m referring to the Unity interface that Ubuntu introduced in 11.04, which I felt clearly lacked some of the easy customization that the Gnome 2.x desktop afforded. I also felt the first version of Unity was still too rough around the edges, and wouldn’t let me do what I needed to do quickly. So, on my production machine (a desktop PC), I run 11.04—but still use the classic Gnome shell in place of Unity.
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Phones
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Android
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Android is growing at a stupendous rate and so is Android Market. Number is applications in Android Market is nearing 300,000 now and the rate of growth is only increasing. Trying to pick the very best of Android games from that enormous list is tough. I will try to give it my best shot anyway. Here are the games I enjoy playing in my Android 2.3.3 powered Galaxy S2.
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One of the most interesting devices showcased on the IFA this year is the KT SpiderPad. The main device is an Android smartphone. What makes this smartphone desirable are the accessories, which transforms it into a very powerfull setup.
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Critics of Google’s Android mobile OS have always been vocal about the f-word– fragmentation. From its inception Android has fallen victim to Google’s soft stance to Android versions and it has been common to see at least three or four versions in the market at any given time.
Last week details emerged about Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Tablet that will run a totally different OS using the Android kernel but little else. Then China’s Baidu announced it will produce its own mobile OS using at its core, you guessed it, Android. There will soon be more versions and derivatives of Android than you can shake a smartphone at.
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The latest figures released by Google show that version 2.3.x of Android, known as “Gingerbread”, is now being actively used on nearly one third of all devices running the open source mobile operating system. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, Android 2.3.x accounts for 31.3 per cent of the total number of devices in use, an increase of 7 percentage points compared to just one month ago.
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It’s one thing to build a scalable filesystem. It’s quite another to build a scalable company. Gluster founder and CTO AB Periasamy has the challenge of trying to do both.
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Nginx was first developed by a Russian guy called Igor Sysoev in 2002. After two years in 2004 it made its debut in the forms of HTTP server and reverse proxy/IMAP/POP3 server. To respond to C10k problem, Nginx adopted event-driven (asynchronous) structure which is not a conventional way (as in Apache) of processing single client in a single thread. Other than Nginx, various newly developed web servers such as Lightpad, Tornado, Magnum and Aleph have adopted Event-driven structure too.
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We have benefited so much from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that for every project we’ve implemented using an open source package the “Proudly Powered by NameOfProject” credit is left visible somewhere. This way, a bit is contributed to spreading word about the project.
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Events
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According to the Open World Forum press function, “In the past, the histories of the Internet and of open software/open source have been so closely interwoven that it’s now hard to imagine one without the other. But changes both in the way they are being used and in legislation could affect the future of the Internet and open source.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, the developers of popular open source software have moved the release of their email product,
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Security startup Toucan System released today the tool they presented earlier this month at the Blackhat US conference as Open Source.
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Public Services/Government
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The government continues to spend billions on proprietary software, despite promising earlier this year that it would create a level playing field for open source software and impose compulsory open standards.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the BBC has revealed that most government departments still spend the lion’s share of their IT budgets on software from big-name vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, rather than seeking cheaper open source alternatives.
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Open-source products still have a way to go before they are adopted widely in government IT infrastructure, new data has shown.
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Government agencies need not make their code available to the public in order to enjoy the benefits of the open source model, said a senior intelligence community technology official.
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The DoD, in fact, already relies extensively on open source, said Kane McLean, a developer at BRTRC, a Fairfax, Va.-based information technology firm–but it does so in an informal, barely acknowledged manner. That means that significant hurdles to open source remain in place at the DoD, despite there being no real procurement-law- or technology-related reason for them to exist.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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een sold. More specifically, The VAR Guy’s publisher, Nine Lives Media, which also publishes the web sites MSPmentor and Talkin’ Cloud, has been sold to Penton Media, a huge business-to-business media company. At last count, according to Wikipedia, Penton “publishes and produces 113 magazines, 96 trade shows, 145 websites and has over six million subscribers across 17 different market segments.” Their target markets run the alphabetic gamut from Agriculture to Wealth Management. Nine Lives will become part of Penton’s “Technology Group.”
If you’re thinking this won’t be good for FOSS, you’re probably right.
Obviously, this “VAR Guy” is a house writer, like some of the in-house hacks that churned out serial novels for U.S. publishers like Grosset & Dunlap back in the 30s and 40s. He has no name. He has no face. He exists as a person only in the way that corporations, according to the Supreme Court, are people. This means that if the new bosses don’t like the content of the blogs churned out by the present “VAR Guy,” they can replace him with “VAR Guy” number two, and if that doesn’t work out with number three….
I’m sure you get my drift.
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Using fixed-price contracts for a contract may seem to limit risk, but it mostly costs more and produces less satisfactory results.
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Security
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Cablegate
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A leaked US diplomatic cable has said that Bollywood welcomed funding from gangsters and politicians, known in India as “black money.”
While there is no direct reference of Dawood Ibrahim which allegedly financed a number of movies, the cable said that in recent decades, the Bollywood film industry has been associated with the notorious Mumbai underworld, at the nexus of gangsters, money, and politics.
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Mayawati has betrayed rational thought. The question is, has she also betrayed the Dalit?
There is no question that the documents are official papers from the US embassy. These papers have been proven the world over–including by the aggressive persecution of our people by Washington. The allegations within them are made by US diplomats in their private communications back to Hillary Clinton. If Chief Minister Mayawati has a problem with the contents of these communications she needs to take it up with Hillary.
I ask that Mayawati admit her error and apologise.
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This morning, at a press conference, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said that the WikiLeaks cables that refer to her appear to be inauthentic. The fact that Mr Assange posted them on his website, she said, shows that he is either mentally ill or is being used by her political opponents. “He has gone mad,” she said. “If there is no room to treat him elsewhere, let him come to Agra…we will find him some space at the mental asylum there.”
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We are very excited to announce the innaugural release of Globaleaks. Accompanying the release is a hands on demonstration of Globaleaks showcasing both the technical aspects and our methodology. While functional, at this time the demo is a working development version, or alpha version and not yet ready for deployment.
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Baghdad’s Jewish community numbered just eight people in late 2009, having fallen from 20 in 2003 due to deaths from old age and sectarian violence, and emigration, a leaked US diplomatic cable says.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Copyright, U.S. lobbying, and the stunning backroom Canadian response gets front page news treatment today as the Toronto Star runs my story on new revelations on copyright from the U.S. cables released by Wikileaks. The cables reveal that former Industry Minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before it was to be tabled it in the House of Commons, former Industry Minister Tony Clement’s director of policy Zoe Addington encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list, Privy Council Office official Ailish Johnson disclosed the content of ministerial mandate letters, and former RCMP national coordinator for intellectual property crime Andris Zarins advised the U.S. that the government was working on a separate intellectual property enforcement bill.
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Parliament is set to resume in several weeks with the reintroduction of a copyright reform bill by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Christian Paradis slated to be one of the government’s top priorities. The bill is expected to mirror Bill C-32, the previous copyright package that died with the election in the spring.
That bill garnered some praise for striking a balance on difficult issues such as fair dealing, damages, and the liability of Internet providers. However, its approach to digital locks — which are used to control access to DVDs, CDs, and electronic books — was roundly criticized by consumer, education, and technology groups since it effectively ensured that inclusion of a digital lock trumps consumer and fair dealing rights. The bill’s digital lock rules largely mirrored those found in the United States.
The Canadian approach is difficult to understand if viewed solely from a policy or legal perspective. As a policy matter, concerns over digital locks was the top issue raised during the 2009 copyright consultation as well as in the hundreds of submissions to the Bill C-32 legislative committee. From a legal perspective, countries such as Switzerland and New Zealand have adopted a far more balanced approach, demonstrating that protection for digital locks need not eviscerate consumer rights.
The rationale appears to lie not in law or policy, but in politics. While U.S. pressure on Canadian copyright is nothing new, secret U.S. government cables demonstrate not only a massive behind-the-scenes lobbying effort to promote U.S.-style laws in Canada, but also a shocking willingness by senior Canadian officials to cave to the pressure.
In fact, newly released cables reveal that former industry minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before tabling it in the House of Commons and a former policy official with industry ministers Jim Prentice and Tony Clement encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list.
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Documents released through Wiki Leaks are painting an alarming picture of Conservative collusion with U.S interests to force through U.S. style copyright legislation.
New Democrat Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay) says the leaks raise serious questions about the role played by former Industry Ministers Maxime Bernier and Tony Clement.
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Over the years we’ve had plenty of fun with the MPAA’s bogus use of stats when it comes to “piracy” claims. They’re really laughable, and it would actually be kind of funny… if policy makers and the press didn’t actually believe those numbers and pass bad legislation based on them. Even the one time that the MPAA admitted its piracy stats were totally wrong, it was too late to stop a law that was passed on the basis of those bogus numbers.
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ACTA
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European parliamentarians in the legal affairs committee have once again cast doubt on the efficacy of the controversial ACTA agreement, but stopped short of declaring it illegal.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I was poking around a GC site when I found that “Linux” was a supported OS. Not only that but they supported Fedora Core 8 or Ubuntu 7.1 and FireFox 2.0.0.6+. I had none of those (Ubuntu 7.1 should probably be Ubuntu 7.10) but Debian GNU/Linux, the current version, Squeeze, worked just fine.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As I tried to explain this a few times in the past to others and had trouble myself, when I started using Linux, I thought I take some time today and write down what parts comprise the Linux graphics stack and how they interact. I’ll ignore some parts which aren’t too interesting to an average user at the moment, to keep this post as consise as possible. Apart from that, I hope I’m able to put all the relevant data into one spot.
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Applications
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It would be hard to find a Linux user who´s never heard of GIMP, the incredibly powerful GNU Image Manipulation Program. Unfortunately, GPS (Gimp Paint Studio) may not be known to that many people, but it certainly deserves to be, and users deserve to know about it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Winter Wolves released Spirited Heart Girl’s Love which is the yuri expansion to the popular fantasy life simulation game Spirited Heart.
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A new crafting MMO game Salem is coming soon to Linux. Published by Paradox Interactive and developed by Seatribe, the game is currently heavily under development with a closed alpha expected next month.
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Cameron Bonde aka Vectrex has found an update on the Unity GNU/Linux Exporter that was posted earlier on LGN.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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An important part of the Plasma Active Contour user interface is the connection between the objects that i can view with my tablet, like images, webpages, and documents with the current activity, to help to organize your work and fun.
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GNOME Desktop
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Remember Gnome2 Global Menu? It’s an applet that adds a global menu (the menu is displayed on the top panel) for Gnome 2 that wasn’t very active for a long time because Ubuntu built its own global menu. But it’s back!
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In the brave new world of GNOME 3, there is no minimize button. Why? Here is the thinking behind it. Wow, he asked a whole two people — on the GNOME team! That’s not even usability testing. It’s like he asked for a focus group and no one came …
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For the most part my experiences with Plop were good.
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New Releases
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The BackBox development team has released version 2.0 of its penetration testing distribution. According to the developers, the latest release has a new look and feel, as well as a significant performance boost over previous versions.
Based on Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, BackBox 2 includes the 2.6.38 Linux kernel and version 4.8.0 of the Xfce desktop environment. The release adds three new security audit sections: Vulnerability Assessment, Forensic Analysis and VoIP Analysis.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I’ve done a lot of Linux installs, but I’ve never seen this much hardware work
right-out-of-the-box on any machine, let alone a laptop. The Win7 side couldn’t
see the Bluetooth mouse without the driver CD, but Mageia 1 had it covered. Amazing.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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It comprises modular structure familiar to me from SLAX with stability of Debian. Dreamlinux has ability to install on USB with persistence option. It includes all the necessary codecs for multimedia.
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For a couple of months, I’ve been watching RaspberryPi with a lot of interest, because I think these guys are about to do something really cool for the computer industry.
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Phones
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Android
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A relatively complete developer test version of the Honeycomb update for HTC’s Flyer tablet appeared over the weekend, showing that, yes, HTC’s quirky 7″ tablet will indeed get an update to the tablet version of Google’s OS at some point in the future.
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The recent times have seen many big companies and even US government face brunt of invasions by hackers from other countries, creating a huge impact on world politics.
With this trend several hackers offer help in repairing vulnerabilities in such systems. They in turn demand payments for the same, which is not ethical, because their work does not comply with pure assurance that an ethical hacker always guarantees.
Thus for us ethical hackers, this unethical wayposes a threat to our image, which is yet to be repaired in the minds of governments and people in general.
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Web Browsers
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Tired of those mainstream browsers like Firefox and Chrome in Linux? You have other options, folks.
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SaaS
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Databases
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Built on top of Apache’s Hadoop, Zookeeper and Thrift projects, Accumulo is a distributed key/value store based on the design of Google’s BigTable. Developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the Accumulo project has now been proposed to the Apache Software Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project. Accumulo’s big difference is that it has fine-grained label-based access control, which could allow different users to access a record but only see the fields they are allowed to see; the NSA developers believe such a database could work in “government, health care, and other industries where privacy is a concern”.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Two weeks ago Google won the right to file a motion for summary judgment on Oracle’s affirmative defense of assignor estoppel. As we explained at that time, Oracle was arguing that, since Google now employs some of the named inventors in the patents Oracle is asserting against Google, Google should be precluded from challenging the validity of those patents.
Oracle has now decided to throw in the towel on that defense by agreeing to stipulate to its dismissal with prejudice, i.e., they cannot reassert this defense again in this case. 387 [PDF] This is not that big a deal. There was almost no chance that Oracle was going to be successful with the assignor estoppel defense (their attempt to apply it in this case went far beyond anything any court has allowed). Nevertheless, it knocks one more issue off the table. Note that the dismissal with prejudice on this defense is not final until the judge enters the order, but given the parties have agreed to the stipulation, that is a mere formality.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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So what has changed? As user noticeable changes we have updated translations for Updated Dutch, French, Danish and Slovenian as well as a completely new translation file for Ukrainian thanks to Yuri Chornoivan. The code will now give more useful results in case the diff program either cannot be executed or fails for some reason.
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Public Services/Government
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What’s Whitehall’s attitude to software procurement? A cynic might sum it up as “nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft”.
The current government has vowed to change the civil service mindset that has always preferred to spend money with the biggest firms and has been conservative about open source software.
The Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has vowed to create a level playing field for open source as part of a drive to cut costs.
Now a BBC Freedom of Information (FOI) request has given us a glimpse of how big the challenge will be.
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Amid promises from the current Government to give greater opportunities to open-source providers, the BBC made a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests aimed at discovering the use of non-proprietary software in Whitehall.
The figures from each department are hardly conclusive and vary in detail, but point to a situation in which conservatism rules the day, with civil-service buyers reluctant to look past low-risk, high-cost packages from big-name suppliers.
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The draft ‘Policy On Device Drivers For Procurement Of Hardware For e-Governance’ states that the, “Government of India (GOI) endeavours to provide e-governance services, which are technology-neutral, cost-effective, interoperable and vendor-neutral. The GOI Policy on open standards is a step towards meeting this objective in the development of e-governance applications.” The policy will be applicable in all new e-governance projects, as well as in existing ones.
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The Department for Transport (www.dft.gov.uk/) has become the latest central Government organisation to extend its relationship with Causeway, the application management services arm of Kainos, with a new contract to support the Department’s web activities and migration to a cloud-based open source platform.
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The “innocent” third parties for this change could either ship their products in virtual machines paying the “tax” or they could port their software to GNU/Linux. Either way would cost ISVs some money but all the software makers owe the manufacturers of all that lovely hardware a lot, I figure. They should be glad to contribute to software freedom. End users might need some retraining but the OEMs could easily host training sites to prepare users. There could be lots of opportunity for smaller ISVs to compete against the big guys if they can get software working on GNU/Linux sooner than the big guys.
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Health/Nutrition
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As President Obama gets ready for his big jobs speech Thursday, America’s nurses have a message for him. “Heal America, Tax Wall Street!” the signs read as nurses rallied in front of 61 Congressional offices this week. The nurses are proposing a bold alternative to the “cut, cut, cut” rhetoric emanating from Washington, D.C.
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Cablegate
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Below are links to two web page pages that have links to 973 U.S. Department of State cables identified on September 5, 2011, using the http://cablegatesearch.net/ tool for searching 251,287 Wikileaks cables, and the search term, “special 301.”
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Finance
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Because no amount of money ultimately protects you against the collapse of a nation, against raging compatriots in the streets too desperate to care anymore. Look at Rome, Greece, Rwanda, Russia (twice recently — the Czars, then the Commies). Take a look at Gaddafi, Hussein and all the other leaders in the Middle East who have been feasting off their people.
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Watch the news this Labor Day. You will have the unique opportunity to hear and see politicians, robbers, thieves and human strip miners tell you about how they have the best interests of “working” American men and women at heart.
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Civil Rights
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Who’s more powerful when it comes to determining how social voting functionality works in Germany? The government or Facebook? You may recall a few weeks ago there were reports of a German official effectively banning the Facebook “like” button on third party sites as a privacy violation. While it doesn’t say it’s officially in response to this, the German news site Heise implemented a neat little workaround, in which you have to first click on the icon to “activate” it, and then you can click the “like” (Google translation of the original German). Under this system, the “like” button isn’t loaded until a user clicks on it, thus there’s no issue of Facebook automatically tracking folks via the button.
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09.05.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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This provides an opportunity for Linux, a free and open source operating system that anyone can download and use, to be more widely adopted in the desktop. Linux is dominant in the mobile space with Android. Apart from the wrong impressions that it is difficult to use, Linux failed to gain much traction in the desktop because people were tied to specific software that worked only on Windows.
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Kernel Space
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Update: David Airlie has replied to say he would rather not merge the plug-in portion of the driver unless there is an open-source module to take avantage of the plug-in API. Rob Clark has responded that he expects an open user within a month or so. This may put the OMAP driver out of reach for merging in the Linux 3.2 kernel, but would then become a target for integration in the Linux 3.3 kernel.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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We have an on-screen (or, if you prefer, virtual or software) keyboard for Plasma. It can run independently of the shell by way of the plasma-keyboardcontainer application (which we use in Plasma Active) or the Keyboard Plasmoid that comes as part of the kdeplasma-addons repository.
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New Releases
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The BackBox team is proud to announce the release of BackBox Linux 2.
BackBox 2 features the following upstream components: Ubuntu 11.04, Linux Kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0
The images (32bit & 64bit) can be downloaded from the following location:
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As of today I find myself in the position of deciding whether or not to stick with my previously preferred distribution, Mandriva Linux.
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I took the plunge to migrate my personal / business desktop PC from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 today (Sunday, 4 September 2011). I used the instructions from this page: Migrate from Mandriva Linux. Specifically the section titled, “b) Upgrading inline, using urpmi (CLI)”. The migration is roughly three quarters done as I type this. I decided to try to use the PC while I ran the migration from console 1 (Ctrl Alt F1). In preparation for this I closed programs I suspected would be most affected. Such as:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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After reviewing Bodhi Linux I had some time to really play around with the system. Preferring a minimal environment, I decided to check out what the minimal installation theme had to offer. One thing is for sure, when Bodhi thinks you want minimal it takes you seriously. I found myself looking at a clock. That was the only gadget on the desktop… there wasn’t even a task bar. Now if this sounds like I’m complaining let me set you straight: I asked for minimal and I expected no less, so seeing this was quite a pleasant surprise. It means that if needed I can build my desktop from the ground up.
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Phones
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Android
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Some retail locations have received all the tools necessary to sell the much anticipated Motorola Droid Bionic. With a surprise Verizon Korean translated commercial showing an additional 31-seconds frame revealing Sept. 8 release date, expect droid Bionic to be launched on Thursday.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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IFA 2011 Medion joined the throng of vendors touting an Android 3.2-based tablet at IFA, though it kept its offering, the LifeTab P9514 behind closed doors.
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Many have predicted, that tablets will replace netbooks completely. While I cannot agree with this absolute statement, I admit that tablets serve a set of use-cases better than netbooks. The touch-interface and low power-consumption of tablets make content consumption more comfortable (e.g. no heating, no fan-noise, longer battery runtime, less weight to lug around…etc).
That said, there are areas where tablets just cannot give enough. For example, any kind of work which requires more serious input while being mobile. The problem of efficient input can be solved with accessories like a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Usually, when you prepare your tablet for extra-home journeys, you buy a case which also hosts the keyboard.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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RMS is working on a press release which will grant a special exception to the GPL to anyone who is using one of the affected tarballs. In the meantime new tarballs have been uploaded to the FSF FTP repository with the missing sources added. The new tarballs have an ‘a’ suffix to their name, but otherwise behave in exactly the same way as the tarballs they replace. So for example the latest 2.21 binutils release tarball is now:
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Health (GNU Health) is now an official GNU Project software. We’re the new kid in town at Savannah, but the project has been around since 2008.
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Public Services/Government
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ou have often argued that the implementation of the White Paper ‘Open Source Vision – Nurturing the Proliferation of Open Source Software’, authored by the Malta Information Technology Agency, could be as important for the future of Malta and its role in the increasingly globalised world as independence or joining the EU. But you have almost always insisted on the economic significance of the proposal, while the best-known international advocates of the Open Source Movement lay just as much emphasis on its political significance from the point of view of democratic development. What weight do you give to this political aspect in the Maltese context in relation to the rapidly and radically changing Mediterranean setting?
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I think the future of the desktop OS is going to be rather irrelevant though. Like it or not, we march on to the cloud and the volume of web-based apps that people are raving about will ensure that it won’t matter which platform you are running. The cloud has many people worried. I’m not one of them.
TechBytes is reaching its first year, the collaboration project that started with Roy Schestowitz making a one line request in Identi.ca has been the focus of much of my efforts this last year, in 2008 when I first started writing Linux articles online I remember the focus of those articles was showing people why Linux was far better than a Windows experience. I see myself having to spend less time doing that since even the tech uninterested are seeming to understand there can be a better (and happier) existence outside of Microsoft products.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today the Obama Administration made a decision that will endanger the health of tens of thousands of Americans. Its choice to delay stronger standards for smog lets polluters off the hook and leaves Americans with sicker family members and higher medical costs.
Smog standards exist because smog is dangerous to human health. It causes respiratory illness, cardiac disease, and premature death. Though we have made progress in reducing this harmful pollution in American skies, we haven’t licked the problem yet.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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On an upcoming edition of PBS’ Frontline, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo argues that the CIA under President Obama is straight-up Bushian. “With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations,” Rizzo says. (Watch a clip of the Rizzo interview here.) Glenn Greenwald points out that this shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been paying attention.
The real news: Frontline also reports that, during the 2008 campaign, Obama promised the CIA that it he had every intention of staying the course set by the Bush administration. That information, if it had come out at the time, might have damaged Obama’s end-the-war, stop-the-torture campaign mojo.
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The recently abandoned room is lined with posters and English-language training manuals stamped with the name Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, which installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: “Help keep our classified business secret. Don’t discuss classified information out of the HQ.”
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Cablegate
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Like many others, I have spent the past several days combing through countless US Department of State cables. I am primarily looking at the cables that describe our government’s efforts to drive up the price of medicine in developing countries. This is an act of state-sponsored violence that is rarely reported by the New York Times, the Guardian or other newspapers that had received early copies of the cables.
I am also looking at the news of and the reaction to WikiLeaks’ failure to withhold access to cables that include the names of sources of intelligence, putting at risk the lives of the persons so named.
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Wondering why gold at $1850 is cheap, or why gold at double that price will also be cheap, or frankly at any price? Because, as the following leaked cable explains, gold is, to China at least, nothing but the opportunity cost of destroying the dollar’s reserve status. Putting that into dollar terms is, therefore, impractical at best, and illogical at worst. We have a suspicion that the following cable from the US embassy in China is about to go not viral but very much global, and prompt all those mutual fund managers who are on the golden sidelines to dip a toe in the 24 karat pool.
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obert Mugabe told a former US ambassador that the ageing president had prostate cancer that would kill him by 2013, leaked US embassy cables show.
Central bank chief Gideon Gono made the claims in remarks to James McGee in June 2008 – when Zimbabwe was mired in election violence following Mugabe’s loss to then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of polls in March.
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A senior New Israel Fund officer told a U.S. official in 2010 that the disappearance of the Jewish state would not be a tragedy, according to a document that was leaked by Wikileaks.
The officer is Hedva Radovanitz, who was at the time (February 2010) NIF Associate Director in Israel, according to the document.
The document relates to the attempts to pass a law that would demand transparency of political NGOs operating in Israel that are funded by foreign countries.
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Naturally, “60 Minutes” wanted to hear from Assange himself. But for producers Tanya Simon and Howard Rosenberg and correspondent Steve Kroft just getting this interview was a story in and of itself.
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It all began so innocently. I started hanging out with a bad crowd on the intertubes, digging into secret filez about energy wars and government corruption. The Afghan War Logs. The Iraq War Logs. Suddenly I was being called a “WikiLeaks groupie”.
And it was true! Yes, I was revelling in this subversive counter-culture! I was spending hours and hours on my computer, chatting with other “groupies”, posting my findings on Twitter, writing up stories the media was ignoring and governments didn’t want people to know. I began writing for WikiLeaks Central and even got re-tweeted by Mr. @wikileaks himself – an intoxicating high for a crazy, deluded cyber-hippy like myself.
It was just a fashionable thing, obviously. It would have passed soon enough, I’m sure. But then along came CableGate, with over 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables just begging to be investigated. How could I walk away now? Ignoring my wife’s futile pleas, I launched myself into the adventure like an alcoholic diving into a beer-filled swimming pool. Alas!
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The National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) is bound to come under pressure to scrap its decision of outsourcing its work in the UK to a private security company after the WikiLeaks revealed that Interior Minister Rehman Malik had offered the US all the records of the Nadra.
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A leaked confidential US diplomatic cable reveals that the US Embassy in Jakarta believed the 2007 gubernatorial election won by Fauzi Bowo had been “rigged” by the capital’s elites.
The cable, dated April 25, 2007, ahead of the election, was among the unredacted cables released by WikiLeaks over the past week. It is believed to have been written by the then-deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy, John Heffern.
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1. Embassy was approached by two advisors to National Democratic Congress (NDC) candidate John Atta-Mills, Edward Nunoo and Sylvanos Tamakloe, who told Political Office that Electoral Commission (EC) Chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan was being pressured by the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) to announce false results that would be supplied by the NPP. The EC Chairman told Ambassador that the allegations were “utter nonsense.” #WIKILEAKS
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The Guardian doesn’t “get” openness when it suits their purpose
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The latest release of leaked diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks has revealed some persons around the Presidency have tried to use their influence to manipulate control of the country’s oil resources for their personal gain.
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When Nepal’s controversial king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah handed over power to a resurrected parliament on April 24, 2006 and faced the abolition of his throne, it might not have been entirely the thought of his subjects’ wellbeing that prompted the move.
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A diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks reveals that entertainment industry groups and law enforcement combined their efforts to infiltrate Warez Scene topsites. One of the strategies they discuss during a 2009 meeting is to have an informant leak music before the official release date, to gain trust of the site’s operator and gain access to the highly secured Scene servers.
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Attorney general says authorities have no plans to prosecute WikiLeaks founder, despite claims that unredacted embassy cables reveal identity of Australian intelligence officer
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The chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh state sent an empty private jet to get a pair of sandals from Mumbai, leaked US diplomatic cables say.
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In Indonesia, the national police are discovered to be using a hard-line Islamic group as its hidden “attack dog.” In Indonesia, octogenarian Singaporean founder Lee Kuan Yew calls Islam a “venomous religion”. In Malaysia, UMNO leaders are “willing to blacken Malaysia’s reputation to ensure the end to opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s political challenge.”
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Latvian national airline airBaltic cancelled its plans to begin flights between Riga and the Iranian capital Tehran in 2010 after pressure from the United States, according to confidential cables by U.S. diplomats released by “WikiLeaks”.
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When policymakers are asked to name the terrorist breeding grounds that keep them up at night, they’re likely to mention Pakistan’s tribal areas, southern Afghanistan, or Yemen. Sunny Jamaica doesn’t usually make the list. But one 2010 cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Kingston warned that the country “potentially presents fertile ground for those who might commit acts of violence in the name of Islamist extremism.”
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MANILA, Philippines – The Vatican pressured the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) not to support protests calling for the resignation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2005, a US embassy cable released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks revealed.
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The 2,000-strong private army of a powerful clan suspected of carrying out the Philippines’ worst political massacre was better armed than the military and police, leaked US embassy cables showed.
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People must seek to protect not only WikiLeaks, but also the mechanism by which the information enters into our purview.
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A leaked US diplomatic cable says that “hundreds” of former employees of Blackwater, which was barred from Iraq over a deadly 2007 shooting, later worked with other firms guarding US diplomats here.
Iraq announced in January 2009 that it would not renew Blackwater’s operating licence due to a September 16, 2007 incident in which guards protecting a US diplomatic convoy opened fire in Baghdad’s busy Nisur Square, killing at least 14 civilians.
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This capital city’s skies were clogged with pollution, as is often the case, and China’s government was concerned. So it summoned officials of the US embassy to a meeting.
But the session had nothing to do with hazy skies. Rather, Chinese officials were peeved that the Americans were monitoring pollution themselves, and posting their more precise findings, which usually judged the smog far worse than official Chinese readings, on Twitter for anyone to read.
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As gut-wrenching as it will be for Labor MPs to dispatch their second prime minister in a row, and to suffer all the bad jokes and gibes – including mine of Australia becoming the Italy of the Pacific, with four prime ministers in four years (Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Rudd?) – they have little choice. Gillard has shown she is not up to the job. Wayne Swan, who will also have to go when Gillard does, has described her as tough as nails. He’s right. One problem. Tough does not equal smart. She has made too many mistakes and shown a worrying inability to learn from any of them. Under her, Labor has fallen to its lowest levels ever.
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WikiLeaks has published a US Embassy cable that says former President Jerry John Rawlings uses drugs and his finance minister at that time was alarmingly incompetent.
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Finance
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The ripple effects of the financial crisis continue to take their toll on banks, as reckless lending during the bonanza years catches up to them. Friday after the closing bell, and ahead of a Labor Day weekend, the Federal Housing Finance Agency confirmed it was suing 17 different financial institutions for misrepresenting the quality of mortgage backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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Weeks after Eileen P. Rominger left Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), she took the helm of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s investment management division as one of the wealthiest people to ever join the agency.
Rominger reported $57.5 million in income from New York- based Goldman Sachs in a financial disclosure form covering 2010 and 2011. She also reported making $2.3 million to $13.2 million in investment income since the start of 2010.
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Censorship
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Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).
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09.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I was pretty certain that Badgers, regardless of their origin were just part of my past. Yesterday I realized that I was wrong. But what connection could there be between Linux and Badgers? I have to admit that I am just a beginner in the Linux world. It took me almost a year to install Linux on a fruit. Apple G4’s are just mean and evil when it comes to playing with their FNA (Fruit Normal Application). This is akin to my Supermarket telling me the approved ways to use parsley!
I knew I had the beast beat when after 10 million ‘fruitless’ attempts it responded with an tech type message that translated into ‘Piss off, I don’t do Linux’. Before it could grep its chron, I had it one the ropes and it was game over.
Installing Linux in a dead Badger makes my efforts pale into insignificance. Badgers do not come with CD Drives, and they tend to be a little lacking in RAM. There are issues with the processor as well. Intel and AMD have not explored the world of multi core, hyper threading Badger brains.
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A few days later, I saw a couple of articles with headlines that read: “The PC is dead, claims IBM chief tech officer on 30th anniversary of home computer launch,” and “IBM Inventor: PC is dead.”
At the time I had not read Mark’s blog, as I was busy getting ready to give a keynote presentation the following week at LinuxCon in Vancouver. I made a mental note to check what Mark had actually written after I returned from Vancouver.
I gave my presentation on August 18 in the morning, right around the time that HP announced that it was considering spinning off its PC business. Later that day, during an interview about Linux and related subjects, a reporter asked me in passing what I thought about the earlier stories that the PC was dead, which were given further prominence given HP’s announcement that morning.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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We also wanted to start working with the newest QtQuick technologies without disturbing the Desktop or Netbook interfaces with our experimentation. It all came together at the right time and Plasma Active was born.
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We do all of our design and development in the open. We have the plasma-mobile repository that holds things specific to the Active shell. The rest of our code can be found in the kdelibs, kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kdeplasma-addons repositories.
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GNOME Desktop
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How fast things change in this world now a days, you can’t sleep a day without, being left behind. Just a few weeks ago I wrote about Chrome OS “I still do not see too much uses for it”, I was saying that mainly because, you needed to be “connected” in order to use it.
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I hope ALT Linux team will add more packages to sisyphus because at times I find some packages lacking in it and I am sure that ALT Linux will live longer life under shadows as compared to its shinning in bright days lights counterpart distributions from west with a powerful arsenal like “Sisyphus” .
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New Releases
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We have released the first updated version of our latest Zorin OS 5 release series. This release uses the GNOME 2.X Classic environment instead of Ubuntu’s Unity shell. Zorin OS 5.1 features a whole host of updates to Zorin OS 5 including an updated Linux Kernel, security updates, upgraded programs and aesthetic changes.
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Red Hat Family
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In the summer of 2008, Google flipped the switch on its App Engine, letting outside developers build applications atop its state-of-the-art online infrastructure – and it soon got a lecture from Jason Hoffman.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1 has been released bringing in revamped Unity interface, improved indicators, hidden window controls and many other features.
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Most of you probably know that Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has reached Beta status today. After intentionally skipping any reference to Natty Narwhal (I didn’t want to sound negative or overly skeptical), I was curious to see if the dreamy cat brings major improvements. Unfortunately, it does not sound like that’s the case.
I can’t say I have thoroughly tested Ubuntu 11.10, but I have quickly checked through the main new features and I must say it does not cut it for me. It feels slow, looks ugly, is needlessly cumbersome at times and plain irrational when it comes to some of its design decisions. Sadly, some interesting features like the introduction of Light DM and Thunderbird fall short when compared to a difficult to explain rush to hide pretty basic controls and a more than obvious desire to copy Apple. In fact, it seems like Ubuntu became “Linux for Human Beings …that love Apple products!”.
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Canonical expects finished code for version 11.10 to be available in October, but you can get a peek under the hood of the new beta now.
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Flavours and Variants
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My experience with Trisquel is somewhat similar to Debian.
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Last Friday, my new ThinkPad arrived, a T420i to replace my beloved T43. The T43 was running strong, but I was starting to get nervous about a catastrophic crash becoming more probable as the machine grew older. Plus, I was ready for a more contemporary machine that had a solid state drive and a built-in web cam.
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Cloud Engines is now accepting preorders for a new version of its Pogoplug personal cloud-server gadget, targeting users of Android and iOS mobile devices. Although dubbed “Pogoplug Mobile,” the compact new model remains powered by an AC wall-wart and communicates via wired Ethernet.
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Phones
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Android
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The report, done by Nielsen for the month of July 2011, shows the market share of the leading mobile operating systems, and the results are not surprising in the slightest.
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The open letter makes a number of very good points, although the availability of alternatives to Adobe’s leading applications doesn’t mean that everyone will adopt alternatives. Part of the reason Flash is so ubiquitous online is simply because it is ubiquitous online. It’s supported by every application you would expect to support it, and supported in standardized, compatible ways.
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I’m going to talk about the costs associated with modifying and maintaining free software “out of tree” – that is, when you don’t work with the developers of the software to have your changes integrated. But I’m also going to talk about the costs of working with upstream projects. It can be easy for us to forget that working upstream takes time and money – and we ignore that to our peril. It’s in our interests as free software developers to make it as cost-effective as possible for people to work with us.
Hopefully, if you’re a commercial developer, you’ll come away from this article with a better idea of when it’s worthwhile to work upstream, and when it isn’t. And if you’re a community developer, perhaps this will give you some ideas about how to make it easier for people to work with you.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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If you look beyond the U.S., Chrome is already well on its way. Statcounter had Chrome exceeding 20% of the worldwide Internet browser market in June. Statcounter’s numbers already places Chrome ahead of Firefox in some areas of the world.
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SaaS
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Aeolus is an open source project intended to provide solutions for managing packs of virtual machines across various private and public clouds. The project has been started by Red Hat, but they do not want to own the project, inviting other companies to join forces with them in creating an open cloud management solution.
Aeolus is very similar to what RightScale does, who provides a cloud management console and an unified API that works across Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, and Rackspace, while support for EC2 is to be added in the near future. Aeolus currently runs on a 64-bit machine with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 or Fedora 14 installed, and can be used to administer virtual images deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace Cloud Hosting, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), VMware vSphere and/or Eucalyptus.
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Licensing
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At the start of the summer, you may recall Project Harmony causing a certain amount of controversy on the subject of contributor agreements in open source communities. My position on them was and is that they are a rarely needed and exceptional tool that should be avoided unless essential, because of their negative effects on the dynamics of open source communities.
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Openness/Sharing
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A London based design and strategy firm wants to make designing and building your own home more possible and affordable. 00:/, the designers, have created an open source house design and construction kit named WikiHouse. WikiHouse will be open to anyone and everyone via a Creative Commons license.
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Open Hardware
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As I mentioned in my previous column, my son and I want to explore robotics as a hobby and a learning experience. We don’t have an unlimited budget, so I wanted to do some estimating of what it would cost to do it using different technology standards. In the first part, I explored Lego Mindstorms, but the open-hardware (and free software) Arduino system has been getting better and better. So I want to consider that possibility in this column and make a comparison to see which is a better option for us.
Arduino is much newer, having only come into its own in the last few years. But it’s also a fully open-hardware (or Open Source Hardware — meaning that the plans are free for anyone to use to make Arduino components), and indeed, there are multiple Arduino suppliers to choose from. Software host environments for communicating with and programming Arduino controllers are available as free software packages in various well-established programming languages. The whole Arduino culture is very free and open.
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Standards/Consortia
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Health/Nutrition
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The destruction of the World Trade Centre has taken a heavy toll on the health of those who tried to rescue people from the burning buildings, those who took part in the clean-up, and those who lived near the site, research shows.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.
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The papers suggest the CIA abducted several suspected militants from 2002 to 2004 and handed them to Tripoli.
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Secret files have been found by Human Rights Watch which show the close intelligence relationship between the UK, US and Libya.
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The political establishment in France is trying to hide the significance of the massacre of 77 people in Oslo by neo-fascist Anders Breivik, in order to conceal the great dangers posed by the promotion of right-wing conceptions and parties by the French and European ruling elite as a whole.
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The overthrow of Gaddafi has brought together strange allies, but few stranger than Abdulhakim Belhaj, the military commander of all rebel military forces in Tripoli, and Nato. An Islamist whom Gaddafi tried to have the US list as a terrorist, Mr Belhaj says he was tortured by CIA agents after being arrested in the Far East in 2004 and later handed over by them to Colonel Gaddafi for further torture and imprisonment in Libya.
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Cablegate
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Unredacted US diplomatic cables published by antisecrecy Web site WikiLeaks on Friday allege collusion between Indonesian security forces and the radical Islamic Defenders Front.
Though the claims are not new, the leaked cables go into far greater detail than before and name the sources providing the US Embassy in Jakarta with information on a number of recent controversies, each of which has the potential to embarrass the Indonesian government.
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Americans love sports. They love watching football and baseball games. I live in the SF Bay Area and I depend on BART rail transit almost everywhere I go. Even though I have no interest in sports and don’t know much about them, I know when the games are on as I experience immediate changes in the familiar scenery of my commute.
Whenever there is a game the station is transformed into a kind of zoo, or maybe like a shopping mall. The train is packed with people wearing uniforms and Giants hats. They are filled with excitement, finding kindred spirits sharing cheers for their team.
[...]
A little known organization called WikiLeaks suddenly emerged into the stadium and grabbed the teams and the audience’s attention. The WikiLeaks founder, a white-haired mysterious dude managed to enter the field and interrupted the game. He is no Goldman Sachs, no Obama-like charismatic politician, no Uncle Tom for the Ivy League elite. He was not a powerful manufactured celebrity groomed for consumption (Heck, he was even homeless!).
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In this age of super-charged discussions and rallies against corruption, it is perhaps instructive to look back five years when scams were not the stuff of daily news.
Hearing the innovative ways in which people rationalized corruption, the then US Consul for Chennai David Hopper wondered if Indians really objected to it at a deep level at all.
In a cable written in 2007 after the collapse of an over-bridge in Hyderabad, Hopper listed the various ways in which people “explained” corruption and wondered “Does anyone care?”
Hopper was, of course, talking about the Andhra Pradesh state administration under YSR Reddy which, like the Central administration at present, was rolling out a number of multi-billion populist welfare measures aimed at the poor.
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A US diplomatic cable leaked by whistleblower website WikiLeaks quotes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as saying that in 2006, he had reached an “understanding” on Kashmir with then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
The cable claims Dr Manmohan Singh told an American delegation in April 2008 that “We had reached an understanding in back-channels, in which Musharraf had agreed to a non-territorial solution to Kashmir that included freedom of movement and trade.”
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From 2004-2010, the Philippines witnessed one of the worst waves of human rights violations in its history. Hundreds of activists were killed or abducted. Hundreds more were arrested and faced with trumped-up charges. The magnitude of the abuses caught the attention of the international community. The issue also further isolated the regime of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The main suspects in the killings and disappearances were state security forces.
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This is what the cable says:
“[FM] Meller’s staff expects that the renditions and “CIA prisons” issue will continue to dog the Polish government, despite our and the Poles’ best efforts to put this story to rest. In response to sustained media pressure, PM Marcinkiewicz announced December 10 that his government will order an internal probe “to close the issue.” Meller anticipates being asked about renditions by the Polish press while in Washington, and the MFA has asked that we remain in close contact to coordinate our public stance.”
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Al Jazeera news producer Jamal Elshayyal recently gained access to the Tripoli headquarter of Libya’s intelligence agency. Among the documents scattered throughout the demolished building were secret files indicating that influential Americans advised Muammar Gaddafi since the beginning of the Libyan uprising. Here is his account of the discovery:
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As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S. The accidental release of these unredacted cables will receive far more attention and more outrage than the extreme, deliberate wrongdoing these cables expose. That’s because many of those condemning WikiLeaks care nothing about harm to civilians as long as it’s done by the U.S. government and military; indeed, such acts are endemic to the American wars they routinely cheer on. What they actually hate is transparency and exposure of wrongdoing by their government; “risk to civilians” is just the pretext for attacking those, such as WikiLeaks, who bring that about.
That said, and as many well-intentioned transparency supporters correctly point out, WikiLeaks deserves some of the blame for what happened here; any group that devotes itself to enabling leaks has the responsibility to safeguard what it receives and to do everything possible to avoid harm to innocent people. Regardless of who is at fault — more on that in a minute — WikiLeaks, due to insufficient security measures, failed to fulfill that duty here. There’s just no getting around that (although ultimate responsibility for safeguarding the identity of America’s diplomatic sources rests with the U.S. Government, which is at least as guilty as WikiLeaks in failing to exerise due care to safeguard these cables; if this information is really so sensitive and one wants to blame someone for inadequate security measures, start with the U.S. Government, which gave full access to these documents to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, at least).
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Finance
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On Thursday, Goldman Sachs gained the government’s blessing to sell off its mortgage unit, but not without a couple of reprimands.
The investment bank, which had been trying for months to exit the retail mortgage business that has been a source of prolonged headaches for other institutions, agreed to forgive a few million dollars in homeowners’ debt, and said it would refrain from an illegal practice known as robo-signing — or approving foreclosure documents without reading them. Goldman also got a stern talking-to from the Federal Reserve, which imposed no monetary penalties at this time.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Embattled Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser has unexpectedly announced he will recuse himself from an upcoming case involving a Tea Party challenge to proposed election disclosure rules. Prosser was asked to step down on conflict-of-interest grounds because his campaign attorney, James Troupis, is also the attorney for the Tea Party groups; for weeks, Prosser had insisted on his impartiality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Copyright, U.S. lobbying, and the stunning backroom Canadian response gets front page news treatment today as the Toronto Star runs my story on new revelations on copyright from the U.S. cables released by Wikileaks. The cables reveal that former Industry Minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before it was to be tabled it in the House of Commons, former Industry Minister Tony Clement’s director of policy Zoe Addington encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list, Privy Council Office official Ailish Johnson disclosed the content of ministerial mandate letters, and former RCMP national coordinator for intellectual property crime Andris Zarins advised the U.S. that the government was working on a separate intellectual property enforcement bill.
The disclosures are particularly relevant since Parliament is set to resume in several weeks with the reintroduction of a copyright reform bill slated to be one of the government’s top priorities. The bill is expected to mirror Bill C-32, the previous copyright package that died with the election in the spring.
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Secret U.S. government cables show a stunning willingness by senior Canadian officials to appease American demands for a U.S.-style copyright law here.
The documents describe Canadian officials as encouraging American lobbying efforts. They also cite cabinet minister Maxime Bernier raising the possibility of showing U.S. officials a draft bill before tabling it in Parliament.
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09.02.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Samba began life in 1992 as “a bit of a hack” by Andrew Tridgell on his university computer in Canberra, Australia, while “procrastinating the stuff [he] was supposed to be doing” for his PhD. The initial hack was to use DOS to mount disks on a Sun workstation through DEC Pathworks running on Vax and Ultrix networks, and it matured rapidly as a means to share files on Windows networks with Linux and Unix servers.
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When he rebooted following the last stage of the upgrade, he saw a … a … a … KERNEL PANIC! The system could not find the root / boot partition. So, he booted a PartedMagic Live CD to access the drive and see what was wrong. But PartedMagic refused to mount the partitions too. When he checked with GParted he saw that the /home partition, which he knew to be an XFS file system, was being “reported” as a “damaged” EXT4 file system. This looked bad. Very bad. So, he ran GSmartControl and tested the drive. Oh no! The drive was giving errors by the megabyte! Oh the horror! The angst! The tearing out of the hair … Okay, so he’s 50ish and mostly bald on top with a ponytail. He really avoids pulling out what hair he has left. But you get the picture.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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Here are 10 possible solutions.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Should enterprises upgrade to Windows 7? If you’re in the IT channel, chances are good you’ve pondered that question at least once or twice in the last few years. In a new e-book, however, Canonical urges administrators to consider another option: exiting the Microsoft ecosystem entirely by switching their desktops to Ubuntu. Here are the details.
To be sure, pushing Linux as an operating system not just for servers but also for corporate desktops is neither a very new idea, nor one that originated with Canonical. Linux distributions such as Caldera were marketed for the business channel more than a decade ago, and as early as 2008, Canonical partnered with IBM to deliver a virtualized desktop solution aimed at enterprises.
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Ubuntu’s next release, the Oneiric Ocelot (11.10), will soon be upon us and the first beta for this release is now out! At this point, Oneiric has already gone through three alpha releases and the features and the interface should be, essentially, set in stone (both the feature and the user interface freezes have past). Following the beta release today the focus should shift from the user interface (UI) to polishing up the release, squashing bugs, and improving over all quality (see the overall workitems here!).
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As we inch towards the first beta release of Ubuntu 11.10, the excitement is growing what’s new in the upcoming version of Ubuntu. We wanted to share with you what Ubuntu would look like as the UI was frozen just two day ago. What it meant was, this is the way Ubuntu is going to look. There won’t be any UI related changes, what-so-ever.
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Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 arrived last night and I installed it on my main PC. I started using Ubuntu 11.04 since its beta days to I have enough trust in Debian’s stability that I can use a beta as primary OS. Ubuntu did not disappoint, there were to serious crashers, yes there were crash reports but your work won’t stop. In fact beta 1 of Ubuntu 11.10 is more stable than the stable version of Kubuntu/KDE. As I am a dual booter, boot between Kubuntu and Ubuntu as somethings KDE handles better and something Ubuntu can’t fix at all.
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News item: Canonical, the organization that leads development of the Linux-based, Ubuntu operating system, releases the first beta version of its “Oneiric Ocelot,” the latest version of the OS.
News item: Geeks are taking HP TouchPads and swapping out the WebOS operating software with Ubuntu.
We’ve already taken a look at the alpha versions of Oneiric Ocelot (more commonly known as Ubuntu 11.10), and found a lot to like.
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The Canonical-backed Ubuntu project released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 (“Oneiric Ocelot”), featuring both an improved Dash interface for the Unity desktop and a makeover for the Ubuntu Software Center that resembles the Mac App Store. Ubuntu 11.10 moves up to Linux 3.0.3, the Firefox 7.0 browser, and a Thunderbird 7.0 beta email client, among other changes.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi uses the Enlightenment window manager. When you log in from live media you are presented with a menu that allows you to choose between a composited or software rendered desktop and a few different themes and layouts. Having carried out a hard disk installation, the first log in repeats the procedure, along with a few other last minute, mostly cosmetic options.
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Cloud Engines announced a new version of its Pogoplug that lets users stream media to their iOS or Android phones, or back up mobile data to the device. The $80 Pogoplug Mobile lets users attach USB drives or SD cards to the device and stream the media via the pogoplug.com cloud service to phones equipped with free Pogoplug Android and iOS apps.
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Trimble’s ThingMagic division has integrated Linux-based Mercury5e (M5e) embedded UHF RFID (radio frequency identification) reader modules into long-range RFID readers from TagMaster. Aimed primarily at the railway industry, TagMaster’s XT-2 is already shipping, and the XT-3 and XT-3HD Readers are on the way and available with an open source Linux SDK.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung has emerged as the leader OEM in the US market, slapping Apple hard against the face which is trying to slow Samsung’s growth using its legal force. Samsung and Apple both gained around 1% market share in the US, with Samsung with 25% and Apple with 9.5% market share.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Intel may be pulling out of MeeGo development, if rumors coming out of Taiwan this morning are true. If that’s the case, this will be the second Linux-based mobile platform dropped by its primary corporate sponsor in less than a month’s time.
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Intel has responded to reports that it was planning to “back off” MeeGo saying that it remains committed to the open source operating system. The reports suggested that Intel was planning to temporarily discontinue MeeGo development due to a “lack of enthusiasm for the platform from handset and tablet PC vendors”. MeeGo was created in February 2010 when Intel and Nokia pooled their Moblin and Maemo development efforts under the aegis of the Linux Foundation.
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The success of the HP TouchPad fire sale and customer surveys show that there is pent-up consumer demand for a cheap tablet. And given the superiority of iPad hardware, the only way for Android to compete is to undercut on price.
Is that possible? Well, iSuppli estimates the 16GB TouchPad’s bill of materials at $296. The biggest cost items in a tablet are the touchscreen and memory chips, which could both be knocked down a peg for an explicitly low-cost tablet. Google could buy huge inventory upfront to bring down unit costs even further.
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While Hewlett-Packard recently announced they will be killing off their webOS devices, just days prior to that I had ordered an HP TouchPad 16GB to carry out some additional ARM-based Linux benchmarks. Although HP’s devices may be going away, I am still fond of webOS and it’s a fair environment to carry out performance tests.
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According to Moodley, the most common problem companies experience is failing to make use of the software support and tools provided by the vendor. “The best way to avoid this is to engage with local partners and the vendor.”
She adds that in comparison with proprietary software, vendor-supported open source software offers more freedom to system integrators and developers. “Secondly, open source software tends to be developed on an open standard, once again making it easier for both developers and system integrators.”
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Things are not what they once were for Adobe. There was a time when Flash’s hegemony on the Web was virtually unchallenged. It was also once common to hear people refer to PDF documents as “Adobe files,” signaling the ubiquity of Adobe Reader. Now, times have changed.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tablets have caught the interest of browser maker Mozilla, which is polishing up a new version of its Firefox browser for Android tablets. Previews show a tablet browser with many elements that will be familiar to users of the company’s desktop version. However, users generally don’t yet seem to be as choosy about the browsers on their mobile devices as they are about the browsers on their desktops.
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The Mozilla team is now working on tablet version of its web browser which started to lose market share owing to slower development cycle as compared to Google’s Chrome. The browser adopted a six week release cycle which while improves the browser in the area it was lagging (speed and resource consumption) also creates a headache for businesses and users who can’t keep up with such fast track release cycle.
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SaaS
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Even with all the great new product and vision announcements at the VMworld and Dreamforce vendor conferences this week, two announcements will make it more difficult for developers and CIOs to leap into their next cloud investment with confidence. Google, EMC VMware, and Salesforce.com, three vendors vying for cloud leadership status, share the blame for that lowered confidence.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has had Solaris 11 available as a preview of sorts with the Solaris 11 Express edition. Oracle released Solaris 11 Express back in November of 2010 so by the time OpenWorld 2011 comes around in October, that’s nearly a full year of testing in the field.
The whole point of Solaris 11 is to be the high-end mission critical operating system for Oracle’s platforms and with a year of hardening and stability work, I think OpenWorld is as good a place as any for it to officially be released.
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Healthcare
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The joint electronic health record for the Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will in effect be open source when it is complete, according to a senior VA official, who provided more details about how that will occur.
VA is developing an open source track to modernize its VistA electronic health record and will incorporate the approach with DOD in the joint system. DOD has become more excited by open source and “sees it as a strong contributor as we move ahead,” said Roger Baker, VA CIO.
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Recently, however, the VA embraced open source as a strategy for VistA enhancement. It hired the Informatics Applications Group, or Tiag for short, to create a not-for profit corporation, the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent, to oversee the program.
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Business
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The appointment of Antony Stone as the new Head of Services and Support strengthens the operations still further and brings strong Open Source, Security and Technical competence to the team.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Cablegate
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A secret State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has revealed that one of the primary reasons behind Israeli objections to Palestinian statehood is that lack of statehood keeps Palestinian territories outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes war crimes.
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It’s far from certain we will get a definitive answer. Back then, the war in Iraq had spiraled into its most violent period. The media scrambled to keep up with daily violence. Reporters had enough on their hands trying to account for an attack several months earlier, in which U.S. Marines retaliated for a roadside bombing in Haditha by killing two dozen Iraqis, including women and children.
Today, much of the American public and media have moved on. The deadliest American war is now in Afghanistan. Economic anguish and the odd hurricane fill the headlines. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, we would all prefer to recall the heroic moments in the war on terror — such as the cops and firefighters giving up their own lives to rescue fellow New Yorkers and the overwhelming majority of troops who have fought honorably for their country.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Against all odds, Mandriva 2011 has been released while HP looks set to drop WebOS and its TouchPad tablet. We discover things, provide an update on our wireless mesh project and listen to your opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Attackers compromised several servers at kernel.org using an off-the-shelf Trojan that appears to have entered via a compromised user credential. However, the source code for the Linux kernel does not appear to have been altered, thanks to its “git” distributed revision control system, say kernel maintainers.
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I have finally decided to blog about my netem tool that I wrote a couple of months ago.
First, the introductions, netem is a kernel component for controlling QoS, rate control and various network properties that allows you to emulate a network by modifying the kernel’s IP stack’s queue disciplines. You can read more about it here : http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/netem
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Graphics Stack
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Following a proposal earlier this summer by NVIDIA to extend the RandR protocol, they have now produced a patch for the X.Org Server that adds border property support to the RandR (Resize and Rotate) extension.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt
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I’ve had a little time to play with my ExoPC tablet kindly provided by Intel, and after a brief look at the MeeGo/Intel tablet UX decided that Plasma Active was the way to go (sorry Intel!). The MeeGo UX is far from complete and the lack of applications made the tablet next to useless for anything besides basic web-surfing. Plasma Active, on the other hand, is a full openSuse and KDE install and so has many apps to play with. Plasma Active itself is remarkably usable already and has some nice features that actually work the way I expect a tablet to function. It’s amazing how far the Active team has come in such a short time and that’s a tribute to both the Plasma architecture that Aaron put in place and the flexibility of our Platform/Frameworks. If only Intel had approaced KDE first…
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So before meeting: Charge tablet & fetch needed documents.
Possible issues: Everything was on a my imap server. Minutes was a plain text file, Agenda was a docx file, treasures report was a xls spreadsheet, and the various other papers were pdf files.
For fetching, I’ve heard a lot about Kontact Touch and everything using Akonadi. Besides me not being fully able to properly enter my password in the first 10 tries, and a sometimes flaky internet connection, everything here was a breeze.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, known as the world’s leading provider of open source technology solutions, announced last week they will move their headquarters from their current location on Varsity Drive to the Progress Energy Building in downtown Raleigh.
The company will occupy part of the space that is expected to be created with the merger of Progress Energy and Charlotte-based Duke Energy.
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Debian Family
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I’ve used Debian many times to get old hardware running and, like the author of this entry, Joshua Price, I find the flexibility and lightness of Debian really helps the Linux distribution live up to its billing as “The Universal Operating System,” which can run well on many different kinds (and eras) of hardware.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A few minutes ago, the first
Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system was made available for testing by the Ubuntu developers. As usual, we’ve grabbed a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 11.10 development.
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For those that do not know, I develop software for the Mythbuntu project. Over the past couple of Ubuntu releases I have been working on Mythbuntu-bare, a backup and restore utility for MythTV systems. I have been slowly adding functionality to this software which was included with the mythbuntu-common package, but due to the growing complexity of the software and size I decided it was time to move it from the mythbuntu-common package into its own set of packages. This is where my issues began.
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There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We’ve seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November this year.
Although we know a bit about the PC, there’s still a lot of information missing, but further details are starting to appear as Raspberry Pi develops the machine further and talks to more people about it. Eben Upton, director of the foundation, recently gave a talk at Bletchley Park regarding Educating Programmers, which focused on the thinking behind the $25 PC. You can watch it below.
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Phones
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Android
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There was another upsurge in discussion of Android GPL issues last month, triggered by couple of posts by Edward Naughton, followed by another by Florian Mueller. The central thrust is that section 4 of GPLv2 terminates your license on violation, and you need the copyright holders to grant you a new one. If they don’t then you don’t get to distribute any more copies of the code, even if you’ve now come into compliance. TLDR; most Android vendors are no longer permitted to distribute Linux.
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A survey of smart phone subscribers over 13 up to July 11 has some interesting numbers. It gives total numbers of smart phones, growth rate of smart phones and shares. If I express the shares as millions of smart phones I can calculate the growth rate of the installed base by platform. Android/Linux is growing at nearly twice the rate of iOS and pulling far ahead. The numbers of new Android/Linux subscriptions can almost account for all the increase in smart phones, indicating that many who already own a smart phone will replace it. Presumably Android/Linux is replacing phones and arriving on new phones while everyone else is replacing and being cast off. The others includes Phoney7 which is not only losing share but numbers of units in service. At this rate Android/linux will have a majority by the end of 2011.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Lenovo has unveiled a seven-inch IdeaPad A1 tablet running Android 2.3, due to ship for just $200 with 8GB of storage memory. Meanwhile, ViewSonic unveiled two more seven-inch Android tablets — a seven-inch, Nvidia Tegra 2-based Android 3.2 tablet called the ViewPad 7x and a lower-end tablet called the ViewPad 7e — plus a V350 dual-SIM Android 2.2 phone.
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Good news today! I read in the news that the Ministry of Education in my country is about to provide 25,000 laptops for several elementary schools in two years. These laptops are the XO-1 models by the project OLPC (One Laptop Per Child).
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I should not have to write about this again but stories are popping up all over the web that Android/Linux tablets are not selling well against iPad and that iPad is pulling away. Nothing could be further from the truth:
* Amazon.com shows 8 Android tablets selling with greater popularity than iPad. Those 8 all have 4 stars just like the iPad. Between the iPad 16 gB and the 32gB there are three more Android/Linux tablets.
* iSuppli, which fawns over iPad, draws a chart showing iPad losing its majority to Android/Linux in 2012.
* Even The Register gets in on the act.
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In early July, I ran across Jeffrey Breen’s post on doing sentiment analysis in R a bit before two in the morning. It was interesting enough that I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning digesting his approach, downloading the necessary dependencies in R and outputting very basic sentiment histograms. Since then we’ve included it as a supplement to our research, as in examples like our post on PhoneGap’s marketplace trending.
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Events
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The popularity of the open source Django web framework is underlined by a 30% increase over last year’s attendance for DjangoCon US with a week still to go. Django, “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” is used by many large corporations, and is a special favorite of the newspaper industry.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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“Firefox 8, which only just appeared on the Nightly channel, is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering. The memory footprint of Firefox Seven (and thus Eight) has also been drastically reduced, along with much-needed improvements to garbage collection.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal unearthed files in Libya’s intelligence headquarters that suggest that David Welch — the former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush who brokered the deal that normalized relations between Libya and the United States and who later went on to work for the manufacturing and development giant Bechtel — met with Libyan officials in early August to coordinate on undermining the Libyan rebels and NATO forces by, for example, trying to establish ties between the uprising and al Qaeda:
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Cablegate
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A confidential cable posted on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks says Chinese officials “sought answers” on how the Australian Government had been handling human rights issues.
The cable is believed to have come from the US embassy in Canberra in 2009.
It reports on Australian talks with Chinese officials who visited the country earlier that year as part of the Australia-China Human Rights Dialogue.
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Whistleblower group Wikileaks announced on its website Friday that it has posted online all 251,287 diplomatic cables in its possession.
The new memos include hundreds of previously unpublished secret and confidential cables on the Philippines.
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After a long day of painful acrimony dealing with the incorrigible ‘old media’ at the Guardian and after weighing the pros and cons of the issue through an online forum and poll, WikiLeaks released a 60 GB torrent of the complete Cablegate files just before midnight New York Time.
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The Government is examining thousands of diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks to find out if any “Australian interests’’ have been compromised, after confirming they contain the name of an ASIO officer.
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Finance
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Crisis says that with no sign of economic recovery in sight, there are already signs that homelessness is returning to British streets. In London, rough sleeping, the most visible form of homelessness, rose by 8% last year. Strikingly, more than half of the capital’s 3,600 rough sleepers are now not British citizens: most are migrants from eastern Europe who cannot find work and, unable to get benefits or return home, are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
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Censorship
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One of the unanswered questions arising from the August riots is whether the government needs new powers to block the use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media which were used to organise the disturbances.
Prime Minister David Cameron suggested, in the immediate aftermath of the rioting, that blocking the use of social networking communications was a policy option that was to be urgently discussed with telecommunications operators (and then implemented as a priority).
So when the Home Office says (as it has done) that no new powers are needed, then it follows that either no new powers are needed (ie, the government already has the power to block social networking communications) or the politicians have quietly gone off the idea (and have decided not to say so).
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Privacy
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Millions of internet users in Pakistan will be unable to send emails and messages without fear of government snooping after authorities banned the use of encryption software.
A legal notice sent to all internet providers (ISPs) by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, seen by the Guardian, orders the ISPs to inform authorities if any of their customers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to browse the web.
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Civil Rights
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The UID is a corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into the IT sector. To me, it is one of the most serious transgressions that is on the cards. It is nothing more than an administrative tool in the hands of a police state. But coming back to censorship: since the US government has pissed on its Holy Cow (Free Speech – or whatever little was left of it) with its vituperative reaction to Wikileaks, now everybody will jump on the bandwagon. (Just like every country had its own version of the ‘war on terror’ to settle scores.) Having said this, India is certainly not the worst place in the world on the Free Speech issue: the anarchy of different kinds of media, the fact that it’s such an unmanageable country and, though institutions of democracy have been eroded, there is a militant spirit of democracy among the people… it will be hard to shut us all up. Impossible, I’d say.
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If you received fundraising emails from Barack Obama or campaign manager David Plouffe in 2008, it probably comes as no surprise that Obama and Plouffe didn’t write all of them. They began with “Friend –” and included links to credit-card donation forms. The campaign regularly blasted them out to millions of people.
Elijah Zarlin, the author of many of these emails as part of Obama’s new-media campaign team, was arrested today outside the White House during a protest of the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed oil conduit from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast. Zarlin was one of Obama’s primary fundraising-email-writers, according to Zarlin and Stephen Geer, a new-media staffer on Obama’s campaign payroll.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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A new study on ACTA, commissioned by the Greens/EFA, concludes that ACTA is incompatible with fundamental European human rights instruments and -standards. [1] We believe the Parliament should ask the European Court of Justice an opinion on this delicate issue. Only the Court can decisively resolve the uncertainties.
A second Greens/EFA study concludes ACTA increases the risks and consequences of wrongful searches, seizures, lawsuits and other enforcement actions against legitimate suppliers of generic medicines. [2]
Furthermore, according to our own analysis, green innovation will partly inherit the issues in the software field. ACTA will hamper both green innovation and diffusion of green technology. [3]
Apart from compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, general principles of Union law, the Treaties, current Union laws and existing international obligations, there are more issues to address.
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Send this to a friend
09.01.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Recently while troubleshooting an issue on a Windows 7 PC, I noticed a number of events in the Application Log labelled “Defrag”. Sparking my curiosity, I looked further and discovered that there was approximately one entry per day in the log. I looked around some more at other Windows 7 PCs and found that they too have “Defrag” entries scattered about. It turns out that Windows 7 now automatically runs a defrag on its NTFS filesystem, compared to Windows XP which never did this. This is a great idea on Microsoft’s part, rather than letting things stockpile up and forcing the user to defrag while waiting for minutes or even hours while it churns away.
This got me thinking back to when I read more about other filesystems, most notably ext3 and ext4 filesystems on GNU/Linux (which are standardly used now), which never need defragmenting. Yes that’s correct, they do not need to be defragmented.
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Desktop
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As we’ve hopefully shown, building a $200 PC is a fun experiment—and, provided you really modulate your expectations, you can get a solidly usable computer out of the deal. But when it comes right down to it, we admit that the $200 figure is a bit arbitrary. Is anyone going to complain if the final total is $225.87, or even $250.94? Of course not. The goal is to find components that have the best balance between low prices and high (or, perhaps more appropriately, decent) performance. And if you’re willing and/or able to spend a bit more money, you can get a better system still. Here are a few of our recommended upgrades if you want to take your $200 to slightly more expensive—but still solidly affordable—places.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Investigations are no doubt continuing on numerous fronts, and Kernel.org is working to make sure that each of its 448 users change their passwords and SSH keys. In the meantime, however, the good news is that there appears to be no need to worry about the Linux code we all know and love.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Like many of you, I occasionally come into possession of an older laptop. Usually, it’s something that used to run Windows XP, sometimes even older. You always hear that Linux is supposed to be so great for resurrecting old hardware, but many modern desktop distributions with all their bells and whistles end up chugging along just as slowly as Windows did. In those circumstances, you can either throw the machine away, or build your own custom install tailored toward the needs of the machine. Today we’re going to put together a Debian installation tailored specifically toward the needs of an older laptop.
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Games
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Unigine Corp announced yesterday they have a new licensee for their Unigine Engine. The latest game studio to license this visually impressive multi-platform game engine — with first-rate Linux support — is BlueGiant Interactive. BlueGiant is developing a real-time strategy game using the Unigine Engine.
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Innovative Linux Game Blocks That Matter about which we have written plenty of times has won Microsoft’s Dream.Build.Play 2011 competition with grand prize of $ 40,000.
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Kitty Lambda will soon release their action RPG The Real Texas which is be available for GNU/Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Development of kdelibs 5.0 has begun in the framework branch of its git repository. The main goal for kdelibs 5.0 is that there will be no more kdelibs as it is now. kdelibs (and kde-runtime) will be split up into smaller pieces to lower the barrier for non-KDE developers to use part of the power we as a KDE development community provide. The rough idea is that there will be three groups of libraries/frameworks:
1. Tier 1: components which only depend on Qt and no other lib/component from KDE.
2. Tier 2: components which depend on Qt and other libraries from Tier 1.
3. Tier 3: components which depend on anything.
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For lack of a better place, I plopped it into the kdeexamples repository so that others (and the future me can easily include it into their project (DataEngine, Plasmoid, application, ..) and see what a given DataEngine is doing. It’s BSD licensed, so it can be used pretty much anywhere.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Project has released the first of two beta versions of GNOME 3.2. The pre-release version, designated GNOME 3.1.90, comes just a few days after the user interface freeze, which, along with the beta, was recently put back a week to allow time to incorporate further modifications.
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The first beta for the upcoming GNOME 3.2 is here for eager users to enjoy. This is still unstable code, so most users will want to hold on until the final, stable version lands, but if you want an early peek, this is your chance.
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Several projects exist that purport to be small, run-in-memory distributions. The most popular probably is Puppy Linux. Puppy has spawned several variations, and I have used it several times myself on older machines. But, I have discovered one that bowled me over completely—Tiny Core Linux. This distribution is a totally different beast and fills what I think is as of yet an unfilled category.
To start, Tiny Core is tiny—really tiny. The full desktop version weighs in at approximately 10MB—this is for a full graphical desktop. Not many other options can deliver something like this. People of a certain age may remember projects like Tom’s root/boot, or muLinux. Tiny Core fits somewhere in between those older floppy-based projects and “heavier” small distributions like Puppy.
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This posting is not meant to start another flame war between these two great Linux distribution. It’s just meant to be my personal opinion after trying ArchLinux for several days and compare it with the distribution i have been using for the last six years. I know it’s not completely fair to compare few days experience with six years, but i will try to be as fair as possible.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Considering that this was a major and highly expected release of a major Linux distribution, did anybody in management bother to take it for a spin to see if basic features work? I have visions of Steve Jobs getting involved in every phase of his company’s products development. There does not seem to be a Steve Jobs in Mandriva’s management team.
None of the shortcoming of Mandriva 2011 will stop me from upgrading one of my permanent test systems running Mandriva 2010.2, but my laptop, which I use for serious stuff, on which physical security is just as important as any other feature, will continue running the old system until I figure out how to configure disk encryption when installing my favorite Linux distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Now that Red Hat has made public what had become the worst-kept secret in Triangle real estate circles, it’s worth delving into what the company’s move to downtown Raleigh will mean for interested parties.
In the near term, the decision eliminates uncertainty about whether downtown would be left with an empty building once Progress Energy and Duke Energy complete their merger and consolidate operations.
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It’s Thursday, and you know what that means? Even if we can’t get Christine to wake-up long enough to write one of her articles, you can always depend on us to be here like clockwork for the Top 10 List.
A while back, Red Hat announced they might be leaving the big city of Raleigh to find a new location to continue tweaking their code. A little later, they announced they’d decided to remain in the North Carolina capital city after all – but they’d be looking for new digs since they were getting somewhat crowded at their old location. This week they announced they’d found their new home, a big ol’ office tower in Raleigh’s downtown.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If Canonical has its way, Ubuntu may soon be powering computers like the one in your car. At least, that’s what the release of Ubuntu Core, a new image of Ubuntu aimed at embedded devices, suggests. Here’s the scoop.
Ubuntu Core, as its name implies, constitutes a very bare-bones Ubuntu system. It’s a minimalist version of Ubuntu that provides the most basic software around which developers can build a larger system to suit their needs.
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A month ago I wrote, “A few hours ago, Kate Stewart marked LP bug #760131 as being a milestone candidate for Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1. This bug is for the main power regression introduced in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel as caused by PCI Express Active-State Power Management changes. There hasn’t been a “solution” upstream in either the Linux 3.0 or 3.1 kernels yet since this is a tough problem. I’m not sure what Canonical is planning to do to “fix” the situation (considering their overall lack of low-level technical contributions particularly in the kernel area) besides possibly forcing PCI-E ASPM or just postponing the fix to a later milestone.”
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The first beta release of Ubuntu 11.10 has been made available for download – but what can you expect to find?
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The RaspberryPi Foundation, which aims to put computers in front of children for £15, has taken delivery of 50 engineering prototypes, and intends to get the final version to customers by the end of the year, writes Steve Bush.
Based in Cambridge and founded by six high-tech high-flyers, the foundation’s aim is to cure the programmer shortage by inspiring people to take up computing in childhood – as Sinclair Spectrums and BBC Micros once did.
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Phones
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Android
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Now, about the camera. The idea here is that the 8MP camera can take photos in 3D (SE used “panorama” quite a lot in the description of the photos). But since the Arc S’s screen isn’t a 3D display, the images are shown in 2D. When the device is plugged up to a 3D-capable TV via the MicroHDMI port, they’re shown as 3D photos. So you can (sort of) take 3D photos, but you won’t be able to view them without a 3D TV. The concept of a 3D camera on a non-3D device baffles us, but we’ll leave such judgments to you.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Reuters is reporting that webOS may not be dead, yet. In an interview, the head of HP’s PSG group Todd Bradley hinted HP may not be done with the webOS or tablet. So what does HP have up its sleeve? Bradley was elusive, but here are my top three ideas for what the PSG spinoff could do, along with some channel implications …
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Samsung understands this, and has thus tried to build a tablet for just about any size pocket or backpack you may own. We all know about the GalTab 10.1 and 8.9, but today even smaller models join the pack. At the IFA conference in Berlin, Samsung today announced the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note.
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Just like the rumor stated, Toshiba used IFA 2011 to announce its latest Android tablet and it’s just as tiny as it looked. The AT200 packs a 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 CPU, up to 64GB of memory, and most of the ports that made the Toshiba Thrive popular: micro-USB, microSD, and micro-HDMI. Toshiba claims that the battery is good for “eight hours of video consumption.”
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HTC announced its first 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet, which is also AT&T’s first tablet to run on the carrier’s new LTE/HSPA+ 4G network. The HTC Jetstream runs Android 3.1 and HTC Sense on a 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, features eight-megapixel and 1.3-megapixel cameras, offers an optional HTC Stylus, and start selling Sept. 4 for a pricey $700 with 32GB of memory.
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Amazon’s 7-inch tablet PC, which is supplied by Quanta Computer, is expected to start shipping in October, the sources added.
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If you thought you couldn’t get a real Android tablet from a brand you’ve heard of for less than $200, think again. Lenovo’s just announced the IdeaPad Tablet A1, a 7-inch Android unit that we got a sneaky first glimpse of back in July. Now it’s real, and it’s cheap, it’s running Gingerbread, and while it doesn’t hold a candle to the Galaxy Tab 7.7, it honestly feels like something far above its price point. Read on for our impressions.
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Aside from the default webOS software, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to install Android onto the TouchPad at some point in the foreseeable future. Teams of Android enthusiasts like the gang from RootzWiki are already hard at work creating Android ports for the product. For the moment, the phone-focused Gingerbread will be as good as it gets — the tablet-optimized Honeycomb release, remember, was never made open source — but with the all-purpose Ice Cream Sandwich release on the horizon, the future holds no shortage of interesting Googley possibilities.
A 9.7-inch dual-core Ice Cream Sandwich tablet for $99? Yeah…exactly.
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At the Community Leadership Summit in Portland back in July, I moderated a session called “The Death Star User Group”, aimed at community managers working for large corporations in the various stages of their journey towards software freedom. Community managers in that situation often have to deal with negative perceptions of their employer. I think having a model for the journey that a company is taking towards eventual embrace of software freedom is valuable.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Until fairly recently, cloud computing has been considered “bleeding-edge” technology, reserved for technology-focused companies and developers. We’re getting to the point now, though, where it’s being recognised by IT departments across all industries as a way to increase service flexibility and reduce in-house infrastructure and service costs.
As the cloud goes mainstream at last, all the major technology vendors are scrapping for market share. They have wasted no time building marketing strategies around their cloud products – explaining why their offerings are more robust, scalable and secure than the competition.
The reality, however, is that there are really only two choices when it comes to building your cloud. You can go with a proprietary solution, such as Microsoft Azure; or you can choose an open-source alternative, such as Ubuntu Cloud.
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Databases
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There are two interesting takeaways from this week’s flurry of PostgreSQL news. Most obviously, it’s a win for the Postgres community. Whether you believe that Salesforce or VMware are in this for the long haul as strategic database suppliers, each is a large, publicly traded enterprise software provider visibly committing to Postgres. Which is big.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It is September. Time for cooler weather and time to go back to school. The Apache OpenOffice.org podling is ready for the season with events to help developers learn more about OpenOffice.org.
Do you want to learn how to build Apache OpenOffice.org on Linux? Do you want to take the first steps towards becoming an OpenOffice hacker? Do you want to help test, review and improve our build instructions, on any one of a variety of Linux distros? If so, you will not want to miss this event.
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Healthcare
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The joint electronic health record for the Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will in effect be open source when it is complete, according to a senior VA official, who provided more details about how that will occur.
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Business
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Funding
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According to a form D filed with the SEC this afternoon, open source cloud-sync company Funambol has raised $3 million in funding from previous investors HIG Ventures, Pacven Walden Ventures and Nexit Infocom.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This was an alternative perspective to most of the events in and around Leeds which we go to, which often focus on the benefits of exploiting technology. Dr Stallman argued that our use of technology means we give up our right ‘to be left alone’. Ask yourself if, 20 years ago, you had been asked to carry a device that tells people your whereabouts at all times, would you have said yes? And yet so many of us carry mobile phones. Personally I do this for all of the positive reasons that come with mobile phones, it was thought-provoking to consider the alternative perspective.
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Licensing
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A lot of great work has been done in promotion and branding of GNU GPLv3. However, I think GPLv3 cannot promise freedoms in digital communications to ordinary users, and adequately protect their constitutional communication rights while using telematics communications.
Even a very wide deployment of GPLv3 software and its adoption – through lots of very easy to use online services and apps – by many end users would still not provide those end users with effective means to verify the levels of security, privacy and authentication of those services, because they would have no means to verify that:
* the code they are using on some website is effectively the same code that, thanks to the GPLv3 license, they could download from that same website
* there is no other malicious software running on the same server
* in general, the hardware on which that software runs has not been compromised
* all that GPLv3 code is regularly tested, to maintain consistent levels of security, privacy and authentication
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Openness/Sharing
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Pearson has embraced an open-source approach to digital content, making its proprietary content available to third-party digital developers.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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As a project admin, maintaining the integrity of the brand around your software can seem like a daunting task. But it’s also one of the most important tasks you face. It’s *your* project, made with *your* blood, sweat and tears. Remember that “open source” does not have to mean “open season.”
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We have taken a list of 24 software forges and classified them according to what features and artifacts are present on that forge (as of early June 2011). The word cloud below represents the relative frequency of the forge tags. The links lead to tables that show what characteristics each code forge has.
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Standards/Consortia
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There’s been a lot of dying technology predicted lately. The death of the desktop. The death of the PC (or, in more market-friendly terms, the “post-PC Era”). The death of Windows. The death of the mouse… you name it, if it’s desktop-connected, its demise been predicted in the last couple of months.
So much anger has been leveled at the desktop operating systems and the PC, it really makes me wonder what the PC did to tick so many people off. Seriously, it’s not like it ripped you off and then asked the government for a bailout, right?
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Health/Nutrition
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In his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is perpetuating a convincing hoax: that implementing Texas-style tort reform would go a long way toward curing what ails the U.S. health care system.
Like his fellow GOP contenders, Perry consistently denounces “Obamacare” as “a budget-busting, government takeover of healthcare” and “the greatest intrusion on individual freedom in a generation.” He promises to repeal the law if elected.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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As much as $60 billion intended for financing U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been lost to waste and fraud over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and payoffs to warlords and insurgents, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates.
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Cablegate
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The UK’s Guardian newspaper’s Investigative Editor, David Leigh, author of the “Get this Wikileaks book out the door quickly before other Wikileaks books are published” Wikileaks book has messed up.
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It seems like just days ago that Luddie asked me to begin looking into the curious case of Jeanne Whalen’s WSJ story, which claimed that five human rights organizations had written a letter complaining to WikiLeaks that it was not taking proper care to protect civilian informants. As we soon discovered, the article was riddled with errors. To wit: not all the signatories were with human rights organizations, most of the signatories were not speaking for their organizations, and the letter was a call to meet with Assange, not an upbraiding. That the letter (which Whalen won’t release) quickly made it into her hands made whole thing smell of Newscorp astroturfing.
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Former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has written an op-ed on the recent release of more than 130,000 US State Embassy cables. Likening the cable publication to “pestilence,” Crowley provides his perspective on what he thinks will happen now that the cables have been published.
Crowley was forced to resign in March after he made some comments that called attention to how accused whistleblower to WikiLeaks, Pfc. Bradley Manning, was being treated at Quantico Brig. When WikiLeaks published the war logs in July, he knew he had to do an assessment and figure out what might be put at risk if US State Embassy cables were released. What he says on WikiLeaks carries a lot of credibility. In fact, he has spoken about his work during the WikiLeaks release and why he made the comments he made about Manning on multiple panels.
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A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.
Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.
For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.
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The release of diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks last year has given people more insight into how the US government works according to Suelette Dreyfus.
Dreyfus is the author of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, the 1997 that featured the exploits of Mendax — the hacker handle of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.
Dreyfus told this week’s Q&A show that people in the US now understand how their government worked behind “closed mahogany doors.” She said that WikiLeaks has also shown that governments don’t always act in the interests their own people. “In that sense, it’s a true whistle blower,” Dreyfus said.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Last night Koch Industries issued a statement on Kochfacts.com that effectively agrees with the main tenet of our new report: Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at Risk of a Poison Gas Disaster.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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U.S. Department of Transportation officials are disputing Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s statement at the Iowa State Fair today that federal administrators plan to require a farmer driving a tractor across a public road to obtain a commercial driver’s license.
“We are absolutely not requiring farmers” to obtain commercial licenses, such as those required of semi-trailer operators, said U.S. DOT spokeswoman Candice Tolliver in Washington, D.C.
She said U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood had put out a statement last week making the DOT’s position clear.
“We have no intention of instituting onerous regulations on the hardworking farmers who feed our country and fuel our economy,” LaHood’s statement said.
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Censorship
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Back in April we asked ORG supporters to write to their MEPs to help campaign against a Directive that would extend the term of copyright protection in sound recordings (for the reasons why, see our previous posts and the campaign site ‘Sound Copyright’). We had a fantastic response, with thousands of letters sent to MEPs across Europe.
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A key moment was the BT/NewzBin2 case. A clutch of Hollywood studios took BT to court in order to force them to restrict access to the website “NewzBin2″. The site in question provides only links to film downloads – it does not even host copyrighted content. The studios were extremely pleased to have the court find in their favour, seeing it as a crucial precedent. They were beginning to lose patience with how slowly the Government was implementing the Digital Economy Act, and saw this as a convenient shortcut. Culture and communications minister Ed Vaizey enthusiastically welcomed the judgment – ironically enough, online, by tweeting: ”Interesting judgment in Newzbin case, should make it easier for rights holders to prevent piracy”. He went on to continue defending the result, and his statement, from a barrage of replies.
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