• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Technicolor Uses Blackmagic Design`s DaVinci Resolve for Color Grading on “The Fighter”

Blackmagic Design today announced that colorist Tony Dustin of Hollywood-based Technicolor used the DaVinci Resolve Linux non-linear color correction system for color grading work done on Paramount Pictures/Relativity Media?s critically acclaimed feature film ?The Fighter,? directed by David O. Russell. The film stars actor/producer Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, and recent Golden Globe® winners Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, and is currently in theaters nationwide.

Server/Routing

• Cisco Updates Small Business Networking Gear

  Cisco is expanding its push to attract more small business professionals to its networking gear. This week Cisco announced a new set of 200-series switches and a new router platform that adds several big-business features tailored for the needs of small business.

Applications

• 6 Popular VOIP Software for Linux that You Might Not Know

  Since its arrival in the market, VoIP has undergone a lot of developments. Now it is being used in many large corporations as the only calling service. Here I would like to discuss the most popular VoIP apps for Linux.

• Home Accounting: Your Personal Accountant On Ubuntu

  If you are a GNU/Linux user, then it’s easier, too.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

  • Virtio install Windows 7 KVM (x64/x86) on Fedora 14

  • Five simple ways to tune your LAMP application

  • Ten ways to tackle a full Linux hard drive

    In theory, cheap storage should have signaled the end of disk-space issues. But huge files and poor house-keeping mean you still need to know how to deal with overstuffed hard drives in Linux, says Jack Wallen.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • kdeexamples moves to git!

    My KDE hero of the day is Nicolás ‘PovAddict’ Alvarez who dove into the KDE Examples module and turned it into a git module, complete with history even of the examples that existed prior to the creation of the KDE Examples module intact! When I queried Ian Monroe the other day about how much work it would be to migrate this module over, Nicolás simply jumped in and attacked the problem with the usual KDE gleam in the eye.

  • How a “Welded-to KDE3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE4.4 Part III “Konquering the Dolphin”

    In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.

  • KDE 4.6.0 Has Arrived

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat reports deal with Denmark’s Sparbank

    Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that a leading Danish retail bank Sparbank has migrated to JBoss Enterprise Middleware to ensure high availability of a number of native mission-critical applications, such as investment assessment applications and risk assessment tools.

  • Opensource.com Celebrates First Anniversary With Increased Participation Across Business, Education, Law, Government and Life Channels

  • Red Hat Summit And JBoss World 2011 Registration Open

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that registration is now open for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. This marks the seventh year that Red Hat has gathered customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts to learn, network and explore open source. The event will be held in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center, May 3-6, 2011.

  • Top Analyst Upgrades & Downgrades (BP, CIEN, IGT, JASO, MRO, MBI, RHT, CRM, STX, STM, STRA, TLAB, TSO, VZ, WDC)

  • Wednesday’s Upgraded Stocks (ERIC, INTC, CRM, RHT)

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) was upgraded to Buy from Hold at Stifel Nicolaus and set a price target of $49.

  • TBJ poll: Red Hat should move HQ to downtown Raleigh

    Nearly half of the voters in Triangle Business Journal’s latest online poll believe that Linux leader Red Hat should choose downtown Raleigh as the site of the company’s new corporate headquarters.

  • Sellers Abandoning Shares Of Red Hat On 1.2x Above-Average Volume (RHT)

  • Red Hat Pops On Upgrade

    Red Hat (RHT) shares are getting a big boost this morning from Stifel Nicolaus analyst Tim Klasell, who raised his rating on the open source software company’s shares to Buy from Hold, while setting a $49 price target.

  • Red Hat Mogul Sued for $30 Million

    Matthew Szulik, the former CEO of Red Hat software, who in December sued his family’s financial adviser for $55 million, is now the defendant in a lawsuit by an aggrieved Los Angeles businessman. Jason Galanis claims Szulik’s alleged losses were just a tax dodge, and that Szulik cost him $30 million in an effort to keep that scheme from unraveling.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project at several conferences and trade fairs

    The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer oriented conferences to user oriented trade fairs. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Natty Narwhal Ditches OpenOffice for LibreOffice

      Future versions of Ubuntu will ship with LibreOffice, the fork of OpenOffice created by developers disillusioned with Oracle’s lukewarm — at best — relationship with the open source community. “Oracle is probably the prototypical vendor of commercial software, and its vision of open doesn’t include a lot of open source,” said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT analyst at Illuminata.

    • Ubuntu Unity Plays a Frustrating Shell Game

      Ubuntu Natty Narwhal will usher in a major change to the distro’s desktop appearance. The new Unity shell design will present a new appearance, a version of which I’ve been using on netbooks and laptops. I realize that my displeasure with Unity is based on my personal preferences for how I compute. But I subscribe to the theory that if something isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. I think the Unity design goes too far.

    • Deja Vu: IBM Pushes Virtual Desktops With Virtual Bridges (Again)

      IBM today launched a Virtual Desktop for Smart Business push — which allows Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally. The VAR Guy is intrigued. But the Big Blue effort sounds suspiciously like a previous initiative called the IBM Client for Smart Work package, launched in 2009 with Virtual Bridges and Canonical (the Ubuntu Linux advocate). So how does IBM’s latest virtual desktop push differ from earlier efforts? Here’s the update.

    • The Other Side of the Road: Ubuntu Linux

      I’ve been a Mac user since 2006, and for good reason – nothing compares to the build quality and attention to detail Apple puts into its products. Still, I’m beginning to get this half-sinking/half-exhilarating feeling that the next big thing is Ubuntu (pronounced oo-boon-too) Linux. And why not? After all, “Bunt” is free, yet it offers much more functionality than a stock install of Windows – and with none of the malware troubles. It’s not quite Mac OS X, but it’s slowly getting there.

      [...]

      Ubuntu is great. Rakarrack is great. That old PC, with a few tweaks and a few upcoming upgrades, will be really great.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River teams with BMW and Magneti Marelli on infotainment system

  Wind River and automotive component manufacturer Magneti Marelli announced they’re collaborating on the first in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) solution based on the open source Genivi Alliance spec. Based on Linux (and MeeGo, most likely), the system will first be brought to market by BMW, says Wind River.

• Fanless 3-watt PC with Dual Core ARM CPU, HDMI and Linux

  Now, Intel’s Atom also has competition from ARM in the desktop PC arena. Israel’s CompuLab has presented the Trim-Slice, a tiny, fanless PC using NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 platform. The System-on-Chip (SoC) has two ARM Cortex-A9 CPU cores with clock rates up to 1 GHz, offering roughly the same computing power as an Intel Atom. But the multimedia equipment is even better. Two HDMI ports are provided, and Tegra 2 also includes an HD video accelerator.

• Tablets

  • 2011: The Year of the Linux Tablet

    For what seems like forever, we’ve been hearing the Linux fanboys of the world proclaiming that the coming year will be the “Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s has become somewhat of a joke amongst Linux naysayers and even with the Linux faithful. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the year of the Linux Desktop or not, but it looks like 2011 is going to be the year of the Linux Tablet. The future success of Linux as a tablet and phone platform might not look as open and utopian as many supporters of free software would like, but it seems that it’s inevitable none the less.

    [...]

    Will it really be “The Year of the Linux Tablet”

    Linux based OSes have the clear advantage when it comes to competing for market share against the iPad. If Microsoft had its act together and if Apple was the type of company to license operating systems, I might not have much hope for Linux’s success. But looking at the current market demand for tablets and the lack of a solid OS from Microsoft, I think this will truly be the year of the Linux Tablet.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Keep My Opt Outs Joins Fight Against Online Tracking

    Google has released a new Chrome extension to address privacy concerns tied to online behavioral tracking.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 stumbling along

    The Firefox 4 browser is edging closer to final release but still faces hurdles

    Once the darling of the Internet digerati, the Firefox browser is still battling problems to issue a new release. Version 4 of the browser has suffered multiple setbacks and although it now looks likely to be released in February, the delays have caused Firefox to lose some of its shine.

  • “Do not track” – Mozilla advocates new data protection standard

    Online advertising networks use cookies to recognise internet users and serve them tailored advertising. Users can defend against this practice by deleting cookies, not accepting cookies, or setting an opt-out cookie, which declares that they do not want their online activity to be tracked.

Project Releases

• VideoLAN updates open source VLC 1.1.6 video for security, VP8

  VLC is among the most popular open source video players. According to the VideoLAN project, the 1.1.5 release has had 58 million downloads.

  Now it’s time for those 58 million downloaders to update to VLC 1.1.6, for some security, bug and stability fixes.

Openness/Sharing

• Filmaster unveils movie recommendation API

  It’s ready and it’s hot. First totally open and free (as in beer and as in freedom) film recommendations API is here for you as a gift from Filmaster. The API enables external programmers to create independent services or apps using our data and algorithms, it allows to easily integrate any website with Filmaster by presenting our content like reviews and film recommendations. Sounds interesting? Read on!

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 drops the 5 to become an evolving standard

  Oh, the ever evolving nature of the web. Just a few days after the W3C unveiled its shiny new branding for HTML5, WHATWG has announced that it will stop using numbered versions to better represent the evolving nature of the standard.

  According to WHATWG’s Ian Hickson, HTML5 was supposed to be finalised in 2012, but the rapidly changing nature of technology and the demands of the people who actually use it mean that new features would have to be added on a near continuous basis. For that reason, it makes a lot more sense to have the standard as a “living document” that can more easily be added to and updated.

• Google documents VP8 at standards group IETF

  The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google’s effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force–but not so Google can standardize it.

More Tales of Terrible IT Managers

Lee Harvey Oswald’s Brother Sues Funeral Home and Auction House for Selling the Assassin’s Casket

Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother has sued a funeral home and an auction house, claiming they sold the assassin’s original coffin, embalming table and records, and their mother’s funeral records, for more than $160,000, invading his privacy and breaching contract. Robert Edward Lee Oswald sued the Baumgardner Funeral Home, Allen Baumgardner Sr. and Nate D. Sanders Inc. – the Los Angeles auction house – in Tarrant County Court, Fort Worth.

Health/Nutrition

• Playing for health

  Binge eating, chronic pain, and addiction. Three very different medical conditions, all hard to treat. Could the virtual exploration of an island be part of the solution for these three patients?

  Some European scientists are convinced it is. So this is the story of how research has managed to develop a serious videogame, for a serious purpose.

• The Overuse of Antibiotics

  Reading a recent issue of Public Citizen’s excellent Health Letter titled “Know When Antibiotics Work,” I recalled the recent tragic loss of a healthy history professor who was rushed to a fine urban hospital, with a leading infectious disease specialist by his side. No antibiotics could treat his mysterious “superbug.” He died in 36 hours.

  Wrongful or overuse of antibiotics has a perverse effect—causing the kinds of bacteria that these drugs can no longer destroy. The World Health Organization has cited antibiotic resistance as one of the three most serious public health threats of the 21st century.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that just in hospitals, where between 5 and 10 percent of all patients develop an infection, about 90,000 of these patients die each year as a result of their infection. This toll is up from 13,300 patient deaths in 1992. Some percentage of these people have problems because of antibiotic resistance.

Security

• Facebook defends security strategy

• Top WordPress themes on Google riddled with spamlinks and obfuscated code

• Tunisia plants country-wide keystroke logger on Facebook

  Malicious code injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! stole login credentials of users critical of the North African nation’s authoritarian government, according to security experts and news reports.

  The rogue JavaScript, which was individually customized to steal passwords for each site, worked when users tried to login without availing themselves of the secure sockets layer protection designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. It was found injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! in late December, around the same time that protestors began demanding the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the president who ruled the country from 1987 until his ouster 10 days ago.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• I Have Been Summoned to Appear Before a Grand Jury

  I have been summoned to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago on January 25. But I will not testify, even at the risk of being put in jail for contempt of court, because I believe that our most fundamental rights as citizens are at stake.

  I am one of 23 anti-war, labor and solidarity activists in Chicago and throughout the Midwest who are facing a grand jury as part of an investigation into “material support for foreign terrorist organizations.” No crime has been identified. No arrests have been made. And when it raided several prominent organizers’ homes and offices on Sept. 24, the FBI acknowledged that there is no immediate threat to the American public. So what is this investigation really about?

  The activists who have been ensnared in this fishing net with different groups to end the US wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to end US military aid for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and US military aid to Colombia, which has a shocking record of repression and human rights abuses. All of us have publicly and peacefully dedicated our lives to social justice and advocating for more just and less deadly US foreign policy.

• Report Condemns Widespread Tolerance for Torturers

  The international community – from Western authorities to Southern powers – lacks courage and hides behind “soft diplomacy” in confronting human rights abusers, a leading rights group accuses in a 649-page world report released Monday.

• Two Toronto Police Officers Guilty Of Assaulting A Disabled Man

  Two Toronto police officers were found guilty Tuesday of assaulting a mentally challenged man they thought was drunk.

  Richard Moore, 58, was headed home to his Gerrard St. East rooming house when he passed by two officers dealing with another situation on April 24, 2009.

• Palestine papers: MI6 plan proposed internment – and hotline to Israelis

  Evidence in leaked documents highlights role British officials played in creating and bolstering PA administration

• Palestinian Papers: What The Al Jazeera Blockbuster Means

  Al Jazeera`s stunning revelations about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have different meanings for Israelis, Americans and for Palestinians.

  The bottom line is that, despite the assurances it gave to the Palestinian people that it was driving a hard bargain with the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority accepted Israel`s position on every key point: borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees.

  On no major issue did the PA hold the line. None.

  The Palestinians offered Israel everything Israel wants and Israel still said `no` with the backing of the United States.

  So what does it mean?

• Cairo protesters in violent clashes with police

  Egyptian police used teargas and rubber bullets and beat protesters in a bid to clear thousands of demonstrators from a central Cairo square late last night after people had taken to the streets earlier today demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in mass demonstrations inspired by the toppling of the government in Tunisia.

• Flier beats TSA video recording charge in court

  Phil Mocek knows he isn’t required to show ID to fly, and that it’s perfectly legal to record video in publicly accessible areas of an airport. A jury agreed with him earlier this week, acquitting him of trumped-up charges brought against him by TSA and police officers who demanded obedience. He didn’t need to call any witnesses or testify himself; he was acquitted based on the evidence entered against him.

• Passenger cleared after TSA checkpoint stare-down

• Another Illinois Resident Charged for Recording Police

  The New York Times reports on the Illinois eavesdropping law, which allows for a felony charge and up to 15 years of prison for people who record police officers on the job. In addition to artist Christopher Drew—whom I’ve written about before and who goes to trial in April—the article finds another person currently being charged under the law. Tiawanda Moore, 20, goes to trial next month. She too could face 15 years in prison, in her case for using her Blackberry to record her conversation with internal affairs officers at Chicago PD about an alleged sexual assault by a police officer. Moore recorded her interview after feeling her initial attempt to report the incident wasn’t taken seriously.

• Artist Could Face 15 Years In Prison For Recording His Own Arrest

  Chris Drew was finally ready to get arrested. An artist and activist, Drew had spent years protesting a Chicago ordinance that puts tight restrictions on where and how people can sell their art on the street. He was downtown, on State Street, selling silk-screened patches for $1 and defying the city to stop him.

  He’d tried his act of civil disobedience three times before — a First Amendment lawyer on hand to argue his case, a team of videographers ready to film the arrest — but the police simply let it slide. When, on December 2, 2009, he finally succeeded in getting booked, Drew was ready for a few hours in lock-up on a misdemeanor, and a lengthy court battle. He was in no way prepared for what he would actually face.

Cablegate

• “The New York Times” May Start Its Own Version of WikiLeaks

  The New York Times is considering developing a system that will let anonymous leakers easily submit large and confidential files directly to the newspaper. Sound familiar?

  While nothing is concrete yet, NYT executive editor Bill Keller says that it could be similar to Al Jazeera‘s Transparency Unit, a system launched earlier this year that encrypts file submissions from anonymous leakers.

• No proof WikiLeaks breaking law, inquiry finds

  A company asked by Visa to investigate WikiLeaks’ finances found no proof the group’s fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

  But Visa Europe Ltd. said Wednesday it would continue blocking donations to the secret-spilling site until it completes its own investigation. Company spokeswoman Amanda Kamin said she couldn’t say when Visa’s inquiry, now stretching into its eighth week, would be finished.

• Despite WikiLeaks drama, State Dept promotes documentary celebrating Pentagon Papers leaker

  Even as prosecutors build a case against the U.S. Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

  Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its “American Documentary Showcase” program.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate sceptic ‘misled Congress over funding from oil industry’

  A leading climate sceptic patronised by the oil billionaire Koch brothers faced a potential investigation today on charges that he misled Congress on the extent of his funding from the oil industry.

  Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a thinktank founded by Charles and David Koch to promote their libertarian, anti-government views, appeared before the house energy and commerce committee in February 2009.

Censorship

• Kroes gives Hungary an ultimatum on media law

  The EU commissioner in charge of media issues, Neelie Kroes, has raised “serious doubts” about Hungary’s new media law in a letter to Budapest and given the country a two-week ultimatum to the government to explain itself. Hungarian leader Viktor Orban however said the law was intended to combat racism.

• Some pols say Twitter ban for the birds

  The social media phenom Twitter may be sweeping America, but it’s banned in the Massachusetts Legislature, which has blocked lawmakers and staffers from tweeting from their office computers.

  The Twitter ban is frustrating some Web-savvy legislators, who say they use the popular Web site to communicate with constituents.

Privacy

• Facebook tightens privacy after friendly warning from Germany

  Facebook will tighten up privacy in its “Friend Finder” feature, following demands from German data protection watchdogs.

• Ex-Employees Awarded $4,000 for Email Snooping by Employer — Pure Power Boot Camp v. Warrior Fitness Boot Camp

  Email snooping and computer fraud statutes (Stored Communications Act; Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) are starting to play a starring role in litigation between departing employees and their former bosses. Plaintiffs asserting claims under these statutes often press tenuous claims, with evidence for damages that are weak at best. There are often unclean hands all around, and the disputes end up just being messy.

Civil Rights

• Why Is Civil Discourse So Important – Yet So Difficult

  In his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting, President Obama urged us to be more civil in our dealings with each other:

  “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy – it did not – but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

• US wants Internet, cell records held longer

  The US Justice Department wants Internet service providers and cell phone companies to be required to hold on to records for longer to help with criminal prosecutions.

  “Data retention is fundamental to the department’s work in investigating and prosecuting almost every type of crime,” US deputy assistant attorney general Jason Weinstein told a congressional subcommittee on Tuesday.

• Civil liberty campaigners fear ‘control orders lite’ regime

  Leading civil liberty campaigners tonight voiced fears that the reform of counter-terror laws to be detailed tomorrowwill amount to little more than “control orders lite”.

• The Voter ID Tap Dance

  The incidence of actual voter fraud at the polls in America is indistinguishable from zero.

• Germany urges drug companies to boycott US executions

  Berlin has asked pharmaceutical companies not to supply the United States with a drug used in executions for prisoners on death row, after the sole US manufacturer announced it would pull out of the market.

• AT&T says it’s a person under the law and should enjoy the right to personal privacy. What’s wrong with this picture?

  AT&T wants us to believe that corporations are people, just like you and me, and that just like us, they have a constitutional right to privacy. Their case, argued before the Supreme Court last week, hinges in part on the relationship between an adjective and the noun it derives from. To prove their point, AT&T wants us to look both at the law and at the dictionary.

• Domestic use of aerial drones by law enforcement likely to prompt privacy debate

  The suspect’s house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles.

  As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department’s aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Canada: Where Innovation Comes To Die

  Aside from how outraged I am about that news, I’m going to say something rather bold: Rogers, Bell, and Telus are killing innovation in Canada.

  Every single year, we are gouged to the bone by these three gigantic corporations by receiving less service for more money. They treat us poorly, and they know they can get away with it because we have no choice. They don’t need to improve a damn thing because we are stuck.

• Canada regulator OKs metered Internet billing

  Smaller Canadian Internet service providers, who operate via networks owned by bigger telecom firms such as BCE Inc, will soon have to pass along the bulk of their host’s charges for extra bandwidth use, the federal telecom regulator said on Tuesday.

  The move limits the independent ISPs’ ability to offer unlimited data plans, just months after Netflix opened for business in Canada, and gives greater pricing power to large carriers such as BCE’s Bell unit and Telus.

• Obama may get power to shut down Internet without court oversight

  A bill giving the president an Internet “kill switch” during times of emergency that failed to pass Congress last year will return this year, but with a revision that has many civil liberties advocates concerned: It will give the president the ability to shut down parts of the Internet without any court oversight.

  The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act was introduced last year by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in an effort to combat cyber-crime and the threat of online warfare and terrorism.

• Internet ‘kill switch’ bill will return

  A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.

DRM

• Just What No One Needs Or Wants: Web Images With DRM And An Expiration Date

  The BBC is reporting on a new project to create web images that “expire” after a certain period of time. The thinking is that people who put photos up on social networking profiles may be embarrassed by them later, so, this way, the photo can only stay up for a set period of time and then no longer be viewable.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Twisted Pixel CEO: We won’t pursue legal action over Capcom’s MaXplosion

  Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford says his comparatively tiny team won’t be suing mega-publisher Capcom for its blatant attempt to rip off the studio’s Splosion Man with iOS clone MaXplosion (pictured). “We’re definitely not going to pursue legal action,” Wilford told Joystiq. “While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom. That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide.”

• How I Beat a Competitor Who Stole My Ideas

  Once I realized we were wasting valuable time, resources and money in court, I decided to focus all of that energy on outdoing our competitor instead. We vowed to differentiate ourselves by focusing closely on our clients’ needs. Innovation became very important. When we started out we only offered a single software option. Now we have six tailor-made modules to meet the varying needs of companies of different sizes and industries. We might not have worked so hard to build out new tools if we hadn’t had a competitor biting at our heels.

• Trademarks

  • UFC owners file suit against Justin.tv for copyright and trademark infringement

• Copyrights

  • IFPI’s Annual Attack On Piracy Once Again Riddled With Errors And Bogus Claims

    IFPI boss Frances Moore apparently claimed that this is “a crisis affecting not just an industry – but artists, musicians, jobs, consumers, and the wider creative sector.” Except that’s not true. There are more people making music today than ever before. It’s cheaper than ever before to make, distribute and promote music. If you’re a musician, there are more ways than ever before to build a fanbase and to build a business model to make a living. It’s a great time to be a musician. It’s also a fantastic time to be a consumer. It’s hard to see how Moore can make such a claim that is obviously false, and no one calls her on the obviously false nature of her claims. When Moore took over last year for John Kennedy, I had hoped that maybe she’d bring some sense to the IFPI. Instead, she seems to be spreading the same propaganda as her predecessor.

  • USCG Refiles Several P2P Lawsuits – in Minnesota

    US Copyright Group makes good on its promise to target settlement holdouts in courts with proper jurisdiction, targeting two BitTorrent users, one for “Call of the Wild” and one for an unnamed movie.

    For almost a year now the US Copyright Group has been trying to hold tens of thousands of BitTorrent users responsible for illegally distributing either of the less than stellar independent movies “Steam Experiment,” “Far Cry,” “Uncross the Stars,” “Gray Man,” or “Call of the Wild 3D.”

  • Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General

    Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry’s legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster’s demise, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a lower court’s pro-RIAA verdict.

  • Piracy Doubled My App Sales

    What were the stat changes?

    - Period 2 had 38.6X more Pirates than Period 1

    - Period 2 had 2.3X more Sales than Period 1

    - (For every 15 or so Pirates, I received an extra Sale)

  • MPAA urges action against campus piracy

    The Motion Picture Association of America published an open letter in December discussing the contents of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which require universities’ participation in preventing illegal downloading.

    The act requires schools to implement a plan to stop the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network, MPAA chief content protection officer Daniel Mandil said in the letter.

  • This unwanted interruption is brought to you by the RIAA.

    By RADIOGIRL [from Comments to Stephen Hough's blog post on Liszt, Daily Telegraph] – Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now in place guidelines with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), that any qualified public broadcasting station that wishes to broadcast sound recordings over the Internet must not only register for agreement for those rights but must comply with the new rules. (BTW, this does not apply to commercial webcasters such as WQXR nor does it apply to recordings of live performances made for broadcast purposes.)

    [...]

    The influences that shape new musical trends are diffuse, complex, and impossible to codify, but if one person can be credited as being the fountainhead of modern music it is Franz Liszt … in three, totally different stylistic directions. Whether we like his own compositions or not, we cannot avoid contact with Liszt if we have contact with music from the late-19th or 20th centuries. Firstly, the heady combination of bel canto with chromaticism, a Lisztian fingerprint formed early in his life, was a major influence on Wagner and on to the latter’s progeny. It has been claimed that Liszt invented the ‘Tristan chord’. Even if such a ‘patent’ is open to discussion, the febrile harmonic instability of Tristan und Isolde is heard in Liszt before it is heard in his son-in-law. On rare occasions of collegial generosity Wagner even admitted this debt.

  • German Mass Copyright Letter Sender Using Debt Collectors To Pressure People To Pay Up

    We’ve seen the various mass copyright infringement factories popping up all over the world, often using similar strategies: suing or threatening to sue thousands of individuals based solely on an IP address. The whole “business model” is based not on traditional copyright infringement statutory awards, but on convincing people to pay up beforehand to avoid being sued. The model feels quite similar to what’s normally considered extortion (“pay up or we harm you”). Someone recently sent us a copy of what’s alleged to be a contract being used by a German law firm, Schutt, Waetke Rechtsanwalte, which has been involved in such mass threats for many years. You can find references online going back to at least 2005 of this law firm sending out such pre-settlement letters to thousands of Germans. I contacted the firm to see if they would confirm or deny the legitimacy of the contract, and they would not respond. So, perhaps take the details with a grain of salt, even though the firm has been connected to these sorts of pre-settlement jobs for a while.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux is a win-win for education

But there are other advantages of using Linux in educational environments, that we may not realize.

Samba 4 ‘will break desktop monopoly’

Free software dynamos Andrew Tridgell and Andrew Bartlett are both hopeful that their next baby, Samba 4, will be due for delivery sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Desktop

• System 76 brings Sandy Bridge to Ubuntu with Gazelle and Serval laptops

  System 76 has been doing open source right for quite some time now, and it’s just unleashed what it claims is the “most powerfull Ubuntu laptop in the world” — so powerful it needs that extra L. It’s the Serval Professional, offering your choice of Intel Core i7 processors ranging from the 2GHz 2630QM to the 2.5GHz 2920XM.

• System76′s ‘Serval Professional Serves Up a Powerful Ubuntu Laptop

  The 15.6-inch widescreen supports a 1920 x 1080 resolution for True HD viewing. The keyboard is in the chiclet-style, each key its own isolated square. The full-size keyboard also sports a crunched numeric keypad. The palm rest has a soft rubberized texture, I imagine it’s much like that of Alienware’s M11x. The System76 Serval Professional weighs 6.83 pounds, so you most likely won’t be toting this around town. No word on predicted battery life, but based on the high-end components it probably won’t last a coastal flight.

Server

• Appropriation – and the kingdom did not fall

  The sequencing of the human genome was an early triumph for Linux and free software, and symbolised an important aspect of the free software movement that goes beyond the immediate objective of free software. As Richard Stallman puts it: “I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”

• Open Source and Open Research Computation

  Free software was inspired in part by the scientific method, but it is only now that science is starting to apply free software’s key insights. For example, opening up the source code would imply that scientific papers should be made freely available for anyone to read and use. And yet it is only in the last few years that this open access approach, as it is called, has made significant headway against the prevailing proprietary system, which says that you have to pay – often handsomely – if you want to read a paper.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Puts Out A Beta Catalyst Linux Driver For The Public

    While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that’s targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.

Applications

• VirtualBox 4: First Impressions

  It might seem strange to post a “first impressions” article an entire month after developers release a new version but the original wasn’t stable and first impressions weren’t positive. To give VirtualBox and its developers a fair shake, the release of 4.02 is a good starting point. There are still some bugs* in the software but overall first impression are positive. While you shouldn’t use it for production just yet, the 4.x line has potential.

• Apache-Switch – GUI application to Start,Stop and restart Apache server

  Apache switch is GUI application to Start,Stop and restart Apache server

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Clone (Copy) A VirtualBox .vdi [Quick Tip]

  • BleachBit 0.8.7 released and installation instructions included

  • Compile Blender 2.56 on Fedora 13 and 14

  • Reclaim Deleted Files and Repair Filesystems on Linux

  • How To Recover Deleted Files in Linux Using PhotoRec

  • Add serious web content control with WebContentControl in Linux

  • How to compile a kernel from kernel.org in Fedora 14

  • Syncing time in Linux and Windows with NTP

  • 6 rsync Examples to Exclude Multiple Files and Directories using exclude-from

  • Hidden Linux: Wallpaper Clocks

  • When was a linux OS installed?

  • Recreate the Hallway Scene from Inception – Part 1 of 2

  • Secure Upload Methods in PHP

  • Install iP1880 in Mandriva 2010.2

  • Tips and tricks to help you do more with OpenSSH

  • Gimp Resynthesizer Explained – Texture Transfer and Input and Output

  • How to fix security loophole in Gentoo

  • Preparing installation media at the FreeBSD command line

  • How to check your CentOS version?

  • 8 gdb tricks you should know

  • The Little Conveniences

• Games

  • 5 Best Video Game Console Emulators for Linux

    In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Oh my God-it’s full of stars!: Free and Open Source procedural space sim round up (a la Infinity or Elite)

    Bowman’s memorable utterance in 2001 A Space Odyssey encapsulates perfectly the way the space and its’ exploration resonates with the imagination and nothing encapsulates the experience of stepping out and living amongst the stars as well as David Braben’s immense procedural opus, the Frontier Elite/Elite series of games.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Pardus 2011 review

    Final Thoughts and Suggestions: Our digital world revolves around apps, applications, software, packages, or whatever you want to call it. And the more that are available, the merrier. Unfortunately, Pardus comes up short in this area. I understand that it is still a relatively young distribution, however, a lot more effort needs to go in to ensuring that the most common applications are available in the repository as soon as a new version is released.

  • Review: Linux Mint 10 Julia Gnome – With Screenshots

    Linux Mint 10 Julia has been around for a while now, but I have not gotten around to reviewing it.

    Now after using it for a while and getting to know it I decided to write up and post a review of this, arguably the best Linux Distro available.

    For this review I am using the DVD edition of Linux Mint 10 Julia.

    [...]

    Linux Mint 10 is worth a try. If you are looking for a Linux Install for your house, if you are looking for something to put on your wife’s laptop, something to give to your dad, something for yourself to use as a work OS – Linux Mint 10 can fill all those needs with aplomb.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • mageia warming up – rebuilding perl packages

    one of the things that keep me busy those days is the rebuilding of perl packages for mageia. around 2000 have been done, with ~400 still waiting. it’s been a good opportunity to clean up the mess: remove old packages, clean spec files, etc.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • FUDCon Tempe 2011

      FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, etc.

    • Fedora 14 for IBM System z 64bit official release

      It’s been a long time since we last had an official release of IBM System z on Fedora…

    • The Moods Project

      Moods is my latest free graphic project and in a long while the first not linked to openclipart.or of Fedora Design (from the first i am on extended leave and from the second on temporary strike).

    • Security

      • Security incident on Fedora infrastructure on 23 Jan 2011

      • Security incident on Fedora infrastructure on 23 Jan 2011 — Don’t Panic

      • Fedora infrastructure hacked – no damage done

• Debian Family

  • Debian Derivatives Census

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Multi-touch Ubuntu using a webcam and your hands [Video]

      Scoffing at the headline? Sure, it doesn’t sound entirely believable but, in a stroke of awesome-osity, it is.

      Developers at the Interactive Computing Lab of ENAC have created just that: the ability to use multi-touch applications in Ubuntu with nothing more than a webcam and a flat surface(- no costly Apple trackpad needed!

    • Taking and storing notes with Ubuntu One

      As someone who writes for a living, I take a lot of notes. No, make that a lot of notes. I either use a Moleskine notebook or an online service called Simplenote. If you’re curious, you can read about how I use Simplenote here.

      As you can probably tell, I like to keep my note taking minimal. I don’t need to remember everything, just what I need to remember. While I like Simplenote, I’m also very curious. Which often leads me to explore other options.

    • Intelligent Design instead of Evolution

      A few years ago I decided to try Ubuntu’s default email client Evolution, as that seemed convenient. It was just there and I had no clear preference, after leaving mutt behind because my approach with it didn’t scale to the amount of email I burdened myself with.

      Evolution worked reasonably well, but at some point started to fail at emptying the trash. A few mails would remain in there until a restart. Seeing emails that I moved between folders in the trash kept making feel uneasy, even after I understood that it are just copies. Deleting or renaming folders sometimes works and sometimes results in utter chaos that can only be fixed by restoring a backup.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Developing the MeeGo community

      It might be helpful for the reader to browse through threads under Community Matters at the MeeGo discussion forum, as I will be referring to points raised there. However, that won’t be necessary for a high-level perspective. Regardless, a community is actually taking shape so I think it’s time to discuss a few subjects.

    • Winning MeeGo Content

    • Nokia MeeGo Device Based on ST Ericsson U8500 Platform

      Yesterday, we showed you a new MeeGo device from Nokia. Well now it seems that the MeeGo device is based on the U8500 Platform from ST Ericsson.

    • Software we’d like to see: contacts and Tracker

  • Android

    • Excitement Builds For Android App Development, Google TV Wanes

      If you had to guess what four types of devices developers are clamoring to code for… what would you guess? I don’t think it’s a surprise that the top 4 are the Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Android Phones and Android Tablets. While Apple products still lead in mindshare with developers, Android is a close second and gaining ground while you’d need a telescope to see all the others.

Next Stop: OpenSim!

The CEO of virtual world hosting service ReactionGrid, Gomboy and his team currently operate more than 100 private regions for educators in the ascendant virtual environment platform OpenSimulator, and, Gomboy says, are renting out space to three to five new schools each week.

Why all the new settlers converging on OpenSim?

They’re part of a wave of K-12 educators packing up their 3D content and moving away from Second Life, long the dominant virtual world. The mass migration was prompted by parent company Linden Lab’s announcement in August that it would be closing the Teen Grid, an area within Second Life reserved for 13- to 17-year-olds and home to hundreds of learning projects belonging to teachers intent on engaging their students through the 3D environment. A second blow came in the fall–the ending of the half-off educator discount, meaning property rates in Second Life would be doubling for K-12 institutions, from $150 a month per region to $300 a month.

Reflections on one year of opensource.com

Dozens of you contributed articles–from students leading open source in their schools to luminaries like Gary Hamel, Tim O’Reilly, and Simon Phipps. These articles were read a combined 1.3 million times by over 500,000 different people.

Lower the barriers to entry

Getting new users actively involved in your open source project is one of the most important aspects of community development. A healthy open source project welcomes new contributors of all kinds and makes it easy for them to contribute. Prospective contributors feel welcome and are guided towards their first contribution, whatever their skills are. My OSS Watch colleague Steve Lee pointed out the website of LibreOffice; they managed to do this very well.

Preparing for the Future of Open Source

The presentation of North Bridge Ventures’ Future of Open Source survey has long been one of the highlights of the Open Source Business Conference, keeping attendees up to date with the views of open source users and vendors alike, and providing details about the trends that will shape open source in the future.

Human Love, Probe – Two New Short Films Using Blender for VFX[Video Trailer]

Here comes even more movies and short films made using Blender for visual effects. For starters, Blender is a free and open source 3D content creation application. If you have seen the brilliant collection of Blender made videos we have featured here before, you probably don’t need any more lecturing on the abilities of this incredible open source tool called Blender.

Events

• Second batch of FOSDEM 2011 speaker interviews

  Here is the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers.

  * Martijn Dashorst (Wicket)
  * David Fetter (PL/Parrot)
  * Andrew Godwin (Django)
  * Soren Hansen (OpenStack)
  * Lennart Poettering (systemd)
  * Spike Morelli (devops)
  * Kenneth Rohde Christiansen (Qt WebKit)

• Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two

  The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the ‘fathers of the internet’, having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

• Linux.conf.au 2011 kicks off: photos

  This year’s Linux.conf.au kicked off with a bang yesterday, with hundreds of delegates from all over the world converging on Queensland University of Technology, despite the flood crisis which threatened to can the annual conference.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • What’s up with SUMO – Jan. 24

  • ECMAScript 5 strict mode in Firefox 4

    Developers in the Mozilla community have made major improvements to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 4. We have devoted much effort to improving performance, but we’ve also worked on new features. We have particularly focused on ECMAScript 5, the latest update to the standard underlying JavaScript.

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 Beta 10

    According to Mozilla’s latest platform meeting minutes, the final beta (11) is scheduled for a final build this Friday afternoon.

Databases

• 15 open source projects you should know about as a web developer

  Traditionally you might have been using MySQL. Although MySQL still is a great database many new alternatives has shown up trying to solve some of the issues MySQL has.

Oracle

• Oracle Nominates Bruno Souza of SouJava to JCP EC

  Oracle is nominating SouJava, the Brazilian Java User Group, to a seat in the JCP Executive Committee. SouJava is one of the oldest and largest Java User Groups in the world with 40,000 members and based in a region where Java and open-source software is prominent. The organization will be represented by its former president Bruno Souza, a well-known independent Java and open source advocate, and earlier member of the OSI.

• Oracle, LibreOffice: ideally a co-opetition, not competition

  Choice is great. It’s one of the key selling points of open source — a guarantee that no one company can monopolize a software category, at least illegally.

  It’s what enabled the first official release today of LibreOffice 3.3, a version of OpenOffice sponsored by the recently formed Document Foundation. The foundation was formed in September by many leaders of the OpenOffice project, who were not too happy with the way megacorporation Oracle was running the show.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Annual Free Software Foundation Fundraiser

  The Free Software Foundation is in the last week of its annual fundraiser and has still has a bit of ground to make up. The FSF needs members and donations to merely sustain its basic activity protecting free software and engaging in minimal outreach. So as I’ve done in the last couple years, I’ve written a fundraising appeal for the organization. That why today my face is plastered, Jimmy Wales style, all over the FSF website. (For the record, the last bit was not my idea and I find it a little embarrassing.)

Government

• Basque Government will make other institutions benefit from its successful Open Source experience

  Ms. Mendia said that in the field of free software, her Government “seeks to contribute and share results” with their environment, “starting with the rest of the Basque administrations, in particular for developments that may be in the public interest.”

• FI: Municipalities increasingly interested in open source software

  According to a survey of the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities (AFLRA), more than 80 % of the Finnish municipalities use open source software. Four years ago [2006], only 57 % of them invested in open source software.

  With open source software, the Finnish municipalities seek to achieve costs savings on licence fees. For example, in Helsinki alone desktop computers and office software licence fees are nearly €5 million a year; licence fees come on top of this for various computer systems and servers. Hence, in November 2010, the Municipal Council of Helsinki decided that the city will try open source software on the client side (desktops).

• FR: City of Rennes opens up its data to the public

  A French communication agency in partnership with Rennes Metropolitan District (Rennes Métropole), the City of Rennes and public transports operator Keolis Rennes released under GNU Project’s General Public License version 3 (GNU/GPL v3) an OpenData platform. The platform has served as a base through which Rennes Metropolitan District/City and Keolis Rennes made their data public, at www.data.rennes-metropole.fr and http://data.keolis-rennes.com respectively.

• IT/EU: Emilia Romagna Region shares findings on open source usage in public administrations

  The administrative region of Emilia Romagna (Northern Italy), has recently participated in the first international conference ‘OSEPA’ (Open Source usage by Public Administration), an EU-supported project.

  The OSEPA project establishes a regional network at European level for the promotion and further spread of open source software within public administrations. The project is intended to conduct a systematic debate among European public administrations, supported by analysis and exchange of experience, on the issue of free and/or open source software (FOSS). Consequently, the exploration of the main benefits /disadvantages and cost effectiveness of FOSS adoption and use by public authorities will be critical for the project.

• EU to Get Feedback on Its Public Procurement Policy

  The European Commission will launch a consultation Thursday to get feedback on modernizing the European Union’s public procurement policy

Licensing

• Brazil’s New Trademark License

  I’m in Brazil for a few days, having given lectures several times at the start of the week, most notably for the extraordinary Campus Party event. There have been several news items here of interest to open source followers:

  * a decree by the new President of Brazil that open source software is preferred by the government,
  * controversy surrounding the expectation that the new Minister of Culture and music industry insider Ana de Hollanda will put a stop to the hard-won copyright law reform that’s in progress, and
  * news that the government will be requiring submissions to its public software portal to grant broad trademark licenses in addition to open source licenses for the copyrights.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Bessemer Venture Partners Invest $15 Million in Flat World Knowledge

    Open Textbook Publisher Presents Viable Alternative to Traditional Industry

China plans city ‘twice the size of Wales’

It’s official: the inexorable rise of China has rendered meaningless ancient units of area such as the square mile, as reporters struggle to express the extent of the country’s megacities in terms the average reader can understand.

[...]

This, of course, is properly expressed as 35,636,280 linguine, 541,173 double-decker buses laid bumper-to-bumper or 36,078 brontosauruses/brontosauri, give or take the odd tail.

People’s Medical Publishing House: to build a media group with 10 billion RMB in assets and sales (China)

Why TripAdvisor is getting a bad review

In quiet moments, Jared Blank likes to kick back by looking at reviews of the world’s greatest hotels on TripAdvisor. Specifically, the terrible reviews. Blank is a long-time analyst of the travel industry, and a user of TripAdvisor – the consumer review site that has become one of the world’s biggest travel resources, attracting 41.6 million users a month, and featuring 40m reviews of hotels and restaurants worldwide. But the pettiness and hysteria of some of the complaints never fail to astonish.

Google to hire 1,000 in Europe

The outgoing chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, has announced a plan to hire more than 1,000 staff over the coming year to boost its European operation.

Cuba continues to provide Venezuela with electricity know-how

Vice President Ricardo Cabrisas met with Electric Energy Minister Alí Rodríguez Araque Monday in Caracas to assess the state of 23 one-year old cooperation agreements on electricity, and to announce new projects.

Cabrisas was accompanied by Vicente Delaó, general director of Cuba’s Unión Eléctrica.

Berlusconi’s “Rubygate” in Italy: Private Vices, Public Virtues

Of course they refer to the Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, and his endless squalid story with underage girls, professional paid escorts, TV stars who become deputies and government officials, all thanks to his protection.

“Rubygate” they call it in the Italian press: it’s named after his biggest and weirdest sex-scandal yet, with an illegal, thieving, juvenile delinquent belly dancer from Morocco.

TV show stings Berlusconi into action

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi rang a TV show discussing his alleged prostitution scandal, exchanged insults with the host and said the programme was like a “brothel”.

Clarence Thomas failed to report wife’s income, watchdog says

Unix dynamic duo awarded Japan Prize

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications.

Science

• The Fantastical Promise of Reversible Computing

  The world of computing is in transition. As chips become smaller and faster, they dissipate more heat, which is energy that is entirely wasted.

  By some estimates the difference between the amount of energy required to carry out a computation and the amount that today’s computers actually use, is some eight orders of magnitude. Clearly, there is room for improvement.

• What is it with researchers and peer review? or; Why misquoting Churchill does not an argument make

  I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the attachment of the research community to traditional approaches. A news article in Nature though, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people and has prompted me to actually write something.

• ‘Darwin talk’ at Turkish school goes to court, sparks new debate

  A warning issued to a primary school teacher for talking about Darwinian evolutionary theory during class has sparked a debate over whether education in Turkey is becoming more religious.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• More troops lost to suicide

  For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Terrorists, technology and fighting back

  Firstly, the explosives were hidden inside a laser printer toner cartridge. Furthermore, it was reported the bomb contained a detonator connected to a mainboard and battery taken from a regular mobile phone.

  According to various accounts, the bombs could have been set off by calling the phone and subsequently activating the vibrating motor. A calendar alert set in the phone could also have triggered the vibrator and therefore the bomb as well.

• Protests in Egypt and unrest in Middle East – as it happened

  Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters have clashed with police in Cairo and other cities in the largest demonstration in Egypt in a generation. Demonstrators want an end to the authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak’s near 30 years of power.

• Revolution Day in Egypt

  Egyptians will be demonstrating today in solidarity with Tunisia and in hope for change within their own government. An Egyptian national holiday in honour of the police, has been renamed ‘The Day of Wrath’, ‘Revolution Day’, and the ‘Koshari Revolution’, the latter referring to a rice, lentils and pasta dish frequently eaten by lower income Egyptians.

• Will Tunisia’s ‘Internet revolution’ endure?

  There has been a great deal written online about how much of a positive role the Internet played in recent events in Tunisia (if you’d like to catch up, Alex Howard’s link round-up provides a good summary of the many sides, both for and against). At CPJ, our focus is on slightly different questions: How did the repression of the Internet hamper the ability to safely gather news, report and analyze such events? Did that repression grow worse in the dying days of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s government? Will it improve in the future?

• Police officers guilty of assaulting disabled man

  Two Toronto police constables have been found guilty of assault causing bodily harm during the arrest of a disabled, verbally abusive man in Cabbagetown.

  Edward Ing and John Cruz were stone-faced and had no comment on after Justice Elliott Allen gave his verdict in Brampton court Tuesday morning.

• Jesse Ventura slams TSA with lawsuit

  Count Jesse Ventura among fliers who don’t want their “junk” touched by Transportation Security Administration agents.

  The former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in Minnesota against the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA.

  The suit alleges enhanced airport security procedures, including pat-downs and full body scanning, violate Ventura’s rights under the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures.

• Ventura sues over body scans, pat-downs

  Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

• Met counter-terrorism chief to take over protest spy unit

  Britain’s most senior police officer in charge of counter-terrorism will next week take over a secretive unit that deploys undercover police officers in the environmental protest movement.

  John Yates, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, will take command of the operation to monitor climate change campaigners in a move that police chiefs hope will bring greater accountability.

  However, the move, which was confirmed in parliament today, is likely to cause controversy among activists who complain that their peaceful movement is being equated to terrorism.

  Tim Godwin, the acting head of the Met, and another senior Scotland Yard officer, Bob Broadhurst, were today brought before parliament to apologise for misleading MPs over the presence of undercover police at the G20 protests two years ago.

• US child appeals against being tried for murder as an adult

  Jordan Brown, who was 11 when he allegedly killed his father’s pregnant fiancee, could face life sentence with no parole

Cablegate/Leaks

• Swedish PM denies political role in Assange extradition case

  We know from the cables and other sources (see the summary in section 7, 92-96, of the “skeleton” legal argument) that Swedish courts have in the past been complicit in the illegal kidnapping of refugee claimants by US agents. More broadly, the role of diplomacy as mediator between law and politics has arisen repeatedly in many of the cables released by its major media partners and WikiLeaks.

• PdF presents: A symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom (II)

• PdF Presents: A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom (II)

• Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi

  Activists David House and Jane Hamsher tried to visit Pfc. Bradley Manning, who stands accused of leaking classified US government documents, at Quantico on Sunday. They allege that while still outside the base, they were given a run-around, threatened with having their car towed, and then essentially detained for two hours, until the 3:00 pm end to visiting hours arrived. They were not on the base, and House is on an approved visitor list. They were trying to see Manning, whose health they say has deteriorated because of the harsh terms of his detainment, and to deliver to the base commander a petition with 40,000 signatories asking that the terms be eased.

• Inhumane Treatment of WikiLeaks Soldier Bradley Manning

  US authorities must alleviate the harsh pre-trial detention conditions of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking information to Wikileaks.

  The US army private, 23, has been held for 23 hours a day in a sparsely furnished solitary cell and deprived of a pillow, sheets, and personal possessions since July 2010.

  Amnesty International last week wrote to the US Defence secretary, Robert Gates, calling for the restrictions on Bradley Manning to be reviewed. In the same week, the soldier suffered several days of increased restrictions by being temporarily categorized as a ‘suicide risk’.

• WikiLeaks, hackers and conspiracy theories

  At the time, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a staunch supporter of WikiLeaks, tweeted “the point of the Quantico episode was to deny Manning his only real visitor: more likely solitary will crack him & induce anti-WL testimony.”

  Greenwald’s claim — for which of course there’s no evidence, only the logic that that’s exactly how law enforcement frequently operates — echoes Julian Assange’s comments about Manning. He recently told John Pilger “cracking Bradley Manning is the first step. The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States.”

  But while there’s more than a touch of the conspiracy theorist about these claims, it’s hard to avoid seeing a pattern in a number of recent events around WikiLeaks and its supporters.

  First there was the claim, advanced with virtually no evidence, that WikiLeaks might have obtained information by hacking, rather than receiving material from whistleblowers. Last week, Bloomberg ran a piece on claims made by the Pennsylvania company Tiversa that “it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks.”

  One assumes Bloomberg meant “trawling”, but anyway. “Trolling” sounds worse.

• Palestine papers reveal MI6 drew up plan for crackdown on Hamas

  British intelligence helped draw up a secret plan for a wide-ranging crackdown on the Islamist movement Hamas which became a security blueprint for the Palestinian Authority, leaked documents reveal. The plan asked for the internment of leaders and activists, the closure of radio stations and the replacement of imams in mosques.

  The disclosure of the British plan, drawn up by the intelligence service in conjunction with Whitehall officials in 2004, and passed by a Jerusalem-based MI6 officer to the senior PA security official at the time, Jibril Rajoub, is contained in the cache of confidential documents obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared with the Guardian. The documents also highlight the intimate level of military and security cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli forces.

• New York Times, Al-Jazeera Do An End-Run Around WikiLeaks

  The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to executive editor Bill Keller. Keller said the plan is still in its formative stages, but the idea is to create a “kind of EZPass lane for leakers,” to make it easier for them to contact the paper and deliver information. And the Times isn’t the only one doing this; Al-Jazeera has already launched its own drop-box for leaks called the Transparency Unit, and recently released thousands of documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

• NYC Installs Virtual Suggestion Box

  New York City is harnessing the power of employee-based collaborative filtering to solicit new ways to save money and improve city government.

  The city has set up what is in effect a virtual suggestion box, called IdeaMarket, where eventually all 300,000 of the city’s employees will be able to give the city their ideas about how to improve operations.

• Blow the Whistle!

  On December 22nd, in the face of seemingly unanimous bipartisan support, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (Bill S.372) was killed at the last minute when a mystery Senator placed what’s called an anonymous hold on the bill. This bill had already been passed by the Senate earlier in December and by the House earlier that same day, but in the final vote on the reconciled bill, which is designed to protect government workers from being punished – as they usually are – for exposing illegality, waste and corruption – it was shut down by a lone anonymous hold.

• The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Tuesday, Day 59!

  4:50 Assange tells AP in London that WIkiLeaks now seeking SIXTY media partners to spread the release of the almost 99% of cable still not published. Would be dramatic expansion of its collaborative efforts and in line with much else happening this week. But outlets would have to agree to full redaction of names. “Sometimes, that could mean doing what Assange called ‘triangulating the politics of a country’ — giving documents to a left-wing paper in a country with a right-wing government, or offering cables to conservative titles in countries with a left-leaning administration.”

• AP Interview:WikiLeaks seeking more media partners

  WikiLeaks hopes to enlist as many as 60 news organizations from around the world in a bid to help speed the publication of its massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic memos, the site’s founder said Tuesday.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Rolling Stone names 12 politicians and executives blocking progress on global warming

  1. Rupert Murdoch: No one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch. In a year of rec­ord heat waves in Africa, freak snowstorms in America and epic flooding in Pakistan, the Fox network continued to dismiss climate change as nothing but a conspiracy by liberal scientists and Big Government. Glenn Beck told viewers the Earth experienced no warming in the past decade — the hottest on record. Sean Hannity declared that “global warming doesn’t exist” and speculated about “the true agenda of global-warming hysterics.” Even Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the chatty Fox & Friends, laughed off the threat of climate change, joking that the real problem was “too many polar bears.”

  Murdoch’s entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny….

  Murdoch knows better. In 2007, he warned that climate change “poses clear, catastrophic threats” and promised to turn News Corp. into a model of carbon neutrality. But at his media outlets, manufacturing doubt about global warming remains official policy. During the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Washington editor of Fox News ordered the network’s journalists to never mention global warming “without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” Murdoch may be striving to go green in his ­office buildings, but on air, the only thing he’s recycling are the lies of Big Coal and Big Oil.

• Was Genghis Khan history’s greenest conqueror?

  In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan’s unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere.

• Newt Gingrich proposes abolishing EPA

  Gingrich has long been just another pro-pollution conservative eco-fraud pretending to care about the environment while adopting the anti-regulation, pro-technology rhetoric suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah” and “Eco-fraud Gingrich has always opposed clean energy, climate action“).

Finance

• [Satire] Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World

  At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” describing the global wealth divide as the “most colossal and enduring of mankind’s creations.”

• Banks Return With a Goal: Pushing Back

  Bankers at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, played the roles of bogeymen. French President Nicolas Sarkozy lashed out at their “indecent behavior” and “morally indefensible” pay packages.

  The bankers aren’t likely to win any popularity contests at this year’s gathering at the Swiss ski resort. But they are hoping some of the stigma of having helped plunge the world into a financial crisis has faded.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• UK gives Murdoch last chance to avoid BSkyB probe

  Britain will give News Corp (NWSA.O) a final chance to avoid a prolonged investigation into its $12.5 billion buyout of BSkyB (BSY.L), a move likely to draw flak for the government’s relations with Rupert Murdoch.

• Hunt and Cameron’s extraordinary decision on Murdoch/BSkyB

  Just 11 days ago I speculated that a judicial review was a near-certainty when the Culture Secretary made his decision on whether to refer Murdoch’s News Corporation bid to take full control over broadcaster BSkyB to the competition commission over concerns of media plurality in the UK.

  Ofcom’s widely-leaked recommendation was confirmed today: the bid should be sent for competition review. Whether the full Ofcom report will be unveiled is at this stage unclear, and in my guess unlikely.

  But the extraordinary part is Jeremy Hunt’s decision to grant a stay of execution and allow News Corp extra time to address concerns over media plurality if Murdoch’s group controlled news output from Sky, along with a raft of newspapers and news websites it already owned.

• Chevron, under pressure for destruction Of Amazon, was top oil lobbyist last quarter

  Chevron, responsible for a multi-billion-dollar environmental disaster in Ecuador, is instead spending millions to shore up political support and to evade the clean up. Brad Johnson has the story.

  Senate disclosure forms reveal that oil giant Chevron spent $2.9 million lobbying the federal government last quarter, eclipsing even Exxon ($2.6 million) and BP ($2.2 million). Chevron’s 2010 lobbying totaled $12.89 million, following a tremendous outlay in 2009 of $20.8 million.

• People trust search engines says PR company

  Whether people trust PR firms is another question

• Pat Sajak says he’s profoundly sorry for infecting the country with Keith Olbermann

  Pat Sajak is finally taking full blame for giving Keith Olbermann his start on national television. Historians note that civil discourse has never been the same in American politics.

  Sajak clearly feels guilty about launching the liberal lamenter into the nation’s thought process like a virus.

Censorship

• Hungary’s New Media Law Faces Opposition in the EU

  Just three weeks after Hungary took over the European Union’s presidency, the Hungarian government is already facing protests over a newly passed media law in the nation. According to Digital Civil Rights in Europe, the approved legislation gives the government the right to “unilaterally judge content material on the basis of broad and unclearly defined criteria,” including protection of the “public order.” The law gives Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn’s party the right to take down media outlets in the country. Furthermore, it also requires media sources to register before publishing.

• Twitter Is Blocked In Egypt Amidst Rising Protests

  Inspired by the recent Tunisian demonstrations against corruption, protesters are filling the streets of Cairo. And like the protests in Tunisia, the Egyptian ones were partly organized on Facebook and Twitter. And now Twitter appears to be blocked in Egypt, according to various Tweets and tips we’ve received. However, so far only the Twitter website itself is blocked (including the mobile site), but people in Cairo are still using Twitter third-party clients to keep on Tweeting. There are also reports of the entire mobile Web being blocked through mobile carriers, but at least one carrier, Vodafone Egypt, denies that it is blocking Twitter, attributing the problem to overloaded networks instead. Update: one tipster says Twitter apps are blocked as well and that the only way to Tweet is by using Web proxies. Update 2: Asked to confirm that Twitter is blocked in Egypt, Google PR points to this Herdict Report, which indicates that it is in fact inaccessible in that country.

• Tunisian State Secretary Says Censorship Is Fine Because The West Does It Too

  Both the US and the EU are obviously failing to be a rolemodel when they should be. Many politicians in the EU have embraced the idea of an internet filter to block child pornography. As for the US, they could be seen seizing domain names of ‘rogue websites’. On the one hand, politicians of the west love talking about the principles of freedom, but on the other hand they hate to actually live up to their own standards when something like WikiLeaks or a music blog comes along. The problems of this for the US and the EU have been discussed here in detail before.

Privacy

• Justice Department seeks mandatory data retention

  Criminal investigations “are being frustrated” because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow.

  CNET obtained a copy of the department’s position on mandatory data retention–saying Congress should strike a “more appropriate balance” between privacy and police concerns–that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.

Civil Rights

• Human Rights Watch Film Festival Comes To Washington D.C.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Will our Internet Rates Suddenly Climb?

  Met an interesting couple at Mayor Cowan’s Levee. In this small world, turns out they are in-laws of a guy I went to school with. In any case, they have a blog about the CRTC approving a change that could put our internet rates through the roof, particularly if you use something like Netflicks or WOW.

• Two-thirds of U.S. Internet users lack fast broadband

  Two-thirds of U.S. Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps, putting the United States well behind speed leaders South Korea and Japan.

• Don’t Take Digital Innovation for Granted

  For example, Over 22,000 people and counting have signed the Stop The Meter petition, demonstrating widespread discontent with big telecom companies who are attempting to hogtie competing indie Internet service providers (ISPs) and make the Internet much more expensive to use.

• A damaged process and a damaged community

  Here’s the big news from the world of Internet governance world: some vague details of a meeting between the ICANN Board and governments, in the form of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), have emerged. But adding concern to the the general vagueness is the inclusion of precise wording that means something specific, although no one is quite sure what. It is this:

  This meeting is not intended to address the requirements/steps outlined in the Bylaws mandated Board-GAC consultation process.

  This wording is indecipherable to any but the greatest of insiders. And that fact, combined with the reality that this Board-GAC meeting is one of the most significant Internet governance meetings in the past five years, makes it all the more frustrating. Despite the global impact, and the open processes, and the much-vaunted bottom-up multi-stakeholder model, here is a very, very small group of people making crucial decisions about the future of the Internet and they are using arcane and indecipherable terminology in order to keep everyone else out.

• France Telecom To Buy 49% of Video-Sharing Site Dailymotion

  France Telecom’s Orange has announced plans to buy a 49% stake in video sharing site Dailymotion for €58.8 million ($79.9 million).

Intellectual Monopolies/Publishing

• Newspapers Try to Reimpose Scarcity on News With Ongo

  In what feels like another attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, three traditional media companies — the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Gannett chain, publisher of USA Today — have launched a new service called Ongo that they hope will convince readers to pay for their content, even though much of that content is already available for free. Although it has some interesting features aimed at compensating readers for sharing content, Ongo seems like yet another Hail Mary pass aimed at trying to rewind the clock and impose scarcity on media content, and one that will likely fail just as quickly as others have.

• This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers.

  In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public. And there were several successful publishers who knew that some of their authors would never sell a lot of copies, but they kept publishing them because they liked their work. It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.

  Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him. Look at this list of last year’s books: over half of them weren’t bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers. Why are you publishing this woman? She’ll only appeal to a small minority. Minorities are no good to us. We want to double the return we get on each book we publish.

• Copyrights

  • Obama nominates former RIAA lawyer for Solicitor General spot

    President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation’s solicitor general.

    If confirmed by the Senate, Verilli, now the White House deputy counsel, would assume the powerful position left vacant by Elena Kagan, who was elevated to the Supreme Court. Obama said he was “confident” that Verrilli, one of five former RIAA attorneys appointed to the administration, would “serve ably.”

  • ACS:Law Can’t Take The Pressure, Quit Chasing File-Sharers

    ACS:Law, the law firm that has terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, has quit the anti-piracy business. The company made the announcement in a hearing at the Patents County Court yesterday set to a backdrop of scathing comments by a senior judge who said he found their cases “mind boggling”.

  • Law firm ACS: Law stops ‘chasing illegal file-sharers’

  • Mysterious Non-Company ‘Helping’ ACS:Law Collect Fines Now Says Forget The Whole Thing

    As ACS:Law’s legal mistakes mount, there was a recent story about how the company had passed on some collections efforts to a firm called GCB, but the details suggested another total screwup. People tracked GCB back to an accounting firm, which quickly put on their website that while GCB was formed by it, it “appears to be being misused by some third party,” and that it was “taking urgent steps” to end this

  • How many Internet pirates are there, anyway?

    For US numbers, we can turn to Warner Music, one of the world’s largest music labels and a company that devoted plenty of time to researching the audience for its products. Last year, Warner execs stopped by the offices of the Federal Communications Commission to brief the agency on its findings—and what it found was that 13 percent of Americans were music pirates.

  • Why Tyler Cowen’s new book will be on Kindles, not bookstore shelves

    Cowen is a noted libertarian economist at George Mason University who writes for The New York Times and other esteemed publications — but he’s probably best known as the coauthor, with Alex Tabarrok, of Marginal Revolution, the very popular economics blog they’ve run for approaching a decade.

  • Google/Coadec Copyright Report: We Want Your Case Studies

    In early November, the government announced that it was launching a review in the country’s intellectual property laws, with a view to spurring technological innovation and “to see if we can make them fit for the Internet age.” The review, which is being chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves of Cardiff University, has now called for evidence on how the current IP regime affects innovation.

  • Law to Shutdown P2P Sites Resurrected By Spanish Coalition

    In recent months a controversial piece of legislation aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites has resulted in massive opposition from the public in Spain. In December the protests appeared to have been successful as the House of Representatives rejected the proposal. However, yesterday the Spanish Government resurrected the law with some minor changes, a move that has outraged the public.

    Traditionally, Spain has been one of the few countries where courts have affirmed that P2P-sites operate legally. This, to the disappointment of the United States who behind closed doors helped the Spanish Government to come up with new laws to protect the interests of copyright holders.

  • Will New Solicitor General Take Harder Line On Copyright?

    To fill the key legal post of Solicitor General, the Obama administration has turned to a lawyer with deep entertainment-industry roots who has taken on some of the industry’s toughest copyright battles. The nominee, Donald Verrilli, is best known for having buried the Grokster file-sharing service at the Supreme Court. Verrilli is one of several lawyers with recording-industry backgrounds who were brought into senior positions in the Department of Justice under Obama.

    The Grokster win is without a doubt one of the most significant entertainment-industry legal victories in the internet age. It created a new copyright doctrine of “inducement” that has allowed other peer-to-peer services, such as Limewire, to be shut down under the theory that even though the services didn’t handle copyrighted material themselves they went too far in encouraging users to illegally share.

  • China Authorities Threaten BitTorrent Sites with Prison Time

    Country’s Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security jointly announce that anybody guilty of illegally distributing copyrighted material that reaches 50,000 hits will face between 3 and 7 years in prison.

    Chinese authorities are stepping up their anti-P2P efforts with news of a joint declaration made by the country’s Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security earlier this month that anybody caught sharing copyrighted material without authorization will face criminal penalties of between 3 and 7 years in prison.

  • ACTA

    • LQDN at the EU Commission’s Ad Hoc Meeting on ACTA

      Today, La Quadrature du Net is attending the European Commission’s meeting on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

      Now that the negotiations on ACTA have come to an end, the Commission wants to “inform and consult civil society” about ACTA. That’s something that should have been done years ago.

      We will be distributing a one-page memo explaining why ACTA — which seeks to establish extremist enforcement measures for copyright, patent and trademarks — runs counter to fundamental rights and innovation. As suggested by dozens of academics across the EU in their common analysis, ACTA is a fundamentally flawed international agreement that needs to be rejected by lawmakers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Open Ballot: have you converted anyone to Linux?

Without multi-million pound/dollar/euro advertising campaigns, Linux’s popularity spreads primarily through word-of-mouth. Many people end up discovering the power of Linux by seeing it running on someone else’s machine, or having it recommended to them. In preparation for our upcoming podcast, we want to know: have you ever converted someone to Linux? Not like, you run Fedora and your wife checks her email on that machine once a day. We mean: you’ve shown someone Linux, helped them to install it, given them guidance and now they’re a full-time Linux user.

Uganda’s ban on refurbished computers sparks the law of unintended consequences

The dirty downside of the ICT industry is that computers have to go somewhere when they die and because they are full of potentially toxic materials they cannot simply be dumped in landfills. Uganda’s Government has sought to tackle part of the problem by banning the import of secondhand computers and sparked the law of unintended consequences. Russell Southwood talked to Shakeel Padamsey of Camara and Kyle Spencer of the Uganda Linux Group about what’s happened.

[...]

In May 2008 a report called “e-Waste Assessment in Uganda – A situational analysis of e-waste management and generation with special emphasis on personal computers authored by the Uganda Cleaner Production Centre and EMPA from Switzerland (and sponsored by UNID0 and Microsoft draw attention to the issue. It concluded that:”… only around 10% of those computers (estimated 300,000 in 2007) reach the waste stream, whereas the rest is kept in storage without being used. The 10% in the waste stream gets collected by individuals, whereas material and parts are sold informally and the rest gets dumped informally…This (is) equal to about 2,000 tons of computer waste (desktop unit and CRT screen) in total, which contains e.g. 80 tons of printed circuit boards and 400 tons of plastic. These numbers are hypothetical but represent a realistic order of magnitude”. The report’s recommendation was that it be dealt with by a UNIDO/Microsoft refurbishment initiative.

Kernel Space

• Living on the edge with the Liquorix kernel, which offers out-of-the-box sound fix for Lenovo G555 (Conexant 5069)

Applications

• CMU Sphinx- An Open Source Toolkit For Speech Recognition | Linux

• 8 of the Best Free Linux e-Learning Tools

  E-Learning consists of all types of electronically supported teaching and learning. It represents the computer and network-enabled transfer of knowledge, behaviors, and skills. E-learning includes Web-based learning, virtual classrooms, digital collaboration, and computer-based applications. The learning activity is often delivered over the internet and intranet/extranet, although optical media, and satellite TV are also alternatives.

  E-Learning has many benefits over traditional methods of learning. It enables individuals to study when it would otherwise not be practical. For example, a student may live in a remote location and be unable to relocate e.g. because of family commitments. It also allows the tuition to be self-paced or instructor-led, and is often more economical than traditional methods.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting up CGI-BIN in apache in Ubuntu linux

  • Setting up public key authentication for SSH

  • Revealers for Gnu/Linux – Part 1

  • Python Multimedia: Enhancing Images

  • Next, Next, Next, Next, Next, Next etc

    It feels very refined and more polished than the last time I tried it with the last of the Ubuntu base 9.04.1. The Debian Squeeze base of the new one seems to fit in well here, my desktop and netbook are both Debian Squeeze too. After this experience, I am very tempted to switch my regular netbook install from Debian Squeeze with XFCE to Crunchbang with Openbox.

• Games

  • Starry – A New 3D Space Shooter in a Retro Style

    Much of the news that we receive here at Ubuntu Gamer consists of updates to existing games or reviews of games that you may well of heard of. Occasionally though, out of the blue, news of a game arrives that turns out to be a real undiscovered gem. Starry is one of those games.

Distributions

• Eight Completely Free Linux Distros (And One More)

  All Linux distributions are supposed to be free, but some distributions are freer than others. Because some gaps remain in free software functionality, many distributions, including Ubuntu, include proprietary applications, such as Acrobat and Flash readers, and drivers for video and wireless cards. Many more include Linux kernels with proprietary firmware for device drivers.

  Among the hundreds of distributions, only eight are officially recognized by the Free Software Foundation as being completely free of proprietary material.

• My Netbook running Pardus 2011

  So I installed Pardus 2011 as a third booting option in my netbook. I’m running Mandriva, Mepis, and now Pardus (Yes, no windows in my netbook) and I must say that it is working perfectly. I haven’t had any plasma crash and everything looks nice. I even used the new Firefox to find pictures (Pardus picks up the wi-fi without any problem) and the GIMP to modify them. The result was this simple wallpaper

• Reviews

  • Quick Look: Dreamlinux 3.5 GNOME

    Overall, I think Dreamlinux has a lot of potential and I look forward to checking it out again at a later date. Since this version (3.5) has been out for a while now, I am hopeful that a new release will fix some of these problems and hopefully put it on par with LMDE. I’ll probably do a full review of it for DLR once the next release is out, so stay tuned.

    Dreamlinux is probably best suited to intermediate and advanced Linux users.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Linux suffers a security incident – compromise risk is minimal

      Long story short is that a Fedora contributor had his/her credentials stolen and then an attacker began to use those credentials to attempt to tamper with the Fedora infrastructure. Due to the limited privileges of the exploited account (and some good luck) it appears as though there has been no risk to Fedora’s build or infrastructure.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Bodhi Linux is a Lightweight Linux Distribution Based on ‘Enlightenment Desktop’ and Ubuntu

      Bodhi Linux is quite lightweight and requires modest system requirements of a 300 Mhz processor, 128 MB RAM and 1.5 GB hard disk space yet it is quite powerful and feature complete. With ever evolving Enlightenment desktop and a dedicated team of developers behind Bodhi Linux, it is surely one distribution you would like to watch for.

    • Expanding Ubuntu Recovery Mode

      Recovery Mode is a text-based interface to a few quick repair tools that is installed by default with most Ubuntu releases and derivatives. I wrote a few add-ons for it that increase its usefulness in remote repair and diagnostics situations. These were developed and tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

      Starting Ubuntu in Recovery Mode (aka. Friendly Recovery) is relatively easy. Just hold down the shift key after the BIOS POST to get Grub2 to show its menu, then just select the kernel with the “recovery” option. Also note the memtest86+ option which is useful for identifying bad RAM.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • $100 – $150 Smartphones Expected in 2011

    The world does want small cheap computers and ARM+GNU/Linux can do the job. Nothing prevents an OEM from building a larger netbook and calling it a notebook. The world can build smaller PCs with ARM + GNU/Linux.

• Tablets

  • Toshiba’s Android 3.0 tablet has swappable battery

    Toshiba launched a preview website for its 10.1-inch, “Toshiba Tablet,” which runs Android 3.0 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and offers dual cameras and a swappable battery. Meanwhile, Motorola’s rival Xoom Android 3.0 tablet will go on sale at Best Buy on Feb. 17, and will be offered by Verizon Wireless for a pricey $799 without a contract, say reports.

  • Mobile developers shifting to tablets, says study

    A joint survey of 2,235 developers published by Appcelerator and IDC shows the emergence of tablet computers has caused developers to refocus their development strategies, with Android interest catching up with the iPad. Meanwhile, a Deloitte study says that businesses will account for 25 percent of tablets sold in 2011.

15 open source projects you should know about as a web developer

Building websites and web applications today is not only about being a great programmer, it’s even more important to be a smart programmer. This means to re-use existing code and applications when possible instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Open source has been around for ages and much of the web is built using it. Every developer knows about Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP).

50 Open Source Applications for Sci-Tech Education

You don’t have to search very hard to find educators and policy makers worried about the current condition of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. There’s a STEM Education Coalition, a National Science Board STEM Education Commission, a Journal of STEM Education and even a STEMEd Caucus in Congress dedicated to passing legislation that increases funding for STEM education.

Organizations like these frequently cite statistics which show that American students lag behind their international counterparts. For example, in the 2007 Trends in International Science and Math Study (TIMS), U.S. fourth graders placed eleventh in math and eighth in science, while U.S. eighth graders ranked ninth in math and eleventh in science. Falling behind in these areas could eventually lead to a decline in American innovation, with drastic effects on the economy. As a result, groups have recently taken a number of steps on local, regional, and national levels to improve interest and achievement in science and mathematics.

Events

• Linux, embedded tech featured in conferences

  The ninth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 8x) has posted a schedule for the conference it will hold on Feb. 25-27 in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the multi-platform Embedded World conference has published a schedule for its 2011 event, to be held Mar. 1-3 in Nuremberg, Germany.

TDF

• The Document Foundation Unleashes First LibreOffice Release

  Today The Document Foundation enthusiatically announced LibreOffice 3.3, the first release of their community developed OpenOffice.org fork. They cite the growth in the number of volunteer developers as the key to releasing ahead of schedule. Contrary to earlier reports stating no new features, today’s press release reveals “a number of new and original features.”

• The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3

  The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today.

• First LibreOffice Release arrives

  LibreOffice 3.3 includes numerous new features when compared to its OpenOffice parent. To my mind, the most important of these for modern office workers is that it has much better import and export tools for Microsoft Office 2007 and above OpenXML formats. Love them or hate them–I hate them myself–more and more businesses are using these formats and being able to work with them is becoming a business-critical feature. In addition, LibreOffice can also now import Adobe PDF, Microsoft Works, and Lotus Word Pro documents and has better WordPerfect document import facilities.

• Free Software Snubs Oracle

  The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3, which comes only four months after the formation of the foundation by leading members of the OpenOffice.org community, demonstrating their commitment to a free and open office productivity suite.

Oracle

• Can Oracle OpenOffice put a dent in Microsoft Office?

  It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Microsoft. Whether Steve Ballmer knows it or not, the big shoes left by 23-year-veteran Bob Muglia, who oversaw major successes by the company’s Server and Tools division, will be devilishly hard to fill. And just last week, Microsoft lost Windows consumer marketing boss Brad Brooks to Juniper; worldwide government general manager Matt Miszewski to Salesforce; and Johnny Chung Lee, one of the key researchers behind the Kinect motion control technology, to Google.

  On the heels of Ray Ozzie and Stephen Elop leaving Redmond, those recent departures may seem like a very bad sign. But the degree to which Microsoft is really in trouble depends largely on the viability of alternatives to its most popular products.

Project Releases

• VLC 1.1.6 is released! PPA for ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and LinuxMint

• Postfix 2.8.0 available

Health/Nutrition

• The GOP’s Health Care Plan: Blame the Lawyers

  Do Republicans really have a plan for fixing the health care system? They’ve insisted, even as they’ve pushed to repeal last year’s health care reform law, that they have some new ideas for reducing health care costs and expanding access to the uninsured.

  So far, though, the Republicans’ new ideas look a lot like their old ones. On Thursday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the new GOP chairman of the House judiciary committee, will hold a hearing entitled, “Medical Liability Reform—Cutting Costs, Spurring Investment, Creating Jobs.” Judging from Smith’s comments, and the subject of the hearing, one of the Republicans’ big ideas for fixing the health care system is simply to keep people from suing the doctors who injured them.

• The Problem With Damage Caps

  Few things demonstrate the deliberate bad faith of conservative arguments for tort reform more than their support of damage caps in medical malpractice suits. Their claim is that caps reduce “frivolous lawsuits,” but of course they do nothing of the sort. Almost by definition, frivolous lawsuits are those filed for small dollar claims in hopes that insurance companies will figure it’s cheaper to settle than to fight. Big dollar lawsuits that exceed damage caps are the exclusive domain of serious injury — the precise opposite of frivolous.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The Feds Go Fishing

  Back in September 2010, a series of FBI raids were conducted in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago and North Carolina. These raids were conducted under laws pertaining to US citizens providing “material aid to terrorists” and targeted members of antiwar, leftist, and solidarity organizations. Since the raids, various activists that were targeted have been subpoenaed to appear at a grand jury and have refused to do so. By refusing, those subpoenaed are risking arrest for contempt. However, as of this writing, none have been taken to jail yet. As I wrote in an article first published in CounterPunch on September 27, 2010: “These raids are a clear and vicious attempt to intimidate the antiwar movement.” and the grand jury “is a fishing expedition, as evidenced (for example) by the warrant asking for papers from no determined time.”

• Tunisian army fires warning shots at protesters

  The Tunisian army fired warning shots in the capital today as demonstrators converged on the headquarters of the long-time ruling party.

  Protesters climbed over the RCD party offices in central Tunis and dismantled the sign bearing its name.

• The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks

  It was on Christmas Day that Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan first noticed strange things going on in Tunisia. Reports started to trickle in that political-protest pages were being hacked. “We were getting anecdotal reports saying, ‘It looks like someone logged into my account and deleted it,’” Sullivan said.

• Hundreds of political prisoners in Tunisia yet to be released

• Egypt braced for ‘day of revolution’ protests

  Egypt’s authoritarian government is bracing itself for one of the biggest opposition demonstrations in recent years tomorrow, as thousands of protesters prepare to take to the streets demanding political reform.

• Executing the Evidence

  Such a sham trial cannot produce a reliable verdict and will not restore the honor of the U.S. military and intelligence agents who tortured al-Nashiri, or the lawyers, doctors, and high-ranking government officials who permitted and encouraged it. And it will do nothing to free this country of the disastrous prison compound on Guantánamo or its legacy.

  Worst of all, because the United States government seeks the death penalty for Al-Nashiri, the trial will become another rallying cry for our enemies and a deep disappointment to our friends. Both will point to our hypocrisy as a supposed leader on human rights and our increasing isolation in the family of nations as we cling to the “peculiar institution” of capital punishment.

• Torture and ‘unjustified homicide’ in US run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay?

  New documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show “unjustified homicide” of detainees and concerns about the condition of confinement in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, according to the ACLU.

  Thousands of documents detailing the deaths of 190 U.S. detainees were released by the ACLU on Friday. The U.S. military gave the ACLU the documents earlier in the week as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the rights group.

• Israeli soldiers fired at Gaza aid flotilla in self-defence, says inquiry

  Israel acted within international law and its soldiers opened fire in self-defence during a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla of aid ships last May that prompted worldwide protests, a government-appointed commission concluded today.

  [...]

  Activists on board the vessels said the Israeli military initiated the violence and used disproportionate force in the ensuing battle.

• Oasis of Peace Blossoms, To An Extent

  The “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom-Waht es-Salaam in Hebrew and Arabic) is the only place in Israel where, 35 years ago, Jewish and Palestinian Israelis chose voluntarily to live side by side; the only place to raise Jewish and Palestinian children together.

• The whistleblower

  A police officer and divorced mother of three, Kathyrn Bolkovac was looking for a fresh start when she signed up as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia. But when she began to investigate the local trafficking of young girls into prostitution, all the evidence pointed to those she worked alongside

• Theresa May set to announce new counter-terrorism package

  The coalition cabinet is to agree an “escalating series of measures” today to replace the controversial control orders imposed indefinitely on terror suspects who cannot be prosecuted.

  The delayed package of reformed counter-terrorism measures is to be announced by the home secretary, Theresa May, tomorrow and will include changes to stop and search powers and pre-charge detention as well as a replacement for the much-criticised control orders.

• Tucson shooting survivor arrested after threatening Tea Party member

  James Fuller, who was shot in the knee and back by Jared Loughner, shouted: “You’re dead” at Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries before being detained and taken to hospital for a mental health evaluation.

• Free speech behind protest at slain cop’s funeral

  But as the funeral procession for Sgt. Ryan Russell went by Tuesday there was a man holding up a sign that stated “Soldier’s Die, Electricians Die and People Die” on one side and “No Police State” on the other.

  This takes some serious gall. What the hell was he thinking?

  He’s either the most heartless person in Toronto. Or someone who is earnest about Canada’s rights and freedoms.

  But Eric Brazau says by making this point outside Tuesday’s massive police funeral at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, all he was doing was expressing his free speech.

• Tony Blair’s promise to George Bush: count on us on Iraq war

• Blair must face trial

  No-one should ever be amazed at the grotesque pretexts dreamed up by Tony Blair to justify the unjustifiable.

  Blair suggested to the Chilcot inquiry that he had disregarded attorney general Lord Goldsmith’s initial legal advice on the planned invasion of Iraq because it was “provisional.”

  However, the then prime minister didn’t simply ignore the advice given. He stood it on its head.

  Blair stood up in Parliament giving a position diametrically opposed to what Goldsmith had told him. He justifies that now by saying that he was convinced that the attorney general would come round to his view once he knew the full facts.

  Both Blair and Goldsmith are at fault for their refusal to take international law seriously.

• Undercover police cleared ‘to have sex with activists’

  Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

  The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

  Sex was a tool to help officers blend in, the officer claimed, and was widely used as a technique to glean intelligence. His comments contradict claims last week from the Association of Chief Police Officers that operatives were absolutely forbidden to sleep with activists.

• Activists plan Scotland Yard blockade to expose spies who used sexual tactics

  Women aim to identify undercover police who infiltrated environment groups and had sexual relations with protesters

  [...]

  As evidence continued to emerge of police officers having had sexual relations with people they were monitoring, the women said they wanted to know if they had been “abused” by police.

  Though senior police insisted that sleeping with activists during such operations was banned, a former agent claimed such “promiscuity” routinely had the blessing of commanders.

  The activists’ concerns follow the revelation that the undercover PC Mark Kennedy had sexual relationships with several women during the seven years he spent infiltrating environmental activists’ groups. Last week the Guardian identified more officers who had sex with the protesters they were sent to spy on. One officer, Jim Boyling, married an activist and had two children with her.

• Easter Islanders Seek U.N. Intervention in Dispute with Chile

  “We are a peaceful people. We don’t like war. We don’t want police and military on our land,” said Erity Teave, an indigenous activist from the Chilean-administered Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks points to US meddling in Haiti

  Confidential US diplomatic cables from 2005 and 2006 released this week by WikiLeaks reveal Washington’s well-known obsession to keep exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti and Haitian affairs. (On Thursday, Aristide issued a public letter in which he reiterated “my readiness to leave today, tomorrow, at any time” from South Africa for Haiti, because the Haitian people “have never stopped calling for my return” and “for medical reasons”, concerning his eyes.)

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Republicans Target Energy Spending

  Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s Republican Study Committee on Thursday released a list of programs they’d like to see cut as part of the Spending Reduction Act of 2011. Clean energy, efficiency, rail, and climate programs were all atop the two-page list of cuts, reaffirming the fact that when Republicans say they want an “all of the above” energy plan, they really mean just coal, oil, gas, and sometimes nuclear.

• How to Rack Up 557 Safety Violations and Not Get Shut Down

  Forty-eight coal miners died on the job in 2010, 29 of them in a single incident at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia—the worst mining accident in the US since 1970. This week, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) outlined the preliminary results of its investigation into the April 5, 2010, accident. The exact causes remain unknown, but safety investigators have made one thing clear: The explosion in the mine was preventable.

• Ecuador: Chevron Trying To Block Testimony Of Diego Borja About Falsifying Evidence In Ecuador Trial, Plaintiffs Charge

  Chevron is attempting to block or delay the sworn deposition testimony of the company’s Ecuadorian “dirty tricks” operative Diego Borja, the spokesperson for the Ecuadorians suing Chevron for oil contamination in the Amazonian rainforest, charged today.

• ExxonMobil warns carbon emissions will rise by 25% in 20 years

  ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, expects global carbon emissions to rise by nearly 25% in the next 20 years, in effect dismissing hopes that runaway climate change can be arrested and massive loss of life prevented.

• Natural signs that show spring comes earlier

  Spring is sooner recognised by plants than by men, states the Chinese proverb – a point that has been backed by science. Researchers have found that the behaviour of plants and the animals that feed on them shows spring is arriving earlier every year. It also appears that this advance is accelerating, according to Dr Stephen Thackeray of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, in Lancaster.

Finance

• SEC looks at Cahill, Goldman Sachs link

  The US Securities and Exchange Commission has delivered subpoenas to the state treasurer’s office in a wide-ranging request for documents concerning dealings between investment banking giant Goldman Sachs and former treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, onetime top staff members, and former campaign aides, according to an official briefed on the document request.

• Wall Street firms earn high profits while still owing Uncle Sam

  Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street giants that played roles in the subprime mortgage debacle are reporting huge profits and awarding hefty bonuses again even as the government remains on the hook for tens of billions of dollars of their debt.

  Banking behemoths are among the scores of lenders and insurers that floated as much as $345.8 billion in federally guaranteed bonds under a program that is widely credited with helping to keep money flowing at the height of the financial crisis, when businesses had nowhere to turn for capital.

• Fannie and Freddie spending lavishly on lawyers

  Taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made a lot of money for a lot of lawyers since the government seized them 21/2 years ago.

  In that time, the companies have spent more than $160 million to defend themselves and their former executives in lawsuits and showered another $50 million on foreclosure lawyers who are now under investigation in Florida.

• Financial Crisis Commission Finds Cause For Prosecution Of Wall Street

  The bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis has concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution, according to two sources directly involved in the deliberations.

• State Bankruptcies? ‘Ludicrous,’ He Says

  California’s state treasurer, Bill Lockyer, denounced on Monday continuing efforts to establish a new framework for states to restructure their debts, saying no state wanted or needed to declare bankruptcy.

• IMF loan policies ‘hampering aid efforts’

  A study has tested whether aid to tackle disease and improve healthcare actually translates into a better health system for the countries that receive it.

  The Oxford-led study found that aid that went to some of the poorest countries was not used to supplement existing spending on public health projects, but instead aid often displaced state spending. Countries that relied on loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were found to channel the least aid towards its intended purpose.

• U.S. Gov-Funded Mission to Make Haiti Christian: Your Tax Dollars, Billy Graham’s Son, Monsanto and Sarah Palin

  In November, 2010, Lewis Lucke, a former U.S. ambassador to Swaziland and former USAID official in Haiti, filed suit against Haiti Recovery Group Ltd. for some $500,000 in unpaid fees for the tens of millions of dollars in contracts Lucke secured for the group in the days after the earthquake. After leaving his USAID position, Lucke immediately signed a $30,000 a month “consulting” contract with the Haiti Recovery Group, a conglomerate formed by several American contractors with the specific goal of securing U.S. funding. Lucke used the contacts developed while at USAID to score the conglomerate over $20 million in contracts. Then it canned him. Sucker.

• Is GE’s Jeffrey Immelt Really an American?

  If President Barack Obama had announced this week that he was appointing Japan’s Takanobu Ito, president and CEO of Honda, to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, one can imagine the shock wave that would go through the American body politic. A foreigner!–and one from one of America’s major competitors–to head a White House advisory panel on jobs and competitiveness?

• Hu Jintao’s visit: the story the media missed

  If these reporters actually had to cover the news to get a paycheck, then this checklist of concerns would have been just the beginning of their job. It’s great for the Obama administration to come up with a wishlist that it would like from China’s leadership. But this is not Disney World. China doesn’t hand the United States everything on its wishlist.

  China is a superpower that doesn’t have to do whatever the United States wants. It makes concessions to the United States in exchange for items on its own wishlist.

  This means that the United States is not going to get everything on its list. In fact, President Obama must decide which items he will prioritise with China and put these items first, as opposed to other items which he will tell Hu are of less consequence. The real job of reporting in Washington last week should have been trying to find out the actual priority that President Obama was assigning to the various items on his list.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• NBC Universal and Comcast’s merger is no joke

  The closest many will have come to expressing an interest in the merger between NBC Universal and Comcast is through watching a parody of the deal unfold in 30 Rock, NBC’s self-referential comedy.

• Tell Meredith Corporation to STOP running ads from tobacco companies!

  Parents and Family Circle magazines routinely include advertisements from Lorillard Tobacco Company’s “Real Parents. Real Answers.” campaign. Tobacco companies use these so-called “youth prevention” ads to manipulate people into thinking they are trying to prevent youth smoking when in reality they are only trying to improve their image so that more people – specifically young people – trust them and buy more products. The ads in these magazines are in fact NOT reliable prevention materials and tobacco companies should not be promoted as a trusted source.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Rogers’ Scare Tactics and “Unsafe Public Wifi”

  As I tweeted yesterday, I had a surprising experience with Rogers customer service yesterday. I was calling to add a text plan to my wife’s cellphone account (the fact that her current plan – which includes hundreds of voice minutes, 1 GB of data, and an assortment of additional services – still charges 15 cents (soon 20 cents) per text is fodder for different post). After I agreed to pay a few more dollars each month to cover texts, the agent asked if used my laptop to access public wifi networks. When I said that I did, he asked if I knew the dangers of using public wifi, which I was told included the possibility of hackers accessing my data or inserting viruses onto my computer. Given the risks, the agent continued, might I be interested in the Rogers’ Rocket Stick?

• A metered Internet is a regulatory failure

  But tell that to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the body supposedly responsible for regulating electronic media for our well-being. The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Bullet points for ACTA debate in the EU

      “Practice what we preach, not what we do”. ACTA is a legally binding treaty for the EU and EU member states but only a voluntary global benchmark for the US. While the EU considers it a legal obligation, the US considers ACTA a “voluntary agreement” that despite clearly contradicting a number of US laws will have no legal impact in the US. Therefore, ACTA will give a competitive advantage to US businesses who will enjoy a more flexible system, for example with the US “fair use” of copyrighted material, while European innovation, especially SMEs will be constrained by the binding obligations of ACTA and other new EU legislation that will increase costs and risks in Europe with regards to copyright enforcement. The US Supreme Court has recently ruled that a law very similiar to ACTA that established very high damages and penalties for IP violations was unsconstititional.

    • Commission’s lost answer to Schaake question arrived

      Here it is, the missing answer to Dutch MEP M. Schaake, which as the document shows was indeed published far too late although referenced in earlier statements to other parties. The Commission arrogant as ever simply disputes the substance. For the first time the Commission states that the provisions in ACTA such as civil and criminal sanctions relate to the “commercial aspects of IPR” legal base in Art 207 of the Treaties, a legal opinion that you would like to see get tested at the ECJ.

    • Certainly, the professors should know better

      Already on 24 or 25 November 2010, the Commission and Council Presidency initialled ACTA. This became clear at the Ad hoc meeting – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a DG Trade meeting to inform and consult civil society about ACTA. Mr Pedro Velasco Martins, Deputy Head of Unit, Public Procurement and Intellectual Property Directorate-General for Trade, represented the Commission.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Skills Are Hot on Improving IT Hiring Front

That’s according to global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which on Monday reported that employers announced plans to cut only 46,825 IT jobs during 2010–a full 73 percent fewer than the 174,629 technology job cuts in 2009.

Certifiable: Why Get a Vendor/Distribution Neutral Linux Certification?

In this second in his series of online videos, Ross Brunson of LPICPrep describes the value of a vendor and distribution neutral Linux certification.

Desktop

• IBM rolls out virtual desktop offering

  The VDI package will allow workers to access desktops from a variety of devices, including iPads and thin clients. They could access both Microsoft Windows and Linux-based operating system desktops. Users can even run the desktops without connectivity, by use of a USB drive.

• Five seriously cool conky set-ups for the Linux desktop

  It’s seen by some as the stat setup of geeks, but once you move past the desktops filled with blocks of terminal-style output, Conky is capable of transforming your desktop into something pretty special.

Audiocasts/Shows

• 2011 Linux Predictions | LAS | s15e03

Kernel Space

• Intel Core i5 2500K Linux Performance

  Earlier this month Intel released their first “Sandy Bridge” processors to much excitement. However, for Linux users seeking to utilize the next-generation Intel HD graphics found on these new CPUs, it meant problems. Up to this point we have largely been looking at the graphics side of Sandy Bridge, and while we have yet to publish any results there due to some isolated issues, on the CPU side its Linux experience and performance has been nothing short of incredible. Here are the first Linux benchmarks of the Intel Core i5 2500K processor.

• Natty to get kernel 2.6.38

  Just a short little update to let the OMG crowd be the first to hear. Andy Whitcroft reported in a bug report that Natty is about to get the 2.6.38 kernel.

• AMD Offers OpenGL 4.1 Support On Linux

  The new functionality is made possible with the release of the latest professional and consumer graphics drivers, ATI FirePro and ATI FireGL unified driver 8.801, and AMD CatalystTM 10.12, available on the AMD website.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 270.18 Linux Beta Driver Is Here

    This morning I talked about a stable NVIDIA Linux driver update (v260.19.36) and that a 270.xx beta driver would be imminent. It turns out, however, that the NVIDIA 270.18 Beta driver is already publicly available. It can be tested for Linux x86/x86_64 with a couple of new features to this proprietary graphics driver.

  • Cairo 1.12 Is Being Prepped With New Capabilities

    Intel’s Chris Wilson has announced the Cairo 1.11.2 snapshot, which is the first development look at what’s to come with version 1.12 of the Cairo drawing library. Besides introducing support for creating Bezier surface gradients and working up the API in some areas, there’s many other improvements being introduced in Cairo 1.12.

Applications

• Touchégg allows you to Assign actions to Multitouch gestures in Linux

  Want a three-finger pinch on your multi-touch trackpad to minimize all windows? Dream of a five-finger tap emulating your mouse scroll-wheel?

• Photo Op: Piwigo

• Purple: a new Dictionary app from the elementary project

  I doubt that dictionaries are on the top of most peoples ‘must have app’ lists, but the release of the elementary projects lush looking lexicon may just change that…

• One Package Manager for them All

  The idea of one universal package format for all distributions has been batted around a few times over the years. One of the most notable was Ryan C. Gordon’s idea of FatELF files. Reactions varied from supportive to skeptical to down right opposed. Well, it seems a new team from major distributions is coming together to implement a “common application installer API and infrastructure.”

• giPlayer – A python-gtk wrapper for get_iplayer

  giPlayer is a very simple python gtk gui to download BBC programmes on the Linux OS. With a deb file it should easily work on all debian based versions of Linux including Ubuntu. There is no help but it is fairly straightforward to use. It is a wrapper for get_iplayer. If you wish to understand in more detail how it downloads programmes you can read the command line program get_iplayer help file.

• Proprietary

  • ESET NOD antivirus solution comes to Linux

    And so they have decided it was time to join the few proprietary antivirus solutions for the Linux desktop.

  • CoreTrace Brings Application Whitelisting to Linux, Mac

    As a result of building Bouncer for Linux, a small part of the program might end up becoming open source.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Be More Productive in Ubuntu Using Keyboard Shortcuts

  • 4 linux masquerading

  • How to continue partially downloaded files using wget

  • Linux Firewall Tutorial: IPTables Tables, Chains, Rules Fundamentals

  • How to change the language of AWStats statistics on Debian Linux (ISPConfig 3)

  • How To Enable Two Finger Scrolling In Ubuntu 10.10

  • Install Xfce And Xfce Goodies On Ubuntu 10.10

  • Getting rid off Catalyst

  • Why ‘export’ if i could just direct assign the variables in bash?

  • Puddletag – A Powerful Mp3 tag editor for Ubuntu Linux

  • Vagrant set up, Part 1

  • Securing Apache – Part 1

  • Oxygenise your Apache

  • Install VLC 1.1.6 In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Via PPA

    VLC 1.1.6 was released yesterday, bringing security fixes and many improvements. Here’s the complete VLC 1.1.6 changelog:

    * Security updates in codecs and demuxers
    * Support for RTP/PCM 24bits, audio/L24
    * Faster Webm/VP8 decoding
    * Major updates in most language translations
    * KDE and PulseAudio integration improvements
    * Subtitles fixes and improvements
    * Improvements in visualisations and interfaces
    * Codecs updates
    * Many miscellaneous fixes

• Games

  • Sintel The Game

    But time passed and nothing showed up; the Blender Foundation showed no plans for another official Blender Game Engine project… Until a bunch of unaffiliated Blender artists decided to have a crack at making the project themselves without the official sponsorship of the Foundation, and started the Sintel The Game project (yay Free Culture).

  • User Days January 29-30 Schedule

    On the weekend of January 29-30th we will be hosting our 3rd Ubuntu User Days event in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

  • Dominions 3: The Awakening 3.26

    Illwinter Game Design released a patch for the turn-based strategy game Dominions 3: The Awakening this week; changes include:

    * Improved performance and window responsiveness during the ‘AI thinking’ host stage.
    * It was sometimes possible to continue sacrificing slaves even if your temple had burned down. Fixed.
    * Fixed crash during turn generation.
    * popkill now works for non-commanders as well.
    * Command line switch -nonationinfo is now implemented.
    * Yogini was not a female. Many a date ended with a surprise. Fixed.
    * Pulseaudio on Linux no longer requires Pulseaudio dev package to be installed.
    * New modding commands for underwater recruiting.
    * Modding: Maximum number of spells increased to 2000.
    * Modding: Maximum number of name types increased to 100.
    * Many, many more changes, corrections, and additions.

  • Lutris

    The Universal Gaming Platform For GNU Linux

    Lutris is a gaming platform planning to support as many games as possible for GNU/Linux. It takes care of installing and running the games by setting up the best environment in order to provide the most enjoyable gaming experience.

Desktop Environments

• Desktop Environment of the Year

  If you’re looking for Fluxbox, Window Maker, Enlightenment or similar options – they are in the Window Manager of the Year poll.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • New Improved Amarok 2.4 “Slipstream” Released, Install in Ubuntu Maverick, Natty via PPA

    Amarok 2.4 codenamed “Slipstream” was released some days ago. Amarok has evolved a lot over the year and we had followed the Amarok evolution in its each and every step. Now with the release of Amarok 2.4 final, a lot has changed. Here is a quick preview.

  • Bangarang 2.0 Release Candidate

    I’m happy to announce that the Bangarang 2.0 Release Candidate is now available. It can be downloaded from opendesktop.org. Packagers are welcome to get the source tarball from here.

  • Amarok Insider – Issue 16

    The Amarok Team is very happy to announce a new edition of our Amarok Insider newsletter. This time, we have really packed it with information, cool insider details, and fun!

  • digiKam 1.8.0 released…

    digiKam team is proud to announce digiKam 1.8.0 release!

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome Shell Daily Build (January 24th, 2011) Video

    As requested by many of our readers, here is a video showing the latest GNOME Shell daily build (as of January 24th, 2011). There have been many changes to Gnome Shell since our last video, including the overview relayout (which is default for some time), notification changes, side-by-side tiling as well a functional notification area and many other changes.

Distributions

• Because Your Distro Should Be Cool!

  Reason 4: Small crew: Foresight is formed by a bunch of very, very enthusiastic group that really enjoy developing and maintaining a cool system! That means that we’re small enough to have an almost family-like relationship and all help out in whatever task needs to be done. That also means that we’re most of the time shorthanded and have a lot of things being worked by one single person! Some people may find this to be a hindrance but I like to see it as a great chance to get involved with an open source project! Do you want to maintain a package? Want to impress the world with your artistic skills? Is documentation your thing? There are very few hoops to jump through and you will learn a whole lot about Linux and running a distribution! What can I say, we are a small team that just love what we do!

• Reviews

  • Quick looks at Dragora GNU/Linux, Asturix and Fuduntu

  • Jolicloud Cloud-Based Linux Desktop Review

    Anyone trying this relative newcomer might call it accessible because it has an extremely easy-to-use interface. Or, it could be called accessible in the sense that it’s free and will run on minimal hardware. Or, it may be accessible because it integrates concepts familiar to social networking users directly into the main interface.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat plans expansion for Brisbane office

    Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat plans to expand its Brisbane support operation, revealing that some US Red Hat customers time support calls according to when calls are likely to be answered by Australian staff.

  • Red Hat builds gutsy, green virtualization machine

    Three years in the making, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 is a gutsy, green upgrade that features native support for KVM, the Linux kernel-based virtual machine.

  • LCA 2011: Multiculturalism a major plus for Red Hat

    Multiculturalism may be something that is frowned upon in some parts of Australia but for Red Hat, the premier open source company, it has proved to be a blessing and nothing else.

  • Fedora

    • Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15

      One of my long-standing pet projects – Consistent Network Device Naming, is finally coming to Fedora (emphasizing the 2 of the Fedora F’s: Features and First), and thereafter, all Linux distributions. What is this, you ask?

      Systems running Linux have long had ethernet network devices named ethX. Your desktop likely has one ethernet port, named eth0. This works fine if you have only one network port, but what if, like on Dell PowerEdge servers, you have four ethernet ports? They are named eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3, corresponding to the labels on the back of the chassis, 1, 2, 3, 4, respectively. Sometimes. Aside from the obvious confusion of names starting at 0 verses starting at 1, other race conditions can happen such that each port may not get the same name on every boot, and they may get named in an arbitrary order. If you add in a network card to a PCI slot, it gets even worse, as the ports on the motherboard and the ports on the add-in card may have their names intermixed.

    • Breaking a few eggs: Fedora 15 changes network device naming

      The Fedora Project is getting ready to break a lot of networking scripts that depend on the ethX naming convention — by being the first major distro to ship Consistent Network Device Naming.

      Matt Domsch, Fedora contributor and technology strategy in Dell’s office of the CTO, put out a call for testing the new naming scheme this Thursday with a description of the new system. Systems that have a single network device have no problems — one Ethernet port means you have one device name (eth0). But two or more network devices, and the naming is not assured on startup.

    • Fedora 14 on Lenovo Thinkpad X100e with Athlon Neo MV-40

      I recently read a perspective that buying a “Windows 7 computer” and replacing its OS with GNU/Linux actually hurts our cause. I disagree with the author of that statement for two reasons. One is that wiping out Windows 7 on this machine means that I’m getting out there with a machine that people think of as needing Windows to run, and showing them, at the coffee shop, at the playground, at the library, in the classroom, that GNU/Linux supports every piece of hardware on this brand new machine, even though most manufacturers don’t make it a selling point. Think of how important that is when there are still people saying that when you switch to Linux[sic] you should know that hardware support is virtually nonexistent. That’s bullsh*t, but people won’t know it’s bullsh*t if we all used machines cobbled together from spare parts.

    • Red Hat in Fringe

    • Fedora: from bleeding edge to bleeding contributors

      As many other problems, this is a design problem, and I am not talking here about graphic design or interaction design, I talk about a higher level design, one that is perhaps the Board’s competence: is the definition of the Fedora purpose and is implemented with policies, peer pressure, the power of example and so on. The problem is: Fedora used to be a distro aimed at advanced users, the ones that are likely, and we want, to contribute back and now is changing into a distro aimed at the Girl Scouts of America. A huge identity crisis, we are tying to become the second Ubuntu and this is not good.

    • We love stinkin’ badges.

      At FUDCon Tempe, though, we’ve added a little twist. Name badges this time around will feature a QR Code that includes a little bit of contact information for each attendee. This code can be scanned by certain smartphone apps, so if you meet someone and you’d like to keep in contact later, you can scan each other’s badges to make it easier to do so. The excellent suggestion for using a QR Code came from contributor Juan Rodriguez (nushio), and all-around superstar Ian Weller provided the script to create the badges.

• Debian Family

  • The Bizarre Cathedral – 91

  • Debian is eating its own dog food more than ever

    I completely share the underlying assumption. Eating its own dog food is very important if you want to build a Linux distribution and claim with some confidence that it’s of quality and usable.

  • Debian derivatives census

    The Debian Project would like to invite representatives of distributions derived from Debian to participate in a census of Debian derivatives. In addition we would like to invite representatives of distributions derived from Debian to join the Debian derivatives front desk. Debian encourages members of derivative distributions to contribute their ideas, patches, bug reports to Debian and to the upstream developers of software included in Debian.

    By participating in the census you will increase the visibility of your derivative within Debian, provide Debian contributors with a contact point and a set of information that will make it easier for them to interact with your distribution. Representatives of distributions derived from Ubuntu are encouraged to get their distribution added to the Ubuntu Derivative Team wiki page.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu One In Your Living Room

      A few months ago, I acquired a PC that has served me well as in my living room. It has Boxee on it, which is a really neat little media center application. Having it as a resource has allowed us to get rid of cable TV entirely, so we’ve been quite happy with it.

      Earlier this week, I thought “I wish I could stream my Ubuntu One music onto this machine.” Enter the Ubuntu One Boxee App.

    • Discover Ubuntu (Ubuntu Commercial)

    • London’s Design Museum Recognizes Ubuntu Fonts

      The Ubuntu Project today announced the opening of a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum dedicated to the Ubuntu Font, in collaboration with international typeface designers Dalton Maag.

      Entitled “Shape My Language,” the exhibition will run from January 28 to February 28, 2011. The exhibition marks a significant milestone for the Ubuntu Project’s advance in design and aims to enhance the consumer experience of using open computing platforms, such as Ubuntu.

    • Some Useful Basics For Newcomers To Ubuntu

      Getting Ubuntu running on your PC is pretty straightforward, and most of its features are fairly obvious if you’ve been used to a graphical user interface like Windows or Mac OS X. Here’s a handful of tips to help you make the transition and find some useful features if you’ve started playing with Ubuntu.

    • Top 5 Bit Torrent Clients for Ubuntu

      Applications for Ubuntu/Linux are not at all in short supply. But picking the best from the rest is not an easy thing to do. There are a number of really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu out there. Here we intend feature a collection of 5 really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu which we think are among the best.

    • Ubuntu Embraces QT Toolkit: Blurring Linux Development?

      GTK vs QT. Now there’s a fast path to a geeky argument between passionate programmers of all walks of life. Despite this once widely debated divide, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu is about to add QT libraries to the Ubuntu release known as Ubuntu version 11.10.

      According to Shuttleworth, the reasoning behind the inclusion of QT libraries in Ubuntu stems from their perceived “ease of use and integration advantages.” I’ll take his word for it until I can find glaring data to support a decent counter-argument, since I’m not a programmer myself.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Xubuntu 11.04 To Get A New Default Theme Called Greybird [Screenshots]

        Starting with version 11.04 alpha 2 (to be released on February 3rd), Xubuntu will use a new theme called “Greybird” as the default theme. The GTK theme is inspired by Elementary but there are quite a few differences between Greybird and Elementary.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Meego SDK update has Windows XP and Windows 7 support

      While many developers use machines running Linux to code, support for Windows XP and Windows 7 is vital to The Linux Foundation’s attempts to increase the number of developers working on software applications to run on the Linux-based Meego operating system.

  • Android

    • Excellent K-9 mail app for Android keeps your messages on a leash

      Google’s conventional e-mail client for Android has always felt like a second-class citizen compared to the company’s GMail application. It has a very limited user interface, lacks basic features like support for moving messages between folders, and isn’t particularly reliable. Google has been slow to address the program’s weaknesses and doesn’t seem to notice most of the complaints.

      Fortunately, there is a good third-party fork called K-9. It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s highly functional and well-maintained. K-9 is based on Google’s original Android mail client and is similarly distributed under the open source Apache license, but it’s got a whole pile of additional features.

    • Android update study finds HTC, Motorola have best track record

      Google’s Android mobile operating system is being adopted widely by handset makers and network operators, but not all of the vendors are committed to keeping their devices updated. Several Android handset brands have been tarnished by poor update practices and it’s becoming an issue that enthusiasts factor into their buying decisions.

      In a laudable effort to paint a clear picture of the update landscape, ComputerWorld assembled a straightforward statistical comparison of update performance across carriers and handset makers. The study looks solely at the percentage of handsets updated to Android 2.2—the previous version of the operating system—in 2010.

    • Mobile phone to blast into orbit

      The mobile will run on Google’s Android operating system but the exact model has not yet been disclosed.

    • Hands on: Dolphin HD browser for Android is swimmingly good

      One of the strengths of Google’s Android mobile operating system is its support for customization. Android enthusiasts can augment the capabilities of their Android device by replacing key components of the platform with superior third-party alternatives.

      There are a growing number of really great third-party home screen implementations and Web browsers that users can install directly from the Android Market. Some of the popular Web browsers include Opera, Skyfire, Firefox, and Dolphin HD. We plan to write up a full comparison at some point in the future, but decided to start by giving you a close look at our favorite: Dolphin HD.

    • Time for Google to take control of the Android update process

      Android is always a hot topic on the web since it’s grown so big. Unfortunately for Google, a lot of the conversation centers around the pitiful update process that has customers venting frustration at the delays (or lack) of updates for their Android phones. I understand that the update process is complicated and involves too many entities, but Google is ultimately the company that gets kicked in the shins as its brand gets dragged through the mud over the frustrating update situation. That’s reason enough for Google to step in and take control over the Android update process, no matter how many partner feathers get ruffled.

• OLPC

  • Who is to Blame for OLPC Peru’s Failure? An OLPC Intern Viewpoint

    Jeff Patzer, a 2010 OLPC intern in Peru, is publishing an amazing set of posts where he tries to explain why the OLPC Peru “Una Laptop Por Nino” is failing.

• Tablets

  • Nokia MeeGo Tablet Leaked by Mobile Review… As Usual

    After checking out Toshiba’s impressive tablet, the folks of Tablet News uncovered an image of a Nokia MeeGo tablet, that popped up on bugs.meego.com as developers were working on it trying to finalize the OS.

  • Motorola Xoom Android Tablet: Launch Date and Price

    The ancipated Android Tablet, Motorola Xoom is expected to arrive soon. Price and Launch date of Xoom has been revealed from Motorola. The Xoom Android tablet from Motorola sports a 10.1 inch touchscreen display with 1,280×800 high screen resolution.

  • Nokia MeeGo tablet leaks: Prototype or dev-device?

    What looks to be a prototype Nokia tablet running MeeGo has surfaced, though it’s unclear whether it’s an authentic slate, an oversized smartphone or merely a development device for the Intel/Nokia collaborative platform itself.

Another RockStar at ForgeRock

It’s already stimulated a great deal of interest and we already have a number of customers for it. We realised it needs a great engineer to act as ForgeRock’s lead architect for OpenIDM. So I am delighted to say that, starting today, Andreas Egloff is joining ForgeRock as Chief Architect, OpenIDM.

Will it Blend? A Look at Blender’s New User Interface

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.

Open Source Isn’t Necessarily Free From Bit Rot

One of the much-discussed advantages of open source software is that it should make it easier for future generations to access data. But in his keynote address at Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf noted that even open source systems weren’t completely free from the challenge of data being created that might not be accessible to future software, a problem he refers to as “bit rot”.

Reduce ongoing costs, increase flexibility with open source software

In an age where computers have become not a luxury or even a necessity, but an integral part of modern business, software has become the cornerstone of commerce. However, proprietary software can eat into organisations’ ICT budgets, with a hefty purchase price and often annual licensing fees that can further drain resources.

In addition to this, because of the prevalence of technology within organisations, there are often many third party tools. Integrating these with proprietary software can cause issues to crop up within all of the tools, not to mention the costs associated with application integration.

Request your limited edition opensource.com anniversary t-shirt today

Events

• Switches rescued from floods for Linux.conf.au

  Relocated Brisbane conference faced major tech challenge.

  Annual Linux conference Linux.conf.au has kicked off at a quickly-located alternative venue in Brisbane, but only after a bout of last-minute organisation which included having to rescue networking equipment from a flooded retailer.

• Floods can’t dampen Linux.conf.au mood

  Nothing can dampen the spirit surrounding this year’s Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, not even a flood crisis, as it officially kicked off in the state’s soggy capital today.

• Robots running on Linux compete in RoboCup [#LCA2011]

• Google’s VP Vint Cerf #lca2011 keynote [Live blog]

• Day one of #LCA2011 in photos (Gallery)

• #LCA2011 – Thinking of starting a small business? Check out these principles

• #LCA2011 – How does one create a sustainable open source business?

• LCA2011 – Picked up in a Linux car? You betcha.

• Linux.conf.au 2011 – Day One

  This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organisers that the conference is able to continue at all.

  In December of 2010, a prolonged period of torrential rain contributed to massive flooding in Queensland. With 31 people reported dead and an estimated 1 billion AUD in damages, this is a natural disaster on a large scale that was spread across the state. To put the scale of the disaster in perspective, Queensland is 1.7m square km, or larger then the state of Texas. Arriving in Brisbane on Sunday the 23rd, there were still some traces showing where the water line was, but the cleanup work has been impressive.

• Govt lock-in overhyped: Linux Oz president

  Under the policy, government staff will operate locked desktop stations where software, browsers and add-ons are controlled by an administrator. AGIMO also mandated the OOXML standard format in the document, which is unsupported by several Office alternatives.

  The OOXML standard selection has drawn the ire of many commenters on the AGIMO blog, with some accusing the government of moving towards a vendor lock-in with Microsoft.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Vote Now: Game On Community Choice Award

    Hope you’ve had a chance to check out some of the games in the Game On Gallery over the past couple weeks. We’ve been having a lot of fun playing them ourselves and productivity is at an all-time high score!

  • Best Firefox extensions: Organize your way to a better Firefox

  • Mozilla’s Firefox Do-not-track Feature Doesn’t Guarantee Anonymity

  • Firefox’s Linuxy Hardware Acceleration Problem

  • Firefox 4 beta 10 this week, beta 11 next week

  • Firefox 4 betas 10, 11 planned

  • Mozilla Firefox 4 beta 9 beats Google Chrome 10 in terms of benchmarks

    A web browser is the gateway to internet world , so each and every company is giving their best to make their browser fast, stable and with tons of feature. forget the era of IE6, now browser are a lot faster, stable , light and took less memory. In this blog I am going to discuss two browser market’s best Firefox’s beta 9 and most innovative browser Google chrome 10.

Oracle

• NetBeans 7.0 IDE due this spring

  Version 7. 0 of the NetBeans open source IDE is due in April, featuring capabilities for Java SE 7, as well as faster deployment to the WebLogic Server application server, according to the NetBeans Oracle-sponsored website.

  NetBeans has served as the chief rival to the Eclipse Foundation’s Eclipse IDE. In a beta release stage since mid-November, NetBeans 7.0 includes backing for Java Development Kit 7, which encompasses version 7 of the standard edition of Java. JDK 7 capabilities cited on the NetBeans 7 release notes include editor enhancements such as code completion and backing for Project Coin, which offers “small language” changes such as type inferencing.

• Oracle continues protectionist stance on open source

  Oracle has been making what seem to some as drastic changes in the way it handles the open source projects it inherited from Sun Microsystems. The open source community has watched with anything from bemusement to outright shock at some of the actions Oracle has taken without apparent rhyme or reason. But if you look close enough, the reason will usually make itself clear soon enough.

  Last Thursday, Jaroslav Tulach, NetBeans Platform Architect for Oracle, posted a public message on the JUnit Yahoo! groups that asked the JUnit developers to consider switching from testing framework’s current Common Public License to something that would be more compatible with the rest of the NetBeans IDE.

CMS

• Gospel Music Channel – watchgmctv.com

  Headquartered in Atlanta, the Gospel Music Channel (gmc) is a channel that features uplifting music and entertainment, including specials, movies and series that the whole family can enjoy. gmc is the only TV network with every program certified as family safe by the Parents Television Council. DIRECTV, Verizon FiOS, and local cable systems bring gmc into roughly 50 million homes across the country. The brand boasts such popular shows as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Highway to Heaven, Promised Land, Sister Sister, Early Edition and Amen. The website receives about 750,000 monthly page views from 250,000 unique visitors.

  The channel recently launched a full site redesign in conjunction with an upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. The project team from Mediacurrent would like to share some of what they’ve learned from the design and build of the site with the Drupal community.

BSD

• Popular Free *BSDs in Full Development

  Three well-known BSD clones are in their latest developmental cycles and have recently released test versions. FreeBSD is closing in on version 7.4 with a RC2, GhostBSD just released their 2.0 Beta 2, and PC-BSD 8.2 has seen its second release candidate as well.

Project Releases

• Announce: OpenSSH 5.7 released

  OpenSSH 5.7 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

Government

• Feds Get E for Effort with Open Source

  The majority of U.S. Cabinet-level offices in the federal government received a failing mark in their open source efforts, though a few others, such as the Department of Defense, excelled in a recent report card from an advocacy group.

Openness/Sharing

• In Defense of Free Culture in Brazil

  We, the undersigned individuals and organizations from civil society, in this letter express expectations and tasks for the formulation of public policies for culture, giving a warm welcome to Minister Ana de Hollanda, the first woman to hold the position.

  We write in order to cooperate with your administration that is about to begin, as we have done over the past eight years with the Ministry of Culture, assured that President Dilma Rousseff wishes that the policies and guidance that have earned the Ministry relevance, prominence and broad support from civil society, be continued and expanded.

• 2999 [creative commons: 'Music lovers, check out Peppermill Records' "2999" project for a fantastic selection CC-licensed tunes']

• Open Access/Content

  • Publishers cut off doctors’ free access to medical journals in poor countries

    What a world of possibilities must have opened up for a hospital doctor or a medical student in Bangladesh or Kenya when the World Health Organisation concluded an agreement with publishers in 2001 to put the world’s most important, respected and groundbreaking medical journals online for free. Suddenly the boundaries were down. A doctor in downtown Nairobi might have a clinic with crumbling walls and precious little equipment, but he had access to the same cutting-edge knowledge as any medic in New York or London.

  • COL Blog

    It’s a great feeling to be startled by the seminal significance of an event that you expected to be routine! On 14 January I went to a reception at the residence of the US Ambassador to UNESCO, David Killion, to celebrate the launch of the World Library of Science. Not having done my homework properly I assumed that this might simply be a donation of some books to UNESCO. Instead, I believe that I was witness to the most important event of the year for the future of education globally – and certainly the most important initiative to date in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

  • EFF Urges California Court to Grant Public Access to Electronic Mapping Data

    Last week, EFF joined a coalition of public interest and media groups in filing an amicus brief (pdf) urging a California Court of Appeal to uphold the public’s right to access electronic files created and stored by local governments. The case, Sierra Club v. Superior Court, focuses on the public’s right to access geographic information system (GIS) basemaps created by local governments in California.

Programming

• Google Summer of Code Announced at LCA

  Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team “encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community – we need your support.” Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith, member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011.

Clarence Thomas Thinks Rules Are For Other People

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life and are not subject to the whims of electoral politics. This is so they can make their decisions on the law and what is right, not on what would get them re-elected (as many politicians do). But that does not mean there are rules they must abide by just like all other public officials or government servants.

[...]

The government watchdog group Common Cause is reporting that Thomas’ wife earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007. However, Thomas’ financial disclosure statements for those years shows that he checked the box saying “none” on the part of the form where a spouse’s income was to be reported. Common Cause also believes Mrs. Thomas received an undisclosed salary from Liberty Central in 2009, and Thomas again declared no income for her on his financial statement.

People’s Daily European version published in Frankfurt

With the goal of serving overseas Chinese, Chinese agencies and consulates, the new version of 28 pages will spread information on China’s political progress, economical development and cultural prosperity to European countries through objective and comprehensive reports.

Bookshops reply to the ebook threat

THE digital era is often seen as a threat to the existence of the traditional bookshop. But the launch yesterday of Readings’s ebook store, using new technology developed in Melbourne, could lead the way for independent bookshops to thrive in a brave new world.

The technology, developed by Melbourne company Inventive Labs, allows readers to buy their digital editions and read them on any device that has a web browser. The Readings store is initially offering titles from smaller publishers but negotiations to stock editions from larger ones and multinationals are under way.

The Death of Book Design

It’s no wonder. All the smiling sadists with their instruments of torture, their Kindles and iBooks, their Nooks and Tabs, had been unleashed on his body. Right in public, on busses and in coffee shops, they crushed and stretched his text, madly changing from Arial to Verdana to Baskerville and back again, viciously reflowing his insides over and over. It was just too much for his system to bear.

When a little menu popped up offering to change an entire book to Cochin in one instant, friends of Book Design knew the end wasn’t far off.

Book Design is survived by his stepsons, Digit Al Typography and E. Books.

There are rumors occasionally that Book Design has been sighted here or there in an old barn in Derbyshire, or off the coast of San Francisco, but no conclusive proof has ever been offered. The trade in so-called relics, like the phony Folio of Fortunata, with its promise of perfect alignment and infinite registration, are nothing but hoaxes perpetrated on the weak-minded.

Alternative search engine Qwiki is now open to the public

Qwiki, an innovative search product, is a service that from its very inception has been the target of praise. The company won the most recent TechCrunch Disrupt, putting them under a large spotlight.

Science

• Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.

  I received a letter that ends, as far as I am concerned, the discussion about 3D. It doesn’t work with our brains and it never will.

  The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.

• Engineer designs his own heart implant

  Tal Golesworthy, a British engineer from Tewkesbury, suffered from Marfan syndrome, an inherited condition that threatened to split his aortic root. After being told that he urgently needed a mechanical valve implant, he designed one that was better than the one already in use, custom tailored to his heart (as displayed on his MRIs) and used a rapid prototyper to refine the design. He received his implant in 2004, and 23 more people have had them implanted since.

• How words get the message across

  Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists.

Health/Nutrition

• Smokers’ brains light up during smoking scenes in movies and on TV

  If your New Year’s resolutions include a plan to give up smoking, you might want to avoid the TV and steer clear of movies for a while, too.

  Scientists have found that simply watching movie stars take a drag on a cigarette is enough to spark a pattern of activity in smokers’ brains that mirrors the act of lighting up.

  This response to seeing smoking on screen is thought to make cravings more intense for those who are trying to quit a habit that kills 5 million people worldwide each year.

• Fiji Water Flees Fiji

  The Fiji bottled water company is stomping out of Fiji in protest after the country’s government increased a tax it charges on the water from one-third of a Fiji cent to 15 cents per liter. Half of Fijians lack access to safe water while the Fiji Water company exports clean bottled water to the U.S., where Americans shell out 3,300 times what tap water costs to buy it.

  [...]

  Ironically, Fiji Water, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — beverage companies that also extract water from developing countries facing water scarcity — have been named finalists for the U.S. Secretary of State’s 2010 Award for Corporate Excellence.

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

• Tuesday’s security updates

• VLC Media Player 1.1.6 fixes critical vulnerabilities

• Nigerian Scam Version 99.5 – Pretend To Be The FBI

  I love reading the more creative spam. Some of it’s absolutely hilarious. A long time ago, when UseNet was more active, I used to take part in a NewsGroup dedicated to making fun of spam, and spammers. We put together some truly funny stuff.

  My favorite wasn’t actually spam – a researcher who was doing a sociological study on love and sex made the mistake of posting a questionnaire to EVERY alt.sex NewsGroup, including ALT.SEX.CTHULHU. Several of us answered it, taking the roles of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth (my contribution), and other entities who’s main interest in humans was as a dietary supplement. I wonder to this day what she thought when she saw those responses!

Defence/Police/Aggression

• EU should appoint a mediator for Albania

  The violent clashes in Tirana, Albania, last Friday are unacceptable for a European country and for a State that aspires to become a member of the European Union. Three died and over 60 others are reported injured.

• We are not loyal – to a government of racists! – report of the Jan.15 demonstration in Tel-Aviv

  `No, no, no – Fascism will not pass!` echoed the old familiar chant along King George Street – and was answered with a new and more ominous one: `People, wake up! – Fascism is already passing!`.

• Wikileaks Cables on Israel’s Gaza Onslaught

  The cables give a notably one-sided account of the assault. Because they take their daily reporting primarily from the Israeli media, the cables keep a tally of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza and dramatically describe “burned dolls and destroyed children’s toys” at an unoccupied kindergarten in Beer Sheba hit by a rocket, but make virtually no mention of Israel’s intensive air and artillery bombardment of Gaza, including its civilian population. There are no reports of burned Palestinian babies or very few of destroyed property in Gaza. Even the western media provided more accurate coverage of Palestinian casualties than this.

• Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process

  The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

• Enabling Crimes Against Palestinians – How Canada Subsidizes Illegal Israeli Settlements

  Canada`s tax system currently subsidizes Israeli settlements that Ottawa deems illegal, however, the Conservative government says there`s nothing that can be done about it.

• Al Arakib Residents Expelled To Make Way for Trees

  On Sunday, January 16th, 2011, the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) accompanied by a heavy police presence destroyed the Bedouin village of Al Arakib for the 9th time since its total destruction in July 2010. During the village’s destruction the police forces used large amounts of violent force, including sponge bullets (a police method of crowd dispersal) which injured eleven of the residents, one of them in his eye.

• Gulet Mohamed Headed Home?

  On Tuesday morning, the lawyer for Gulet Mohamed, an American teen who has been detained in Kuwait for a month, filed suit against the US government, claiming that by placing Mohamed on the no-fly list based only on suspicion, the government is denying him the most basic right of citizenship—the right to live in America. Just over an hour after the papers were filed, a federal district judge in Alexandria, Virginia ordered an emergency hearing. By mid-afternoon, Justice Department lawyers were in court, telling the judge that Mohamed would be on his way back to the States in short order.

• Crisis escalates in Albania after death of 3 protesters

  A political crisis has escalated in Albania as the government and the opposition traded blame for the deaths of three protesters during a violent demonstration against an administration accused of deeply rooted corruption.

  Arrest warrants had been issued for six officers of the National Guard, army troops under Interior Ministry command who guard government institutions and senior officials, the Prosecutor General’s office said.

• The Empire Strikes Back

  Rep. Lleana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl), a long-time hawk on Cuba and leftist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia, is the new chair of the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the rightist Rep. Connie Mack (D-Fl) heads up the House subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs. Ros-Lethinen is already preparing hearings aimed at Venezuela and Bolivia, and Mack will try to put the former on the State Department’s list of countries sponsoring terrorism.

  Ros-Lehtinen plans to target Venezuela’s supposed ties to Middle East terrorist groups and Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and to push for economic sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and banks. “It will be good for congressional subcommittees to start talking about [President of Venezuela Hugo] Chavez, about [President of Bolivia Evo] Morales, about issues that have not been talked about,” she told the Miami Herald.

• Woman Arrested For Recording Attempt To Report Police Officer Who Sexually Assaulted Her

  We’ve had a few stories about how police have been abusing wiretap laws to arrest people who video or audiotape the police, and here’s a whopper of a case. Apparently a woman named Tiawanda Moore has been arrested and faces 15 years in prison in a case that goes to trial shortly. Her “crime”? Apparently, after being sexually assaulted by a Chicago police officer, she went to the Chicago Police Department’s internal affairs group to report the officer.

• Shame on the Kennedys

  In yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe, Bryan Bender reported on the Kennedy family’s tight-fisted and iron-willed efforts to keep the official papers of Robert F. Kennedy secret. Those papers, spanning Kennedy’s public career, are housed under close guard at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The papers of greatest interest to historians and researchers are those from Kennedy’s years of service as Attorney General in the Administration of his brother, John F. Kennedy. In particular, historians say the records presumably contain valuable archival resources — perhaps diaries, notes, messages and memos, phone logs and recordings, and other documents — that would reveal details, and answer questions, about Robert Kennedy’s role in the early 1960s as the coordinator of Operation Mongoose, a covert effort to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro or to destabilize his regime.

• PA negotiators reject leaked report

  Palestinian Authority officials have come down hard on secret documents obtained by Al Jazeera showing that top negotiators offered major concessions to Israel in the division of holy sites and Jerusalem, the would-be capital city of a future Palestinian state.

  [...]

  “Al Jazeera tries to copy WikiLeaks,” Rabbo added.

  Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas official in Gaza told Al Jazeera that the Palestinian authority officials should be ashamed of themselves.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks cables: Turkey let US use airbase for rendition flights

  Turkey’s involvement in the controversial programme was revealed in a cable dated 8 June 2006, written by the then US ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson. The cable described Turkey as a crucial ally in the “global war on terror” and an important logistical base for the US-led war in Iraq.

• WikiLeaks on South Africa

  An explosive WikiLeaks cable claims that spy boss and President Jacob Zuma confidante Mo Shaik threatened to expose the “political skeletons” of Zuma’s enemies.

• The story behind the Palestine papers

  How 1,600 confidential Palestinian records of negotiations with Israel from 1999 to 2010 came to be leaked to al-Jazeera

• 2 turned away trying to visit WikiLeaks GI

  David House and blogger Jane Hamsher say in a statement they had not had problems previously driving onto the Quantico base.

• Submit a correction or amendment below.

  David House — a 23-year-old who just graduated from college — has been traveling from Boston to Quantico for five months to visit Bradley on his own. Everyone but David has stopped visiting Bradley; only once has a member of Bradley’s family seen him in Quantico.
  Just last month, David broke the news that Bradley’s physical and mental well-being were deteriorating in solitary confinement, and he was the first to challenge the Pentagon’s version of Bradley’s treatment. Because of his work for Bradley, David has been harassed by the FBI, and has had his computers and phones confiscated for several months without explanation. He recently returned from overseas, where he was raising funds for Bradley’s defense in the interim.

• NBC: U.S. can’t link accused Army private to Assange

  U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

  The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.

• Wikileaks Scandal Hits paraguayan president Fernando Lugo

  Latin America – Paraguay president may need “a little help from ’upstairs’ to govern” says U.S

  Natalia Viana, 19 de dezembro de 2010, 15.00 GMT

  Paraguay president Fernando Lugo, a center-left politician who was elected to office in April 2008, was seen as a potential ally to the U.S. by the U.S. embassy in Asuncion, so long as he had “more than just a little help from ’upstairs’ to govern as president” which Lugo was apparently willing to accept.

  “(S)o far, his signals to the United States Embassy have been clear — he is grateful for our offers of assistance and wants a close relationship,” wrote U.S. ambassador James Cason to Washington on June 2, 2008, adding: “If you can’t believe a priest, who can you believe?” (See cable here)

  From 1954 to 1989, Paraguay was run by Alfredo Stroessner, a right-wing dictator whose regime is also blamed for torture, kidnappings and corruption. Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, became president of the small land-locked country of 6.3 million people after promising to give land to the landless and end entrenched corruption, defeating the Colorado
  party which had ruled for six decades.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ex-wife of police spy tells how she fell in love and had children with him

  Environmental campaigners had been invited to the meeting at the Cock Tavern pub in Euston in June 1999. They were members of Reclaim the Streets, a group that had days earlier brought the City of London to a standstill. By chance, two strangers sat next to each other: Jim Sutton, an articulate, if at times moody, 34-year-old fitness fanatic who relished his role as the group’s driver, a function that earned him the sobriquet “Jim the Van”; and Laura, 28, an idealistic activist. Laura (not her real name) did not know that this new acquaintance, a man she would go on to marry and have children with, was in fact Jim Boyling, a police officer living undercover among eco-activists.

• Kochs Invade Canada

  After losing their fight for Proposition 23 in California, one might have hoped the world would be safe from oil-rich climate deniers Charles and David Koch for a little while.

  But unfortunately their misinformation campaign is drifting over the border into Ontario, Canada where renewable energy is once again under fire from the “forces of yesterday.”

  Tim Hudak, the leader of Ontario’s Conservative party, wants to gut the Ontario Green Energy Act — an initiative that Al Gore has said is “widely recognized now as the single best green energy program on the North American continent.” The Environmental Defence report Faces of Transformation analyzes the impact this legislation is having in Ontario.

• Canada sees staggering mildness as planet’s high-pressure record is “obliterated”

  The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.

• Won’t Someone Think of the Trees?

  The concept of the commons derives from common land. This still lives on in England, in the form of commons – like Clapham Common – and as national forests that all can use. Against that background, I am naturally appalled that the coalition government proposes selling off our forests in order to raise a few pennies to throw into the bottomless pit of our National Debt.

Finance

• WikiLeaks given Swiss bank account data

  Julius Baer has dismissed Elmer’s claims as baseless attempts to discredit the bank and its clients. It accuses him of both falsifying documents and sending death threats to its employees.

• Another go at categorising money technologies

  Our current era, Money 4.0, can be dated in retrospect to 1971 when Richard Nixon finally ended the gold standard and Visa introduced the Base 1 network for authenticating card payments based on the magnetic stripe. Money 4.0 is bits about bits, but we still apply the wrong mental model, and imagine it to be bits about atoms.

• Facebook To Make ‘Facebook Credits’ Mandatory For Game Developers (Confirmed)

  Facebook is about to ruffle some feathers. We’re hearing from one source that the social network is reaching out to game developers to inform them that it is making its own, official Facebook Credits currency mandatory. Our understanding is that it will be the exclusive currency as well.

• Making Sense of your Credit Card Number

  You credit card number may look like a random string of 16 digits that’s unique in the world but those digits reveal a little more than you think.

  For instance, the first digit of the card represents the category of industry which issued your credit card. American Express is in the travel category and cards issued by them have 3 as the first digit. If you have VISA or MasterCard, your card’s first digit should be either 4 or 5 as they are from the banking and financial industry.

• Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time

  ‘Plunder: The Crime of Our Time’ is a hard-hitting investigative film by Danny Schechter. The “News Dissector” explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed.

Politics/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Vindication (by Barack Obama) of Dick Cheney

  In the early months of Obama’s presidency, the American Right did to him what they do to every Democratic politician: they accused him of being soft of defense (specifically “soft on Terror”) and leaving the nation weak and vulnerable to attack. But that tactic quickly became untenable as everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was embracing and even expanding — rather than reversing — the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. As a result, leading right-wing figures began lavishing Obama with praise — and claiming vindication — based on Obama’s switch from harsh critic of those policies (as a candidate) to their leading advocate (once in power).

• Clearing Out the Regulatory Smog

  The Obama administration’s announcement today that it plans to “root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb” was, rather transparently, meant to appease business interests. It’s not really clear the degree to which the administration will follow through on that directive, or whether the move is a rhetorical flourish meant to stave off gripes that they’re ignoring the economy. But how dangerous is their repetition of talking points from the forces of deregulation—and with it the impression that federal agencies are sitting around making up rules just for the heck of it?

• Chevron’s Crude Attacks

  Joe Berlinger’s back is against the wall. Last week the independent filmmaker, already facing crushing debt from legal bills, was dealt a major blow in his continuing fight against the third largest company in America, Chevron.

  It’s a battle that epitomizes the hardship individuals face trying to challenge corporate giants that punch back with a knockout force of high-powered lawyers and unlimited cash.

  What’s more, Joe’s struggle continues to raise serious First Amendment issues and — as we approach the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — throws yet another spotlight on the increasingly pro-business stance of the nation’s legal system.

• Phone hacking enquiry: questions to Colin Myler and Tom Crone

  Q1501 Mr Watson: Mr Crone, on the Taylor case, your advice was to settle in April 2008, I think you said?

  Mr Crone: I agreed with the outside advice that was given, yes.

  Q1502 Mr Watson: So you took it to the Board in June 2008?

  Mr Crone: No, I did not take it to the Board; I reported to Mr Myler as editor, and at one stage we both reported it upwards together.

  Q1503 Mr Watson: A £700,000 payment would be a decision taken at Board level. Is that right?

  Mr Crone: I am not aware of that.

  Q1504 Mr Watson: So the News International Board did not agree the payment in any way?

  Mr Myler: What do you mean by the “Board”?

  Q1505 Mr Watson: Your managing Board; the directors of the company.

• Loyal Bushies Flagrantly Ignored The Law

  When we think of the Bush/Cheney White House we tend to think of policy failures, incompetence, comically flawed judgment, and systemic mismanagement.

Censorship

• Google fights Spanish call to remove links

  GOOGLE will this week challenge a Spanish demand to remove links to articles in newspapers and official gazettes that the subjects of the articles have complained are potentially defamatory.

  Spain’s data protection authority has ordered Google to remove almost 100 online articles from its search listings, which Google says would have a ”profound, chilling effect” on freedom of expression.

  Google will challenge the orders in a Madrid court tomorrow, the outcome of which could set a controversial new precedent for internet publishing in Spain.

Privacy

• Mozilla Leads the Way on Do Not Track

  Earlier today, Mozilla announced plans to incorporate a Do Not Track feature into their next browser release, Firefox 4.1. Google also announced a new privacy extension today, but we believe that Mozilla is now taking a clear lead and building a practical way forward for people who want privacy when they browse the web.

• Do Corporations Have a Right to Privacy?

  This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether or not corporations have the same rights to “personal privacy” that individuals do.

  This is a good analysis of the case.

  I signed on to a “friend of the court” brief put together by EPIC, arguing that they do not.

Civil Rights

• I’m Hugo Chávez’s prisoner, says jailed judge

  As a judge María Lourdes Afiuni thought courts had the ultimate power to jail people, but as a prisoner in a cramped cell she now believes Venezuela has a higher judicial authority: Hugo Chávez.

  The judge has spent a year among murderers and drug traffickers in Los Teques women’s jail, just outside the capital, Caracas, and if the Venezuelan president has his way she has another 29 to go.

• Seattle man vs. TSA: ‘You do not have to show ID’ (ABQ Journal)

  A 30-something software developer, Mocek was on trial in Albuquerque after refusing to show ID to TSA officers at an airport checkpoint in that city in 2009. Officers accused him of creating a disturbance, during which he used his cell phone to record the scene. He was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, concealing his identity, refusing to obey a police officer, and criminal trespass.

• Welcome to Police State Watch Canada

• Police State Watch Canada

  I’d started putting this idea together months ago, but between not feeling all that well, things got delayed, so today, Monday January 24th, 2011, is the official opening date of Police State Watch.

• The Never-ending Prisoners Votes Argument

  There is vast irony in this. The Convention on Human Rights was created to protect groups from being screwed over by their government on the basis of prejudice. And now prejudice is the only argument that is being deployed. This is illustrated by Philip Davies MP calling us, “vile creatures”. This is what this debate is reduced to. And in fairness, I hope no one now objects to my suggesting that Philip Davies is a joke of a legislator, a man who is tasked with helping guide the fate of a nation and yet whose public utterances on prisons – there are many – reveal that he is labouring under a burden of ignorance that is so profound that it must qualify him for help under the Disability Discrimination Act. On the prison landings we would dismiss him with the term “muppet”.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Major Sites that a “tiered” Internet Would Have Killed

  From just the .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us TLDs, there are over 127 Million registered domains. As of even 2002, it was estimated there were 3500-4000 ISPs in the United States. So, are these sites supposed to sign 4000 contracts each? A total of something like 508 Billion contracts in the US alone? This is positively insane.

  Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems that Wired.com has made this same argument. I, for one, will never use an ISP that cuts off access to part of what I’m paying for. Charge me for my bandwidth, just as Google’s ISP charges them for their bandwidth.

DRM

• The Ongoing Erosion of Ownership

  Entertainment is being used as justification to erode ownership, or even cancel it outright. There is a very disturbing trend where you don’t own the things that you buy — the companies that sold them to you keeps claiming ownership even after the money has changed hands.

  Apple has been caught using nonstandard screws on the iPhone and MacBooks with the only purpose of preventing you from doing what you want with your own telephone and computer. Sony is suing people who are tinkering with their own consoles, bought for hard-earned money.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Chinese telecom manufacturer says Motorola sold trade secrets

  Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies has filed a lawsuit against Motorola, accusing the technology giant of trying to transfer Huawei’s intellectual property to Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) without permission. The move is the latest in the two companies’ spat over trade secrets—a dispute that could potentially hold up the sale of Motorola’s wireless business.

  Huawei and Motorola maintained a healthy relationship for nearly a decade, as Huawei’s radio access and network technology was used in Motorola’s wireless business. According to Huawei, Motorola not only had access to Huawei’s intellectual property, the company also made use of Huawei’s team of 10,000 engineers in order to create and sell handsets directly to customers.

• Pot Calls Kettle Black. Huawei Sues Motorola

  We never thought we’d see the day when a Chinese telecom company, which has in the past been accused of industrial espionage by U.S. companies, would sue a U.S. equipment maker. Well, that’s exactly what has happened.

  Huawei filed suit Monday to stop Motorola Solutions from selling its wireless network business to Nokia Siemens Networks, because the sale would transfer trade secrets and competitive intelligence from the Chinese equipment firm to its competitor. (By the way, Motorola had accused Huawei of industrial espionage in July 2010.) The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Illinois, seeks to stop Motorola employees and information associated with Motorola’s UMTS and GSM equipment businesses from being transferred to Nokia Siemens Networks under the $1.2-billion deal.

• Copyrights

  • The State of Music Monetization

    Who’s paying for what? We’ve been getting hit with a lot of subscriber updates here and there, including a few at MidemNet this weekend. So here’s the latest monetization intelligence, please share if we’ve missed something!

  • Fair Use Symposium Published in Journal of the Copyright Society

  • FAST: ISPs, Copyright Holders Should Become Business Partners

    John Lovelock, chief executive of the Federation Against Software Theft, has apparently given up on trying to force ISPs to protect its outdated business model, saying now that it “must be in the ISPs’ commercial interest to work with rights holders to develop mutual business models.”

    There’s the old adage that “if you can beat them, join them,” and the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) seems to be taking it to heart. For years it’s fought a war against the business model of ISPs and tried to force them into the fight against illegal file-sharing with little success, so now it wants to try a different tactic by intertwining the business models of the two.

  • Leading Chinese File-Sharing Site Disables Illicit Music and Movie Downloads

    One of China’s leading file-sharing sites permanently disabled access to many music and movie downloads this weekend. Citing copyright concerns and tightening legislation, the boss of VeryCD said that after 7 years hard work since the creation of his company, times are changing. In the face of a massively disappointed userbase, VeryCD will now concentrate on directing users to licensed content.

  • ACTA

    • IPRED Consultation Is Decisive For the Future of the Internet

      A few days ago, the European Commission launched a new consultation on its report regarding the “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPR) enforcement directive (IPRED). The Commission’s services who drafted this report (Internal Market Directorate General) exhibit a profound misunderstanding of current technologies, as they seek to apply an unadapted copyright regime to this new digital era. That’s why it is so important that all interested citizens and NGOs take the time to submit an answer to the consultation, to tell the Commission to turn away from dogmatic repression and instead embrace the promises of the online creative economy.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • *Exclusive* EC raised concerns on UK Digital Economy Act cost split of 25% to ISPs

      The European Commission raised several concerns to the UK government when legislation recently laid before parliament that forces ISPs to shoulder 25% of the costs of implementing anti-copyright infringement measures of the Digital Economy Act were sent to the EC for consultation.

      Verified documents passed to this blog show that the EC did not have access to sufficient “elements” to allow it to conclude that the costs that ISPs were expected to cover fell entirely into categories of adminstrative costs permitted under European law, namely Article 12 of the Authorisation Directive (2002/20/EC on the authorisation of electronic communications networks and services).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The People Who Support Linux: Linux Skills Land Job for This Linux Lady

Deborah Wazir says Linux helped her land her current job.

She says she was first introduced to Linux in the late 90s in the form of a Knoppix Live CD that she glanced at and put away. Ten years later a recruiter refused to submit her resume for a position because it didn’t specifically say she had Linux experience (even though she had 20+ years of Unix experience).

1999-2011 Eleven Years of Success for GNU/Linux

GNU/Linux had about 3 million active servers then and 60% of active servers now. That’s 31% per annum growth. That leaves 7 million client machines or servers hidden from the web growing to about 140 million now.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 260.19.36 Driver Released; 270.xx Coming Soon

    On Friday the NVIDIA engineers working on their proprietary Linux driver put out a new driver update. This new driver update is marked NVIDIA 260.19.36 Certified, but it brings just three official changes.

Applications

• Of Software and Soffits

  Editors note…if anyone is interested in trying to package this as a deb file for Ubuntu and derivatives, that would be cool…

  Once downloaded you get a .tgz file and you just extract the archive to where ever you want the package to live. For now I decided to “install” it into my home directory. No fancy installer here boys and girls. Unarchive it (using folder names) and you get a directory called SweetHome3D-3.0

• Applications

  SourceForge and GitHub host about 1.75 million software projects with about 3 million contributors.

• AirPlay video playback comes to Totem

  Ubuntu One announced support for streaming music using AirPlay via the official Ubuntu One client for iPhone late last year.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Google Earth on Ubuntu 10.10

  • Scribus: Creating a Layout

  • Creating Swap File/ Partition with out re-installing the system

  • A Brief Tutorial on a Shared Git Repository

  • Fix the animated titles issue on Ubuntu for OpenShot Video Editor

  • File Integrity Checkers and Rootkit Revealers for Gnu/Linux – Part 1

  • How to enable IP forwarding in Linux

  • Ubuntu 10.x Firefox font rendering fix for Gnome

  • Virtual Machinery on GNU/Linux

  • We’re Locked-in and We are Afraid to Open the Door

    This drama is repeated daily thousands of times around the world. People keep feeding the cash cows and the cows grow. It is time folks did more of their IT on FLOSS.

    see http://www.debian.org
    see http://wiki.debian.org/KVM

    apt-get install qemu-kvm virt-manager
    That just takes a few minutes and the software includes the licence. So easy yet some prefer to throw money at foreign corporations rather than employees. Sad.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • A Look at Linux Mint Debian Edition

    In all, though, I found LMDE to be a very palatable version of Debian, and I am strongly considering it for one of my production platforms the next time I get the itch to switch.

  • What’s in Various Debian CDs?

    I don’t use Debian CDs much these days as I use network installations and USB drives. Most PCs will boot from a USB device. Still, when Mark Shuttleworth stated that Ubuntu was looking to include some Qt-using applications on it’s single CD, the question arose, “Where does Qt come in Debian’s CDs?”.

  • Mepis Goes to 11

    Mepis is a KDE-centric distribution originally based on Debian, then Ubuntu, then Debian again due to development needs.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu opts for LibreOffice over Oracle’s OpenOffice

      The Ubuntu developers met last week in Dallas to make final design decisions about the popular Linux distribution’s features and decided to use LibreOffice for its office suite.

      This comes as no surprise to Ubuntu watchers. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth told me back when LibreOffice developers were forking away from Oracle’s OpenOffice had told me that, “The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu.” It wasn’t a sure thing though that Ubuntu 11.04, aka Natty Narwhal, due out on April 28th, would have LibreOffice. It is now.

Music on Ubuntu

It’s a dirty secret that as a lawyer who specialises in (and loves) free and open source software, one of my favourite pieces of software is Reason (and its snappily-named stablemate “Record”) from Propellerheads in Sweden.

It’s professional music making software (which is not to say that I can make professional music with it) and runs on Windows and Mac. It is also about as un-free as any software can get: although it does have some capability for interfacing with other programmes through the ReWire API.

Events

• Against the odds, Linux.conf.au 2011 kicks off in Brisbane

  During this morning’s keynote, a Loongson MIPS-based mini computer was given away to someone in the audience.

  There is also a rumour that Linus Torvalds himself, a frequent LCA visitor, will also come to Brisbane this week, but nothing has been confirmed by the organisers.

  The first two days of LCA is usually devoted to specialist “miniconfs” of varying topics. This year miniconf topics include business, cloud computing, mobile, government, graphics and even rocketry.

  On Tuesday, Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf will deliver the keynote address before the main conference programme starts on Wednesday.

Oracle

• New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m98) available

CMS

• Five WordPress Plugins to Make You a Better Blogger

  Open source blogging platform WordPress is popular with millions of bloggers worldwide for its versatility and ease of use. One of the best things about self-hosting a WordPress blog on your own server is its nearly infinite tweakablilty. Post-deployment plugins turn a standard blog into a useful interactive and engaging site for readers. Here are five plugins to make your great blog even better.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Arduino The Documentary. How open source hardware became cheap and fun

    Open source software has had a major impact on the applications and platforms we all use today. Linux is now a very viable alternative to Windows and Mac OS even for beginner PC users. The Android operating system looks set to dominate on mobile hardware, and more and more software applications are being released for free as open source projects by anyone who can learn to program.

5 Operating Systems Starting 2011 With a Bang

Max Mosley Fights for Right to Be Told About Nazi-Orgy News Stories in Advance

Max Mosley, former head of international motorsports organization FIA, has been fighting with British tabloid News of the World for almost three years. In 2008, News of the World published a story about Mosley’s raunchy role-playing rendezvous with five sex workers, in which they played prison guards to his naughty prisoner. One of the sex workers had a camera supplied by the tabloid, so the story had a graphic video component. The News of the World focused on the fact that the sex workers spoke German throughout the role-playing, and thus described it as a “Nazi orgy.”

Weak Commitment to Human Rights Factors into Boston Common’s Decision to Divest of Cisco Systems

Boston Common Asset Management, LLC has divested of its holdings in Cisco Systems, Inc. stock (NYSE: CSCO) due in part to the company’s weak human rights risk management and poor response to investor concerns. Cisco’s deceptive announcement of vote results on proxy items at the 2010 annual shareholder meeting has raised further alarm about the company’s commitment to transparency.

Argentina: agribusinesses accused of enslaving workers

Labor ministry inspectors from the Argentine national government and the Buenos Aires provincial government said they found 199 farm workers in conditions close to slavery during raids carried out at the end of December and the beginning of January on estates in the area of San Pedro, about 100 kilometers west of the national capital. The inspectors said 130 of the laborers, including some 30 children and adolescents, were producing for the Dutch-based multinational Nidera, and 69 were producing for the Argentine company Southern Seeds Production SA; the workers appear to have been subcontracted through temporary agencies.

Health/Nutrition

• Oregon sues Johnson & Johnson for leaving flawed Motrin on store shelves

  Lynn Walther was bothered by his instructions to secretly buy up faulty pain relievers from Salem-area stores.

  So in June 2009, he faxed his employer’s orders to Oregon pharmacy regulators. “Something was wrong,” Walther said.

• Sick Gulf Residents Beg Officials for Help

  However, most of the 250 people at the meeting here focused on the health crisis that has exploded in the wake of the April 2010 disaster, leaving former BP clean-up workers and Gulf residents alike suffering from ailments they attribute to chemicals in BP’s oil and the toxic dispersants used to sink it.

  Dr. Rodney Soto, a medical doctor in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, has been testing and treating patients with high levels of oil-related chemicals in their bloodstream.

  These are commonly referred to as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Anthropogenic VOCs from BP’s oil disaster are toxic and have negative chronic health effects.

• NHS bans on operations gamble with patients’ health, senior surgeon warns

  The NHS is gambling with patients’ health by increasingly banning operations for hernias, cataracts and arthritic joints to save money, one of the UK’s most senior medical figures said .

  John Black, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, accused NHS primary care trusts (PCTs) of pursuing a “dangerous” course by refusing treatment to patients, who will then suffer unnecessary pain and have less chance of recovering fully.

Security

• How Attack Toolkits Impact the Cyber-Underground

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Cyberwar Is Harder Than It Looks

  Modern life is made possible by sets of tightly interconnected systems, supplying us with electricity, water, natural gas, automobile fuels, sewage treatment, food, telecommunications, finance, and emergency response. In wartime, combatants have traditionally sought to disrupt their enemies’ supply systems, generally by blowing them up. Nowadays, many of these systems are increasingly directed and monitored through the Internet. Would it be possible for our enemies to disrupt these vital systems by “blowing up” the Internet?

• Cancer survivor demands investigation after Calgary airport screening

  After spending the Christmas holiday with family in Calgary, Elizabeth Strecker, 82, was flying back to her home in Abbotsford on Jan. 4 when she was selected for further screening by security officials and told to go through the full body scanner.

• Leahy to Review Use of ‘Invasive’ Scanners at Airports

  Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., plans to review the use of full-body scanning machines at the nation’s airports, calling them “invasive” and one of a handful of “emerging privacy issues” for his panel’s oversight agenda.

  The Transportation Security Administration has installed about 500 full-body scanning machines at airports across the country, with plans to buy and operate about 500 more this year. The agency first began deploying the machines in 2007, but it significantly ramped up their use last year after a Nigerian man unsuccessfully tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit using explosives material sown into his underwear.

• Israel demolishes homes and classroom in West Bank village

  In a bleak but beautiful landscape of undulating stony hills I watched a group of Palestinian schoolchildren take their lessons yesterday in the open air next to a heap of rubble that, until this week, was their classroom.

• Shot in the Head

  Several years ago, I was researching the cause of death of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces during the first months of the Second Intifadah, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. As I counted up the numbers, I was chilled to discover that the single most frequent cause of death in those beginning months was “gunfire to the head.”

  In the past 10 years Israeli forces have killed at least 255 Palestinian minors by fire to the head, and the number may actually be greater, since in many instances the specific bodily location of the lethal trauma is unlisted. In addition, this statistic does not include the many more Palestinian youngsters shot in the head by Israeli soldiers who survived, in one form or another.

• Thousands of Israelis rally in defence of human and civil rights

  Thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv at the weekend in the biggest demonstration for years to protest against a series of attacks on civil and human rights organisations and a rise in anti-Arab sentiment.

  Under the banner of the “Democratic Camp”, a coalition of organisations and prominent individuals, the marchers heard speakers lambast the Israeli government, singling out the rightwing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who is seen as threatening Israel’s democracy.

• Barack Obama acts to ease US embargo on Cuba

  Barack Obama has eased America’s long-standing embargo on Cuba, allowing many Americans to travel there for the first time and increasing the amounts that they can invest in the island.

  Other changes announced by the president will allow all US international airports to accept flights to and from Cuba; at present, chartered flights are restricted to Miami and a handful of other airports. The moves represent an important step to rapprochement between the US and Cuba.

• How Many Gitmo Alumni Take Up Arms?

  Almost a decade after the first detainees accused of terrorism were sent to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and almost two years after U.S. President Barack Obama promised to close the prison within a year, more than 170 of Guantánamo’s prisoners remain in custody.

• Iran opposition says rulers ‘totalitarian’

  Iran’s opposition leader on Wednesday denounced the country’s ruling system for being ‘totalitarian’ like the old Nazi and Soviet regimes, with lying to its people being its defining characteristic.

  Mir Hossein Mousavi statement comes as reaction to a stepped up campaign by the ruling system to discredit opposition leaders, calling them traitors that would ultimately be prosecuted.

• Attack of the drones

  There is a second-and-a-half delay between the RAF operator pressing his button and the Hellfire rocket erupting from the aircraft he is controlling, circling in the sky above Afghanistan.

  That’s a long time in modern warfare, but the plane is an unmanned “drone” and its two-strong crew are 8,000 miles away at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Right now, the Reaper is being commanded from a console with twin video screens shaped to resemble a plane’s cockpit.

  The UK has five Reapers like this one operating in Afghanistan. With a wingspan of 66ft, they are 36ft long, reach a top speed of 250 knots and usually carry four Hellfire rockets and two laser-guided bombs. These Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – which rely on fibre optic cables, European “upstations” and satellite links – are part of an international trend towards remote combat. RAF-controlled Reapers used their weapons in Afghanistan 123 times in the first 10 months of 2010.

• Confusion, fear and horror in Tunisia as old regime’s militia carries on the fight

  Confusion, fear and horror in Tunisia as old regime’s militia carries on the fight

• Tunisia forms unity government in effort to quell unrest

• UK linked to notorious Bangladesh torture centre

  UK authorities passed information about British nationals to notorious Bangladeshi intelligence agencies and police units, then pressed for information while the men were being held at a secret interrogation centre where inmates are known to have died under torture.

  A Guardian investigation into counter-terrorism co-operation between the UK and Bangladesh has revealed a detailed picture of the last Labour government’s reliance on overseas intelligence agencies that were known to use torture.

• Analysis: No more Iraq mistreatment inquiries (for now at least)

  The High Court has dismissed a challenge to the government’s decision to ‘wait and see’ if another public inquiry into abuse of Iraqi detainees is necessary, pending the outcome of internal Ministry of Defence investigations. The court looked in detail at the obligation on states under Article 3 to conduct an independent and effective investigation into allegations of torture, before concluding that what is required by Article 3 essentially depends on the facts of any given case.

Cablegate

• Harm or no harm? Government can’t keep story straight on Wikileaks

  Moreover, the exposures most damaging to U.S. interests appear to be those that offered new information on misdeeds, lies, deaths and so forth — those that were most clearly in the public interest and most easily defensible as ‘legitimate’ journalism.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Last refuge of rare fish threatened by Yangtze dam plans

  The alarm was raised after the authorities in Chongqing quietly moved to redraw the boundaries of a crucial freshwater reserve on the Yangtze, which was supposed to have been the bottom line for nature conservation in one of the world’s most important centres of biodiversity.

• Who are the biggest electric car liars – the BBC, or Tesla Motors?

  In a world-gone-topsy-turvy moment, the BBC has been accused of virulent anti-green bias by advocates of electric motoring, including Kryten from Red Dwarf and – of course – famous battery-car manufacturer Tesla, maker of the iconic Roadster.

• Undercover police officer ‘could be prosecuted in Germany’

  Green party MP calls for government to reveal whether Mark Kennedy committed criminal offences in Germany

• Police climate spies can’t break us

  Planting police spies among green activists was an attempt to derail a growing social movement – and it has failed

• Mark Kennedy ‘took part in attack on Irish police officers at EU summit’

  The undercover policeman Mark Kennedy was in the vanguard of militant anti-capitalist protesters who attacked Irish police officers at an EU summit in Dublin marking the accession of eastern European states to the union, Irish anarchists have told the Guardian.

• Eco-terrorism: the non-existent threat we spend millions policing

  Spying on environmental activists serves no one’s interests except for big corporations. Let’s end this insult to democracy

• Mark Kennedy accuses senior officers of suppressing vital evidence

  The undercover policeman at the centre of the storm over infiltration of the environmental protest movement today insisted that all his actions had been sanctioned by his superiors and accused senior officers of deliberately suppressing evidence that would have exonerated six activists facing criminal charges.

  Mark Kennedy, whose seven-year career as an undercover officer in the protest movement was detailed by the Guardian last week, broke his silence in a newspaper interview in which he rejected claims he had acted as an agent provocateur by orchestrating and financing protests. He also said he knew of 15 other undercover officers who had infiltrated green protest groups in the past decade, and of four who remained undercover.

Finance

• Nick Clegg signals support for banks breakup

  Nick Clegg today indicated the government would back a breakup of the banks to “make them safe” and protect the British economy from having to bail them out again.

  The deputy prime minister said there was a “very strong case” for separating high-risk “casino” banking from low-risk high street banking to ensure banks were no longer “too big to fail”.

• Racism, Materialism and Militarism in the US

  Here are some of the facts about racism, materialism and militarism in the US which we should reflect on as we decide how best to carry on the radical struggle for justice of Dr. King. (For each fact, I provide a brief cite to the sources which are listed at the end of the article).

  Let us renew our commitment to the radical revolution of values for which Dr. King gave his life as we turn to the realities of current life.

  [...]

  Even with similar qualities (credit profiles, down payment ratios, personal characteristics, and residential locations) African Americans were more likely to receive subprime loans. Similarly blacks and Hispanics were significantly more likely than whites to receive loans with unfavorable terms such as prepayment penalties. The result: from 1993 to 2000, the share of subprime mortgages going to households in minority neighborhoods rose from 2 to 18 per cent.

• The myth of Japan’s lost decade

  Growth rates that take demographics into account show Japan has done better than most of Europe over the past 10 years

• The ‘new normal’ of unemployment

  The American Economics Association held its annual meeting in Denver last weekend. Most attendees appeared to be in a very forgiving mood. While the economists in Denver recognised the severity of the economic slump hitting the United States and much of the world, there were few who seemed to view this as a serious failure of the economics profession.

  The fact that the overwhelming majority of economists in policy positions failed to see the signs of this disaster coming, and supported the policies that brought it on, did not seem to be a major concern for most of the economists at the convention. Instead, they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models.

• Yes, bonuses do work – but for fruit-pickers, not City bankers

  Open the business pages at this time of year, and a whole bunch of telephone numbers come tumbling out. An average payout of £233,000 for the investment bankers at JP Morgan. A £9.7bn pot for the swots at Goldman Sachs. And a £2m kiss goodbye for the boss of Lloyds, Eric Daniels, presumably as thanks for bungling the high-street bank’s affairs so badly that it now relies on cash from the British taxpayer.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• DC Public Affairs Firm Dumped Tunisia Last Week

  A week before the Tunisian government collapsed on Friday, with its longtime dictator fleeing the country in the face of massive popular protests, a Washington, DC public relations firm that had been hired by the government abruptly severed its relationship the North African nation.

• 2011 Census press and social media “incident” media spin preparations

  The 2011 Census is rapidly approaching on Sunday 27th March 2011 and the Government bureaucracy is preparing its media spin and propaganda campaign…

• [People for the American Way]

  Unfortunately, politicians and pundits on the Right are now responding the same way they always respond to criticism: deflection and denial. They are angry that they would be held accountable and are showing bitter defensiveness by going on the offense against anyone who raises uncomfortable truths like Sheriff Dupnik and some in the media. And they’ve childishly resorted to their own irrational finger pointing. Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Tea Party leaders and others on the Right are now claiming that the Tucson shooter Jared Loughner is a liberal because he listed Marx’s Communist Manifesto among his favorite books (a ridiculous stretch since he also listed Mein Kampf and an Ayn Rand book). Rush Limbaugh said that the gunman has the “full support” of the Democratic Party. And Republicans from Lamar Alexander to Sarah Palin are pushing the message that merely discussing examples of the violent rhetoric which has come to define our political discourse is tantamount to contributing to the ongoing rancor.

Censorship

• Customs Chief Defends Seizure Of Domain Names

  The head of the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency Tuesday defended his agency’s aggressive efforts to combat online piracy and counterfeiting by seizing Internet domain names.

  During a speech at the annual State of the Net conference, ICE Director John Morton defended the agency’s “Operation In Our Sites” actions that involved the issuance of warrants in June to seize nine Internet domain names engaged in piracy of copyrighted content. A second operation carried out in November involved the seizure of 82 domain names of commercial websites that the agency said were illegally selling and distributing counterfeit goods and copyrighted works.

  [...]

  Computer and Communications Industry Association President Ed Black questioned Morton on whether the seizure of domain names sets a precedent that will allow less Democratic governments around the world such as China or Iran to seize domain names in the name of intellectual property protection but are really aimed at shutting down political speech they oppose.

• EC Survey Finds Cracks In Online Filtering Tools

  The European Commission Thursday released the results of a survey it conducted that found while most software programs it tested do a good job of blocking kids from accessing certain websites, they are less effective at blocking access to social networking sites and blogs.

• Hate Speech and Free Speech

  What Lerner is urging, in modern form, is the revival of laws against sedition. The “protected values” (or in modern legal lingo, the “cognized groups”) may be different but the principle is the same: words which have a “tendency” to incite violence and/or threaten the security or wellbeing of … [insert your cherished value-of-choice here]… need to be outlawed and criminally punished.

  Whether enacted in 1789, 1918 or 2011, laws against sedition are inimicable to a free society; and no amount of spurious sociological “impact studies” (so-called) can change that constitutional fact.

Civil Rights

• Homeland Security’s laptop seizures: Interview with Rep. Sanchez

  Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It’s completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There’s no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse — not even to have their property returned to them.

• “No Touching” at High School? A Student Protests!

  Dear Free-Range Kids: I am a senior at a a small New England high school. A few days ago, the administration implemented a new rule: No physical contact at any time. The only appropriate touch, we are told, is a handshake. Presumably, this is to thin out the kissing couples who clog up the halls. I have no problem with that. But am I wrong in thinking that banning all touch goes too far? This morning I was in the library and saw a boy and girl studying at a nearby table. She had her arm around his shoulders. A librarian rushed over and loudly harangued them. They were forced to sit two feet apart for the remainder of the period.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Sequel to Catcher in the Rye ‘banned in US’

  But a US judge blocked its publication in North America, saying it mirrored Salinger’s original too closely.

• Third Parties Increasingly Targeted In Infringement Cases

  This is unfortunate, but not a surprise. We’ve been warning for the better part of a decade the problems with third party liability. Those who benefit from it will always push to stretch it to dump liability on third parties who had absolutely nothing to do with the actual infringement, and often had no idea that any infringement was going on. These payment companies, ad networks and registrars are quite far removed from any actual infringement. As noted above, they’re barely “third parties” at all, as they’re really fourth or fifth parties, so far removed from the actual infringement as to make these legal actions really quite questionable. It’s hard to see how anyone can reasonably argue that a registrar or a payment processor or an ad network should somehow be liable for actions done by the users of a site that they work with. If this continues it will severely stifle many of these activities, as payment providers and ad networks won’t do business with all sorts of perfectly legitimate sites, just to avoid the liability of being blamed for the actions of someone two steps removed.

• Senator who opposes antipiracy bill under pressure?

  Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, was instrumental in blocking the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) late last year. COICA was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and passed in that committee unanimously. But it was derailed when Wyden opposed it. Individual senators can place holds on pending legislation.

  Since the legislation was introduced very late in the prior congressional session, Wyden’s opposition forced supporters to wait until Congress reconvened. Now that Congress is back to work, Leahy has said he will again try to get COICA passed. The bill already has the backing of the major Hollywood film studios and record labels, but a mostly new group of supporters sent a letter today to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, praising him for past antipiracy efforts and asking for his support in getting COICA passed.

• Copyrights

  • RIAA threatens ICANN over new TLDs

    The RIAA, no stranger to playing the bogeyman when it comes to technological change, is concerned that .music, for example, could be used to encourage copyright infringement.

  • MegaUpload joins the fight against MPAA and RIAA propaganda

    After a flood of piracy allegations, the file locker site MegaUpload has stood up against the music and movie industry. In an interview for TorrentFreak the company says RIAA and MPAA are directing them with some “grotesquely overblown allegations”.
    Just a couple days ago Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor claimed that upload sites are “on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy.” MarkMonitor’s stats say that RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo alone account for more than 21 billions visits to illegal files per year.

  • Canadian-Uploaded YouTube Video Doesn’t Infringe in US–Shropshire v. Canning

    This lawsuit relates to the Christmas novelty song, “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” a song I listened to far too many times while preparing this blog post. I won’t dignify the song with a link. Just know that it was initially released in 1979 (not known as a good year, or era, in music) and co-performed by a guy named Elmo Shropshire. Need I say more?

  • No, Just Because A Site Contains ‘Academic’ ‘Advantage’ & ‘Scam’ On The Same Page, It Is Not Defamation Against Academic Advantage

    I would love to see this law firm go to court and try to defend the claim that the post on BoingBoing (which is actually quite interesting) was designed to do nothing more than damage Academic Advantage when absolutely nothing in the post or the comments is about the company Academic Advantage.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 187 – Let Me URL-Shorten That for You

  On this episode: L33tm33t at FOSDEM, Pirate Party member becomes Tunisian government minister, the FSF joins Google in fight for open video on the web, Sony tries to sue PS3 hacker Geohot, Ballmer fires another top Microsoft executive, Jobs on another medical leave and Arnie says bullshit!

Google

• [Marc Fleury:] ChromeOS and Android: there can be only one

  Since I dived into Android and started thinking about ‘what it could be’, it is obvious that a lot of what android does is supposed to be delivered by ChromeOS.

  First, I had to freshen up on ChromeOS. The Google OS that is supposed to be a windows killer is a web-browser centric view of the world has ‘cloud’ written all over it. The net-centric PC has been in the making for 15 years. There is nothing earth-shattering in there but yet another Linux kernel. Of course, where google could really kill it, is if they replicated the success of MacOSX. After all the rebirth of apple included “leveraging” open source and providing a closed source UI on top it. And what a great job they have done at it. A part of me hopes Goog will deliver on the UI front. It could be enough for me to try it.

Kernel Space

• That Was Quick: Here’s Linux 2.6.38-rc2 Kernel

  The Linux 2.6.38 kernel is shaping up to be very exciting even though it’s first release candidate arrived just four days ago. Tonight, however, the Linux 2.6.38-rc1 kernel has already been superseded by the Linux 2.6.38-rc2 release.

• Linux 2.6.38-rc2

• Kernel prepatch 2.6.38-rc2

• Graphics Stack

  • An Open-Source GLES Driver For Samsung’s Galaxy GPU

    Embedded Linux GPU driver support is a great big mess. There’s no doubt about it. There’s some partial open-source driver code, but nothing that’s been quite popular or welcomed for integration into the mainline Linux kernel. There might be an open-source PowerVR SGX driver later in the year, but that’s still months out. However, with more mobile Linux devices emerging that utilize these closed-up ARM GPUs, clean-room reverse engineering to write open-source drivers is going to be inevitable unless the vendors step up their Linux support game.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Remove old mails automatically in Thunderbird

  • Five tips for migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

    Many small businesses are migrating from Microsoft Office to alternative solutions to save money and sidestep the Ribbon interface that arrived with Office 2007. There are plenty of alternatives, but none of them stacks up to Microsoft Office as well as LibreOffice.

  • Support the newbies: A very important initiative

    In this weekend, I planned to write some lines to Neutrino Project, because there’s to much job to be done, and so little time. But one thing have changed my plans completely: a user requested me help to install Fedora in his PC, and remove Windows. He wanted some light.

    The doubts wich he had, were the same wich many of us had in the beginning: he wanted proprietary codecs installation, Nvidia’s 3D driver installation, wanted to know how to configure his 3G network and if he’ll need to run text mode commands to all these things. I answered all his questions, and the installation and configuration of Fedora was complete sucessfuly.

• Games

  • Alienware conducting a survey about linux systems

    Alienware is conducting a survey about the possibility to sell their system with Linux preinstalled, the more manufacturers that embrace Linux, the more popular it becomes and the better hardware support we all get, so why not help out?

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Orta 1.4.0 Released – The Best GTK Theme for Ubuntu Just Got Better

    We have discussed about Orta GTK theme in length before and also about the impressive Orta GTK theme + Faenza icon theme combination, which in my view is the best theme I have used with Ubuntu in a long time. Its so simple and eye-pleasing at the same time. The recent release of Orta 1.4.0 version brings in a number of important changes.

Distributions

• Pardus 2011: KDE SC 4.5.5 With A Pinch Of GNOME In One Of The Best KDE-Based Linux Distros

  Pardus is a Linux distribution funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey. Even though it uses KDE, Pardus tries to make every user – including those who come from a GNOME Linux distribution – feel like home and in which the user is in control of how his desktop looks like right from the start.

• New Releases

  • The Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux 11 Has Arrived

    Version 11.0 of Calculate Linux has been released. This release of the Gentoo-based operating system, which we benchmarked last August, brings many improvements to this promising distribution that — like Sabayon and others — makes it easier to run Gentoo on desktops and servers.

• Debian Family

  • Debian frees up the kernel again

    The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs.

  • Living on the edge with the Liquorix kernel, which offers out-of-the-box sound fix for Lenovo G555 (Conexant 5069)

    I’ve been good. I’ve been running the 2.6.32 kernel that powers Debian Squeeze since I did the installation in November.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • The Dash Has Landed

      User visible changes to Unity have slowed down quite a bit until this week. There have been things like bug fixes landing, and the nm-applet getting indicatorized, and then that getting fixed up. But essentially, Unity has been just the launcher and the panel with indicators for weeks.

    • WebUpd8 PPAs Updates: Jupiter 0.0.48, Haguichi 1.0.4

      Jupiter is an applet which allows you to switch between maximum and high performance and power saving mode, change the resolution and orientation, enable or disable the bluetooth, touchpad, WiFi and so on. But most importantly it allows your Eeepc netbook to take advantage of SHE (Super Hybrid Engine).

    • Other ways to integrate with web apps

    • Notify-OSD on scroll wheel volume change [Video]

      Volume in Ubuntu; always one of the first things I hammer my keyboard volume keys to reduce after a fresh install. It’s so loud!

      Notify OSD, also know as Ubuntu’s pretty pop-up bubbles, helpfully appear the second I hit my volume keys, allowing me the chance to gauge the level of audial change without the need to open the Sound Menu itself

    • Will The Catalyst Driver Work On Ubuntu 11.04 At Launch?

      For the past few years there’s been a tradition where AMD supplies Canonical with an early snapshot of their very latest Catalyst driver prior to the next Ubuntu release. This hasn’t been done to ensure Ubuntu ships with any magical graphics driver features (in some cases though it can provide a glimpse of what’s to come), but rather is provided so that there is actually a Catalyst driver that works on the given Ubuntu Linux release. There’s an unfortunate tradition where by the time the next Ubuntu release rolls out that the latest publicly available Catalyst driver does not support either the latest Linux kernel and/or the X.Org Server used by that release. The Catalyst snapshot provides that belated support.

    • Ubuntu 11.10 naming

      Is it possible to make proposals for the Natty+1 Ubuntu codename ?

      If so, I propose Ozzy Osbourne.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • T-Mobile’s Galaxy S Vibrant Getting Froyo Now

      While Nexus One users are busy trying to get their hands on Gingerbread, there are an awful lot of people still waiting for upgrades to previous versions of Android. However, it seems Galaxy S Vibrant users are about to join the steadily increasing number of Froyo users.

• Tablets

  • iPad 2 critics galore: After Motorola Xoom, its Toshiba Tablet’s turn

    Toshiba is poised to launch Android Honeycomb tablet this year, to compete with the iPad 2. But before the launch date, Toshiba insults iOS users to convince them that Flash is a must.

[Gimp-developer] GIMP icon “stolen” by commercial Symbian software on sale at Nokia app store

Oracle

• LibreOffice To Be Released On January 25th

  The Document Foundation will release the first stable release of LibreOffice on January 25, 2011.

  In an exclusive interview with Muktware Italo Vignoli of TDF had told us that the first stable release of the office suite should be made available by the end of November 2010.

Healthcare

• The United Nations University chooses MEDICAL

  GNU Solidario and UNU are now working together in specific areas, such as the documentation process. GNU Solidario will also work with UNU in the installation of a demo server.

Business

• OpenERP vs Lotus Domino

  I spent last week out in Belgium, the home of fine chocolates, waffles and Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning applications. I was lucky enough to sample all three as I was on a training course in the OpenERP head office. OpenERP 6 has just been released and it is an amazing thing to have a full ERP system that is Free Software and has Ubuntu as the preferred platform (we were all given an Ubuntu VMware/Virtualbox virtual machine for the training course).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship interview with Anne Østergaard

  Anne Østergaard is a veteran of the Free Software community, and attended the first Open Source Days, back in 1998. She holds a Law Degree from The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and after a decade in government service, international organisations, and private enterprise, she has become a devoted Free Software advocate. Her interests lie in the long-term strategic issues of Free Software; in the social, legal, research, and economic areas of our global society. A former Vice Chairman at GNOME, she’s heavily involved in political lobbying, and has been fighting for changes in software patents and copyright for a number of years.

Project Releases

• Fragmentarium: a new GPU-side generative art tool

  Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen released first version of Fragmentarium — his new cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU which, we have no doubts on that, many people interested in generative art will fall in love with.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Launches RDF Working Group

  W3C today launches the RDF Working Group, whose mission is to update the cornerstone standard for the Semantic Web: the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

• Google submits documentation for VP8 video codec to the IETF

  Shortly before announcing its decision to remove H.264 support for HTML5 video from Chrome, Google’s codec developers submitted an Internet Draft (I-D) of its VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a request for comments. The document provides a detailed description of the bitstream format and the decoding mechanism used for the VP8 video codec, developed by On2 Technologies. Google took over the codec-lab just under a year ago and released the codec under an open source license as part of its Web Open Media Project (WebM) shortly thereafter.

• Anniversaries & Ideologies

  The IETF · That stands for Internet Engineering Task Force. I’ve been to some meetings and co-chaired a working group and written text that’s ended up in this RFC and that.

BBC anonymous briefing on Surveillance Orders planned replacement for Control Orders

The phrases “the BBC learns” or “the BBC understands that” or “Whitehall sources” etc. are euphemisms for an “off the record” a “leak” / briefing by a Whitehall spin doctor, not for revelations by a worried whistleblower.

The BBC and other mainstream media should refuse to publish such anonymous briefings about changes to Government policy. There should be a named official Government spokesman and Minister who takes the credit or blame for the policy announcement. If the final details of Government policy have not yet been decided, then they should say so and invite comment and advice from the public and outside experts, who know at least as much as they do about the issues.

Tribe’s $500M Fall River casino plan dead

Mayor William Flanagan, who last year touted the site as the perfect location for a $500 million resort-style casino, has told the tribe that the city will stick with the original plan for a biotechnology park on the land.

Tunisia’s Inner Workings Emerge on Twitter

“The first conflict with the old RCD-ists,” Mr. Amamou, 33, told his 10,000 Twitter followers from the closed-door cabinet meeting, along with the rest of the fly-on-the-wall details reported above. “I like the minister of Justice,” he wrote on Twitter a few days later. “I am going to wear a tie just to please him.”

Silvio Berlusconi’s party gaining support despite scandals

It has shocked and titillated newspaper readers the world over, but it would seem that the latest scandal over Silvio Berlusconi’s riotous private life has done nothing to undermine his supporters’ faith in him.

AOL Is In Talks To Acquire Outside.In, Save It From Near Certain Death

AOL is talking to local news aggregator Outside.in about a possible acquisition, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

One source close to the deal told us that it would be “premature” to report that AOL has acquired Outside.in, and that another party may be involved in the negotiations.

Bring me the head of Eric Schmidt!

No, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down from being CEO of Google to take Steve Jobs’s position at Apple. I’m fairly certain Schmidt was demoted. Or if he wasn’t, then he should have been.

Science

• Insert <discovery> here: the role of placeholders in science

  The comments appear like clockwork every time there’s a discussion of the Universe’s dark side, for both dark matter and dark energy. At least some readers seem positively incensed by the idea that scientists can happily accept the existence of a particle (or particles) that have never been observed and a mysterious repulsive force. “They’re just there to make the equations work!” goes a typical complaint.

• Quantum Entanglement Could Stretch Across Time

  In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart.

  Now, two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky effect, called entanglement, could also bind particles across time.

  If their proposal can be tested, it could help process information in quantum computers and test physicists’ basic understanding of the universe.

• Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation

  I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering.

  In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.

  Why does this matter? Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions. Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.

• My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer

  It’s no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and industry, are scarce. While the percentage of females in other male-dominated fields has been on the rise, that of females majoring in computer science has been on a downward spiral in the past few decades, currently sitting at about 12% to 20%. When I was at Princeton, it was on the lower end, with the class of 2007 having 2 women out of about 20, and the class of 2008 having about 5 out of 50. I don’t claim to know why the numbers are so low, though I think much of it has to do with the culture of Computer Science and the type of people that go into the field. I thought I’d share some of my experiences both in school and in industry.

  In high school, I took two computer science courses– Intro to Computer Science using C++, and AP Computer Science. Had it not been for these courses and the confidence they instilled in me (due largely in part to my excellent teachers), I doubt I would have had the guts to major in Computer Science in college. I had some female friends that took the standard intro course in college, and liked programming, but never really considered majoring in it. I can understand why–if you’ve never programmed before, that course is really very difficult. It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems like most people know all the material already and have been programming since middle school or earlier, especially when they are very vocal about their technical knowledge.

Health/Nutrition

• Parents who won’t vaccinate their kids should pay higher insurance premiums

  Writing on CNN, pediatrician Rahul K. Parikh suggests that parents who allow the irresponsible lies of publicity-mongers like Jenny McCarthy to scare them into not vaccinating their kids should have to pay higher insurance premiums.

  I think this sounds like a good start, but I’d go further: I think that kids should have to show a certificate of vaccination to use public schools — because vaccinations don’t confer resistance on all people, we have to rely on “herd immunity” (that is, a preponderance of people taking vaccination) to keep all of us safe.

• Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs

  Here’s a good Boston Globe report on the first decade of Portugal’s bold experiment with drug decriminalization and increased treatment. Ten years ago, Portugal — whose drug problem had been spiraling out of control — decided to treat drug addiction as a public health matter, not as a criminal matter. They decriminalized possession of drugs, and increased treatment available to addicts, and experienced an immediate, dramatic and sustained drop in negative effects from drug use — though the use of some drugs went up.

• Who is to blame for the dioxin scandal in Germany?

  The recent scandal was uncovered one day before Christmas, when one feed producer informed the authorities that he found dioxin in his feed. Six days later a feed production site in northern Germany was closed and at beginning of January dioxin was found in eggs and later in pigs. Almost 5,000 farms in Germany were closed down for precautionary reasons.

Security

• Critical vulnerability in VLC player

• Don’t Sacrifice Security on Mobile Devices

  [M]obile systems lag far behind the established industry standard for open disclosure about problems and regular patch distribution.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• New Navy Jammer Could Invade Networks, Nuke Sites

  When China’s stealth-fighter prototype took to the air two weeks ago, it intensified what was already a heated debate in Washington over which, and how many, new fighter planes to buy.

  Lost in all this noise was the U.S. Navy’s real plan for winning any future air war with China or another big baddie. Rather than going toe-to-toe with J-20s and other enemy jets, the Navy is planning to attack its rivals where they’re most vulnerable: in the electromagnetic spectrum.

• Peace Corps Gang Rape: Volunteer Says U.S. Agency Ignored Warnings

  More than 1,000 young American women have been raped or sexually assaulted in the last decade while serving as Peace Corps volunteers in foreign countries, an ABC News 20/20 investigation has found.

• The BBC’s Nick Robinson can’t spell dictatorship (nor can Coulson, Cameron etc)

  Over on his blog the BBC’s chief political correspondent Nick Robinson posts a revealing PS about Blair’s second appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war.

  [...]

  This is appalling. The word for government being one man’s judgement is dictatorship. This is not a mere “clash of cultures” (as in ‘do you prefer a sofa to a table?’). And Blair has made it clear it is not a matter of judgement. Judgement demands a larger process such as the assessment of evidence and a demand for different options. What Blair has always fallen back on is the sincerity of his belief or gut instinct; again an attribute of dictatorship.

• The aforementioned diatribe..

  3) The sad state of affairs we regressed to during the G20 summit in June of 2010. There are still hearings and things dragging on regarding abuses of powers and denials of civil rights during the event. Recently, this story went to the figurative presses of the interweb. I dont rightly know if it made it to paper copy, but my lovely friend Andrea’s facebook post was kind enough to direct me to the webpage. To summarize, a video surfaced of police telling protesters that they must surrender their backpacks for search, blocks from the protected ‘Redzone’. When one of the protesters quipped back that they were in Canada, he wasnt breaking any law, and had the right to deny unreasonable search and seizure, the officer replied that “this ain’t Canada right now”.

• Interview: ‘Authoritarian Governments Have Immensely Benefited From The Web,’ Author Says

  Evgeny Morozov, a noted specialist on the use of new communications technologies to promote democratic values, has a new book titled “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom.” In it, he argues that hype about “Twitter revolutions” and the enormous potential of the Internet to promote open societies and roll back authoritarianism is naive and overblown.

  What’s more, Morozov warns, authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran have adapted quickly to devise new ways — often modeled on commercial Internet-monitoring tools used by Western corporations — to track and neutralize Internet activism.

• [Satire] Congress Honors 9/11 First Capitalizers

  In an act that many are calling long overdue, Congress passed legislation this week to honor those Americans who were first on the scene to profit from the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001.

• The Shawna Forde trial: Will the mainstream media bother to notice?

  There’s another infamous shooting of a nine-year-old girl that is making headlines this week in Tucson. This time, we wonder if the rest of the media will bother to cover it.

• Intelligence agencies go to supreme court over ruling on secret evidence

  MI5 and MI6 will argue in a test case before the supreme court tomorrow that in future no intelligence gathered abroad, even if initially obtained through torture, should ever be disclosed in a British court.

  Last year an appeal court dismissed what it described as an attempt to undermine a fundamental principle of common law: that a litigant must see and hear the evidence used against him or her.

• Police State Watch Canada

  Let’s consider the case of Alex Hundert, which I first heard of yesterday. I’d heard of Byron Sonne, who is also being held, but I hadn’t heard of Alex, who by the descriptions may have been railroaded.

  Who else is still in jail? Who else is being penalized for what the Ontario Ombudsman André Marin has declared the greatest mass violation of rights during peacetime.

Cablegate

• Activists Trying to Visit Bradley Manning Detained by Military Police

  Earlier today David House and FireDogLake publisher Jane Hamsher were detained at Quantico when they tried to check on Bradley Manning and deliver a 42,000 signature petition demanding an end to the inhumane conditions of his arrest. Manning remains locked up in solitary confinement, despite claims that his brutal treatment — 23 hours a day in a cell, no exercise, no pillow or comfortable blanket — has led to his physical and mental deterioration.

• Lawyer for Bradley Manning, Army figure in WikiLeaks case, alleges prison mistreatment

  The lawyer for alleged government secrets leaker Bradley Manning is accusing military authorities of using punitive measures against Manning at the Marine Corps jail in Quantico, Va.

  Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week – against the recommendation of the jail’s forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.

• BREAKING: Military Harassing David House, Jane Hamsher for Visiting Bradley Manning

  Jane Hamsher is with David House who is trying to visit Pvt. Bradley Manning at Quantico today while carrying a petition with 42,000 signatures requesting humane treatment for Manning. The military isn’t making it easy at all and detained Jane and David for two hours.

• Breaking news: Manning Supporters Detained by Quantico

  Beaking news: David House, supporter and personal friend of Bradley Manning, traveled to Quantico with journalist Jane Hamsher to visit Manning earlier today. Though House is an approved visitor, he was prevented from seeing Manning. They were detained for over 40 minutes. House and Hamsher communicated their detainment via Twitter status updates.In addition to visiting Manning, House was planning to deliver a petition with 42,000 signatures calling for the humane treatment of Bradley Manning. Military officials demanded Hamsher’s Social Security number and prevented her from leaving the base. Their car was then searched and impounded. House was unable to visit Manning.

• Activists delivering Bradley Manning petition held at Quantico

  Activist reporters who tried to deliver a petition protesting Bradley Manning’s treatment by the US military were blocked from seeing Manning and held against their will at Quantico on Sunday, while their cars were towed on seemingly flimsy pretenses, the reporters say.

  FireDogLake blogger Jane Hamsher told her Twitter followers that she was detained at the gate to the US Marine base at Quantico when she showed up to deliver a petition signed by 42,000 people, demanding that the US military take Bradley Manning — the alleged source of the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks — out of solitary confinement.

• WikiLeaks lawyer vows to prosecute Palin if she goes to Australia

  In a Facebook post in December, Sarah Palin wrote that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be “pursued with the same urgency as al-Qaida and Taliban leaders.” Robert Stary, an Australian lawyer for Assange, tells National Public Radio he’ll pursue a “private prosecution” of Palin if she ever sets foot on Aussie soil. Her remark is essentially a call for Assange’s execution, Stary says.

• So Much For The NYT Investigation Of Bradley Manning’s Confinement Conditions

  I guess we should be glad The New York Times is checking up on Bradley Manning at all. Between August 9 and December 16 they published exactly zero articles about the man Julian Assange called “the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience.” Meanwhile Bradley has been in the brig at Quantico Marine Corps Base since July. Supporters have become increasingly concerned that he is being mistreated, perhaps to pressure him to testify against Mr. Assange.

  The Times piece begins with the obligatory caricature of the Wikileaks founder. Although Assange has about 90% name recognition, it felt nonetheless compelled to remind readers that he is the “flamboyant founder of WikiLeaks, [who] is living on a supporter’s 600-acre estate outside London, where he has negotiated $1.7 million in book deals.”

• WikiLeaks founder Assange slams Swiss banker arrest

  The founder of whistleblower site WikiLeaks attacked Switzerland on Sunday for arresting a Swiss banker on suspicion of breaching banking secrecy instead of investigating the tax evasion he said he had uncovered.

  In an interview published in the Swiss weekly Der Sonntag, Julian Assange, whose website has angered Washington by releasing confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, said Switzerland’s actions were drawing renewed international attention to its controversial banking practices.

• streisand.me

  This is how it works: A known phenomena on the interwebs is the Streisand effect. Whenever something important or popular gets blocked, withdrawn or censored, the internet finds a way of keeping it online. This is because of the fact that the internet consists of humans that refuse to keep their mouths shut just because some authority tells them to. Which often results in a fast propagation regionally or even globally and a wide spreading of the surpressed information in digital form on the internets.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Oil drilling is getting even more extreme and dangerous

  You’d think that blowback from the Deepwater oil disaster would make companies more cautious about drilling deep into the Earth in search of black gold. But a terrific article by Discover’s Mac Margolis reveals drilling is only getting more extreme.

• Britain Ignores Tyndall Centre Report Urging Shale Gas Moratorium At Its Own Peril

  Despite the evidence of significant potential risks presented in a recent report by the Tyndall Centre, the British government says it will forge ahead with plans for shale gas development in the UK. The Tyndall Centre’s study, “Shale gas: a provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts” [PDF], urged the UK to place a moratorium on shale gas in light of serious risks associated with shale gas development, including the contamination of ground and surface waters, the expected net increase of CO2 emissions, and substantial monetary costs which could delay major investments in clean energy technologies.

• Canadian Government Wasting Taxpayers Money On The Oil Sands

  We’ve seen a lot of gasoline filling stations close over the last 40 years, as the old companies have tried to maximize profits. Fewer stations mean less costs to them, both operating, and delivering fuel.

  Now assume I’m right, and that 50% of the vehicles sold in the 2015 model year are electric. Typically older vehicles are driven less. People who put high yearly mileages on their vehicles usually try to drive newer vehicles for reliability reasons. Most owners of vehicles that are five years old or older, use the vehicles as second cars.

• Last chance to see? Bearing witness.

  Bearing witness is one of the founding principles of Greenpeace, up there with Direct Action. Unlike direct action however it doesn’t rely on directly stopping something bad from happening. Its power comes from the story it tells, and poignantly for me, the empowerment it brings to those who see the story and then feel compelled to act. So while it doesn’t offer the instant gratification for the activist chained to the bulldozer – its affect can be broader, quicker and more powerful – inspiring millions of people who simply look at a photo and are awakened to something that they didn’t necessarily know even existed. Once they know they usually act and often in numbers.

• Is breaking the law always illegal?

  Early in the morning of 17 December 2001, a group of intruders penetrated the area inside the perimeter fence surrounding the Lucas Heights nuclear plant, Australia’s only reactor.

Finance

• Senior MEP warns of ‘scam’ targeting EU businesses

  Senior MEP Malcolm Harbour has alerted European businesses to be on their guard against a “scam” thought to involve hundreds of thousands of euros a year.

  Under the “deal” businesses receive an invitation to appear in a “business directory” for free.

• Facebook Completes $1.5 Billion Fund-Raising Round

  The investments include $500 million from Goldman Sachs and the Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, as well as $1 billion from wealthy Goldman clients based overseas.

• Goldman Sachs Changes Its Facebook Deal To Avoid Scrutiny

  Looking to side step scrutiny, Goldman Sachs is changing the terms of its recent transaction with Facebook. Under the initial deal, Goldman Sachs created a “special purpose vehicle” to allow many of its high-end clients to invest up to $1.5 billion in the social network and still be treated as one shareholder. That, however, drew broad accusations that the company was trying to do an end-run under SEC regulations that mandate that private companies with more than 500 investors have to disclose their finances.

• The NYT’s Hallucinations of a Business Investment Led Recovery

  The New York Times was touting the prospect of renewed spending by business leading the recovery. There are two major problems with this story. First investment in equipment and software has already been growing rapidly. Over the last four quarters it has grown at almost a 20 percent annual rate. People who have access to the Commerce Department’s data on GDP (a group that apparently excludes employees of the NYT) are aware of this fact.

• S.E.C. Study Recommends More Oversight of Brokers

  Investment advisers and stockbrokers should be subject to the same fiduciary standard of conduct — putting a customer’s interests above their own — rather than the different governance regimes that currently apply to the two groups, the Securities and Exchange Commission recommended on Saturday.

  In a report closely watched by Wall Street, the commission’s staff said retail investors “generally are not aware” that stockbrokers and their firms are subject to a lesser legal standard, one that requires brokers to make sure the products that they sell are suitable for their clients. Investment advisers are already subject to the higher fiduciary standard.

• Jerry Brown takes a big risk

  After spending nearly 20 years working his way back to the pinnacle of California politics, Jerry Brown is risking it all with an opening gambit that will either lead his distressed state to solvency or leave him in political ruin.

  Brown’s bet is that the fear over California’s enormous $25 billion budget hole will give him a six-month window to unite the state’s many powerful warring factions for the greater good – even as each of them takes a major hit.

• California treasurer warns of IOUs, if no cuts

  State Treasurer Bill Lockyer says California could be forced to issue IOUs as early as April or May if state lawmakers don’t cut state spending soon.

  Lockyer, a Democrat, said Saturday that California could run short of cash as it faces a $25.4 billion deficit through the end of June 2012, including an $8.2 billion gap in the fiscal year that ends in July.

• Foreclose on the Foreclosure Fraudsters, Part 1: Put Bank of America in Receivership

  After a quick review of its procedures, Bank of America this week announced that it will resume its foreclosures in 23 lucky states next Monday. While the evidence is overwhelming that the entire foreclosure process is riddled with fraud, President Obama refuses to support a national moratorium. Indeed, his spokesmen on the issue told reporters three key things.

• How Goldman Sachs Helps Keep the Economy in Limbo

  Accounting practices should be cleaned up rather than permitted to exist in order to hide huge losses. Is the Federal Reserve promoting such accounting? The banks helped destroy the financial system and are now being supported by the political system and the highest reaches of the financial system.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Jeremy Hunt announces review of 2003 Communications Act

  The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, has announced a review of the 2003 Communications Act.

  The Act was responsible for replacing Oftel with communications regulator Ofcom and setting up a regulatory framework for ISPs, telecoms and television.

Censorship

• A misguided approach

  EU measures to block access to websites which host indecent child images threatens both our freedom and privacy, and is not the most effective way to combat child abuse

Privacy

• Census 2011 press release on Lockheed Martin – ONS still pretending that they will not hand over your Sensitive Personal Data to anyone else

  There are only 69 days left before the mandatory United Kingdom Census on Sunday 27th March 2011

  The Office for National Statistics has issued a misleading Press Release which seeks to allay the understandable public fears about what the risks are to their Sensitive Personal Data in regard to the involvement of he massive United States defence contractor Lockheed Martin.

• Facebook Agrees to Change ‘Friend Finder’ Feature

  Under pressure from the German government, the social networking site Facebook has agreed to make a major concession due to privacy concerns. The company says it will no longer automatically e-mail invitations to join the site through services like Google Mail when a person uses the controversial “Friend Finder” feature.

• TalkTalk or StalkStalk?

  TalkTalk’s trial took place in secret, reminding many people of the controversy caused by BT when they trialled the now-abandoned Phorm advertising system, also based on interception of their cusomers’ communications.

Civil Rights

• Early Lessons from the Tunisian Revolution

  Last week’s post about the increasingly draconian and desperate measures the Tunisian government was taking to censor bloggers, journalists, and activists online was rapidly made irrelevant by subsequent events. Over the next few days, Tunisian dictator El Abidine Ben Ali promised not to run for re-election in 2014, then offered widespread reforms, including freedom of expression on the Internet, and finally stepped down from power and fled the country. The steps that EFF called on Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to take in order to protect the privacy and safety of their Tunisian users soon lost their urgency. For now, Tunisians are experiencing unprecedented freedom online after years of extensive government filtering and censorship of websites.

  [...]

  Even so, Zuckerman credits social media with giving Tunisians a view of the protests that they did not get through heavily-censored government television, radio, and newspapers.

• Reversing the Erosion of Civil Liberties

  As many Americans embraced the illusion of “perfect security” – even at the cost of their freedoms – government agencies stepped in with ambitious “counterterrorism” programs that soon were targeting innocent citizens, a problem that former FBI officer Coleen Rowley says must now be addressed:

  Who has not yet awoken to the fact that we have been sailing since the 9/11 attacks into a perfect storm? Here are just some of the turbulent winds blowing and pushing officials in the wrong direction…

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The end of the net as we know it

  ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don’t pay them first. Barry Collins fears a disastrous end to net neutrality

  You flip open your laptop, click on the BBC iPlayer bookmark and press Play on the latest episode of QI. But instead of that tedious, plinky-plonky theme tune droning out of your laptop’s speakers, you’re left staring at the whirring, circular icon as the video buffers and buffers and buffers…

• Public and Political Concern Over Usage Based Billing Gathers Steam

  The increasing use of bandwidth caps and usage based billing models among Canadian ISPs may enjoy support from the CRTC, but the practice has begun to attract increasing critical attention in both the media and at the political level. Yesterday, the NDP issued a release lamenting that “Canada is already falling behind other countries in terms of choice, accessibility and pricing for the Internet.” NDP MP Charlie Angus, who will be appearing at a net neutrality town hall on the weekend, noted that UBB could be used to limit third-party services such as Netflix.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Gibson Can’t Resist, Sues Another Video Game For Infringement, Despite Being Smacked Down By Court Last Time

• The Times thinks piracy is our big trade problem!!

  Finally he totally ignores the effect of China’s intervention to weaken its currency, in leading other big Asian exporters to keep their currencies low. The list of such countries includes Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, all of which add to the US trade deficit.

  The response to a drop in foreign currencies will not be instantaneous, because it will take time for US producers to expand output. Thus, it is unlikely to have a rapid impact on current unemployment, but our exchange rate is important in our current large job losses and in worsening our income distribution.

• Copyrights

  • Lies, damn lies, stats, and newspaper stories

    The entertainment cartels regularly and routinely hijack local governments and media to present their specious ‘file sharing’ and ‘copyright violation’ statements.

    Then, national and international print and electronic outlets jump right to it, either ignoring, or misrepresenting, what’s happening, publishing unbalanced and completely inaccurate reports as though they’re based on factual information, coming from credible and reliable sources

    In Canada, the Globe and Mail in particular consistently carries not only biased, but incorrect, reports on the war between ‘consumers’, as they’re called disdainfully, and the corporate music and movie cartels, which are using legislation originally drawn up to protect citizens, to attack them in the name of the bottom line.

  • Francis Ford Coppola On Art, Copying And File Sharing: We Want You To Take From Us

    He’s saying it shouldn’t be presumed that they automatically must make money — or that if they are to make money, that it needs to come from the film directly.

  • How YouTube became the place to go for music on the Web

    One of the more interesting trends to emerge in the world of digital music in recent times has been that of YouTube seemingly becoming one of the most popular, perhaps even the most popular, means of experiencing music online.

  • Belgian and Israeli Courts Grant Remedies to CC Licensors

    In the Belgian case, Lichôdmapwa v. L’asbl Festival de Theatre de Spa, a theater company used 20 seconds of the song “Abatchouck” in an advertisement. The song had been released by the Belgian band Lichôdmapwa under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution, NonCommerical, NoDerivatives) license. Lichôdmapwa brought suit, claiming the theater company violated all three license conditions when it failed to provide attribution, used the song in a commercial advertisement, and used only a segment of the song.

  • Russian Music Uploader Faces Criminal Copyright Charges

    Russian prosecutors have filed criminal online copyright infringement charges against a 26-year-old accused of posting 18 tracks on Russian social network Vkontakte, Agence France-Presse reported.

    [...]

    If convicted, the accused uploader faces up to six years in prison, and copyright infringement damages in the amount of $3,600.

  • today in school, I learned that I’m an “extortionist”

    Why would CAUT publish such a one-sided, unbalanced non-review promoting a highly politicized view of copyright reform? Do they have a stated position on copyright reform in Canada?

  • The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry

    For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling, and now a Pirate Bay insider has just confirmed to TorrentFreak that the major record labels have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.

  • The Best Music Infographics

    Infographics, Venn diagrams, and flowcharts: They are hard to avoid these days and data visualization is a hot topic. Therefore, HaveYouHeard.It did some research for you and selected the best music related infographics. Enjoy!

  • CRTC asks the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to review decision to ban Dire Straits song

    The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today wrote to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) asking it to review its determination that the unedited version of the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits was inappropriate for Canadian radio. On January 12, 2011, the CBSC’s Atlantic Regional Panel found that the use of a derogatory word in the song breached broadcast codes.

  • Reading between the Lines of Bill C-32

  • So-called ‘sequel’ to ‘Catcher in the Rye’ effectively banned in the U.S. as part of copyright lawsuit settlement agreement.

    The unauthorized ‘sequel’/commentary on J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye can be published and sold around the world, EXCEPT for the U.S. and Canada.

  • ACTA

    • Ad hoc meeting – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

      DG Trade is organising a meeting to inform and consult civil society about the plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

      [...]

      Ms Ancel-La Santos Quintano, European Patent Office

    • ACTA Inconsistent With European Law, Legal Experts Say

      The recently completed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is not fully consistent with European Union law and goes beyond international law in some of its aspects, concluded a group of intellectual property law experts from universities in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Spain.

      In an open declaration, they point, for example, to criminal law sanctions not yet harmonised in EU law, but also to border measures extended to simple trademark infringements “based on mere similarity of signs, risk of confusion and even the protection for well-known trademarks against dilution.”

• Distributions

How to develop for Linux

Apple built this platform from scratch, but thanks to the work put in by the GNU project and countless others, we already have a platform. We have a rich set of development tools, a range of desktop environments and a wide range of development forges packed with source control, bug tracking and other features.

Linux: Successful Upgrade – SBS 2003 to Linux

Late in 2010 one of our charitable organization clients, a local church, came to these decisions: 1) The aging XP Professional systems in their office needed to be replaced with new systems. 2) The existing XP Professional systems that were not so old needed to be upgraded to newer operating systems. 3) The existing SBS 2003 system needed to be upgraded to a new OS as well.

We at ERACC made the pitch for Linux on the desktop and the server but the staff at this client thought they “needed” to stay with something “famliiar like Microsoft” and voted for Windows 7 Professional on their new and “upgraded” desktop systems. (I knew they were not going to see fuzzy, cuddly familiarity with a migration from XP to W7. But I also know when to stop promoting Linux and move on along.) However, the fellows in charge of decision making about their server decided they wanted to try Linux and not spend money to “upgrade” SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008. We considered this latter victory enough for our Linux sales pitch and laid out an upgrade plan for their office. Funds were procured and the parts for new systems were ordered from ERACC in late December. The work began the first week in January 2011.

[...]

At this point the upgrade from SBS 2003 to Linux is done. Some call this a “migration”, but we here at ERACC think of any move from Microsoft to Linux as an upgrade, so that is what we call it. Over the next few weeks each user’s PC will either be replaced with a new PC running W7 Pro or migrated to W7 Pro from XP Pro. To date, two of these are done and we are working on the third one this weekend. In case you are wondering, the W7 Pro installations work just fine with SAMBA 3.5.3 on Mandriva 2010.2 Linux.

Applications

• Is this a dagger which I see before me?

  I’ve come close though, with the recommendation of dagger, as a Python renaming tool that uses “conventional” variables to match the information stored in music files.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?

  • How to prepare your Windows disk for a Ubuntu installation

  • Using Mencoder Profiles

  • Using exit codes in the Bash Shell

  • How to make a Melt text effect

  • Meld Diff Viewer – Compare and Merge files/directories in Ubuntu

  • How to update MEPIS signing key

  • Modifications Mandriva Bootsplash

    The following steps change the boot mandriva background, ie there are three stages. The first stage is the stage of preparation, the second phase is the editing stage, third stage is the stage of building.

• Wine

  • In Praise of The Wine

    So I feel like I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wine developers and the surrounding community which have made it easier for us to convert to marvels of GNU/Linux.

• Games

  • FOSS party games

    Ok anyways… today I have a more sensitive topic… yes FOSS gamers have lives too. Hard to believe I know, but out there (yes, outside of your parents basement… the place where yo go for geo-caching) people have real parties (without the LAN- suffix) and they use FOSS games during those occasions! At least some do

  • How to compile space-shooter M.A.R.S. from source on Linux

    2D space action shooter M.A.R.S. has got a fair bit of attention on Ubuntu Gamer as of late, but many people have had trouble installing it.

Desktop Environments

• Qt in the land of Gnome-based desktops: The issue of copyright in Free software

  Recently Mark Shuttleworth wrote about how Qt will become part of the Ubuntu 11.10 desktop, and that Qt-based apps will eventually be considered as possible default Ubuntu apps. Obviously, this would be a big change from using GTK-only applications (that is, aside from Firefox and Open/Libreoffice applications), but Mark encourages GNOME developers to consider using Qt, too. He writes, “Perhaps GNOME itself will embrace Qt, perhaps not, but if it does then our willingness to blaze this trail would be a contribution in leadership.”

  I agree on this, and think that enabling usage of Qt in GNOME projects would be a contribution in leadership. It would be great if developers had the option of using tools like Qt Creator and Qt Quick when building applications for GNOME-based desktops (or other devices!).

• My way or the highway?

  2 days ago I wrote an enthusiastic blog about a cross-distribution collaboration meeting on App Stores we’ve organized in Nuremberg. Then, a day later, Canonical decided to ship Qt with Ubuntu. While not anything special from an openSUSE pov (we give both GTK and Qt equal treatment and offer the best platform to develop for both), it’s a nice move. In the announcement Mark Shuttleworth emphasized Qt integration with Ubuntu. I specifically write Ubuntu, not GNOME/GTK – Aaron Seigo responded to that with a blog post showing a bit of frustration with Canonical’s policy, the push for dconf & Ubuntu-specific Qt integration in apps.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome Applet to Quick Prevent monitor/screen from going to sleep/screensaver while watching movies

    I was aways setting Gnome Power Manager to stop the display from going to sleep or screensaver when I was going to watch movies. But it is annoying to launch System -> Preferneces -> power management and repeat the setting everytime.

Distributions

• Why I Use Gentoo: Unused Dependency Removal

  Perhaps with the exception of Slackware, today’s modern distributions have completely mastered the fine art of installing a package’s dependencies automatically. The installation of a package and all its required dependencies is no more difficult than a single command.

• Skolelinux interview: Morten Amundsen

  This time the Tromsø office of the Free software Centre and the newly elected board member of the association FRESH I’ve been speaking in my interview series with Skolelinux -people.

  How did you connect with the Skolelinux project?

• Pardus

  • Review: Pardus 2011

    It’s stable, smooth, reasonably quick, and extraordinarily newbie-friendly. Plus, it has goodies that most people would need on a daily basis. That said, there are a lot of applications that will need to be uploaded to the repository soon. Otherwise, I can only recommend this to people who will only be surfing the web and creating documents (and nothing else).

  • Pardus2011- A Linux distro that needs your attention

  • Pardus 2011, Independent Distro Releases Latest and Greatest

    All in all, Pardus is a truly underrated and underused distribution. It’s a wonderful offering that everyone should try. And everyone can, because it comes with support for about every language in the known world.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Meld Diff Viewer – Compare and Merge files/directories in Ubuntu

      Fudcon 2011 will be coming up next weekend. I’m looking forward to it, and hope to see lots of Fedora folks I talk with on irc and on mailing lists, as well as new folks I haven’t met yet.

    • Stripes Fedora^WInfinity, Gnome 3, Owl, etc.

      I’ve made Fedora branded stripes to submit it for potential inclusion in F15. Unfortunately, Mairin (the famous Fedorartist) explained that wallpapers need to be published under a free license, and since mine contained Fedora logo, it can’t be (that is, Fedora logo is TMed).

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • 300+ Easily Installed Free Fonts for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

      Ubuntu offers a lot of fonts, in addition to the defaults installed, and the MicroSoft msttcorefonts package , in its repositories. All these fonts mentioned here are provided as packages, which can easily installed using command line tools like apt-get or using Synaptic.

    • Natty’s Unity launcher adds icon theme support

      Welcome news for Ubuntu 11.04 alphas testers partial to non-default icon sets: Unity’s launcher now adheres to your chosen icon set.

Oracle

• The Oracle scorecard: One year after Sun

  To be fair to Oracle, it shouldn’t be expected that the company carry all the projects forward that Sun sponsored. It would have been nice if Oracle could have seen fit to continue sponsoring activities like GNOME a11y — but hard to argue that GNOME is particularly strategic to Oracle. But the list of projects that Oracle has stopped investing in entirely, or have stopped contributing to the FOSS project, is fairly long.

Project Releases

• Postfix 2.8.0 brings new features

  Postfix stable release 2.8.0 is available. This release continues the move towards improving code and documentation, and making the system better prepared for changes in the threat environment.

• GLX-Dock (Cairo Dock) 2.3 Beta Gets MintMenu, Cardapio Applets, Many Other Improvements [Video]

  A new version of GLX-Dock (previously known as Cairo Dock) is on the way – 2.3 (currently in beta), which will bing a lot of new applets: MintMenu, Cardapio and Lancelot menus, a translator applet, Thunderbird unread count applet, Transmission, Deluge and Ktorrent applets and more.

Silvio Berlusconi defended by Italian porn star

The debate raging in Italy about Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged taste for teenage girls and prostitutes has taken a surreal turn, after the country’s top porn star weighed in with high praise for the prime minister. “The truth is,” said Rocco Siffredi, “that Italians are proud of someone like Berlusconi who is 74, loves sex and has a good sex life – and I don’t just mean working-class Italians.”

[...]

Two years after Berlusconi’s wife left him over his friendship with teenager Noemi Letizia, and a prostitute, Patrizia D’Addario, claimed to have slept with him, Berlusconi is again facing criticism after accusations that he had sex with pole-dancing prostitutes at parties at his mansion near Milan. One guest, Nadia Macrì, described Berlusconi lying on a bed calling out “Next” as women queued to have sex with him.

Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google?

Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided “adult supervision,” and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were “geniuses” and he, in effect, was their manager.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• GNU/Linux To Connect 9.2 Million UK Adults To The Internet

  While 200 computer packages have been set aside for the pilot, over the course of the next 12 months around 8000 consumers are expected to take up the Remploy offer. People will be able to get additional support by phone and email from Positive IT solutions, who can help with set up problems and troubleshooting. As well as making IT affordable, the scheme also has a Green IT message – giving a computer a second life is the equivalent of taking two cars off the road for one year.

Server

• Zentyal Counters Windows Small Business Server In the Cloud

  Zentyal estimates that there are roughly 50,000 active Zentyal server installations worldwide.

• Linux supercomputer beats humans in Jeopardy match

  IBM showed off its Linux-based Watson supercomputer in an exhibition “Human vs. Machine” game of Jeopardy, while discussing potential practical uses of its natural-language AI in the IT industry, especially in health care and tech support. Watson beat two human challengers in this practice round, but the real winner will be proven in a televised competition in February.

• Large Scale SMP, Yes Really

  My desire for SMP is rather practical and has nothing to do with performance or cache coherency.

Google

• As CEO of Google, Larry Page Won’t Frown on Open Source

  Google does qualify as the biggest open source company of all, and has consistently employed open source experts such as Chris DiBona, who serves as Open Source Program Manager. More than that, Google has released tons of open source code into the wild, sponsors Google Summer of Code, runs its own search engine on Linux, and generally gives open source much more of a fair shake than many companies focused on proprietary technology do.

Applications

• Introducing the Starry Hope Uploader for Facebook

  Over the last few years, I’ve often been frustrated by the way that every new iteration of the web-based Facebook photo uploader never seems to work right with Ubuntu. Even more annoying is the fact that Facebook’s ever-changing API often leads to many Ubuntu based tools for uploading photos being broken. With the introduction of Facebook’s Graph API and Ubuntu’s Quickly project, it seemed like building a Facebook photo uploader should be pretty easy.

• 6 of the Best Free Linux Digital Forensics Tools

  Digital forensics is a specialist art. It allows investigations to be undertaken without modifying the media. Being able to preserve and analyze data in a safe and non-destructive way is crucial when using digital evidence as part of an investigation, and even more so when a legal audit trail needs to be maintained. Digital forensics can be used in a wide range of investigations such as computer intrusion, unauthorised use of computers including the violation of an organisation’s internet-usage policy, gathering intelligence from documents and emails, as well as the protection of corporate assets.

• 7 of the Best Free Linux Password Managers

  A password manager is a utility which helps users to store and retrieve passwords and other data. Most password managers use a local database to hold the encrypted password data.

  In today’s society, people are faced with a bewildering amount of information to retain. Most people read a considerable amount of information online on a regular basis. Whether you conduct business online, read for your job, or just read for pleasure, the internet is a vast source of information. Retaining that information on a long-term basis can be difficult. However, some nuggets of information need to be recalled quickly. Passwords are one such example.

• 5 VPN Clients for Linux

  Here are five Linux VPN clients for Cisco, Juniper, and other VPN servers, with some compatibility tips and getting connected.

• RSS-Aware indicator adds ‘quit’ button, but still no ‘clear all’

  An updated version of RSS-aware – an indicator applet for displaying and alerting you to new news items in given feeds – is available for download.

• Tribler – P2P application that enables users to find, enjoy and share content

  Tribler is an application that enables its users to find, enjoy and share content. With content we mean video, audio, pictures, and much more. Tribler has three goals in helping you, the user:

• 3 IT Tools You Can’t Live Without

• Proprietary

  • Top 12 Useful Opera Extensions You Might Want to Try Out

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Set Up WebDAV With Apache2 On Mandriva 2010.1 Spring

  • Download all youtube videos of an user

  • How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Ubuntu 10.10

  • Integrating Twitter with Magento

  • Show/Hide Files and Icons in GNOME Desktop

  • Command-Line Scan

  • Scheduled Downtime and Nagios

  • Scripting the Linux desktop, Part 1: Basics

  • Using Access Control Lists

  • Desktop Sharing Install, Setup, & Configuration Guide for Linux Mint and Ubuntu

  • config file for your bash script

  • The PATH to /home/timmy/grannys_house

  • ssh security tip | Change sshd listening port

  • org-mode is awesome

  • What’s in Various Debian CDs?

  • Accelerating PHP with the Alternative PHP Cache

  • How To Create Speech Bubbles For Screenshots In GIMP

  • What Else a Method Keyword Could Do

  • Playing minecraft with an Xbox 360 controller on Gentoo

  • Change PostgreSQL Locale

• Games

  • A heaping helping of Linux games

    Rather than sift through AUR for the umpteenth time, I scouted out the LinuX-Gamers Live DVD. And was quite pleased.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Common user interface mistakes in KDE applications, part 3: Message Boxes

• GNOME Desktop

  • Elementary Studio GTK Theme – Fusion of Elementary and Ubuntu Studio Themes

    Elementary Studio GTK theme is a nice and impressive fusion of DanRabbit’s Elementary GTK theme and beautiful dark Ubuntu Studio default theme. Elementary theme is supposed to be the default theme for upcoming Elementary OS codenamed “Jupiter”.

  • Unity Window Decorator

    The reason this is a fork (for now) is because it does depend on those changes to libmetacity-private and it makes no sense for the compiz project to ship a decorator which depends on a patched library. The plan is, of course, to get the changes to the metacity theme spec upstreamed once I’ve finished working on them and to merge the changes made to unity-window-decorator back into the upstream gtk-window-decorator.

Distributions

• Gentoo Security Team: Scouting Tips

  When someone volunteers on the security team, the first role they are asked to fill is that of a “Scout.” In this role, they primarily work to learn of newly disclosed vulnerabilities, determine if it applies to Gentoo, verify that a bug does not already exist, and then open bugs as appropriate. I wish I could say that this job is out-of-this-world-fantastic-fun. But that just isn’t always the case. At the same time I think that done right, it doesn’t have to be that bad.

• Classifying Linux Distributions

  This is somehow my personal classification, of Linux distributions. And maybe at the same time of the Linux users.

  I’m going to classify only those I have used more than just a few hours in a virtual machine.

• Linux CDs Vs. Linux DVDs…

  My only complaints are that it is 1.1 Gb. and that Pardus repository is not as varied as those of Debian-based distros or Mandriva are. However, I can do without some packages…they are not vital…just minor things I like. In exchange, Pardus does have its unique features.

• Request to Linux distributions

  Do not waste my hard disk!

  I recently acquired an 2 TB hard disk drive, which I immediately formatted with ext4. Given that mkfs.ext4 defaults to 5% reserved blocks for too, that amounts to 100 GB of lost* space.

  Wow. 100 GB. On a desktop machine. For root.

• Reviews

  • Sabayon 5.4 KDE – More mature, less fun – and buggy

    Comparing to Sabayon 4.x, this version is a major step ahead. But to best Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS, or perhaps openSUSE, Sabayon has a long way ahead.

• New Releases

  • Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-59 Stable Has Been Released

    Steven Shiau announced earlier today, January 18th, the immediate availability of a new stable release of his system-cloning Linux distribution, Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-59.

    Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-59 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32-30, and it introduces a couple of important bugfixes, as well as many enhancements and changes.

    “This release of Clonezilla live includes major enhancements, changes and bug fixes.” – said Steven Shiau in the official release announcement.

  • Pardus Linux 2011 Has LibreOffice, Firefox 4 and KDE SC 4.5.5

    Gökcen Eraslan announced earlier today, January 21st, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the popular Pardus 2011 Linux-based Turkish operating system.

    The final and stable version of Pardus 2011 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.37 and it’s available as Live and Installation images for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It includes an enhanced YALI installer, a fist boot configuration tool, and the brand-new KDE Software Compilation 4.5.5.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Provides an Educational Solution for Schools and OEMs

    Mandriva Linux is the ultimate operating system from Mandriva. It is the fruit of the convergence of three technologies: Mandriva, Conectiva and Lycoris and is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for both i586 and x86-64 architectures.

  • PCLinuxOS, LXDE, and User Management

    PCLinuxOS is an excellent distribution for everyone, especially for people who have never used Linux. The LXDE Desktop is similar to Windows reducing a casual users learning curve. Combine the two into PCLinuxOS – LXDE and it is an instant hit. Everything the Community Center’s need is included on one CD. The included programs are well thought out, and Open Office Org install is available at the click of a button, completing the setup.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Squeeze on the horizon – and of all the systems that could like my hardware so well, I’m extremely glad it’s this one

    Users are reminded in the post that Debian Squeeze will ship with a totally free kernel and that nonfree repositories must be enabled manually. That’s the way things have always been, but I suppose there were enough binary blobs in the kernel to get most people going.

  • Debian Squeeze set for Stable release on Feb. 5 or 6 – it’s a distro you shouldn’t ignore

  • People behind Debian: Michael Vogt, synaptic and APT developer

    My name is Michael Vogt, I’m married and have two little daughters. We live in Germany (near to Trier) and I work for Canonical as a software developer. I joined Debian as a developer in early 2000 and started to contribute to Ubuntu in 2004.

  • Mint Debian Edition

    After a brief but failed install attempt with Saline OS (another Debian-based distro) I thought I’d try Mint Debian Edition which is a rolling release distro based on Debian unstable (Squeeze at the moment).

    [...]

    Overall Mint Debian Edition offers a good compromise – it has the speed and lightness of Debian and some of the ease of use of Ubuntu and I’d recommend it for older desktops and laptops.

  • Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.8 released

    The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

  • Debian 6 To Be Released In The First Week Of Feb, 2011

    If everything goes well, Debian 6 should be released in the first week of Feb, 2011.

    Neil McGovern posts on the Debian mailing list, “…we now have a target date of the weekend of 5th and 6th February for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone.”

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Server and the Cloud: Notes from a Developer

      Kirkland also touched on the release of cloud-compatible images of Ubuntu desktop edition, based on Ubuntu 11.04 and the new Unity desktop environment. He didn’t offer many details on how exactly this would work or which types of real-world applications Ubuntu developers envision for cloud-compatible desktop images, but a development like this sounds quite innovative — especially since the cloud has traditionally been treated as a space mostly for server users, with little thought given to how desktops hosting might be integrated.

    • Making Ubuntu More Personal: Identify Contributions To Engage More Personally

    • Testing software: Ubuntu 64-bit, Unity and PlayOnLinux, the new Wine-Doors?

      I have an announcement to make: Today I made the switch to Ubuntu 64-bit.

      This should have happened ages ago, I know. Well, to be honest I never had a compelling reason to do the switch until a month or so ago I got the incentive I needed: moving from 2GB to 4GB RAM.

    • Finally, LibreOffice Replaces OpenOffice In Ubuntu Natty

      Today an update for Ubuntu Natty has pushed LibreOffice replacing OpenOffice packages. If you are running the Natty on your test machines, go to Synaptic reload to refresh repositories and then click on mark upgrade. You will find LibreOffice being installed removing OpenOffice packages.

Devices/Embedded

• Boxee Box Review

  For many, the Internet has become a preferred source of entertainment. With offerings like Netflix, VUDU, Hulu and digital downloads, even once loyal cable television subscribers are abandoning their service for online content.

• Phones

  • Smartphone watch

    Once a mobile powerhouse, Motorola has been struggling to remain relevant in the fast-moving cellphone market over the past couple of years. Now the company looks as if it is ready to make a serious comeback. The Motorola Atrix 4G was awarded the title of best smartphone at the recent Consumer Electronics Show and will be the company’s flagship device for the early part of this year. The handset runs Android 2.2 operating system and is powered with a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor coupled with 1GB of memory – the device is a serious contender.

  • Android 3.0 to kick-start tablet wars

    The Android Honeycomb release will feature many tablet PC-specific features

    Google’s Android mobile phone operating system was one of the winners of 2010, booming in popularity to become the second most popular smartphone OS by the end of the year. Now in 2011 it looks that Google is setting its sights firmly on the tablet market.

  • Android

    • Google Silently Updates Android Gingerbread To Version 2.3.2

      Google doesn’t create much fuss around the software updates of Android. Previously the Android Market was upgraded to version 2.2 and now Google has upgraded Gingerbread to version 2.3.2.

• Tablets

  • Android tablet boom

    Most of the devices here will run Honeycomb, Android’s 3.0 release, which has already been earmarked as being specifically designed for tablet PCs.

  • Motorola Atrix vs the Always Innovating Smart Book

    It is not an overstatement that the Motorola Atrix smartphone was one of the bright stars of CES 2011. An often-mentioned, breakthrough feature of the Atrix is its modularity, namely that it can be placed into a netbook dock which gives it work-time (and battery recharge) and a desktop-like work environment (Linux based).

  • Acer to ship Android tablets based on Sandy Bridge CPUs, says report

    Acer is expected to release two to three Android-based tablets running Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” Core processors, and will start to back out of the netbook business, says an industry report. At CES, Acer announced ARM Cortex-A9 based Iconia Tab A500 Android tablet for Verizon’s 4G LTE network.

  • Is HP’s WebOS heading for netbooks?

    HP is prepping a netbook using its Linux-based WebOS operating system, says an industry report. On Feb. 9, HP is expected to announce several WebOS devices, including nine-inch “Topaz” and seven-inch “Opal” tablets, says Engadget.

  • Turn Your Linux Desktop,Tablet or Touch Device into Digital Sketchpad

Open Source Search Solutions Ready For The Enterprise: Ovum

Open source enterprise search software is viable and reliable and can stand up against leading commercial players from the industry, according to Ovum.

In a new report* the independent technology analyst states that open source software is ready for the enterprise and is able to deliver on the needs of most organisations.

Mike Davis, Ovum analyst and author of the report, said: “Free-to-use open source enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) solutions are now ready for the enterprise. We believe enterprises should start with open source options when looking for a search solution and only go to the big players if open source is unable to deliver what they need.”

Events

• 2011 Call for Presentations

  The Arizona Business and Liberty Experience Conference (ABLEconf) is soliciting presentations for its third annual conference. ABLEconf 2011 will take place on Saturday April 02, 2011, at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) in Tempe, Arizona.

• Texas Linux Fest 2011 Call For Papers is open!

  We are proud to officially open the call for papers for Texas Linux Fest 2011, scheduled for April 2 at the Hilton Austin hotel in downtown Austin, Texas.

  Texas Linux Fest 2011 is the second annual Linux and open source software event for Texas and the surrounding region. We are assembling a one day program for the business and home Linux user, and for the experienced developer and newcomer alike.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome 10 advances with new V8 3 JavaScript engine

    Google is updating its dev-channel version of the Chrome browser this week with an updated JavaScript engine and a long list of bug fixes.

    Chrome 10.0.642.2 is an update for Windows, Linux and Mac and includes the new V8 version 3.0.7.0 JavaScript engine.

• Mozilla

  • Skype Toolbar Blocked by Mozilla – FINALLY!

    According to Mozilla, the Skype toolbar was one of the top crashers of Firefox 3.6.13 last week, accounting for some 40,000 crashes! In addition to that, Mozilla says that having the Skype toolbar installed can make some parts of Firefox as much as 300 times slower, making it appear that Firefox is slow loading pages.

SaaS

• Open Source: OpenERP Launches SaaS Version for Partners

  OpenERP, as you may guess from the name, sells a suite of business applications built on open source code, ensuring low-cost apps for the customer and flexible deployment for the administrator. But OpenERP has always been limited by its status as an on-premises product. Not anymore.

Oracle

• Univa forks Oracle’s Sun Grid Engine

  Another fork has appeared in the Sun Microsystems software road. Univa is forking the Sun Grid Engine project, now controlled by Oracle.

  In the wake of Oracle’s $5.6bn acquisition of Sun a year ago, co-founder and chief executive officer Larry Ellison made no secret of the fact that Oracle was not going to waste time on products and projects that do not make the company money. And rightly so, by the way.

• Whamcloud Building New Lustre Distro

  The open source Lustre technology is a parallel file system that is often found in high performance computing (HPC) environments. Users of the file system will soon get community Lustre distribution, thanks to the leadership of startup Whamcloud.

  Whamcloud is a venture backed startup that includes veterans from Oracle and Sun, where the Lustre project originated. The reason why Whamcloud is building a Lustre distribution isn’t about creating a fork from Oracle, but is about helping to support and expand the Lustre community.

• New: OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 10 (build OOO330m20) available

  OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 10 is now available on the download website.

CMS

• My first look at DIASPORA*

  Consequently, when I finally got around to getting to getting an account for the DIASPORA* alpha, what I mainly noticed was the difference in the privacy policy and interface

Business

• AsteriskExchange Attracts More Than 50 Partners

  First, a little background: Asterisk is an open source IP PBX that seeks to disrupt the traditional IP telephony market, much in the way that Linux disrupted the traditional operating system market. Digium is the best-known promoter of Asterisk, but scores of hardware and software companies have bet their businesses on Asterisk as well.

• Asterisk: Open Source PBX and VoIP In the Cloud?

Project Releases

• VirtualBox 4.0.2 is released ! Installation for Ubuntu & Debian

  Virtualbox 4.0.2 is released, this is an update release that comes with some bug fix and improvements.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Canada’s Digital Library a Grassroots Effort

    Last week, the European Commission released “The New Renaissance”, an expert report on efforts to digitize Europe’s cultural heritage. Europe has been particularly aggressive about its digitization efforts, developing Europeana, an online portal currently featuring more than 15 million works of art, books, music and film, as well as the European Library, which provides access to 24 million pages of full-text scanned by 14 national libraries.

• Open Hardware

  • Nvidia Tegra3 launch imminent. Intel, you did this to yourself.

    Reading about the likely launch of Tegra3 at Mobile World Congress 2011 and seeing this video, one cannot help wondering how big a mistake Intel made when denied Atom hardware interfaces from Nvidia some time ago. Doing that, it practically forced Nvidia to abandon mobile-x86 solutions and pour all of its resources into Tegra/ARM development.

Programming

• JQuery Mobile, Part 3: Attack of the Forms

  In our prior articles we have introduced JQuery Mobile and begun to look at application structure. In this article we continue our look at JQuery Mobile by touching upon forms handling.

  While many mobile applications are dominated by the presentation of information, we cannot escape the fact that mobile devices are ideally suited for data gathering, or data-collection.

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 to become a living standard called “HTML”

  HTML5, which has been developed by the WHATWG group, is to lose its version number and be referred to only as “HTML”. Ian Hickson, the author and editor of the W3C’s current HTML5 draft, announced this decision in a blog posting. Hickson said that, when the group announced that the HTML5 specification was progressing to “Last Call” in 2009, the plan at the time was to publish a “snapshot” of HTML5 in 2012. However, due to the high demand for new features, the group has now decided to switch to a different development model.

Takeover War Turns Into a Trial Over ‘Poison Pill’

For almost 30 years, companies have used the pill as the critical legal tool to ward off hostile takeovers.

Now the pill itself has come under attack and, in the next few weeks, a Delaware judge is expected to rule on its use as part of his review of a year-long takeover battle for industrial-gas company Airgas Inc.

Investors to stay lawsuit as HP investigates Hurd departure

A committee of Hewlett Packard directors will investigate former CEO Mark Hurd’s departure from the company amid sexual harassment allegations last year, according to a recent court filing.

The inquiry comes in the course of shareholder litigation involving the company. The investigation will be conducted by independent directors who joined HP’s board after Hurd’s departure and will be assisted by outside lawyers, according to a joint case management statement filed on Jan. 14.

H.P. Replaces 4 on Its Board in Wake of Chief’s Dismissal

The changes are intended to diversify H.P.’s board and add new experience and perspectives, according to Raymond J. Lane, H.P.’s chairman. It comes just months after the hiring of Léo Apotheker as chief executive.

Deaf Attorney Takes On Key FCC Legal Post

When Gregory Hlibok was 9 years old, he wanted to be a lawyer — until adults told him to consider another field, since it was “not possible” for him to litigate in a courtroom as a deaf person.

Profoundly deaf since birth, Hlibok at first dutifully studied engineering, but never gave up on his dream. Now one of an estimated 170 deaf lawyers in the United States (out of a population of 36 million people with impaired hearing), Hlibok, 43, is the new head of the Federal Communications Commission’s Disability Rights Office.

A Supreme Conflict of Interest

Americans are about to find out just how much baseball and our judicial system really are alike.
Common Cause, which I’m privileged to lead, has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from the landmark Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case last year because they may have attended secret retreats where lobbying and political strategies were developed by some of the biggest players in the 2010 elections.

The Problem With Vendor Sponsored Testing

Sponsored tests are meaningless, from any vendor. I simply don’t believe that sponsored tests provide value to the technical community. But that’s ok – they’re not targeted at the technical community. They’re marketing tools, used by sales and marketing teams to sway the opinions of management decision makers with lots of “independent” results.

Security

• Cyberattacks on social networks doubled in 2010

• It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees

  Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad has a great title. Then it’s all downhill. I suppose it’s appropriate for an audience of managers who want cheerleading for bad management more than good information.

  It starts off with a tale of ultimate horror: not only is your trusted systems administrator selling you pirated software and incurring the wrath of the BSA (Business Software Alliance), he is running a giant porn server from the company network and stealing customer credit card numbers.

  Then it takes the obligatory gratuitous swipe at “rogue” San Francisco admin Terry Childs.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Cyberbullying Leads to Prison Term for New Jersey Man

  Federal prosecutors last year indicted New Jersey resident Matthew Bean, 20, for distributing sexually explicit photos of a teenage boy, in an alleged effort to drive the boy to suicide.

Finance

• Booya! Latest Wall Street Innovation: Twitter Trading

  Major news providers Dow Jones and Reuters offer news products that archive and structure news to provide machine-readable feeds for use in trading algorithms. This enables large-scale trading with little human screening. The market for unstructured data is also big. The New York Times reports that about 35 percent of quantitative trading firms are exploring whether to use unstructured data feeds of news, blogs and tweets. Two years ago, only about two percent of those firms used them.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Lorillard’s Unreal “Youth Smoking Prevention” Campaign

  Family Circle and Parents magazines regularly run youth smoking prevention (YSP) ads called “Real Parents, Real Answers” that are paid for by the Lorillard Tobacco Company. The ads drive readers to a website operated by Lorillard that contains no information about the health hazards of cigarette smoking, the nature of nicotine or cigarette companies’ role in promoting youth smoking through advertising and marketing techniques.

• Dog-Whistling Past Disaster

  Recently the use of the political phrase “dog whistle” came to my attention while listening to the Sunday morning political talk shows. According to Wikipedia, “Dog-whistle politics” refers to political speechmaking or campaigning that uses coded language to signify one thing to the general public, while also signifying a different and more specific meaning to a targeted subgroup of the audience. The analogy is a reference to dog whistles, which emit an extremely high-frequency pitch that only dogs can hear, and humans can’t. Political “dog-whistling” as a tactic of public persuasion can take a variety of forms.

• RootsAction.org Taps Into the Discontented Left

  A new, independent, progressive public interest group called RootsAction has formed to fight “a far-right Republican Party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, and a Democratic Party whose leadership is enmeshed with corporate power.” RootsAction is an online campaign to address issues like the squandering of billions of taxpayer dollars on foreign wars that are generating hatred of the U.S. overseas, Wall Street schemes that are costing Americans their homes and the continuation of Bush administration policies under President Obama.

• David Martosko’s Glass House Takes a Hit

  In his role as research director for the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) — the notorious front group that works for the alcoholic beverage industry — David Martosko has routinely attacked Mothers Against Drunk Driving, claiming the group persecutes social drinkers by “expanding the parameters of the ‘drinking and driving problem’ ” to include social drinkers, rather than just focusing on hard-core alcoholics. Now a new website has sprung up called AboutDavidMartosko.com, that contains official law enforcement documents showing that Martosko was arrested in September 2008 for driving while intoxicated.

Civil Rights

• UK ID Cards Are No More!

  The Identity card system was a perfect example of Big Brother. They were photo cards that, like a passport, enabled you to travel to other countries (but only a few countries, unlike a passport) and could be used to prove your identity, just like a modern photo driving licence. What then was the point?

DRM

• Sony’s solution for root key hack? – Is a more open system really that bad?

  I would hope Sony keeps in mind that DRM/copy protection systems are very unpopular with end-users, we just have to look towards the PC to see the problems it can cause, one of the many advantages of the consoles is that any DRM type systems are mostly invisible to the user who merely wants to run and use the software. If introduce a more PC approach, making that “plug-in and play” gaming more of a chore and I think you are asking for trouble.