01.06.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s time for our annual outlook on Linux for the new year, and after spending the last few years highlighting non-desktop Linux in 2008, the range of Linux in 2009 and hidden Linux in 2010, they will all be coming together in 2011, which will be the year of Linux in cloud computing. This is a trend that has been building over the past few years, but I believe it will hit a tipping point in 2011.
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Instead I think there needs to be more focus on “control” over how things are running.
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Kernel Space
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After about eleven weeks of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 2.6.37. The new version of the main development line has many improvements. Advances in the Ext4 file system mean it should be able to compete with XFS on larger systems and new discard functions can inform slow SSDs of vacant areas, without negatively affecting performance.
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Applications
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Familiarity is not something users are born with, Hoogland notes; rather, “it is something they learned over an (often extended) period of time.”
Hoogland’s question, then, was, “do you think a time will ever come when users will realize that just because you know how to use a piece of software doesn’t automatically make it the best software for completing the task at hand?”
That’s a key question, in Linux Girl’s view, cutting as it does straight to the heart of one of FOSS’s biggest challenges — how to get past the inevitable learning curve.
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After placing my order without looking at the menu, I realized that what’s true at Steak ‘n Shake is true for a lot of applications — there’s no good reason to change just for the sake of change. Especially when you know your way around the classics. And unlike the double burger and fries, Mutt and Vim aren’t doing any damage to my arteries.
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Clementine is a multiplatform music player. It is inspired by Amarok, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching, organizing and playing your music.
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Share This
Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI.
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K9Copy is a small utility which allows copying DVD’s on Linux.
The DVD video stream is compressed by the program Vamps.
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Proprietary
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FBReader is an e-book reading program that makes it quick and simple to access thousands of free literature titles available on the Internet. It runs on the Linux, Microsoft Windows and Free BSD platforms. In addition, it runs on various Linux-based mobile devices such as Nokia, Motorola, Sharp and Siemens smartphones.
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Opera 11 with new extensions, tab stacking and visual navigation aids put the web browser on a competitive footing with Microsoft’s IE
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Fluendo’s big announcement at CES 2011 this week centered around updates to its Moovida media player, including long-anticipated support for a stable Linux version. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters for Linux partners in particular.
As many readers may know, Moovida has a long history. Its origins date back several years, when Fluendo – a company based in Barcelona which makes most of its money selling legal multimedia codec solutions for Linux — launched Moovida’s predecessor, Elisa, as a media player for Linux. The project was later ported to other operating systems and renamed Moovida. It enjoyed popularity for a while among many users, particularly on Linux platforms, where few good alternatives existed at that time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Games released prior to 2000 on Amiga or perhaps on other operating systems and now ported to Linux.
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Urban Terror (UrT) is one of the most popular games for Linux platform with hundreds of players playing it everyday. Many players use their own configuration files and scripts to configure game as per their needs and boost FPS (frames per second).
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE, including all its libraries and its applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE can be obtained in source and various binary formats from http://download.kde.org and can also be obtained on CD-ROM or with any of the major GNU/Linux and UNIX systems shipping today.
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KDE’s release team has rolled another set of 4.6 tarballs for us all to test and report problems: 4.6 RC2 This is the last test release leading up to 4.6.0, which is planned for 26th January.
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I carved out a few days to work on this idea and finished up the last bits today. I called it synchrotron. It goes with the whole particle physics naming theme in Plasma and sounded like something out of an awesomely bad sci-fi movie. Win-win, really.
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A few people asked if Synchrotron could replace kde-look.org or kde-files.org and the simple answer is: “no”. The reason is that Synchrotron is not meant to allow for uploads and sharing of content by users. It is quite specifically an upstream tool. It’s designed to make our lives as upstreams as easy as possible, in fact, but this makes it rather useless as a public file and data sharing hub. In theory it’s possible for Synchrotron to be extended to be such a thing, but I have zero personal interest in that. 
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If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got at least one old desktop PC or antiquated laptop lying dormant in the attic, cupboard or still under your desk. I’d even hazard a guess you’ve got a CRT monitor and a serial mouse to boot.
Now, you’re never going to use that old machine for anything particularly demanding, but if a simple web browser and word processor is the order of the day then there’s plenty of lightweight solutions that can come to your rescue.
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Red Hat Family
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Today, shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) have crossed bullishly above their 10-day moving average of $46.32 on volume of 518 thousand shares.
This may provide swing traders with an opportunity for a long position as such a crossover often suggests higher prices in the near term. Watch for a close above this moving average level for confirmation.
SmarTrend issued an Uptrend Alert for Red Hat on October 29, 2010 at $42.22. In approximately 2 months, Red Hat has returned 10.7% as of today’s recent price of $46.74.
In the past 52 weeks, shares of Red Hat have traded between a low of $26.51 and a high of $49.00 and are now at $46.74, which is 76% above that low price.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We’ve already heard news of Augen’s dual-booting Gentouch Espresso Doppio–offering users the choice of Android 2.2 or Ubuntu–but an alternative focusing exclusively on Ubuntu could be attractive.
It didn’t take long, after all, before recipients of Google’s Chrome operating system-based CR-48 notebook computer got Ubuntu up and running on the device.
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There is plenty of time left for the next version of Ubuntu, version 11.04 now in Alpha, also known as “Natty Narwhal,” to leap some of its current technical obstacles.
But an initial look at an Alpha version of the forthcoming Linux distro shows a dispiriting number of technical issues with its vaunted new “Unity” interface that need to be smoothed over before it will be the reliable, smooth technology we’ve come to expect from the Ubuntu community.
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All in all, 2010 proved to be *the* most important year as far as Ubuntu and Canonical are concerned. Two major Ubuntu releases and a bunch of new strategies and change of platforms that are going to makeover Ubuntu over the years. Here is a nice and simple listing of changes that completely reinvented Ubuntu in 2010.
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By joining the millions of users today who are using Ubuntu, you are doing good deeds for your computer; you are preventing it from being damaged by spyware and other viruses.
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Phones
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Android
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Motorola delivered on its rumored Android tablet Wednesday. It presented the Xoom, a tablet running Android 3.0, aka “Honeycomb.” The tablet will have 4G capabilities using Verizon’s network. Another star of Motorola’s show was the Atrix, a heavily powered smartphone that can connect with a docking station to create a laptop- or desktop-like form factor.
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Today’s announcement is yet another in a series of scheduled app releases Comcast’s development team will deliver on as many different devices as possible including other smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.
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Android app store is growing at a precedented rate. Apps for Android are all set to explode the market, reason being an 800-pound gorilla entering the Android app segment with a lucrative paid model. This gorilla specializes in selling out stuff over the Internet. If I may say, this gorilla has become the defacto online market. It’s called Amazon.com.
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DRM is the cancer of the digital world. It attaches its value degrading quality to everything it touches. Ironically its a failed model. Amazon, the on-line middle-man is now exposing Android market to its DRM cancerous cells. The company is all set to launch its own Android app store and it will allow developers to attach DRM to their apps.
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In conclusion, we reiterate that we welcome WANdisco’s involvement in Subversion, and failure on WANdisco’s part to address the above concerns will have no effect on the acceptance of technical work funded by WANdisco. We simply felt it necessary to clarify WANdisco’s role in Apache Subversion, for the benefit of our users and potential contributors.
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So as we reach the start of 2011, you might want to ask: will those developers really be there in a year?
That’s a question of more than theoretical concern, as the events of the past year have shown. Oracle Corp.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. and the impending sale of Novell Inc. have thrown many of the most important open-source projects into a state of uncertainty, or worse. Widely adopted tools, including the MySQL database, Java software platform and OpenOffice productivity suite have all been in play, as has SUSE Linux, the second most popular enterprise distribution of Linux.
To varying degrees, each of these projects has suffered. Initially, the fear and uncertainty caused by the protracted sales of Sun and Novell allowed competitors to cherry-pick their open-source project development teams. After the Sun sale went through, Oracle’s actions led to further departures. Worse, Oracle abandoned support entirely for some projects, and declined to clearly signal its intentions regarding others. The consequences have been significant, including new forks of MySQL and OpenOffice. In the Java community, turmoil is ongoing, as evidenced most recently by the resignations of several representatives from the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process.
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The very point is that the community as such does not distinguish between a user and a contributor. Every user is, by definition, also a contributor—and vice versa. How does one contribute? By writing code, doing documentation, translating, testing applications, reporting or fixing bugs, using applications, advocating FOSS adoption, writing tutorials, textbooks and how-tos, conducting training workshops, giving talks at user group meetings, attending user group meetings, monitoring mailing lists and chat channels, and asking and answering questions… or by just talking about FOSS—the list is endless.
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It seems it will be some time before the WWF will release a Linux version. But wait a minute: Linux is already supported! Yes, a set of simple bash scripts was able to fill the gap, simply because the FOSS ecosystem is very rich already. And it is performing very well.
In a test performed by Hermann Radeloff this file was printed using the WWF driver, which resulted in this file. The same file generated by the Linux toolkit resulted in this file. In short, a 104 KB file was bloated to a massive 686 KB file, while the Linux toolkit reduced it to a meager 95 KB. That is: with WWF banner.
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It’s a new year, and as we look to 2011 as the year that open source kicks butt, we should take a few moments to reflect back on 2010. After all, that’s what you’re supposed to do in January, right? Look back, then look ahead, then resolve to be better.
So during my retrospective look, I realized that sitting among the rubble of the open source landscape in 2010, there were a few gems that stood out. These are in no particular order, and I think they all represent what the future of open source is truly about: community, giving back, driving imagination, challenging assumptions, and not accepting the status quo or the mandates of others. In short, it’s about freedom, innovation, and collaboration.
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Discussions of the relative security benefits of an open source development model — like comparative discussions in any realm — all too often revolve around only one factor at a time. Such discussions tend to get so caught up in their own intricacies that by their ends nobody is looking at the big picture any longer, and any value such discussions might have had has already evaporated.
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With many of the major Linux vendors behind them, it looks like LibreOffice will be the office suite of the future, at least on many non-Microsoft platforms. Oracle, while perhaps never a darling of the open source community, seems to be making more enemies than friends as of late. If they cannot build more good will toward one of their most prominent offerings, the days of OpenOffice as the free suite of choice may soon be at an end.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Rob Sayre, one of the leading developers of the Firefox platform has posted a very candid opinion about Apple’s influence on the web and it is not the kind of opinion you would expect. In fact, Sayre openly criticizes Flash as being incompatible with the mission of Firefox.
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CUBRID/Databases
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On December 31 CUBRID 3.1 arrived! For the last two months, since we released CUBRID 3.1 Beta on November 12th, 2010, several new features have been added to the final stable release, many have been enhanced and fixed.
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Oracle
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Oracle caused quite a stir in 2010 when it announced its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux. With the New Year upon us, we checked in with the company’s Senior Director of Open Source Product Marketing Monica Kumar to get a refresher on the ABCs of this important introduction as well as the company’s latest take on Linux.
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Education
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A few years ago I fell for the official Government line when Becta announced (pre-bank crisis) that school ICT spending was unsustainably high. Of course this kind of talk fired up the apologists for free, open source software and as the recession bit the idea of saving money grew.
Obvious cuts could be made in software costs, energy consumption and technical support but few took up the challenge. Then came the big cuts and the new Coalition Gov axed nearly all BIG IT projects setting the mood music for the possibility of further money saving through technological change maybe like low energy thin-client workstations running off free, open source software (stop me if you have heard this one)?
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Business
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We have had a couple of queries this week regarding the open source business strategy framework we have used for the last two years or so in our analysis of open source-related business strategies.
The framework has evolved over time based on changing strategies, our research, and feedback from clients (and non-clients), but the last publicly-available version of the framework (to which the query related) was only a work in progress.
Since there is interest in making wider use of this framework – we are pleased to have seen several OSS-related vendors using it to explain their strategy – the easiest thing to do is to publish it here.
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Programming
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CollabNet®, the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (Agile ALM) in the Cloud, today announced the immediate availability of CollabNet Lab Management 2.3, the latest version of the company’s Cloud-based server provisioning and profile management offering. Lab Management enables distributed development, build, and test teams to significantly reduce infrastructure costs while promoting development productivity and rapid innovation.
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WANdisco, the makers of Enterprise Subversion, has today announced a major new initiative to overhaul the Subversion open source Software Change Management (SCM) project. With more active developers from the Subversion project on staff than any other company, WANdisco will use its vantage point to lead efforts to improve Subversion with major new features and enhancements that the user community have been asking for.
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Standards/Consortia
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China UnionPay and various Chinese authorities plan to draft an online payment standard for Internet TV which is expected to be launched in the first half of 2011, according to a report of the National Business Daily Tuesday, citing Liu Fengjun, assistant president of China UnionPay.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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By the time United States policymakers in Haiti are finished playing with Haiti, they will hang Preval out to dry, ignore the process that was not inclusive, not fair, not free even before one ballot was cast; ignore that most of the candidates asked for the (s)election to be annulled by midday of the farce, their voters then stopped voting – and go on with their farce. But with Manigat and Martelly. I think that’s most likely what they will do.
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It might have all ended there, but Shaul and a few others decided to continue: Today, six years later, Breaking the Silence, which consists of six people on salary and another 15 volunteers, constitutes part of the public discourse in Israel. Since the exhibition, the organization has published five pamphlets of testimonies from soldiers who served in the territories, all of them describing infringements of the rights of the local population (including testimonies from Hebron, soldiers talking about the rules of engagement in the territories, testimonies of female soldiers and more ).
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The Mahmoudia canal wends its way through some of Alexandria’s poorest quarters before eventually reaching the middle-class suburb of Somoha, where elegant blocks of flats abut the water’s edge and a rickety old footbridge connects one bank to the other.
It was here that 19-year-old Ahmed Shaaban’s body was found floating among the reeds, battered and bruised. The police say he drowned himself deliberately, though it is difficult to see how – the channel is so shallow it barely reaches one’s knees. A few days later, Shaaban’s uncle stood in front of a local journalist’s video camera and addressed Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, directly. “You are at war with your own people,” he said softly. “Your gang is running loose killing citizens, and all you care about is the presidential chair.”
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John Tyner, a software engineer who posted an Internet blog item saying he had been ejected after being threatened with a fine and lawsuit for refusing a groin check after turning down a full-body scan at San Diego International Airport
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Israeli police raided Madaa Community Center this afternoon and arrested Jawad Siyam, director of the Center. A force of uniformed and plainclothes police stormed the Center at 2pm today, seizing Siyam amidst several children’s classes run by the Center each afternoon and instigating fear and panic. Officers shouted aggressively at Siyam to comply in front of the young students, including Siyam’s 7 year old child.
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A female protester dies at a Bil’in protest from tear gas inhalation. The IDF is not only faced with a public relations nightmare, but also with the real possibility that there will be pressure to change its mode of operations, and to use a less effective (from its standpoint) tear gas. There may even be pressure to conduct a military investigation, which the IDF certainly doesn’t want. So the only thing that it can do is to attack the credibility of the woman’s family and witnesses.
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Cablegate
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Pakistan’s president alleged that the brother of Pakistan’s opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, “tipped off” the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) about impending UN sanctions following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, allowing the outfit to empty its bank accounts before they could be raided.
Six weeks after LeT gunmen killed more than 170 people in Mumbai, President Asif Ali Zardari told the US of his “frustration” that Sharif’s government in Punjab province helped the group evade new UN sanctions.
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In 2006, a senior Commerce Department official hand-delivered a personal letter from George W. Bush to the office of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urging the king to complete a deal with Boeing for 43 airliners, including some for the king’s family fleet.
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To a greater degree than previously known, diplomats are a big part of the sales force, according to hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks, which describe politicking and cajoling at the highest levels.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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CMD’s guest blogger, Jill Richardson, has done some ground-breaking reporting on the potential cause of the massive bee die-off. According to Jill’s investigation, leaked U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memos reveal that the agency gave conditional approval to pesticides now in wide use, without requiring adequate proof that they are safe to use around honeybees. In the wake of the new information, beekeepers are starting to blame the country’s massive die-off of honeybees on the pesticides.
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Finance
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Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, has reportedly asked more than 150 trade associations, corporations and think tanks to provide a wish list of public health, environmental and other public protections that they would like to see eliminated. The purported rationale for such an effort is to spur growth, but in fact this is the cutting edge of a movement to trade away public health, clean air, and a stable economy to gin up corporate profits already at record highs.
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* Corporations and their apologists routinely overstate the costs of public protections and ignore their benefits. To take one example, the Heritage Foundation attributes more than a third of all costs of regulation issued in 2010 to fuel economy standards. Yet Heritage fails to mention that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found those rules would confer benefits three times as great as the costs.
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Cut spending, raise taxes and fees, and accept billions of dollars from Congress. That’s been the formula for states trying to survive the worst economy since the 1930s.
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I will depart from my policy of not commenting on articles where I am mentioned to clarify the issues (to me) surrounding Gene Sperling’s selection as a President Obama’s national economic advisor. The primary issue is not that Sperling got $900,000 from Goldman Sachs for part-time work, although that does look bad. The primary issue is that Sperling thought, and may still think, that the policies that laid the basis for the economic collapse were just fine.
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Granted that Bill Daley, whom Obama will announce Thursday afternoon as his new chief of staff, is not your typical banker. He’s a former commerce secretary, who headed up President Bill Clinton’s effort to enact the historic NAFTA treaty, served as chairman of Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, and happens to be a member of a storied political dynasty in Obama’s hometown of Chicago.
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Starting in 2001, Mr. Sperling took on a variety of jobs, mostly part time, including a position at the Brookings Institution, as a columnist for Bloomberg News and as an adviser to Goldman Sachs. For much of this period, he worked for the Council on Foreign Relations, where girls’ education around the world was one of his main interests.
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One of the largest demonstrations in the Irish Republic’s history brought more than 100,000 people on to Dublin’s streets in protest over the international bailout and four years of austerity ahead.
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Oil prices are entering the “danger zone” and threaten to derail the fragile global economic recovery, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.
The Paris-based government policy adviser calculates that the oil import costs for the 34 countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) soared by $200bn over the past year to reach $790bn by the end of 2010.
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With a $4.7 trillion dollar bailout under their belts with no harm done to their billion-dollar bonuses, don’t expect Wall Street bankers to be chastened by the 2008 financial crisis. Below we list eight things to watch out for in 2011 that threaten to rock the financial system and undermine any recovery.
1. The Demise of Bank of America
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the troubled Bank of America (BofA). BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages it peddled to investors. The firm is also at the heart of robo-signing scandal, having wrongfully kicked many American families to the curb. If Assange has emails showing that Countrywide or BofA knew they were recklessly abandoning underwriting standards and/or peddling toxic dreck to investors, the damage to the firm could be irreparable.
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Those of us who want President Obama to improve his relationship with the business community and bring more people with actual business experience into his administration are hoping that such steps will make the President more pragmatic and better able to address the very complex problems the nation faces. We are hoping that such steps will make him a more effective leader, better able to get things done.
And, as Matt Bai points out at the end of his column: “Such compromises [like the tax deal], ideal or not, are the building blocks of responsible governance. If that makes Mr. Obama some kind of triangulator, then it could also make him a successful president.”
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Money, as one of the podcasts observes, has been one of the great constants in human affairs, right up there with sex and war. Money was not necessary when people lived in small communities where they knew and trusted their neighbors and could therefore exchange labor, food or goods in kind. But the need for inventing money arose once civilization started to expand and people were dealing with strangers they may never see again and could not trust, as was the case in Lydia and neighboring communities a few thousand years ago.
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According to the publication Domain Name Wire, Bank of America (BofA) is buying up hundreds of domain names such as BankofAmericaSucks.com and BrianMoynihanBlows.com. The megabank is prepping for the possible release of damaging information from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a big bank executive.
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Company defensively registers hundreds of domain names for its senior executives and board members.
As Bank of American awaits a possible release of information from WikiLeaks, it wants to ensure that you don’t think its executives suck. Or blow for that matter.
The company has been aggressively registering domain names including its Board of Directors’ and senior executives’ names followed by “sucks” and “blows”.
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Tobacco industry documents, for example, show that in 2001, after Philip Morris changed its corporate name to Altria Group to escape the bad image of being a tobacco company, the company bought up a huge number of similarly derogatory domain names, including AltriaSucks, Altria-Sucks, AltriaKills, and AltriaStinks, each one with the suffixes .com, .net and .org.
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Lorillard, Inc., manufacturer of the country’s best-selling menthol cigarette, Newport, is working behind the scenes to keep the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from banning menthol as a cigarette flavorant. Adopting a PR tactic other embattled companies like Bank of America and Altria have used, Lorillard is scooping up a host of menthol-bashing domain names to keep them out of the hands of critics, including MentholKills.com, KillerMenthol.com, MentholKillsMinorities.com and MentholAddictsYouth.com.
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Among the company’s tactics: buying up a host of menthol-bashing Internet domain names, including MentholKillsMinorities.com, MentholAddictsYouth.com and FDAMustBanMenthol.com.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Lobbying firms are expanding their roles beyond the corridors of the Capitol by establishing public relations and communications divisions to work their issues directly to the public through television ads, rallies, radio, print and the Internet. (Times Union archive)
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Professional lobbyists are expanding their activities beyond the traditional cajoling of legislators in the halls of the Capitol and are now using election-season tactics — like polling, “grassroots” rallies, radio, print and television ads, and social media like Facebook and Twitter — full-time to push legislation. As a result, the PR and lobbying fields have exploded with firms that do all of the above and more.
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“In this business, what we do is build narratives and tell stories,” he said.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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More than 300,000 Americans have signed our petition opposing the “Internet Blacklist Bill” — the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). (Click here to sign the original petition and read more about the bill.) The bill would give the government the power to force Internet service providers to block your access to certain sites. It’s shockingly similar to what goes on in places like China and Iran — and it’s the kind of thing that’s just not supposed to happen here.
Motorola Atrix 4G Walkthrough — CES 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When it comes to ease of use, there is no difference between a computer with Windows and a computer with Linux, assuming both systems are installed properly. That there is a meaningful difference is a myth perpetuated by Windows fanboys or individuals who have outdated experience with Linux. Also, the comparison that is often being made is unfair: One’s experience with a computer purchased as Best Buy or supplied at work, with OEM Windows already installed (see below) is being compared with a self-install of Linux onto an about to be discarded computer.
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Server
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When it comes tackling a challenge as tough as answering a human question, the best computational approach may be to break the job down into multiple parts and run them all in parallel, IBM is betting.
IBM will be taking this strategy next month when its custom-built computer, nicknamed Watson, will compete in an episode of the Jeopardy game show against two previous champions.
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Four years ago, data center server utilization was just 18 percent. To put it another way, on average 82 percent of the server capacity in major data centers was underutilized. Given all of the emphasis on server virtualization in the last few years, you’d expect utilization to have increased sharply. But it hasn’t. According to Gartner research, overall utilization is still at 18 percent — and utilization of x86 servers is one-third lower at 12 percent.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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Hexxeh, who recently released a Cr-48 tool to boot any OS, including Windows or Mac OS X, has now successfully got Android 2.3 Gingerbread to run on his Cr-48 netbook.
All we have right now is a single photo (above), but you can click it for a super-high-res (cellphone camera?) photo if you like. According to unnamed sources close to Hexxeh, it is indeed Gingerbread running on Cr-48, but beyond that we know nothing.
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Kernel Space
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In Linux 2.6.24, file capabilities were introduced, which allowed for the distribution or the administrator to set the capabilities needed for an application via modification of the application’s extended attributes on disk. The immediate application of file capabilities is to remove the need for suid-root binaries on the system. It can also be used however to reduce the capabilities used by a normal root-running daemon, by clearing the effective bit in the file capabilities.
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After two alpha releases, with really valuable feedback from testers, I’m now releasing the beta release of PowerTOP 2.0 to go with the release of kernel 2.6.37, which has some features that the new PowerTOP will use.
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It’s official: Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 “Iveland” and OpenBenchmarking.org will be launching next month at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, California.
In the talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices by Matthew Tippett and myself, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org will be officially unveiled and launched.
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Graphics Stack
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There has been much progress over the past year to the open-source ATI drivers and the Linux graphics stack in general, but it still has a ways to improve. Our similar set of results for the NVIDIA side with the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver will be out in a few days. Also worth noting is that at this time only the R300 class Gallium3D driver is enabled by default in Mesa (and most Linux distributions) while the R600 classic Mesa driver is still used rather than its newer Gallium3D driver. Based upon the faster performance, minimal regressions (just Nexuiz with Evergreen ASICs and a few other areas), the superior architecture (support for state trackers, etc), better OpenGL 2.1 support, and other benefits, hopefully in Mesa 7.11 we will see R600g by default and it being utilized by most Linux distributions upon their next major update.
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At the end of December we reported on the 3Dfx KMS Linux developer working on VIA code to provide kernel mode-setting support for VIA’s IGPs in the Linux kernel and thus TTM/GEM memory management support too. This is after VIA had promised to deliver this support (along with Gallium3D support) in 2010, but failed miserably. This code though is now moving along but without any support for VIA.
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For the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, VIA Technologies has just released their Nano X2 Dual-Core CPU.
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It would be really great if they would implement NVIDIA’s VDPAU within their driver, but that’s perhaps too optimistic.
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Applications
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So, let’s explore the 5 cleaning tools at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop and android phone if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free. so basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.
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A new version of Nautilus Columns which adds PDF info (thanks to draxus) is available in the WebUpd8 PPA. This is very useful for those who have a lot of PDF files for which the title is not descriptive.
To display the PDF info, in Nautilus go to Edit > Preferences > List Columns and check “Artist” (Artist was used instead of Author to keep the Nautilus columns number low) and “Title”, then navigate to a folder where you have some PDF files and change the Nautilus view to “List View”. Please note that your PDF files need to have the author and title info available or else you’ll get “n/a” in those fields.
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You won’t get the Gobolinux filesystem hierarchy by using these packages, you’ll just be able to “really” hide folders.
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To be fair in MusicMe’s favour it has been around a little while just not much talked about.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The following article was created to inform our readers about popular native Windows games and applications which install and run under Linux-based operating systems, with the help of the Wine software.
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Games
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Steel Storm is an old school top down arcade shooter with score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action and have limited amounts of time to play computer games.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Hope you all remember Orta GTK theme, one of the best themes I have ever used in Ubuntu. Atolm is another impressive theme by the same artists who gave us brilliant Orta theme. Atolm is especially suited for those who like dark themes more.
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PCLinuxOS – works, including left/right buttons and tapping, but to actuate the buttons you have to touch only the very corners at the bottom of the ClickPad. In particular, if you try to click at the point where the “dot” for the buttons is marked on the ClickPad, it will not work. I believe that it works here because PCLinuxOS is still using a somewhat older version of X and synaptics, such as the version which worked on Ubuntu 10.04.
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DouDouLinux is, maybe, the greatest aid for parents who don’t have enough time to spend with their children while they have fun on the computer but who also don’t want to come back and find out that their operating system kind of crashed or that some important document was accidentally erased. That’s because you don’t have to install DouDouLinux to be able to use it, all you have to do is boot it from an USB stick (and when booting you can choose if you want the changes to be saved or not) or a CD/DVD and the kids don’t have to log in to be able to play!
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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If you’re using Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, or a number of other RPM-based systems, you are probably very familiar with using Yum to install packages and update your system. It’s very useful out of the box, so to speak, but it can be extended to add even more functionality.
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A while back, I found myself reading a generic PC magazine in a waiting room, and they had an article on Tuning SSDs for Windows 7. It made me wonder what the Fedora equivalent would be. So, I asked my friend and Red Hat coworker Jeff Moyer about it. Jeff knows more about SSDs in Linux than anyone else I know, he does most (if not all) of the testing of SSDs for Red Hat’s storage team.
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Debian Family
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Every piece of software written has bugs. From the insignificant to the showstopper, bugs are there despite the herculean efforts of developers. But thanks to a new Debian project, many previously undetected bugs may finally get squashed.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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CoU is the best place to find beta testers for your applications and concepts. One of the best way is to connect with your users directly. You can publish your own write-ups and blogs on CoU without any editorial intervention. Either send your write-ups to the editor or send an account request and we will create an account for you to publish your content at your will. If you think there is better way of doing this, let us know and we will do what ever is possible.
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Ever on the watch for mainstream media articles that don’t quite *get* Ubuntu, yet another questionable article catches my eye.
Short summary: “Ubuntu is ruining the kernel. It’s buggy and a copycat of OS X. No wonder it has so many bugs: It’s based on Debian UNSTABLE. Even Dell is dropping it. And to top it off, Ubuntu is switching to Unity and not making it easy for users to opt out. Their existing user base is no longer the focus.”
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The Ubuntu Software Centre in 11.04 Natty Narwhal will comes with support for application ratings and reviews.
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Caine is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04 for forensic scientists and security-conscious administrators. Poised to do battle against IT ne’er-do-wells, Caine has a comprehensive selection of software, a user-friendly GUI, and responsive support.
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Aside from Unity, the Software Center is one of the main areas of development in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narhwal. It is getting a lot of new features like support for user ratings, reviews etc. Another feature – search suggestion – has quietly landed in trunks.
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It looks as if some folks got a little bit carried away with the news yesterday that the next version of Ubuntu, 11.04, will feature LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org.
Because, actually, that’s not exactly what’s happening. Yet.
On Monday, Linux Magazine’s Amber Graner got it right, when she reported that Ubuntu Desktop Engineer Matthias Klose announced that “LibreOffice would be included in the Alpha 2 Natty Narwhal release for evaluation and possible inclusion into the final Ubuntu 11.04 release.”
Somehow, by the next day, the news was mistakenly distorted to headlines in more than a few outlets that stated “LibreOffice Replaces OpenOffice In Natty, PPA For Lucid And Maverick,” or similar. It hit the Twittersphere, and I even re-tweeted the news myself. And off it went, with a lot of folks, including me, thinking that LibreOffice had indeed made the Ubuntu big-time.
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LibreOffice, the Oracle-free fork of the OpenOffice office suite, may, or may not, end up being the default office suite in Ubuntu, but its first release is almost here.
Before getting into that though, there have been rumors running around that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had already committed to using LibreOffice in its next release, Ubuntu 11.04. True, Ubuntu has always been interested in replacing OpenOffice with LibreOffice Indeed, Mark Shuttleworth told me back when LibreOffice was starting to break away from OpenOffice that, “The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. That’s not the same thing though as saying it’s going to ship in Ubuntu 11.04.
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In light of the discussion I’m referring to above, as well as a number of bugs that have been reported against network-manager-applet, I’ve been working on fixing these issues, including making the animations work again, re-adding icons for wireless signal strength and fixing the icons when connected to VPNs.
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Flavours and Variants
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moonOS is a complete, Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the LXDE and Enlightenment 17 desktop managers and imaginative, original artwork.
A project created and designed by Cambodian artist Chanrithy Thim, moonOS is intended as an operating system for any desktop, laptop or virtual machine.
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I’ll cut to the meat of this review right away: Bodhi Alpha 4 has had a dramatic makeover. The new default E17 theme – called A-Nogal-Bodhi – gives the whole desktop a lighter, less oppressive feel than the black and green ’80′s terminal’ theme previously used.
The icon set has been changed to the popular Faenza set.
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moonOS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. moonOS 4 codenamed “NEAKE” has been recently released, replacing E17 with GNOME for the main edition and is currently available for 32bit only. While it provides a new stylish interface by default, the most interesting new feature in moonOS 4 is the use of a new File Hierarchy System which aims to make the filesystem more user-friendly. Read on!
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In this Screencast I show you how to share and backup your packagelist of currently installed applications. This is especially usefull if you want to share you list of applications between different computers or you want to have a backup in case you reinstall Lubuntu
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Phones
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Sure, the webOS App Catalog lags behind the markets of other mobile OSes — but the homebrew community continues porting apps to HP/Palm’s platform. One of the more recent additions is mPlayer, the cross-platform open source media app.
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Android
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Motorola’s first Android tablet will be called the Droid Xoom, and will ship in February with an external 4G LTE modem, say industry reports. Meanwhile, photos have leaked of a purported HTC Thunderbolt 4G phone due to be announced by Verizon next week at CES, and more evidence piles up for Honeycomb being Android 2.4 instead of 3.0.
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If you’re the proud new owner of an Android-based smartphone or tablet you might be digging through the Market wondering what you should be installing. So I thought we’d take this chance to tap the collective wisdom of the Linux Mag audience and see what everyone is using on their phones and tablets.
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Android is set to “explode” at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, with smartphones and tablet computers including a newly revealed HTC Shift 4G phone for Sprint and a four-inch smartphone/tablet hybrid from ViewSonic. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is cutting the price of the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet by $100 to $500, says an industry report.
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Smartphones are now an essential business tool and there are hundreds of applications to choose from
Smartphones are a key part of any businessperson’s gadget lineup and Android-based phones are among the most popular. We look at some of the best Android applications on offer.
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Motorola is no longer one company. A long-in-the-works breakup of the smartphone and telecom equipment maker finally took effect Tuesday morning — probably to the delight of frustrated institutional shareholders like corporate agitator Carl Icahn.
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First, some background for those who don’t follow Android too closely. All Google-endorsed Android devices ship with the Android Market, along with a suite of other Google-made applications like Gmail. Android Market is a lot like Apple’s App Store with a few key differences: it doesn’t have an approval system, so developers can quickly submit and iterate on their applications. It also tends to have a lot of junky applications that Apple would reject — things that crash on launch on certain devices, or apps with that occasionally have features that don’t work as expected. While Google’s terms do require descriptions to be accurate, the general attitude is to let the market decide what works, and it surfaces the top rated applications (most of the time) while letting the junk sink.
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More than 40% of U.S. customers who purchased smartphones over the last six months have chosen Android-based phones.
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The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one of the first high-end Android tablets from a mainstream hardware vendor. Available with 3G connectivity from a wide range of carriers, the Tab is arguably the vanguard of the legion of Android tablets that are expected to arrive in the coming year.
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Tablets
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All this is about to change. Android is coming to strike back. CES will witness a whole new species of Android Tablets competing with the iPad. Just the way Android has beaten the iPhone in the mobiles space, Android is all set to beat iPad in the tablet segment.
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Asus has outed its Android tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), including one that cannily solves the problem of typing quickly on a touchscreen: it has a drop-down physical Qwerty deck.
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Earlier today, computer maker Asus kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show a day early by announcing four upcoming tablet computers. Three of them run Google’s Android operating system. One runs Windows 7. See if you can guess which one is the outlier:
* Eee Pad MeMO: starts at $499
* Eee Pad Slider: starts at $499
* Eee Pad Transformer: starts at $399
* Eee Slate: starts at $999
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A diverse developer community is critically important to the long term viability of free and open source projects. And yet companies often have difficulty growing communities around their projects, or have trouble influencing the direction of the maintainers of community projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME. Sun Microsystems and AOL are prominent examples of companies which went full speed into community development, but were challenged (to say the least) in cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with community developers. There are many more examples – but often we never even hear about companies who tentatively engage in community development, and retreat with their tail between their legs, writing off substantial investments in community development. Xara, for example, released part of their flagship software Xara Xtreme for Linux as open source in 2005, before silently dropping all investment in the community project in late 2006.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Summary
* These posts written every 2 weeks explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers. There’s a lengthy overview of the Add-on Review Process that should be read as a general guide about the review process.
* Most nominations are being reviewed within 10 days.
* Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
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Friendly reminder: the finish line for the Game On competition is just one week away on the 11th of January, 2011! If you want to build a game for the whole wide Web to use, this is your chance to make that game. We’re beyond excited to see what the possibilities will be, so we’re building a gallery to show your games to the world! This gallery will be opening soon after the contest ends.
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SaaS
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Behind the cloud it is still just computers – not the Great and All Powerful Oz – (and data, data connections and us IT professionals), but there is certainly a lot more that needs to be considered before connecting to it.
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The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011. One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments.
At this stage of cloud development and deployment, standards are still emerging, which is where open source software may be able to help.
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CMS
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We are proud to present to you our best work yet – Drupal 7, the friendly and powerful content management platform for building nearly any kind of website: from blogs and micro-sites to collaborative social communities.
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Drupal, the popular open source content management platform that powers websites like WhiteHouse.gov and NPR Public Interactive, got a fresh new look this week. It took three years, and the effort of thousands of contributors from more than 200 countries, but Drupal 7 is now available for free download at the project’s website. More than just a facelift, this release sports several important new features.
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Healthcare
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Reporters did manage to catch up with the woman who briefly heckled Scott during the inaugural speech. Her basic complaint appears to be the fact that Scott would prefer to blow off his singular achievement as a human being — the record-setting fraud penalty that Columbia/HCA had to pay after systematically bilking Medicare under Scott’s leadership.
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Business
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All-in-all, “The Business of Open Source” offers some useful stuff to get the mental wheels turning after the holidays at the start of what will doubtless be another exciting and successful year for open source in business.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Get active: Help with Euro 2012 championship
Help us gathering information about government’s Free Software usage. This information helps us to evaluate the current situation and of course it will decide who will be the European Free Software champion in 2012. Add the information on our website before March 25 and it will influence the next matches, add information continuously and it will help Free Software activists all over the world.
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Project Releases
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While I was working in a project involving sqlite, I wanted to check the contents of a sqlite database. The command line sqlite client involves too much of typing for viewing records. The sqlite viewers that I found were not very keyboard friendly.
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Openness/Sharing
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The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India’s first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala.
Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies. Under this concept, the movie and its sources are made publicly available via an online download or by other means that are either free or with a cost that covers only reasonable reproduction expenses. About 20 people have already registered to film an open source animation movie in the website www.chambaproject.in and are working to make possible the open source movement in the Indian movie sector.
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I posted to foundation-l concerning the other way to get more people editing Wikipedia: the perennial wish for good WYSIWYG in MediaWiki.
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Eight times the number of smart and knowledgeable people who just happen to be bad with computers suddenly being able to even fix typos on material they care about. Would that be good or bad for the encyclopedia?
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Here’s how it works:
1. An Internet site that allows people to search on an address to view a picture of that location.
2. An address specific self-service advertising system (akin to adwords and earlier work on context sensitive advertising).
3. A cell phone application that makes it easy for anyone to take a digital picture and upload it to the site.
The twist in this approach comes in how it is built at the software level. It provides a way for tens of thousands to contribute and earn nearly all of the revenue it generates.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits “2.2250738585072011e-308″ from the string format into the floating point format.
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Check out ProPublica’s website today, and you might notice — along with blog posts, donation buttons, links to special projects, and the kind of deep-dive investigative journalism that the nonprofit outfit is celebrated for — a new feature: advertisements. Starting today, the outfit is serving ads on its site to complement the funding it takes in from foundation support and reader contributions, its two primary revenue streams.
“This has been something we’ve been expecting to do for some time,” Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager, told me in a phone call. “It was a question of when.”
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Once upon a time, infants were quietly removed from orphanages and delivered to the home economics programs at elite U.S. colleges, where young women were eager to learn the science of mothering. These infants became “practice babies,” living in “practice apartments,” where a gaggle of young “practice mothers” took turns caring for them. After a year or two of such rearing, the babies would be returned to orphanages, where they apparently were in great demand; adoptive parents were eager to take home an infant that had been cared for with the latest “scientific” childcare methods.
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Social media like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn enable ordinary people to do international live broadcasting. It’s little wonder companies worry about the potential damage to their brand or reputation from wayward tweeting employees, and I am told many a celebrity’s agent has considered adding a “no drinking and tweeting” clause to his contract. Here’s a look at how some companies are writing (and rewriting) their social media policies to deal with the risks they face.
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Science
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Philosophy, Étienne Gilson observed, “always buries its undertakers.” “Philosophy,” according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in their new book The Grand Design, “is dead.” It has “not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, [and] scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” Not only, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, has philosophy passed away; so, too, has natural theology. At any rate, the traditional argument from the order apparent in the structure and operations of the universe to a transcendent cause of these, namely God, is wholly redundant—or so they claim: “[Just] as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit. Because there is a law of gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
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That headline is the cover language from the current issue of Forbes magazine – for a story I wrote about DNA sequencing and, particularly, about Jonathan Rothberg and his new Personal Genome Machine.
What we are declaring in this story is that DNA sequencing, the technology by which individual letters of genetic code can be read out, could be the basis for a $100 billion market that encompasses not only medicine, where sequencing is already being evaluated to help cancer patients, but also other fields like materials science, biofuels that replace petroleum, and better-bred crops and farm animals. There are even synthetic biologists who are talking about using biology to make buildings and furniture based on the idea that this will be better for the environment than current plastic and concrete.
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This video captures the beauty of “The Central Dogma” of molecular biology, which is that “DNA makes RNA makes protein”. (For you twitter fiends, this translates as “DNA>RNA>protein”.)
This nicely done animation describes how proteins act similarly to “molecular machines” to copy, or transcribe, specific genes in the DNA of every cell into small, portable RNA messages, how those messenger RNAs are modified and exported from the cell nucleus and finally, how the RNA code is translated to build proteins — a process known as “gene expression.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — When Americans spend $100 on health care, is it possible that only $4 goes to keeping them well and $96 goes somewhere else? Single payer health care [government-funded universal health insurance] advocates compare US health care to that in Western Europe or Canada and come up with figures of 20–30% waste in the US.
But there is one country with very low level of economic activity yet with a level of health care equal to the West: Cuba.
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Europe
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Full European Union membership is still a strategic goal for Turkey, several ministers and top diplomats have maintained, despite admitting making significant errors along the way, including a decrease in public support for this bid.
On the second day of a week-long annual gathering of ambassadors, the Foreign Ministry hosted on Tuesday a session titled “A balance sheet on the fifth year of our EU membership process: Negotiations and reform process.”
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China’s leadership has launched a charm offensive aimed at Europe. The country’s vice premier, who is visiting Spain and Germany this week, has promised that Beijing will continue buying up government debt to support the troubled euro zone. He has also called for more bilateral trade.
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Northern League leader Umberto Bossi on Wednesday insisted that the government must pass its pet federalism project by the end of the month.
Bossi, Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s key ally, said the week of January 17-23 would be crucial to get the bill out of a parliamentary commission and on the way to final approval.
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The watchdog introduced last year to govern MPs’ expenses today hit back against threats that it could be reformed or even scrapped with a poll reminding parliament of the depth of public mistrust they still face in the wake of last year’s expenses scandal.
David Cameron issued a warning before Christmas that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority should reform and improve the way it works after complaints from every corner of the House of Commons of slow payments, troublesome IT systems and unfair rules. He set an April deadline for Ipsa to improve or face being forced to change, meaning it could even be scrapped.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The California Supreme Court allowed police Monday to search arrestees’ cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they’re carrying when taken into custody.
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Does warning other drivers about speed cameras constitute obstructing a police officer?
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Many Tibetans these days are rightfully feeling dismayed, believing that their culture and identity is increasingly being eclipsed and their hopes for a resolution to the Tibetan question dashed by the rise of China.
But hold on a minute. Though China is already on the path to being an undisputed economic and military power, Tibet has also become a superpower in its own right.
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Cablegate
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I didn’t realize that you needed to use such professional help to figure out if you had a disgruntled worker on your hands. Isn’t it the role of managers themselves to have a sense as to whether or not their employees are disgruntled? Though, I’m somewhat amused by the idea that the US government thinks that a psychiatrist or sociologist can accurately pick out who’s likely to leak documents.
Not that it’s a bad thing to try to figure out if there are disgruntled workers or to make sure secure systems really are secure. I’m all for that. I just think it’s a bit naive to think any of this will actually prevent future leaks. You just need one person to get the info out, and there’s always someone and always a way to do so — as demonstrated by the fact that this document itself “leaked” so quickly. It seems a better situation would be to focus on making sure that any damage from such leaks is minimal.
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The army court-martial defense specialist and Bradley Manning’s attorney David E. Coombs published his Motion to Dismiss Manning’s case for Lack of Speedy Trial in his blog Army Court Martial Defense dot Info.
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There is even a delightful irony in his prescription. Among the groups Mr Shirky proposes that American embrace is WikiLeaks. His essay was evidently penned before the site was cursed by American officials for releasing hundreds of US diplomatic cables onto the net. America can benefit from promoting social media, he concludes, “even though that may mean accepting short-term disappointment”. If only he had known what was to come.
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The Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive new steps to prevent more WikiLeaks embarrassments, including instituting “insider threat” programs to ferret out disgruntled employees who might be inclined to leak classified documents, NBC News has learned.
As part of these programs, agency officials are being asked to figure out ways to “detect behavioral changes” among employees who might have access to classified documents.
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Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday.
Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed that Israel kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv briefed on its internationally criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip.
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Palestinians say impoverished Gaza remains effectively a “prison” sealed off by Israel, and have called for an opening to allow normal trade and other links with the world.
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Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th. (I develop this point in a fuller way in my 14-min video, here.)
In May of 2004, the New York Times, to its great credit, finally went back and looked at its coverage of the build-up to war in Iraq. (Shamefully, NBC and the other networks have never done that.) But the Times did not look at the problem of journalists giving powerful officials a free pass by stripping names from fear-mongering words and just reporting the words, or of newspapers sworn to inform the public keeping secrets from that same (misinformed) public, of reporters getting played and yet refusing to ID the people who played them because they needed to signal some future player that the confidential source game would go on.
In its look back the Times declared itself insufficiently skeptical, especially about Iraqi defectors. True enough. But the look back was itself insufficiently skeptical. Radical doubt, which is basic to understanding what drives Julian Assange, was impermissible then. One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.
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Former environment minister Jim Prentice told U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson that he was prepared to step in and impose tougher regulations on the oilsands if the industry damaged Canada’s green reputation, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks.
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Iran’s president ‘slapped’ by the head of the revolutionary guard, a German CEO blasts French industrial espionage and the latest on WikiLeaks
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Open source HTTP accelerator Varnish gained 545k hostnames. A recent blog post on the varnish site identifies WikiLeaks as one particularly prominent user of the software, with both cablegate.wikileaks.org (performance graph) and warlogs.wikileaks.org (performance graph) served by Apache via Varnish.
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As everyone who’s even half-awake knows by now, a bunch of people who used to work on Wikileaks have got together to work on Openleaks. From what I hear, Openleaks is going to be so much better than Wikileaks – it will have no editorial role, it will strongly protect people who submit leaks, it’s not about the people who run it, it’ll be distributed and encrypted.
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The Wall Street Journal notes that cables released by WikiLeaks show the Japanese government repeatedly asked the US for help against anti-whaling activist organization Sea Shepherd (covered many times on BoingBoing in the past). These repeated requests for assistance included asking the US to revoke the group’s tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization.
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6. If the government can pressure private companies to silence Wikileaks, it can silence anyone.
Senator Lieberman’s staff seemed to apply some governmental pressure to Amazon, which found a violation of its broadly worded “terms of service” to remove Wikileaks from Amazon servers. (The administration has not applied similar pressure, to my knowledge.) Paypal and Mastercard refused to process donations, applying a standard far lower than the standards applying to government.
I agree with those who view these moves as an Internet “tax on dissent.” To put this in perspective, what if Amazon interpreted its terms of service to kick controversial politicians off its servers? What if Paypal stopped processing payments to controversial newspapers, political blogs, or … Klansmen and flag burners? What if Mastercard, after receiving calls from a Senator, refused to process donations to the Palin or Romney campaigns, while processing donations for the Obama reelection? The affected speakers would be harmed and would have no legal means to defend themselves by challenging the government’s attempt to silence them.
The New York Times has raised concerns about these actions: “A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.”
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EFF staff activist Rainey Reitman will be participating in a panel discussion on WikiLeaks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The dramatic fall of Mexican oil production, and its largest field Cantarell, is often cited as a signature example of the problems facing Non-OPEC supply. Since the production highs of 2004-2005, Mexican production has lost over 800 kbpd (thousand barrels per day) which is fairly dramatic for a country that was producing around 3.4 mbpd as recently as 5-6 years ago. But as accelerated as these declines have been in Mexico, another oil producing region has seen even quicker declines.
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Quantification of the decline of available energy, which results from the increased cost of energy extraction, is difficult.
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After reports over the weekend of thousands of dead birds falling from the sky in Arkansas and around 100,000 dead fish washing up on the shores of the Arkansas River, more mysteries abound with hundreds of birds dying in Louisiana, dead fish in Maryland, dead sardines on Brazil’s beaches, and hundreds of snapper floating in New Zealand waters.
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One detects a slow, ironic hooray welling up from the climate change community this week because after a year of intense weather that’s devastated food crops worldwide now an epic flood in Australia threatens to cripple the production of coal. Accounting for 30% of global energy supply–and ready to go higher as oil supply declines–coal was thought to be permanently relegated to the 19th century only a decade ago. Now, however, coal is the go-to energy source of the developing world, the 5 billion people now passing through the gears of industrialism. And Australian coal, both thermal and metallurgical, is called upon heavily to feed this soaring demand. But as flooding in Queensland, Australia’s northern coal country, spreads over an area as large 350,000 square miles, what will happen to coal production and the export of coal?
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Environmental activists who planned to shut down a coal-fired power station near Nottingham were spared jail today after a judge declared they acted with “the highest possible motives”.
The campaigners were convicted of planning to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in what would have been one of the most audacious protests by green activists in the UK.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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From bloggers of Myanmar’s 2007 Saffron Revolution to tweeters of the protests that followed Iran’s 2009 election, the Internet has proven itself to be a tool in promoting change and democracy in the world.
But Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, argues that it doesn’t always work out that way.
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First, let’s establish some basic definitions. For the purpose of this blog post, the following definitions will suffice (I’ll address alternative definitions later):
• Privacy: having control over one’s personal information or actions
• Security: freedom from risk or danger
• Anonymity: being unidentifiable in one’s actions
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LOPPSI 2, the surveillance legislation in France, has been making headlines recently given that the legislation has re-entered political debate in recent weeks. The Interior Minister reportedly was out in the media telling everyone that one of the benefits of LOPPSI 2 is that it would stop cell phone theft in its tracks. Critics point to one tiny little problem with that sales-pitch – it doesn’t exist in the legislation in its current form and blocking stolen phones is already possible.
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Following formal ratification, it is the first time in history the EU has become a party to an international human rights treaty – the United Nation’s (UN) Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The Convention aims to ensure that people with disabilities can enjoy their rights on an equal basis with all other citizens. It is the first comprehensive human rights treaty to be ratified by the EU as a whole. It has also been signed by all 27 EU Member States and ratified by 16 of these (see Annex). The EU becomes the 97th party to this treaty. The Convention sets out minimum standards for protecting and safeguarding a full range of civil, political, social, and economic rights for people with disabilities. It reflects the EU’s broader commitment to building a barrier-free Europe for the estimated 80 million people with disabilities in the EU by 2020, as set out in the European Commission’s disability strategy (IP/10/1505).
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A man in possession of the world’s greatest license plate has lost his battle with the Virginia DMV, who ridiculously claim it encourages oral sex with kids instead of just cannibalism. Here’s their predictably unfunny response to the funny plate.
According to poster WHOWANTSBEEF at Reddit, he’s the owner of the infamous “EATTHE Kids First” license plate floating around the internet for years. Unfortunately for him, someone complained his plate was advocating something beyond hilarious cannibalism.
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The next time you’re in California, you might not want to bring your cell phone with you. The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can search the cell phone of a person who’s been arrested — including text messages — without obtaining a warrant, and use that data as evidence.
The ruling opens up disturbing possibilities, such as broad, warrantless searches of e-mails, documents and contacts on smart phones, tablet computers, and perhaps even laptop computers, according to legal expert Mark Rasch.
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Views are being sought by January 10th on a document being described by some as the first step towards a British codified constitution. The 150-page draft cabinet manual, drawn up on 14 December, aims to set out how the UK is governed. While the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, has stressed in his introduction that the manual is intended only as a source of information and guidance on governance, the draft document has instigated a debate over Britain’s constitutional status in part thanks to the Cabinet Secretary himself proclaiming in interviews before it was issued that it was an eagerly awaited stage on the road to full codification. The political and constitutional reform committee is now heading a consultation on the manual, with responses to be submitted at 10am on Monday 10th January if possible, and otherwise by Friday 28th January. This is a chance to help broaden the debate around a document that could prove the foundation to a written constitution for Britain.
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We’re holding a Tor hackfest on Saturday, January 15th. The bulk of the Tor developers are in town and coming to this event.
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La Quadrature du Net joins the blackout operation launched by Hungarian civil rights activists who oppose the newly enacted media law. Everybody is invited to join the blackout and contact their representatives to oppose any kind of censorship in the European Union.
This law imposes a stringent regulation of printed, audiovisual and online media which severely undermines the democratic foundations of the Hungarian republic.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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This is the latest example of how that other OS hides an endless stream of problems in its bloat. This is about displaying an image on your computer screen and compromising security. It is another example of how an OS designed by salesmen to sell in a desktop monopoly was not designed to deal with a hostile environment on the network and should be avoided like the plague.
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If you haven’t yet taken a look at what’s happening in Canada to DSL pricing “you may want to, given that if North American incumbent ISPs get their wish — all broadband customers continent wide could be looking at paying an arm and a leg for aging DSL technology”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Among the items San Francisco gallery and store Park Life stocked for holiday gifts was that most innocent of objects — a bookend in the shape of a balloon dog, made by a company based in Toronto. But right before Christmas, Park Life co-owner Jamie Alexander received an unusual Christmas present.
Lawyers for artist Jeff Koons sent a letter asking Park Life to stop selling and advertising the balloon dog bookends, return them to some mutually agreed upon address, tell Koons how many have been sold and disclose the maker of said bookends — a fact, Alexander said, that could easily be found via Google.
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Copyrights
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The Points of Culture, the Digital Culture Forum, the Forum of Free Media, the development of free software, the initiative to revise the copyright law, the rejection of irrational proposals for the criminalization of the network, the construction of a Bill of Rights for the Internet (the Marco Civil) and the rejection of ACTA are well-known examples of this inclusive policy, and they are based on the guarantee of the right of access to the network and to knowledge, enabling a fertile and innovative environment for cultural production.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller’s right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores and rejecting UMG’s attempt to claim that a sticker on a CD created a license agreement forbidding resale.
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The Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” is a set of snapshots of the Web over time. It’s a wonderful way to delve into the past (see Ars in its 1999 black-and-green glory to learn why “ERD Commander turns me on”), but it’s only possible thanks to rampant copying—and the potential copyright infringement that goes along with such copies. Thanks to US law, a successful copyright suit against the Wayback Machine could put the nonprofit Internet Archive on the hook for up to $150,000 per infringement.
Multiply that $150,000 by the number of individual pages in the Archive and you quickly run into some serious damages.
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ACTA
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The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) requests proof that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal measures are essential. The EU can only harmonise criminal measures if approximation of criminal laws and regulations of its Member States proves essential to ensure the effective implementation of a Union policy. The same is true for harmonisation by way of trade agreement. The FFII also requests documents which discuss the proportionality of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal measures.
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01.05.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we delivered the last three. Joi and her son Jack were the last install of 2010. Jack is an honor roll student, looking forward to entering Middle School next year and with a Dell D610 laptop from The HeliOS Project, he can go forward with confidence.
And his mom has one less thing to worry about.
In the meantime, we had a backlog of requests for laptops. They were mostly students preparing to enter college or trade schools. Unfortunately, many of them had already moved or had begun college and had not provided us a forwarding address.
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Taqipour also pointed out that an open source operating system would help pinpoint penetrable portholes in systems and said, “Many countries are turning to the open source [OS] as a solution to this problem.
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This post (tries to) describe what happened in 2010 about GNU/Linux security. What this post is not is a long list of vulnerabilities, there are some people doing it way better that me.
The first part of this post is dedicated to new vulnerability classes where the second one focuses on the defensive side, analyzing improvements made to the Linux kernel. Before closing this post, some selected quotes will be presented, pointing the finger at some of the Linux failures.
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Desktop
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As many readers of this blog already know, I love radio! I listen to the radio in my studio when I’m at my drawing table or in front of my PCLinuxOS computer.
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Server
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As data centers have grown in complexity, so has the task of keeping all or even most of the machines on the same page in terms of Linux version control and modeling. “Overall, the tension between ‘We have to have the latest patches installed’ and ‘Leave well enough alone’ means that a lot of different systems are at a lot of very different patch levels,” Illuminata’s Johnathan Eunice said.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Bradley and Karen discussed the inclusion of ZFS code now included in GRUB, as the GRUB Project announced and was covered at LWN by Jonathan Corbet.
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Google
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There aren’t many Chrome notebooks out there. Google has been sending a select few out to developers and those who signed up for its pilot program, but you can’t buy them at retail stores. Unless you count yourself among the lucky few that got a Cr-48, or work for a tech blog and were sent a review unit, it’s kind of hard to get your hands on one. Still, if you’ve read reviews or had a chance to play with one, you’ll know that Chrome OS is all web-based and completely different to the desktop experience we’re used to.
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Kernel Space
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2010 was another exciting year for the Linux kernel and its community. Over the course of four kernel releases and many tens of thousands of mailing list messages, over one thousand individual developers (some working alone, some working for corporations) contributed two new architectures, several new file systems, and drivers for key hardware in the form of the Nouveau Nvidia driver (produced independently of Nvidia) and an open source Broadcom driver for its recent Wi-Fi chips. Of course, many more features were added, too…
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Linus Torvalds has released the 2.6.37 kernel. Not much has changed since the 2.6.37-rc8 prepatch, just some VFS locking documentation updates, ASoC codex register cache changes, and “small and boring” fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel’s Carl Worth has just announced the xf86-video-intel 2.13.903 driver release. He hopes this DDX release candidate will be the last before the xf86-video-intel 2.14.0 driver is officially released carrying the proper X.Org driver support for their new Sandy Bridge CPUs.
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The Sandy Bridge Linux graphics support isn’t actually too bad besides lacking out-of-the-box support or any easy way to easily upgrade the driver stack for novice end-users of Linux. There’s open-source OpenGL acceleration (though it’s over classic Mesa and not Gallium3D), VA-API video decoding (and encoding support is evidently on the way this quarter), 2D/KMS, etc. This support though will be found in Ubuntu 11.04 when released in April and Fedora 15 in May, so it’s really just the very early adopters that will be impacted by having to roll their own driver stack or find any third-party package repositories.
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Applications
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A lot of us rely on online backup service since it is a quick, secure and cost-effective solution in backing up or storing files. As some of you may know, we have featured here some of the best online backup services for Linux not long ago. Today, we would like to add five more online data backup services that are mostly as capable as those mentioned on the previous list.
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If you took a bazillion photos over the holidays and have been dragging your feet about editing and organizing them, we’re here to give you a nudge. Check out these five open source apps that make quick work of getting your pictures off your camera and on your computer for tweaking and viewing.
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I still have a few low-profile graphical applications stacked up, found during some of my distro-surfing late last year. Both are audio-video editors, which are only vaguely useful to me.
It’s true I do, on occasion, have use for an audio editor. It’s rare, but probably once a year it comes in handy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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You can run multiple Linux distributions at the same time, on the same computer, without a virtual machine. Milo’s production environment is a mix of Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid, while eBay’s production Linux is Red Hat. Eventually, this will all converge on one environment, but in the mean time while we port, we need a way to rapidly iterate changes on a handful of Linux distributions. A virtual machine seems like the obvious answer, but that’s overkill for this situation.
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Games
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Steel Storm is an old school top down arcade shooter with score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action and have limited amounts of time to play computer games.
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The game recently got a nice major update (version 1.5) and brought many new features that include a new game type, new maps, new player models, a new weapon, new power ups, improved textures, new sounds and music tracks, menu optimizations, improved HUD, new cross-hairs and many many fixes. Full changelog can be found here.
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Endi is working on “Dead Cyborg”, an adventure game using the Blender Game engine. The game is free (as in free beer) – if you like it you’re asked for a donation.
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Indie developer Endi is working on a new donation based Sci-Fi adventure game titled Dead Cyborg.
Based on the Blender Engine, the 3D game will be an episode-based “hard-sci-fi” adventure, seeing the player navigate their way a variety of environments, interacting with objects and also what appear to be robots, or cyborgs.
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At some point in the future, Valve will eventually release a Steam client for Linux. But how will you know about it?
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Version 1.5.0 of Chocolate Doom was released recently; the project aims to replicate the behavior of the original DOS DOOM releases. Changes include the importing of the DOSbox OPL emulator for better MIDI playback.
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Desktop Environments
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With Windows you’re stuck with, well, Windows. With Linux, you have a choice. And whether you have a preference for a ‘do everything’ approach, or a ‘do nothing at all’ one, there’s a window manager made for you.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New year, new alpha release; Kolab 2.3 alpha is now released for testing!
For users, Kolab 2.3 introduces new mobile synchronisation features in the form of ActiveSync integration and, for packagers, provides improved code modularity for the web client. Detailed information on the release can be found here: Release Notes
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As the Phonon team is hard at work to prepare for the release of Phonon 4.4.4, the GStreamer backend has seen some awesome improvements these past few days.
Not only will it be the second backend to support the experimental video capturing features introduced with Phonon 4.4.3 but has also seen tremendous improvements with regards to stability. But most importantly of all it got improved codec installation support.
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Over the Christmas holidays, I spent some time coming up with a solution to a new challenge we have been running into in Plasma, and which I suspect other KDE teams may be as well: quick and easy deployment of application addons.
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In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest:
* Non-destructive editing (with an interface fully adapted to versioning) arrives in Digikam, along with work on demosaicing and interpolation options, and filters
* Drag-and-drop support for launchers, and version 4 of the SlimGlow theme in Plasma
* User interface improvements in KFileAudioPreview
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GNOME Desktop
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While busy discussing Sandy Bridge Linux support, it’s been brought to my attention en route to Las Vegas that the Wayland back-end for GTK+3 has been merged!
With this Git commit by Intel’s Kristian Høgsberg, the Wayland back-end has been pushed forward.
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Atolm, the new but already popular dark theme created by the Orta author has been updated yesterday. Here’s the changelog for Atolms 0.6.5:
* Speed optimizations, the theme is now faster than Orta
* Notebook spacing changed.
* Notebook tabs changed.
* Nautilus breadcrumbs and mode button improved.
* Check, radio buttons and tabs now share the same coloring with buttons.
* White arrows on spinbuttons fixed.
* Ubuntu Software Center text colors fixed.
* Emesene status button text color fixed.
* Pidgin status toggle button text color fixed.
* Various Evolution Fixes.
* OpenOffice text visibility fixes.
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Yesterday there was quick, airborne coverage of the GTK+ Wayland back-end moving forward for GTK+ 3.0. Not only was the back-end merged, allowing the GTK+ tool-kit to begin working on this alternative display server that’s quickly garnering attention, but it also works with the new GTK+ multi-backend capabilities.
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New Releases
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After several months of development, the Parted Magic developers have issued version 5.8 of their open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.
The latest maintenance update is based on the 2.6.36 Linux kernel and features the addition of the SciTE SCIntilla-based text editor. According to Parted Magic developer Patrick Verner, version 5.8 marks the first time that the ISO image can be booted completely from RAM. Verner says that this means, for example, “that the default syslinux menu can be used for a PXE boot”.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva sudoers file has changed, I can’t speak for other distros, but after my post about setting up sudo with mandriva, and using zsh (z-shell) for cli shortcuts/aliasing.
Now most of that aliasing can be configured in sudoers instead, so it wont matter what shell you use.
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Red Hat Family
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As we’ve described before, we have a unique organizational model here at Red Hat in that we’ve combined the more traditional Human Resources and Corporate Marketing functions into a single department that we call People & Brand. Thanks to this structure, we are able to explore the places where our brand intersects with many different elements of our culture and associate programming, such as recruiting, interviewing, orientation, on-boarding, and training & development (among other things).
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Debian Family
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When the Linux Mint Debian Edition 201012 distribution was released recently, I installed it on all of my 64-bit systems without problem. But I couldn’t get it to install on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, the installer always hung. I assumed it was because of the very finicky Broadcom 4312 WiFi adapter, or perhaps something else out of the ordinary with that system. Now it turns out that it wasn’t my 2133 after all, there was a problem with the 32-bit distribution. The details of the problem, and what they are doing to ensure that it doesn’t happen it again, are in this Linux Mint Blog post.
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In my opinion, Mint passes easily on all points.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While the software-center team is currently focusing on ratings&reviews there are still some nice features landing in trunk.
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The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has been in a state of flux since the Editor in Chief had to step down. I worked with Nathan Handler over the weekend to get Issue 218 out the door today covering much of December and it gave me a taste of how challenging and time-consuming the task was (and made me hugely thankful that the former Editor so thoroughly documented it all). It also made me realize that it could be more succinctly divided up into small sections that volunteers can take – we just need to do a better job of documenting that so we can give pieces out easily when volunteers come along.
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Canonical has a new Ubuntu branded keyboard for sale on their website. The keyboard is made from silicon which makes it moisture resistant, easy to clean and it is flexible – you can just roll it up and take it with you. It even has a screaming huge Ubuntu logo on the left.
This should make the perfect keyboard for all the Ubuntu supporters out there. Except that it is not. And it is the fault of that Windows logo that the keyboard sports.
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Aside from Unity, the Software Center is one of the main areas of development in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narhwal. It is getting a lot of new features like support for user ratings, reviews etc. Another feature – search suggestion – has quietly landed in trunks.
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Flavours and Variants
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Our recent article entitled Ubuntu As Intended drew in a fair amount of discussion about the base software and configuration in the default Ubuntu install. Some readers pointed out a few alternatives that aim to take the standard Ubuntu desktop and give it more polish than the original. Some of these projects just include a few extra packages, some replace the standard software suite, and others are complete makeovers. Today we aim to sift through a few of the more popular Ubuntu variants to find the best ones of the bunch, and see what they can offer.
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This morning I read a blog article from Intel in which it was discussed how Linux was once again making inroads on the enterprise. The survey indicated that about 75% of those surveyed stated they were planing on adding Linux servers to their organizations in the next 12 months. Only 41% stated they were going to add Windows servers to their business. So who conducted the survey? The Linux Foundation.
So let me tell you about my recent experience with Linux. Every year, usually towards the end of the year, I select a Linux version to try for several weeks. Inside of me there is a Linux freak trying to break out and a little voice in the back of my head saying how nice it would be to dump Windows. Before I proceed let me state that I really enjoy my Windows 7 boxes. They have been working flawlessly since I installed W7 and I have had no major, or for that matter, no minor issues with the OS.Basically Windows 7 has been problem free for except for the self-induced problems I have caused on my own.
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ARM and Android are exploding and taking GNU/Linux along for the ride.
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Phones
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Android
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Sometimes it seems like everyone on the subway or in the café is using an iPhone, but according to market research firm Nielsen, new smartphone buyers are going after Android phones in droves. Nielsen says that 40.8 percent of US consumers who bought a smartphone in the last six months bought Android devices, while 26.9 percent bought iPhones and 19.2 percent bought BlackBerrys.
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According to beancounters at Nielsen, data from November 2010 shows the Iphone is still the most popular smartphone in terms of marketshare in the US but Apple must be looking in its rear view mirror as Google’s Android juggernaut starts tooting and telling it to get out of the way.
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The most remarkable thing about Android is that it is the first widely adopted Open Source client operating system. It’s long been clear that Open Source is the best way to preserve infrastructural code from the vicissitudes of corporate and governmental volatility, but using it for client applications has so far not taken off as well. There has often been a separation between an open source underlying layer and a proprietary user experience that is built atop it.
Android does follow this pattern to some extent – the underlying OS code is fully Open Source under an Apache License, so anyone can bend it to their own uses, but in order to get the “with Google” logo on your device, you need to conform to Google’s Compatibility Definition Document. That has changed over time; for example the 2.1 version specifies that your device MUST have a camera and 1.6 requires telephony.
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You can buy iPad lookalikes, things that look like a huge iPod, TV-based video game systems and more that run Android, often for under $100.
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This is… unbelievable. PC and laptop specialist Lenovo has officially unveiled its IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook – a combination device that blends a standalone Android 2.2 tablet with an Intel PC.
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It seems that the forthcoming Android Honeycomb will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, such as the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip, to work. I can buy that. It’s tough luck for anyone using a Samsung Galaxy Tab or a Dell Streak, but that’s life on the bleeding edge of technology.
To users ready to blow a fuse because they no longer have the newest and best toy on the block, I suggest that they chill out. Does your device still do what you bought it for? After all, I’m still perfectly happy with my first generation iPod Touch, and it will never see a significant operating system upgrade again.
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The Open Source Research (OSR) Group was founded in Sept 2009, so it has been 16 months since inception. We hope to be writing a year-end summary every year, available to anyone interested. FAU is the university, CS is the computer science department, “we” is the group, and “I” is Dirk Riehle.
* Hiring: During 2010 I succeeded in hiring three top-notch Ph.D. students; this fills the initial positions available to us. The three are actively working on their dissertations now. A first funding proposal for another Ph.D. student was submitted to the DFG during 2010, more are to follow.
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Open source vendors playing in the cloud arena are growing in number, probably in 2011 others will come, but only who will be able to nurture its community has good chance to be a winner in 2012. Among interesting players I didn’t mention before I would definitely enlist Cfengine and OpenStack.
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Failure is part of predictions. Certainty demands comprehensive intelligence, which is by definition absent in the business of forecasting. But in prediction, the question isn’t whether you fail: that’s expected. The metric by which success is determined is rather how often. That is what separates the genius from the idiot.
Let us score last year’s predictions, then, so that you may know whether to pay attention to the 2011 iteration.
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A NASA-led project has won the full support of the Apache Software Foundation, bolstering development efforts around Java-based middleware that uses metadata to foster cross-platform collaboration.
Apache has deemed the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) architecture, originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a Top Level Project, according to the space agency. This means it is one of a handful of the foundation’s open source projects to receive project management and resource support.
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The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.
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This article shows that Apache is pulling away from its “arch enemy, ” Microsoft’s IIS. In December 2009 there were 2.2 times as many Apache websites as there were IIS websites. In December 2010 Apache had 2.7 times as many websites as IIS.
Apache is arguably one of the most emphatic open source successes, a product that has consistently since its birth been the preferred web server for millions upon millions of webmasters. Unless something drastic happens, it will remain dominant for a long time to come.
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Web Browsers
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The key event is immediately evident: as the graph shows, Firefox’s market share has overtaken that of Internet Explorer, with 38.11% against 37.52% (although I wouldn’t place much – any – faith in those last few significant figures).
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Mozilla
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The figures show that the gap between the two browsers started narrowing in March 2010. However, it appears that the real winner over the past year has been Chrome. Google’s browser ended 2010 with almost 10% extra marketshare than it started the year with. The main casualty of Chrome’s rise was Internet Explorer, which lost 7.32% during the year, according to StatCounter’s figures.
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The big things this week:
* No big issues since the release of Firefox Beta 8, Mobile Beta 3, Firefox Home 1.1 and Sync 1.6
* Fancy-schmancy SUMOdev schedule (links below)
* Improved search on SUMO
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IE’s market share in India is slipping (following the global trend), and while Google Chrome continues its offline promotions, a browser version that comes out winner is Firefox 3.6.
IE is still the most popular browser (i.e. combined market share of IE 6, 7 and 8), but when it comes to a browser version, Firefox 3.6 takes the cake (23.25% market share as of today).
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The newer version of Firefox from Mozilla is definitely better than Firefox 3.6 and is definitely worth trying out. Firefox 4 runs on the Gecko 2.0 web platform. Earlier today I downloaded Firefox 4 and put it through some drills, here is a review of Firefox 4 Beta 1 where you can find the new features and also the how Firefox 4 fares against other browsers in web browser benchmarks.
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Well, the time has come. For the first time probably, we can see firefox with tabs on the title bar. This is not available in the current beta 8 release but this feature will most probably be added and supported in the upcoming 9th beta.
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Oracle
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Oracle Corp. and its wholly owned subsidiary Passlogix stole confidential information to deprive a competitor of royalties, force it into bankruptcy, and use the stolen intellectual property for their own profit, 2FA Technology says in a $110 million claim in Federal Court.
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It’s been over a year that Java EE 6 was released in Dec 2009 along with GlassFish as the Reference Implementation. JBoss contributed two new specifications to the Java EE 6 platform – JSR 299 (Contexts & Dependency Injection) and JSR 303 (Bean Validation) and contributed in multitude of other ways to make the platform successful, many thanks for that. RedHat released JBoss 6.0, their first Java EE 6-compliant app server (no production support and only Java EE 6 Web Profile) last month, a very hearty congratulations to them!
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CMS
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For those who track such things, the U.S. Department of Energy has hundreds of websites, all of which are currently maintained through a variety of content management systems (CMS).
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Education
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It has now become clear to several of us that we need to identify an ethos of Open Scholarship. This means that – when and however disseminated – scholarship should be created in a semantic manner which allows us – and machines – to make better decisions and bout what we do, and to re-use the material that we create. By transferring the power of semantics to authors we give them greater voice; the costs can be very low and toolsets can be free and transparent. I shall pull this together in my presentation and several of us will have worked to create a first draft of Open Scholarship principles and practice, building on Panton and other initiatives.
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BSD
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Two respected Chinese software companies of two operating systems used in China are said to be joining forces (20/12/2010) to create a domestic operating system called NeoKylin.
China Standard Software and the National University of Defense Technology have signed a strategic partnership to launch an operating system brand known as “NeoKylin” that will be used for national defense and all sectors of the country’s economy.
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Kylin is based on FreeBSD 5.3 with some proprietary security extensions to add an extra level of security to that operating system. Kylin, named after qili, a mythical beast, has been organised in a hierarchy model, including the basic kernel layer which is responsible for initializing the hardware and providing basic memory management and task management, the system service layer which is based on FreeBSD providing UFS2 and BSD network protocols, and the desktop environment which is similar to Windows. It has been designed to comply with the UNIX standards and is compatible with Linux binaries.
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Project Releases
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A release candidate for version 4.6.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is nearing. Novell’s Richard Guenther has provided a GCC 4.6 status update whereby this version of the leading free software compiler has now left “stage 3″ of its development and the code-base is now only receiving regression fixes and documentation work.
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A new Conky Colors version has been released (5.0 beta 1) today which adds a beautiful new “board mode” which you can see in the screenshot in the beginning of the post.
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The Blender Foundation and associated online developer community have released Blender 2.56 Beta, the fourth official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series. On final release this development code will become Blender version 2.6.
This beta is for the most part feature complete and over 440 bugs have been fixed since the 2.55 beta, although a very bad bug in “undo” for the Cloth / Fluid sim was discovered the day after the initial release. This bug has now been fixed and the developers say they will probably release a 2.56a update including the fix, soon.
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We’ve known that Canonical has been looking at LibreOffice replacing OpenOffice.org within Ubuntu and it looks like this packaging work is indeed materializing for the forthcoming Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release.
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Government
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We’re pleased to announce that San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System has now been open sourced!
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If you’re interested in trying EAS, please go to code.google.com/p/eas
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Openness/Sharing
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For my birthday several months ago, I got a Kindle. No fewer than three people have since asked me, “What are you doing with a Kindle? It’s not very open source-y.”
Confession: I love my Kindle. I only have one book to carry when I travel. I can play games. And it let me tweet from Paris over free 3G from Open World Forum, where cell data was expensive and, like many conferences, the wifi was shaky. Surely that counts for something?
But the accusers are right. It’s not very “open source-y.” The DRM is painful and prevents sharing.
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“We see Cancer Commons as the harbinger of a new patient-centric paradigm for translational medicine, in which every patient receives personalized therapy based upon the best available science, and researchers continuously test and refine their models of cancer biology and therapeutics based on the resulting clinical responses,” Tenenbaum and colleagues wrote in their October white paper.
That may be how you need to talk to entice a recalcitrant scientific audience, but when I spoke to Tenenbaum just before Christmas, he summed it up in a way that’s easier for patients to digest.
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Open Data
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For years, useful MTA data – including route schedules, service disruptions, and station details – were unavailable to software developers. While these data are technically public domain and available under the Freedom of Information Law, the MTA (like many transit agencies) faced many obstacles to providing it to developers. Internal regulations, licensing issues, and concerns about data quality hampered efforts to release the data, and the relationship between MTA and developers had become litigious.
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Programming
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Web developers are in a lather following the discovery of a bug in the PHP programming language that causes computers to freeze when they process certain numerical values with large numbers of decimal places.
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California is now destined to take its place among such stalwarts of free speech, such titans of comedy, as Morocco and India, both of whom arrested its citizens for making Facebook pages for others.
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Peter Daou and James Boyce claim they came up with the site’s signature blend of blogs by prominent people, news aggregation, original reporting and online community-building, originally envisioned as a liberal counterpoint to such conservative-tilting sites as the Drudge Report.
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In summary, it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like “There will always be books and libraries” and “People will always need librarians to show them how to use information.” We’ll never know now what kind of treatments might have worked. Librarians planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall.
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I’m not a fan of deletionism (more below), but given the current rules around notability, I am either somewhat questionable as an English Wikipedia article subject (using the general, easy to interpret charitably summary of notability: “A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.”) to unquestionably non-notable (any less charitable interpretation, which presumably any “deletionist” would use, thus my user page statement).
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Designer Marloes ten Bhömer is well-known for her unorthodox shoe designs, and now she’s apply 3D printing technology to her craft. Pictured above is her latest creation, the Rapidprototypedshoe, showing at the Design Museum Holon in Israel until January 8th.
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The gunman was identified as has since been detained, as was his “lookout”, the man behind the elderly woman in the photo.
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This evening I was just minding my own business and doing what I like to do from time to time, look over data. In particular, I was looking over the 2010 TechCrunch data, because we had earlier posted some data given to us by WordPress.com (which hosts TechCrunch) that seemed a bit odd. Namely, Facebook was nowhere to be found as a top referrer to TechCrunch. That’s weird because as we’re all well aware by now, Facebook was the most visited site in the U.S. in 2010.
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In a recent phone interview, Zinsser talked with me about the craft and shared these five tips for journalists who want to grow as writers.
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Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it has on me and other bloggers, with the simple premise that I’d like to be writing the content that everyone links to in those media, instead of merely passing around links to other people’s work.
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The US federal government seems to have IPv6 on the brain as of late: both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) came out with IPv6-related documents recently. The FCC document is a collection of previously known information—it’s not about FCC policy—but they managed to include a few things we weren’t aware of.
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A leading candidate for president in Peru’s April election “took his campaign” to Vancouver, reported the city’s leading daily. Earlier this month Alejandro Toledo — who served a previous term as president — met mining officials, investment bankers and journalists, telling them his government would improve the climate for mineral exploration and mine development.
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Science
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New York City seems pretty extraordinary: Its residents make more money, produce more stuff and commit more violent crimes than those of any other U.S. city. And New Yorkers are nearly the most creative, as judged by the total number of patents they produce. But according to mathematician Luís Bettencourt, New York is actually quite average, given its size. For a really exceptional place, swap coasts and look at San Francisco.
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Earlier today Europe, Asia, and Africa got to see a nice partial solar eclipse as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, blocking as much as 85% of the solar surface. The extraordinarily talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault traveled from his native France to the Sultanate of Oman to take pictures of the eclipse.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Republican party is to use the new Congress, which begins on Wednesday, to mount a guerrilla campaign aimed at destroying Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, slashing the federal budget and preparing the ground for his defeat in the 2012 White House race.
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Of the 12,000 people questioned internationally, 81 percent searched for advice about health, medicines or medical conditions.
Russians were found to be the most curious, searching for health advice the most on the internet, followed by China, India, Mexico and Brazil. The French search for online health information the least, according to the survey’s findings.
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Many of the people I know are dealing with chronic health issues that require daily medications and ongoing treatments
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According to the Sefar Website, the state institution is planning to produce Atenolol, Vitamin C, Ethambutol, Ibuprofene, Loratadine and other drugs.
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At the annual American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans this summer, 200 protestors chanted “no conflicts of interest” and held up photos of individual doctors outside the convention center. Inside the hall, their charges were verified.
The meeting’s Daily Bulletin disclosed that the APA president himself, Alan Schatzberg, has 15 links to drug companies including stock ownership and serving on a speakers bureau.
Doctors on other speaker bureaus like Shire’s Ann Childress and Wyeth’s Claudio Soares gave presentations and workshops that — surprise! — extolled company drugs.
And signing books, side by side, was the duo now accused of penning an entire book for the drug industry: Alan Schatzberg and Charles Nemeroff.
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Security
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Several gigbaytes of sensitive government data has been stolen from government and online security staff in a fake White House e-card scam, according to KrebsonSecurity.
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Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player, specially crafted files can be used to inject code that will trigger a buffer overflow in the demultiplexer used for Real Media format files.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Italy is considering taking Brazil to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over its failure to extradite leftist ex-terrorist Cesare Battisti.
The Brazilian government said it would refuse to hand over the convicted murderer on Friday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s last day as the South American country’s president, sparking an angry response and a crisis in diplomatic relations, with Italy’s ambassador called back to Rome for consultations.
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But new numbers tell a different story, suggesting that doubt is creeping into the state’s psyche. While Texas is still No. 1 with a bullet, carrying out more than twice as many executions as any other state, the number of new death sentences has plummeted.
In 2010, only eight Texas juries sentenced someone to die – a record low since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Compare that with 1999, when 48 juries in our state handed down death sentences.
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How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war.
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The current Israeli government (as well as past governments, whether led by Labour, Likud or the catch all Kadima party) has zero intention of moving forward with negotiations with the Palestinians.
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An anonymous group of students has created a document to express their frustration born of Hamas’s violent crackdowns on ‘western decadence’, the destruction wreaked by Israel’s attacks and the political games played by Fatah and the UN
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After 43 years of occupation, Israel has lost the right to be called a state of law
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This year will see the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan and, according to current plans, the beginning of British troop withdrawal. A decade into the military campaign, there is no longer even discussion of winning. The initial objective to release the country from the despotic grip of the Taliban and prevent its use as a safe haven for al-Qaida was achieved within months. Since then, it has only ever become harder to discern what victory might look like.
There is some clarity on what would count as defeat. If Nato withdrawal leads to the total collapse of Hamid Karzai’s government and a return to Taliban rule, there would be no disguising the humiliation to western powers, nor the increased security threat from jihadi terrorism. Not that President Karzai is an attractive ruler. His administration is corrupt and repressive.
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Ivory Coast is on the “brink of genocide” and the world must take urgent action, the country’s new ambassador to the UN has warned. Youssoufou Bamba also claimed that some houses were being marked according to the tribe of the occupier.
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Ghanaians are waiting for their normally slow court system to deliver a verdict in a shocking case that illuminates resurgent beliefs in witchcraft.
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At least four former presidential candidates in Belarus are facing up to 15 years in prison after they were charged with “organising mass disorder” during protests over the disputed re-election of hardline leader Alexander Lukashenko this month.
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Last week the U.N. Security Council voted to lift the sanctions that it imposed on Iraq 20 years ago. Vice President Joe Biden hailed the occasion as “an end to the burdensome remnants of the dark era of Saddam Hussein.”
What he did not say was that the sanctions were more than burdensome. They triggered a humanitarian crisis that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and the collapse of every system necessary to sustain human life in a modern society. And he certainly did not mention that among all the nations on the Security Council, it was the U.S. — and the U.S. alone — that ensured that this human damage would be massive and indiscriminate.
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A new complex of government offices on the banks of the river Niger in Bamako, Mali, is like a wedding cake; pale pink, frosted with decorative detail, its plate glass winking in the sun. It’s called the Administrative City and it was financed by the Libyan-backed Malibya development company. It is a powerful symbol of North African oil money and what it has to offer one of the poorest countries in the world.
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The US military is investigating the leadership of an army brigade whose soldiers are accused of running a “kill team” that murdered Afghan civilians, as further evidence emerges of widespread complicity in the deaths.
A brigadier general is conducting a “top to bottom” review of the 5th Stryker brigade after five of its soldiers were committed for trial early next year charged with involvement in the murders of three Afghans and other alleged crimes including mutilating their bodies, and collecting fingers and skulls from corpses as trophies.
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Police in Denmark and Sweden arrested five men today on suspicion of planning a “Mumbai-style” attack on the Danish newspaper that printed cartoons portraying the prophet Muhammad.
In a series of raids, Danish police seized an automatic weapon, a silencer, ammunition and plastic strips that could be used as handcuffs, foiling what they described as the most serious terror operation ever uncovered in the country.
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I have a hit list in my hand. Fifteen people are threatened with assassination because they speak out for freedom and democracy, against a massacre. One of them, in a list of civilians including church ministers, youth leaders, legislators and an anthropologist, is a friend of mine.
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Cablegate
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There are two Robert Mugabes, according to the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks. One is a frail “crazy old man” who has a young helper kneel at his feet during high-level meetings so he can wash his hands on a silver tray. The other is a physically fit, mentally agile and “charming” leader in full control over all factions in his party.
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Today, James Richardson had an opinion and analysis piece published in The Guardian about the fallout in Zimbabwe from the publication of the 09HARARE1004 cable. Information about Morgan Tzvangirai’s meetings with US embassy officials was disclosed in the Harare cable, and this will likely be the subject of a politically motivated high treason trial brought against Tzvangirai by Mugabe, the ultimate penalty for which is a death sentence.
It shouldn’t be downplayed how serious it is that Tsvangirai might be facing the death penalty. But there are problems with the conclusions that Richardson draws, and they derive from a worrying looseness with the facts.
It would surely be unreasonable to claim that merely expressing approval of the sanctions in private meetings with US officials warrants a treason trial. But these are the sorts of concerns that journalists must consider when conducting harm minimization, and the unreasonableness of a particular regime is always something that has to be considered a factor when assessing the consequences of publication.
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When WikiLeaks whistleblowers began circulating in April footage of a 2007 Iraq war incursion in which US military personnel unwittingly killed two war correspondents and several civilians, the international community was aghast at the apparent murder. With sobering questions on the material’s full context largely falling on deaf ears, the group was free to editorialise the scene as it pleased: “collateral murder”.
But now, with the recent release of sensitive diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier.
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The idea is simple – each participant can download and run a small program acting as a web server and serves the files and the information from the site. Thus, anyone who wishes to participate and to help WikiLeaks may install on their computer this small software which does not take lots of resources. Resources are not a problem because sites of the WikiLeaks type to not take much space. There is no problem with Internet speed either as the many users together provide a huge capacity, while individually (one session, for a segment of the site) does not require high speed to access small web files; large data files will be transported through the peer to peer distribution technology such as bittorrent, recombining the speeds of the many participants.
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Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg
A fantastic book. Ellsberg turns out to be an incredible writer and he tells not only his own incredible story of the fight to release the Pentagon Papers (did you know the New York Times actually stole them from his house?), but, even more interestingly, recounts a great deal of fascinating personal experience about what it was like working with McNamara and Kissinger and trying to maintain your sanity in the highest levels of government.
With the WikiLeaks cables in the news, this book is more relevant than ever. And personally, I can’t wait until Ellsberg’s next book, The American Doomsday Machine, comes out. (Here’s an excerpt from back when he planned to publish it online; since then Bloomsbury snapped it up.)
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If you think prosecuting journalists is the province solely of the sort of authoritarian governments in the developing world and the former communist bloc, think again. In the wake of WikiLeaks’s late-November dump of thousands of diplomatic cables, American provocateurs are urging the prosecution of the site’s founder, Julian Assange, and others who were involved in bringing the cables to the public’s attention. Of course, the alleged leaker, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, will face prosecution for giving away state secrets. Reporters and publishers who receive material from a government leaker, however, are typically considered protected from prosecution under the First Amendment.
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Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence agency, says Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks.
“These officials are spies for the US in their countries,” Assange told Al Jazeera Arabic channel in an interview yesterday.
The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA.
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Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has become the latest victim of online attacks by supporters of WikiLeaks, it was claimed today.
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Two journalists with access to a secret transcript of comments by Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of leaking confidential material to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, have denied speculation that the material could potentially help a prosecution against Julian Assange.
The pair, from Wired magazine, said there was nothing “newsworthy” in unpublished internet chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who claims to have discussed the leak with the young intelligence officer and later tipped off the FBI.
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The British government faces a legal challenge over allegations it was complicit in the torture of Bangladeshi MP Salauddin Chowdhury, who was arrested by the country’s security forces earlier this month.
Lawyers acting for the 63-year-old’s family claim the training provided by British forces to Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion [RAB], which arrested Chowdury, places the UK in breach of its obligations under international law.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This is a post about my website Zvon.org where I’ve created a resource for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4). I’ve created a searchable database of almost every peer-reviewed paper referenced in the AR4, with links to each paper’s abstract and lists of all the authors. This provides a powerful tool that lets you search the AR4 by author, subject, title and journal.
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The doors of perception often hang heavy on rusty hinges. Regardless of motivation, though, good advertising can work like good art. It issues an irresistible invitation to see the world differently. Here we leap from the familiar grumble about congestion, to the unsettling realisation that we are the thing we grumble about.
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Finance
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Bank of America (BAC) said it agreed Monday to pay $2.8 billion to taxpayer-funded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to settle claims that it sold the mortgage giants bad home loans.
The agreement is the biggest so far between Fannie and Freddie and lenders that sold them loans during the subprime lending boom and before standards were tightened.
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The Coalition surely cannot wish to impair the education and lives of children, but in that case, why force such philistine cuts on local councils? Why plan to cut 100% of literacy charity Bookstart‘s funding?
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Businessweek put together an article about opening up the NFC market to allow shoppers to just “swipe their phone” at a register to pay for goods. While at a restaurant, you’d be able send half the bill to your dining companion’s phone. Your store loyalty card info may also be stored on your device.
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Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans’ assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paperwork, American companies have also been picking the pockets of workers more directly.
This second round of paycheck theft has come in the form of stolen productivity gains.
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At least 17,368 Indian farmers killed themselves in 2009, the worst figure for farm suicides in six years, according to data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This is an increase of 1,172 over the 2008 count of 16,196. It brings the total farm suicides since 1997 to 2,16,500. The share of the Big 5 States, or ‘suicide belt’ — Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — in 2009 remained very high at 10,765, or around 62 per cent of the total, though falling nearly five percentage points from 2008. Maharashtra remained the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth successive year, reporting 2,872. Though that is a fall of 930, it is still 590 more than in Karnataka, second worst, which logged 2,282 farm suicides.
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The end of 2010 brought renewed Washington rhetoric, media hype and academic me-too declarations about the US economy “recovering”. We’ve heard them before since the crisis hit in 2007. They always proved wrong.
But recovery noises are useful for some. Republicans claim that government should do less since recovery is underway (of course, for them, government action is always counterproductive). Likewise, Republicans and many centrist Democrats claim that income redistribution policies are no longer needed because recovery means growth, which means everyone gets a bigger piece of an expanding economic pie. Recovery hype also helps the Obama administration to claim that its policies succeeded.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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China has banned Skype and other Western VoIP providers in a move designed to stop the services from eroding the profits of traditional telecoms operators in the country, China Telecom and China Unicom.
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When I first heard about The Wall Street Journal’s expose article last weekend, titled “Your Apps Are Watching You,” I was outraged: My iPhone apps where sending my iPhone 4′s Unique Device Identifier (UDID) to marketing companies? They were tracking my location and sharing it with advertising networks? They were sharing my age and gender and ZIP code? And when I spent a certain amount of time navigating some apps, they were tattling on me — communicating how much time I spent with them, how deep into the app I delved? And after they sent this off willy nilly to various marketing companies, the marketing companies built profiles and judged me, then slapped me into a category to sell to advertisers?!
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Online book seller Amazon has taken down an ebook which dishes the dirt on its best seller ranking system.
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Ilina Sen, wife of rights campaigner Dr Binayak Sen, who has been sentenced to life for sedition, on Sunday stressed the need for judicial accountability. She felt that though the judgment of December 24 has so far affected only her family, but its implications goes much beyond it.
“The immediate impact of the judgment is on me and my family. But the implications goes beyond and can affect the entire country. We need to take our steps carefully so that our future is secure. It is more on how we select the judges and how monitoring of the judiciary is done. Judicial accountability is more serious subject than corruption,” she said.
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Sorry for being so blunt, but reality looks worse than the apprehensions some of us had. The Hungarian EU presidency also has a remarkably bad press.
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On the 21st of December the party holding the majority of the Hungarian parliament voted in favor of a new media law that is a collection of some of the most oppressive and undemocratic laws from all over Europe and with some worrying changes.
To show our concern for fundamental rights and free speech we black out its online presence on the 5th January 2011 for 24 hours.
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According to Gawker, Anonymous, the loosely-organised band of hacker activists and vigilantes, attacked the government sites, including that of the president, prime minister, the stock exchange and several ministries, in protest against Tunisia’s censorship of access to whistle-blower site Wikileaks, following the Cablegate affair, and for the country’s repressive censorship.
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A bill that could undermine a new and important form of online activism has quietly worked its way through the California legislature. If signed by the governor, the new law would make it a crime to impersonate someone online in order to “harm” that person. In other words, it could be illegal to create a Facebook or Twitter account with someone else’s name, and then use that account to embarrass that person (including a corporate person like British Petroleum or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or a public official).
Here’s the problem: temporarily “impersonating” corporations and public officials has become an important and powerful form of political activism, especially online. For example, the Yes Men, a group of artists and activists, pioneered “identity correction,” posing as business and government representatives and making statements on their behalf to raise popular awareness of the real effects of those entities’ activities, like the failure to Dow to adequately compensate victims of the Bhopal disaster and the U.S. government’s destruction of public housing units in New Orleans. These sorts of actions regularly receive widespread media coverage, sparking further public debate. Last year, the activists staged a thinly veiled hoax, presenting themselves at a press conference and on a website as the Chamber of Commerce and, in direct opposition to the Chamber’s actual position, promising to stop lobbying against strong climate change legislation. (Not amused, the Chamber promptly sued the Yes Men based on a trumped-up trademark complaint; EFF is defending the activists.)
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THE so-called Shield bill, which was recently introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.”
Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very least, the act must be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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You’ll recall that before AT&T entered the TV business they sent their lobbyists around the country to gut the traditional video franchise system, instead replacing it with a system of state-level laws that in many instances were little more that legislative wishlists directly written by AT&T. The laws were sold to states as a way to lower TV prices by speeding competition to the TV space, though in reality they wound up legalizing deployment cherry picking, killing off useful consumer protections, and eroding local community rights (including eminent domain).
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NET NEUTRALITY OPPONENTS have had an encouraging start to the new year with British Telecom (BT) introducing a service that could create a two tier Internet.
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providers the opportunity to charge content owners for high quality distribution of their videos to consumers, say it will create a two-tier internet, the Financial Times said.
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BT has introduced a controversial service that some say could allow broadband providers to create a “two-tier internet”.
[...]
In addition, net neutrality advocates says that allowing large content providers, such as YouTube, to pay for premium delivery could put smaller companies at a competitive disadvantage, reinforcing the gap.
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BT’s attempt to take the nation’s broadband pulse with a nationwide survey and competition called “Race to Infinity” has resulted in six winners. The company initially had said it would hook up five winning areas to superfast broadband in 2012 but it has added another winning entry.
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The Obama administration says it wants to hear from organisations interested in fostering “internet freedom programs”.
The US department of state’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) have issued a Joint Request for ‘Statements of Interest’ (SOI) from organisations “interested in submitting proposals for projects that support Internet freedom under the ‘Governing Justly and Democratically’ Foreign Assistance program objective.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Even those of us who know better refer to copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and other monopolies as “IP.” Some of us excuse this by saying “IP” stands for “Imaginary Property” (the word imaginary is weaker than intellectual) or “Intellectual Privilege” (privilege is much weaker than property), but neither of those phrases have the power of intellectual property. On the other hand, they keep the initials IP, which is good – they can be used wherever “IP” is. But we need to use bigger guns. What this problem calls for is a word of the same potency as property – one that sticks in the head so that once the association is made, it can never be lost.
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As you can see, copyright initially got much less coverage than patents, but that changed somewhere around 1950. Trademark first popped up around 1900, but didn’t really get much attention at all until about 1970 or so. That’s not all that surprising if you’re familiar with the history of trademark law. What struck me as most interesting — by far — is the fact that there’s basically nothing doing on “intellectual property” until you get to 1980. I always find it amusing when people insist that “intellectual property” has been a common term for patents and copyright going back ages, when the reality is that, as a popular term, it’s really quite recent.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court Monday to affirm downsized damages in Sony v. Tenenbaum, a file-sharing case in which a jury originally ordered a college student to pay $675,000 for infringing copyright in 30 songs. EFF was represented by the Stanford Fair Use Project and the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic in filing the amicus brief.
A federal judge reduced the jury award to $67,500 last July, citing constitutional concerns and basic fairness. The record companies appealed the judge’s decision to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In Monday’s brief, EFF argues that the judge was right to try to ensure that damages in infringement cases bear a reasonable relationship to actual harm.
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Copyrights
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One of the more ridiculous lawsuits of 2010 involved AFP — the big news organization that once sued Google claiming that merely linking to AFP news articles was copyright infringement. However, when it came to others’ copyrighted works, AFP took a rather different position. After the Haitian earthquake a year ago, AFP got into a legal tussle with photographer Daniel Morel, who is based in Haiti.
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This seems to be upsetting to some, but I find it rather amusing that the only reason why copyright is even considered “property” is because those who wanted to pretend copyright was something more than a limited government granted monopoly started calling it property.
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If you’re an artist, let’s rule out the middleman. In fact, if your music is any good, you don’t need any protection of your music. Your real fans will buy your CD. Others will have a listen by hearing it on the radio, getting it over the Internet, by getting a CD of a friend… But don’t say these people are pirates for being curious! In fact, these people are the most important link in the chain of mouth-to-mouth advertising. Since no middleman need to be paid, the percent of the money paid by a consumer for a CD going to you, will increase enormously. Also songs bought online will have a much higher return. This will make up for the money not gained by songs played on parties or levies pulled on empty carriers or Internet connections.
If this incentive for a new business model appeals to you, you might want to take a look at what creative commons is all about. In 2012 I hope to start an organisation in Belgium which helps artists to take their music to consumers in a brand new way.
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Stern hired Zimet to sell the list, which seems straightforward enough… except that Rosenberg claimed that she has full ownership of the list, via her copy, including a copyright on the list. The court, in its decision basically punted on the question of copyright, because Zimet isn’t looking to publish the list, but merely sell the physical copy of the list — which has nothing to do with copyright. However, the court still does suggest that there may be a (state) common law copyright claim here. However, I have to agree with Eugene Volokh, who suggests the court got this wrong.
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AiPlex Software, the Indian anti-piracy outfit that made a name for itself when it allegedly DDoSed several major BitTorrent sites including The Pirate Bay, has returned to the scene. The outfit is once again sending out many DMCA takedown requests to torrent sites. In addition, they threaten to impose a pan-Indian ban by the local Government on sites that dare to contest their requests, even when they have the right to do so.
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Last year, we had noted that the 9th Circuit appeals court was set to hear three separate cases, all revolving around the first sale doctrine, which allows you to resell copyrighted works that you possess. The first ruling of the three, back in September, was bad news: overruling a good district court ruling, in Vernor v. Autodesk, saying that anyone could effectively wipe out your first sale rights by simply putting a “license” on it. The second ruling, in MDY vs. Blizzard, was more of a mixed bag. It accepted the basics of Vernor but said that just because you violate a “license,” it doesn’t automatically mean you violate the copyright.
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ACTA
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Interestingly, while Canada stood mute on ACTA, the European Union very firmly put the breaks on ACTA by calling for transparency.
Who’s zooming who?
Google Android running on ASUS P535
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.04.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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2010 was the year in which Linux took over. Not that many people will have noticed.
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Walmart lost interest in GNU/Linux on netbooks for some reason but welcomes it again on tablets.
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I tried CrunchBang Linux 10 on a MacBook Pro. Previously, I had a lot of trouble dual booting with OS X, so I did the same thing I did for Ubuntu–I told it to use the entire disk. This turned out to be a big mistake.
I put GRUB on the MBR since I wasn’t dual booting. I also set up an encrypted LVM. The system wouldn’t boot. I just got a flashing folder with a “?” icon. I think this is a known problem with Debian right now.
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There is no golden rule for security that applies in every single case, and even if there were it would have been cracked already. Security is something that needs to be worked upon, and personalised. Follow the tips and tools in this tutorial as we show you how to adapt them to your very own Linux installation.
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Desktop
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Browsers
Firefox 57.11%
Chrome 16.44%
Internet Explorer 16.40%
Safari 3.43%
Opera 3.25%
Mozilla 2.21%
Konqueror .47%
Firefox is now on a multi-year slide while Chrome has passed IE to move into the number two position. Safari made some significant gains while Konqueror use was cut in half.
Operating Systems
Windows 51.71%
Linux 41.33%
Macintosh 5.78%
iPhone .21%
Android .15%
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It amazes me that so many times people who are in charge of large and small software companies make dumb decisions. They get nice salaries but often make decisions that come back and bite them later on. One good strategy for any large or small company that is lagging behind on the Windows or Mac OS market is to create software for GNU/Linux.
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Server
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During one game, the category was, coincidentally, “I.B.M.” The questions seemed like no-brainers for the computer (for example, “Though it’s gone beyond the corporate world, I.B.M. stands for this” — “International Business Machines”).
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Ballnux
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We Americans may not see it until summer, but Samsung’s 3.2-inch Galaxy Player is about to call Europe home, as following French presales the PMP has now appeared at Amazon UK. There, it’s sporting a tentative January 7th release date and a pair of capacities and prices, with a modest £150 (about $234) nabbing you 8GB of storage and £180 (roughly $280) fully doubling that capacity to 16GB.
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Companies rely on technology for marketing, human resources, supply chain and numerous other applications, and as a rule, executives understand the tasks these singular tools execute and comprehend their cost-cutting benefits.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Linux is not mentioned once in the press release. At least its better than their S3 Graphics side talking about magical Linux drivers in their press releases.
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In order to see same-day support “out of the box” for Sandy Bridge graphics, in the case of Ubuntu 10.10 the Intel developers would have had to mainly meet the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and Mesa 7.9 releases of months ago. The final Sandy Bridge bits would have had to be done over six months ago when the 2.6.35 merge window was open and Mesa 7.9 was released this September. The 2.6.35 kernel merge window, which is what’s used by Ubuntu Maverick, opened in early May and per the Linux kernel development process, only bug-fixes would have been allowed after that window closed. While the Linux kernel release schedule is predictable for the most part, the Mesa updates come every quarter too and are generally released by Intel’s own Ian Romanick. Even if Ubuntu 10.10 shipped with “out of the box” OpenGL acceleration support for these new Intel processors, the code would have still been months out of date. There certainly would have been new features and bug-fixes the users would have wanted, like the VA-API Sandy Bridge support not going into libva until early December and the many Mesa Sandy Bridge fixes since then.
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Applications
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Midnight Commander (MC) is a visual console file manager that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included.
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I’m not at all sure how PhotoRec works on OS X or Windows; on Linux it’s a command-line app, available through most package managers as part of a bigger suite called TestDisk. Once installed, launching it is as easy as typing the following command into a terminal window:
sudo photorec
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Instructionals/Technical
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Outsourcing authentication services gives you access to more services – at a price. Kurt examines the pros and cons of distributed authentication.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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I have to blog about this before the other Kristian finds out and beats me to it. Kris wrote about the new GDK backend work that Alex Larsson started and Benjamin Otte and Matthias Clasen finished. The backend work lets us compile several GDK backends into GTK+ at the same time. Over the holidays I was able to dust off my Wayland backend work for GTK+ and bring it up to date with all the cleanup that’s been going on and make it work with the multi-backend stuff.
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New Releases
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Summary:
· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 5.8
· Announced Distro: Puppy Linux 5.0 Wary Edition
· Announced Distro: VortexBox 1.7
· Announced Distro: Grml 2010.12
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 2.0.0
· In Other News: Russia Moves to Linux In 2011
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Red Hat Family
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Linux provider Red Hat has taken a beating of late, as investors sold their shares following a sizable run in the stock. But with the stock up 2 percent on Monday, can investors assume the declines are finished?
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The $60 million lawsuit filed by the former chairman and CEO of Red Hat against his family’s former financial advisers has been referred to mediation.
The referral by the federal court in Raleigh means that the next stage in the lawsuit filed by Matthew Szulik and members of his family, which accuses an investment management firm of losing $60 million of their money through improper investments and fraud, will be conducted behind closed doors.
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Support of Leading Linux Platform Enables Refined Market Response and Venue Arbitrage Through Precision Time Data Delivered to Trading Apps
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In their latest venture into server based OS adapters IdentityForge announced today that they now support Linux RedHat OS. IdentityForge is the leader in standard access integration into many different target systems, including ERP, OS, Mainframe, and application security managers.
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A sensible new release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform that, with enhanced hardware scalability plus support for the latest RAS technologies, should enable it to maintain its position at the top of the corporate Linux tree.
It’s not cutting edge and there are no big surprises, but then that’s what the enterprise Linux market demands, the only worrisome note being the move to KVM rather than Xen virtualisation.
Pros: Scalability to 4,096 cores/threads and 64TB of memory; default EXT4 file system; integrated KVM virtualisation; SELinux sandboxing of VMs; new range of subscription-based add-ons
Cons: EXT4 limited to 16TB; move to KVM virtualisation may deter some customers from upgrading
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Fedora
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I noticed the creation of a new Fedora mailing list today when Rahul Sundaram sent out the first post on it… a mailing list for Fedora Remixers.
That made me wonder just how many Linux distributions there are that are Fedora-based. I did a quick search and found a Fedora wiki page that says, “There are roughly over a hundred distributions based on Fedora.” Then it links to a distrowatch.com search page that shows 41 distributions that are “Fedora based”.
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Well it’s now been updated to include the latest Fedora 14 drapes and the Maverick murals.
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Debian Family
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I put 5 EUR in Flattr each month and I like to spend those among other Debian contributors. That’s why I keep a list of Debian people that I have seen on Flattr (for most of them I noticed through an article on Planet Debian).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In This Issue
* Announcing the next Ubuntu User Days Event
* Results from the December 17th Americas Membership Board meeting
* Results from the December Asia-Oceania Membership Board meeting
* Welcome new Edubuntu members and an Edubuntu Developer
* Announcing Ubuntu IRC Membership
* Natty Alpha 1 Released
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo News
* Launchpad News
* Caching Ubuntu Package Downloads
* Sound Indicator news and updates
* Natty Translations Plans I-III
* Ubuntu Screencasts: How To Sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct
* Working together to get Unity ready for Natty
* Project Unity L10N
* Unity Bitesize Progress Report for 20 December
* Checking in with the Artwork Team
* No More PS3 CD Builds for Natty
* Paul Tagliamonte’s “Myth Busted” Series
* Ubuntu Translations Interviews: André Gondim (Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team)
* AskUbuntu reaches 5000 questions – 11000 answers – 7000 users – 50000 votes
* Ubuntu Cloud Screencasts
* Design Museum exhibition London
* Full Circle Magazine – Issue #44
* Full Circle Magazine – Issue #43
* Featured Podcasts
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Monthly Team Reports: October 2010
* Monthly Team Reports: November 2010
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security for 6.06, 8.04, 9.10, 10.04 and 10.10 in December
* And Much Much More
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Matthias Klose announced yesterday, January 3rd, some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release.
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I am the sole editor and contributor of new content for the just-released Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition. This book is intended for intermediate to advanced users.
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Tablets
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Always Innovating call it the ‘”Swiss knife” of electronics and looking at the device breakdown image below you can certainly see why that description is apt! -
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Test photos of the Galapagos tablets show the devices running what appears to be a Linux-based OS. Initial reports stated that the devices would run Android, but as you can see in the photos below this is not the case.
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I had hoped to blog more regularly about my work at Conservancy, and hopefully I’ll do better in the coming year. But now seems a good time to summarize what has happened with Conservancy since I started my full-time volunteer stint as Executive Director from 2010-10-01 until 2010-12-31.
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Today I no longer do programming, except for a few improvements at getdeb and some scripting at my job when I look at code this days is mostly to identify a problem or feature. For me the (open source) code has lost the magic it had a few years ago. Thankfully to my loved wife, daughter and friends I no longer have the required free time or desire to learn/work on what is required to fix bugs or develop new features. I have lost most of the capacity to use one Free Software’s fundamental freedoms “The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1)” , I can still do many things with the code, but no longer the ones I wish.
Why am I still here, an Ubuntu member, supporting Free Software yet economically dependent on and surrounded by commercial/closed source software?
I have assimilated the values of the Free Software -without the radicalism of some of it’s activists-.
I believe that the ability to keep and expand such freedom is still more important than to use it.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tristan Nitot started working for Netscape in 1997, and was one of the first volunteers to work on the Mozilla project that rose out of Netscape’s ashes.
He started Mozilla Europe (he’s now president of that organisation) and has seen the birth, growth and worldwide success of Firefox from the inside – so who better to ask about the future of the project, how its guiding philosophy chimes with that of Linux and why the folks at Mozilla welcome the competition from Google’s mighty Chrome.
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Oracle
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It’s been (almost) a year since Oracle’s Acquisition of Sun. Some of the ex-Sun folks stayed at Oracle but others moved to other companies, small and large, public, private or still in stealth mode. This Diaspora will contribute talent, expertise and experience to many companies, and, I hope, also some of the culture at Sun that I’ve enjoyed for so many years.
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Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, one of the IT industry´s most hard-working firms in the fight for open standards and against the Redmond juggernaut, the Evil Empire of Redmondia. Sun was also one of the most unrecognised firms by FOSS pundits, despite its vast contributions to the open source movement, be it in the form of developers on Sun´s payroll collaborating with FOSS projects -from Gnome to MySQL to OpenOffice.org to you-name-it, and also when taking into account the hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary code turned to open source.
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BSD
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The NetBSD project isn’t one which I’ve given much thought to over the years. Its reputation of being able to run on just about any architecture is something I consider amazing, but not specifically useful for my purposes. The project’s famed flexibility, when placed against the backdrop of the rest of the open source community, brings to mind a contortionist in a room full of gymnasts: impressive, but not so much as to stand out from the crowd. Perhaps that’s unfair, I am very much an outsider where NetBSD is concerned. Aside from my pleasant brush with Jibbed last year, I’ve never taken the time to properly investigate the project.
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Project Releases
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I’ve just released OCRFeeder 0.7.3.
This first version of 2011 doesn’t introduce as many features as the previous ones but fixes a few issues and introduces user documentation (F1 help).
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Handbrake is a multithreaded video transcoder that supports any DVD-like source and most multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.
Even though it’s not its first aim, Handbrake is used by many as a DVD ripper and it was voted as “best Linux DVD ripper” by the WebUpd8 readers.
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The release candidate of the Muon package management suite 1.1 is now available. As with beta 2, the main focus for the release candidate milestone was to iron out issues to make sure the 1.1.0 release rocks. (Expect 1.1.0 to be released in around 2 weeks) Packages are available for the development version of Kubuntu 11.04 as well as for Kubuntu 10.10 via the QApt PPA as usual. Packages of interest are the muon and muon-installer packages.
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Government
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Government can be seen as an answer to the often messy question of collective action. There are some things people need together, but since that’s not easy to coordinate, we set up institutions to do so. Over time, the government’s focus and expectations developed — understandably — to a place where it was seen less as a coordinator and more as a service provider. This is what some call the vending machine model of government. My tax dollars in, a safe and well-kept community out.
But, as we’re all seeing now, that machine is profoundly broken. Buckling under the weight of the budget crisis and burdened with ever-increasing demands from its citizens, governments are unable to provide those services we’ve come to expect. The federal debt is in the trillions, many cities and states are nearing bankruptcy, and some already have. And so this analogy needs to change. Government can’t be a vending machine any longer; it must be a building block, something we use together to create the communities we hope to live in.
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Licensing
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It’s Public Domain Day again, and it’s now been exactly a year since I first introduced the Unlicense.org initiative: an easy-to-use template and process intended to help coders waive their copyright and dedicate all their code to the public domain with no strings attached. It seems a good time for a brief recap of the happenings on this front over the last 365 days.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s January 1st, 2011, New Year’s Day and, for millions of “works” in the copyright law sense of the term, the first day of the rest of their existence. Yes, it is Public Domain Day, the day on which “life-plus” copyrights expire in those countries which calculate the duration of copyright from the death of the author, for N years thereafter, and to the end of that final year.
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Thanks to all our supporters who helped us raise over $500,000 for our annual fundraising campaign! Stay tuned for a precise total and analysis — we’re still counting mailed checks! If you didn’t get a chance to donate to the 2010 campaign, start 2011 off right by showing the world how much you appreciate CC.
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Open Data
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Open Data
Let’s start with the obvious. Without open data there wouldn’t be mashups. Coming from the library industry I’ve often heard vendors or computer services staff say “you can’t have access to that,” but it never sat well with me. I always wanted to know why. Why if I spent eight hours a day entering that data couldn’t have access to it in any format I wanted?
The ludicrousness of it all became even clearer to me as I was doing my mashups research. There were all if these amazing APIs out there that I could use to enhance the data I was putting into our systems, but without proper access to my own data I was stuck watching organizations around the world making use of these tools instead of being able to participate in mashing up content. I’ve heard this phenomenon in libraries referred to as a “culture of learned helplessness.” After years of being told “no” we have come to just accept that the answer is going to be “no” and we no longer ask “why” or try to find a way around the limitations.
This experience isn’t limited to libraries of course. We all have been in situations where we too have come up against these barriers of entry. Being the stubborn person that I am though I couldn’t accept it and so I moved away from the “culture of learned helplessness” to become an educator, teaching the power that comes along with open source and open data.
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Open Access/Content
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What other works would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.
* The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
* Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
* Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim
* Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception
* Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!
* Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O
* Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today’s youth”
* Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
* Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
* Alan Le May’s The Searchers
* C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
* Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
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Programming
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Last year, we published a report on turnaround time, tools and application containers in the Java ecosystem. Over 1300 Java developers ended up sharing info about their development environment, and over 40,000 people found these results helpful.
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Programmers looking for work in enterprise shops would be foolish not to learn the languages that underlie this paradigm, yet a surprising number of niche languages are fast beginning to thrive in the enterprise. Look beyond the mainstays, and you’ll find several languages that are beginning to provide solutions to increasingly common problems, as well as old-guard niche languages that continue to occupy redoubts. All offer capabilities compelling enough to justify learning a new way to juggle brackets, braces, and other punctuation marks.
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The newest version of the open source JBoss Application Server has been released, and is now one of the first production-ready app servers to support Java EE 6.
Java EE 6 is the newest version of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, which was designed to build enterprise applications with the Java programming language and related tools. The Java Community Process (JCP) oversees the development of Java EE.
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What do Scheme, Bash, and elisp have in common?
They’re infinitely flexible and infinitely customizable and, if you force two users with great libraries of customizations to swap profiles, you are a cruel, cruel person.
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Standards/Consortia
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For example, Archivematica’s media-type preservation plans convert .doc, .rtf, and .wpd word processing files to the XML-based Open Document Format (ODF) for preservation and to Adobe’s PDF for viewing. Likewise, the system saves .bmp, .jpg, .jp2, .png, .gif, .psd, .tga, and .tiff raster image files as uncompressed TIFFs for preservation and as JPEGs for viewing.
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This winter, 130 activists gathered to discuss superfast broadband in a village hall in Cumbria. They had come from 100 villages, by 100 paths. Ali had presumably travelled north along the shore of Ullswater, rounded Loadpot Hill and turned south down the Lowther valley, until (three miles from where she began, but 45 minutes by car), she could take the narrow track east across the moor. Brian came over Hartside at 3,000ft, down the switchbacks into Eden, and worked his way along the East Fellside. They were joining a community experiment, which is becoming almost a revolution.
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The News of the World website has recorded a 59 per cent decrease in unique users to its website in November -it’s first full month behind a paywall – compared to September 2010 – its last free-to-air month, according to comScore data supplied to the Beehive.
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A gamer completed the original Quake title for the PC in just over 52 minutes, killing off all enemies and discovering all secret areas.
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Every year about this time, people make resolutions. The origins of this practice are shrouded in mystery, but it suffices to say that for most people they have become a joke. Few people actually follow through on any of them. This is mostly because they are unachievable resolutions. This year, I have a list of universal resolutions for computer users that may solve part of this problem and help them improve themselves in the process.
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Google Inc. continues to make incremental improvements to web search, and in this vein, Instant search was added in 2010. For better or worse, the accompanying search suggestions cannot be disabled. This drop down list is intended to save time, but it also gives some clues about what other people are searching for.
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If you’re reading this post via a feed, you aren’t a “typical” user. According to stats gathered by Mozilla only about 7% of users use the RSS button. Though fewer Windows use the button, and nearly 14% of Linux users make use of it.
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Science
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A few weeks ago one of my fellow SciBloggers, Siouxsie Wiles, wrote an interesting piece about a childrens’ film that she’d seen where the underlying message seemed to be: you don’t have to understand, you just have to believe. Which as she says, does rather encapsulate a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense that’s promoted these days (homeopathy, ‘miracle mineral supplements’, etc etc etc). Anyway, Siouxsie mentioned creationism in her post, & now a new commenter has dropped by to inform us that ‘intelligent design… is not creationism in any shape or form, but serious scientific debate about the latest evidence for the origins of life.’ My immediate response emulated the famous Tui billboards (here’s an example), but then I & other regulars there went on to point out that this comment is a long way off-base. And I thought the subject was worth revisiting in a separate post.
For Siouxsie’s correspondent is wrong – so-called ‘intelligent design’ is creationism, pure and simple, and not a valid scientific explanation for life’s diversity. There’s a lot of evidence out there to back up this statement.
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Security
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The creators of the Storm/Waledac botnet mounted a spam campaign over the New Year holiday in a bid to appear as holiday e-cards.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A powerful coalition of human rights groups has intensified pressure on the government to abandon its use of control orders, as ministers continue to wrangle over whether to scrap the controversial counter-terrorism measure.
An international alliance of civil liberties organisations has united to condemn the UK for presiding over one of the “most serious violations” of natural justice in any developed democracy.
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Hundreds of schools have begun monitoring children in the past few year with the United Kingdom intent on stepping up the pace in the new year. Biometrics and CCTV are the most prevalent with many schools in Scotland planning on introducing or expanding schemes in the coming year.
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Cablegate
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The WikiLeaks saga could be summed up as an affair which pitches the no-frontier freedom of the internet against the might of the world’s most powerful state. Its operations, impeded in the United States where private companies buckled under pressure from the administration, but relayed across the world thanks to the multiplication of ‘Mirror’ sites (see Mediapart’s WikiLeaksMirror site here), the daily disclosure of confidential US diplomatic cables has been continuing in the manner of a kind of Chinese torture. Totalling 251, 287, they have been released at the rate of a little less than 2,000, day after day, drop by drop.
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Finance
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A SUBSTANTIAL part of all stock trading in the United States takes place in a warehouse in a nondescript business park just off the New Jersey Turnpike.
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he engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity, according to the New York Times.
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Robert Rubin was a very powerful man. After 26 years and rising to the level of co-senior partner, he left Goldman Sachs in 1994 to become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration.
[...]
What is this Goldman Sachs that issues forth such powerful people as Robert Rubin? What is its magic? Maybe we can find something out from their financial statements? If we look at the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Earnings for December 2009, the company identifies itself as being in three businesses: Investment Banking, Trading and Principal Investments, and Asset Management and Securities Services. To get a better historic picture of these businesses, we have gone back to the beginning of Goldman Sachs’ life as a publicly held company in 1998.
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Meetings with top Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. officials were on the schedule of Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley in his first days on the job in February 2009, the regional reserve bank chief’s daybook showed yesterday.
Dudley, a former partner and chief U.S. economist at Goldman, had an appointment to meet that bank’s chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, on Feb. 6, 2009, according to his schedule for 2009 and the first nine months of 2010. Four days earlier, Goldman was the topic of a planned meeting between Dudley and his staff.
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Halt your threats and turn on the charm. We’ve heard enough dire warnings that JP Morgan, HSBC and hordes of hedge funds will quit the square mile in favour of Hong Kong or Geneva if higher taxes and bonus restrictions come into play. The public, for the most part, doesn’t care – in fact, there are plenty of volunteers who would pay bankers’ taxi fares to Heathrow in the hope of seeing the back of them.
If you want an end to “banker bashing”, change tactics. Make the case persuasively for the contribution that finance makes to Britain’s economy. Explain how you’re helping business to grow. Teach us about how you can put our savings to work. Give us lessons that you’ve learned from the credit crunch. Tell us why we should love bankers. Nicely.
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A suggestion that banks deemed “Too Big” to fail should be broken up or made small enough to fail. an idea backed by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and hedge-fund manager David Einhorn, also failed to win any support from US policy makers, as bank executives argued that size alone did not make a company risky, and that it could be essential for banks to compete.
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The author sees a conflict at the heart of Americans’ attitudes toward money and debt. We tend to view ourselves “as reasonably prudent and sober people,” he writes, while “the choices we make at the ballot box seem to be at odds with that self-image.”
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President Barack Obama began the new year with a fresh promise to make jobs his top priority in 2011, even as he expressed optimism the nation has been “riding a few months of economic news that suggests our recovery is gaining traction.
“And our most important task now is to keep that recovery going,” Obama said in his weekly address. “As president, that’s my commitment to you: to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs and strengthening our middle class. That’s my resolution for the coming year.”
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In the early 1990s, the biggest names in the mortgage industry hatched a plan for a new electronic clearinghouse that would transform the home loan business – and unlock billions of dollars of new investments and profits.
At the time, mortgage documents were moved almost exclusively by hand and mail, a throwback to an era in which people kept stock certificates, too. That made it hard for banks to bundle home loans and sell them to investors. By contrast, a central electronic clearinghouse would allow the companies to transfer thousands of mortgages instantaneously, greasing the wheels of a system in which loans could be bought and sold repeatedly and quickly.
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Oil prices rose to near $92 a barrel Tuesday, close to a two-year high, as a stock market rally to start 2011 boosted crude trader optimism.
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The study, conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, was based on a survey of Americans around the country who were unemployed as of August 2009 and re-interviewed about their job status twice over the next 15 months.
As of November 2010, only about one-third had found replacement jobs, either as full-time workers (26 percent) or as part-time workers not wanting a full-time job (8 percent).
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In a year of political upheaval, fiscal crisis in Europe and the threat of a double-dip recession in the United States, the stock market weathered all challenges, plodding upward.
The final tally after Friday’s light trading day: The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closed up 12.8 percent for the year, at 1257.64, and the Dow Jones industrial average closed up 11 percent, at 11,577.51.
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PacWest Funding’s CEO watched in late 2007 as rival mortgage brokerages, banks and collaborators collapsed under the weight of the declining housing market.
Fearing his company would be next, Curtis Melone restructured his business to offer what he felt people needed most: help with their crushing mortgage debt.
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The bank lost a major procedural ruling in a lawsuit over its liability for allegedly toxic mortgages. The ruling will make it harder for the bank to defend itself in that case, and it could set a standard for similar disputes.
Bank of America had tried to set a high bar for plaintiff MBIA Insurance by requiring that the files for each of 368,000 or more disputed loans be evaluated individually. That process would have cost MBIA $75 million, and it would have taken a team of 24 people more than four years, MBIA estimated.
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Grand Ole Ponzi exposes the GOP’s intentional Ponzi Scheme being perpetrated on the American people. The GOP intends to make the top 2% wealthiest Americans even wealthier while making the middle class and everyone else poorer.
A Ponzi scheme is an intentional fraud set up to get you to invest money while promising you that you’ll get a lot more money back – even though the schemers promising this know you will not get a lot more back and that they will be profiting from your money.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Rupert Murdoch is on record supporting a UK variant of Fox News.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we’re going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting.
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Anonymous, the loosely-organized band of hacker activists and vigilantes, has chosen its next victim: The government of Tunisia. (They’ve taken down its official website.) Why? In part, because it tried to block access to secret-sharing website Wikileaks.
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So I’ve been dreading this for some time. But this is going to be my last post for FDL, a community I’ve been honored and fucking thrilled to join ever since Jane let me take Attackerman 2.0 here in June 2008. My departure is pretty mundane: the congressional press galleries are wary of giving me permanent credentials while I’m affiliated here, and I don’t want to impede any of my reporting responsibilities at my day job with Wired‘s Danger Room. So off I go.
It’s really hard for me to imagine writing Attackerman without it being a part of FDL. I’ve been incredibly privileged to host it among a community as thoughtful, challenging, provocative and passionate as this one. Thanks to everyone who challenged me in comments: even if I got pissed, you helped me reexamine the weak points in my thinking. I love seeing FDL expand, grow and develop. Now I’ll watch it happen as a commenter, well-wisher and reader.
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Saudi Arabia is beginning a major internet clamp-down, starting with blogs, forums, news sites, personal websites, electronic archives, chat rooms and online ads.
New regulations were approved by Dr. Abdulaziz Bin Mohee Al-Dien Khoga, the Minister of Culture and Information, which will require licences for the operation of an e-publishing site within the country when the laws come into effect in a month’s time,
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Let’s say I stop at the mall to pick up a new jacket. As I browse through the stores, I am followed by a man with a walkie-talkie, reporting on every item I look at and passing that information to the other stores in the mall. By the time I reach the third floor, out of a store pops a salesperson, holding exactly the madras jacket I want, in the red-and-yellow plaid I favor as well as in my size.
Disconcerting? A little. Convenient? Absolutely. I buy the jacket.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.
In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.
“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.
“The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices,” said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the St Louis-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.
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Copyrights
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At a recent panel discussion about the book industry, publisher David Kent cut through the moderator’s polite introduction and jokingly accepted the label Satan. The bubbly Kent might seem an unlikely incarnation of evil, but he’s the CEO of HarperCollins Canada, a foreign-owned publisher, and his Canadian competitors were out in force that night in Toronto, ribbing him as they aggressively denounced foreign ownership – just in case anyone was thinking we might need more of it in the Canadian book industry.
Bohemian Rhapsody, for Four Violins
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Diversity: Don’t like something or anything about your computer? Change it.
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Desktop
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The netbooks were perfectly nice,and represented a solid choice for schools because of their abundant free software and competitive prices when compared to other netbooks with similar specs. However, System76 also sent me a high-performance, consumer-oriented laptop to evaluate in the broader context of desktop Linux.
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The smart mobile user shouldn’t overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick?
You’ll get a different answer depending who you ask. You’ll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps.
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Server
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As far as the power requirements go for this ARM-based Linux server, the power consumption ranges between 8 and 13 Watts, or as low as 5 Watts if using the SSD-equipped model.
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The group intends to generate a proof-of-concept video tomorrow, and release the tools sometime next month, which they claim should eventually enable the installation of Linux on every PS3 ever sold. Catch the whole presentation after the break in video form, or skip to 33:00 for the good stuff.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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So today, on a hunch, I set up a crowdfunding site to get Dan to FOSDEM. The site I used has a minimum target of $500, but I estimated $400 would suffice to fly Dan in, pay his accomodation, all the fees and fly him back again. I set the end of the campaign to January 20 and only advertised this on identi.ca and in less than twelve hours, we not only met our target, but well exceeded it. As I write this, the fund sits at an amazing $555. Once again, the absolutely unbelievable generosity of the LO community totally floors me! Even better, while all this happened, Dan was in studio with the band, totally oblivious to what was happening. I can only imagine he was pretty amazed as well when he eventually found out.
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In the longest Linux Outlaws episode ever (by far!), Dan, Fab and guest-host Ade Bradshaw discuss Linux and open source in the year 2010 and celebrate the move to the new year with loads of beer.
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps
Tiki is a tool to build and maintain your Website/Wiki/Groupware/CMS/Forum/Blog/Bug Tracker or any other project you can run in a browser window.
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In this Podcast an ozmart tip, dvtm, fun with openbox, and xorg 1.9 without hal.
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This is an extra, irregular, short-form podcast, which is intended to be a side-branch of the main Full Circle Podcast. Somewhere to put all the general technology, non-Ubuntu news and opinions, hobby-horses and kruft that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Be prepared for a healthy dose of British sarcasm.
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Google
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A quick scan of Google News this morning revealed alternating headlines about Chrome OS. Some pundits say “Google Chrome OS Faces Serious Risk of Failure.” Others say “Google’s Chrome notebook will succeed.” I’ve certainly had great impressions of the notebook in educational settings and it works well for a lot of what I do.
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Ballnux
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Samsung has announced a new Android-based Galaxy Player that will be showcased next week at the CES 2011. Samsung says the new music player takes inspiration from its successful Galaxy S phone and is spec’d similarly sans the cellular connectivity.
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Kernel Space
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So, after reading all this, I downloaded the patch, spent some good 30 minutes playing with the kernel configuration (as always :p), enabling the BFS feature and compiling it into the kernel. The compilation took a little more than an hour, while sitting at FOSS.in, giving me the bzImage which I immediately put into my GRUB configuration. Rebooted and ta-da, it was BFS running on 2.6.35 vanilla.
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Execution of the ARM kernel begins in the inferred standard location of arch/arm/kernel/head.S, at the place very obvious labeled with “Kernel startup entry point”. At this point, the MMU must be off, the D-cache must be off, I-cache can be on or off, r0 must contain 0, r1 must contain the “machine number” (an ARM Linux standard assigned number, one per machine port, passed from the bootloader code), and r2 must contain the “ATAGS” pointer (a flexible data structure precursor to things like fdt and device trees that allows a bootloader to pass parameters). First, the processor mode is quickly set to ensure interrupts (FIQ and IRQ) are off, and that the processor is properly in Supervisor (SVC) mode. Then, MMU co-processor register c0 is copied into ARM register r9 to obtain the processor ID. This is followed by a call to __lookup_processor_type (contained within head-common.S, the common file for both MMU-enabled and non-MMU enabled ARM kernels – the latter are not covered by this document).
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The Linux kernel input/output scheduler (IO Schedulers) controls the way the kernel handles read/write to disks. Different I/O schedulers may have different impact on certain workloads. Here are the list of available Linux I/O schedulers:
1) Noop
Noop scheduler is the simplest IO scheduler available in the kernel. It does not perform sorting or seek-prevention. It is intended for devices that has no mechanical parts or is capable of random access such as SSD or flash-disk.
[...]
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Graphics Stack
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This comparison is being done not only to satisfy requests from our Phoronix Premium subscribers, but to also test some of the new OpenBenchmarking.org features. [Yes, besides OpenBenchmarking.org tests causing a large FirePro driver comparison, it's also caused this large cross-GPU cross-driver comparison, new Amazon EC2 benchmarks (the new benchmarks of all Amazon cloud instances using the Amazon Linux AMI will be here by mid-January), and other yet-to-be-announced articles that are very exciting for early 2011.]
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At the end of last year, Broadcom released open-source drivers and a library for their CrystalHD hardware video decoder; You can read the details about that at Jarod Wilson’s blog if you’re interested.
The hardware is particularly attractive because it’s low cost and can be added to any system, regardless of the GPU it uses. It provides MPEG1/2, H.264 and VC-1 decode capabilities in all hardware versions, and the latest 70015 part also adds MPEG4 Part 2 / DivX / XviD support – and, if you care about such things, it does so in a way that means all the infamous patent issues are handled in hardware.
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This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I’ll be there again looking out for Linux), Intel will officially launch their next-generation Sandy Bridge micro-architecture and CPUs. The NDA though expired at midnight on these first CPUs so there is now a stream of reviews coming out. Is there any Linux graphics test results for the Core i3 2100, Core i5 2400, Core i5 2500K, and Core i7 2600K? Unfortunately, there is not.
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That said, what am I talking about? If you try to use Sandy Bridge under Linux, it is simply broken. We tried to test an Intel DH67BL (Bearup Lake) with 2GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3, an Intel 32GB SLC SSD, and a ThermalTake Toughpower 550W PSU. At first we tried to install vanilla Ubuntu 10.10/AMD64 from a Kingston Datatraveler Ultimate 32GB USB3 stick. The idea was that it would speed things up significantly on install.
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Applications
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Start the new year giving this awesome project a hand!
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VLC Shares that can be hosted on a Apache server is accessed from a browser and comes with a plug-in based structure that extends it capabilities and features. An online video library with all the info and metadata can be easily made by a single click. All you need to do is click on VLC Shares bookmarklet and it will fetch links and details about the videos on a webpage for your library.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I have wanted to build a storage solution for many years, and I finally broke down and bought some hardware.
I had looked at many options for a system including the Drobo, Thecus products, Acer EasyStore, and building my own machine. My biggest concern was cost. I wanted to get the most for what I paid. I originally wanted a Thecus, but changed my mind because of its cost. I later wanted to get the Acer EasyStore, but changed my mind after finding out that it did not have a video output so the idea of installing an alternate OS was out of the question. Curiosity got the better of me so I did a little research and learned that you could in fact achieve video out on the Acer.
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So it seems like Jeremy feels we’re asking too much of maintainers by asking them to test their packages. As I said in the comments to his blog, picking up poppler as a case study is a very bad idea because, well, poppler has history.
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Jeremy has described in a nice way three ways one can test Gentoo. I think that indeed we need to have many people doing each of those ways, and it seems we already have.
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I recently had to move from one machine to another about 50 GB of data, divided into hundreds of thousands of small files, and i had no additional space on the machine to make a zipped tar and then move it comfortably, I tried a scp, but after 45 minutes it had moved around 2 GB of data, too slow.
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But as first thing, what’s tar ?
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You can run multiple Linux distributions at the same time, on the same computer, without a virtual machine. Milo’s production environment is a mix of Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid, while eBay’s production Linux is Red Hat. Eventually, this will all converge on one environment, but in the mean time while we port, we need a way to rapidly iterate changes on a handful of Linux distributions. A virtual machine seems like the obvious answer, but that’s overkill for this situation.
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KeePass (KeepassX for Linux) has always been my favorite password manager. It works in all platforms, including portable USB drive and can generate secure passwords and store them securely. One thing that it doesn’t support is a browser plugin that can detect the site you are visiting and auto-fill the login field for you. For that matter, I used LastPass. LastPass is an online password manager that works in (almost) all browsers. You just have to visit the site and it will auto-login for you.
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Games
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Some math: 200 million minutes a day / 60 minutes per hour * 365 days per year = 1.2 billion hours a year spent playing Angry Birds.
Or, if Shirky’s estimate is in the right ballpark, about one Wikipedia’s worth of time every month.
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As we have already talked about OilRush a fair amount, see our posts about it if you aren’t already familiar with Unigine’s inaugural game. Embedded below is the twelve minute video going over the OilRush game-play using the latest pre-release.
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It’s surprising where you can end up if you start following interesting sounding links. I was trying to fix a problem I was having with steam, and got distracted, ending up at a game called Grappling Hook.
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To install on Ubuntu, go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Center…
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KOffice team is happy to announce the 2.3 release of KOffice. This release brings many small improvements to all the KOffice applications, but not as many large new features.
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Looking forward to the final release, which must be due out in a few weeks.
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GNOME Desktop
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I am blessed with some amazing team. The magnificent Cando just finished a new view for Activity Journal. It took me by surprise since all I did was suggest this view to be done, then he showed me what I thought is a mockup. Only it wasn’t check it out on his blog. Basically its a graph that displays subject usage_count per day (item count/day) which is very useful tracking work stuff done each day.
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WebUpd8 reader Ghogaru has sent us a tip about a simple, clean and lightweight GTK theme he created called Boomerang.
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Xfce
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Today we are pleased to announce the third and hopefully final preview release of Xfce 4.8 which is set to be pushed out to the public on January 16th, 2011. Compared to Xfce 4.8pre2 this release mostly features translation updates and bug fixes.
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Ankur has updated the wallpaper collection we’ve mentioned a while back that includes all the Ubuntu and Fedora official wallpapers in the 4:3 and 16:10 formats. The update includes the Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10 wallpapers along with 10 extra wallpapers (from Linux Mint, Mandriva and the latest KDE 4.6 wallpaper)…
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How I started with Slackware?, Well I’m using Arch Linux for about two years now. In the Arch Linux Wiki, there is a comparison of Arch Linux with other distributions, one of them is Slackware.
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It has been over two years since I first switched from a mighty popular “Linux” distribution to ArchLinux. And two fine years it has been.
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New Releases
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Wary Puppy is a project of the Puppy Linux developer, Barry Kauler, to develop a linux distro which provide support for older hardware. Puppy Linux is already a very light weight distro and runs well on many older systems. However, Puppy Linux is moving to a new software base and it may no longer run so well on the older hardware. To maintain the support for the older hardware Wary Puppy has been introduced.
Wary Puppy uses the older Linux kernel 2.6.31.14 because it provides better support for older hardware. Other components in Wary are a mix of old and new software. X.org which comes in Wary is quite old, Mesa is also fairly old and GTK, gcc etc. are fairly new. Wary also includes the latest releases of applications like SeaMonkey, Abiword, Gnumeric etc. and the latest drivers for printers, scanner etc.
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Parted Magic 5.8 is released, this new release comes with new software and many bug fixes. The following programs have been updated:partedmagic clonezilla-1.2.6-40, plpbt-5.0.11, psensor-0.4.4, linux-2.6.36.2, busybox-1.17.4, nwipe-0.03, simpleburn-1.6.0, syslinux-4.03, clamav-0.96.5, e2fsprogs-1.41.14, gparted-0.7.1. These are the new programs that were added: zerofree-1.0.1, cmospwd-5.0 ( A password recovery tool), open-iscsi-2.0.871, hfsprescue-0.1, gscite223.
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Debian Family
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Interview with George Castro, discussing Ubuntu as a Debian derivative.
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One of the factor that makes your system easily crackable is the weak password. PAM cracklib forces users to choose stronger password by analyzing the password strength, length and entropy.
To enable pam_cracklib in Debian / Ubuntu operating system, you need to install libpam_cracklib:
sudo apt-get install libpam_cracklib
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Squeeze is not officially released yet but the bug-count is in the same ball-park as the last release, Lenny, and the bugs I have examined are pretty narrow. With the additional available manpower on the weekend I would not be surprised that Debian Squeeze could be released within a few days. That will start 2011 off right.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new officially branded waterproof keyboard has gone on sale in the Canonical store.
Made from silicon, the keyboard is flexible and can roll up for easy travel.Waterproof too it can withstand most liquid spills (I.e. and not fry), weighs a relatively light 204 grams and, best of all, has a whacking great Ubuntu logo on it to scream out your OS of choice.
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It’s hard to get new users when the new users can’t use what you’ve made to a effective degree. If Ubuntu is going to be competitive with the rest of the operating systems out there (mainly Windows and Mac OS), then we have to first ensure that it works on the user’s computer to the highest degree that we possibly can.
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In the meantime, I will continue to love and support the development of Linux and Ubuntu, even if it doesn’t get the respect that I feel it does.
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In Summary, using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat has been a great experience since it is fast, simple, and reliable to use as an everyday operating system for my web browsing, Linux gaming,watching video files on my computer or YouTube, listening to music and online radio, and office/school related tasks like e-mail, word processing, making slide presentations, and spreadsheets.
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This is it folks, the last issue of Full Circle…
… last issue of 2010 that is!
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Both are responsible for a disruptive desktop experience for many users. I also wish that the effort for the new “consistent user experience for desktop” does not keep or increase our current inability to fix such severe open source problems.
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In short, Eagle Scout candidate Raymond Westbrook of Boy Scout Troop 534 from Chicago, IL built a computer lab from 6 recycled PCs and running Ubuntu 10.04.
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Since my inspiration to write has been rather dry the past couple of months, mostly due to work and work, I thought it would be cool to re-ignite my writing by sharing some reasons why I use (and love) Ubuntu. So here goes.
There are many reasons why my partner, my son and I use Ubuntu but here is just a few.
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This is an awkward thing for me, because I do enjoy my expensive gadgets, and I’m not actually decided on Ubuntu – I might go for a Hackintosh instead – but there’s no question in my mind after reviewing the relevant research that choosing Ubuntu over OS X is the rich man’s (or woman’s) move.
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I am seriously thinking of making the switch from Windows to one of the Linux Operating Systems.
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We got ripped off being forced to buy Vista, now Vistas flaws pressure us to spend more buying Windows 7. How much is Windows 7? Too freakin much.
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So here I am, and it is the night before I go back to work for my first day back in 2011. I have had some wonderful and frankly much needed time off work. Towards the end of 2010 I was pretty bushed and was ready to spend some time with my wife and family, my guitar, and my Playstation. The time off was worth every second and I am now rested and raring to go…raring to contribute to making Ubuntu a success in 2011.
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Canonical’s decision to go with the Unity shell on GNOME may be a game changer for Ubuntu, but it doesn’t come without risk. Mark Shuttleworth’s declared aims are to unite design with free software. He hopes to blur the line between the web and the desktop, to create an intuitive Linux desktop that is a thing of beauty, and to make Ubuntu and free software popular among the kinds of user who have never heard of free software before.
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Flavours and Variants
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One of the best features of the open source Linux operating system is that there are so many distributions to choose from.
Ubuntu gets by far the lion’s share of the media’s attention, it’s true–largely by virtue of its top ranking at the top of DistroWatch’s popularity list–but there are hundreds of other options out there as well, many tailored to particular kinds of users and situations.
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As re-spin of the LMDE 201012 32-bit ISO was made available under the name “201101″.
The new ISO comes with an up-to-date live kernel which addresses the following issues:
* “Black screen of death”, live session hanging with a black screen.
* Installer hanging while configuring Grub.
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Linux Mint is one of the oldest, and arguably one of the best-developed, spin-offs of Ubuntu. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing more articles talk about another similar spin-off of Ubuntu called Pinguy OS, and I thought, “Another Ubuntu derivative? How many more does the world need?” But then I saw that these articles were placing Pinguy OS on the same level of Linux Mint. I figured this warranted a full-on comparison test.
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Phones
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When reading the comments disputing the possible end of the voice-phone era I’m reminded of similar comments disputing the end of the PDA era.
Although the Apple Newton pioneered the market in 1992 and John Sculley came up with the acronym, the Newton did not sell in significant volumes. It wasn’t until 1997 with the Palm Pilot that the PDA market took off. Microsoft quickly followed with a licensed OS based on Windows CE. In 2001 Microsoft launched the Pocket PC brand to cement its attack on the PDA market. The first phones using a Microsoft OS were using something called Pocket PC Phone Edition. The first Nokia smartphones (Communicators) were built like mobile PDAs.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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WebTab also features 11.6-inch display and a custom Linux operating system based on MeeGo Linux. The tablet features a custom user interface that offers a sidebar that lets you navigate through apps, web pages and widgets that are on the home screen.
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In the year 2009 we started to spend dedicated effort in recording of Qt Developer Days and got very positive responses from Qt users. Surprisingly, even archived records from the years 2005-2008 found a large audience. People even voted against removing old videos! Sure, we will not do this!
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While bored today, I decided to take a look at getting MeeGo running on the HTC HD2.
The HD2 is very similar to the Nexus One hardware-wise, and MeeGo is already known to run on that, but as far as I know, nobody had ever got it running on the HD2. I set to work, and a few hours later we were up and running!
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While Intel is looking to use Wayland on MeeGo Touch for their mobile/embedded purposes, the Nokia side is still focusing upon X for the time being. But rather than using X with KDrive, developing all of their X support out of the mainline trees, or going down any other messy paths, they are working towards using the mainline X.Org Server as found on FreeDesktop.org along with the other X libraries.
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When one open source developer complains about corporate influence on a project, it’s not necessarily a danger sign. It’s a big community full of a diverse range of opinions, and some folks are easily agitated or provoked to anger when things don’t go entirely their way — and generally do a good job of broadcasting their displeasure. So I take it with an enormous grain of salt when one developer complains about a project.
But in this case, the drumbeat is loud and coming from several projects. MeeGo has done a pretty good job of alienating most of the downstream projects that would re-package it and help MeeGo gain some traction in the developer and FOSS user community.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks
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I’ve dug out two lesser known distributions that are for once not based on Ubuntu or using its repositories, and have nothing to do with Nokia, Intel or Google either. Independent is what we want.
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In the meantime, Fluxflux seems more flexible and well stocked with all sorts of programs and little helper scripts and utilities.
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Tablets
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The Archos 101 Android based internet tablet is now available for $299 in the U.S.. I’ve had mine for about a week now and have some initial likes and dislikes. First I want to discuss the hardware. Can a sub $300 device compare well with an Apple i-Pad or Samsung Galaxy Tab? Surprisingly yes. Archos has been in the media player business for some time now and in general their devices are well thought out and ergonomic.
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Notebook vendors have expressed concerns about the launch schedule of their Android 3.0 tablet PCs as Google is currently giving priority for Android 3.0 support mainly to smartphone players such as Motorola, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, High Tech Computer (HTC) and Nokia, leaving notebook vendors facing delays in their R&D schedules.
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Free Open Source Software (FOSS) may seem to many to be more of a catchphrase than a reality, since it is not immediately clear why anyone would produce software without charging a price. But around the world, it is a widespread enterprise that saves consumers $60 billion a year in software expenditure, according to a 2008 study by Boston-based Information Technologies consulting group, Standish Group. It is also highly profitable, many proponents of free open source technologies have argued.
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Many people install Linux on their machines for its simplicity, believe it or not. Distributions like Ubuntu and Mint target the curious inexperienced user and provide a complete suite of free software to tackle most PC-related tasks.
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“Like most businesses, [Netflix has} to struggle with the balance between contributing to open platforms and protecting their business models from upstart competition,” said Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “Doing this in an all-FOSS manner is rather difficult, but it’s not impossible.” In any case, Netflix, “like Microsoft, should be complimented on the things they support, and encouraged to support more.”
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Apple is doing it again: they are releasing an app store for OS X on the 6th of January. Just like the iPhone app store, and the Android app store, this is going to be a hit: the OS X ecosystem will get a giant boost from it, and we are left — once again — with a lot to learn. Before you mention that GNU/Linux doesn’t need an app store because it’s free software, and before you even say that GNU/Linux already has an app store through one of the many software managers (Synaptics, Ubuntu Software Center, apt-get), please read this article.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tsinghua University and Mozilla China have jointly developed a new Internet browser product that is specially designed for IPv6.
Based on the core of Firefox, the widely-used browser by Mozilla, the new browser product, with the help of IPv6 tunnel technologies, enables smooth access to some IPv6, Facebook, and Google services, which are usually unstable. Facebook, at the present moment, is blocked in most areas of China. At present, this browser mainly targets the campus network of Tsinghua University with initial V1.0.6 version. It also has a “green download” edition which is about 16MB.
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Firefox 4 is nearing its final release date. Another milestone was reached when Mozilla confirmed that developers can now create add-ions for the new browser without having to be afraid that future Firefox 4 versions will bring further changes.
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Oracle
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I am not defending Oracle’s undermining of Open Source nor do I support it, but the company is at least being clear about its intentions and convictions. Customers like that.
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Meh – Oracle took over Sun – With the completion of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a new regime of Oracle’s “special” brand of communications took over from Sun’s bloggy, chatty style. The Oracle brand of communications mostly involves Oracle not saying anything or so little that the community is left to fill in the blanks.
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CMS
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The primary audience for this book is web site designers interested in using Drupal to build web sites. The audience may have previous experience using Drupal but do not consider themselves proficient. They are familiar with coding a basic HTML/CSS web site, although these skills are not required to benefit from the book.
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Funding
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The Wikimedia Foundation announced this morning that it has reached its goal of $16 million in record time, more than doubling the $7.5 million the organization raised in 2009. The foundation, which is the non-profit parent organization of massively collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia and a multitude of other wikis, says that more than half a million people from all over the world donated to the effort this year.
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BSD
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The jail does not boot its own kernel, and does not run a full version of the operating system. A jail is comprised of a filesystem, a hostname, an IP address, and an application. Jails can be seen as the logical successor to the older chroot environment, which restricted an applications access to the filesystem by providing the application it’s own root. Jails expand on this concept by further separating the host operating system and the application they are running. The difference between virtual machines and jails can be summed up by saying that virtual machines are for operating systems, jails are for applications.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far. In 2010, 1,401 journals were added to DOAJ for a total of 5,936 journals. The Electronic Journals Library now records over 27,000 journals that can be read free of charge; over 3,500 were added in 2010. 1,037 journals actively participate in PubMedCentral, an increase of 313 over the past year, and more than half of these journals contribute all articles as open access. PMC now provides access to over 3.2 million free articles, an increase of over 300,000 this year. OpenDOAR lists 1,817 repositories, having added 257 this year. A Scientific Commons search encompasses 38 million items, an increase of over 6 million since last year. There are 261 open access mandate policies, an increase of 83 this year.
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Programming
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In the meantime, other people arrived there, and we talked about how to get more people to contribute, about making use of CPAN modules in projects and about which versions of Perl are used in the enterprise. Then the talks began.
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After another year in which prominent corruption scandals and embarrassing controversies were brought to widespread public attention on the Internet–despite an intensifying clampdown on information by the government–you might think the government isn’t a big fan of the Internet’s role in the corruption issue.
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Pew Internet reports that 65% of American Net users (75% of the people they contacted) have paid for online, digital content. Ever. And there’s no category of goods in which more than one third of the respondents have ever paid for content.
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But, Lepper said, “The evidence is overwhelmingly that they are a fraud. And the premise that the Smithsonian or anyone made an effort to cover this up is not factually based.”
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Chilling Effects says it received records of 11,500 total takedown notices in 2010, as of Dec. 15. Major contributors include Google, Yahoo and Digg.
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It’s been less than two years since Facebook moved into its 150,000 square foot office space at 1601 South California Ave in Palo Alto, but the rapidly growing company is already itching for a new home. Now we’re hearing from multiple sources that Facebook has chosen the site for its new headquarters: the former Sun Microsystems/Oracle campus in Menlo Park CA, just off the Bayfront Expressway at 1601 Willow Road (map). The campus is around six miles from Facebook’s current home, and is bordered by Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.
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Science
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The Joy of Stats is an hour long BBC documentary by Professor Hans Rosling, in which he illustrates the beauty and importance of statistics as a means of understanding the world and society in which we live.
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1. Walk through X-ray airport scanners — Who can forget the classic scene in Total Recall where Ahnuld walks through the scanner at the space port and we get a full x-ray of his body? Well, for some reason, people didn’t think this technology was quite as cool when it was brought to an airport security line near them this year. Maybe it was the the thought that someone in a dark room is looking at virtual nudie pictures of us. Maybe it was the increase in radiation bombarding our bodies. Whatever it was, many want to leave this advance behind in 2010.
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Health/Nutrition
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According to Madbury, regulators who approved these chemicals for use with food and other products made three assumptions, which have now been proven wrong:
1. The chemicals won’t migrate from paper into food.
2. The chemicals won’t become available to your body.
3. Your body won’t process these chemicals.
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New Year
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Here are a few of the FSW developments that I think have been important in 2010. The list is in order from least important to most important, and all opinions come from yours truly only. My criteria for inclusion were influence on future uptake of federation technologies – positive and negative. I didn’t exclude events or developments that my company or I personally was involved in; it would be a pretty short list in that case.
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Our computers are about ten times faster in clock speed than they were circa 2000, but have vastly more (and faster) storage, are cheaper, and are crawling into everything from hotel room doorhandles to automobiles and TVs. My mobile phone today is significantly faster and more powerful — and has a higher resolution display and more storage! — than my PC in 2000. And my broadband today runs roughly 32 times as fast as it did in 2000. (Whether this is good or not is a matter of opinion, but at least it’s available if you want it.)
There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.
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Amid the planes, trains and automobiles of the holiday season comes a surprising finding from transportation scientists: Passenger travel, which grew rapidly in the 20th century, appears to have peaked in much of the developed world.
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Here are a dozen copyright predictions for 2011, mostly but not solely of interest to Canadians…
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So…what exactly is in store for Linux and open source in the upcoming year? Will it FINALLY be the “year of the Linux desktop”? We’ve been saying that for, what, three thousand years now? Let me don my Nostradamus cap and reach into the future and find out what is in store.
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Security
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Debian has updated phpmyadmin (multiple vulnerabilities).
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Andrei Sannikau, an opposition activist in Belarus and presidential candidate in the 19 December presidential election, has been tortured while in detention. Andrei Sannikau’s lawyer reported that his legs appear to be broken and the way he speaks and holds himself indicates that he may have brain damage. He needs urgent medical attention.
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An activist decapitated, a journalist killed, a lawyer beaten, a magazine closed and an embarrassing legal case mysteriously settled out of court. In the past few days China’s netizens have dug their claws into a smorgasbord of crimes and controversies in which the only constant is a reluctance to believe the official version of events.
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The new shadow transport minister has suggested that the country’s network of average speed cameras could be used to monitor and reward careful drivers with prizes, cheaper car tax, or by deducting penalty points from their licence.
Conscious that her party was perceived as anti-motorist when in government, Angela Eagle suggested such uses for the cameras “might make people understand there is a point to [them]” she told The Daily Telegraph.
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Civil servants were urged to sign up their own families for ID cards as the controversial scheme flopped, it can be revealed today.
Confidential reports into trials of the controversial £30 cards, obtained by the M.E.N., expose for the first time the chaos that surrounded their introduction.
The £1bn scheme was launched in Greater Manchester in November last year but proved a hugely expensive failure, with only 13,200 people signing up.
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Polish prosecutors looking into the torture (including waterboarding) of prisoners held at the former CIA black site in northeastern Poland near Szymany air base turned to the U.S. Department of Justice with a request for help in collecting information relevant to the case.
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Under secrecy, Russia’s first fifth-generation PAK FA fighter jet has successfully completed a test flight. Its appearance has now been revealed by Sukhoi, the plane’s manufacturer, which released footage of the flight.
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Cablegate
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Wired.com’s Kevin Poulsen and Evan Hansen have confirmed key details concerning unpublished chat logs between whistleblower Bradley Manning and informant Adrian Lamo. Responding to questions on Twitter, Poulsen wrote that the unpublished portion of the chats contain no further reference to ‘private’ upload servers for Manning, while Hansen indicated that they contain no further reference to the relationship between Manning and Wikileaks chief Julian Assange.
U.S. Army Pvt. Manning, who allegedly sent 250,000 diplomatic cables and other secrets to Wikileaks, awaits trial in Quantico, Virginia. Wikileaks, working with newspapers in Europe, has so far published about 2,000 of the cables, with minor redactions.
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This highlights an issue that also came up with WikiLeaks. The US government used a system for holding its confidential communications that was intrinsically insecure (a unified database with something like two million officials authorised to use it). When its insecurity is finally revealed by Bradley Manning (and then WikiLeaks), the response is to rage against the breach whereas the rational thing to do is to rethink the security architecture. Governments are entitled to keep some secrets. But if those secrets are important, then they ought to be seriously protected, not put at risk in such a clueless way. So exposure fulfils a vital function, however annoying it may be at the time.
One wonders, though, if anyone in the UK Cabinet Office is paying attention to all this. As far as I know, the Coalition is still committed to the computerisation of NHS medical records embarked upon by New Labour. This means that the UK is constructing the same kind of intrinsically-insecure system as that breached by WikiLeaks. If the NHS system is built, the UK will have a centralised database of highly confidential documents — the medical records of every citizen — to which upwards 100,000 people of different organisational grades will have routine rights of access. Imagine the fuss there will be when the News of the World pays some bent geek to access the medical records of Cabinet ministers, celebrities and the like.
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A powerful bankers’ association has failed in its attempt to censor a student thesis after complaining that it revealed a loophole in bank card security.
The UK Cards Association, which represents major UK banks and building societies, asked Cambridge University to remove the thesis from its website, but the request was met with a blunt refusal.
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Back in 2009, Daniel Domscheit-Berg applied to the Knight News Challenge in the name of Wikileaks for $532,000 to fund a project to “improve the reach, use and impact of a platform that allows whistle-blowers and journalists to anonymously post source material.” At the time Domscheit-Berg was known to the world by the pseudonym “Daniel Schmitt” and made frequent appearances on behalf of Wikileaks alongside its editor-in-chief Julian Assange (including at the October 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in Barcelona). Now, as is widely known, he and Assange have parted ways and Domscheit-Berg is part of a group organizing the launch of OpenLeaks.org, which is being described as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks, and which is promising to roll out a detailed description of its organization and plans in January 2011.
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There is more to fighting for freedom than simply picking up a gun.
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The Internets are buzzing about an interview Julian Assange gave to Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel Wednesday, in which the WikiLeaks frontman reportedly threatened to release cables showing that various Arab officials were working with the CIA.
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The owner of the rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico is refusing to honor subpoenas from a federal board that has challenged the company’s involvement in monitoring the testing of a key piece of equipment that failed to stop the oil spill disaster.
Transocean said the U.S. Chemical Safety Board does not have jurisdiction in the probe, so it doesn’t have a right to the documents and other items it seeks. The board told The Associated Press late Wednesday that it does have jurisdiction and it has asked the Justice Department to intervene to enforce the subpoenas.
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Again, no one is saying that Amazon has no right to deny service to whomever it wishes, but it does seem a bit odd from a PR standpoint, and raises questions about how much anyone should trust working with Amazon web services. I know it’s making me reconsider my own use of the platform for various projects.
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As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of “zombie lies” — misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information.
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The government should take the WikiLeaks revelations as a lesson that civil servants and ministers can no longer assume they operate in private, and “wise up” to a world where any official communication could be made public, according to the information commissioner.
Christopher Graham, the independent freedom of information watchdog, told the Guardian that the website’s disclosures had profoundly changed the relationship between state and public, in a way that could not be “un-invented”. But he warned against “clamming up,” saying the only response was for ministers to be more open.
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A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has revealed that a U.S. diplomat warned the Obama administration about significant environmental impacts stemming from Canada’s controversial tar sands oil production program.
The language in the cable contradicts recent statements by U.S. State Department officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that underplay the environmental impacts of tar sands oil while defending a proposed pipeline that would bring the extremely polluting oil from Canada to the U.S.
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In the event of his untimely death or long-term incarceration, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would make public all the leaked documents his group has, the activist reiterated Thursday in an interview with the broadcaster al Jazeera.
“If I am forced, we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to,” he said, according to media groups reporting on the interview.
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A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart an attack in the United States.
The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government’s system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab’s father had told U.S. officials of his son’s radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person’s name on the watch list.
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Private First Class Bradley E. Manning was arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. He has been held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico since sometime in May 2010.
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It’s possible that the plain meaning of the Pentagon Papers case will clear Assange and Wikileaks, full stop, and the era of self-restraint of the press in response to extra-legal constraints is over, at least in the US context. It’s possible that the Pentagon Papers case will be re-adjudicated, and the press freedoms of the traditional press in the US will be dramatically constrained, relative to today. It’s possible that new laws will be written by Congress; it’s possible that those laws will be vetoed, or overturned, or amended. Whatever happens, though, this is new ground, and needs to be hashed out as an exemplar of the clash of basic principles that it is.
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A Romanian online publication known for its editorial independence is honoring Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for his service to press freedom, which it warns is under threat in Eastern Europe.
Cotidianul.ro said Saturday Assange was given the “Free Dacia” award for exposing the “duplicitous behavior of some democratic countries.”
Wiklieaks has begun publishing some 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The window of New Market on Via Antonio Cantore in the Prati quarter of Rome was crammed with the delicacies that go into a traditional Italian New Year’s Eve feast – lentils, zamponi (stuffed pig’s trotters) and hyper-calorific cotechino sausages from Modena.
Tomorrow’s cenone (literally, “big dinner”) will usher in not just a change of the year, but a revolution for shoppers and store owners. From 1 January Italy’s hundreds of thousands of retailers will be banned from giving their customers plastic bags.
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Finance
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Bitcoin is an open source, peer-to-peer electronic currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and maintained by a small team of developers. As part of what’s turning into an ongoing series on the distributed Web, I talked to contributor Gavin Andresen about how the software works. This is a technical overview. If you’re interested in an economic or political look at the software, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Niklas Blanchard’s essay on the project.
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The Vatican, whose bank is the focus of a money laundering investigation, enacted laws on Thursday to bring it in line with international standards on financial transparency and the fight against funding terrorism.
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Democracy has been rendered a quaint exercise in which we are asked to select which robber baron will loot our resources, which moral entrepreneur will pander to us, and which corporate elitist will decide our fates.
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As the new year starts, millions of hard-working men and women gather the money they have saved throughout the year, go to a local Western Union office and wire it to their relatives throughout the developing world. But up to 20% of these savings are taken in transfer fees, allowing companies to make billions of dollars in profit on the backs of the world’s neediest.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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UK media and political watchers and workers continue to be captivated by Rupert Murdoch’s every breath and word. Owning five newspapers that regularly boost or end politicians’ careers with editorial endorsements and slant as well as controlling a hugely successful television franchise News Corporation has undisputed clout. With zestful assurance News Corporation, through its subsidiary News International, announced its intention to acquire shares in pay-TV company BSkyB it doesn’t already own within minutes of Conservative Party leader David Cameron, endorsed by News Corporation newspapers, becoming UK Prime Minister after parliamentary elections.
[...]
Sky News, which operates under News International, drew heat from some quarters fearful it would morph into something like News Corporation’s veracity -challenged, teabagger-supporting US all (sort of) news channel Fox News.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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FIDESZ, a right-wing party, was elected to government in Hungary in April with a stonking majority and a large popular mandate for change following what it saw as eight years of misrule and corruption under the Socialist Party. In office, Fidesz, led by the belligerent prime minister, Viktor Orban, has interpreted this mandate in a liberal fashion, extending state control over independent institutions and appointing party men to roles of authority. With Hungary about to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union, some observers are concerned about what they consider to be a growing trend of assaults on the country’s independent centres of power. Our interactive chart chronicles the events of the last eight months.
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They removed another one of my books from their list and are still ignoring me.
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At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we’re going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting.
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The Chinese regulator has declared Internet phone services other than those provided by China Telecom and China Unicom as illegal, which is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country.
The decision was criticized as a measure to protect the duopoly of state-owned telecom carriers, media reports said yesterday.
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Facebook is like a casino: garish, crowded, distracting, designed to lure you in and keep you there far longer than you ever intended. (The same is true of its predecessor, MySpace.) Status updates—not only by actual friends and acquaintances but also from companies, news outlets, celebrities, sports teams—jockey for space with videos, ads, games, chat windows, event calendars, and come-ons to find more people, make more connections, share more data.
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Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation of Italian original) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a small tax (500 €), the obligation to publish corrections within 48 hours upon request of people who consider themselves slandered by published content, and the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots.
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TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the affidavit filed by the DHS agent. It makes an interesting read.
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Tim Wu in the Meat Packing district in Manhattan, NY on December 19, 2010. Tim Wu specializes in telecommunications law, copyright, and international trade. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet?— Jimmy Jeong for The Globe and Mail
‘This is not about selling wristwatches or sweaters,” says Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor considered one of the world’s leading thinkers on technology policy. “This is information – information is power.”
Raised in Toronto and a graduate of McGill University, he argues in The Master Switch, his new book, that information empires from radio to the modern Internet have a standard “cycle.” They begin with intense and extremely positive innovation but eventually lead to the rise of monopolistic entities that stray from their roots and, in some cases, stifle progress rather than foster it.
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A new media law in Hungary creates a powerful censorship authority without oversight and excessive powers under control of the governing party, which endangers the freedom of speech, the Internet and journalism as a whole. Citizens are called to black-out the Internet from the 5th January – when Hungary is taking over the EU presidency on the 6th January 2011.
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Many political activists, nonprofits, and businesses use an anonymity system called Tor to encrypt and obscure what they do on the Internet. Now the U.S.-based nonprofit that distributes Tor is developing a low-cost home router with the same privacy protection built in.
The Tor software masks Web traffic by encrypting network messages and passing them through a series of relays (each Tor client can also become a relay for other users’ messages). But using Tor has typically meant installing the software on a computer and then tweaking its operating system to ensure that all traffic is routed correctly through the program.
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton staked out clear a position for the American Government in favor of global online freedom and against Internet censorship. But subsequent developments have been much less encouraging. In fact, as 2010 draws to an end, the United States has veered dangerously towards becoming a significant Internet censor itself.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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CHIPMAKER Intel has cut a deal with Hollywood in its Sandy Bridge chips to put digital restrictions management (DRM) in them.
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As soon as Barnes & Noble released the Android-powered Nook Color, one question that many people were asking was would you be able to run the Kindle app for Android on the device. Of course, Barnes & Noble wasn’t going to authorize it, but it was only a matter of time before people started “rooting” the Nook Color to run a customized flavor of Android that would allow you to download Android apps, including the Kindle app.
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Will Net Neutrality fare better? As the last frontier of press freedom, it gives consumers access to any equipment, content, application and service, free from corporate control. Public interest groups want it preserved.
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When the Federal Communications Commission passed its first binding network neutrality rules earlier this month, it brought a sort of closure to a long-running, raucous debate that had left nearly all participants exasperated, if not exhausted.
But one would be hard pressed to find an observer who really thinks the FCC’s Dec. 21 order will be the final word in the net neutrality debate. So what happens next?
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski billed the rules as a compromise that would establish some baseline prohibitions against service providers blocking lawful content on their networks, while shielding them from the heavy-handed regulatory oversight cable and phone companies had long fought against.
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Monopolies
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For years, the telcos pushed for cable franchise reform, which was sorely needed to some extent. Basically, for decades, various local municipalities would offer a “franchise” for cable TV providers, so that residents really only had a single choice. When I was growing up, if you wanted pay TV you had one option and one option only. The reason for this did make some sense at the time. Laying infrastructure for cable was disruptive and expensive, and towns didn’t want multiple providers to dig up everyone’s lawn or whatever. On top of that, with a single franchise managed by local government, that local government could put conditions on the franchise that helped local residents (for example, here in Silicon Valley some franchises required super high speed broadband connections between schools, government building and a few other facilities). However, with it also came the downsides of a monopoly.
[...]
I think the real turning point on pay TV prices (contrary to the claims of some) won’t come due to franchise reform, but as more people ditch pay TV altogether and cut that cord to go internet-only.
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Of course, using a logo in such a manner is not trademark infringement in the slightest, but it doesn’t stop Olson from making claims that it is. The letter claims that this is “misappropriating Career Step’s goodwill… and confusing the public. This will damage and likely has damaged, Career Step.” Of course, I’d argue that having its lawyer send out such a cease & desist would likely do more damage than the original post.
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A couple months back, I had a really fascinating experience. I had two meetings in a row, each with incredibly successful content creators — people who have embraced new business models and new technologies to amazing results, both creatively and monetarily. We were discussing the state of the entertainment industry today, as well as additional strategies for navigating what’s coming next. What I found amusing, however, was how at some point, in the middle of each of those meetings, the person I was talking to sat back, laughed, and said “you’re such an optimist about these things!” I was amused, since both of these individuals had already shown an ability to thrive in these new, often unchartered waters, but they still weren’t completely convinced of their own success.
But the part that really struck me, was that immediately following these two meetings, I went to check on Techdirt, and was reading a series of comments about how reading Techdirt each day was making people more and more pessimistic — what with new, more draconian copyright laws, domain name seizures, free speech violations and the like happening. And the juxtaposition of the two things struck me as odd. Yet, it seems to happen quite frequently.
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The NHS has moved a step closer to obtaining a cheap drug to prevent the leading cause of blindness, in spite of attempts by drug companies to block it.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which decides which drugs may be prescribed on the NHS, has decided to move towards an official appraisal of a drug, Avastin, that has been widely and cheaply used to prevent wet age-related macular degeneration – even though the drug companies that make and market it refuse to seek a licence. They have a licensed version which is many times more expensive.
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Copyrights
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In the media interviews so far, the new minister, who is not a member of the PT, points out that she had been approached about ten days earlier and received the invitation to head the ministry only two days before her appointment. Nevertheless, as a professional artist and someone who has worked in the public culture administration, her initial statements are astonishingly clueless. The direction in which she is set to go, however, seems to be already clear. One of the first interviews, published by O Globo (in a DRM format that prohibits copying of the text) is headlined “Culture Minister will review the new Law on Copyright” (Ministra da Cultura vai rever a nova Lei do Direto Autoral, André Miranda, O Globo, 23.12.2010)
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In January 2010, in response to the emerging tragedy from the earthquake in Haiti, Radiohead performed before a limited audience at a charity concert in the United States. Since that performance, footage of the event has been painstakingly compiled by fans and now a twin DVD has been released, endorsed by the band. All proceeds are going to charity and the fastest way of acquiring it? BitTorrent of course.
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Holy downloads, Caped Crusader—the judge that has been kneecapping copyright troll suits right and left has done it again. This time, West Virginia United States District Court Judge John Preston Bailey has “severed” 7,097 out of 7,098 Joe Doe defendant subpoenas in a lawsuit alleging that they illegally downloaded copies of Batman XXX: A Porn Parody.
Bailey’s reason for the dismissal? Same as the massive smackdown he dealt to a host of porn movie infringement suits earlier this month. Bunching them all together in one big case made no sense, since the defendant’s actions weren’t related to each other.
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But the card also comes with an inserted petition, urging people to sign to protest Bill C-32, the Harper government’s proposed copyright legislation. The petition says the legislation would tamper with existing copyright protection for artists and musicians.
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China’s Ministry of Culture has published a notice stating that it will further clear the Chinese online music market and shut down irregular and illegal music websites.
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Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1954 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2011.
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Five years ago the first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden. In the years that followed the Party shook up the political climate in its home country and the European Parliament where it holds two seats. Now, five years later, founder and chief architect Rickard Falkvinge is stepping down as leader. He will focus on promoting the Pirate position internationally, while Party deputy Anna Troberg will take over the reins.
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In 2011 the war against BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites will reach a new level. Since sites such as The Pirate Bay have proven that no amount of litigation or criminal sanctions against their operators can take them down, the focus will switch to undermining their infrastructure. Companies and organizations providing file-sharing sites with essential services are set to face the glare of the spotlight and attempts to hold them accountable for the actions of their customers’ users.
Google Demo Slam: Streetview Road Race
Credit: TinyOgg
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01.01.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The topics for this edition include a discussion of various open source BIOSes (also known as kernals) for personal computers and my experiences with CoreBoot and SeaBIOS. We also talk about using FreeDOS and running old MSDOS programs in the modern era. Duration is a bit over 16 minutes, 38 megs in size.
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Google
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But perhaps most troubling to Microsoft, they now must compete with the economics of free, as Google is offering its Open Source Chrome operating system (O/S) free to hardware manufacturers—taking dead aim at the core business model that sustains rival Microsoft.
That’s give-away O/S, give-away browser, give-away video player technology all from Google. This can power literally hundreds of next generation devices, from netbooks to iPad tablet /EBR wannabe’s ready to hit the market.
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Google’s Cr-48 notebook with Chrome OS is an incredibly sophisticated strategy to build traction and reputation for an operating system that is far from being ready and far from being able to replace any major operating system on the market today. But the implication and the goal is clear: The target is to become the future Windows in breadth and reach. There has never been a greater threat for Microsoft’s core business than today.
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Applications
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DockBarX 0.42 is released, this version comes with some improvements and a new feature codenamed “ScrollPeak” : ” With ScrollPeak instead of rising windows while scrolling, the windows will simply be opacified one by one until you found the one you are looking for and when you move the mouse cursor away from the group button it will be raised. Nothing revolutionary but it should improve the work flow for some of you.”
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Proprietary
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Now it looks like the upcoming 4.0 will kill that for new versions, meaning the FLOSS versions of NX will likely remain with version 3 of things. Which in turn makes me fear NX is soon to be dead for FLOSS.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Motivations for Open Sourcing
Why do people Open Source code in general? Looking at a lot of Open Source code I came in contact with I can probably assign each piece of code into one of four categories:
Working with Others
If you want to work together with other people, Open Sourcing code is a great idea. If you want to connect different systems it makes a lot of sense to make the communication interface open source so that everybody can work on that. I think the buzzword for that is probably “interoperability”.
Community Maintenance
If a company went out of business or is no longer maintaining a particular piece of software, projects are often opened for everybody.
Marketing
Some people open source code for marketing reasons. These releases come often with ridiculous strings attached to the license or are missing essential bits. At the very least, these projects are not noticed as Open Source projects, even if they are technically Open Source.
Because it makes sense
Certain things only make sense to be distributed as open source. Either because people expect it to be open source (like libraries for Python or other dynamic programming languages) or because there is just no reason to keep it closed. My stuff falls under this category for instance. None of the Pocoo projects would work in any way if they would not be Open Source.
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Indie games are not very popular, on any platform. They are independent of the big game companies like EA, id Software, Infinity Ward, and Crytek. Thus they also lack the kind of funding these companies have. Windows users started taking games for granted a long time ago. With Windows being the dominant operating system, Windows users know that high quality commercial games have to have Windows versions, so when an indie game comes out, with an average price of $20, they seem too expensive to most people using Windows. As evidence, the average price Windows users are paying for the recent “Humble Indie Bundle #2″ is $6.63.
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Unigine Corp. announces that Digital Arrow Studio has started working on “Dilogus – The Winds of War” fantasy RPG based on Unigine engine.
Do you enjoy Unigine Heaven benchmark? Have you ever imagined a game with the same setting powered by its stunning to the eye technology? Your dreams come true: now there is a RPG based on the Unigine engine featuring floating islands and mystical caves in a fantasy setting.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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After I moved to Linux, I favored Thunderbird as my email client because I found it easy to configure. Of course, I knew that KDE includes a client called KMail, but its appearance was not attractive enough for me. However, I decided to give it a try now that I have some spare time…those brief moments in which my four-month old daughter is asleep and I can go play with the computer.
The question was if I could configure KMail on my own and get it to work properly. Given the fact that I am not an expert, the issue is significant because if I can handle it, that means that KMail is user friendly.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading day at $46.25 close to its 50 day moving average currently set at $44.32. Red Hat’s price action is just above this important support level translating into a trading opportunity.
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Fedora
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Checking that nothing (or almost nothing) needs to be rebuild is faster. On a sample system (Notebook with Core2Duo, 2 GHz) on Windows XP (anti virus software installed), rechecking that nothing needs to be done for module sw takes 7 sec with a warm cache. On the same machine build.pl/dmake took 210 sec with the same “full” header dependencies.
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Debian Family
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The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike “regular” Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Partimus is a California Ubuntu LoCo Team and 501c(3) non-profit which has successfully deployed Linux on the desktop in 6 Bay-Area schools.
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In a post yesterday, we mentioned Jack Valenti, the late but not lamented ex-boss of Hollywood’s MPAA (centre).
With him (on both counts) is/are Dan ‘The Joker’ Glickman, the failed and now departed but still alive ex-MPAA boss.
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Synology announced a high-end model in its line of NAS (network attached storage) devices targeting small- and medium-sized business. The DS1511+ has a 1.86GHz dual-core processor, room for up to five hard disk drives and 15TB of storage, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and compatibility with two external storage units, according to the company.
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FoxNews reported that HP will release three versions of PalmPad that will run on webOS juice, version 2.5.1. It further reported that the fourth tablet primarily crafted for university students will not be showcased at the CES event.
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Phones
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Android
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Verizon’s first LTE phone, an Android smarpthone called “Thunderbolt,” will reportedly make its first official public appearance at CES next week. Meanwhile, Thunderbolt specs and images are making their way around the Web. The phone will allegedly have a 4.3-inch touchscreeen with a resolution of 1,280 by 800.
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It’s nice when a post with such a grandiose title like “The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995″ actually delivers. It takes a look at the number of “Android will crush everyone in 2011” articles and ponders what that actually means. Not directly for the industry as a whole, but what it means for Google as a business, and the hardware partners who have tied themselves to the Mountain View company?
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Of the two new offerings, the Nexus S is the one most visible to consumers. The phone went on sale in the U.S. yesterday at Best Buy Co. stores and online for $199 on a two- year contract from Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, and for $529 with no contract.
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Education
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James M. Cruikshank, a middle school principal and member of the Potsdam Central School District’s technology committee, said the switch would alleviate the rising cost of licensing fees associated with Microsoft’s suite, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The free alternative, OpenOffice, has similar components and can open Microsoft documents.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In these times, it really is important that we build professional and social solidarity around a core set of ideals. It’s critical that we hang together, both to advance our positive ideas for a better world and to stop those trying to turn computers against their users.
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Project Releases
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The open source Pligg project has been around now for five years and is celebrating with a new release.
The Pligg 1.1.3 release provides security and bug fixes as well as a new Karma-based voting method to complement the existing digg and reddit styles of voting.
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Programming
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eWEEK takes a look at seven of the biggest stories to impact or raise the interest of the Java community in 2010 – starting with Oracle acquiring Sun.
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Many users see Java as stuck in a quagmire. But there’s hope. The innovation needed to keep Java relevant will come from the broader Java ecosystem, and not from Oracle or the Java Community Process. However, frameworks and APIs can only provide so much innovation. The community is starting to turn to new programming language paradigms.
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The Winklevosses — identical twins and Harvard graduates — say that they, along with another Harvard student, Divya Narendra, had the original idea for Facebook, and that Mark Zuckerberg stole it. They sued Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg in 2004, and settled four years later for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares.
They have been trying to undo that settlement since, saying they were misled on the value of the deal. But it has not been an easy decision.
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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: People should be forced to upgrade their systems if they’re going to be on the Internet. One way to do that is to make sure applications, like Skype, which depend on the Internet, can be automatically updated. Yes, that can be a headache for system administrators, but then so is having out-of-date software on the loose that contributed to taking down an important service.
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No amount of advertising, FUD, bribery or corruption will keep the Wintel monopoly strong after 2012. M$, Intel and their “partners” will have to earn a living the old-fashioned way, by working for a living.
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The CEO of Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell, Sehat Sutardja, has downplayed the significance of rumors circulating this week that Microsoft plans to unveil a version of Windows that runs on low-power ARM chips like those made by Marvell, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many other companies.
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Science
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The UK-built solar-powered Zephyr aeroplane has been confirmed as a record-breaker following its non-stop two-week flight earlier this year.
The world governing body for air sports records, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), gave Zephyr three records including longest time aloft.
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Health/Nutrition
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Over the last decade, the federal government has been targeting doctors who treat pain patients with prescription drugs like Percocet and Oxycontin. Advocates like Reynolds argue that doctors who overprescribe painkillers should be disciplined by medical boards if they are sloppy or unscrupulous, not judges and prosecutors. Dumping them into the criminal justice system puts drug cops in the position of determining what is and isn’t acceptable medical treatment. One promising treatment of chronic pain known as high-dose opiate therapy, for example has all but disappeared because doctors are too terrified of running afoul of the law to try it.
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Security
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Well, it wasn’t. And it won’t be, at least not anytime soon. The reason is that unscrupulous, shameless marketers who pursue a spam strategy evolve and adapt like a virus. As soon as you build a better spam filter, they figure out how to get around it.
As a result, e-mail long ago became a bad neighborhood. And now an increasing number of people, especially young people, avoid e-mail altogether.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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An airline pilot is being disciplined by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for posting video on YouTube pointing out what he believes are serious flaws in airport security.
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The huge LEMV* surveillance airships now being built by British designers for the US Army may be able to carry substantial cargoes as an alternative to sky-spy equipment, according to reports.
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A Brooklyn man standing in front of his apartment was hit with a trespassing ticket, even after cops watched him use his key to get inside.
Lindsey Riddick, still fuming over the bizarre Aug. 18 incident, said he showed police his identification. And when he opened the door to the Flatbush home, his girlfriend and two daughters greeted him and then ran outside the apartment.
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The massive push to fix airport security in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a gold rush in technology contracts for an industry that mushroomed almost overnight. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors.
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A note to the financial industry: perhaps instead of worrying about student papers, you should worry about a system that is vulnerable to so many problems.
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Authorities in Birmingham have barely been out of the papers this year, such is their enthusiasm for public surveillance. This month is no exception.
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Readers will remember that early in November I wrote to the British Airline Pilots’ Association about the Association’s policy on body scanners, given the boycott that had been announced by the Allied Pilots’ Association (the largest such association in the world).
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No, it’s not a joke: this little piece of surveillance hell really can be yours by clicking here.
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When launching the review in July this year Theresa May said, ‘National security is the first duty of government but we are also committed to reversing the substantial erosion of civil liberties…I want a counter-terrorism regime that is proportionate, focused and transparent. We must ensure that in protecting public safety, the powers which we need to deal with terrorism are in keeping with Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness.’
The question now is whether any substantial policy change will result from the review or whether it will be concluded that control orders are in keeping with ‘Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness’.
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A top military official says new warnings about insulated beverage containers are an example of federal officials trying to anticipate terror tactics.
Adm. James Winnefeld told The Associated Press Friday that the Transportation Security Administration is “always trying to think ahead.” Winnefeld is the head of the U.S. Northern Command, which is charged with protecting the homeland.
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Cablegate
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If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, from those which amount to unsubstantiated assertions about “the ideology that drives a lot of the online world,” to ad-hominem sniping (for example, “we didn’t necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment” — maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don’t like and so discretion is the better part of valour), to outright misapprehension (“Wikileaks isn’t really a “wiki,” but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia” — er, well, no actually, it doesn’t look like it in the slightest), and to various straw men: “What if we come to be able to read each other’s thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me.” As far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.
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The United Nations has responded to the ongoing WikiLeaks kerfuffle, urging member states to – ahem – remember the basic human right to access information held by governments and other public authorities.
In issuing a joint statement on Wikileaks with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression does not mention the US or other involved countries by name. But he does mention “the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks” – a reference to the classified US State Department cables released late last month – and clearly, he’s concerned that in responding to the leaks, the US and other countries will step on established international legal principles – if they haven’t already.
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Wikileaks cables have revealed a disturbing development in the African uranium mining industry: abysmal safety and security standards in the mines, nuclear research centres, and border customs are enabling international companies to exploit the mines and smuggle dangerous radioactive material across continents.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It is now conceivable that the myth of ethanol as the salvation for America’s energy problem is coming to an end. And maybe we always should have known it would wind up in italics, underlined, with the real facts of the damage ethanol can do to gas-powered motors laid out for all to see in a court of law. I say that because this past Monday a group calling itself the Engine Products Group, comprising small-engine manufacturers, automakers, and boat manufacturers, filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to vacate the EPA’s October ruling that using a 15 percent blend of ethanol in the nation’s fuel supplies would not harm 2007 and newer vehicles.
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A major U.S. mine for rare earth metals has gone back into operation, adding a much needed source to offset China’s control of the unique group of materials necessary to build tech gadgets like smart phones and laptops.
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Greenpeace has today received and verified reports that since December 11th, more than 200,000 litres of radioactive sludge from three cracked waste pools has leaked into the environment at the SOMAIR uranium mine in Niger, operated by French energy company AREVA [1].
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After two and a half years of hard work in Japan to expose corruption at the heart of the whaling industry – we have a significant victory!
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And that’s where the good news comes in. last week, Matti, Greenpeace’s hard-working forest campaigner in Finland, let us know that following a decade of endeavor, a final victory has been achieved in the campaign to protect old-growth forests in northernmost Finland. Negotations between the Saami reindeer herders and the Finnish state forestry company Metsahallitus have resulted in a deal to protect 80% of the forests defined as important by both reindeer herders and Greenpeace in 2002.
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Finance
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the trading of shares in privately held companies that include Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
Such trading has taken off on small, private exchanges in the past year, helping to boost the multibillion-dollar valuations of the social-networking companies and other closely held concerns.
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This piracy link means that the sites in question could fall foul of the proposed—but essentially dead—Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). COICA would allow judges to force service providers, including credit card companies, to block payments to websites “dedicated to infringing activities.” However, the bill was blocked by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who described it as a “bunker-busting cluster bomb,” when what was needed was “a precision-guided missile.”
In spite of COICA’s failure to pass—in this Congress, at least—the RIAA and MPAA have been pressuring payment providers, advertising networks, and ISPs to do more to fight piracy, and the combination of industry pressure and the possibility of legislation appears to be having some effect. Earlier this month, Google announced a range of measures to improve its response to copyright infringement.
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While many victims of the so-called “Nigerian e-mail scam” would be too embarrassed to trumpet that fact, others end up infamous for their victimhood like the appellant in a published opinion of the California Court of Appeal in Riverside. Also known as an advance-fee fraud, the Nigerian scam baits the victim with an advance sum of money now in the hopes of realizing an even larger payment later.
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Here in this large, airy room, all high ceilings and exposed beams, it’s warm; outside it’s cool and breezy, in advance of the near-freezing temps said to be coming just in time for Black Friday. Lowest November lows in 17 years, they say. But the real chills are coming from the economy — on Monday came word of a study by Forbes.com that seemed to confirm what we already know: Las Vegas is the hardest city in which to find a job.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Peter Mandelson has been barred from lobbying ministers and civil servants for two years – amid fears he could exploit his former government contacts for private gain.
The former Labour business secretary has been told he must not attempt to influence decision-makers in Whitehall on behalf of the foreign billionaires and wealthy corporations expected to employ the services of his new ‘global consultancy’.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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As of January 1, 2011, California’s first online impersonation law – SB 1411 – goes into effect, making malicious digital impersonation a misdemeanor that comes with fines up to $1000 and/or up to a year in jail.
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What’s nice about this system is that it gets you censorship resistance without introducing anything wildly new. There are already certificate authorities. There are already hash-to-URL servers. There are already mirrors. There’s already Tor. (There’s already tor2web.) The only really new thing specific to censorship resistance is URL-to-hash servers of the form I described, but they’re very simple and hopefully uncontroversial.
There is some work to be done stitching all of these together and improving the UI, but unlike with some other censorship-resistance systems, there’s nothing you can point to as having no good purpose except for helping bad guys. It’s all pretty basic and generally useful stuff, just put together in a new way.
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Over at PC Pro, an unbelievable story: the Information Commissioner’s Office and Google “teamed up” on their response to Rob Halfon MP’s complaint about the search giant’s Wi-Fi scandal.
PC Pro obtained documents using the Freedom of Information Act which support this explosive allegation of collusion between “watchdog” and data snatcher.
As readers of this site will know well by now, Google was caught scraping private data from unsecured Wi-Fi connections in May as their cars trundled around the country, but initially said no personal information was collected.
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In another thread, I have already mentioned the situation in Hungary. In a nutshell, if you don’t feel like reading that, the new media related law in Hungary consists of the following ridiculous regulations effective 1st January:
- News about crimes can’t take up more than 20% of the total amount of news in any news program in any kind of media. Which is just ludicrous. What’s next? Ministry of Happiness?
- Anything in any media can be reported by anyone on the grounds that it violated some hazy rule (the section which explains what can be regarded as a violation is deliberately ambiguous). Nationwide television and radio stations can be punished up to 200 million Hungarian Forints ($1 million ballpark) – any random person who owns a blog, writes down their opinion and gets reported by some moron can be punished up to 50 million Hungarian Forints (approx. $200.000)!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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If you happened to have received a PaperJamz guitar toy for the holidays this year, you may want to hang onto it as a collectors’ item. In November, we wrote about how Gibson, the famed guitar company, was suing a bunch of companies over PaperJamz. The main target, of course, was Wowwee, the toymaker who makes the devices (which are plastic — not actually paper — guitars with a capacitive touch screen that turn your air guitaring into something a bit more real), but Gibson also sued a bunch of retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Target, etc. for selling the toys.
Eric Goldman now lets us know that Gibson successfully got an injunction against all the defendants, with the court ordering them to stop selling the toys, just days before Christmas, though the defendants quickly appealed the ruling. The full injunction is embedded below.
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In San Francisco last week, US district judge White couldn’t have been clearer. The GE seeds company Monsanto had illegally planted GE sugar-beet in Arizona and Oregon; the permits for it had been granted by the US Department of Agriculture in violation of an earlier ruling. The judge’s order: Up-root and destroy the whole lot of it!
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Copyrights
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On Thursday 13th January we will have a world first, a Pirate Member of Parliament. Did you just laugh or rubbish that statement? Well, I don’t want your help. If you didn’t and you do genuinely believe that we have a chance of winning the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election, albeit an outside chance, I want to hear from you as soon as possible.
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The copyright-infringement allegations are part of Perfect 10’s ongoing lawsuit against Google, a suit with a tortured procedural history. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10’s perfect babes.
Fast forward to today.
Part of the case, originally filed in 2005, is back before the San Francisco-based appeals court. Among other things, Perfect 10 (NSFW) alleges Google’s forwarding of Perfect 10’s takedown notices to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website constitutes copyright infringement.
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Megaupload has hit back saying that it is not up to payment processors to take the law into their own hands.
Bonnie Lam of Megaupload said that it is not up to them, rather than elected governments, to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.
Otherwise we would be getting into the silly situation where people cast their votes by choosing a conservative or a liberal credit card, she said.
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Yet, we’ve noticed an unfortunate pattern. A2IM often seems to want to be the “mini-RIAA,” frequently staking out identical positions on the issues, and simply adding a “me too” to whatever the RIAA says. Early on it came out in support of ACTA. It’s also been involved in astroturfing campaigns in favor of 3 strikes laws, and most recently, argued against the concept of net neutrality (Update: to be clear, as Bengloff explains in the comments, they were only against specific aspects of a proposed net neutrality plan). The group’s leadership has effectively admitted at times that they take orders from the RIAA. For example, on the issue of ACTA, A2IM’s President, Richard Bengloff, admitted he had not seen ACTA, but supported it because the RIAA told him to.
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Should fashion designs be eligible for copyrights? When I listen to people talk about this issue, many of the same interesting arguments come up. These people know about designer knockoffs and feel that something is not quite fair about them. Yet they also view copyists as moving innovation along in the fashion world. Copying releases new fashions from the small circles of their origins to the wider marketplace; it translates designs from abstract experimentation on the catwalk to concrete wearability on the sidewalk. Copying thus plays a vital market role in fashion. And so, in my admittedly small and biased sample, a typical conversation about fashion copyright invariably trends toward a reluctant opposition.
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After six years, the criminal proceedings against P2P index site ShareConnector have finally come to an end, much to the embarrassment of the Dutch Department of Justice. The Court dismissed the case and ruled that the Public Prosecutor relied too much on evidence provided by anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and failed to do a proper investigation of its own.
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This is a real shame. Every aspect of music that I care about and that I participate in, for the past 15 years Djing across 19 countries on 3 continents, has been based in practices and traditions in which remixing and mixtapes are a fundamental element. In fact, similar practices are fundamental to every living musical tradition (from hiphop & reggae to jazz improvisation to tecnobrega and beyond (and are vital to nonmusical creative traditions too). Whether they involve re-using copied digital recordings or live re-performances or re-incorporating riffs, quotations, basslines, and beats… those specifics are different in different times and places, but their legality is not relevant to the creative practice. Recycling/repetition/reference is a basic element of creativity. Creativity is a living, social practice that arises from people (and peoples) interacting and communicating.
So I am sorry to hear of Soundcloud cracking down on this practice and making it harder. I don’t really care what they say their official policy was (it’s there if you look), in practice they knew what was happening because they benefited from it. And the law on this is hazy, there’s fair use arguments to be made even within the law as it stands, but nobody can afford the lawyers to make it.
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Time Warner Cable, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, has refused to turn over customers accused in a lawsuit by Larry Flynt Publishing of pirating one of the company’s porn films, according to Flynt’s attorney.
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The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear a case involving whether previews of music downloaded from the internet should be subject to royalties.
Linux, Debian 6 (Squeeze), KDE 4.4.5
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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It’s no longer fun waiting to see when Microsoft will fix bugs, or what new features it will come out with. You’re ready to start driving changes like that yourself.
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I do not like this word consumer. I prefer customer. The definition of customer is much more interesting than consumer: “1. a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron. 2. Informal. a person one has to deal with: a tough customer; a cool customer.”
A customer is courted, a consumer is herded. A customer must be won over, a consumer is told what to do. A customer negotiates and bargains, a consumer accepts whatever is dumped on them.
What does this have to do with Linux
What does this have to do with Linux and FOSS? Everything. FOSS users have strong rights. We can do whatever we want with FOSS code for personal use. Actually that is true of everything, since trying to place limits on personal use of anything requires unwarranted invasions into our private business. But that is exactly what is happening.
We can open up FOSS code, tear it apart, mix and match, and install it all over the place. You know, just like normal possessions. In my life I have repaired and customized vehicles, modified furniture, modified my homes, messed with appliance guts, made lawnmowers into go-karts, made super-powered electric razors that buzzed really loud and went really fast until they fried out, and done strange and wondrous things to bicycle parts (art!). That is normal.
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The hackers uncovered the hack in order to run Linux or PS3 consoles, irrespective on the version of firmware the games console was running.
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Continuing to advocate “for all things Open Source or built with Open Source” is on Slashdot blogger yagu’s 2011 to-do list — “and I resolve to call out any and all reaping the benefits of Open Source who don’t give back.” Also, “I resolve to be respectful and humble in regards to everything Microsoft,” he asserted sincerely before adding, “I always like to pick at least one resolution I can break early.”
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Desktop
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Shame on Dell for making a simple purchase complex. Give the customers what they want. Give them choice. Don’t promise choice but make them struggle to get it.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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IBM
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Here’s a list of these types of questions and my guesses at answers:
* Will ChromeOS from Google be an interesting player, will it merge with Android, and will it replace Windows on hundreds of millions of desktops? Yes / maybe / no.
* Will Android devices surpass those from Apple? Perhaps, but only in aggregate volume.
* Will one emerge that will clobber the iPad in market share? No way.
* Will some flavor of Windows be more significant than Android on tablets? No.
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Kernel Space
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Support for fast USB 3.0 storage devices with USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), an audio loopback driver plus extensions to support Apple’s Magic Trackpad are only some of the advances that improve the hardware support of the forthcoming Linux kernel version 2.6.37; final release is expected in January.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this week we published our annual look at AMD’s Catalyst driver releases from the past year. Not only did the Catalyst Linux driver this year picked up a couple new features, its driver performance had improved slightly over the past twelve months. In building up some initial test data for OpenBenchmarking.org we decided not only to do these tests on the latest consumer-grade graphics card this year, but expand it to cover the workstation performance too and to go back nearly two years in time. These results for an AMD FirePro V8700 graphics card with the monthly driver updates going back to Catalyst 9.2 are quite interesting. AMD announced twice this year optimizations to their FirePro driver software, but in reality these “optimizations” were largely unsustainable and not optimizations as much as they were attempting to address driver regressions from the past.
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Applications
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The world of Linux includes several options for users who need to create slide presentations in the style of Microsoft PowerPoint. OpenOffice.org’s Impress does a great job of mimicking most of PowerPoint’s functions, giving Redmond refugees a familiar tool. KPresenter, however, suffers from a frustrating layout. Impressive isn’t used to create presentations, but it can definitely juice up a performance.
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So… one of the many desktop regressions introduced in the Fedora 14 desktop is affecting the basic image viewer, eog, which became almost unusable: the colors are wrong (see the photo above) and the image loading times are unbearable slow. So I decided to try Shotwell, the new default image viewer in Fedora, which I use only as an image viewer, not as a photo manager, it has correct color reproduction, is fast but lacks many essential features and has horrendous user interface.
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This post is a list of soft phones available for Linux. It is not an all inclusive list, more of a list of those I’ve installed or tested. These are just a handful of them, there are probable way more available that I’m not aware of. Some of these are cross platform and are listed if they are available in Ubuntu and Fedora’s repositories as of the time of this writing. Use the comments to let me know of any good ones or which ones you’ve used or recommend!
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NoMachine, a global leader in cross platform remote access and application delivery solutions, announced a software preview of its upcoming new products and technologies which offer a completely redesigned client GUI and restructure its flagship suite of NX Server. The new products will not only extend the current functionalities of NX application delivery and remote access products, there will also be new naming conventions adopted. This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.
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So, let’s explore the 5 Twitter clients at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews. Start tweeting today!
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Today I present you an interview with Bertrand Florat the creator of Jajuk.
“Jajuk is software that organizes and plays music. It is a full-featured application geared towards advanced users with large or scattered music collections. Using multiple perspectives, the software is designed to be intuitive and provide different visions of your collection.”
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About 3 years ago when I started my Linux adventure one of the challenges I initially had was finding an easy way to convert videos to formats I could play on my mobile phone. I remembered having to search through the web and the only option available then was FFmpeg which (don’t get me wrong) is a very power tool for converting from one video file format to another, but it was commandline and not something a newbie like me (coming fresh from windows) would want to try out. Fast forward to 2010 and the landscape has changed. They are now dozens of tools which provide a nice GUI frontend to ffmpeg and hence a very easy way to convert videos on Linux.
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Proprietary
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If you are a fan of Pandora Music and a user of Linux you know that Linux is a bit behind in the app space for this service. There are only a few possible clients and, until now, those clients simply were not options. The official Pandora client, due to flash issues, could bring your Linux machine to a screeching halt. Many of the other clients either will not install or will install but will not run. Fortunately a new-ish Pandora client is available for Linux – Pithos.
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Instructionals/Technical
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These past days I was contacted by several leads of native-language teams of OpenOffice.org who asked me this question: How can we start to work on the localization of LibreOffice?
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Games
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Xonotic preview 0.1 is released, this release is still a preview, which means that is not a stable release yet, in this release many things have progressed, both in features and graphics, one of the things that makes the game feel much more smooth is the change from 20 to 60 server frames per second, the entire weapon balance has been rewritten from scratch, and while the game still have the old weapons, some of them have been given entirely new functions, the menu theme has been updated and the options have been tuned to better reflect what values players are likely to change. Xonotic also features several remade and brand new maps.
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Desktop Environments
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While the Enlightenment desktop is fantastic, there is no doubting that in all it’s grace and glory it is a bit different from other desktop environments. While I know there are some people (such as myself) that like to just muck their way through things on their own, I also know that others like a bit of a guide to follow along with. A couple of months ago I made a post detailing the answers to some common questions those new to the Enlightenment desktop have. Today I would like to address a few more such questions and give a few tips I have picked up over the years.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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As my desktop I’m using a bit of KDE infrastructure (power management and such) but with the fabulous openbox as my window manager.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’ve mentioned in previous posts (The non-operating system operating system and My Personal Gnome) that I’m not too worried about the underlying operating system (although I do prefer it to be a Debian derivative – currently I’m using Mint 8.0) but I do like the tools that I’m used to that come with the Gnome desktop.
Here, I’d like to take a look at what I don’t like or, more specifically,
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This has been one of the guidelines in my life for quite some time… It started as a curiosity a long time ago with Notify OSD and evolved to full project in openSUSE. It is important to acknowledge at this point the motivation provided by the openSUSE GNOME Team from which I’ve been getting plenty of guidance and help, namely from Vincent Untz (vuntz) and Dominique Leuenberger (Dimstar). Thanks to them, we have now a GNOME:Ayatana Project on OBS (openSUSE Build Service), currently being populated with the support libraries for Ayatana’s Unity and Indicators.
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Development is slower than many other distributions, but that means a long life span. This can be either good or bad depending upon your point of view. The latest stable release is the various 6.0 editions, but 7.0 is on its way. Don’t wait for it though. Developers are cautious and 7.0 is unlikely to go gold much before fall of 2011. Finally, don’t let all the versions confuse you. You can go and grab any of them really and then install about anything you need from repositories.
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The QA team has said that there is some sort of “policy” on masking packages that break reverse dependencies. I’ll subscribe that that policy for the sake of not breaking users machines on purpose, however, let’s take a look at the current case study: poppler-0.16
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Because of the large proportion of my AntiX-install and the inconsistency of packages that grew over time I decided that it was necessary to start a fresh install. This time I chose PClinuxOS (the LXDE-version). In reviews it was considered absolutely userfriendly. Within twenty minutes the install was completed. What a dissappointment. Everything worked out of the box. My printer, my scanner, it all functioned allmost immediately. Nothing to do for me. No puzzles to solve, nothing to tinker. What a turnoff. But a comfort to my wife and children though, because here they had an OS that their daddy would leave well enough alone.
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A few days ago I mentioned Salix OS, a Slackware-based distribution, as one of my top five distributions of 2010. Even at the end of the year they are still keeping up the momentum and have released the last remaining version of 13.1.2, this time with the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). Salix now has images for four different desktops: the standard XFCE, LXDE, KDE4 and since recently Fluxbox. Like the other, the LXDE release is now available for x86_64 as well. Seperate live images are currently available for all but the Fluxbox version.
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You may have also heard that the next Ubuntu version–Natty Narwhal, version 11.04–will use the 3D-enabled Unity desktop by default instead, along with the Wayland graphics system.
Unity is still based on GNOME, so it won’t affect the use of any GNOME-based applications, Canonical says. It will also still be possible to reinstall GNOME, if you really want it.
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Reviews
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This is guest blogger Prashanth Venkataram, and I write and manage the blog Das U-Blog by Prashanth, where I post reviews of Linux distributions and software as well as my thoughts about the current state of science, technology, and people’s freedoms (especially with regard to technology).
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora has always kept it’s promise of bringing cutting-edge computer technology to it’s users. It has now been confirmed that Fedora 15, codenamed LoveLock will ship two database packages: MySQL 5.5 and PostGreSQL 9. Fedora 15 Lovelock will have a couple of other advanced features too like Wayland & Systemd about which we have already told you earlier.
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Debian Family
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There was a presentation by Gaurav Paliwal on Debian vs Ubuntu and why you should pick Debian over Ubuntu. I’ve been associated with Ubuntu for a very long time now. I started using Ubuntu when it was a nascent project (in 2006) and I was a passionate (severe and extremist would also do here) evangelist of the system. Ubuntu was doing something that no distribution had ever done before. It was bringing Linux to the masses. I was a part of those “masses” too. I supported them and I was proud to be a tiny part of the movement.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu recovery mode is a basic boot configuration for repairing a broken system. In this mode it skips most configuration files and daemons in order to achieve a functioning root prompt. For the security-conscious administrator this itself is a problem.
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Flavours and Variants
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The download is simple enough, from the Pinguy OS page on Sourceforge. With all of the extras that they have added to Ubuntu, this is strictly a LiveDVD distribution, they haven’t attempted to shoehorn it into a CD image. But, how to turn that LiveDVD image into a LiveUSB stick?
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Linux Mint Debian Edition, or LMDE, is the edition of Linux Mint based on Debian Testing. The latest release was made available for download on December 24, 2010. LMDE was announced as an alternate edition of Linux Mint in first week of September 2010. A review of that release was focused on the installation program. This article presents a more detailed review of this distribution.
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Our recent article entitled Ubuntu As Intended drew in a fair amount of discussion about the base software and configuration in the default Ubuntu install. Some readers pointed out a few alternatives that aim to take the standard Ubuntu desktop and give it more polish than the original. Some of these projects just include a few extra packages, some replace the standard software suite, and others are complete makeovers. Today we aim to sift through a few of the more popular Ubuntu variants to find the best ones of the bunch, and see what they can offer.
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Phones
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Android
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In 2011, we might see half a billion phones sold worldwide. Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.
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Sub-notebooks
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Netbooks still matter in education, especially K12. They’re cheap (almost to the point of being disposable) and fit well into small hands. They can often last through a school day and generally give students lots of what they need with few of the bells and whistles they don’t. With all the talk of tablets, netbooks remain the easiest, cheapest way to get kids connected to the Internet and taking advantage of ubiquitous computer access at home and at school.
That being said, netbooks aren’t sexy or inspiring. Give the average teacher a choice between netbooks for his or her students and iPads all around and, chances are, the iPads are going to win out, even if the teacher can’t describe the relative merits of either platform. It’s not that the iPads are a bad idea for students, by the way. It’s simply that there are times when netbooks (or full-sized laptops, for that matter) will lend themselves better to classroom use than iPads. Like when a student needs to type. Or use a Flash application.
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Tablets
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Furthermore, the operating system of the Kno is Ubuntu Linux with a Webkit-based interface. This means that all apps for the Kno are written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
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Events
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SCALE 9x, the 9th Annual Southern California Linux, is now open for registration. SCALE is a community run Linux and open-source conference base in Los Angeles.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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During a mid-2010 meeting I had with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, he predicted open source combined with cloud computing would allow Red Hat to thrive within small businesses. Whitehurst certainly didn’t go out on a limb. Plenty of open source companies — everyone from Canonical to Zmanda — are making cloud computing moves. But will those moves pay dividends to VARs, managed services providers (MSPs) and other types of channel partners?
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Oracle
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The year 2010 has seen a number of enemies of open source software making waves. After thinking about it long and hard — about five minutes or so — I have determined the proper winner of the 2010 Open Source Enemies Prize, though some other contenders deserve a Dishonorable Mention.
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BSD
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After reading PC-BSD 8.2-BETA1 Available for Testing last week I decided to give the latest version of PC-BSD a try on my ESXi server. I failed earlier to get the installation to succeed using PC-BSD 8.1, but I had no real issues with the new BETA1 based on FreeBSD 8.2 PRERELEASE. (PC-BSD will publish their final 8.2 version when the main FreeBSD project publishes 8.2 RELEASE.)
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Update 12/23: It turns out Linux programmers aren’t the only ones who find the RealTek 8139 chips frustrating. While perusing the FreeBSD code for the 8139 driver, I found a comment at the top of a source file to the effect that the 8139 “brings new meaning to the term ‘low-end.’” Ouch.
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The first beta release of PC-BSD 8.2 is released, a user-friendly desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. The Version 8.2 contains a number of enhancements and improvements.
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Project Releases
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I was only recently made aware that GIMP 2.8, a.k.a. ‘the one with single window mode’, had strayed off course from its intended release date of December 26th this year.
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I’m pleased to announce the release of the Christmas Edition of FreeDiams 0.5.2.
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Standards/Consortia
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So how much time should you spend looking at existing standards? What would it be worth to you if there was a free specification that solved your problem, but was already designed, tested, was cleared of known patent clams, and which made your product more interoperable with other products? On the other hand, if you don’t look at existing standards, then what position does it put you in compared to a competitor who does implement an open standard?
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Health/Nutrition
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Recently, though, perhaps the most unconscionable act was the blatant obstructionism Republican Senators engaged in recently: they threatened to deny healthcare to 9/11 first responders who are now suffering illnesses resulting from toxic exposures at Ground Zero. Reflecting the party’s flawed moral character, every single Senate Republican followed through on their threat to block the bill until Democrats agreed to extend Bush-era tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The companies that build futuristic airport scanners take a more old-fashioned approach when it comes to pushing their business interests in Washington: hiring dozens of former lawmakers, congressional aides and federal employees as their lobbyists.
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Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges against the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other individuals over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks.
Johannes Tomana, the attorney general, said he would appoint a commission of five lawyers to examine whether recent disclosures in leaked US embassy cables amount to a breach of the constitution. A cable dated 24 December 2009 suggested Tsvangirai privately insisted sanctions “must be kept in place”.
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As an American – that is, someone considered lucky to get seven consecutive days off work – the only way I could possibly travel such distance is to fly. But flying includes the legal obligation I submit to having my genitalia groped by some TSA thug wearing the same latex gloves already shoved down nine dozen other strangers’ underwear. There’s only two ways an American flyer can reliably avoid this: be rich enough to buy your own plane, or a high-ranking congressman or other VIP exempt from the indignities they inflict upon ordinary citizens.
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Danny Fitzsimons, 29, from Middleton, Manchester, is charged with shooting dead another Briton, Paul McGuigan, and an Australian, Darren Hoare, in August 2009 and wounding an Iraqi guard while fleeing.
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Tunisia’s leader, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, has threatened a crackdown against violent protests over graduate unemployment following some of the country’s worst unrest in a decade.
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An independent West Bank journalist detained for five days by Palestinian security forces after broadcasting a news item relating to frictions within the ruling Fatah party has questioned the extent to which freedom of speech is permitted by the Palestinian Authority.
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On Friday, I was detained by Border Police officers in Nabi Saleh along with another Israeli. We were handcuffed behind our backs, thrown to the ground and beaten. The other Israeli was beaten much worse than I. His head was smashed against the ground and he was kicked repeatedly in the stomach. All of this happened in front ofa Palestinian Btselem photographer who captured the whole thing on video. After the beating, we were then detained and held in a Jerusalem prison for thirty hours. This story is only unique because it happened to Jews.
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Cablegate
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In the interview, Assange reportedly said that 2,000 websites are prepared to flood the Internet with information if it is deemed necessary. Right now, that information is under strong password protection.
Assange noted that the safeguard showed his group was acting responsibly.
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Finance
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Thanks to these spectacularly large taxpayer-funded bailouts, Goldman was able to continue “doing God’s Work” – as CEO Lloyd Blankfein infamously remarked – like the work of producing billion-dollar trading profits without ever suffering a single day of losses.
Thanks to the Fed’s massive, undisclosed assistance, Goldman Sachs managed to project an image of financial well-being, even while accessing tens of billions of dollars of direct assistance from the Federal Reserve.
By repaying its TARP loan, for example, Goldman wriggled out from under the nettlesome compensation limits imposed by TARP, while also conveying an image of financial strength. But this “strength” was illusory. Goldman repaid the TARP loans with funds it procured days earlier from the Federal Reserve. Then, over the ensuing months, Goldman recapitalized its balance sheet by selling tens of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities to the Fed.
And the public never knew anything about these activities until two weeks ago, when the Fed was forced to reveal them….
Secret bailouts do not merely benefit recipients; they also deceive investors into mistaking fantasy for fact. Such deceptions often punish honest investors, like the honest investors who sold short the shares of insolvent financial institutions early in 2009.
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If Goldman Sachs was insolvent in 2008 (and we know that they were borrowing massively from the Fed which suggests insolvency), then it should have been shut down rather than bailed out by the taxpayer. Goldman Sachs is right now pretending that recovery has occurred but the rules were gimmicked to the banks’ advantage so that mainly finance has recovered. In spite of the mortgage crisis, not a single arrest, indictment or conviction has been made!
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Shashidhar Mishra was always a curious man. Neighbours in the scruffy industrial town of Baroni, in the northern Indian state of Bihar, called him “kabri lal” or “the news man” because he was always so well informed.
Late every evening, the 35-year-old street hawker would sit down with his files and scribble notes. In February, the father of four was killed outside his home after a day’s work selling pens, sweets and snacks in Baroni’s bazaar.
The killing was swift and professional. The street lights went out, two men on motorbikes drew up and there were muffled shots. Mishra, an enthusiastic RTI activist, as those who systematically use India’s right to information law to uncover wrongdoing and official incompetence are known, became the latest in the country’s growing list of RTI martyrs.
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Human rights activists condemned the prison term, saying it was an unusually harsh punishment for a charge that usually results in a non-custodial sentence.
Pollak, 28, is one of the founders of a leftwing Israeli group called Anarchists against the Wall, which demonstrates with Palestinian activists in the occupied territories.
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Iran has arrested the family of a Kurdish student whose execution, scheduled to take place on Boxing Day, was delayed because of protests outside the prison in which he has been held for three years.
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State Department cables revealed to the Herald by WikiLeaks, show that senior police briefed the embassy about the investigation into Munir’s murder, which has dogged the country’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudiyono.
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Vladimir Putin said, earlier this month, that a thief must be in jail. After his president, Dmitry Medvedev, said no official had the right to comment before a verdict had been reached, Putin said he was referring to the first conviction of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, not the second, which took place yesterday. Even if we discount the flagrant breach of due process that Putin’s comment constituted – it is only one of a lengthy list – his words rang hollow. As everyone who lives there knows, thieves in Russia don’t exclusively belong in a jail. They belong in government. They are in and around the Kremlin. Every official, high and low, steals. Whether you end up in jail, in government or owning a chunk of Cyprus, London or Nice, stems ultimately from a political calculation. Get the politics right and you stay a very wealthy man, whether you have stolen assets or not.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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You can request legal access to ACTA related documents from the Council. Either documents are available through the register or for the confidential ones just fill out a form with your address and mention the requested document numbers. The Council will either enable public access to the documents and sent you a pdf or deny your request and state reasons for that or they sent you a crippled, a redacted version. If your request is refused you can file a confirmatory application and when that is denied again, you can go to court or complain at the EU ombudsman. In the case of ACTA the confidentiality at the Council was so rigid. Many first applications were rejected which is quite unusual.
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According to European Parliament sources, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has already been initialed. That would be amazing: normally the initialling of a trade agreement is a PR moment. Take for instance the EU – Korea free trade agreement: “EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton and Korean Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon have today initialled a free trade agreement (…) Speaking following the initialling in Brussels, Commissioner Ashton said (…)”. The initialling of a trade agreement signifies the closing of negotiations with a stable legal text. Negotiators sign with their initials.
Console Hacking 2010
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sure, unlike me, you’re probably not reading this on a Linux desktop–Mint 10 for those who care about such things–but do you use Google, Facebook or Twitter? If so, you’re using Linux. That Android phone in your pocket? Linux. DVRs, network attached storage (NAS), trade stocks? Linux, Linux, Linux.
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Cuba has set a strategic goal in 2011 to migrate most of its computers to open-source software, a move designed to strengthen the country’s technological security and sovereignty.
Once the migration is fully implemented on the ground, the Cuban Nova Linux will be the operating system used in 90 percent of all working places, and Microsoft Office will be replaced by Open Office in all government institutions, Vice Minister of Information and Telecommunications Boris Moreno told Xinhua Tuesday.
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I agree with him that “The Year of the Linux Desktop” is a myth that will never materialize (at least it won’t be called “Linux desktop”), but “niche OS” is a bunch of bologna. It ignores the fact that most of the world’s servers are run by this niche OS, but it also ignores the fact that people choose to use software for reasons other than how successful it is in a highly anticompetitive market. People use GNU/Linux not just because it’s easier to use, more featureful and more reliable than Microsoft Windows (if you disagree then you haven’t tried GNU/Linux lately), they use it because of the freedom it allows them. Everything else (ease-of-use, features, stability) just comes along for the ride. (not to mention that his argument about Google needing device drivers is BS, too; he obviously forgot what ChromeOS is supposed to do; I’ve never had trouble with keyboards and mice, as those are most of the time controlled by the BIOS; duh)
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Google
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The end of the year is always a great time to take a moment and look back at the developments of the past twelve months. Two members of the Google Open Source Programs Office, Chris DiBona and Jeremy Allison, sat down together for a review of open source accomplishments in 2010, and the conversation is shared with you here. Chris is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google, which means he directs Google’s open source compliance, releasing, and outreach efforts. He reveals lots of insights into Google’s approach towards open source and the influence of open source on technology and business.
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Kernel Space
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For those hoping Linux 2.6.37-rc7 was the last release candidate of the Linux 2.6.37 kernel before going gold, it’s not. Linus this evening decided to go ahead and make a Linux 2.6.37-rc8 release.
Linux 2.6.37-rc8 was tagged in Git two hours ago and we’ve been waiting for an official announcement but so far nothing has come down. Though unless there ends up being some severe last minute issues, it would be quite surprising if a Linux 2.6.37-rc9 emerges in the coming days.
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Another week, another -rc. This should be the last for the 37 series, so I still expect the merge window to open early January when people are hopefully back to working order after having eaten (and drunk) too much.
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Graphics Stack
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With VIA not really doing anything for open-source and Linux as all of their efforts seemed to have stalled, the small open-source development community centered around VIA has become quite fragmented as we have talked about multiple times now. There’s multiple X.Org drivers for VIA, with not a single one clearly dominating or being feature-complete and well maintained, while other areas like the DRM/KMS and Mesa/Gallium3D support are just in shambles.
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Earlier this month we reported that the X.Org multi-touch work was nearing completion and now this work is getting even more readied for X.Org Server 1.11 once its merge window opens in February. Daniel Stone has today put out a fourth version of these X patches that provide proper multi-touch support to Linux and other operating systems running X.Org.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Season of KDE (SoK) allows KDE to help support students and worthwhile projects who didn’t manage to get one of the limited places in the Google Summer of Code program. Each SoK student works on their chosen project with a mentor from KDE with experience in that area to help and guide them.
[...]
Please enjoy the gifts from KDE and Google commemorating your contributions. They will be sent to you soon.
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The plugin lets you perform all the actions required to get data sent to the various build services and publishing sites, by contacting the server part, which then distributes the information to the appropriate places. The implementation of this also prompted ammending the Attica library with new features. As some will already know, Attica is the full featured implementation of a OCS client library built by KDE which is now officially included in the MeeGo platform as well.
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GNOME Desktop
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Atolm is a new dark GTK theme created by SkiesOfAzel (who is also behind the very popular Orta GTK theme) in collaboration with MonkeyMagico who’s mockups were the inspiration for this new theme.
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Phones
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Android
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A skillful user has managed to run Android 2.3 Gingerbread on the Linux device Nokia. There are many Android smartphone that are not currently running Gingerbread, yet although the Nokia N900 got the latest version of Android. WiFi and the main hardware components are properly handled by the smartphone OS, although there is a still need of improvement.
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Martin is one of the core GIMP developers but this past spring after coming up with this release schedule he ended up becoming too busy with other work to contribute to GIMP on a daily basis, which left this free software project with less than three dedicated developers. That ended up being a significant setback for the GIMP project and has now pushed back the GIMP 2.8 release by at least a month or more.
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Web Browsers
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Openness/Sharing
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The software world has turned this process on its head, at least with respect to certain types of fundamental technology. Open source software has come to play a significant role in the infrastructure of the Internet and open source programs such as Linux, Apache and BIND are commonly used tools in the Internet and business systems. (for a good background article, see Kennedy, A Primer on Open Source Legal Issues.) Leading software companies with proprietary technology portfolios, such as IBM, Novell, and Oracle have learned to work with open source programs and even to profit from them. See Koenig, Open Source Business Strategies. Not to mention the successful enterprises founded with the goal of supporting, integrating and maintaining open source platforms (Red Hat, Progeny, 10X Software).
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Open Data
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Over the past few weeks people have been in touch with me about what happened in their city during the open data hackathon. I wanted to share some of their stories so that people can see the potential around the event.
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The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
[...]
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
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If we have learned anything about the Internet economy it is that it moves faster than most organisations ability to adapt. Our internal view at Briefing Media, is that the coming thing is curation. It is a topic that has been bubbling under for a year or two and has begun to be more mainstream in 2010, with a couple of conference events and some interesting online debate from many quarters on both sides of the Atlantic. The premise of curation (it is not aggregation), is that some kinds of content are more valuable and useful if they are organised and contextualised. The very essence of curation is that although technology plays a part, human editing is vital. That’s why we spend a lot of time improving our taxonomy, making it unique to our community needs.
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On Monday the 13th of December – two weeks before Christmas – I was sacked by a Google algorithm.
It sent an email to me and summarily killed my main source of income. No humans were involved in this process at all. It was, literally, the most inhumane letting go I have ever experienced.
As well as ‘letting me go’ the Google Algorithm also confiscated all my earned income October 31st to December 13th. Tough indeed – and no human has ever done that to me; they have always paid me for work done.
Then twio days before Christmas I got a letter from my bank saying that the check for October – worth £1,700 had been stopped.
That is £3,700 gone from my family fiancés in the two weeks before Chisitmas.
Welcome to the world of Google. Kafka would be proud of Google, whilst Orwell would be perfectly unsurprised.
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On December 16 Yahoo accidentally told the world they were shutting down popular bookmarking site Delicious. They fired most or all of the Delicious staff. Then they untold that story, saying they intended to sell it off and that the press got it all wrong.
Ok great. So how’s that sale process going?
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Americans don’t usually get fitness advice from Sarah Palin, but last week the mother of five lashed out at Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program to help curb childhood obesity by helping kids eat well and stay active.
“Take her anti-obesity thing that she is on. She is on this kick, right. What she is telling us is she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children, for their own families in what we should eat,” Palin said on Laura Ingraham’s national radio show.
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Asia
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Japan just poached the impoverished country’s top-level Internet domain, the so called Top Level Country Code (TLCC) dot SO (.so), at a time when the state of the embattled nation is at an all-time low.
“Governed” only for the sake of whitewashing the dealings of their UN-, US- and EU-masters by a Transitional Federal Government, which rules over two roads, a villa and the air-and seaport with he help of mercenary troops from US- and EU-paid African nations assembled in the African Union (AU), Somalia continues to be pillaged again and again by the UN, the U.S., the EU, the AU and other robber-baron-conglomerates. Under the oversight of a pseudo-governmental parliament, whose members were chain-selected by the UN, who is playing on the one hand the role of an overlord towards the Somalis and on the other the stir-up holder for the interests of the most powerful UN member states like U.S., France and the UK, the robbery continues even in cyberspace.
Japan – now closing shoulders with the U.S. in the emerging power-games with China and Russia – has a particular role and uses that window to fill their own pockets.
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China’s economic growth is inflicting more than a trillion yuan’s worth of damage on its environment each year, according to a government report that increases pressure on planners to slow the breakneck speed of development.
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Health/Nutrition
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The case for the end of the war on drugs has never been stronger than it is today. The Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs published a paper in The Lancet last month demonstrating the clear scientific evidence that stands to oppose UK government drugs policy. This follows a recent paper directly calling for an end to the “War on Drugs” in the British Medical Journal. Two former UK Government drugs tzars have now come out publicly in opposition to the war on drugs.
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A New Orleans law firm is challenging government assurances that Gulf Coast seafood is safe to eat in the wake of the BP oil spill, saying it poses “a significant danger to public health.”
It’s a high-stakes tug-of-war that will almost certainly end up in the courts, with two armies of scientists arguing over technical findings that could have real-world impact for seafood consumers and producers.
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Twitter
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Evan Williams and I have known each other for a long time. From a struggling entrepreneur who started Blogger, to a successful founder who got liberal funding for his podcasting start-up Odeo, to the accidental launch of Twitter — to me, he has been pretty much the same person. He prefers to stay out of the limelight, leaving (most if not all the media duties) to his co-founder Biz Stone. And even in crowds he is quiet.
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I’m getting a similar feeling after reading about Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s use of Twitter in response to the big blizzard that hit the northeast this past weekend. He’s been tweeting up a storm, as he travels around Newark helping to plow streets and dig out cars and help people in trouble. As you look down the thread, he’s specifically responding to different people calling out for help — either sending people to help or showing up himself, such as the case of the woman who was stuck in her home and needed diapers, which the mayor brought himself.
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Security
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A recent talk at the Chaos Communications Congress revealed how BitTorrent swarms can be exploited to take down large websites with relative ease. A vulnerability in the technology behind so called trackerless torrents makes it possible for someone to trick downloaders of popular files into send thousands of requests to a webserver of choice, taking it down as a result. Basically, this turns BitTorrent into a very effective DDoS tool.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Beacon Herald kicks off a series of year-end interviews with local political leaders with Perth- Wellington MP Gary Schellenberger. Wednesday, Perth-Wellington MPP and provincial Environment Minister John Wilkinson.
Perth-Wellington’s MP is backing the government all the way on its controversial pension reform plan and on its stand that spending close to $1 billion on security for a weekend G20 summit in Toronto was justified.
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One of the most frustrating and bizarre Freedom of Information request standoffs could be about to come to an end after the Government said more data about speed cameras must be released.
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Police have asked the government for a new counter-terrorism power to stop and search people without having to suspect them of involvement in crime, the Guardian has learned.
Senior officers have told the government the new law is needed to better protect the public against attempted attacks on large numbers of people, and are hopeful they can win ministers’ backing.
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As night fell, and the House of Commons moved towards its vote on tripling student fees, the police in full riot gear closed in on the protestors in Parliament Square on 10 December. They began to corral them towards Westminster Bridge having formed a ‘kettle’ to contain them. They then trapped them onto the bridge which the demonstrators thought was being used as an exit – and a long cold walk – away from Whitehall. Once they had captured them there the police were ordered to squeeze the ‘kettle’ and crush the demonstrators so that they could barely breathe. This was indeed an operation of gross police brutality.
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The eminent minds at TSA saw fit to confiscate an armed soldier’s nail clippers because he might use them to take over the plane. At this point I would like to point out that he was not armed with nail clippers, he was armed with an assault rifle – which was apparently acceptable because it didn’t have bullets.
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Cablegate
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I’m really concerned with the public complacency about the recent blocking of donations to Wikileaks by the biggest bank in the US: Bank of America, one of the leading credit card companies: Mastercard and the largest online payment provider: PayPal.
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The FBI has reportedly raided a Texas web host and worked with international authorities to search servers in pursuit of the anonymous leaders of the group Anonymous, who blocked the website of PayPal earlier this month in retribution to the company’s decision to stop its customers from making donations to Wikileaks. That according to an affidavit posted in part by the legal watchdog website The Smoking Gun today.
“These coordinated attacks, investigators allege,” writes The Smoking Gun, “amount to felony violations of a federal law covering the ‘unauthorized and knowing transmission of code or commands resulting in intentional damage to a protected computer system.’” How several hours of inaccessibility constituted damage to the system was not described in the part of the affidavit posted online.
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Although the theory that Israel orchestrated the WikiLeaks’ affair is circulating on a relatively small number of Web sites, it has gained traction with those catering to the far right and the left, as well as on some Arab and Islamic sites, and others dedicated to spreading “anti-Zionist” messages like Islam Times and Hezbollah’s Al-Manar Web site.
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On Thursday, Julian Assange told reporters that WikiLeaks would be releasing State Department cables concerning the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, and he has made good on the promise with a couple of short dispatches from the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi. They don’t offer any more insight into the still-unsolved killing, but they do paint a picture of the diplomatic conundrum the incident posed for the United Emirates and the United States.
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Four days later, Poulsen and Zetter published a new article on Manning, as well as an incomplete transcript of Lamo and Manning’s chats, which had begun on May 21 and continued for a few days. “The excerpts represent about 25 percent of the logs,” they wrote. “Portions of the chats that discuss deeply personal information about Manning or that reveal apparently sensitive military information are not included.”
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Armchair critics, apparently unhappy that Manning was arrested, have eagerly second-guessed our motives, dreamed up imaginary conflicts and pounded the table for more information: Why would Manning open himself up to a complete stranger and discuss alleged crimes that could send him to prison for decades? How is it possible that Wired.com just happened to have a connection with the one random individual Manning picked out to confide in, only to send him down for it?
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…Wired, with no justification, continues to conceal this evidence and, worse, refuses even to comment on its content, thus blinding journalists and others trying to find out what really happened here, while enabling gross distortions of the truth by Poulsen’s long-time confidant and source, the government informant Adrian Lamo.
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The Washington Post also received yet another version of these mysteriously never-quite-identical logs. But no-one cares about that, because discussing journalism with the Washington Post would be like discussing metaphysics with a melting knob of butter.
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I’ve now gone through just about everything I can find of various accounts of what transpired between Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo, Wired and the federal government. (A data base of all the relevant media can be found here.)
And having reviewed all the material, I cannot tell you how implausible I find the cover story to be (Wired 6/6/2010, CJR 6/18 2010). Furthermore, I cannot believe that anyone of any journalistic standing has not seriously questioned it before going into print using Lamo as a source.
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HaikuLeaks searches through the Wikileaks “Cablegate” data for haikus. I’m not sure if it’s fully automated, or human-generated—seems too perfect to be computerized. Either way, genius.
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It appears obvious that the Espionage Act is unconstitutional because it does exactly what the Constitution prohibits. It is, in other words, an effort to make an end run around the Treason Clause of the Constitution. Not surprisingly, however, as we’ve seen in times of political stress, the Supreme Court upheld its validity in a 5-4 decision. Although later decisions seemed to criticize and limit its scope, the Espionage Act of 1917 has never been declared unconstitutional. To this day, with a few notable exceptions that include my parents’ case, it has been a dormant sword of Damocles, awaiting the right political moment and an authoritarian Supreme Court to spring to life and slash at dissenters.
It is no accident that Julian Assange may face a “conspiracy” charge just as my parents did. All that is required of the prosecution to prove a conspiracy is to present evidence that two or more people got together and took one act in furtherance of an illegal plan. It could be a phone call or a conversation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, incoming energy chair Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) joined Americans For Prosperity (AFP) president Tim Phillips — a global warming denier who pushes the dumbest denier myth — to support the lawsuits by global warming polluters against climate rules. One of the companies leading the charge against the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding is Koch Industries, the private pollution giant whose billionaire owners have been directing the Tea Party movement through its AFP front group.
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Recent attention to NASA’s announcement of ‘arsenic-based life’ has provided a very public window into how science and scientists operate. Debate surrounds the announcement of any controversial scientific finding. In the case of arseno-DNA, the discussion that is playing out on the blogs is very similar to the process that usually plays out in conferences and seminars. This discussion is a core process by which science works.
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Finance
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Among the first announcements President Barack Obama will make upon returning from his Hawaiian Vacation is his choice for top economic adviser, a decision that could si
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Actually, many American companies are – just maybe not in your town. They’re hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.
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The Obama administration has begun monitoring the high-level board meetings of nearly 20 banks that received emergency taxpayer assistance but repeatedly failed to pay the required dividends, according to Treasury Department officials and documents. And it may soon install new directors on some of their boards.
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Holiday spending surged this year, but Americans still have their doubts about the economy.
With unemployment high and home prices falling in the nation’s largest cities, consumer confidence took an unexpected turn for the worse in December.
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Leaders of this city met for more than seven hours on a Saturday not long ago, searching for something to cut from a budget that has already been cut, over and over.
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On the mental list of slights and outrages that just about every major figure on Wall Street is believed to keep on President Barack Obama, add this one: When he met recently with a group of CEOs at Blair House, there was no representative from any of the six biggest banks in America.
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Shoppers spent more money this holiday season than even before the recession, according to preliminary retail data released on Monday.
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As the Federal Reserve debates whether to scale back, continue or expand its $600 billion effort to nurse the economic recovery, four men will have a newly prominent role in influencing the central bank’s path.
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Through a combination of procrastination and bad timing, many baby boomers are facing a personal finance disaster just as they’re hoping to retire. Starting in January, more than 10,000 baby boomers a day will turn 65, a pattern that will continue for the next 19 years.
The boomers, who in their youth revolutionized everything from music to race relations, are set to redefine retirement. But a generation that made its mark in the tumultuous 1960s now faces a crisis as it hits its own mid-60s.
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The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently issued a circular declaring that VOIP services other than those offered by State-owned giants China Telecom and China Unicom are illegal.
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There are very few times we see someone who supports restricting copyright laws that are so direct, but Alejandro Sanz probably should win an award for most direct and honest opinion (and maybe rather asinine as well) of those who don’t agree with his point of view on matters. Still, it appears to be quite a good indicator of just how tense the debate over Spanish web censorship has become. Maybe the defeat of the web censorship bill has only served to infuriate foreign interests as well as those who side with them.
The Sinde Law, a law that would allow the Spanish government to censor any website they deem to contain pirated material, was defeated in a government vote shortly after Wikileaks revealed that such laws were brought forth due to, what some would argue, foreign (US) interference. In spite of the law being defeated once it was brought to a vote, the minister responsible for the law vowed to pass the law anyway, regardless of any difficulty she may have passing it after it was defeated once already.
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The point I wish to make is simple. We do not have to agree with Binayak Sen, anymore than we have to agree with Mahaswta Devi or Arundhati Roy or Baba Amte. But these have been voices of conscience. These are people who have care and healed, given a voice to the voiceless. They represent the essential goodness of our society. They are Indians and outstanding Indians and no nation state can negate that. I admit that such people are not easy people. They irritate, they agonize over things we take for granted or ignore. They take the ethical to the very core of our lives. Let us be clear. It is not Sen’s ideology that threatens us. It is his ethics, his sense of goodness. We have arrested him because we have arrested that very sense of justice in ourselves.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Though there was an interesting tortious interference decision in the appeal, I’m going to focus on the two copyright issues that were decided by the Ninth Circuit, one involving a claim that users of MDY’s Glider program breached World of Warcraft (WoW)’s software license and the other claiming that users of MDY’s Glider program violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s prohibitions on circumventing technological protection measures that limit access to copyrighted works. This second claim focused on the operation of Blizzard’s Warden program, which monitors a player’s computer to see if it is running any unauthorized software.
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We’re watching this one closely, as it may set important precedent for political fair use. And the Chamber of Commerce continue to pursue their trumped-up trademark claims against the Yes Men, in retaliation for a Fall 2009 press conference in which the activists put out a press release and held a spoof news conference on Monday, claiming that the Chamber of Commerce had reversed its position and would stop lobbying against a climate bill currently in the Senate. We’re looking forward to a court decision affirming the legality of the Yes Men’s actions in early 2011.
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it unlawful to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected by copyright, and to traffic in devices designed to accomplish that end.
In last month’s IP Update, we expressed wonderment at the reasoning of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in MGE UPS Systems Inc. v. GE Consumer and Industrial Inc. In that case, the court was unable to find a violation of the DMCA where software had been modified without authorization so that it would not check for the presence of an external hardware device that the software vendor distributed only to authorized users of the software.
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If you’ve been to a gym lately, you’ve probably seen how “spinning” classes have become quite popular these days. When I first heard of them, I couldn’t figure out why they called them “spinning,” rather than just “stationary bike” classes, but now I know: apparently “spinning” is a trademarked term, held by a company called Mad Dogg Athletics, and the company is gaining a reputation for trying to enforce that trademark around the globe. If you look at the USPTO, the company appears to have a ton of different trademarks on “spinning,” covering not just exercise classes, but also sports drinks, lotions and creams, nutritional supplements and computer software. It looks like the original spinning trademark was filed for back in 1992 — so it’s entirely possible that this company really did come up with the term and popularize it.
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Copyrights
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A new study by a German economic historian hints at an answer. In his two-volume History and Nature of Copyright, Eckhard Höffner compares and contrasts the industrial-age economic histories of Britain (which provided copyright protection beginning with the 1710 Statute of Anne) and the 39 German states (where a uniform copyright code was impossible to enforce across a loose federation).
Höffner’s discovery: German writers produced more books and made more money than their English counterparts. Through the middle of the 19th century, the German book market produced and sold roughly five times as many books as the British. The advantage was interrupted only by the Napoleonic occupation, and it did not end permanently until after 1848, when Germany began to enforce consistent copyright rules.
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A group representing German musicians found itself accused of Scrooge-like meanness on Tuesday after pressing kindergartens to pay up for singing songs that are protected by copyright.
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A tightening of copyright rules means kindergartens now have to pay fees to Germany’s music licensing agency, GEMA, to use songs that they reproduce and perform. The organization has begun notifying creches and other daycare facilities that if they reproduce music to be sung or performed, they must pay for a license.
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Hadopi, the French authority with responsibility for issuing warnings to illicit file-sharers, has just announced that so far it has sent out 100,000 email warnings. While the figure is far below the 50-70,000 reports filed by the entertainment industry every day, around 15% of warning recipients have responded by email, some with confessions, some with confusion.
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FilmOn founder Alki David charges CNET, a subsidiary of CBS, with the distribution of “illegal software” that allows users to circumvent DRM technology in violation of the Copyright Act as well as other software that lets users illegally stream and download copyrighted material. Countersuit is in response to claims by CBS and other TV broadcasters that FilmOn illegally retransmits copyrighted programming.
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The Southern District of New York issued an order denying AFP’s request to dismiss photographer Daniel Morel’s copyright claims, rejecting AFP’s argument that uploading pictures to Twitter/Twitpic granted third parties (including AFP) a broad license to exploit this content. The result is not surprising from a legal standpoint, but should allow photographers (and others who upload content into Twitter’s ecosystem) to breathe a sigh of relief.
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And this is where I think some of the confusion often comes in in these discussions. No one (well, I’m sure there are a few, but they’re a minority) denies that there is value in the works created. The question is where is that value captured. Many content creators feel that it should be captured in you paying up before you’ve consumed their work for the first time. Many content consumers don’t like that bargain. And so they seek out something else. But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t value created when someone experiences the music or the film. It’s that value that Barnard was discussing in the emotional impact of the work. The trick then is not to worry about getting paid for every copy or every download, but to set up all sorts of opportunities for people to support you as a content creator. Now, this can come in all sorts of formats. Fan-funding has become popular these days, via platforms like Kickstarter, and that can work for some artists. Others are doing creative things like selling related tangible goods that are made more valuable due to their connection to music or movies (Amanda Palmer selling off special ukuleles). Others are selling their experience (Kevin Smith is offering a wonderful 10-week “film school” discussing how he made his latest film). Others are selling a wide variety of things (Nina Paley’s long list of ways in which she makes money from her film, Sita Sings the Blues).
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ACTA
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The Commission is the guardian of the Treaties and oversees the respect for fundamental rights. It needs to have a position on the matter.
Chris DiBona interviewed by Jeremy Allison – PART 1
Chris DiBona interviewed by Jeremy Allison – PART 2
Chris DiBona interviewed by Jeremy Allison – PART 3
Chris DiBona interviewed by Jeremy Allison – PART 4
Chris DiBona interviewed by Jeremy Allison – PART 5
Credit: TinyOgg
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