Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

10.05.10

Links 5/10/2010: Marvell Gives OLPC $5.6 Million

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Some Statistics about My Linux Box

    So, in conclusion I must say I am very satisfied with my migration. It was much less painful than I expected and much more rewarding, too. Of course, there’s still a lot to learn, but I’m going one step at a time.

  • Warning Themes – Interesting Concept to Make “Being Root Scary” for Newbie Linux Users
  • Linux Gazette October 2010 (#179)

    # Mailbag
    # 2-Cent Tips
    # Talkback
    # News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
    # Henry’s Techno-Musings: User Interfaces, by Henry Grebler
    # Away Mission – PayPal Innovate, by Howard Dyckoff
    # A Nightmare on Tape Drive, by Henry Grebler
    # Making Your Network Transparent, by Ben Okopnik

    [...]

  • 5 Operating Systems Making Big Waves This Week

    Fedora 14 “Laughlin” beta was released last week, introducing Red Hat’s SPICE virtual desktop infrastructure, ipmiutil — which adds features including Serial-over-LAN and identity LED management, and a preview of systemd, a replacement for SysVinit that acts as a system and session manager and that will ultimately allow faster boot times.

  • LPI and My First International Proctoring “Job”

    One of the contributions that I have lent to LPI, and of which I am very proud, is the constant drum beat about making LPI multinational. From the very beginning I remember talking about the issues in various countries around the world in terms of language, costs of certification and ease of finding and taking the tests.

    As in other interactions with LPI, I acknowledge that others also spoke and were concerned about these issues, but for me they were the heart-blood. Either LPI was going to be an international organization with an international certification, or it would be ineffective for the needs of Linux and FOSS.

    [...]

    I had been to Brazil before 2002, and even before 1999. Two years after I had met Linus Torvalds and a few months after Red Hat Software’s Alpha Linux distribution was first distributed, I was flown to Sao Paulo in 1996 to speak at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), and saw my first Beowulf high-performance computing system running Linux at that university. USP had 160 PCs hooked together to do real-time computer graphics of “Toy Story” quality. While others were using Beowulf clusters to render animation frames over time, USP was doing it in real time. USP was also using their Beowulf to shorten the time needed to analyze a mammogram for cancer from close to a day to a few minutes. And finally they were using Linux to help manage remote Windows systems. “When the windows systems do not boot we tell the user to boot Linux, then we FTP a new copy of Windows onto their system. Is this a legitimate use of Linux?” asked the school’s president. I told him that every use of Linux was a legitimate use of Linux.

  • Desktop

Free Software/Open Source

  • Subsonic – OpenSource Web Based Media Streamer for Windows, Mac and Linux

    Subsonic is a free, opensource, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Listen to your favorite music where ever you are and you can even share your songs with friends and family usnig Subsonic online media streaming service.

  • ★ Rehost And Carry On

    The community around OpenESB is actually fairly active, and they (or, as it includes ForgeRock where I now work, perhaps I should say “we”) want OpenESB to stay around. But what do you do if the project is hosted somewhere under the control of a disinterested party? There’s no huge crime or disagreement to “justify” a fork, but on the other hand any new plans really will need the source and the community presence hosted in a way that allows the interested parties can change and improve things without having to wait for weeks to get replies to requests and risk having them declined if they are deemed inconvenient.

  • An open source of inspiration

    “The creative lot at agencies have a different lifestyle and attitude. They used to come into the office at 5 pm and start their work. I could not digest that but I learned quite a bit from that experience.” That was the time IBM was looking for talent from outside the IT framework. The Big Blue was scouting for personnel from varied backdrops. “I felt like giving it a shot and I did. I got selected and was made to undergo training for three months. I distinctly remember me wanting to drop out that training. Something inside me told me that this was not my scene. A lot of jargon was thrown at me and I felt I was not able to comprehend them. The I remembered my advertising days. Advertising has a few jargons and I could master them with time. So I decided to stay back and complete the training.”

    The training did wonders to him as a professional and he realised the importance of working in an organised, process oriented environment. “The 10 years at IBM were great. It taught me everything. I found the work place challenging my abilities everyday. It is at IBM that he developed the reputation of a business leader with demonstrated ability to tackle tough business and management challenges. People around Sandeep say that he has an innate ability to inspire people, and lead through vision and logic.

    At IBM, he transformed an ailing Unix business, while aiding the development of the Linux market across Asean markets, and led significant business transformation for IBM…

  • 10 great free desktop productivity tools that aren’t OpenOffice.org

    But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts.

  • Simon Phipps unbound

    After 10 years at Sun, half of them as the company’s chief voice on open source, he was one of the first out the door when Oracle’s tentacles closed in. This has liberated him to say what he feels, rather than just what he is allowed to say. It has given him the fire of a good Baptist preacher.

  • Contributing to an open source project

    You don’t have to be a software developer to contribute to an open source project – there are all sorts of ways you can get involved, whether you are experienced or a newcomer, technically minded or otherwise inclined.

  • October Project of the Month: jEdit

    When it comes to open source text editors, it’s hard to find a programmer who hasn’t heard of jEdit. Under development for more than 10 years, it’s a perennial favorite of developers, writers, bloggers, and casual users alike. As Project Leader Björn “Vampire” Kautler succinctly puts it, “It is simply is the best text editor out there, that can be easily customized and extended to eternity and is cross-platform. It supports syntax highlighting of over 200 languages.”

  • Events

    • #possesa – day 2 – patching, translating, concentration

      So what did we do? I kicked off the day with explaining the galaxy that is Open Source and Free Software. the multitude of projects, the different governance models, how to find out about maturity and sustainability. I showed gource in action -. I love the visualization of open source projects over time that it generates.

      We then went to our first round of checkount – build – modify – commit using git, which was fun and rewarding. People could actually learn how stuff works with immediate results.

    • Web Browsers

      • Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples

        Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples
        Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.

      • Internet Explorer Falls Below 50% Global Market Share. Chrome on the rise

        In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. While in North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

  • SaaS

    • ABC “Unofficially” Partners with Twitter-Alternative StatusNet

      ABC News Radio and StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, have “unofficially” partnered to unveil a newswire for the radio service.

      While the partnership may not be “official”, it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.

      According to Dan Patterson, the digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, the partnership is not yet official because the two companies haven’t done the “lawyerly dance”, among other things. In his explanation of why ABC chose to work with StatusNet, Patterson writes a mini-treatise for an open, distributed Internet.

  • Oracle/OOo/Java

    • Oracle ready to go solo with OpenOffice
    • The future of OpenOffice.org
    • Your Office is Saved — OpenOffice.org Forked!
    • OpenOffice is dead, long live LibreOffice

      So excuse the headline on this blog, but OpenOffice is not dead per se. It will continue to live out its existence breathing in the air on planet Oracle. The suite itself is mature, stable and works cross-platform, so there should be no major reason to worry about its future growth and well-being.

    • The OpenOffice fork is officially here

      It’s not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn’t going to be having anything to do with it.

      When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu.

    • Google asks court to dismiss Oracle’s Android lawsuit
    • Java: The Unipolar Moment
    • Mixed reactions from attendees about JavaOne

      JavaOne seemed to be near extinction last year, but Oracle’s acquisition of Sun revived it. We talked with some notable attendees to see how the conference went.

    • ☆ New ventures: OpenDJ, FossAlliance

      If it sounds familiar, it may be becuase it is based on the OpenDS project Sun used to work on. My old colleague Ludovic Poitou has joined ForgeRock to look after it for us, and I am keen to see a co-developer community grow around it in addition to the substantial deployer community that is now free to migrate from OpenDS to OpenDJ. There’s plenty more about it in the press release and FAQ.

    • ZFS gains data encryption

      Seven years after developers started working on ZFS, crypto functions have been added to the file system. The functions will probably be part of the forthcoming Solaris Express 2010. While no implementation details are available so far, a blog post talks about “support for encrypted ZFS datasets,” which points towards an encryption of the entire file system. The ZFS crypto project’s web site lists targets such as a per-dataset policy for enabling algorithms and key lengths as well as an encrypted swap area.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The black perl -Sabayon 5.4 is released! Screenshot Tour

      As can be seen in today’s announcement, today is my first day as full-time Executive Director at the Software Freedom Conservancy. For four years, I have worked part-time on nights, weekends, and lunch times to keep Conservancy running and to implement and administer the services that Conservancy provides to its member projects. It’s actual quite a relief to now have full-time attention available to carry out this important work.

    • GNU Telephony Statement on new Internet Surveillance Laws

      Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.

      Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Author Don Tapscott on the growing influence of public participation

      Watching television at his Boston home in January this year, Patrick Meier, a director of the crowdsourcing internet platform Ushahidi saw early reports that a devastating earthquake had caused massive damage to Haiti. Within 40 minutes, he was working with a colleague to set up a dedicated Haiti-focused website, and in less than an hour the site was gathering intelligence from people on the ground.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Despite Rumors, MIT OpenCourseWare Insists “No Paywall”

        With both private and public schools facing budget issues in tough economic times, it’s no surprise perhaps to hear a university employee say that the school is re-evaluating distance learning opportunities. But when an MIT employee made a statement to that effect at the OECD’s Institutional Management in Higher Education earlier last month, some media outlets erroneously reported it as an indication that MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was considering implementing a paywall.

  • Programming

    • JQuery set to tackle mobile Web development

      Countless developers use jQuery software tools today to provide advanced Web sites and to ease the difficulties of spanning multiple browsers.

      Starting in about two weeks, though, they will start being able to extend their reach to the fast-growing world of the mobile Web as well. That’s when Mozilla plans to release the alpha version of jQuery Mobile, jQuery founder John Resig told attendees of the Future of Web Apps conference here Tuesday.

Leftovers

  • JPEGs with Alpha Channels?!?

    I wanted a reasonably sized photographic image with a 24-bit alpha channel. So I used a JPEG for what JPEGs are good for and a PNG for what PNGs are good for…

    I combined them using an HTML5 canvas element and then inserted into the DOM. The results look the same as using a normal 24-bit PNG but are one-half to one-sixth the size. In one case we got a 573KB 24-bit PNG down to a 49KB JPEG with a 4KB PNG alpha-mask!

  • The real cost of free

    Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (including me) “charge hefty fees to speak at events”.

    Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called “Free” (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall’s view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don’t practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.

    It’s unfortunate that Lindvall didn’t bother to check her facts. I haven’t been represented by the agency she referenced for several years, and in any event, no one has ever paid me $25,000 to appear at any event. Indeed, the vast majority of lectures I give are free (see here for the past six months’ talks and their associated fees – out of approximately 95 talks I’ve given in the past six months, only 11 were paid, and the highest paid of those was £300). Furthermore, I don’t use an agency for the majority of my bookings (mostly I book myself – I’ve only had one agency booking in the past two years). I’m not sure who the unfortunate conference organiser Lindvall spoke to was – Lindvall has not identified her source – but I’m astonished that this person managed to dig up the old agency, since it’s not in the first 400 Google results for “Cory Doctorow”.

  • 911: Can you hear me now?
  • Cell Phone Service Coming to NYC Subway Stations by End of 2011

    Looks like NYC subway stations are getting cell phone service earlier than expected: Six stations—Along 14th St., and at 23rd St. and 8th Ave.—should be wired by the end of 2011. It will be both convenient and annoying.

  • Google Apps Now In A New York State Of Mind

    Google sees the adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges as vital to the growth of the productivity suite; an outlook that Microsoft also seems to emulate as well. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps and other productivity suites, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, New York is the fifth U.S. state to adopt “Google Apps,” joining Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, and Maryland.

  • Science

    • Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF

      The 2010 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine goes to British researcher Robert Edwards for pioneering in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a process that has led to roughly 4 million births since it was first successfully done in 1978.

    • Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

      A pair of new studies — one in the United States, another in Germany — reports strong evidence that diabetes rates climb with increasing air pollution in the form of of tiny airborne particles.

      “Although previous studies had hinted at this possibility, the data were mostly from small studies or from animals exposed to high levels of particulate matter,” notes Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who did not take part in either study. He says the new data provide important and more rigorous evidence that real-world pollution may be tampering with blood sugar control in a large and growing number of people.

    • Breaking the noise barrier: Enter the phonon computer

      In 2001, Pat Gelsinger, then the chief technology officer of Intel, made a striking prediction about the future of microchips. If current design trends continue, he said, microchips will be running at 30 gigahertz by the end of the decade. However, he added, at this speed they will be generating more heat per cubic centimetre than a nuclear reactor.

      Sure enough, by 2003, Intel and other chip-makers had found that their plans for faster processors were running into trouble. For a chip to speed up, its transistors need to be shrunk, but smaller transistors must consume less power or they overheat. With chip-makers unable to keep to the reduced heat budget, the race for faster chips hit a wall (see diagram).

    • Meet RatCar, a Japanese Robot Car Controlled By a Rat’s Brain

      Robots are a major part of the cultural fabric of Japan; they’re performing weddings, buying groceries and keeping people company. A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo is taking this robotic cultural immersion a step further — they’re making animal-robot hybrids. Sort of.

      RatCar is a brain-machine interface that uses a rat’s brain signals to control a motorized robot. The rat hangs in the air, and the robot does what the rat’s limbs would do. It’s far from the only brain-robot locomotion contraption, but it’s arguably one of the strangest.

    • Nobel Honors Work on Ultra-Thin Carbon Film

      Two Russian-born scientists working in Britain won the prize for investigating the strange properties of graphene, a form of carbon one atom thick.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Hull man guilty of snooping on hundreds of medical records

      A Hull man has been given a suspended sentence for looking at hundreds of women’s medical records.

      Dale Trever, 22, was working for Hull Primary Care Trust as a “care data quality facilitator” when he accessed medical records of 413 female patients. The court was told he accessed records 597 times.

      He started his snooping when a female work colleague turned him down for a date, the East Riding Mail reports.

    • France arrests nine in anti-terror raids

      A French official told AFP that police had seized weapons “including a Kalashnikov (rifle) and a pump-action shotgun, as well as ammunition” in Tuesday’s raids.

    • Even Mahatma Gandhi was against ID cards

      About a century ago, Gandhiji started the world famous ‘Satyagraha’ in order to oppose the identification scheme of the government in South Africa. Hundred years later, India is repeating a similar programme under the pretext of unique ID numbers

      As the old saying goes, ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’. It seems that both the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and ultimately the Indian government have overlooked history and even the Mahatma’s views while going ahead with the ambitious and expensive unique identification number (UIDN) programme.

    • The perils of ‘Aadhaar’

      An elaborate charade has begun with the rolling out of the first Aadhaar unique identity (UID) numbers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi in a tribal district of Maharashtra. The 12-digit number for each citizen is supposed to achieve pilferage-free delivery of services to the underprivileged.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Cuccinelli attempts to criminalize all of climate science — with Post Normal logic & fervor

      The Tea-Party crowd, the hardcore anti-science extremists, can’t stomach the scientific reality that mutiple independent studies back Mann’s core finding Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause. And so Cuccinelli goes after Mann and the University of Virginia once again. His new case is infinitely weaker but his fervor has reached OCD levels.

    • [stop climate change]

      It’s called the “10/10/10 Global Work Party.” The goal of the day is to send a message to our political leaders: If we can get to work, you can get to work too — on the legislation and the treaties that will protect this planet for our children and grandchildren.

    • One in five plant species face extinction

      One in five of the world’s plant species – the basis of all life on earth – are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study published today.

      At first glance, the 20% figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.

    • Oil: Can Ecuador see past the black stuff?

      One of the most extraordinary people I have met in 10 days of travelling around Peru and Ecuador has been Alberto Acosta. He’s head of Ecuador’s leading research group now, but until 2007 was the second most powerful man in the country after the president, Rafael Correa. He was not only charged with masterminding the new constitution but was head of the assembly, or parliament, a founder of the ruling political party and minister of energy of the country that depends on oil.

      But Acosta will go down in my memory as the world’s only serving oil minister to have ever proposed leaving some of a country’s black stuff in the ground. That’s like Dracula renouncing blood, or a sports minister saying it’s better to play hide and seek than football. It just does not happen.

    • Greenpeace banned from intercepting oil-drilling ship

      Greenpeace has been banned from intercepting a deep sea oil-drilling ship after the protest group sent “wave after wave” of swimmers into the north Atlantic to stop the vessel from reaching its drilling site.

      The US oil giant Chevron was granted a wide-ranging interdict, or injunction, by judges in Edinburgh today, ordering Greenpeace to stop any further direct action preventing the Stena Carron from reaching its destination or impeding its “lawful business”.

    • Modern-day slavery: horrific conditions on board ships catching fish for Europe

      When environmental campaigners began tracking a hi-tech South Korean trawler off the coast of West Africa, they were looking for proof of illegal fishing of dwindling African stocks. What they uncovered was an altogether different kind of travesty: human degradation so extreme it echoed the slavery they thought had been abolished more than a century ago.

      “It was horrendous,” said Duncan Copeland, a senior campaigner at the Environmental Justice Foundation, who boarded the South Korean-flagged trawler at the end of 2008 with naval forces from Sierra Leone.

    • Prop 23 battle heats up in California as Schwarzenegger comes out fighting

      California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has come out fighting for his green legacy, going on the attack against the oil companies and rightwing groups bankrolling a campaign to suspend AB32, a landmark environmental law.

  • Finance

    • Fear and Favor

      I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

      Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

      And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

    • How Fake Money Saved Brazil

      This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked.

      Twenty years ago, Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, if eggs cost $1 one day, they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost $1,000.

    • Do You Understand Taxation?

      California, if you didn’t know, has one of the highest tax rates in the nation. On top of federal rates that can reach 39% of each additional dollar, California takes up to 11% of each additional dollar. This means that top earners pay half of their marginal income (the part above a certain amount) in income taxes. At 50% of each additional dollar going to taxes, it is no wonder that people devote such tremendous effort to tax avoidance schemes. To do anything else wouldn’t be sensible.

    • Anglo Irish bank bailout to hit €30bn

      The full cost of the 2008 banking crisis in Ireland will be laid bare tomorrow when the republic’s government is expected to admit that bailing out Anglo Irish Bank will cost at least €30bn (£25.9bn) – equivalent to a fifth of the country’s national output.

    • Foreclosure funny business

      Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.

      That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.

    • Money transfers could face anti-terrorism scrutiny

      The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • DRM and us

      Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.

    • ISPs begin fighting IP lookup requests in wake of data leak

      UK Internet providers have now banded together to challenge anti-P2P law firms who try to turn thousands of IP addresses into customer names—and a London court will hear their objections to the entire process.

      The ISPs were burned last month when a massive e-mail leak from the top anti-P2P firm in the UK, ACS Law, exposed their own spreadsheets of customer names matched to the pornographic films they allegedly downloaded. The revelation of this embarrassing (and unproven) behavior was compounded by the fact that several of the ISPs were taking no security precautions, instead e-mailing their Excel spreadsheets unencrypted and without passwords.

    • BSkyB to challenge requests for customer information from ACS:Law

      BSkyB, one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors’ firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.

    • Should ISPs cut off bot-infected users?

      Contractually, the ISP would be reasonably justified in cutting off a user from the internet, as bot infection would be contrary to the terms of the ISP’s acceptable-use policy.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • BT seeks moratorium on internet piracy cases

      BT is seeking a moratorium on legal applications to obtain details of its customers who are alleged to have illegally shared files online.

      The firm outlined its stance following a high-profile data breach at London law firm ACS:Law last week.

      The leak saw thousands of customers’ details from various ISPs – including BT-owned PlusNet – published online.

    • ISPs set to fight future IP data disclosure in the UK

      On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO, named after the case in which it was first established). This order allows a potential claimant to ask for a third party to disclose the identity of an unidentified defendant.

    • UK ISPs Successfully Resist File-Sharing Data Handover

      In the High Court today, UK ISPs BT and Plusnet refused to hand over subscriber data to lawyers acting for independent record label, Ministry of Sound. Their objections followed the catastrophic subscriber data leak from ACS:Law two weeks ago. The hearing was adjourned until January 2011.

    • Copyrights

      • Find and Reuse Images: Painless Attribution

        Finding CC licensed images and using them properly is something many people seem to struggle with: finding them can be straight-forward, but many sites don’t provide copy and paste reuse code that complies with the license. Xpert, a project of University of Nottingham, has launched an image search tool that helps with this. Xpert Attribution tool searches Wikimedia Commons and Flickr and provides an easy way to get the image with the attribution information overlaid, or (even better, in my opinion) with RDFa suitable for embedding. I’ve combined the two below (downloading the image with attribution, and adding the structured-data enriched embed code below it).

      • IMDb Relents And Allows BitTorrent Movie The Tunnel a Listing

        The creators of the BitTorrent-only movie The Tunnel are celebrating today. After being refused an IMDb listing on several occasions, the makers wrote an open letter to the Amazon-owned company which was featured in dozens of news articles. Today, the horror movie, which was funded by people buying individual frames of the production, has been accepted into the IMDb databases.

      • Well Covered

        When we rolled out Hudson for CC code last month, I already knew that I wanted to have test coverage reporting. There’s simply no reason not to: it provides a way to understand how complete your tests are, and when combined with branch testing, gives you an easy way to figure out what tests need to be written (or where to target your test writing efforts).

      • Join the Legion of CC Superheroes!

        A legion of Creative Commons (CC) Superheroes is already at work, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing all over the planet. GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, recently released its entire malarial data set using CC tools, speeding the urgent search for new medicines to tackle the devastating disease. Online communities at Flickr, SoundCloud, and Vimeo are making creative works available for anyone in the world to use freely and legally through license adoption. Publisher Pratham Books has begun to CC license more and more of the textbooks it provides to 14 million children in India, lifting them from a future of poverty and miseducation. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Google and Wired used CC tools to keep information widely available to relief workers, journalists, and governments worldwide.

      • Minecraft’s Developer Making $350,000 Per Day

        Now Jay sends in some news that continues to build on the legend of Minecraft, pointing to a story claiming that Persson is making $350,000 per day. With alpha software, and without going after “pirates” who are supposedly destroying the industry. Yeah. Apparently, he’s selling a copy every 3 seconds. And he’s done all this with no distribution. No retail deals. Just creating a really good game, getting people interested in it, not treating them like criminals, and giving them a reason to buy.

      • US Seeks Comments on Internet Access and Copyright

        The Internet Policy Task Force of the United States Commerce Department today issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking comment from any interested stakeholders – including rights holders, internet service providers, and consumers – on the “protection of copyrighted works online and the relationship between copyright law and innovation in the internet economy.”

      • Neeru Khosla

        Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That’s why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons licenses.

      • Open Source Animated Movie Shows What Can Be Done Today

        For years, one of the points we’ve raised in answering the movie industry’s $200 million challenge to us (i.e., “how do you keep making $200 million movies?”) is that, in part, it’s asking the wrong question. No one asks “how do we keep making $10,000 computers?” Instead, they look for ways to make them cheaper (and better, at the same time). But in the world of Hollywood accounting, there’s little incentive to make cheaper movies (sometimes the incentive goes the other way). And, we keep showing how the world is reaching a place where it’s cheaper and cheaper to make good movies. We’ve pointed out nice examples of people making high quality movies for next to nothing. The idea is not that movies should be made for nothing, but that the technology is making it so that movies can be made for less. In fact, with two of the examples of cheap movie making we’ve highlighted, the makers later went on to score deals to do higher end movies for more reasonable budgets.

        [...]

        The technology keeps getting better and the cost to do such high quality work keeps decreasing. This movie did cost $550,000 to make — involving a 14-person team. But, that’s a hell of a lot less than it would have cost not so long ago for anything of this level of quality.

      • ACTA

        • US, EU settle food fight in anti-counterfeit pact

          The United States and European Union have reached a compromise over the use of prestigious geographical food names like Champagne and Parma, clearing one of the last obstacles to an international pact to battle the growing trade in counterfeit goods.

        • Lawmakers call for halt to ACTA deal

          Reports that negotiations on the controversial agreement have ended alarmed MEPs, who have called on the Commission to explain the matter as soon as possible.

        • ACTA: Sorting Through The Spin

          The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has always been the exception to the general rule for international negotiations – closed participation rather than open, secretive rather than transparent – so it should come as no surprise that the negotiations have come to an end in an unusual manner. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that there will be no further rounds of negotiation as the latest round in Japan is being described as the final round of talks. Other than that, the conclusion seems open to considerable speculation and spin.

          From the U.S. perspective, the negotiations are done and ACTA is nearly a reality. USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk has been quoted as saying that there are solutions to even the toughest issues and that nearly all parties have agreed to them. Another U.S. official admitted that there were still as many as six issues without agreement, including two on border measures and another from the Internet chapter. The EU has been even less supportive, with an official quoted as saying “we’ve come a long way but we must still close the remaining gaps without which there will be no agreement.” Moreover, several European Parliament Members are already calling for a halt to the deal. Meanwhile, Japanese officials have acknowledged that there are issues that require further discussion back home and that “in that sense we haven’t gotten agreement.”

        • EU Parliamentarians move to block anti-counterfeiting pact

          Four members of the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the international anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to be halted.

          The news comes after reports that the controversial accord had been “concluded” in Japan on Friday. The MEPs, Greek Socialist Stavros Lambrinidis, French Socialist Francoise Castex, Czech center-right Zuzana Roithova and German Socialist Alexander Alvaro, have long argued for the negotiations to be more transparent and were outraged that the U.S. prevented the E.U. from publishing the proposed agreement earlier this year.

Clip of the Day

Andy Wingo – “GNU in the Cloud”


Credit: TinyOgg

10.04.10

Links 4/10/2010: Codenames Needed for Fedora 15 , Linux-based Palm ‘Mansion’ Rumoured

Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Penguins Old, Penguins New, Penguins Battered and Penguins Blue

    The canton, in fact, “should fire those and hire more flexible people,” Pogson suggested. “Seriously, why would an employer tolerate insubordination? There are thousands of people ready, willing and able to work with GNU/Linux.

    “If GNU/Linux gives the canton the efficiency and performance it needs, why should employees be allowed to say, ‘No’?” he added. “That would not be tolerated in any place where I have worked.”

    At Pogson’s current employer, “we brought in GNU/Linux with little fanfare, just swapping it for dead/dying XP machines, and there has been no fuss at all,” he noted. “Why are the canton’s employees different — or is that just hype by the media to sell papers?”

  • 20 Reasons Linux Will Boom in a Post-Recession World

    1) Total cost of ownership – Despite what the marketing material from select proprietary software companies might like you to believe, the software provided by proprietary vendors comes at a cost. There’s something to be said for having the ability to control the cost of your data and the software that runs it.

    By using Linux, one can be assured that the future of any projects enabled by this open source solution will be in firm control of those who are running the controls. No faceless company is going to come along and suddenly change the rules as to how you run your projects or how their software can be used. With Linux based options in your arsenal, you’re in control of your data. From beginning to end, you have control over how much or how little your company spends on Linux solutions.
    2) Updates are automatic – For many desktop Linux users, it’s something that we often take for granted. When we go to update our desktop operating system, we also have the option to update the software installed on our system as well…automatically. 1

  • Linux Magazine Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary

    Prize drawing for a free 10-year subscription — Linux Magazine celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the November 2010 issue, which includes a free archive DVD with a complete library of all previous issues.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Geek Time with Ric Wheeler

        Ric Wheeler is the File System Group Manager at Red Hat, and Jeremy Allison caught up with him at LinuxCon in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier this month. Ric tells Jeremy how he got into file system development as a grad student, then how he progressed into building storage arrays, eventually becoming a Linux advocate. From there, Jeremy and Ric talk about the direction that Linux is headed and the future of desktop computing. At the very end of the video, you can even hear about Ric’s brush with Hollywood!

  • Applications

    • CloudSN: Google Reader, Identi.ca, Facebook Or Any RSS Feed Notifier (And More) With Messaging Menu Integration

      CloudSN (Cloud Services Notifications) is an application similar to Specto (which is not maintained anymore): it can display notifications when you have new emails (POP3 and IMAP), new Identi.ca messages, Google Reader unread items or it can watch any RSS feed for changes. It used to also work with Twitter but since Twitter introduced OAuth for all apps, CloudSN stopped working with Twitter (hopefully it will be fixed soon).

    • Improve Your Linux Desktop Experience with a Dock

      One of the best features of Linux is its flexibility, and nowhere is that more obvious than the desktop. Your Linux desktop can have the look and feel of any desktop environment you want. One reason for this flexibility is the ability to add and remove small applications to better the desktop experience, like desktop docks Cairo-Dock and Avant Window Navigator.

    • DockBarX Gets Closer To Version 0.40 Stable (DockBarX 0.39.8 aka 0.40 RC, Released)

      DockBarX is a taskbar with grouping and group manipulation which works as an applet for both the GNOME Panel and Avant Window Navigator. DockBarX 0.39.8 (codename 0.40 release candidate) has just been released, bringing 2 changes:

      * The tooltip for pinned programs with no open windows shows name and description now, just as normal Gnome launchers do.
      * The width of the window list frame is slightly smaller.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Addictive Linux Game ‘Steel Storm’ Released

        Arcade shooter game Steel Storm Episode 1 version 1.0 is released which was only available as beta until now. The game is quite addictive with fast paced action that wants you to annihilate hordes of enemies . Episode 1 is available as free download for Linux, Mac and Windows users.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Give a helping hand to a fellow Linux user in need

        This is a bit atypical for OMG! Ubuntu! but this morning Bryen Yuko Yunashko, also known as suseROCKS, reported that he was robbed for many valuable gadgets during his travels in Europe. As a user Bryan has dedicated much of his life to raising awareness of accessibility in technology, and this theft has robbed him not only of valuable data but of the tools he uses to increase his quality of life given his disability.

  • Distributions

    • Open Ballot: is Graham Morrison wrong?

      Our kid Graham has had a rough time of it on the internet recently. His article for our sister site TechRadar, “The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice”, sparked off a few flamewars. Most notably, Caitlyn Martin over on the O’Reilly blog delivered a no-minced-words response: “Are you intimidated by breakfast cereal?”.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution?

        The rolling distribution is certainly a good idea but the rules governing it must be designed to avoid any conflict with the process of releasing a stable distribution. Lastly, the mere existence of rolling would finally fix the marketing problem plaguing testing: the name “rolling” does not suggest that the software is not yet ready for prime time.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Palm planning keyboard-less ‘Mansion’ with 800 x 480 screen?

        This one is still very much a rumor, but PreCentral is reporting that it’s heard from a “very reliable tipster” who says that Palm is prepping a new phone codenamed “Mansion,” which may or may not be the same device that recently turned up in a certification database under the name P102.

      • Android

        • Amazon building its own Android App Market?

          The current Android Market — actually Markets, since several carriers have customized it to their own ends — have a long way to go to match the customer and seller experience of iOs. Amazon knows ecommerce better than just about anybody, and the kind of collective intelligence filtering they brought to books would be a big leap forward for app discovery. But I’d caution developers eager to get their apps in front of more buyers via an Amazon store to carefully review the terms and conditions to make sure they’re entering a relationship with a retailing behemoth like Amazon with both eyes open.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Wipeout! Google Wave’s inevitable crash

    Well, it seems that Google Wave isn’t quite dead yet after all. Turns out, they’re open sourcing a bit more of the project and asking for collaboration. (Ok, someone to take over.)

  • Minix 3.1.8 Release

    We would like to thank our Google Summer of Code students for their hard work this summer. Thanks also to Google for generously supporting our students while they hacked on MINIX. We are also grateful to the MINIX community for all your contributions and feedback. We hope you enjoy the new release.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Google releases first Chrome 7 beta

      The Google Chrome development team has released Chrome 7.0.517.24, the first beta of version 7 of the company’s WebKit-based web browser. Formerly only available in the Chrome developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel), the first Chrome 7 beta resolves a number of bugs that lead to crashes in the Dev channel release and introduces several changes and new features.

  • Databases

    • Firebird 2.5 Released 4-Oct-2010

      The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.

  • Business

    • (Finally) Meeting Mr. Open Source Business

      I spoke with Augustin ten years ago when I was writing Rebel Code, but until today, I had never met him. So it was good to do so, and to catch up with the many interesting things he has been doing in the world of open source business recently.

      Things soon went downhill at VA Linux after those amazing times a decade ago. The dotcom meltdown meant that people stopped buying VA Linux’s boxes almost overnight: revenue went from $60 million a quarter to $15 million in six months. So Augustin set about restructuring the company, turning it from one based around hardware, to one based around the Web. For when it was flush with money, VA Linux had acquired a number of leading sites, including Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat. These formed the core of a business with $40 million annual revenue – rather a come-down from the $240 million the hardware business had been bringing in just a little while before.

      One side effect of this slimming down was that Augustin had effectively made himself redundant. He joined some friends who had set up the venture capital firm Azure Capital Partners. The idea was that Augustin would help them invest in exciting new open source companies. During this time he formulated his view – novel then, but hardly earth-shattering in retrospect – that the next wave of open source companies would be at the application level.

    • Alfresco Community 3.4 arrives

      Alfresco has issued version 3.4 of its open source enterprise content management system (CMS). The latest release is aimed at making it easier for users to collaborate and and share their content as quickly and easily as possible. Discussing the release, Alfresco Software CTO John Newton said that, “The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web”.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Conservancy Appoints Full-Time Executive Director

      Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which provides Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects with fiscal sponsorship, asset stewardship, license enforcement and license compliance services, announced the appointment of Bradley M. Kuhn as its full-time Executive Director.

    • Free Software Foundation Turns 25

      The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Silke Helfrich on the commons and the upcoming International Commons Conference

      As more and more of the world’s population has gained access to the Internet so a growing number of free and open movements have appeared — including the free and open source software movements, free culture, creative commons, open access and open data.

    • Open Data

      • Rethinking Freedom of Information Requests: from Bugzilla to AccessZilla

        During the panel I noted that, if we are interested in improving response times for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests (or, in Canada, Access to Information (ATIP) requests) why doesn’t the Office of the Information Commissioner use a bugzilla type software to track requests?

      • Govt to make FoI data machine readable

        The government is to change the law so that all data released under the Freedom of Information Act will be fully accessible to computers.

        Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the Freedom of Information Act will be amended so that all data released through FoI must be in a reusable and machine readable format.

      • A Taxonomy of Data Science

        Data science is clearly a blend of the hackers’ arts (primarily in steps “O” and “S” above); statistics and machine learning (primarily steps “E” and “M” above); and the expertise in mathematics and the domain of the data for the analysis to be interpretable (that is, one needs to understand the domain in which the data were generated, but also the mathematical operations performed during the “learning” and “optimization”). It requires creative decisions and open-mindedness in a scientific context.

        Our next post addresses how one goes about learning these skills, that is: “what does a data science curriculum look like?”

    • Open Access/Content

      • Opening Up Technology in Service of Teaching

        Electronic content and digital interactivity are everywhere – except in most public school classrooms. How can schools and teachers take advantage of technology to help students excel? What do teachers really need?

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Five Things You Need to Know About HTML5

      It’s open standard. The good news with HTML5’s standards is they are open and free of patents. For example, WebKit, which keeps a library of open-source software, provides a free layout engine that can be used to create browsers or ­applications. “You won’t have IBM (IBM) knocking at your door, saying, ‘You’re using our patents,’” says Le Hégaret. This also means you’re not dependent on one vendor’s tools, as with Adobe Flash or Microsoft (MSFT) Silverlight.

Leftovers

  • SBA suspends major contractor GTSI from government work

    Federal officials on Friday suspended one of the nation’s largest government contractors from receiving new work, alleging that the Northern Virginia company inappropriately went through other firms to gain access to contracts set aside for small companies.

    The U.S. Small Business Administration’s action imperils hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for GTSI Corp., a top-50 contractor that has relied on the Pentagon and the rest of the federal government for more than 90 percent of its sales in recent years.

    At issue is work GTSI did as a subcontractor for small businesses serving as the prime contractors on government contracts.

  • Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From

    Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.

  • IBM Explores Water Management Market

    Divining a possible new market in municipal water management systems, IBM has set up a pilot project in Dubuque, Iowa, to investigate whether cities could both save money and conserve water by monitoring citizens’ usage more closely.

    In this project, over 300 home dwellers have been issued smart water meters that wirelessly transit their water usage back to IBM data center, on a periodic basis. The citizens can check into a secure Web site, run by IBM, to see how much water they use, and when the it is being used during the day. The idea is that by studying water usage habits, citizens may be able to tell if they have hidden leaks.

  • Investor Peter Thiel asks Silicon Valley: Where’s the innovation?

    .

    In an interview with TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, Thiel, 42, argued that the high-tech gold rush that has skyrocketed valuations for Internet companies represents a sharp disconnect from the economic malaise that has blanketed much of the world, stagnating median wages and living conditions for most people just 30 miles outside of Silicon Valley.

  • Science

    • Scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth

      A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.

    • History of hardware tessellation

      With the introduction of Shader Model 5.0 hardware and the API support provided by OpenGL 4.0 made GPU based geometry tessellation a first class citizen in the latest graphics applications. While the official support from all the commodity graphics card vendors and the relevant APIs are quite recent news, little to no people know that hardware tessellation has a long history in the world of consumer graphics cards. In this article I would like to present a brief introduction to tessellation and discuss about its evolution that resulted in what we can see in the latest technology demos and game titles.

  • From My Personal Blog

    • Science Blogging

      I found it gratifying back in the days around 2006 when people in my scientific field knew me in conferences because of my blogs and wanted to hang out with me because of these. The readership grew steadily as long as I kept writing. PZ Myers sees the same type of trend and Techrights, where I wrote over 11,000 posts, is the same. Perhaps I will resume posting in blog form about science later this month or next month. As always, I will separate my professional life, my personal life, and my hobbies (the 4 blogs I run will provide this separation).

    • One of My Favourite Documentaries: BBC Dissecting the True Evils of PR

      The programme is broken down into several episodes, each delivered in parts due to time limits in YouTube. Here is the first part of the four episodes.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • The Cyberwar Echo Chamber

      On Wednesday, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III discussed the military’s cybersecurity strategy after meetings at NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. “Like air, sea, land and space, we’re going to have to treat cyberspace as an arena where we need to defend our networks and to be able to operate freely,” he said.

      The rhetoric sounds uncannily familiar to what retired CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden told infosec professionals at the annual security conference Black Hat in July. “Cyber is a domain like land, sea, air, and space,” he said.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • FBI ignores DoJ report, raids activists, arrests Time Person of the Year
    • Reddit user flames Flickr photographer; Flickr photographer threatens copyright lawsuit

      A Reddit user who posted meanspirited remarks about a Flickr user’s photo was called a jerk by the photographer. To get back, the critic posted a tiny thumbnail of the Flickr image (which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) to Reddit along with a complaint about his treatment.

    • Wikipedia co-founder slams Wikileaks

      The co-founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on Tuesday slammed whistleblower WikiLeaks over its release of Afghan war documents which he said could “get people killed”.

      Wales also expressed irritation over the website’s use of the term “Wiki” in its name, which refers to a site that allows different users to collaborate and make contributions.

      “I would distance myself from WikiLeaks, I wish they wouldn’t use the name, they are not a Wiki. A big way they got famous in the first place was by using the word Wiki, which was unfortunate in my view,” he said at a business conference in Kuala Lumpur.

    • Teller accused of texting robber during bank heist

      Technology is such an enabler. Even when it comes, allegedly, to robbing a bank.

      For police in Arlington, Texas, believe they have rumbled an inside job of a bank robbery by stumbling on the cell phone of one of the bank’s tellers.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Bearing witness to the human cost of water pollution

      As part of our work to witness and expose water pollution problems around China, Greenpeace campaigners and photographer Lu Guang visited several areas along the Yangtze River that have been severely affected by industrial water pollution.

    • Global Warming Aids and Frustrates Archaeologists

      The discoveries are providing new insights into the behavior of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, crumble to dust in days unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.

    • Oil on the bottom of the Gulf

      Here aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, we are continuing our three-month science mission in the Gulf of Mexico. We are floating about five miles north of the Deepwater Horizon well site, in water that would have been covered with oil a few months ago, where thousands of gallons of oil were skimmed and burned on the surface while an armada of boats and planes delivered daily bombardment with chemical dispersants that sunk the oil back underwater into the path of any unlucky sea creatures nearby.

    • Where’s all the oil gone?

      While the water samples taken from way down deep during the trip are off to the lab to get analyzed, the immediate, measurable data obtained by Rainer tells us this; that there’s a clear indication of an oxygen deficiency in the Gulf’s waters, in an area stretching from around the Deepwater Horizon disaster site to 300 miles (500km) to the west. The infamous plume still exists – perhaps not visibly, but the essence of it is still there.

    • Man caught with uranium in Purulia

      A criminal with alleged links to gangs across the country and even Afghanistan was nabbed in Purulia with nearly 1 kg of uranium on Sunday. The market value of the radioactive element is said to be about $7 million.

    • A global network of marine reserves can restore the world’s oceans to health

      Our oceans are an absolute marvel – but they are also in a deep, deep crisis. If we don’t act fast, our oceans will continue to deteriorate and vital food sources and essential functions provided to our planet and its people by the oceans could be lost forever. Since healthy oceans underpin our very survival, Greenpeace is today releasing an “Emergency Oceans Rescue Plan” aimed at world leaders, which sets out the best way to save our oceans- something that can and should be done at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which takes place later this month in Japan.

  • Finance

    • Bank of America halts foreclosures in 23 states

      Bank of America is delaying foreclosures in 23 states as it examines whether it rushed the foreclosure process for thousands of homeowners without reading the documents.

      The move adds the nation’s largest bank to a growing list of mortgage companies whose employees signed documents in foreclosure cases without verifying the information in them.

    • FTC Report Will Detail Ways To Help Journalism Survive

      FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Wednesday that his agency hopes to release a report by the end of the year that would detail proposals for helping journalism survive but said one idea that is unlikely to be included is a call for taxing electronic devices to subsidize newspapers and other media platforms.

      [...]

      He added that “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers and [any proposal] should be platform neutral.”

    • IMF admits that the West is stuck in near depression

      The IMF report – “Will It Hurt? Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Consolidation” – implicitly argues that austerity will do more damage than so far admitted.

      Normally, tightening of 1pc of GDP in one country leads to a 0.5pc loss of growth after two years. It is another story when half the globe is in trouble and tightening in lockstep. Lost growth would be double if interest rates are already zero, and if everybody cuts spending at once.

    • Rich Germans demand to pay more in taxes.

      You read that correctly. Some of Germany’s wealthy are demanding that they pay a “Rich man’s tax” They feel that simply contributing to charity is not enough, they feel that they should pay more to support society, because they can. They say they have more money than they need.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Electronic Frontier Foundation Fires Back At Righthaven

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation is joining the fight against Righthaven, a company that has been widely criticized for suing a string of news sites that use content belonging to its clients, including, notably, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The EFF is now defending Democratic Underground, a political site which Righthaven sued last month for using a five-sentence excerpt of a Review-Journal article without permission. The Las Vegas Sun, which has closely been following Righthaven’s moves, says it’s the first time that Righthaven has been hit with a counterclaim.

    • ‘Pre-crime’ Comes to the HR Dept.

      In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, police belonging to a special Pre-crime unit arrest people for crimes they would do in the future. It’s science fiction, and it will probably never happen in our lifetimes.

      However, the pre-crime concept is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management.

      A Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.

      While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I’m aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character.

      Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and “thousands of other sources,” the company develops a report on the “real you” — not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around.

    • Doctors caught revealing secret patient information in Facebook posts

      DOCTORS have been disclosing sensitive medical information – and even mocking patients – on Facebook.

      The NSW Medical Board has cautioned one doctor for making “flippant and derogatory” comments, and warned others to “think twice” before disclosing patient details on social networking sites.

    • Illinois Mayor Claims Anonymous Bloggers No Different Than 9/11 Terrorists; Says Anonymity Is A First Amendment Challenge

      And so, the mayor of Mokena gets a history lesson on the First Amendment from the press that the First Amendment enables. There’s something nice about that, though, you would have hoped the history lesson would have come sooner.

    • Blocked for two years, then taken down in just 30 minutes – a disastrous result of Internet Blocking policy

      Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.

      How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.

    • RIAA Claims That If COICA Isn’t Passed, Americans Are ‘Put At Risk’

      With the Senate trying to rush through COICA, the online censorship bill that ignores history and appears to violate both the principles of the First Amendment and due process, a bunch of concerned citizens have been speaking out against the bill, and asking the Senate not to rush it through without at least holding hearings about the massive problems with the bill.

    • What Else Might COICA Be Used To Censor
    • Even Without COICA, White House Asking Registrars To Voluntarily Censor ‘Infringing’ Sites

      While there’s been increasing attention paid to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA), the proposed law that would allow the government to require ISPs and registrars to block access to websites deemed to be “dedicated to infringing activities,” it looks like the White House (which we had thought was against censoring the internet) appears to be working on a backup plan in case COICA doesn’t pass.

    • Quebec Carnival hires lawyers to protect Bonhomme

      Quebec City’s Winter Carnival has hired lawyers to defend its beloved Bonhomme Carnaval, whose iconic image is gracing newsstands across the country this week after Maclean’s magazine used it to illustrate an explosive cover story about corruption in la belle province.

      “For the past 57 years, the Carnival has invested considerable energy and resources into protecting Bonhomme Carnaval’s outstanding reputation,” said the event’s CEO Jean Pelletier in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We are therefore examining the options available to us to enforce our intellectual property rights.”

    • Your Comments: The Maclean’s cover with Bonhomme Carnaval
    • DoT rejects BlackBerry’s email decoding solution

      The BlackBerry security jinx is unlikely to be resolved soon. The telecom department has rejected the interception solution offered by Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) for its secure corporate email service. What’s more is that it has spurned RIM’s technical solution for decoding all chat communication on the popular BlackBerry Messenger service, which contradicts the home ministry’s recent clean chit to the Canadian smartphone maker’s interception solution for its messaging service.

    • Wiretapping the Internet

      Taking a cue from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are seeking to re-engineer the Internet and other digital communications networks to make them easier to spy on.

      In the week since the plan became public, it has been roundly condemned by civil liberties groups and security experts — and rightly so. While the proposal described in Monday’s New York Times probably won’t do much to hinder sophisticated criminals or terrorists, it does threaten to undermine the security of global communications and stifle technological innovation.

    • Opting out of behavioral ad tracking may get easier

      A number of major advertising associations have banded together to announce a self-regulatory program that would allow users to opt out of ad tracking. The program revolves around the awkwardly named “Advertising Option Icon”—an icon that websites could place on their site that would allow users to get more information on why they’re being targeted for ads and let them control their data collection.

      The program is based on an industry report from July 2009 titled Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, which focuses on education, transparency, and consumer control when it comes to targeted ads. The participating organizations include the Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Better Business Bureau, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Initiative. And, lest you assume this is a small effort, these trade groups represent some 5,000 other companies when it comes to advertising on the Web, so they have some pull.

    • Introducing the PCI Hug It Out Podcast Series [EFF donations]

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Films and the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010

        One of the key objectives of the Indian Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, is to protect the authors of underlying works in films (such as scriptwriters, lyricists and music composers) from exploitation by effecting extensive structural changes in the Copyright Act, 1957, and, consequently, in India’s film and music industry. The amendments proposed in the 2010 Bill cover a range of subjects including exhaustion, the regulation of copyright contracts and the role of copyright societies.

      • Launch: From “Radical Extremism” to” Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda
      • Inside the finances of the UK “legal blackmail” copyright enforcement company

        Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson continues his excellent reporting on British law firm ACS:Law, a much-derided firm that sends threatening copyright letters on behalf of pornographers. ACS suffered an Anonymous denial of service attack in September, and inadvertently dumped its entire email repository, which is now available for download all over the net. Today, Anderson digs into ACS’s finances — how much it makes, what it expects to make, and how much paper it goes through printing threatening letters to mail to poorly researched accused infringers.

      • Sarah Novotny joins OSCON for 2011

        Tweet

        The O’Reilly Open Source Convention will be returning to Portland, Oregon, July 25-29, 2011.

      • R-J owner faces counterclaim in copyright lawsuit campaign

        The owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has for the first time been hit with a counterclaim over its online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign, with attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing the newspaper of entering a “sham” relationship with the Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner Righthaven LLC — and accusing Righthaven of copyright fraud.

      • Would IMDB Really Not List A Film Because It Was Distributed Via BitTorrent?

        .

        The explanation that it’s because of the BitTorrent release is pure speculation. Another article, from TorrentFreak provides some more details, with notes of rejection from IMDB. They claim that the movie needs to be associated with a production company that has a history of releasing movies, in order to get listed at this early stage. However, Tedeschi notes that this is a real production house that has released movies in the past, all of which have been listed in IMDB. The only thing that he sees that’s different is the planned BitTorrent release.

      • LA Times’ Propaganda Piece Claims Piracy Hurts Filmmakers Without Any Actual Evidence

        The article also highlights a filmmaker, Ellen Seidler, who complains about spending hours a day sending emails to file sharing sites, demanding they take down her film. Just think how much better she could be doing if she spent that same time connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy.

        What a waste of space by the LA Times, who shouldn’t be misleading people like this with bogus articles. It’s articles that portray these people as victims, due to their own lack of business initiative, that does real harm to filmmakers. If, instead, the LA Times focused on smart filmmakers who are in the same situation as Carter and Seidler, but instead embraced it and are making real money because of it, they’d be helping. Instead, they’re just making more of a mess.

      • If The Major Record Labels Tried To Adopt The ‘Radiohead’ Model…
      • No court order for Gallant Macmillan today!

        In the meantime one has to wonder, if BTplc had expressed concerns in the past, why is it only now they get an adjournment? Could it be that in not only damaging ACS:Law, the recent email leaks have also damaged the system which some wished to seek revenue from? and now Gallant Macmillan has been put on hold, what of Ministry of Sound? their site is still appears to be down. How much damage to their reputation with its potential customers has been done? From some forums, I’m seeing quite alot.

        [...]

        Torrent Freak is currently reporting a comedy spoof of a certain historical figure finding out about he leak at ACS:Law. You can find that here: http://torrentfreak.com/acslaws-anti-piracy-downfall-sends-hitler-crazy-101004/

      • ACTA

        • The ACTA deal – are they faking it?

          ACTA negotiators claim a deal has been done, but is it really a counterfeit? How is it that a deal is successfully concluded when there are matters still outstanding? It would seem that the European Commission statement of a “successful” conclusion of ACTA is somewhat pre-emptive.

        • Vrijschrift: ACTA’s secrecy is illegal

          The Dutch foundation Vrijschrift requested publication of ACTA documents. The request was denied. Vrijschrift filed an objection, below a translation:

          1. Many provisions in ACTA are mandatory: “Each Party shall”. Substantially, often they regard legislation, eg “Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at (…)”. There is a binding relationship between ACTA and legislation.

        • ACTA W5

          Participating in ACTA

          mouse ears on the world: text says ACTA ATTACKS INTERNET

          * Australia
          * Canada,
          * the European Union
          * Japan
          * South Korea
          * Mexico
          * New Zealand
          * Switzerland
          * United States

          American Flag hangs down

          ACTA came with heavy duty Non-Disclosure penalties. Which is why most if not all of the elected representatives of the participating governments were kept in the dark about what was even on the table. This includes elected representatives of the American Government. If they were made privvy to the negotiations, they were legally restrained from talking about it. Not very democratic, eh?

        • Did ACTA pass?

          The fact that ACTA did NOT go as planned probably means they will fight harder to achieve their goals in different ways. Canada is likely to get more “special treatment” since we’ve provided a hot bed of opposition. The fact that ACTA has not passed probably means that there will be an even stronger push to get the dreadful Bill C-32 passed.

        • Upcoming Comic Book By Law Professors Compares ACTA To 1984
        • ACTA: No More Negotiating Rounds Planned; Latest Text To Be Released

          The round of negotiations in Tokyo last week on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will be the last in the several-year long process to come to a final agreement, negotiators have said. The latest text – along with highlighted issue areas on which certain countries still have reservations – will be released before the end of the week, negotiators told Intellectual Property Watch.

          The most critical outstanding issue is scope, especially on border measures, a Japanese negotiator told Intellectual Property Watch today. There was a “certain convergence” but “further examination was needed in some capitals,” the negotiator said. “In that sense we haven’t gotten agreement” yet.

Clip of the Day

Juan Pedro Bolivar – “GNU Psycosynth”


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 4/10/2010: DebConf10 Report, ODF is Green

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • FOSS Community Orientation?

    * Yellow: Production Orientation
    * Pink: Marketing Orientation
    * Green: FOSS Community Orientation

  • Wasteful Technology Habits – Think Before You Buy

    OpenOffice meets the needs of easily 95% of home users (and a good deal of those that use office software at work) and most of those people using an, often times illegal, version of Photoshop would be able to accomplish the exact same tasks using the legally free GIMP. Beyond this beginning Linux distros such as Linux Mint or Pinguy OS easily fulfill all the desktop computing needs of your average user.

    With all of this in mind, why don’t you see Linux, OpenOffice, or GIMP on the shelf at your local computer store? Simple:

    There is no money in it for the retailer.

  • Draft of the ANLoc FOSS localisation manual

    Today is international translation day! As part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), I have been writing a book on the localisation of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

  • Events

    • IRILL Days 2010: detailed program
    • Free Software and the Playing Field

      In only a few years, Free Software has evolved from being a niche phenomenon into an increasingly mature mainstream movement. Despite the commonplace understanding as Free Software as one of the driving forces of tomorrow’s information technologies, the surrounding political and economic environment has often not yet kept up. As the founder and first president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as well as CEO of a Free Software enterprise, the speaker has unique insight into political and economic aspects that keep favouring proprietary technologies until the current day despite the assurances to the contrary by some. From his personal experience, Georg Greve will give some real life examples of how Free Software companies work and interact with partners and customers, and how a truly level playing field would be constructed.

  • Web Browsers

    • Desktop dictatorship: Corporate Australia still prefers IE

      That’s a sizable chunk, when you realise that total global average daily users of Firefox at the same time was about 114 million. In short, roughly 1.5 percent of total Firefox users globally are Australian. And the number is growing. As at August 2009, there were 1.6 million average Australian daily users of Firefox. That figure was much smaller — 1.2 million — in August 2008. In other words, although IE is still the dominant force, Firefox is a strong challenger, with Chrome and then Safari coming up behind.

      IBM CIO Godbee compares his company’s adoption of Firefox to the way that the similarly open source Linux operating system gained traction on servers around the world over the past several decades since it was first released.

      “Over a period of time it has been organic,” he says. “And suddenly there is it is, on a wide scale.”

  • Databases

    • Road to MariaDB 5.2: Virtual Columns

      MariaDB 5.2 is almost here. The gamma release (think “RC”) was released on 28 Sep and the stable release will follow just as soon as the developers are happy with it.

  • Project Releases

    • FireBreath 1.2 released

      FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.

    • ForgeRock Releases OpenDJ

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is ODF Green?

      Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals. Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”. This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.

      When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents. This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents. It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.

      [...]

      So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption. But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem. Graphics and video are far larger.

Leftovers

  • Editor’s Note: Do Boobytrapped Websites Capture Readers?

    Compounding the problem is decreasing quality and quantity of original material and increasing torrents of swill from content farms, recycling the same shallow junk over and over merely to provide a framework to hang yet more ads on, and then SEO-gaming for all they’re worth. Thanks, I so love it when the first page of a Google search is link farms and content farm crapola.

    Consider supporting sites you enjoy, if they accept reader subscriptions or donations. For example, Groklaw and LWN.net serve up some of the best, most in-depth articles anywhere. Groklaw runs no ads, and LWN.net relies on subscriptions to help them keeps the ads to a minimum. As always, it comes down to the Golden Rule– the one with the gold makes the rules. Me, I don’t even want to live in a world controlled by marketers. Though I fear we are already mostly there.

  • Science

    • US Government To Operate Fab Labs?

      They want to establish “at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation”. Um, our simplistic arithmetic shows this would be 438 Fab Labs, based on 307,006,550 residents (from July 2009) divided by 700,000. Many cities would have several Fab Labs, if this scheme works. Oh, and the population is likely to grow a tad by ten year’s time.

    • Anti-antibiotics: Bugs, drugs and bureaucrats

      For certain kinds of bacteria, we have reached the end of the line. No new antibiotics have been developed for decades, and some superbugs are now resistant to all those we have. There is no one solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance, but we desperately need new antibiotics.

      Far from helping, though, drug regulatory agencies are discouraging the development of new antibiotics, say those who met in London last week to discuss solutions to the problem of antibiotic resistance, at a conference organised by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. New Scientist finds out what is going on.

      Why are regulators coming under fire?

      They are making it ever harder and more costly to get new antibiotics approved. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came in for the most criticism.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Conversation With Frederick Kaufman

      Could Del Monte, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart become the deciders on stainability? In “What’s New for Dinner,” Frederick Kaufman writes about the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, an attempt by large companies to measure the environmental impact of the seed-to-shelf life cycle of any produce-based product.

    • Say hello to mechanically separated chicken!

      Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve–bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Miliband retains Labour line on DNA and CCTV

      Ed Miliband, giving his first speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September 2010, said of civil liberties, “too often we seemed casual about them”.

      “I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty,” he said. “I want our party to reclaim that tradition.”

    • We would be better off without the vetting and barring scheme

      As a report published yesterday by the Civitas think tank makes clear, this is a dangerous approach. The idea behind the Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed and remodelling it will make no difference. The scheme was introduced to make children safer after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002 exposed the flaws in vetting their killer Ian Huntley. Yet it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, while at the same time poisoning their relationship with adults.

    • Police to trial while-you-wait DNA tests

      Police will soon have the means to grab someone’s genetic sample and run it through the national DNA database while waiting in the street, if early trials by military industrial giant Lockheed Martin are successful.

    • Supermarket tells Norwich toddler – take your hood off

      A Norwich two-year-old was asked to take down the hood of his anorak when entering a city convenience store – for security reasons.

    • £470,00 Norfolk speed camera may never be used

      Yesterday Norfolk County Council confirmed that the camera has never been used and as a result no tickets have been issued.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 10:10′s Boom video: you can’t control the debate any more

      10:10’s climate change murder video has caused much offence, but one thing nobody is questioning is their inability to control the material, or the debate.

      The instant negative reaction from most of the climate change campaign community after its release yesterday morning, prompted the video to be quickly pulled from 10:10’s own website, but it was even more quickly reposted by people wishing to continue to comment.

      Wisely, in their apology statement yesterday evening 10:10 said they are not going to try to control how people use the video now it is in the wild, for instance via copyright take-downs.

  • Finance

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Social Mores At Work: Sigur Ros Calls Out Commercials With ‘Similar’ Music
    • Well then; All’s right with the world

    • Copyrights

      • Sintel Open Movie Released and It’s Absolutely Beautiful!

        This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. Also, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.

      • Ministry of Sound Silenced By Huge DDoS Attack

        Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.

      • Historic audio at risk, thanks to bad copyright laws

        The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.

        “It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”

      • ACTA

        • ACTA is No Done Deal!

          The spokesperson for the Trade European Commissioner has announced Saturday October 2nd, that all parties have reached an agreement on ACTA. This is one more example of how the secrecy of this negotiation permits all manoeuvres to deceive citizens and Members of Parliaments. La Quadrature du Net calls all European citizens to alert their MEPs and National MPs about the need to monitor closely the rest of this negotiation and prepare to reject its by-product.

      • Digital Economy (UK)

Clip of the Day

Neal Walfield – “GNU Hurd”


Credit: TinyOgg

10.03.10

Links 3/10/2010: Economist.com on Drupal, GIMP 2.6.11

Posted in News Roundup at 10:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Adoption of GNU/Linux on the Desktop

      One picture is worth a thousand words…

    • OS representations and the choice of migration

      For these beginner Linux users, Linux represents an all-mighty fortress that stands impenetrable. Consequently, they engage in all sorts of risky on line behavior. While it is a fact that Linux is more secure than Windows is, the hubris of these tragic heroes gradually leads them to their destruction…or to the bitter realization that a great many of the attacks a computer can suffer are fostered by a careless user.

      Fanboys always wage wars based on prejudice. Regardless of the OS you like, an open mind will help you fly over the clouds of ignorance and, eventually, you can make a conscious choice about whether or not your OS satisfies your needs or if a migration is the solution to your computer woes or the beginning of them.

    • 20 Really Awesome Linux Desktop Customization Screenshots

      Without further delay, here are some impressive Linux desktop customization screenshots…

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDEMU – Matt Rogers in the 25th Century

        This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kopete ex-maintainer and all around Basket case, Matt Rogers.

      • Review: Sabayon 5.4 KDE

        I guess Sabayon 5.4 hasn’t really changed much from version 5.3, which had many of the same bugs that I experienced today. I simultaneously love it for its vast collection of applications included out-of-the-box and hate it for its stability issues, which still haven’t been resolved despite using the extremely stable KDE 4.5. I guess this is going to get a solid “meh” from me. (That said, don’t be surprised to see me testing the next version of Sabayon when it comes out.)

      • The role of KDE e.V.

        From time to time we hear the question, what actually is KDE e.V., what’s its role in the KDE community? Let me try to answer this question here.

        In short, KDE e.V. is the organization, which represents, supports, and provides governance to the KDE community. It gives the community a legal body so it can participate in activities which require a legal representation, somebody handling money, or a way to legitimize individuals to speak and act for the community.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Nautilus Elementary in Ubuntu Maverick, A Quick Review

        For some strange reasons, I am not able to enable clutterview in my Ubuntu Maverick. When I press F4, it just shows a black screen. Hence the ammonkey’s screenshot above. Another important feature worth mentioning is the integration for zeitgeist search engine. Take a look at the awesome video by ammonkey himself demonstrating zeitgeist search engine.

      • GTK+3 Completes Its Rendering Clean-Up

        Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.

  • Distributions

    • “BSD vs. Linux” or “what to do when your favourite Linux distro falls appart”

      And then of course there is Debian. I think about half the servers we have deployed are Debian based and indeed I like it very much. Desktop however is another story, many of our test runs have miserably failed due to unsupported graphic cards, malfunctioning wireless support and so on.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat near Resistance

        Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $41.75 with the current price action closing at just $41.00 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • A challenge for a Mandriva user: SimplyMepis!

        Megatotoro was kind enough to remove Gloria and install Mepis for me, after which, as in the Sioux hanblecchia, I was left alone on the hilltop…or, more accurately, inside the Mepis pyramids. This is the beginning of my challenge: For the next week, I will only use Mepis on my netbook to feel the differences. Remember, since I am not a computer guru, all I have is my limited empiric access to this fascinating world.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ Release Candidate is Available Now, Complete Review

          * Ubuntu One was greatly improved with lots of bug fixes with focus on stability and better nautilus integration. Users can now create account with out a need to visit a browser. The web interface was improved and feels more intuitive.
          * An Android application was released for Ubuntu One and a new feature introduced where Ubuntu One will stream music to phones.

        • Toshiba AC100 dumps Android for Ubuntu 10.10, gets useful

          Toshiba’s AC100 is certainly an interesting notebook on the face of it: Tegra 2 processor, full QWERTY and plenty of battery life, but the Android OS does mean it’s definitely a companion device and not your sole ultraportable. That could all change, however, now a hack for loading Ubuntu onto the AC100 has been developed; Carrypad pulled together the instructions and files from tosh-ac100.wetpaint.org, ac100.gudinna.com and the official Toshiba forums and managed to get his AC100 up and running with Ubuntu 10.10.

        • Thank you, Ubuntu

          Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, will be released in just a couple of weeks. That got me reflecting on the fact that I have been a happy user of Ubuntu for what must be over 5 years now. That’s a long time!

          The GNU/Linux variants are the only OSes I’ve used where I really have the flexibility to define my own workflow (example). So they are a pleasure to use (ok, most of the time). I use a computer for many, many hours a day nearly every day. And the time spent customizing software and learning it is a drop in the bucket when it’s amortized over the months and years I’m going to spend using it. Sure, Windows and Mac OS are a bit more learnable and easier to get started with— but they are much less usable. And for me, and most other people who sit at a computer for a living, that is precisely the wrong optimization to make.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Review: wattOS R2

            The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I’ve done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS.
            wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name).
            The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a “light” version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I’ve heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation.

            [...]

            Overall, I think wattOS is a great distribution that is highly customizable and is a great way to revive an old computer with modern software. I do still feel slightly cheated by the absence of the power management tools. I highly recommend anyone to try it out. (See? I did include the download link this time!)

          • Leaving CrunchBang Linux for Lubuntu

            Overall it works great – just as well as Crunchbang, but with update to date software. The only thing I didn’t like was that there was no update gui – I needed to run apt-get to find out stuff is ready for update – this also annoyed me with CrunchBang. Come on guys, every major distro (including Ubuntu, upon which it’s based) has some way of letting the user know there are updates to be installed. The user shouldn’t have to go manually checking every few days.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Firefox 4 vs. Internet Explorer 9 – Head on!

      In a head-on comparison, Firefox 4 wins over its Microsoft arch-enemy. But that does not mean Internet Explorer 9 is bad. Far from it. Furthermore, the fact the browser scene has another new player, a good one with big teeth and a decent punch, should make you really excited. As the end user, you will benefit from even more attention and better and cheaper products. This is what fierce competition is all about. You.

      Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are going to be great browsers once released. If you’re a Firefox user, no need to abandon your favorite product. It’s still the good ole stuff that made the difference and broke the monopoly. If you’re an Internet Explorer user, now you truly have a good browser, which you can use and be proud of.

      And that would be all.

      I hope you enjoyed the article. If not, feel free to point out where I might be wrong.

    • Firefox, What I Would Like To See

      Firefox is my default web browser, which can be mainly attributed to its amazing add-on support and customizability. But other browsers have emerged (Chrome) or improved to a point, that Firefox feels old fashioned in certain categories. Especially speed and performance wise. If you ever experienced how fast Chrome or Opera are opening the most complex websites, and then compared that to Firefox, you know that something is amiss there.

  • CMS

    • The Economist.com data migration to Drupal

      The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces. The Economist will be adding lots of social tools to its site over time, and doing so on its existing platform was too slow/inefficient.

    • Movable Type

  • Business

    • Outgrowing QuickBooks? Maybe open source ERP can help

      Recent surveys have found that small and medium-size businesses are increasingly willing to consider open source tools. Not surprisingly, small businesses and large enterprises are predisposed to different categories of open source software. Survey data suggest that ERP is one category where small businesses are more likely to adopt open source than their large enterprise peers.

      Several open source ERP vendors are vying for a share of the action. Small-business owners and/or their IT department heads should consider whether an open source ERP package could meet their business needs as their companies grow.

  • Project Releases

  • Government

    • Open Government Licence enables re-use of information

      The National Archives is today launching a new Open Government Licence, which makes it faster and easier than ever before to re-use public sector information.

      The UK Open Government Licence is a key element of the Government’s commitment to greater transparency. It provides a single set of terms and conditions for anyone wishing to use or license government information and removes some of the existing barriers to re-use.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Dinner is Ready

        At the moment, due to limitations in the GCC compiler only 128k of flash are immediately useable but we’re very close to unlocking the whole memory space.

  • Programming

    • Modern Perl: The Book: The (draft) PDF

      I’ve finished writing and editing Modern Perl: The Book, and it’s gone into production, which means that Onyx Neon is preparing a print-ready PDF to give to the printers. The book should be available in print by the end of October, if not sooner.

Leftovers

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Investigating CC’s welfare impact, the first step

        To recap, what I am offering is to think of CC as an enterprise operating on three separate spheres, each with its distinct, although definitely not independent, value contribution. The first is the contribution to transactions between actors in the creative fields, the second is the institutional contribution and the third is the contribution in the normative field.

        The idea is that this can serve as the baseline for analysis, a fundamental categorization which lends itself to further sub-categorization, by field, by activity, by actor and by CC tool, but that doesn’t lose track of the way all of these tie into the one primary goal.

      • Quick review: Sintel

        Technically the video is impressive, it shows the software advancements and the grown experience of the team, it had good music and voices and it slightly longer. Still… I think it will be a smaller success compared with its predecessor, Big Buck Bunny.

Clip of the Day

Simon Josefsson – “Autobuild”


Links 3/10/2010: Gimpbox Introduced, ACS:Law Boss Could Go Bankrupt

Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Max Out Your Video, Graphics, and Audio Arsenal

    If you think back to what you were doing digitally 10 years ago, and then think about what you’re doing today, odds are that you work with video, graphics and audio much more than you ever did before. Within the world of open source, there are not only outstanding free applications that can improve your experience in these areas, but there are many free guides and tutorials to get you going with them. In this post, you’ll find a huge number of resources for pumping up your multimedia muscles. Spend some time with these, and you’ll collect some rich dividends.

  • Why There Won’t Be a LAMP For Big Data

    It is possible that we’ll see standardization of componentry around specific projects like Hadoop – although even that seems unlikely with the rampant proliferation of query, import and other ecosystem projects – but I do not expect to see a standard stack of software used to tackle generic Big Data problems, because there really aren’t many generic Big Data problems. Inconvenient as that might be from a vocabulary perspective.

  • FLOSS on YouTube

    # Guadalinux on hundreds of thousands of computers in schools and offices in Andalusia, Spain. A million downloads so far.

  • Apache Shindig 2.0: OpenSocial implementation for Java and PHP

    Apache Shindig 2.0 is available to download and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence. An overview of the project explains Shindig’s history and how it implements the OpenSocial specification.

  • Events

    • Women Proved “Securest” in the Defcon Social Engineering Game

      In a recent post (Hackers Play “Social Engineering Capture The Flag” At Defcon), I pointed to a game in which contestants used the telephone to convince company employees to voluntarily cough up information they probably shouldn’t have.

      Of 135 “targets” of the social engineering “game,” 130 blurted out too much information. All five holdouts were women who gave up zero data to the social engineers.

  • Web Browsers

    • Google hands number 7 shirt to Chrome browser

      Mountain View updated Chrome to 7.0.517.24 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. But the latest release is light on new features, which has left some Chrome fans a bit nonplussed.

  • Databases

    • Five Enterprise Features in PostgreSQL 9

      The PostgreSQL Global Development Group recently released PostgreSQL 9.0, with major new features and more than 200 addons and improvements for the popular database.

      If you look at the release notes you’ll find a ton of new features and enhancements to existing features. For example, this release brings better error messages for unique constraints, improvements in PL languages for stored procedures, and a lot more. Wading through the PostgreSQL 9.0 release notes is a DBA’s delight, but what are the top features in this release? I pinged PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus and got some input on the most important features for PostgreSQL 9.

  • Oracle

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.4.5 Brings Bug-Fixes

      While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that’s now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it’s here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.

  • Project Releases

    • ForgeRock announces OpenDJ LDAP directory service

      ForgeRock has announced OpenDJ, a Java based open source directory server as part of its I3 platform. OpenDJ, a standard compliant LDAP directory server built for scalability and stability, is a based on OpenDS, a project initially developed by Sun Microsystems, and ForgeRock has announced that a key OpenDS developer, Ludovic Poitou, has joined its ranks. ForgeRock CEO Lasse Andresen said “It’s a real delight to work with him again”. Enterprise subscriptions to OpenDJ are available now from ForgeRock.

  • Government

    • Topic Report No 16: INSPIREd by Openness: The case of the implementation of Directive 2007/2/EC in Greece as a general model for open data regulation within the context of Public Sector Information

      This state of play report on recent PSI initiatives in Greece discusses the national transposition of the INSPIRE Directive by the Greek Parliament: the National Infrastructure for Geospatial Information (3882/2010). This is a vitally important piece of legislation both in the context of open data and the regulation of Public Sector Information. It adopts a life cycle approach and increases the threshold of protection of the re-use of public sector information. This was the result of lengthy process and a concentrated effort to create a functional and sustainable system for the sharing of Geospatial Information in the context of the Greek legal system. The success of Law 3882/2010 is something yet to be tested in its implementation. However, the author concludes that it is significant as a model for increasing administrative capacity in dealing with open data. This report demonstrates the value of the EU focus on INSPIRE and PSI legislation.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • A little bit of federated Open Notebook Science

      Jean-Claude Bradley is the master when it comes to organising collaborations around diverse sets of online tools. The UsefulChem and Open Notebook Science Challenge projects both revolved around the use of wikis, blogs, GoogleDocs, video, ChemSpider and whatever tools are appropriate for the job at hand. This is something that has grown up over time but is at least partially formally organised. At some level the tools that get used are the ones Jean-Claude decides will be used and it is in part his uncompromising attitude to how the project works (if you want to be involved you interact on the project’s terms) that makes this work effectively.

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Great Disconnect: Scholars Without Libraries

        This naming of a threat seemed interesting when read in connection with Steven Bell’s recent ACRLog post, “Underground Resource Sharing,” in which he related the outrage over Netflixgate to a blog post by a scholar who was horrified to discover that once he finished his degree, the library cut him off from JSTOR. (Apparently he thought an alumni association deal would keep the connection open to everything; anyone who has had to negotiate a license agreement to spend over ten thousand dollars to share two seats across the total population of three institutions, each kicking in over 10K for the privilege is now rolling around on the floor laughing so hard it hurts. Or … well, it hurts, anyway.) How was he supposed to get any work done? He reported feeling a “fresh surge of hatred” for his alma mater. (Excuse me, but does this mean everything you publish in future will be open access? Whose fault is it that research findings have to be paid for and fenced off? You’ll find a hint if you look in the mirror.) Comments on his post pointed out that, duh, you just get a friend to send articles to you, or you join a Facebook or FriendFeed group dedicated to swapping articles or just get somebody’s login. Too bad we spent so much on EEBO – apparently everyone has a bootleg login.

Leftovers

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Europe should keep the internet open

      Who gets to decide what you do on the internet: you or your internet service provider? Until recently, the answer was simple: you decide which services and websites you want visit. This is changing rapidly, however. Most internet providers want to restrict your internet traffic. Unless the European Commission prohibits them from doing so. Bits of Freedom together with EDRi on 30 September 2010 urged the European Commission to prohibit this. If you have 5 minutes, you can do the same.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • P2P Backed Film Platform to Reward Influencers

        Supported by a conglomerate of file-sharing sites and applications, the VODO project offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers. The model has already proven itself as all major releases have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. However, to really tap into the core of peer-to-peer distribution, the focus will now shift to peer-to-peer promotion.

      • Top Legal Experts Explore Reforms to Copyright Law

        Berkeley, CA-September 28, 2010…A group of leading experts on copyright law and policy released a report today that explores ideas for meaningful reforms to the U.S. copyright system. Crafted over three years by a group of legal academics, private practitioners, and corporate attorneys, the report examines several ways to improve and update the law in an era of rapid technological change.

      • UK Law Firm Gallant Macmillan Taken Offline In Revenge Attacks

        Law firm Gallant & Macmillan, which was threatened with a DDos attack by 4chan yesterday, appears to have disappeared from the internet. It is unclear whether the host disconnected the domain in advance of the attack or whether Gallant & Macmillan is now the latest company to be forced offline through traffic overload.

        Anonymous group 4chan began waging war on copyright bodies and solicitors involved in accusing internet users of copyright infringement as part of what it described as a ‘operation payback’.

      • Gallant Macmillan – site is down but 4chan not to blame? Who’s next?

        It’s being reported by some tech writers that Gallant Macmillan might have been taken down with a new ddos by users from 4chan (It also suggests the possibility that the site was taken down intentionally by its owners.)

      • ACS:Law Boss: I Feel Defeated And Could Go Bankrupt

        After disgruntled letter recipients mailed off a barrage of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority against ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, he told his advisor that not only did he “feel defeated” but that in his long-term interests it might be better if he “shut up shop”. Doing so, he explained, would bankrupt him.

      • Third Blender film available to download

        In just under 15 minutes, the film narrates a traditional fantasy story with all the pathos expected from the genre – a young female warrior called Sintel finds an injured baby dragon and nurses it back to health. When the baby dragon, barely able to fly, is kidnapped by a powerful older dragon, Sintel takes up the pursuit.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

QuestionCopyright.org: Street Interviews About Copyright, Chicago, June 2006 (2006)


Credit: TinyOgg

10.02.10

Links 2/10/2010: Wine 1.3.4, Firefox Claimed at 70% in Indonesia

Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux on TV: ‘The Glades’ – detectives run GNOME on a Windows-branded PC

    The detectives, no doubt eager to solve their case, save money & get it all done a little bit faster, are running a GNOME-based operating system on Windows branded HP computers.

  • Linux News Roundup: Fedora 14 Gets MeeGo, Madriva Is Reborn

  • Server

    • Identi.ca and WordPress.com Sharing Service

      As I recently discovered WordPress.com has a pretty neat sharing service support. It essentially adds a bunch of social network links to the bottom of your pages. Which makes a lot of sense, because every content provider (e.g. a blogger) would like their content to be spread to the world and what better way to archive this than by giving the user the means to easily share something they like or find interesting.

      One problem though. Since I am a free software advocate and suppose that you, my readers, are too, I prefer Identi.ca (which is using a free software microblogging software) over Twitter. Yet WordPress.com does not have a share button for Identi.ca…

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Kindle 3 Kernel

      I really dig the Kindle 3. The small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability. As my friend Chris put it, “as soon as I turned it on I realized I did the right thing.”

      For the curious, I got ahold of the Kindle 3′s source code and generated a patch against 2.6.26 (I did the same for the Kindle 1′s kernel).

    • Linux 2.6.32.24 stable kernel update
    • Thoughts on Linux multitouch

      Two weeks ago, I was in Toulouse, France, at a multitouch workshop organised by Stèphane Chatty. After the workshop, in the same week was XDS. The workshop had a nice mix of people, Benjamin Tissoires whom I credit with kicking off much of the multitouch work with his evdev hacks, Pengfei, a PhD student of Stèphane, and Chase Douglas from Canonical, involved with their multitouch efforts. Ping Cheng from Wacom, Gowri Ries and Pascal Auriel from Stantum represented the hardware side. And Zeno Albisser and Denis Dzyubenko from Nokia for the toolkit side (Qt). We talked multitouch for two days and I think we got a lot done – not in code but in concepts and general design questions. The current state is essentially that both hardware and software guys are waiting on us, the X server, to integrate multitouch.

  • Applications

    • REDCap: A Tool for Collecting Clinical Trials Data

      In the course of my day job I tend to get drawn into interesting niche projects because of my Linux expertise. Recall that the Mothership (that corporate entity located somewhere on the East coat which pays me fairly well to work for them) is *shudder* a Windows shop, primarily.

      However, Open Source Software is making not-too-subtle encroachments into even this bastion of All Windows All The Time. I got a call one day a couple of weeks ago from a semi-stressed project leader who at the suggestion of the client was being encouraged to use an application built entirely out of open source components. We have it running on a virtual Linux server. It’s called REDCap, and was developed by Vanderbilt University. Basically, it is a web-based interface to an underlying mysql engine. It is a highly specialized database tool developed specifically to support data collection for clinical studies.

    • command line alternatives to wget and so much better!

      Most people including myself are hooked on using wget to do whatever quickies that we need to do on our servers. I use it in my scripts, crontab entries and even site mirroring and web crawling.

    • Proprietary

      • AutoCad

        AutoCad which is frequently touted as a killer app unavailable on GNU/Linux has some new developments:

        * some cloud services which may with GNU/Linux to view drawings via a browser

        [...]

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

      • Wine 1.3.4 Adds New Features, Supports ARM

        New to Wine 1.3.4 is support for right-to-left mirrored windows, Winelib now supporting the ARM architecture, a new taskkill.exe built-in application, the Inetcpl control panel being fleshed out, AcceptEx has been implemented, and there’s improved security checks for SSL connections. There’s also the usual translation updates and bug-fixes. The Wine library now supporting the ARM architecture is good for those interested in wanting to run Windows applications on your ARM-based netbooks or other mobile-focused devices.

    • Games

      • Catalyst Deluxe And Anirah Released !

        If you like MahJongg and solitaire card style games then you would be happy to learn that two games were recently released, one is free as a beer, other cost $10.
        Those games are made by the indie company named Lost Luggage Studios.

      • The Linux Box – a conceptual open source gaming platform

        Would you buy an open source gaming console? How about some purpose made open source gaming software that you could install on your computer? Do you think there is a market for this?

        [...]

        The latter two are already familiar concepts, with games already available for download on many platforms (Steam, App Store, Android Market, Ubuntu Software Center etc) and as you should all know, games have been available for purchase from a store since… well… since ever.

      • 10 is the magic number – of Linux gaming compilations

        Welcome to the tenth mega compilation of Linux games. The magic number! … one more … This time, I truly do not have any grand opening. The only thing I’d like to mention is that the games included in the Humble Indie Bundle, as mentioned in my Linux news article, will be reviewed separately, in the eleventh compilation.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+3 Completes Its Rendering Clean-Up

        Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat in a financial-news nutshell

        Those of us who write for the insular world of the open-source-software enthusiast don’t often think about how the rest of the planet looks at Linux and other free software.

      • Money Flow Positive for Red Hat, Inc.; RHT
      • Red Hat near Resistance
      • OSS nets Red Hat prize

        Red Hat says the award recognised OSS as the most successful Advanced Business Partner in the region this year and acknowledges its work migrating datacentres at major corporates locally to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform.

      • Fedora

        • McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project

          What am I talking about? HTML5 and javascript. Javascript has gotten significantly faster in just the last two years. In some cases over 100 times faster then just 2 years ago. Who drove that? Google and Chrome. Why did they do it? They realize HTML5 is disruptive technology. What we think of advanced “web technologies” today, are still based on html 4.01. Not changed in over 10 years. Ajax was a nice addition 7 or so years back but the foundations, the primitives are 10 years old.

        • Fedora Updates Policy

          Yes, finally there’s an updated updates policy for Fedora.

          I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point.

          I was writing a more or less deep review of the document, but my internet connection failed, Chromium crashed (!), and here I am writing this post again, so instead of explaining something that you can read yourself in the policy page, I’m going to focus in the most interesting part: the releases.

          The updates on the branched release are divided into pre beta, beta to pre release, pre release and release. Although the updates policy helps to have a more solid release, the updates after the release are a very important part of the user experience (for example, it’s an excellent way to polish the rough edges of the release).

    • Debian Family

      • Is Linux Mint Debian Edition All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

        There are a number of different operating systems today based on the latest Linux kernel, and because Linux itself happens to be open source, anyone can monopolize on the concept and create their own Linux distribution, Ubuntu being one of the distros that rose from the dust of the once great Debian. Debian was an excellent distribution in it’s day, but it fell out of favor for a number of reasons…

      • SimplyMEPIS 8.5 [Review]

        MEPIS is a Linux distribution (a.k.a “distro”) that is designed to give new users a no frills experiece when trying it for the first time. It is based on Debian and gives users the option of either running it as a LiveCD or installing it permanently on your hard drive. When run in the LiveCD mode, the OS gives users the ability to test drive the OS from either their USB stick or a DVD and explore all the available features without making any permanent changes to the filesystem of the host machine. This would mean that you could try this distro on your MAC or Windows PC and then install it later if you so choose.

        [...]

        Eventually, it comes down to you, the user. With MEPIS 11 in the pipeline and Linux distributions available dime a dozen for you to test, MEPIS or any other popular distro would be ideal for you if you want to break free (literally `0) from the shackles you are wearing while using proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows. The community fourms are always there to help if you do have any questions and the least you could do is try the LiveCD for yourself and see if it suits your needs.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Gives Maverick a shot in the ARM

          Amongst the many improvements the Ubuntu ARM team have made happen this cycle are support for the community-driven, high-performance, embedded Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 mobile development OMAP4 Panda board and the forthcoming Beagle board XM which boasts 512mb of low-power RAM and a nippy 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor.

        • Spreadubuntu Logo

          Spreadubuntu is a repository for marketing material by and for the community, with the goal of increasing the market share of Ubuntu.

          It will see a theme update soon, to match the new visual identity of Ubuntu. I have been kindly asked to help with the logo.

        • This week in design – 1 October 2010
        • Ubuntu emoticons
        • New t-shirts
        • Observations On Long-Term Performance/Regression Testing

          At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” RC Comes Out With a Ton of Improvements

          Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release candidate is here and it’s packed with a slew of new features. The amount of changes happening with Ubuntu lately is quite overwhelming. Here’s a quick look through the improvements in the new Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android 2.2.1 Update Appears for Nexus One

          Google’s flagship device, the Nexus One, is always the first phone to receive the latest software updates. It was the first to obtain the initial over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) and this update provided the basis for much development and discussion across the site.

        • Android IM apps: which one should you use?

          I’m a big fan of instant messaging apps. They’re fun and easy—plus, like Google Voice, they’re sometimes a money-saving alternative to texting via your mobile number. Living on the west coast, they’re one way I keep in touch with my east coast family, especially my busy brother and my mom, who loves her iPad’s expandable, easy-on-the-eyes fonts. Plus, I sometimes ping Ars’ staff on their IM accounts to work out stories (hey Nate, Eric!).

    • Tablets

      • StarNet Brings Fast, Secure Linux Desktops to iPad

        StarNet Communications of Sunnyvale, California, a leading developer of X11 connectivity solutions, announced iLIVEx, a fast, secure and fault-tolerant X11 client that turns the Apple iPad into an X terminal for powerful Linux and Unix mainframe and supercomputers.

        iLIVEx is available from the App Store for $14.99. It allows iPad users to connect to Unix and Linux desktops and applications hosted on remote Unix and Linux servers. iLIVEx features an ultra-thin data transfer protocol allowing for LAN-like performance, even over 3G connections. iLIVEx connections also run over securely encrypted SSH tunnels. Built-in session persistency allows users to reconnect to their remote desktops should the iPad get disconnected, turned off or the user temporarily switches to another iPad app.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The 7 principles of successful open source communities [Flash/Video]
  • Lightspark May Work Towards A Gallium3D State Tracker

    We have previously reported on Lightspark working on a new graphics engine for this open-source project to implement the Adobe Flash/SWF specification. This new graphics engine leverages OpenGL and Cairo, but now the lead developer is considering a different approach.

  • Keeping Free Software/Open Source Vendors Honest

    I really like the recent trend of communities forking free software projects when they become unhappy with the direction that the parent company or organization is taking. The first example of this in my memory was when the creator of MySQL, Michael Widenius, created a fork called MariaDB due to his unhappiness with the purchase of Sun Microsytems by Oracle. Widenius feared that Oracle would damage or destroy MySQL, the free software database that his blood, sweat, and tears created and that Sun faithfully supported. Recent events have shown that his fears were valid. More recently, former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation created a fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice due to similar fears. Today, it was announced that some members of the Madriva community have created a Mandriva fork called Mageia because they no longer trust the direction in which Mandriva is being taken.

  • Forking Time

    MySQL alone has had at least four forks (Percona, Our Delta, MariaDB, and Drizzle).

  • Integration Watch: The myth of open-source forking

    Core developers of large projects are almost always paid developers. This is true for Eclipse, JBoss, Red Hat, most Google projects and, notably, OpenSolaris, among many others. These developers are either employees of companies that have a commercial interest in the finished product, or that derive revenue from ongoing support of the product. These developers, then, don’t have any reason to join a fork. In fact, they have strong reasons not to.

  • Events

    • The European way of open source

      One thing I have learned at the Open World Forum is that Europe’s approach to open source is highly political, but not in the way you think.

    • Connecting the Social Web with OStatus at Future of Web Apps in London

      Sometimes late, but always on time, Future of Web Apps added me as a speaker this week to the Carsonified-powered Future of Web Apps London event. After some swapping my schedule around since I’ve been speaking about the Federated Social Web at Joi Ito and Digital Garage’s New Context Conference in Tokyo, I’l be speaking mid-day in London about connecting the social web.

    • Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

      The last decade has seen many open source activities run for the benefit of a single company, but the roots of software freedom can be found in the synchronisation of part of the interests of many equal participants. The next phase of open source should embrace “open-by-rule” and have the liberties of every participant respected equally. We have already seen OpenStack and The Document Foundation arise; I believe there will be more.

      The benefits that businesses derive from open source – especially flexibility, vendor independence and the cost savings that result from both through accelerated and simplified procurement – arise from Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Jeffrey Hammond presented research showing lower barriers to adoption of open source software in enterprises as their understanding of and comfort with open source improve.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • So how on earth did Firefox reach 70% market share in Indonesia?

        Mozilla is paying special attention to Indonesia these days because Firefox has become the leading browser in the country with up to 70 percent market share. Exactly why, we’re unfortunately as baffled as Mozilla is.

        On Sept 27, the Mozilla Foundation’s chairperson, Mitchell Baker, and its director of Asia business development, Gen Kanai, and id-mozilla, the Indonesian Mozilla community, held a public talk at Blitz Megaplex at Pacific Place in Jakarta about Mozilla’s market-leading position in Indonesia.

      • Firefox says Swiss Consumer Protection office not to be trusted

        I’m not sure if my hat is going off to Firefox for being a good watchdog, or to the Swiss Consumer Protection office, ironically, for slipping up on this one. I wanted to see their new web page on how to find out where your wooden furniture (and other objects) comes from.

      • GNUzilla – News: GNU IceCat 3.6.10 released

        This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.10.

        Now the privacy extension gives an alert everytime a bookmark containing javascript code is stored.

        Now, by default, HTML5 local storage is disabled. If you desire it, then it must be manually enabled.

      • Mitchell Baker on This Week in Asia podcast

        Mitchell was interviewed by Bernard Leong and Daniel Cerventus, two of the hosts of This Week in Asia podcast.

      • The Future of the Web: How Firefox Panorama and Aza Raskin will shape the Web

        When you are designing and creating a browser that’s used by 400,000,000 users of the Web, it goes without saying that a lot of responsibility lies in your hands. A crippling bug or fundamentally flawed user interface not only turns people away from your browser, but from the entire Internet. When a geriatric user with Window Me and IE6 announces that they can’t make a website work, it’s not their fault. It’s not the Web’s fault either: it’s the browser! Fortunately, a rather gifted designer is at the helm of Firefox.

  • Databases

    • MySQL fork Drizzle goes beta

      With the release of Build 1802, Drizzle, the community driven fork of MySQL, is now officially “beta” software. The new version includes an enhanced version of drizzledump which can now be used to migrate databases from MySQL to Drizzle without any intermediate files. When connected to a Drizzle server it will perform a normal dump, but it it detects a MySQL server it converts all structures and data into a Drizzle compatible format which can be sent directly to a Drizzle server.

    • MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

      MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.

      The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don’t expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

  • Oracle

    • Oracle is an open source of concern

      BY VIRTUE of its purchase of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle has acquired not just a venerable computer hardware maker but some of the open source community’s best-known applications and building blocks, ranging from database MySQL to the Java platform to operating system Solaris.

      Even the free and popular Microsoft Office challenger Open Office now belongs to Oracle.

      Oracle isn’t a newcomer to open source – software that is community-produced by developers, often made available at zero or nominal cost, with the software code freely available to anyone to examine or modify. It has long supported many open-source applications and has been a champion of open-source operating system Linux for years.

      [...]

      To kick things off, James Gosling, the eminent Sun engineer who created Java – a computing platform that was designed to enable developers to write a program once then run it in any computing environment – quit Oracle soon after he became an employee by virtue of its purchase of Sun.

  • CMS

    • Learning Drupal Fundamentals

      Since many of you have your own open-source projects to promote and support, but may not be as well-versed in web development, I will create an open-source project site for the Billix distribution to demonstrate site building. When you’d like to expand beyond your SourceForge page, you can turn to Drupal.

    • The Awesome Croogo – Free and Open-Source PHP CMS

      Croogo is a free, open source, content management system for PHP. It is built on top of the popular MVC framework CakePHP and is targeted towards developers, designers and administrators. It was first released on October 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal, and continued to see 6 more releases in less than a year. The project is currently at version 1.3.2 beta, and is being actively developed.

  • Education

    • RMS and I, Teaching the Kids

      I had an interesting class with my grade 9 students today. Usually it is very hard to keep their attention long. Today, I played a video of Richard M Stallman speaking in a college lecture theatre about Free Software. They gave him rapt attention. They got it. I followed up with a bit of history of GNU, Linux and the SCOG v World saga.

  • Government

    • UK Adopts Open Government License for everything: Why it’s good and what it means

      Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information.

      On the National Archives website, the UK Government made public its new license for managing software, documents and data created by the government. The document is both far reaching and forward looking. Indeed, I believe this policy may be the boldest and most progressive step taken by a government since the United States decided that documents created by the US government would directly enter the public domain and not be copyrighted.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Video Labs: P2P Next Community CDN for Video Distribution

      As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more. One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.

    • Data

      • Open Source Policy Map: suggestions for getting started (student project)

        Thanks for your reply – it inspired me to go back and do a little more poking around, in the hopes of giving you more resources to get started. How to do everything is ultimately up to you – consider these notes as options you can choose whether or not to take, possible pointers for places to look if you’re unsure where to begin.

        On the technical side, I’d suggest looking at the OpenGeo stack, in particular the OpenLayers javascript library, for implementation. It’s an open source mapping library and they have very supportive core developers and a growing community. Some documentation:

        http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers-intro/

        http://docs.openlayers.org/

        http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/

      • How to be a data journalist

    • Open Hardware

      • On Feminism and Microcontrollers

        Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.

        We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Google JPEG alternative aims to speed up the Web

      In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65 percent of the bytes on the Web.

      Google announced late Thursday afternoon that it’s releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it’s dubbed WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.

    • Pytextstat 1.0

Leftovers

  • Explore the world with Street View, now on all seven continents

    To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island – such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.

    We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Ancient giant penguin unearthed in Peru

      The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been discovered in Peru.

      Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were present quite early on in penguin evolution.

      The team told Science magazine that the animal’s feathers were brown and grey, distinct from the black “tuxedo” look of modern penguins.

  • Finance

    • Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign

      Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign

      10. Under Buffett’s protection since 2008

      9. Putting the zero in zero-sum game.

      8. Government Bailout: $29 billion
      SEC Settlement: $550 million
      Doing God’s work? Priceless.

      7. Helping you forget about Bernie Madoff one CDO at a time

      6. Goldman Sachs: America’s Counterparty

      5. Let us do for you what we did for Greece.

      4. Like we give a fuck what you think about us . . .

      3. Goldman Sachs: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s JPMorgan.

      2. The Rothschilds were Pussies

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • The stench of dictatorship

      The raids carried out by the FBI against antiwar activists last week are an ominous warning to the entire working class. The police-state tactics show the extent to which basic democratic rights—including the right to free speech and political association—have been undermined in the US.

      The Obama administration ordered the invasion of the homes of several individuals—primarily members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)—and the seizure of documents, computers, cell phones, cameras and other personal and political material. Those targeted have been summoned to appear before a grand jury on October 12 and may face criminal prosecution for “material support” for terrorism.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Web founder warns of Internet disconnect law ‘blight’

      Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, warned Tuesday of the “blight” of new laws being introduced across the globe allowing people to be cut off from the Internet.

      “There’s been a rash of laws trying to give governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) the right and the duty to disconnect people,” he told a conference on web science at the Royal Society in London.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • [CC Labs] October 2010 Tech Update

        Inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation, I wanted to give a brief update on the past month’s technology work at Creative Commons.

      • Boy Scout Magazine Says Don’t Listen To Legally Burned CDs, As They’re Too Similar To Piracy

        Four years ago, the MPAA worked with the local Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America to create a special “activity patch” for Boy Scouts to repeat propaganda about how evil file sharing is. For some reason, that story got renewed attention earlier this year, when a few sources came across the 2006 story without checking the date on it. While there’s really nothing new on that story, it does appear that the Boy Scouts are making some absolutely ridiculous suggestions to parents about how to talk to your kids about copyright issues.

        That link is to an article in the latest issue of Scouting Magazine, supposedly about the “ethics” of file sharing, and how parents should talk to their children about it. And, yet, it’s entirely one-sided, quoting the RIAA’s claims about “losses,” but oddly leaving out the stacks upon stacks upon stacks upon stacks of research showing that musicians are making more money these days, via alternative business models. You would think that would be a relevant part of the discussion… but it’s totally absent. Someone, apparently, failed their “research the facts” merit badge.

        But where the article goes totally off the rails is in telling parents that their children are too stupid to understand the nuances of copyright law, and because of that, they should take an extreme position: one so extreme that they shouldn’t even listen to legally burned CDs…

      • Anti-Piracy Lawyers Face DDoS Before Pivotal Court Decision

        Undeterred by the online destruction of ACS:Law, UK lawyers Gallant Macmillan will head off to the High Court on Monday to demand the identities of hundreds more people they claim have been detected sharing files online. While the ISP that holds the identities says it will resist the demand and ask for the hearing to be adjourned, the judge and jury of Operation Payback will pass down their verdict tomorrow, sentencing Gallant Macmillan to a DDoS attack.

      • ACTA

        • Danger of international accord on repressive policies in final ACTA talks, says RSF

          As the 11th round of negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) gets under way in Tokyo, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its opposition to the way these talks are being held behind closed doors without democratic consultation and to the potentially repressive positions being taken by the countries involved. The negotiators aim to conclude the accord or at least finalize its main points, but the latest draft is unacceptable and must be changed if not abandoned altogether.

          According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.

        • Deal or No Deal?: Japan ACTA Round Ends With Near Agreement

          The Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations concluded earlier today with countries saying that they “resolved nearly all substantive issues and produced a consolidated and largely finalized text.” Earlier reports from Reuters indicated that the latest round of ACTA negotiations in Tokyo, Japan has failed to produce an agreement. That report indicated that there is still disagreement over scope, including geographical indications and patents. A later report indicated that there was a basic agreement.

        • Joint Statement From All The Negociating Parties to ACTA

          The 11th and final round of the negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was concluded successfully in Tokyo, Japan on October 2. The Government of Japan hosted the negotiations.

        • Global anti-counterfeiting agreement still weeks away

          Negotiators for an international anti-counterfeit accord failed to reach agreement after more than a week of talks on Saturday, but European Union officials said a final deal was just weeks away.

        • ACTA Truth or Pravda?

          ABC reports that Agreement Reached in Tokyo Anti-Counterfeiting Talks

          I tried to comment on the article, but even after jumping through hoops, it wouldn’t let me. If it has to pass a moderator my comment is certainly dead in the water. Which is a good reason to have a blog, so I can comment on articles full of misinformation like this one.

          Why shouldn’t Kraft be prevented from calling their product “Parmesan” or have to pay royalties to Parma, Cognac, Roquefort or Champagne for infringing on these legally trademarked names? Isn’t that the point? REAL Parmesan cheese comes from Parma. Kraft’s Parmesan Cheese is COUNTERFEIT. That’s what ACTA is all about… stopping piracy, right?

          Isn’t that why they want these laws? So THEY get paid every time. But paying someone else is a problem. They don’t want to have to pay others, I guess they like the RIAA/CRIA music business model where everything possible is done to avoid actually paying the artists.

      • Canada

Clip of the Day

Konsole Demo


On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRBoi1At_0

10.01.10

Links 1/10/2010: Sabayon GNU/Linux 5.4, MeeGo Linux Can Run on Google-branded Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Leftovers

  • Arm Plans to Add Multithreading to Chip Design

    Arm plans to add multithreading capabilities to future architectures as it tries to boost the performance of its processors, a company representative said on Tuesday.

    The company is looking to include multithreading capabilities depending on application requirements in different segments, said Kumaran Siva, segment marketing manager at Arm, at the Linley Tech Processor conference in San Jose, California.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Mexican Government Answers KEI’s Concerns About ACTA

          KEI has received a letter dated September 28, 2010, from Lic. Alfredo Rendón Algara – Director General Adjunto de Propiedad Industrial of Mexico (IMPI). The letter from the Mexican government is in response to KEI’s earlier letter to C. Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, Presidente Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, regarding the position of the Mexican government in the ACTA negotiations. (See also the reply from the President, here). In general, the letter is defensive, and fails to engage in most of the substantive concerns of our earlier letter.

          The following are notes from the letter of Lic. Alfredo Rendón Algara:

          The letters claims that “the deteriorated international trade”, “the intimate connection” between piracy and terrorism, specially on music, the losses produced by “Chinese and pirate” goods, and “the obsolescence of previous international instrument on intellectual property” are the main reasons that move the Mexican government to become part of the negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Clip of the Day

Bruno Haible – “Contributing Reusable Code to Gnulib”


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 1/10/2010: Fedora Hiring, Ubuntu Starts Mobile Music Streaming, WebP Comes From Google

Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Marcan Names PS3 Linux Bootloader on Firmware 3.41 AsbestOS

    Nintendo Wii developer Marcan has been sharing updates via Twitter on his progress with a PS3 Linux bootloader, one that is currently working on PlayStation 3 Firmware 3.41 (including on the PS3 Slim) and now named AsbestOS.

  • Desktop

    • 5 Things Linux Does Better Than Mac OS X

      I think the success of the Mac is mostly a matter of marketing. Whatever your own personal beliefs, though, there’s no denying that there are certain things Linux clearly does better than Mac OS X. If you’re trying to decide on a platform for your business, these factors are worth keeping in mind.

    • The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest Finalists

      I apologize for the long delay of presenting the finalists of our $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest. But, as they say, it’s better late than never. So today, I’m going to present to you the 5 finalists, and we will let our readers and site visitors ultimately decide on who really deserves to win the most coveted price.

  • Server

    • A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations

      What does facebook sysadmins have to support?

      * Monthly 700 million minutes of time spent on fb
      * 6billion pieces of content updated
      * 3 billion photos
      * 1 million connect implementations
      * 1/2 billion active users

      Infrastructure Growth

      * fb reached a limit on leasing datacenter space
      * fb is building their own http://www.facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter
      * currently serving out of california and Virginia

      Initially a LAMP stack. LB -> Web Servers -> Services/Memcached/Databases

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • ATI R600 Classic Mesa 7.9 Performance

        As we have talked about in numerous articles now and delivered various benchmarks for different graphics processors from those using a classic Mesa DRI driver to the newer NVIDIA/ATI hardware with Gallium3D support, Mesa 7.9 brings a lot to the table. There are many new features to be found in Mesa 7.9 for all drivers, but in this article, we are specifically looking to see how the OpenGL performance of the classic R600 driver has changed compared to Mesa 7.7 and Mesa 7.8.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Panel Discussion – Death of the Desktop @ COSSFest 2010 [Flash/Video]

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • On the fly Preview on Quanta (also, my first real code for KDE)

        Since I begin to use KDE, my big desire It was to contribut with code, but I would have to study different things (indeed that was what I wanted the most: a challenge), and I admit that I thought many times that I would never be able to do it. So I decided to make talks about “KDE for Beginners” (beginners like I was), It was a quickly way to promote and contribut to FOSS, more quickly than to develop.

        I made one talk before Akademy, in the Seminar of Free Software Tchelinux at Caxias do Sul, and after, I made two talks, one at International Free Software Forum and the other happened in the 4th Seminar of Free Software Tchelinux at Pelotas. In these talks I met more KDE users, and who knows coming soon contributors as well.

  • Distributions

    • Linux Distro as Food ?

      Debian

      The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Debian comes with over 20,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) – all of it free.

    • Reviews

      • Review: ArchBang 2010.09 “apeiro”

        Overall, I think ArchBang has regressed a bit from its testing version, from not loading properly under 192 MB of RAM where the previous version could to not being able to handle Mozilla Firefox at all. It has a lot of potential, but I’m intentionally damning it with faint praise, as it definitely could use more polish and more testing. While #! has never failed me in this regard, #!’s website and documentation always includes the warning, “CrunchBang Linux is not recommended for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. CrunchBang Linux could possibly make your computer go CRUNCH! BANG!” While I think it’s funny that #! phrases its disclaimer in this way and is upfront about any possible stability problem, I find it odd that #! has this warning at all given its stability; I think ArchBang needs a similar warning, though what does “ARCH! BANG!” mean?

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • New development release name has been chosen, Cauldron!

        In Mandriva the development release was named Cooker. The development release of Mageia will be, like Cooker, a rolling distro. The idea here is that any new packages go into the development release first, where they’re tested and any bugs found in them are fixed; then when the development cycle nears its end the repositories are frozen in preparation for pushing a new stable release (after that the development distro starts again). Of course it’s not recommended to run development releases on day-to-day production machines as, by its very nature, it’s unstable and prone to break. Things tend to break quite a good number of times in development releases however they get fixed pretty fast too, so if you like living on the cutting edge don’t hesitate to join forces with those brave souls who’ll be testing Cauldron; the more the testers the better the stable release that’ll follow as more bugs will get squashed this way.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 Beta is released! Screenshot Tour
        • You must be this tall to ride: __

          How do you get contributors? You recruit from your pool of users! How do you get users, to widen your potential contributor pool and to spread your free software / free culture message? You reach out to them, providing them a compelling reason to care. Okay, great, that’s easy right? We just get out there and send our message out – it’s a great cause – folks will want to help, right?

        • Fedora is hiring

          People regularly ask me about how they can work for Red Hat, specifically, how they can work on Fedora for Red Hat. Usually, my answer is “Contribute, do good work, get noticed, and you’re likely to be hired”, but at the moment, two positions have opened up.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat — First Impressions

          Wow.

          That’s what I can say about Maverick so far.

        • Canonical announces Ubuntu One music streaming service

          The Ubuntu One service originally launched last year with cloud file storage capabilities and support for synchronizing the user’s e-mail address book and notes. Canonical later added the Ubuntu One music store, which integrates into GNOME’s Rhythmbox audio player. When the user purchases music from the store, the files are deployed directly into their Ubuntu One cloud storage space and are automatically propagated to all of the computers that the user has connected to Ubuntu One. The new music streaming feature complements the music store by giving the user mobile access to their music. It’s worth noting that the streaming feature works with any MP3 that the user uploads to their Ubuntu One storage account, not just the songs that they have purchased from the Ubuntu One music store.

        • Ubuntu One Blog: Mobile music streaming public beta now available
        • Future Ubuntu Releases Will be Shipped With LibreOffice, Says Mark Shuttleworth

          OpenOffice’s future was doomed from the day when Oracle acquired SUN Microsystems. The eventuality became even more obvious when they pulled the plug on OpenSolaris. Thankfully, OpenOffice is an open source software and leading contributors of the original project has forked OpenOffice and the new project will be called LibreOffice.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 RC Available for Download Now

          A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the Release Candidate (RC) version of the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.

        • Using Ubuntu One Cloud Storage: From Basic to Creative

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Lubuntu Maverick Beta 2 iso available

            Julian Lavergne has released the Lubuntu Maverick Beta 2 iso is now available for testing. This is the last testing iso before the final release of Lubuntu 10.10. As the iso is still not build with Ubuntu architecture, this release and the final one will be named “Beta”.

          • GnackTrack

            GnackTrack is a Live (and installable) Linux distibution designed for Penetration Testing and is based on Ubuntu. Although this sounds like BackTrack, it’s most certainly not; it’s very similar but based on the much loved GNOME!

  • Devices/Embedded

    • MIPS touts its quad-core IP as an Atom-beater

      Android was specifically cited as an operating system platform for the latter, but the 1074K CPS is said to run any MIPS32-compatible software, which would include Linux and Windows CE. At CES in January of this year, MIPS showed off a number of Android-based set-top box designs from its partners using MIPS-based Sigma Designs processors.

      The 1074K CPS core is supported by tools from CodeSourcery, CriticalBlue and others, including MIPS Technologies’ own development tools and probes, and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) versions of Linux, MIPS adds.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • O.S.A.N. Accouncement

    This is a community project. Its goal is to advertise Free / Libre / Open Source Software and Projects among the community and on non-commercial web sites. Nobody is making money out of this. Publishing banners and text advertisments is free for FLOSS projects. Likewise there is only a good feeling to be earned by hosting our ads. No money involved nowhere.

  • Nagios Trademark Truth

    I would greatly appreciate the Nagios Community’s assistance in helping me to resolve this issue by pressuring NETWAYS and Julian Hein to do the right thing and return what is not rightfully theirs.

  • Nagios Trademark Statement

    Nagios Enterprises posted a blogpost at their community site, accusing me, Julian Hein the owner and managing director of NETWAYS to have taken away their Nagios trademark and that they want it back. While some of the facts in the blogpost are true, some assumptions are not, some are taken out of their context and some may be just a result of misunderstandings.

  • Events

    • Open World Forum keynote panel: Challenges of open communities

      During this afternoon’s final keynotes at the Open World Forum, five panelists met to discuss a few of the challenges of geographical and physical barriers open communities face.

      The panel was moderated by Cedric Thomas, CEO, OW2 Consortium, who was joined by:

      * Bertrand Delacretaz, Director, Apache Software Foundation
      * Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation
      * Simon Phipps, Director, Open Source Initiative, Chief Strategy Officer, ForgeRock
      * Louis Suarez-Potts, Open Office Community Manager, Oracle

  • Web Browsers

    • 2 Simple Chromium Extensions For Ubuntu Users

      We featured a post on ‘Three Must have Firefox Add-ons for Ubuntu Users’ some time back. I wanted to do a similar post for Chrome/Chromium but could not find many extensions specifically made for Ubuntu users. So I decided to share these two extensions available as of now.

    • Warning: Google Chrome Apparently *Removing* Key Privacy Feature

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla CTO: Why Firefox wins over Chrome

        Eich noted however that the upcoming Firefox 4 release will compete well in the speed category against Chrome. But speed and a minimal user interface alone are not what will continue to make Firefox a great browser. He added that at one point Google approached him to try and get the Chrome engine into Firefox, but that didn’t work out due to both technical and philosophical reasons.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • Let’s Open Joomla! to a Wider Audience

      Until now have already ported other famous Web applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, and phpBB. Today Joomla is one of them! We did our best to make a smart porting. We haven’t altered a single functionality of the Joomla package, but created the CUBRID intermediary classes which parse the original MySQL queries to CUBRID compatible queries. At this moment the developers focused on bringing the CUBRID support. The final stable release will allow users to deploy the same Joomla distribution with both CUBRID and MySQL Database systems with no difference except for the performance. As we mentioned in the previous blog, the final stable version is expected to have higher performance on CUBRID than on MySQL due to the Web optimizations of the CUBRID Database. Let’s cross our fingers for this.

  • Oracle

    • Goodbye OpenOffice. LibreOffice, Here I Come!

      I loved OpenOffice! For 6 years, OpenOffice was my bedrock and one of the key tools that allowed me to free myself from the chains of proprietary software. For that, I will forever be grateful. I am certain that the affection that I had for OpenOffice and its development team will be reborn as I discover LibreOffice. It would be pretty cool if the entire OpenOffice Team signed and sent a resignation letter to Oracle stating that they would be moving to the Document Foundation. Can you imagine the deafening silence when Oracle tried to recruit people to work on OpenOffice? One thing that Oracle did not realize is how badly they shot themselves in the foot when they decided to sue Google. Google has some very powerful friends in the form of Redhat, Canonical, and Novell. It is not surprising that all of these friends now support LibreOffice. I too will be supporting LibreOffice as I wave my old friend OpenOffice goodbye. It was great knowing you. LibreOffice, here I come!

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

    • BlackBerry Widgets Renamed WebWorks, Goes Open Source

      BlackBerry Widgets, a web-based development platform RIM had released in October, has been renamed WebWorks, and will be an open-source project. Using the BlackBerry Web App Packager, developers will be able to create full-fledged programs using familiar web languages, like HTML5, CSS, XML and the like.

  • BSD

    • I brought out the OpenBSD 4.7-stable laptop and ran the latest patch

      Now that I know how to patch my OpenBSD-release installation and keep it updated as OpenBSD-stable, I pulled out the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 now running 4.7-stable, applied the latest patch, then rebuilt the kernel and rebooted.

      As I wrote in the earlier entry, once you have the sources and know how to apply patches and rebuild the kernel and system, keeping a patched OpenBSD box is pretty easy.

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • Neo-proprietary tactic considered harmful to open source

      At some point, one could even argue that the most successful open source company (RedHat) is very closed to this model : they offer a great product for free (the RedHat Linux Distribution) and monetize services of only a small percent of their users.

      Fauxpensource has several definitions and even if this is not yet a widely used term. Some synonims are open-core or neo-proprietary. Neo-proprietary is the term I will use in this post as there is no common sounds or part with Open Source.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Hal Plotkin Releases Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials

        Yesterday Hal Plotkin announced the release of Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials. The guide explains how the flexibility and diversity of Open Educational Resources (OER) can improve teaching and learning in higher education, all while retaining quality and enabling resource sharing and collaboration. Free to Learn features case studies and highlights several interviews with leaders of the OER community. The document suggests that community colleges are uniquely positioned to both take advantage of OER opportunities and to become pioneers in teaching through the creative and cost-effective use of OER.

  • Programming

    • The Humble README

      The README file goes back to the dawn of computing. We’re pretty sure Grace Hopper had one in a filing cabinet, right next to a folder marked “Bug”. It is a time-honored tradition: developers pour their heart and soul into a README file and users promptly ignore them. We probably can’t do anything about that here at SourceForge, but we can try.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Science

    • IBM characterizes single-atom DRAM

      The ultimate memory chips of the future will encode bits on individual atoms, a capability recently demonstrated for iron atoms by IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., which unveiled a new pulsed technique for scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs).

      Pulsed-STMs yield nanosecond time-resolution, a requirement for designing the atomic-scale memory chips, solar panels and quantum computers of the future.

      “My hope is that we can spawn a great following doing nanosecond time resolution and atomic-scale spatial resolution with their STMs,” said Andreas Heinrich, a physicist in the IBM’s Almaden Lab.

      STMs, invented at IBM in the 1980s, have become the workhorse of the semiconductor materials industry. Their resolution extends all the way to the atomic scale, allowing individual atoms to be imaged. Unfortunately, STMs are slow at making such delicate measurements. Now IBM has perfected a new pulsed-STM technique that puts its ability to measure time on par with the nanoscale accuracy as its distance measurements.

  • Finance

    • Admission of Guilt With No Consequences…We Need Justice For All

      The story of bank fraud, committed by the banks themselves is an ongoing story that has been on the side lines since the very beginning of the “meltdown” in 2007. Banks lied then to protect themselves, they continued to cheat and lie to protect themselves, they lied (along with our highest elected officials) to get our money so that they could steal from us even more.
      This is a story of a financial system gone bad. It is a story of a government taken over by a financial system gone bad and it is a story of a once free people in a nation whose Constitution has gone bad. Everything we once had and stood for has been destroyed by our banks.

    • JPMorgan Suspending Foreclosures

      The lender, JPMorgan Chase, said on Wednesday that it was halting 56,000 foreclosures because some of its employees might have improperly prepared the necessary documents. All of the suspensions are in the 23 states where foreclosures must be approved by a court, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida and Illinois.

      The bank, which lends through its Chase Mortgage unit, has begun to “systematically re-examine” its filings to verify that they meet legal standards, a spokesman, Tom Kelly, said.

      Last week, GMAC Mortgage said it was suspending an undisclosed number of foreclosures to give it time to take a closer look at its own procedures. GMAC simultaneously began withdrawing affidavits in pending court cases, throwing their future into doubt.

    • Let’s Ramp Up The Fight Against Illegal Foreclosures and Fraud By Banks

      I have been writing on the topic of fraud by the banks since the beginning of the so called “mortgage meltdown” began in 2007. There was fraud during the bubble committed by the banks, not the loan originators as they claimed. Yes there was fraud at the originator level but without the coaching and approval of the banks the street level fraud would have been held to a minimum as it had been for years.

      Now the next wave of fraud being committed by the banks – illegal foreclosure – are being totally ignored by our courts and most of all by our government. This fraud has been public common knowledge for several years now but NO ONE LISTENS.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Tie Theory

      Like Gladwell, I too grew up with stories of the civil rights movement. A lot was accomplished. Great odds were overcome. And of course it makes for high drama. Which is great on a movie screen but for the people living it, not so much. In fact, I’m guessing that most activists would prefer not to give up their lives or their freedom or their livelihoods to meet their goals. Think how much more Mr. King might have accomplished had he lived.

    • EU Commission takes UK to court over web privacy

      The European Commission is taking the UK to court for failing to comply with EU rules on internet privacy.

      The case in the EU’s Court of Justice – called an “infringement procedure” – could lead to a fine for the UK if the judges support the Commission’s view.

      The EU began investigating the UK last year, suspecting that UK law provided insufficient safeguards against illegal interception of internet traffic.

    • Lawyers to continue piracy fight

      A London law firm has pledged to continue to target file sharers, despite controversy surrounding the acquisition and care of users’ data.

      Gallant Macmillan is to go to the High Court on 4 October to seek the personal details of hundreds of PlusNet users.

      Internet service providers have pledged to take a tougher stand before handing over data, after the leak of thousands of users’ personal details by ACS:Law.

    • In the wake of the ACS:Law email leaks, will the BPI disclose their P2P surveillance methods?

      ACS:Law have managed to highlight the perils of companies operating as private surveillance agencies. By collecting extremely sensitive information – and letting it into the wild through their own incompetence – many people will be suffering serious personal trauma.

      Possibilities of this, or smaller scale abuse, are exactly why Peter Hustinx warned that private surveillance was unlikely to be a proportionate means of dealing with copyright infringement, compatible with privacy rights.

    • What BT, Sky and other ISPs should do about the likes of ACS:Law

      Open Rights Group spoke to BT today, and has requested a meeting with Sky to discuss how they handle future applications for people’s data when they are thought to be infringing copyright.

    • EU taking UK to court for privacy deficiencies highlighted by Phorm

      The result was that the EU Commission threatened to take the Uk to court. Such action is extremely rare, but today, they announced that they will do exactly that.

      At the time, ORG made a technical analysis of Phorm alongside the Foundation for Information Policy Research and wrote to Commissioner Reding and her Commission’s officers in the wake of the Phorm complaint.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 3 More Adult Companies Sue 1,100 Bit Torrent Users

        Another wave of bit torrent piracy suits were filed Wednesday.

        The latest action targets 1,100 John Does in three suits waged by CP Productions Inc., First Time Videos and Future Blue Inc.

        All three suits were filed by attorney John L. Steele at U.S. District Court in Chicago and seek to identify each user through their Internet service providers. Each asks for injunctive relief and damages.

      • RIAA Continues to Be Attacked from DDoS Flood

        Security firm PandaLabs recently spoke with hacker group Anonymous about its global cyber-war with the pro-copyright industry. Called “Operation Payback,” the DDoS assault was triggered by a similar attack on file sharing sites by an Indian firm. Now Anonymous is in offensive mode and looking to sign on more members by sending out flyers and recruiting people through Facebook, Digg, Reddit and other sites.

        Their mission? To fight back against the anti-piracy lobby. “There been a massive lobbyist-provoked surge in unfair infringements of personal freedom online, lately,” one member said. “In the USA, a new bill has been proposed that could allow the USA to force top level registrars such as ICANN and Nominet to shut down websites, all with NO fair trial. Guilty until proven guilty! Our tactics are inspired by the very people who provoked us, AiPlex Software. A few weeks back they admitted to attacking file sharing sites with DDoS attacks.”

      • White House IP Chief Talks Tough on Online Piracy

        Victoria Espinel, who serves as the nation’s first intellectual property enforcement coordinator within the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration is working with a variety of stakeholders, including Internet service providers, search engines and payment processors, in what it is billing as a “voluntary cooperation initiative.”

Clip of the Day

Jaromil – “dyne:bolic and dyne.org”


Credit: TinyOgg

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts