10.31.10

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Server

  • B3 Wi-Fi home server review

    Operating system Debian Squeeze-based (2.6.32.6 kernel)
    Processor ARM 1.2GHz
    Memory 512MB DDR2-800
    Ports 2x USB 2.0 and one eSATA

  • High Performance Community

    Now consider the Open Source mantra “give a little, get a lot.” All the organizations benefit from the combined efforts and the cost is cheaper than if they were to go at it alone or try to create complex IP agreements among the interested parties. A fair sharing model based on copyright, like the GNU license, short circuits many of the traditional impediments to cooperation. In addition, you get this thing called “a community” around your project. Within this community are your beta-testers, developers, reviewers, first customers, and most importantly conversations about your project/product.

  • Chinese Supercomputer Blazes Path to Glory

    The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia. One petaflop is a thousand trillion instructions per second.

  • LPI Exam Labs with InWent/FOSSFA in Africa

    The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) with the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) on November 13, 2010 (Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya) and February 12, 2010 in South Africa (location to be announced). These exam labs are part of a larger “train-the-trainers” program jointly sponsored by FOSSFA and InWEnt Capacity Building International of Germany (InWEnt).

  • Should Servers Be Rebooted?

    Another exception is that some AIX systems need significant uptime, greater than a few weeks, to obtain maximum efficiency as the system is self tuning and needs time to obtain usage information and to adjust itself accordingly. This tends to be limited to large, seldom-changing database servers and similar use scenarios that are less common than other platforms.

    In IT we often worship the concept of “uptime” – how long a system can run without needing to restart. But “uptime” is not a concept that brings value to the business, and IT needs to keep the business’ needs in mind at all times rather than focusing on artificial metrics. The business is not concerned with how long a server has managed to stay online without rebooting – they only care that the server is available and ready when needed for business processing. These are very different concepts.

• Ballnux

  • Samsung Android PMP open for pre-orders

    French online retailer Material.net has begun taking pre-orders for an Android portable media player (PMP) spinoff of Samsung’s Galaxy S phones. Aiming to compete head-on with Apple’s iPod Touch, the Samsung Galaxy Player 50 offers a 3.2-inch 400 x 240 pixel display, a two-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and GPS.

• Kernel Space

  • Atom Power Usage Reduced with kernel 2.6.36

    I’m sure it’ll lower your power consumption by at least 0.5W on average loads.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mixed Feelings Over The PSCNV Nouveau Driver Fork

      For those that had not read our prior article on the PSCNV driver, it’s a fork largely of Nouveau’s kernel DRM driver.

• Applications

  • YaRock – A Music Player Designed For Browsing Your Music Collection Based On Album Cover Art

    YaRock is a new QT4 music player designed to provide a nice overview of your music by allowing you to browse your music collection based on the album cover art. Thanks to its multiple views: album, artist, track, genre or folder view, you can easily find an artist or album even with a large music collection (and if that’s not enough, you can always use the built-in search). Depending on the view you’re using, you can drag a whole album or just some tracks to the playlist on the right.

  • 6 of the Best Free Linux Server Provisioning Tools

    To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 6 desirable server provisioning tools. We have ranked them in our order of preference, with FAI and xCAT carrying our highest recommendation. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for any system administrator that needs to set up many servers as quickly as possible.

  • Ubuntu Linux with Google chrome browser download install and usage guide

  • 6 of the Best Free Linux Camera Tools

    Since the advent of the consumer digital camera, hard disks and memory devices have faced the burden of ever increasing amounts of images to store. This is, in part, due to digital photography being an inexpensive way of taking thousands of images without any image processing costs to bear, thereby encouraging the photographer to snap many pictures of the same thing. The only ongoing expense is recharging the batteries in the camera.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • 13 Beautiful Inkscape Tutorials for Creating Stunning Vector Graphics

    • How to upload a video to YouTube and ensure it is viewable in WebM

    • Music And EXIF Metadata Information In Nautilus List View [Nautilus Columns Extension - PPA]

    • My iPod and/or Rhythmboxplays somehow convert oggs to MP3

    • How To Install OpenQRM 4.7 With LXC Containers In Debian Squeeze/Lenny: Step By Step

    • Lighting an Outdoor Scene in Blender

    • A Simple Bash Script to Download and Organize Photos

    • digiKam Tricks eBook

    • Rapidshare wget direct download and Linux

    • Disabling Fsync in Laptop_Mode

    • Putting Varnish In Front Of Apache On Ubuntu/Debian

    • Set up XenLinux kernel 2.6.34.7 aka Suse under Xen 4.0.1 on top of F14

    • Exploring the ListField, Part 1

    • Cryptography and digital sign with GnuPG

    • UNIX Monitoring Tool for PostgreSQL

    • How To Integrate ClamAV (Through mod_clamav) Into ProFTPd For Virus Scanning On Ubuntu 10.04

    • Installing Webmin on CentOS 5.5

    • Innovative Nautilus Location Bar Mockup by DanRabbit

    • Using an IMG instead of an ISO to put Debian on a USB Flash drive

    • Arch Linux Backup Server– Headless Administration

    • 13 Beautiful Inkscape Tutorials for Creating Stunning Vector Graphics

    • Linux authentication login with USB device

    • Create a Localized Web Page with PHP

    • Cygwin, the Great Linux vs. Windows Compromise

  • Wine

    • Just one more turn

      So we set out to make the newly released Civilization V would work in CrossOver a few weeks back. I felt it was my duty to help the QA staff with the testing.

  • Games

    • Official Ryzom Client for GNU/Linux

      This page explains how to install and play Ryzom, the game, under GNU/Linux in native.

    • The war | Economy strategy game 0 A.D. Alpha 2 Bellerophon is released!

      Wildfire Games has announced the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 2 Bellerophon”, the second alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This release comes with victory conditions, fog of war, formations, a new in-game GUI and many other features that make 0 A.D. feel more like a real RTS than ever before.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Elementary 2.0 GTK Theme Brings in Optional Dark Panel Among Other Improvements

      Elementary 2.0 was released days ago and the latest Elementary theme brings in the much awaited dark panel elementary theme variant. Elementary 2.0 feels a lot more snappier too.

• Distributions

  • Gentoo PAM developments

    You might remember that last time I stated that only two patches were applied on version 1.1.2. Well, this time around no patches are applied over the released Linux-PAM! This makes it the first version in five years that Gentoo is shipping without custom patches at all, and thus without needing re-building autotools. It is indeed a milestone for us.

  • Remember SplashTop? Here’s An Update On Them

    At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, DeviceVM launched SplashTop 2.0 with a redesign application dock, customization wizard, tailored themes, personalized packages, instant search, and other features. Previous to that the last time talking about SplashTop on Phoronix was when Lenovo began deploying SplashTop as QuickStart OS and then within the Phoronix Forums there were some users that hacked SplashTop to allow it to run on other devices from a USB device. During this time there’s also been the emergence of Phoenix HyperSpace as another instant-on Linux environment, and to a lesser extent, the once-popular gOS and Linpus Linux QuickOS.

  • New Releases

    • Salix KDE 13.1.2 releases are available!

      The Salix team is proud to announce the very first official release of Salix KDE edition. A collection of three KDE iso images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as a live image that can be burned to a CD or used with a USB drive.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 13 sailing along

        As I said at the beginning of this entry, I’ll very likely spend at least a few more months in this Fedora 13 Xfce environment since it’s working so very well (and I’ve cranked through most of the configuration-related surprises and arrived at a pretty good place audio, video and suspend/resume-wise).

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Installer 6.0 Reaches Beta

      With the upcoming release of Debian Squeeze, the Debian Installer team has announced the first beta release of the Debian Installer 6.0. This version of the Debian Installer brings several fixes, package updates, and new features.

      Among the new capabilities of the Debian Installer 6.0 Beta 1 include the auto-selection of the kernel for the Sony PlayStation 3, recovery partitions for Microsoft Windows are properly recognized, support for new platforms, support for isohybrid images when using cdrom-detect/try-usb, the installer now looks for Debian firmware packages within the firmware/ folder on the installation media for bundling hardware firmware, hardware-specific packages are now installed automatically, and there’s improved localization.

    • Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release

    • Debian totally flies (rant on the general state of Linux and my laptop included)

      Debian is fast. It’s always been so. I’ve run Debian on a half-dozen different machines since I downloaded my first Etch installer in April 2007. At the time I had just started getting interested in Linux, and the release of Etch just happened to dovetail with my growing ability to grab ISOs and try them out on test machines. I eventually spent considerable time running both Etch and Lenny on both Intel (Pentium II, Celeron and VIA C3) and PowerPC (Mac G4) architectures. (I could never get Sarge onto my Sparcstation 20, not that I didn’t try. I still don’t have enough geek skills for that one.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Adoption of Unity is the Most Significant Change Ever for Ubuntu, Says Mark Shuttleworth

        It’s going to be Unity all the way for Ubuntu’s next major release codenamed Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”. During Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) at Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu’s default interface not just for netbook editions, but also for Ubuntu desktop editions.

        [...]

        But our experience with Ubuntu Unity has not been good so far. While GNOME Shell was really easy to learn and adapt to(even the keyboard shortcuts work as you expect it to), Unity is no piece of cake yet. It’s not even stable in my Intel dual core Lenovo laptop.

      • Unity thoughts…..

      • Unity workspace mock-up; 4 workspace limit in Ubuntu 11.04

        In the above picture, the purple boxes represent workspaces. The user can also move windows among workspaces easily.

      • Generative wallpapers for Ubuntu: Game of Life

        We love the idea of Generative Wallpapers – self-updating ever-changing backgrounds – here on OMG! Ubuntu! and, seemingly, so do you!

      • Official Ubuntu Advert at Its Awesome Best!

      • Ubuntu 10.10 Release Forecasts Cloudy Skies Ahead

        I recently upgraded my trusty Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook from Ubuntu Netbook remix version 10.04 to the recently released version 10.10. Canonical and the Ubuntu community have made some very significant changes to the user interface, but the changes were pretty intuitive, so they did not take a lot of getting used to. In this article, I will reveal some of the insights that I have had over the last several days using the latest Ubuntu, and how I think that Ubuntu is really going to help cloud computing become more popular.

        [...]

        Ubuntu 10.10 is the best Ubuntu yet. It is clean, polished, user-friendly, and very functional.

      • Ubuntu Makes Private Clouds a Breeze

        The tools you use to accomplish this feat are all found on one simple platform: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is found on Ubuntu Server. Using an Ubuntu Server 10.10 disc, I was able to install all of the software I needed within a half-hour’s time: and a chunk of that time was downloading the software I needed, including Ubuntu.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lubuntu Screencast: Abiword Wordprocessing

• Devices/Embedded

  • MontaVista Android platform targets single-Watt ARM11 SoCs

    MontaVista Software announced the availability of an Android reference platform for the Econa CNS3xxx ARM11-based processors manufactured by its parent company Cavium Networks. The reference platform offers support for on-chip hardware acceleration blocks, and integrates drivers for peripherals including Bluetooth, 802.11n, and touchscreens, says MontaVista.

  • Full of Little Bugs but not without potential – First impression of the OYO

    The new e-reader on the European block was just released…

  • Huawei S7 Android tablet review

  • Android DIY kit builds on BeagleBoard platform

    LiquidWare announced an open source hardware development platform for Android-based tablet or HMI devices. Designed for rapid prototyping, the DIY Android Modular Gadget Platform is based on modular hardware, including a 720MHz TI OMAP3530-based BeagleBoard, a 4.3-inch OLED touchscreen, and a “BeagleJuice” battery pack.

  • PandaBoard opens up Cortex-A9 SoC to developers

    Digi-key is shipping a 1080p-ready development board based on Texas Instruments’ Cortex-A9-based, dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4430 system-on-chip (SoC). The $174 “PandaBoard” offers 1GB of DRAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, DVI, and HDMI connections, and targets smartphone and mobile device development using open source Linux distributions such as Android, Angstrom, Chrome, MeeGo, and Ubuntu.

  • PogoPlug Biz Review: File Sharing and Remote Access

    Enter the PogoPlug Biz, which aims to be an alternative to cloud-based storage, file sharing or collaboration services; it builds on the capabilities of the consumer-focused PogoPlug with some added features that offer small businesses more flexibility and control over remote access and file sharing.

  • Phones

    • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Nokia announces profits, layoffs, and bigger focus on Qt

      • Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

        Some time ago Qt/Nokia decided to open their repos (great! even if they are not the real repos) and also decided to start accepting contributions from non Qt/Nokia employees in a way that they will make you the favour of accepting your code for free without making you fax things and talk with lawyers (you still have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code).

        The fact that you have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code was the reason i decided myself not to contribute to Qt.

      • Linux Foundation Announces MeeGo Developer Conference

    • Android

      • Firefox’s Android play

        The mobile version of Firefox was originally only available for the Nokia’s Maemo platform which is not in widespread use. Now there is a version for Android, the rapidly growing mobile OS from Google.

      • Desktop Linux is Dead, but Linux is Still the Future

        Even if the train has left now, I think this approach is clearly working in other areas in which Linux indeed is a success. Google doesn’t sell “Linux OS”. They sell “Android”, and when people talk about Android they barely even think of “Linux”, let alone the whole debate over whether the name refers only to the Glossary Link kernel or to an entire OS. By treating it as an independent brand of its own, not tied to the confused legacy of the Linux ecosystem with all its antics, Google made Android seem like a platform that stands on its own even while it is actually “Linux in disguise”.

      • 10 great Android apps

        There are around 90 000 apps in the Android marketplace. We suggest 10 worth looking at.

      • The Gingerbread Man Cometh

        There’s still a bit of confusion swirling around Gingerbread. It’s not yet clear whether the OS will be dubbed Android 2.3 or 3.0. Further, Gingerbread is reportedly more suited for tablets than smartphones.

      • Android Gingerbread Baking Design, Video Chat Goodies

      • ObamaBerry tech heading to Android phones

        Although initially available for Android, the underlying security solution, described in a newly available white paper, could be applied to other open source operating systems, such as Linux or Symbian, says OK Labs.

      • Freescale’s Cortex-A8 SoC jumps into Android phones

        Lumigon Corp. announced three Android 2.1 phones — the T1, S1, and E1 — touted as the first smartphones to use Freescale’s 1GHz i.MX51 system-on-chip. Meanwhile, the company also reported contributing to Ulysse Nardin’s Chairman, an Android handset that will start at over $13,000, and Freescale announced an Android evaluation kit for the i.MX51.

      • Asustek, Garmin ending joint smartphone development

      • 10 Tips for Tricking Out and Optimizing your Android Smartphone

        Make no mistake, Android devices are amazingly powerful and useful right out of the box. Still, if you are a newcomer to Google’s mobile operating system, you may find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the configuration and accessory options available to you. If you look at a lot of the advertising, the convenience and productivity gains that a smartphone brings to your daily activities will be about the unique mobile apps that you download and install. I’ve found that being a satisfied Android user is not just about the apps — settings, configuration and accessories can make an enormous difference. Here are 10 practical tips that will enhance your complete Android experience.

Free Software/Open Source

• Asterisk SCF Goes for Scale in New Open Source VoIP Project

  The open source Asterisk project started off as an effort to be an on-premise IP-PBX. Over the years, demand for increasingly scalable and modular approaches for voice communications has grown, which is why a new Asterisk project is being announced this week.

  The Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) is a new project sponsored by Digium that aims to build an open source VoIP system for large-scale deployments.

• Asterisk 1.8 Secures Open Source VoIP

  The new Asterisk 1.8 release is intended to be supported for at least the next four years, as part of a new support model the project first discussed earlier this year. Asterisk 1.8 packs in a long list of new features, including reverse call display and integrated Google Voice support.

• How Open Source Can Help Real People

  The success of open source is undeniable. Just about any website you visit today is running on some kind of open source software. Your shiny new Mac is running FreeBSD under its beautiful surface. Google uses open source software. So does Facebook. Yet if you mention open source software to most people, they probably will give you a blank look. Few non-technies know what it is, even though they use it countless times everyday.

• OpenERP Makes Open Source Business Software Work

  OpenERP seems to be a rarity among open source business software companies. There are no special enterprise editions — open source and paying customers get the exact same software and features — yet the company has managed to turn a profit on services and hosted solutions.

  “Exactly the same software is available for both customers and downloads,” OpenERP COO Marc Laporte told eCRMguide. “We don’t have an enterprise edition.”

• The Opening up of GSM

  Traditionally the development of GSM technology has been largely the reserve of GSM Association members and their partners, subcontractors and licensees. This was due in part to the complexity of GSM but perhaps also as a result of concerns over the legality of any entirely independent grassroots initiative. In addition it is quite likely that a fear of being perceived as a black hat hacker has played some part. However, the situation has started to change over the last few years and we are now seeing the opening up of GSM technology via a number of open source efforts.

• Events

  • Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference Announced

    In an effort to bring Open Source education to America’s Heartland, a group of volunteers have teamed up to host the Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference on May 6-7, 2011. These dedicated volunteers have attended, spoken at and sponsored other similar events in far flung parts of the United States and the world, from Florida and California to The Netherlands and Australia.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Wants You to Build Your Own Browser

      Mozilla has officially revealed “Chromeless,” an experimental project by the Firefox creator that lets developers create their own browser interfaces using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies.

• SaaS

  • Building a Test Platform in the Cloud with Open Source Technologies

    Cloud computing, which aims to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services on demand, offers new possibilities for testing. A cloud-based test platform delivers automated scaling — up or down — of testing infrastructure, which overcomes many challenges of traditional test environments.

• Oracle

  • Every end is a new beginning

    the past days and weeks here in the project were marked by sometimes heated discussions, about how we perceive the cooperation in the project and how we make this more willing and able. Unfortunately, this discussion has not always been objective, problem- and goal-oriented, as it would have been desirable, but sometimes very emotional.

    [..]

    Oracle’s official response to the announcement of The Document Foundation was clear – Oracle will continue OpenOffice.org as usual. The result is now indeed the lately postulated conflict of interest for those community members who are in charge of or representing project, but to whom it is not enough “to continue working as we always did”. Although it has been stressed several times that there will be collaboration on a technical level, and changes are possible – there is no indication from Oracle to change it’s mind on the question of the project organization and management. For those who want to achieve such a change, but see no realistic opportunity within the current project and are therefore involved in the TDF, unfortunately this results in an “either / or” question.

    The answer for us who sign this letter is clear: We want a change to give the community as well as the software it develops the opportunity to evolve. For this reason, from now on we will support The Document Foundation and will – as a team – develop and promote LibreOffice. We hope that many are going to join us on this path.

  • My dream: Java SE on Android Linux

    Although the Oracle – Google Java lawsuit looks ugly, there is a possibility that something good comes out of it: full Java SE appications running on Android.

    That would be an awesome success for Oracle since it is by nature (steward of Java) interested in running Java applications in Android devices. Devices shipping with Android (tablets with dual-core ARM processor and 512Mb to 1 GB of RAM) are powerful enough to run full Java applications, even with Swing. Desktop applications are quite common in the enterprise space and would make Android devices very appealing in this segment. Especially in the tablet form factor.

  • SAP concedes role in pirating Oracle software, moves to shorten trial

• Licensing

  • Licensing Considerations When Integrating FOSS and Proprietary Software

• Openness/Sharing

  • The Commons Prosperity by Sharing

  • [Blender] Yafaray Shaders Database

    So this database now has 18 shaders and several categories, and you can help it growing.

    The site is hosted at Yafaray Shaders Database. Feel free to browse it, download and test any shader you want. You can also upload some worth-posting shaders, if you’re proud of your Yafaray work !

• Programming

  • Foundations: The Ministry of Silly Objects

Leftovers

• Curiosity is banned at Westfield High

  Westfield High School in Fairfax County is one of the largest and most competitive public schools in America. It is not unusual that 180 sophomores enrolled in Advanced Placement World History this year, more students than most U.S. high schools have taking AP courses of any kind.

• New York Judge rules 6-year-old can be sued

  A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled.

• Pressure group calls for TV licence boycott over S4C

  A Welsh-language pressure group is calling for people to refuse to pay the TV licence fee unless the independence of S4C is guaranteed.

  The Welsh Language Society is urging the action from 1 December unless plans for the BBC to take over part funding of the channel are stopped.

  [...]

  The BBC will take over part-funding of S4C from 2013, with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reducing its grant by 94% over the next five years.

• Science

  • Validation in Dijkstra’s shunting yard algorithm

• Security

  • Kernel vulnerabilities: old or new?

  • Metasploit Goes Pro for Security Testing

  • D.C. hacking raises questions about future of online voting

    For the upcoming election, Washington, D.C., was preparing to allow some voters to send their ballots in over the internet. It’s a good thing election officials tested the system first.

    Just two days after the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics opened the application for the public to experiment with this fall, the system was hacked. Unbeknownst to D.C. officials, a team of computer scientists from the University of Michigan took control of the Web site, and changed the code to make it play the school’s fight song.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • [IP] Re READ US rolls out invasive pat-downs this week

    I found the timing on this new policy surprising, with a launch right before midterm elections. Perhaps TSA have been drinking their own koolade and they genuinely think most people will accept these procedures. Why might they think that?

    – deployment of back scatter-style scanners did not jar people at selected airports. Pittsburgh installed them. I watched dozens of people go through, some with slight pause to understand how to stand and where to put their hands, but that was all. When I politely declined, it took four people to figure out how to make that happen, which suggests it is not a common occurrence. I expect TSA keeps statistics.

  • Out of the madness of 7/7 emerge lessons in how to face terrorism

    On the day of the 7 July bombings, I came across a man on London’s Edgware Road whom I recognised as a Muslim fundamentalist from a stall near Marble Arch, where he regularly handed out leaflets. It was about three hours after the bomb had exploded on a train near Edgware tube station and he was making an impromptu speech to a knot of passersby about the CIA plot to blow up the Twin Towers and other such lunacies.

  • Iraq war logs: Detainee beaten and totured, reported by US Marines

  • Iraq war logs: WikiLeaks’ virtual memorial

  • Obama administration handed over detainees despite reports of torture

  • Like my Pentagon papers, these Iraq war logs can’t be buried

    Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • BP to link pay to safety after Gulf spill

    BP is to link staff bonuses just to improvements in safety standards in its fourth quarter, in an attempt to improve its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

    Bob Dudley, BP’s new chief executive, announced the move in an email to employees seen by the Wall Street Journal. He said the sole criterion for judging performance in the fourth quarter would be “each business’s progress in reducing operational risks and achieving excellent safety and compliance standards”.

  • Drought brings Amazon tributary to lowest level in a century

    One of the most important tributaries of the Amazon river has fallen to its lowest level in over a century, following a fierce drought that has isolated tens of thousands of rainforest inhabitants and raised concerns about the possible impact of climate change on the region.

    The drought currently affecting swaths of north and west Amazonia has been described as the one of the worst in the last 40 years, with the Rio Negro or Black river, which flows into the world-famous Rio Amazonas, reportedly hitting its lowest levels since records began in 1902 on Sunday.

  • Nagoya biodiversity summit is showing depressing parallels with Copenhagen

    Without a deal on these issues, Brazil and other developing nations – which are home to most of the world’s natural capital – are holding up international efforts to establish a strategic plan to halt biodiversity loss by 2020.

    [...]

    In other words, Nagoya is another ill-tempered bout between the global haves and wanna-haves in which the fiercest blows are landing on the natural world that both sides claim to be protecting.

  • India examines cost of mining more closely

    Citing the need to protect the environment and local residents, Indian courts and government bodies have started blocking – or even cancelling – a growing number of industrial projects. Last month the high court in Madras ordered the closure of a copper smelter operated by the London-listed mining conglomerate Vedanta, to protect “mother nature” from “unabated air and water pollution”.

  • Borneo’s majestic rainforest is being killed by the timber mafia

    The cows are afloat, with squawking chickens sharing their sturdy bamboo rafts. Children splash and swim in and around their homes, keeping away from the deeper channel of peat-coloured water that powers through the village of Meliau. Adults tightrope-walk across makeshift paths of hardwood thrown over huge floating logs. Others paddle around in long wooden boats. Everything that floats is lashed to everything that doesn’t.

  • Rare scaled mammal threatened by traditional medicine

    An unprecedented haul of records from wildlife smugglers in Borneo has revealed the scale of the illegal trade in pangolins. They show that between May 2007 and December 2008, the smugglers bought at least 22,200 endangered Sunda pangolins, or spiny anteaters, and nearly a tonne of their scales, for export.

    By contrast, local police seized only 654 illegally shipped pangolins between 2001 and 2008. A report on the smugglers’ records from Traffic, the group that monitors wildlife trade for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says that this “raises serious concerns for the continued survival of the species”.

  • Seed saver with a germ of an idea

    Despite training as a nuclear physicist at an elite Mumbai research reactor and then gaining a PhD in quantum physics from a top overseas university, Shiva switched to environmental activism.

    “I went from nuclear science to quantum physics and then to being a natural philosopher,” she says. “I would describe my vocation as a combination of natural philosopher – the old, old notion of trying to understand nature in all the complexity, which is the original form of science – and as a protector of the Earth.”

    Shiva’s attempts to protect the Earth have brought her into regular conflict with big corporations, especially those patenting genetically engineered seeds.

• Finance

  • Book by PM’s economic advisor wins award

    The book looks at the hard choices that will prevent another recession like the one in 2008, following the financial collapse of 2007.

  • Benefits cut, rents up: this is Britain’s housing time bomb

    At last the Tories have a final solution for the poor – send them to distant dumping grounds where there are no jobs

  • Pakistan’s feudalism boosts Taliban cause

    Millions of peasants, who in many places work as virtual slaves, have long demanded reform, but to no avail.

    “It’s to reduce the wide disparity of income and opportunity between rich landlords and poor tillers of the soil and to maximise the agriculture output,” said Farooq Sattar, a mover of the bill and leader of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) that dominates the politics of the commercial hub of Karachi.

    Tenants in Pakistan work the land for no pay because of debts owed to landlords, often incurred generations before.

  • Vodafone shops blockaded in tax protest

    Campaigners claiming Vodafone has been let off an unpaid tax bill of £6bn spent the day blockading several shops.

    Campaigner Ed Brompton said: “This money – £6bn – could be spent on schools, housing and hospitals.”

    But a Vodafone spokesman denied the tax bill reports, adding: “We pay our taxes in the UK and all of the other countries in which we operate.”

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Joe Miller Security Guards Handcuff & Detain ‘Alaska Dispatch’ Editor (VIDEO)

    Security guards for Alaska senate candidate Joe Miller handcuffed and detained the editor of the online magazine “Alaska Dispatch” on Sunday while he tried to interview the Republican nominee, according to multiple reports.

  • The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires

    The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

    An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

    Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it’s good for them.

  • Leading scientists accuse thinktanks of being logging lobbyists

    Twelve leading scientists, including the former head of Kew Gardens and the biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, have written an open letter accusing two international thinktanks of “distortions, misrepresentations, or misinterpretations of fact” in their analysis and writings about rainforests and logging.

  • EU food safety chief forced to quit GM lobby role

    Questions raised over why European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) chair Diana Banati failed to make clear her connections to International Life Science Institute (ILSI), which advises biotech giants like Monsanto, Bayer and BASF

    A key figure in charge of food safety within the EU has been forced to quit her director role at a pro-GM group.

    European Green MEPs had called for EFSA chair Diana Banati’s resignation after she had failed to disclose her seat on the board of directors of the International Life Science Institute (ILSI), which advises biotech corporations including Monsanto, Bayer and BASF.

  • Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography

    The Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, who died recently at the age of 46, stimulated a debate on sectarianism within Irish nationalism and on the nature and conduct of the Irish War of Independence (WoI). He provoked controversy and subsequent research that has helped to clarify differences over the interpretation not only of Irish history but also of Irish society. Professor Paul (now Lord) Bew of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), said of Hart’s landmark The IRA and its Enemies (OUP, 1998), ‘The first work on the Irish revolution which can stand comparison with the best of the historiography of the French Revolution: brilliantly documented, statistically sophisticated, and superbly written’.[1] The weight of academic opinion afforded Hart numerous prizes and plaudits.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • YouTube removes video on torture of Papuans

    The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | A four-minute video depicting Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan separatists has been removed from YouTube because of its “shocking and disgusting content.”

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Paying For Teh Frees. How’s That Working Out?

    • ACTA

      • Marietje Schaake (D66, NL): ACTA – a law enforcement treaty?

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        # Marietje Schaakes asks a question about the right of the Commission/Council to conclude confidentiality agreements with third nations which overrule Art 15 TFUE.