04.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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When the average computer user hears about Ubuntu or Linux, the word “difficult” comes to mind. This is understandable: learning a new operating system is never without its challenges, and in many ways Ubuntu is far from perfect. I’d like to say that using Ubuntu is actually easier and better than using Windows.
This doesn’t mean you’ll experience it that way if you’ve used Windows for a long time: at a certain your habits begin to feel like conventional wisdom, and any system that doesn’t match your current habits will seem difficult.
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In many ways, Ubuntu is easier to use than Windows. Does this mean Ubuntu is superior to Windows? Of course not, and I wouldn’t suggest so. You should use whatever operating system works best for you.
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Not only are they providing CUPS drivers, but also they are even printing Tux in the corner of every box they ship right besides the Windows and Apple logos. Do you know who we are talking about? Probably not, but it’s Lexmark. After months of wrangling within the company, Lexmark has stepped up to become a Linux and open-source friendly company. We are seeing how far this Linux support extends as we try out the Lexmark Pro905 Platinum multi-function printer.
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Applications
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Gramps has a mile-long feature list of ways to help you organize and analyze the data you gather on your family history. Use it to record the details of individual people in your family, and also manage the intricate relationships found in your family tree.
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Element is a lightweight Linux distribution for use on a home theater PC (HTPC). It comes with most of the same video-playback applications one would find in a modern desktop distribution, but the development team has put considerable effort into wrapping the applications in an environment that is easy to navigate from across the room, and comfortable for non-multimedia-hackers. Tough challenges still remain for any HTPC distribution at the hardware and configuration level, but Element’s results are definitely an improvement over basic Linux systems in setup, application integration, and usability.
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Optimised virtualisation, support for recently introduced AMD and Intel processors, new versions of OpenOffice, PostgreSQL and Samba as well as numerous fresh drivers are all among the major advancements of RHEL 5.5.
After releasing a beta version in early February, Red Hat has now released version 5.5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As usual at the first stage in the life cycle of this Linux distribution for corporate customers, the new version not only offers new drivers and various corrections, but also numerous new features.
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Ubuntu
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Our mascot for 10.10 is the Maverick Meerkat.
This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself. We want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move. We will deliver on time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver this cycle. Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little. Let’s hear the best ideas, gather the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the next two year major cycle.
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Ubuntu 10.04 is a long-term support release, which means that the focus during the current development cycle has largely been on stabilization and refining the existing technology. Shuttleworth says that we can expect to see a return to experimentation in the 10.10 release, with the potential for some radical changes.
Some of the most important goals include delivering a new Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface, improving the Web experience, boosting startup performance, and extending social network integration on the desktop. Shuttleworth also hopes to advance Ubuntu’s cloud support by simplifying deployment and making it easier to manage cloud computing workloads.
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Mark Shuttleworth announced seconds ago that the Metacity window controls will remain on the left in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), however the order will change to: close, minimize, maximize.
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Acer’s Aspire One line of netbooks has been a huge hit, and the company continues to experiment with designs and software configurations. As the number of applications for Android has risen, it makes more and more sense for the operating system to run alongside Windows and various flavors of Linux. After all, Linux resides on many dual-OS systems, and Android is Linux-based.
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Even though Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Tony Quan’s body has been ravaged by Lou Gehrig’s disease, his mind is as sharp as ever. Unable to move anything but his eyes, he nearly had to give up his love of creating art until a group of hackers stepped in with an alternative. They designed Quan an open source eye tracking device that allows him to continue creating his artwork using nothing but the muscles in his eyes.
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A good place to join the discussion is around Mozilla’s Concept Series, which as the name implies is really a system for brainstorming. Once a prototype is built and a group created around it, it gets its own icon and identity, as with the Bespin code editor or Raindrop messaging group.
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WordPress is unquestionably the most used blogging platform out there. There also are thousands and thousands of templates ranging from the free to the most expensive available for use on any WP powered blog.
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Open source business intelligence (BI) software vendor Pentaho has raised a cool $7 million in fourth-round funding, bringing it’s total funding to around $32 million. Company CEO Richard Daley talked to OStatic about how Pentaho plans to use its cash influx, and has some advice for other companies considering an open source business model.
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Programming
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By typical development conventions, PHP 5.3 only qualifies as a “point release.” However, the features packed into this new version are easily the most significant PHP development enhancements since PHP 5.0 was released in 2004. The powerful new PHP 5.3 features include namespace support, lambda functions and closures, late static binding, improved Windows support, and a host of syntactical additions. This article provides all the information you need to begin taking advantage of these PHP 5.3 goodies.
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A University of Utah study into the effects of mobile phone use on people’s driving skills has come to the expected conclusion that using a phone while driving can be highly dangerous.
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Freehold Capital Partners, a company started in Texas, is selling developers across the country on a plan that would attach a private transfer fee to homes, allowing developers to profit for generations.
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EBay Inc. isn’t responsible for the ssale of fake Tiffany & Co. jewelry on its Web site, an appeals court ruled, while returning Tiffany’s lawsuit to the trial court for further action on a false-advertising claim.
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Security
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You might have heard it said that China executes more people than all other countries in the world put together. Not just a handful, but thousands and thousands of people every single year. This, broadly, is true.
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Environment
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The activists chained themselves to the mooring ropes of the container ship NYK ORION, which has meat from 13 endangered fin whales onboard in seven containers. Greenpeace is calling on the authorities to seize the containers and urging the protection of whales at the upcoming meeting of the International Whaling Commission.
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Finance
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On March 23, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Maguire is a metals trader in London. He has been told first-hand by traders working for JPMorganChase that JPMorganChase manipulates the precious metals markets, and they have bragged to how they make money doing so.
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Goldman Sachs is back. This time, they are not at the door asking for handouts to shine their guilded toilet fixtures. They are on a public relations mission to recover their image. Perhaps, they shouldn’t have claimed they were doing God’s work as they plundered billions from public coffers to save themselves if they cared about public perception.
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The fact of the matter is that Goldman Sachs has reached its tentacles into the Obama administration, as it had the administrations of George W Bush and Bill Clinton. Thus, there has been little movement by the adminstration to follow through on it’s promise to reign in Wall Street’s risky behavior. This is where the people need to be heard.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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After another divisive war, Hollywood now has a chance to get back in the good graces of the American people, who always want to see our fighting men portrayed positively.
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Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The whistleblower, Charles Rehberg, uncovered systematic mismanagement of funds at a Georgia public hospital. He alerted local politicians and others to the issue through a series of faxes. A local prosecutor in Dougherty County, Ken Hodges, conspired with the hospital and used a sham grand jury subpoena to obtain Mr. Rehberg’s personal email communications. The prosecutor then provided that information to private investigators for the hospital and indicted Mr. Rehberg for a burglary and assault that never actually occurred. All the criminal charges against Mr. Rehberg were eventually dismissed. Hodges is currently running for Attorney General of Georgia in the Democratic primary.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.
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As if problems in the U.S. home entertainment market weren’t bad enough, with declining sales revenue and continued pressure from low-cost rental services Redbox and Netflix, the major movie studios are close to being overwhelmed by piracy in a second major foreign market.
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I’m really curious how Lynton keeps his job when his response to a market challenge is to leave the market entirely, shifting the unauthorized rate from whatever it is all the way up to 100% by choice. This is the same guy who claimed that the internet was killing the movie business, in the midst of a year with more movie releases than ever before and the largest box office take ever. He’s also in charge of the company that wouldn’t even support one of its own movies for the Oscars because it was afraid that the Oscar reviewer copies would end up online, even though the movie was already available for download.
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Keeping with the idea of creating innovative ways to fund recording sessions of new music while involving fans in the creative process, Jill Sobule and John Doe are inviting 40 fans to buy tickets to both participate and observe an exclusive recording session with Grammy-award winning producer, engineer, and mixer Dave Way on Sunday April 11th in Los Angeles. We’ve laid out a couple of different paths to experiencing the studio with the artists for your enjoyment:
ALL-DAY “MUSICIAN’S MUSICIAN” ACCESS ($200)
For recording engineers, DIY musicians or anyone that wants to see it from the ground up. Only 10 tickets are available.
Attendees will be able to see and interact with every aspect of the recording process for the entire day, starting at 10am: set up, getting sounds, tracking, overdubs, editing and rough mixing. No prior recording experience is required but we’ll drill down as much as you’d like into the technical side of the process.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 5 (2004)
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Having said so, I kept feeling Windows 7 would never surprise me again after a mere couple hours of use. Windows offers immediately its goods, but once discovered, all paths beyond them seem to end very quickly. In turn, Ubuntu felt more like an empty canvas, offering a vast amount of choices. From system configuration to Look&Feel and applications available, there were options all over the place for the end user to pick. In that sense, Ubuntu and Linux don’t feel immediate or still, but ever changing and evolving after the user’s will and skills.
Aside from its inherent flexibility, Ubuntu keeps a 6 month release schedule, which allows it to stay much more current and fresh. While Windows 7 will remain almost unchanged for a good 3-4 years, Ubuntu 12.04, for instance, will likely be very different to 10.04.
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While Sony is pulling away from Linux and the community, we can’t help but to think about the other end of the spectrum and a company that has fully supported the enthusiast community: id Software.
Rather than increasing restrictions over time, id has a great history of decreasing restrictions over time. One good example is how they release the source code to their game engines via GPL after a reasonable amount of time. If Sony were following id’s model they would be opening up RSX support in a future version of PS3 Linux as opposed to pulling it away.
I sent a few quick questions to John Carmack, co-founder of id software, lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace, Linux supporter, and an all-around good guy to get his thoughts on the situation.
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Audiocasts
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Ubuntu switches to base 10, Novell fights a takeover bid while Sony removes Linux support from its older Playstation 3 consoles. We reveal how little we’ve used Emacs and ask whether Wikipedia should use open codecs.
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The day before I discussed the importance of open source screen readers with Joanie I interviewed Will Walker about open source accessibility and development of assistive technology.
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Server
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You will be talking about 10+ years of Linux at IBM. What has changed about Linux in a decade? What hasn’t?
Frye: Whoa. Everything has changed. Nothing is the same, with the possible exception of the “can do” philosophy of the global Linux development team. Everything has evolved – the technology, the market, customer adoption, the development process (yes, Linux community does have processes, even if they’re frequently loathe to admit it….). And all for the better. One of the most amazing things about the Linux market has been unbroken chain of success over the past decade – not once did the Linux pause or even briefly decline. The rise of the Internet ushered in the age of open standard computing with customers demanding freedom from relying upon any single, closed operating system provider. As a result, today, Linux is an unstoppable force in the industry, changing the economics of information technology, driving open standards in a way never before possible, and advancing customer innovation.
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Kernel Space
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Arnd Bergmann noted that he’s working on removing the BKL from the Linux kernel, “I’ve spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have [a] bkl-removal branch in my git tree”. He went on to explain that his branch is working, and lets him run the Linux kernel, “on [a] quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL being mostly obscure device driver modules.” Arnd noted that this effort has a long history, “the oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy’s patch to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that removes it from most of the VFS.”
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Applications
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Proprietary
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When I tried using the programs they all ran smoothly and with no glitches, crashes or unexplained pauses. Even the network functions worked properly. I could use netscan and gencontrol on our active directory network with no hassles whatsoever. To really give it a workout I decided to give Nero a try and see if that would work. Nero installed fine and I was actually able to burn a CD with it with files from my Linux home directory. Internet explorer 8, Chrome and the windows version of Firefox all worked like a charm. The best thing is, I didn’t have to go searching for windows dlls or make any configuration changes. Installing those programs was no different to installing them under windows.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Two years on, things are back on track. It’s perhaps time to begin a campaign of telling people who left KDE, “it’s safe to come back!”. As it stands, not only is KDE 4.4 a superb desktop, thanks to the new frameworks that are now in place the potential for new developments is almost overwhelming. Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend KDE4. However, it’s been a rocky couple of years getting here.
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GNOME Desktop
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April Fools turned out to be a great day for Linux enthusiasts, as GNOME developers decided to offer them something to look forward to except getting punked and do a proper launch, and a pretty big one at that. GNOME 2.30 is now available for everyone and the final release of the 2.xx series is packing some serious punch and plenty of goodies for even the most demanding user.
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Gentoo Family
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The following applies to Gentoo, not Exherbo. Exherbo developers (Exherbo has no users) already know what’s going on there. I figure it’s worth having a clear source of information on this for Gentoo users, though, rather than making people rely upon rumours and third hand transcriptions of what’s been said on IRC.
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4. How is Gentoo involved in the project?
All the source code that the analysis uses to find patterns comes from the Gentoo distribution (i.e., the snippet you submit gets compared to the source code of projects coming from the Gentoo distribution).
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Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Manual Team strives to improve its availability of educational resources by catering for a wide audience of people across all aspects of life, be it translating the manual into different languages or providing size 25 font versions for those with sight difficulties.
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With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.
We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole?
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All in all, I’m impressed by the number of changes Canonical decided to make for Lucid, given that it’s an LTS release–for which Ubuntu developers have traditionally focused on delivering maximum stability, with minimal novelty.
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The two new Android phone – HTC Desire and HTC Legend have been rooted for full file system access on Android 2.1. Paul at Modaco forums has confirmed to have got full su (root) access on the said devices, and is currently going through final release mechanics before he makes it public for everyone to use.
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Sub-notebooks
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So how does the netbook edition look on my dell mini ? Amazing ! The icons/interface look better and the interface setup is perfect for the small screen estate of the netbook. The old 8.04 ubuntu version was boring , and this version is alive and makes me want to use the netbook even more. The 8.04 version doesn’t have an update OS feature compared to the later releases so it’s best to upgrade to a later version or 9.10. I can see why a lot of netbook ubuntu users are upgrading to the netbook version , it simply rocks !
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At a launch event for its TimelineX notebooks in Europe, Acer let it slip that it is working on an Aspire One D260 netbook that will have dual-boot capabilities with Android and Windows, likely XP. An update to the Aspire One D250, it is expected to ship with the latest Atom processor, though technical specifications are not yet finalized. At the same time, Acer revealed a netbook running on Chrome OS is also due in the summer of this year.
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The Linux-based user interface which runs on the XO laptop, Sugar, is currently developed by the open source community.
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Tablets
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But Buchholz must have jumped the gun, because the WePad’s creator Neofonie had scheduled all official announcements about the WePad’s hardware and media partnerships for April 12.
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Simon Phipps, who was chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems for the past five years, has become a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors.
In an email response to questions Thursday, Phipps said he was not offered a position at Oracle, which closed its acquisition of Sun in January. Phipps worked nearly 10 years at the now-defunct company.
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The software development equivalent of kaizen, of course, is open-source software. As the chief executive of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open-source technology solutions, you can color me biased, but open source represents the most significant change and most disruptive force in software development in 20 years. In the open-source software model, the human-readable source code is distributed along with the computer-readable machine code. Users are encouraged to understand the code, find flaws, suggest fixes, and add functionality. As with kaizen manufacturing principles, open source encourages participation and continuous improvement. It can shrink defects to a negligible number. Since 2006, the Coverity Scan Open Source Report has analyzed more than 60 million unique lines of code from more than 280 popular open-source projects, including Firefox, Linux, and PHP. In 2009, states the report, open source code had roughly one defect per 4,000 lines of code, a marked contrast with the stats for proprietary code.
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GIMP
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Today will show you another two nice plugins for Gimp, the first one is Sunny landscape : This script changes a rainy landscape to a sunny one, the second is called Resynthesizer, and can generate textures from a given sample the same way Photoshop’s content-aware fill does.
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If you’ve ever tried your hand at The GIMP, you know that, at first, The GIMP can be a bit challenging to learn. That is coming from an adult. Imagine a younger user attempting to use The GIMP.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of tools for the Linux operating system for children. There are educational tools, interfaces, and more. One of those “and mores” is the Debian Junior Art package. This package includes both Tux Paint and Xpaint. This article will show you how to install Junior Art and introduce you to both tools.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s little browser that could is actually on its way to dethroning Internet Explorer as the default, most widely used browser in the world, and the apex of its growth is in Europe.
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I’m happy to announce that I’m moving to the Firefox team, where I’ll be taking the role of Creative Lead for Firefox to help in designing and guiding the future product path for Firefox. I’m excited by the new role, excited by the team, excited by the possibilities, and excited by the potential to make nearly 400 million people’s lives demonstrably more rad.
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Openness
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The race to complete the first human genome sequence had everything a story needs to keep its audience enthralled — right down to a neck-and-neck sprint for the finish by two fierce rivals. In the end, the result was basically a tie. The rivals — the international, publicly funded Human Genome Project and the private, for-profit company Celera Genomics then based in Rockville, Maryland — jointly announced the completion of their draft sequences in June 2000 at a gala televised press conference attended by US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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The March 31, 2010 issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available. Highlights: DOAJ is now at 4,863 journals, having added a net total of 864 journals in the past year for a DOAJ growth rate of over 2 titles per day. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now searches over 23 million documents; this is an increase of over 1.2 million in the last quarter, or over 13,000 documents per day. There are now more than 200 open access mandate policies listed in ROARMAP, with strong growth in every category. Compliance with the U.S. National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy is 62% – still not 100%, but definitely getting closer. In the past year,120 more journals began contributing all content as open access to PubMedCentral. There are now more than 5,000 journals around the world using Open Journal Systems (OJS).
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Now, the OCW critics will claim that this takes away from the big schools that put content into OCW, but again, that’s misunderstanding the market, and assuming a zero-sum game, rather than an ability to expand the overall pie, recognizing that better education programs across the board are a good thing that open up many more opportunities than they take away.
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Ordnance Survey opens up UK mapping data!
Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week – today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public.
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Programming
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As an April Fool’s joke, I created a fake Linux app for the iPhone that made it look like Linux was running on your phone. It doesn’t actually do anything – when you type text, it just spits out one of several pre-determined responses, but there are various geeky in-jokes for people in the know. The idea was that you’d buy it knowing it was fake (it was made very clear in the app description), then show it to your Linuxy friends, say “hey, I installed Linux on my iPhone!” and see how long it took for them to figure out it was a joke.
Sadly, Apple rejected the app for various reasons.
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Standards/Consortia
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Formally this alignment to ODF 1.1 would be done via an amendment to ISO/IEC 26300:2006, to add the enhancements from OASIS ODF 1.1 — primarily accessibility improvements. The process will look something like this:
1. OASIS submits the full text of ODF 1.1 to JTC1 (done)
2. The ODF Project Editor will work with SC34/WG6 to prepare the text of an amendment to ISO/IEC 26300. Think of it as a diff between ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 (in progress)
3. A ballot of SC4 NBs in what is called an FPDAM (Final Preliminary Draft Amendment)
4. A ballot of JTC1 NBs in what is called an FDAM (you guessed it — a Final Draft Amendment)
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Today is Document Freedom Day. In the five years since Open Document Format (ODF) first was approved in OASIS we have certainly made progress, but there is still work remaining to be done. How will we know when we have arrived? At what point can we declare victory and say “Free at last”?
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Last month, John Doerr, one of America’s most celebrated venture capitalists, announced that he would step down later this year from the board of Amazon.com, a company that he helped to finance and build. At the time, Amazon said Mr. Doerr “has decided not to stand for re-election and will focus more of his time on new ventures.”
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Libel
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Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.
He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.
The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.
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Government plans to limit success fees charged by “no-win no-fee” lawyers in libel cases were put in serious doubt over becoming law before the general election after a Labour rebellion in a House of Commons committee.
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According to a new study released by PR Week and PR Newswire, 52% percent of bloggers surveyed consider themselves journalists.
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Science
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Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, did something gutsy but smart Tuesday: they revved the Large Hadron Collider up to a new energy level in full public view.
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Security
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Adding to the complexity of counting and classifying the world’s second biggest population will be a simultaneous process of collecting biometric data on every person, to be used in a new National Population Register.
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A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.
The lawyer representing Malaika Brooks said Monday that the court’s 2-1 decision sanctioned “pain compliance” tactics through a modern-day version of the cattle prod.
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I am shocked. I am appalled. But above all, I am outraged.
As a child, I was always taught that the police force deserved maximum respect; they were the people looking after our welfare, the people who were protecting us. I would see a fluorescent jacket and feel safer for it. As a woman walking alone after dark, I would be relieved by the sight of an officer on the beat. As a student, I knew that if I got separated from my friends, the police patrolling the ‘party streets’ of Norwich would help me to get home safely.
Unfortunately, I no longer feel reassured by the sight of an officer in uniform. Instead, I wonder if I will be arrested for using my camera phone. I wonder if I’ve inadvertently dropped my notebook and will be given an on-the-spot fine for littering. Most of all, I fear for my personal safety – and not just when I’m on the other side of a picket line.
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Environment
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The Times of London reports that the London Science Museum has decided to change its position from promoting understanding of the science of global warming to one that they deem “neutral” in their climate science gallery. And by neutral they mean a stance at odds with the widely accepted science on climate change. Science accepted by NASA, the UN IPCC and climate scientists around the world. And science being visibly demonstrated right now – today – in places like Antarctica and Nepal where ice is shrinking and in Africa where bodies of water are rapidly decreasing from drought and climate changes and in our oceans where coral reefs are dying at an alarming rate. But better not to upset a confused public. Let’s stay neutral.
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Koch Industries has “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” spending over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the climate denial machine, according to an extensive report today by Greenpeace.
The Greenpeace report reveals how Koch Industries and the foundations under its control spent far more than even ExxonMobil in recent years to fund industry front groups opposed to clean energy and climate policies. Koch spent over half the total amount -nearly $25 million – funding climate denier groups from 2005 to 2008, a period in which Exxon only spent $8.9 million.
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This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.
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Draft rules on implementing the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive would allow imports of tar sand and other energy intensive oils to the EU, undermining greenhouse gas emission savings, environmentalists have warned.
The European Commission is currently drafting implementation measures for the Fuel Quality Directive to establish a methodology for calculating greenhouse gas emissions from fuel. The directive, adopted to complement the climate and energy package in December 2008, requires suppliers of petrol, diesel and gas oil used in road transport to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of fuel by 10% by 2020.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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These developments explain why a coalition of organizations and companies—including Google, AT&T, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American Civil Liberties Union—have joined in asking Congress to drag our privacy laws into the 21st century. They think search warrants should be required before law enforcement can demand this sort of electronic communications information.
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In a huge ruling, a court has said that the US government violated wiretapping laws in eavesdropping on phone calls without a warrant.
If you haven’t been following the fight over the legality of warrantless wiretapping, this case, involving lawyers working with the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is extremely important. When it was revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phonecalls without a warrant, lawsuits were filed — but the “problem” was that the parties (such as the ACLU) that filed the lawsuits didn’t have “standing” because they had no evidence that they, personally, were impacted by the warrantless wiretapping. This created a ridiculous Catch-22 situation. As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.
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Web site posters’ anonymity an invitation to mischief: Connie Schultz
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Joe McNamee, the European Policy Affairs Coordinator for European Digital Rights (EDRi), recently discussed the current EU Commission’s plans to introduce internet blocking measures with the British webportal Index on Censorship: Out of sight, out of mind. On this theme, I asked him a few questions to further illuminate this topic.
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Something very disturbing is happening in Scotland. At one time it was a beacon for transparent and democratic government. Kevin Dunion, the Scottish Information Commissioner, made bold rulings on the people’s right to know including a decision that all Members of the Scottish Parliament would have to disclose their expenses. It was this decision that I used as a legal precedent in my own case against Westminster MPs.
Now it seems some Scottish politicians are regressing. The SNP Government is going to court to try and strip the Scottish Information Commissioner of his power. Ministers, including First Minister Alex Salmond, want the Court of Session to rule that the Commissioner doesn’t have the right to ask the Government for information as part of his FOI investigations. This comes after Mr Dunion launched a freedom of information probe after ministers turned down a request to see government files. When the Government refused to provide the files, the Commissioner issued an “information notice” against ministers, demanding they provide more details.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Linux Foundation, on behalf of its members, would like to register its serious objections to the current BBC/OFCOM proposal, which would impose content management controls on new free-to-air high definition channels. The plan, which involves restrictively licensing the Huffman codes used in the electronic programme guide, would have a negative effect on open source applications and would distort the markets which have built up around those applications.
The treatment of Open Source in the BBC document is incorrect and ignores the severe market distortions that this content management scheme would produce in open platforms. The use of Open Source within the market segments that would be affected by the BBC proposal can be divided into two business models: Proprietary but built on Open Source and fully open platforms. The HD Freesat system the BBC used to characterise Open Source falls into the Proprietary but open category; no analysis at all was attempted of the fully open category. The failure to look at fully open platforms leads to an important segment of the market being ignored.
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…teach and conduct research at the Open University, which since its inception has used broadcast and multimedia technologies in education, we are writing to express our objections to the proposal to allow the BBC to add a Digital Rights Management (DRM) flag to its high definition (HD) output.
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This leading question (and they are all phrased thus) pretty much indicates that Ofcom has made up its mind about the issue, and is simply going through the motions of consultation. Note, too, the euphemism “copy management”, when what we are talking about here is DRM, plain and simple: even Ofcom is aware that trying to espouse the benefits of DRM is a lost cause.
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If you run open source capture/viewing software, such as MythTV, things get a little trickier. The developers of MythTV can’t sign an agreement with the BBC in order to obtain the decoding tables, because part of the terms of the agreement are that the decoding tables aren’t given out to anybody else. This is fundamentally opposed to the open source nature of the project, so simply won’t happen.
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India has been under a lot of pressure from the US, due to the Special 301 report which US puts out annually, to amend and enforce its copyright laws to a standard closer to what the US would want; usually standards which the US has succeeded in pushing through in WIPO treaties. Therefore, essentially, it is the same lobby which pushes for stricter laws in US as it is in India. (Incidentally, I recently wrote a post on Hollywood tying up with Bollywood to check piracy in India). To further add to this, even as their effect in US has come under severe criticism; for them to be the lobbying party in India without due regard for the local context, economy and culture seems absurd. For a developing country like India, which even other developing countries look up to, it is important to get their copyright law correct, since the alternative is that instead of incentivizing and aiding creation and creative works, it is creating unnecessary barriers to access to creative works (especially considering that there is a big emphasis in Indian culture to adapt and improvise on works already in the public domain).
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Newspaper Industry
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Fox News loves “fair use” … if it can help win a copyright lawsuit.
Rupert Murdoch may be on the record attacking the legal doctrine as an excuse for online piracy, but attorneys for the mogul’s top-rated cable news network are hanging their hat on fair use in responding to a lawsuit brought by a TV producer who claims FNC improperly aired an interview with Michael Jackson’s ex-wife during its nonstop coverage of the singer’s death.
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We could have told Johnston Press, when it announced the plans back in November, that people won’t pay to read local newspapers online. But you can’t begrudge the publisher finding out for sure for itself…
Its three-month pay trial on six local papers sites is now ending, with apparently dismal results. One paper staffer tells HTFP the trial was a “disaster” with subscribers “in single figures”, while another title got subscribers only “in the low double figures”, Press Gazette says.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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I gave a talk in Edinburgh last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs?
That kind of question comes up a lot. It’s a tough one to answer, not just because the answer is unlikely to make anybody happy, but because the premise is more important than the question itself.
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Hyper-linking is what the net is all about. Without it, the Internet would become a drab and pale facsimile of the exciting news, data and information medium it is today.
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The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content—an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung’s two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he’s still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won’t result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren’t looking good for the torrent site.
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Lots of people use YouTube and other video sharing sites to upload videos taken on their vacations. But when it comes to footage of your last trip to Disneyland, a park run by corporate masters who are famously vigilant in protecting their intellectual rights with lawsuits, you may want to keep those videos to yourself.
[...]
Disney doesn’t deny it either way, but the wording of its policy, and its ominous reference to its “options,” might suggest otherwise. Disney has no stated policy against your right to post videos that document your park experiences. It also has no stated policy saying you can.
To stave off persistent accusations of enabling copyright infringement, YouTube historically been quickly compliant with corporate complaints. It follows a largely pre-emptive policy of summarily deleting any video for which you can’t prove you own the rights. Its policy can be as erratic as Disney’s is vague, inciting the ire of Web watchdog groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (That may be annoying, but at least you don’t live in Italy, where the government is proposing you have to obtain a license if you want to upload any moving picture to the Internet.)
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A few days back, we highlighted a new study out of France that found piracy actually going up after the country passed a strict Internet disconnection law. Though the law won’t be implemented until later in the year, les internautes are already moving away from P2P networks; the thing is, even more of them are moving to other forms of piracy not dealt with by the new law, like online streaming and one-click downloads.
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On one hand, I would propose that you abandon “intellectual property enforcement” (which actually means “intellectual freedom restrictions”) since the restrictions in question are clearly unethical and extreme.
On the other, I would recommend stepping up the enforcement — maybe doing so will make enough people aware of the oppression so that they will see the value of free culture and free software, and finally, bring about the political change that is needed to eliminate the cancer on our society that is deceptively labelled “Intellectual Property.”
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New Zealand’s Labour party, currently in opposition, has stated that it would no longer support provisions for cutting off file sharer’s internet accounts.
The policy is a back-flip on the party’s position on graduated response legislation in the past, which supported termination of internet access.
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It has been the setting for many a spaghetti western, but now Hollywood has warned that Spain could be facing high noon over its appalling record of movie piracy, with a future devoid of DVDs.
The unauthorised downloading of films from the internet is so rife, with film-makers complaining that a legal void makes people think movies are free, that Spain could become the first European country to be abandoned by Hollywood studios.
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The Telecoms Package contains a provision which means that graduated response measures cannot be imposed without giving the user a right to due process. The actual words are ‘a prior, fair and impartial procedure’ which guarantees the presumption of innocence. (EU Framework directive 2009/140/EC, Article 1.3a). The intention of the European Parliament was that users would have a court
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Last year, we wrote about the decision by Turbine to turn its formerly fee-based Dungeons & Dragons Online MMO into a free offering, that had reasons to buy built into the game. At the time, we noted that the early results looked good, but over time they’re looking even better. Reader Murdock alerts us to the news that DDO was able to get 1 million more users and boost revenue 500%… all by going free.
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It’s all about access to knowledge
In 1978 we were accessing information very differently to how we are accessing it today. If we’re not accessing information via a computer, we’re doing it via a mobile phone. But doing it, we are.
The Copyright Act, which is one of the major acts that governs how we access information, is 32 years old. It is now time to be updated.
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During October 2007, the popular BitTorrent tracker OiNK was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. Three months ago the site’s administrator was cleared of all charges. The remaining uploader had his case dropped today and also walks free.
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ACTA
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Digital Economy Bill
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Lilian Edwards (well, her Pangloss persona, anyway) offers another characteristically trenchant analysis here of the shocking mess that is the Digital Economy Bill. The DEBill* appears to be yet another in the growing list of legislative measures in which the Bill is drafted so as to confer disproportionate powers, while we are assured by the sponsoring Minister‡ that they will either never be used, or be used only for good.
[...]
The DEBill is wrong at the meta-level, too. Not only does the Bill itself enshrine evasions of due process (as described above), it is also about to be pushed through Parliament without debate, as part of the inappropriately-named “wash-up” process in the closing days of the legislative session.
On April 6th, the Bill will be given its second reading and then become a bargaining chip in an unaccountable and undemocratic haggling session amongst MPs whose chances of forming part of the next legislature are entirely uncertain.
I urge you to let your MP know that you object to the Bill and its passage through Parliament.
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• The biggest concern with the User Notification Rules is the potential effect on ISPs, which includes not just upstream providers but anyone who makes Internet access available (and so theoretically applies to cafes and other providers of wi-fi hotspots). The administrative burden on these smaller ISPs is likely to be very high, and in combination with potential fines of up to £250,000 for non-compliance, these provisions may be enough to put many ISPs out of business. The long-run effect will be substantially reduced Internet access in public places, which (1) will have a disproportionately large impact on the earliest-stage entrepreneurs, who rely on publicly-available wi-fi to develop their innovations before they move into an office and (2) conflicts with the Government’s mission of make high-speed access widely available.
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Lord Mandelson, who is putting through the protectionist Digital Economy Bill on behalf of the wealthy creative industry corporations, has come out with a revised version of the BPI’s website blocking clause. But beware, because this is merely a ruse to get 3-strikes carried when it goes before the House of Commons next week.
The Clause is not substantially different from the one proposed by Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Howard of Rising. All it seems to do is to create another layer of legislation, and possibly it could have two effects: one is that Mandelson is trying to get the rest of the Digital Economy bill passed before the election, so this is a ruse to leave out the most controversial clause. And, in putting it off until the political heat is also off, he can sneak it through more easily.
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The Digital Economy Bill now represents a wonderful opportunity for would-be next-Parliament MPs. Show us why we should trust you. Show us that you will stand in the gap and uphold democratic rights and due process. And think before you alienate a good slice of your electorate.
I guess dinosaurs have to be allowed their ritual dances as they exit the evolutionary stage. And this Bill, flawed as it is, may still become law. Because of clever timing, apathy. And the Power Of Not Being Elected.
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I would therefore urge you to press ministers for a full debate on the Bill, perhaps by signing this Early Day Motion (EDM 1223):
“That this House believes that the Digital Economy Bill [Lords] is too important to be taken further in the last days of a dying Parliament; and considers that a bill with so many repercussions for consumers, civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet should be debated and properly scrutinised at length and in detail, with a full opportunity for public discussion and representation in a new Parliament after the general election and not rushed through in the few days that remain in this Parliament.”
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 4 (2004)
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04.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Still, Linux has found multiple back doors into the small business market — without necessarily attracting much attention from small business owners.
Small business network appliances — everything from routers to switches to security hardware — often have Linux at the core. Plus, a range of managed services and SaaS applications run atop Linux. (One prime example: N-able’s N-central software for MSPs was written on Linux.) And Google Android will surely give Linux a lift in the mobile small business market.
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‘Crapware’
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Sure, there are dumb programs that can be installed in Linux. Generally, they are pretty straightforward to uninstall though. Sure, you could mess up your Linux system if you tried hard enough, but in general programs are fairly easy to sanitize or destroy. Certainly there are complexities at play with things like gconf, but they’re nothing compared to the Windows’ system registry.
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If your set two machines side by side at Dell, you’ll notice in some cases that both machines, although equal in hardware specs and feature, are different in price, with the Linux machine actually being more expensive than the equivalent Windows machine. So what gives? Why does a machine with Windows cost less than one with Linux on it? One simple word: Malware.
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Server
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I could rush out to try OpenSolaris now, while it still lives, but I think GNU/Linux does what I need very well.
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Cisco announced an updated line of Linksys wireless 802/11/b/g/n routers for the home market, including a Linux model.
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Kernel Space
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Another month, another kernel release. Last month saw what is hopefully the final RC (release candidate) 2.6.33 kernel, and so it should have been released by the time you read this. The latest kernel includes lots of shiny new features that have been developed over the past three months since 2.6.32, including some nice virtualisation speed-ups (detecting when virtual machine guest’s VCPUs are within spinlocks and automatically yielding), driver updates and the removal of the legacy ‘anticipatory’ IO scheduler (long since replaced in function by the CFQ or ‘Completely Fair Queuing’ one).
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MeeGo
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linpus Technologies is its newest member.
Linpus is a popular Linux distribution for the consumer PC market with a long history of shipping on notebooks and netbooks for many of the world’s largest OEMs. It is becoming a member of The Linux Foundation to play an ongoing role in the MeeGo project and other community initiatives that advance Linux’s competitive position for a new generation of computing devices.
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Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open – as we set out to do from the beginning.
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The MeeGo community has “opened the repositories” on early code for the open source mobile Linux operating system, which combines the Intel-backed Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms. Images are now publicly available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base “from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer,” says the community.
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In a statement today at the official MeeGo community Web site, Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imad Sousou announced that the MeeGo source code and first installable images are available for download. The platform itself is still incomplete and under heavy active development. The purpose of this release is to make it possible for third-party developers to begin participating in the project.
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Applications
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Makagiga is a free, easy-to-use, cross-platform application for doing a variety of tasks, such as text editing, todo listing, RSS reading, and simple image viewing. Plugins are used to implement its various capabilities. It can perform file import/export, backing up files, Internet searching (Google, Wikipedia), and more.
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You may not be able to be in two places at once, but there’s no reason your e-mail can’t be. The Sync Mail Dir tools let you synchronize a pair of mailboxes in maildir format across a network over a Secure Shell (SSH) link, so you can have all your messages available in two places. It’s similar to the Maildirsync utility in design and requirements, but more efficient, and while that program hasn’t been updated in more than five years, Sync Mail Dir’s newest version was released just last week.
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Version 1.0 of lightweight image viewer Viewnior – which reached number 5 on our 12 top applications of 2009 – was released yesterday.
It’s still easy to see why. Not only is Viewnior lightening fast and super light but still manages to pack in the features including in-app cropping and support for animated images.
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According to the peekabot project’s Web site:
“peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.
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Instructionals
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Games
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That’s via telnet crawl.akrasiac.org, on a 120Mhz Pentium machine running Crux. As you might be able see in the lower corner, the memory and processor load are negligible, probably because the bulk of the responsibility is shifted off this machine and out into the ether. I have installed crawl directly on to this computer, but the work involved seems a bit overkill when I can just use telnet to jump into a game remotely.
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Desktop Environments
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The KDE Desktop Project has hit upon the idea of having the American socialite Kim Kardashian promote its next release.
April 1st is a very difficult day for me. Both my parents tested positive for the gullible gene. The Internet makes it…
KDE is one of the two major desktops for Linux and most of its applications have names beginning with “K”. Kardashian manages to keep her name in the headlines all the time, most recently by releasing a sex tape which led to the calling off of her marriage to American sports personality, Reggie Bush.
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The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features.
GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME 2.28 release from September 2009.
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The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the April 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
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Built with Linux-Live scripts 6.2.9, the Debian-based PureOS 2.0 Linux distro has been recently released. This distro and live CD features the KDE 4.3.4 desktop environment, Linux kernel 2.6.33 w/ with Squashfs 3.4 and LZMA, Iceweasel 3.5.8, Icedove 2.0.0.22 with Lightning 0.9, OpenOffice 3.2.0 and many other new applications. The PureOS 2.0 release announcement shows a Full List of included packages.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is updating its flagship Linux server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to version 5.5 providing performance and feature improvements.
The new Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) release takes advantage of the latest Intel and AMD processors as well as advancements in virtualization and Windows interoperability. The release of RHEL 5.5 comes as Red Hat is about to begin to ramp up its next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.
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Ubuntu
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There is also an Ubuntu Foundation that has dedicated funds of $10 million that could keep Ubuntu going if Canonical stopped backing it. I’ve previously been critical of Canonical keeping the grasp on the trademark, and not giving the dormant Foundation greater control. With the funds Canonical has put into Ubuntu I suppose it is reasonable for it to have a pseudo-guaranteed position. Mark Shuttleworth has been a member of the ‘Community Council’ since inception and was willing to stand for election as if he was any other person of the community. This is quite telling of Canonical not enforcing a control that it legally could. At the last developer summit Mark announced that he would be passing the helm to Jane Silber allowing Mark to take a more ‘hands on’ role.
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The above icons come in all main Tango! colours as well as one awesome Ubuntu Aubergine coloured one for the brand-obsessed contingent, too. (Which, I must say, looks mighty awesome when using the Radiance theme)
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I’ve read about all of the changes online (which are below), and from what I’ve read, it’s faster, more reliable, cleaner bootup screen (which is very simplified), and a brand new theme. It always seems to be that Ubuntu always has a different theme when they release a new version!
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Variants
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Quick steps:
* Download the ISO or the torrent.
* While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features in Linux Mint 8 Xfce, read the User Guide and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
* After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5 (as described in the user guide).
* Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy Linux Mint 8 Xfce.
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As for Microsoft, Moorestown’s funky power management approach and non-standard PCI implementation could give Linux a healthy headstart in mobile x86 devices. But that’s a topic for another day.
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available from chinagrabber.com this is the Bphone, a hybrid netbook/cellphone which features a rotating touch screen and a keyboard…
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Android
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My current Android build of choice for my Kaiser, and the second one I would like to recommend here, is Myn’s Warm Donut. Under this build I have a fully functional Android system on my Kaiser. Warm Donut is a variation of Andriod 1.6 for your device, this version is quite snappy/responsive. Which of the two builds you would like to use is up to you – personally I recommend trying them both and seeing which one you enjoy more/suits your needs.
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Google declined to comment on Engadget’s claim that Google will decouple Android components from core code releases, offering them over Android Market, says eWEEK. In other Android news on eWEEK, the Motorola Droid started receiving Android 2.1 updates, and Google denied that it’s sharing ad revenues from Android apps.
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A few of years ago, we saw a spate of open source name changes, including Likewise and SpringSource. The reasoning then seems to remain the case today: the positive association of open source with cost savings and the positive connotations of an open source project in the enterprise outweigh any disconnect or disassociation with the project. This seems true even though differentiation from open source projects was a key challenge among vendors we polled recently for our report on sales and marketing for open source software.
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Karlie Robinson, a Rochester local and open source entrepreneur, gave a short talk at RIT about open source and business as a part of the Computer Science House (CSH) Seminar Series. This year, CSH has hosted speakers such as Kevin Purdy, contributing editor of Lifehacker, and Charles Profitt, of the Rochester Linux User Group (LUGOR), which meets regularly at Rochester Institute of Technology in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.
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At first glance, the ecosystem in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world can seem a bit complicated. There are several ways to get software: project websites where you can download it directly, use a software management tool that your Linux distribution provides, or you may also be able to install a Linux distribution that includes everything you need right out of the box! Once you understand this ecosystem, you can find where your contributions would be most useful, and why contributing is beneficial to your organization and the FOSS community.
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Fusion
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Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible, according to researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software open source.
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A University of Washington team has developed a system it says makes all software effectively open source, allowing users to add custom features to any program.
“Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
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Most people with an interest in software freedom will turn to GNU/Linux as their operating system of choice. Few realize however, that the vast majority of GNU/Linux distros are not entirely free. Imagine migrating away from Windows, only to find that by installing GNU/Linux you are accepting a restrictive Microsoft license!
Many distros promote the use of proprietary software, knowingly show incorrect licenses, and attempt to hide the problem under the guise of an ‘option of freedom’. When the majority of developers of a collection of software don’t care about freedom, neither will their users. Non-free distros make almost no attempts to inform their userbases of the importance of freedom, even though they wouldn’t exist without it. I will discuss how the option of freedom is an unacceptable solution, and propose some real fixes.
The problem
I’ve been using GNU/Linux for over 5 years, but I’ve only recently discovered just how much non-free software my distro contains. I decided to search through my system and remove everything that was non-free, and there was quite a lot that I removed.
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Education
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As an advocate for open source the additional observations left me feeling good because I can assist with many of them. I currently present at educational technology conferences about FOSS and how it provides greater value to education than merely lowering costs.
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Since this needed to be a single double-sided sheet of information, it’s been edited quite judiciously! A lot of great stuff has been left out here, but I think this is a sampling of the best-of-the-best of the resources out there. So if you’re a K12 educator looking for more information on open source but overwhelmed by the amount of info out there, I’m hoping this will be a good shortlist for you to start from!
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Mozilla
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Today we released the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the State of the Internet. This is the start of something new… in addition to metrics related discussions on this blog and across the broader community, we wanted to create a somewhat standardized, ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes. You should expect to see this report released at the end of each calendar quarter.
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As part of Mozilla’s ongoing security and stability update process, Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.0.19 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.2.
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And now the Mozilla graphics team have issued themselves a goal, according to a mailing list message: ship a developer preview version of Firefox with Direct2D support that will work on at least some machines by the end of the second quarter.
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The issue is caused by the fact that traditionally web browsers have displayed visited and unvisited links differently. A web application can use this information to find out what pages a user has visited. The W3C has responded to this problem by modifying the CSS 2.1 specification to allow browsers to represent all links as unvisited, or to take other measures to ensure the privacy of the user.
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On Tuesday, the open sourcers pushed out Firefox 3.0.19, which includes several security and stability updates, and in a brief blog post, Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto confirmed that this would be version 3′s final incarnation. It patches six vulnerabilities, five listed as critical.
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SaaS
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JumpBox, providers of IT infrastructure solutions, announced a major upgrade to their offering, including the unveiling of their new product, which delivers open source server applications as a service. Here’s what resellers should know.
“Open Source as a service,” as JumpBox calls it, is exactly what it says on the tin. The company now allows 55 of their namesake “JumpBoxes,” each one a virtual machine containing an open-source server application like Ruby on Rails or MySQL, to be deployed in on-premise, cloud, and hosted environments. The packages can be downloaded directly from JumpBox with a paid subscription.
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Funding
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VC’s pouring more money in, record setting financials and analyst acclaim validate that open source is finding an eager market in the enterprise
[...]
First MuleSoft, makers of open source middle ware announced that they have just raised another 12 million dollars in a level C round. In the present money raising market, this is no small feat. MuleSoft has raised nearly 30 million dollars now from some very blue chip Silicon Valley investors. They claim 5 out of the top 10 banks in the world as their customers, 2,500 deployments and over 1.5 million downloads.
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BSD
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I’ve heard on BSD Talk, which I recommend highly, that some kind of journaling is coming to the FFS/UFS in FreeBSD. I don’t know what the real-geek opinion of journaling in BSD is, but it seems to me like a good idea.
So I’ll have a whole lot of user files (with my 3 GB+ of Thunderbird mail on an 8 GB ext3-formatted USB stick) on this FreeBSD installation, and I could very well see myself in this environment at least until Debian Squeeze’s release as a Stable distribution is imminent.
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Releases
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British organization Public-i has made its ePetitions software publicly available under European Public License (EUPL) on the Forge page of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) information service.
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Openness
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The primary legal materials of the United States — laws, hearings, opinions, dockets, regulations, and other writings issued by the government that govern our daily lives — are not readily available. A national conversation is taking place in 2010 at many of the top law schools in the country to help define what it would take for our government to embrace the ideas behind Law.Gov that all primary legal materials should be readily available in authenticated registries and repositories. These workshops have strong participation from the legal academy, including law librarians, professors, and deans. But, they also involve senior officials from the federal and state government as well as a strong representation from non-profits and for-profits involved in presenting legal information to the public and to the legal profession.
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Standards/Consortia
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On January 4th, 2010, Microsoft published on his website a job offer for a Linux and Open Office Compete Lead. Since then the offer has been removed, but a PDF version of that page is still available here and in other places online. Reading that offer is very interesting because it proves, in case you weren’t convinced yet, what really constitutes the reason of Microsoft’s huge market “share”.
Among other things, the job offer says that (bold fonts are mine) “the job consists of focusing on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for… Steve Ballmer… The core mission of CSI is to win share against Linux and OpenOffice.org”. Responsibilities include (last bullet on page 1) “to see where Linux Server and OpenOffice challenges arise.”
Here is, in normal language, what Microsoft actually said with that job offer:
1. Operating systems which are alternative to Windows, like Linux, are a “big issue” only in the server market (the servers are the computers powering websites, databases and other centralized services: the computers on people’s desks, and by extension the software they run, are called “desktops” instead)
2. In the desktop market the real “big issue” for Microsoft are not alternatives to Windows, like Linux, but alternatives to Microsoft Office, like OpenOffice
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ODFA: Edmonton is obviously in good company among leading Canadian cities embracing open standards and interoperability, along with efforts underway in Vancouver and Toronto. Have you been working collaboratively with those cities to share insights, and do you think the Canadian Federal Government will follow the lead? What are they doing in this area, and should they be following your lead? Do you think it’s harder for a Federal Government to transition than municipal or local governments?
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Drew Jensen, a stalwart OpenOffice.org community contributor, pointed us to this worksheet describing office suite market share. It should probably be posted, too, to Major OpenOffice.org Deployments – OpenOffice.org Wiki and also to our Market Share wiki, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis
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In this sense, I am reminded how Tommy Douglas, the founder of universal medical coverage in Canada, explained why he stood by his social democratic beliefs when most of them had no chance of being widely accepted:
You say the little efforts that I make will do no good; they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance. I don’t think I ever thought they would, but I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.
In other words, sometimes you need to stand up for what you know is right, regardless of consequences, simply out of self-respect. Campaigns like Document Freedom Day give the opportunity for such self-reaffirmation, and I would support them for that reason alone, even if more practical reasons did not exist as well.
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Adobe’s Flash is still the dominant rich media platform on the Internet, but HTML5 is coming.
Love it or hate it Adobe’s Flash technology is a key part of the Internet as it currently exists. It hasn’t always been so and it may not remain so for much longer if the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft have anything to do with it.
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Security
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An audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General reveals that while the FBI and Justice Department have made “various efforts” to fight identity theft crimes in recent years, these initiatives have “faded as priorities” mainly because the agencies have failed to develop a coordinated plan to deal with what’s become an epidemic of cybercrimes.
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This Thursday a year will have passed since Ian Tomlinson died after a police assault at the G20 protests. No charges have been brought against the police; no one has been punished. Despite 300 official complaints about the policing of the protests on 1 April, and plenty of video and photographic evidence, no officer has faced serious disciplinary proceedings. Those who removed their identification numbers, beat up peaceful protesters and bystanders and then repeatedly lied about what had happened remain untroubled, either by the law or their superior officers. There has been no apology to Tomlinson’s family.
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Environment
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MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a “culture of withholding information” among the climate change scientists whose private emails caused a furore after being leaked online in November.
The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the “standard practice” among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee’s chair, Phil Willis MP, described as “reprehensible”. He added: “That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.”
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This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.
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Finance
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The Federal Reserve for the first time released details of individual securities acquired in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos., part of the information that Bloomberg News sued the central bank for in 2008.
The Fed, through its New York regional bank, also identified securities acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. The central bank had agreed to take on the Bear Stearns assets, including mortgage-backed securities and commercial real estate loans, to ease the investment bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase & Co.
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He did lose them $616 million though. Here’s how he did it.
1. Lucido’s team bought a bunch of CDOs. For example, a $7 million of a mostly subprime bond.
2. They put the CDOs in a $1.5 billion fund managed by TCW (like these guys Lewis shows us were total idiots in his new book) called Davis Square Funding.
3. A few months later, TCW asked them to buy more and Lucido bought $3 million more.
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Debt issued by California, the world’s eighth-largest economy, is outperforming Greece’s bonds as funds including Cumberland Advisors say investors are betting the lowest-rated U.S. state’s credit risk has been exaggerated. The cost to protect against California not paying its obligations is the lowest relative to Greece in at least 15 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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But Goldman seems to be proving that it will continue pushing forward in the aftermath of the financial crisis and amid a media backlash against the company. After a dismal fiscal 2008 and a systematic burying of its December 2008 results, $13.4 billion in 2009 profits makes it look like the Golden One is back to printing money from the cozy confines of its New York office.
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By reversing course, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under its activist chairman, Gary Gensler, is trying to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few large businesses. For example, a single firm, the United States Oil Fund, was able to gain the rights to nearly one-fourth of all the publicly traded crude oil scheduled for delivery during one month last spring, the fund’s head said in an interview.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Australia came under fire today from the United States for its proposed internet filtering system, which, if implemented, would be the strictest of any democracy.
A US state department official said that it had raised concerns with Australia over the plans, which are to be voted on by its parliament.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Usenet is now looking to be the new target for those seeking civil recourse for their material being shared without authorisation.
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So we repeat the cycle (yet again) of sucess, failure, sucess, failure (in respect of filesharing cases) and whilst both sides take their delight in their respective victories, the filesharing issue continues and damages the industry. Mark my words as we see more aggressive attacks on filesharing, we will merely see a change of technology, I don’t think the industry can keep up with the innovation nor can law have the remit to cover all facets of modern tech.
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I’ve written two controversial pieces concerning intellectual property. One with the view that if it should come to pass that the MPAA / RIAA / xyz advocating new enforcement law to monitor users of the Internet and are found to have illegal copyright material, then who should regulate it, in which I proposed that the FCC is one possible solution.
I wrote immediately thereafter that intellectual property associations are going way overboard and border on the absurd? Just because file sharing is going over the internet, should these associations have the right to find you guilty, have multiple different mediums content distribution, many of which are free to the public while being able to sue you for infringement? They need to change their business models.
This week, 50,000 new lawsuits have been filed against downloaders. It’s only going to get worse.
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SourceCode Season 1: Episode 3 (2004)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.31.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux has come a long way from being just a geek’s operating system. But there is no doubt that Linux is still the best operating system for geeks and developers. The effect of Linux as a development environment has not just been limited to Linux, but has spread on all systems including embedded devices. Projects like Firefox, FileZilla, Qt and SuperTux were originally created on Linux and then made their way to different platforms.
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It used to be when you bought a product, you owned it. Simple, right? And once you owned it, you could do what you want with it? But, lately, thanks to digital products and an always connected world, many companies have changed things around — so the products you thought you owned, you actually rent.
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I have an awesome story that I would like to share, it involves Ampache, Ubuntu, Chelsea School, and the use of FOSS in education.
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Server
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Based on Oracle’s recent actions, it seems the company is hell-bent on driving as many of its potential customers as possible away from the UNIX offerings it acquired from Sun and into the arms of Red Hat and other enterprise Linux vendors.
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What’s startlingly clear from this little exercise though is how dismally Apple’s operating systems match up to this list of ideals. Quite simply, OS X Server doesn’t tick any of these boxes at all. If Linux is the closest thing to a dream OS, then OS X is without doubt an OS nightmare. Think, being chased by monsters, your teeth falling out and finding yourself naked in public all rolled into one.
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Kernel Space
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Ok, so -rc2 was messy, no question about it. I’m too much of a softie to hold back some peoples work, so my hard-line -rc1 didn’t work out the way I wanted. But _next_ time! For sure this time.
Anyway, from a messy -rc2 we now have a -rc3 that should be in much better shape. Regressions fixed, and the ShortLog is short enough to be worth posting to lkml (-rc1 never is, and -rc2 seldom is. It’s not like -rc2′s are generally wondeful, this time around wasn’t _that_ much different).
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According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.
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Applications
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Thunar and Rox Filer are different from the average file manager, and different from each other too. Both are powerful and flexible, offering features unavailable in other Linux file managers. Thunar has an XP-like interface but it’s Linux to the core. Rox has a unique look and feel — and a rhyme and reason all its own. It grows on you.
[...]
Describing any Linux app as a counterpart for a Windows program can be a kiss of death, but that is what first attracted me to Thunar. When I migrated to Linux, Windows XP was my comfort zone. So Linux apps that gave me the look and feel of Windows made the transition easier. All file managers do not work the same way. Thunar worked like what I knew.
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Instructionals
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This free guide will tell you all you need to know in 20 illustrated pages, helping you to take your first steps. Let your curiosity take you hostage and start discovering Linux today, with this free manual as your guide!
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47. Debian GNU/Linux: Got Apt-Get?: Log in to a shell as root, type “apt-get moo” and press Enter. An ASCII-based drawing of a cow saying, “Have you mooed today?” will appear. If you type “apt-get,” a help file with the various switches appears. At the very end, it says, “This APT has Super Cow Powers”.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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We take a peek at how to create your own plasmoids for the latest KDE desktop, giving you the power to build the perfect active desktop environment.
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Red Hat Family
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LEADING LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux version 5.5 and it is capable of running the latest Intel and AMD server processors.
RHEL 5.5 comes out just as Intel has announced its launch of the Xeon 7500 line based on its Nehalem EX architecture, and it has support for users wanting to run Linux workloads with cool stuff like virtualisation, cloud deployments and high-performance computing.
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Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to take full advantage of the latest spoils from the heated microprocessor battle between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. RHEL version 5.5, released this week, has been reconfigured for Intel’s just-released eight-core Nehalem-EX and AMD’s almost-as-recently released 12-core “Magny-Cours” Opteron 6100 Series processors, said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president for platform engineering. The software also supports the IBM eight-core Power7 processors, released in February.
“This is a great time for the next version of RHEL to hit the market,” said Pund-IT analyst Charles King. This latest round in the continued proliferation of cores within AMD, IBM and Intel processors represents an “inflection point” for the industry, one that could spur a lot of data centre server consolidation, through the use of virtualisation, he said.
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Ubuntu
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Chris started using Ubuntu on his server back in 2007 with Ubuntu Server 7.10. After realising the awesomeness of Ubuntu, he began using it on his desktop and laptop in 2008 with the Hardy Heron. Last year he was awarded Ubuntu Membership status for his continued work in the Ubuntu Beginners Team, Ubuntu Classroom and his LoCo in Florida.
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Variants
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WHAT price do you put on a principle?
Some people put their principles before their lives, dragging the whole of the human race along with them to a better place.
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This is something that’s been cooking for a while now and we are finally ready to serve it up to a hungry world!
Highlights
Here’s the bullet points:
* Based on Ubuntu
* GNOME
* Includes Wine by default
* No Mono
* Some QT/KDE apps by default
* More you, less them
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Price: £229
Tech Specs
OS Tested: Ubuntu 9.10, Moblin 2.1, Fedora 12
[...]
We found the Zotac MAG HD-ND01 a real pleasure to use for everyday tasks. It dealt with fully fledged 32-bit distros like Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 wonderfully, thanks to its dual-core Atom processor. And its Ion-powered graphics will really hit the spot with videophiles looking for a slimline media unit.
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Phones
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Italian start-up Synaps Technology announced a Linux-based feature-phone that ships with an RF-connected keyfob panic button for GPS-enabled security response. The Petra phone is equipped with an ARM9 processor clocked at 266Mhz, and offers a 2GB SD card, GSM tri-band cellular service, a 2-megapixel camera, and a highly sensitive uBlox Neo 5G GPS receiver.
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Android
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Of course, Google’s Android defragmentation strategy is just speculation at this point, but it makes sense. There already are several manufacturers who customize various Android releases (HTC Sense, SE Timescape), so there has to be a better way to deliver core applications updates to users.
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KDDI Corp., the country’s second- largest mobile-phone operator, will introduce its first handset running Google Inc.’s Android operating system in June to catch up with rivals NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Softbank Corp.
The new model, made by Sharp Corp., will feature a 5-inch touch screen, full physical keyboard and will be able to receive television broadcasts, Tokyo-based KDDI said in a statement today. The handset is the first Android phone by a Japanese manufacturer.
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Here in the United States, Android continues to gain steam as it grew from 27 percent to 42 percent share over the last four months.
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The delayed Android 2.1 update for the Motorola Droid is starting to tarnish the successful launch of Verizon’s first smartphone to run on Google’s open source mobile operating system, according to posts at Motorola’s Facebook page.
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Sub-notebooks
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If you like ubuntu and like making digital music you should definitely take a look at Indamixx’s Transmission.
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Although it hasn’t been confirmed, one device is expected to be Windows-based while the other is either Android or Chrome.
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Jolicloud plans to release an SDK to help port apps to its platform, but since apps are in HTML5, any developer writing HTML5 apps won’t need to make a “port,” per se, said Krim.
For now, Jolicloud is a free product. Krim said the company is looking at different ways to monetize the software and/or services but for now, “we want to provide a compelling user experience before charging people.”
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What if all software was open source? Anybody would then be able to add custom features to Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes or any other program. A University of Washington project may make this possible.
“Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
[...]
“It dramatically lowers the threshold to getting new innovation into existing, complex programs,” Fogarty said.
Research has been funded by the Hacherl Endowed Graduate Fellowship in the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering, a fellowship from the Seattle chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists, and Intel.
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Registration opened last week for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON,) the premier free and open source software confence in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s a great way to both educate and involve yourself, or your organization, in free and open software and technology.
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Mozilla
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Our role in the market is to act on their behalf and make their lives better, both through strong positive product improvements, but also sometimes by standing up and saying that something is wrong. Our market share (30% of all traffic to Wikipedia comes through Firefox!) gives us a lot of leverage in that space to make choices in the market or drive other browser vendors to make the web better as well. It’s a virtuous cycle.
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Ten years ago next month, I moved to California to work on Mozilla full time and one of my first discoveries was a metal worker building giant metal dinosaur sculptures. I suggested to folks at Mozilla, back then, that we get one. Today, thanks to the efforts of Tiffney Mortensen, we finally have one.
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MartinSchirr put together a few videos of Fennec on his Milestone (Droid) to show how things are progressing.
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Databases
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When making your first forays into relational database development, you can use simple SQL statements to mine your data easily enough. However, as your data grows in both size and breadth, you’ll need to begin employing more sophisticated strategies for exploiting increasingly complex data relations. After all, pulling data from a single table is easy, but what if you need to query for data spanning three, four, or even eight different tables?
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CMS
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The original article referenced discussed how The Onion moved from Drupal, a PHP application platform, to Django, a Python framework.
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BSD
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After finishing his Bachelors Degree from the University of Michigan, and his Masters Degree from UC Berkeley, Joy wrote the original BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX operating system. Many modern operating systems are based on BSD, including NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly, Ultrix, and Mac OS X. In addition to BSD, he also wrote VI (Visual text editor), NFS (Network File System), and Csh (C shell). Yes… you read that correctly… Bill Joy wrote the VI editor and the C shell!!! Any UNIX-guru is more than familiar with these programs. They are still widely-used today.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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Bradley and Karen discuss the obligations and details of serving on a Board of Directors of a not-for-profit organization. Following that, they briefly discuss The Open Source Business Conference and LibrePlanet conference.
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Releases
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After a beta phase lasting exactly a year, the final version of OpenSSL 1.0.0 is here. The source code is now available to download and the list of changes from the previous version 0.9.8(n) is extensive. Version 1.0.0 includes several new features and enhancements, including support for the Whirlpool free hash algorithm, an alternative to the MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms, which have been under scrutiny due to the existence of simplified collision attacks.
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Shishi is an implementation of the Kerberos 5 network authentication system. Shishi can be used to authenticate users in distributed systems. Shishi is part of a GNU system.
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We have reached the zero P1 GCC 4.5 regressions required for a release candidate build of GCC 4.5.0. To allow this state to prevail the trunk is frozen for non-documentation changes starting April 2nd (use your timezone for your advantage). A release candidate will not be built before the end of Easter.
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Government
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In short, according to the Court, favoring Free Software does not infringe freedom of competition, since software freedom is a general legal feature, and not a technological aspect connected to a specific product or brand. This ruling demonstrates the weakness of the arguments of those who, until now, have opposed the adoption of rules aimed at promoting and favoring Free Software arguing that they conflict with the principle of “technological neutrality”.
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Schools
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The final year of all Italian High Schools (18/19 years age students) ends with a formal State Exam. Depending on which category of school they attend, all students are tested in a different group of subjects and the final vote also depends on personal projects prepared for each subject. This year, among all the final year students in Italy there are two who are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting.
[...]
The final year of all Italian High Schools (18/19 years age students) ends with a formal State Exam. Depending on which category of school they attend, all students are tested in a different group of subjects and the final vote also depends on personal projects prepared for each subject. This year, among all the final year students in Italy there are two who are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting.
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The Swiss agency for IT in education, SFIB, is recommending that all schools switch to open source software. The IT agency is developing support offerings for schools that are using free and open source software.
The IT agency for Swiss schools, SFIB (Schweizerischen Fachstelle für Informationstechnologien im Bildungswesen) on 1 March posted several documents on its web site, recommending schools to start moving to free and open source software and to stop purchasing or renewing proprietary software licences.
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Licensing
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Batman! What the fsck does that say? Here’s my plain English translation:
If you (or one of your partners) provide software licensed under GPLv3, and agree not to sue anyone — the agreement not to sue (and the use of patents that are in the software) will apply to all future recipients of that software.
Any patent agreement which attempts to nullify any rights given to you or others in the GPLv3 is invalid. This includes paying a partner distribute the software for you and agreeing not to sue them.
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Openness
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Open-source recipes
After a day of shopping and a night of stirring, seasoning, tasting and waiting, you’ve created a food symphony — a perfect meal and a killer recipe. Now, thanks to open-source recipe sharing, you can make your recipe public for chefs everywhere to recreate.
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Standards/Consortia
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Incidentally, an Italian court ruled yesterday that public authorities in Italy’s Piedmont region can legally maintain a preference for Free Software in their purchasing decisions. The court considered that such a requirement refers to a characteristic of the software, rather than to a specific product or technology.
This should give a further boost to public bodies that want to use Free Software and Open Standards. It should also remove an obstacle for those that are interested, but haven’t yet made the jump.
In this context, Document Freedom Day is a day of hope. It shows that people around the world are passionate about Open Standards, Free Software, and the freedom to use technology as they wish. Governments in Europe and elsewhere should take note.
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Today (March 31st) is Document Freedom Day, and I encourage everyone to talk about Document Freedom with all of your friends, and even your enemies.
In 1973 I worked for Aetna Life and Casualty, at that time the “largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the Free World”. We did not know what the government was using, and we did not know what the Russians were using, but other than that, Aetna was the largest.
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One day I was finding out where a series of magnetic tapes were located for a project that I was working on and I typed the tape numbers into the mainframe. Eventually I was finished, and curious, I typed in the tape number “000001”. The machine came back:
TAPE NOT LOCATED
I typed in “000002”.
TAPE NOT LOCATED
Being persistent (some people unkindly say I am “stubborn”), I typed in “000003”:
TAPE NUMBER 000003 IS LOCATED AT IDAHO SALT MINE, 500 FT, 7-TRACK, 128 BITS PER INCH, RETENTION PERIOD 999999, DATASET NAME: INCORPORATIONPAPERS
Astonished at this, I went to my boss and said “Tom, how in the world are we ever going to read this magnetic tape in the future?” Tom looked at me wisely and said, “No problem. If we ever have to read that tape we have a seven-track tape drive wrapped in bubble-wrap at the salt mine too.”
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So of course this is all hinting at ODF (OpenDocument Format), which has a specification (v.1.1) and a process for updating the specification when needed. I believe the specification itself has its issues — it really is difficult to specify syntax and semantics with rigor — but it gets the job done and, most importantly, is written in good faith and available for everyone to implement on a royalty-free basis. The latter is important because we want to play by the rules but also need to enable current and future implementations of tools that use the document format without restrictions.
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When you attach a file to an email, please make sure that your correspondent will be able to read your files correctly. It is a basic principle of courtesy. And there is an easy way to make this possible: use open standards. If you do so, your correspondent will have the possibility to choose which program he or she wants. Open standards guarantee sustainability and interoperability for your data, making sure you will be able to access them in the future, even with another software, on another platform or operating system.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched a campaign calling on all computer users to start politely rejecting email attachments sent in secret and proprietary formats: for freedom and the good of the web!
The campaign is in support of Document Freedom Day and the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument is an ISO standard that allows anyone to create software that supports it, without fear of patent claims or licensing issues. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations sent in Microsoft Word or Excel native formats, or documents created in Apple’s iWorks, are proprietary and incompatible with freedom and an accessible web.
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According to other reports, the NY Times also paid $114,000 to the father and son (and to a lawyer representing both). Either way, this whole thing is very odd. Why would a reporter for a respectable publication ever agree not to give an opinion on something? And why would the NY Times’ cave for merely stating that having a father and son both as prime minister’s represents something of a dynasty?
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The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.
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Security
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Last April, Sen. Jay Rockefeller [D, WV] (pictured at right), the Chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 to his committee. The goal of the bill was to develop a public-private plan for strengthening national security in the case of internet-based attacks. But it stalled almost immediately because of a controversial provision that would have give the President unilateral authority to declare a cybersecurity emergency and then shut down or limit access to parts of the internet without any oversight or explanation.
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Schools are denying pupils their civil liberties by fingerprinting them without seeking the consent of their parents, teachers warned yesterday.
Around 80 secondary schools have introduced a new method of scanning the thumbs of pupils as part of a biometric system to replace swipe cards for registration, library book borrowing and cashless catering for school meals. The use of fingerprinting comes despite fears – acknowledged by the Information Commissioners’ Office – that some parents believe the practice leads to children being “treated like criminals”.
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PERSONAL details of 9,000 school pupils has been stolen from the home of a Barnet Council worker, it has been revealed.
Twenty unauthorised and unencrypted CDs and memory sticks with details including names, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers and school attainment were taken from the house a fortnight ago.
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You can imagine my surprise after I paid my 50pence to use the public bathroom, walked in and found myself staring at not just one but three ceiling mounted video surveillance cameras. I had to get real close to their enclosures to convince myself that I wasn’t seeing things. Not only was it really there, but it was a Pan-Tilt-Zoom model with a microphone to top it off. Must get some great noises coming from there. It has also been reported that London officials are now installing cameras with speakers to allow them to talk as well as see and listen. Perhaps its just me, but I had absolutely no idea that this was legal anywhere, let alone in downtown London, UK. Sure I knew that London has more cameras per square mile than any other country on the planet, but in bathrooms?! How are they getting away with that one? It is appalling!
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The second issue is that the former Prime Minister implies that those opposed to an expansion of the DNA database are somehow letting ‘murderers, rapists and those who commit violent assault’ get away with their crimes. Yet, as a staunch opponent of the retention of DNA from those who are later proven innocent, I can say without any doubt that I am not opposed to DNA being collected from those three groups of ne’er do wells.
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Earlier this month we highlighted the tragic case of Jim Railton – the auctioneer from Alnwick who had been arrested for putting a 19th Century wooden cabinet containing birds eggs up for sale at his auction house.
Jim is a parish councillor and a law-abiding man who, because of this ridiculous episode, has now had his DNA added to the national database and gained a criminal record.
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John Thompson spent 18 years in a Louisiana prison, 14 of them in a windowless, six-by-nine-foot death row cell. According to a federal appeals court, “There were multiple mentally deranged prisoners near him who would yell and scream at all hours and throw human waste at the guards.” Thompson, whose execution was scheduled half a dozen times, was a few weeks away from death by lethal injection when his life was saved by a bloody scrap of cloth.
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The latest version of Passware Kit Forensic has become the first commercially available software to break TrueCrypt hard drive encryption without applying a time-consuming brute-force attack. It was also the first product to decrypt BitLocker drives.
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Nearly a quarter of people (23 per cent) polled in a survey by Symantec use their browser to keep tabs on their passwords.
A survey of 400 surfers by Symantec also found that 60 per cent fail to change their passwords regularly. Further violating the ‘passwords should be treated like toothbrushes’ maxim (changed frequently and not shared), the pollsters also found that a quarter of people have given their passwords to their spouse, while one in 10 people have given their password to a ‘friend’.
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London is “on budget and on time”, according to organisers, but the cost is about three times the original estimate. The economic downturn scuppered its private and public partnership plans for two of the park’s biggest projects, the Olympic Village and media centre, forcing the taxpayer to step in.
Experts say the security budget of 600 million pounds, the same as Vancouver, is hopelessly optimistic given that Britain will be a much bigger target for potential attackers after its support of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Environment
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To be clear we are not picking on Apple, we are not ‘dissing’ the iPad, but maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.
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Finance
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Bloomberg, which has done some of the best reporting on the financial crisis, is also leading the charge on the fight for transparency at the Federal Reserve and in the financial sector. While many policymakers and reporters were focusing their attention on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout bill passed by Congress, Bloomberg was one of the first to notice that the TARP program was small change compared to the estimated $2-3 trillion flowing out the back door of the Federal Reserve to prop up the financial system in the early months of the crisis.
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Kaptur is authoring a bill, H.R. 3995 the “Financial Crisis of 2008 Criminal Investigation and Prosecution Act of 2009,” that gives the FBI 1,000 more agents and forensic experts and tells them to get cracking.
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The insider trading scheme revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, the founder and managing director of Galleon Management, formerly a $7bn New York hedge fund that was unwound last year in the wake of the scandal, and Danielle Chiesi, an employee at New Castle Funds, formerly the equity hedge fund group of Bear Stearns.
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Noted banking security expert Ross Anderson was forced to threaten action in the small claims court before his bank agreed to refund a disputed transaction.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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President Obama’s push for electronic medical records [1] has faced resistance from those who question whether health information technology systems can protect patient privacy.
So last week, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services hired a public relations firm to try to win consumer trust.
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Just days after President Obama signed the new health care law, insurance companies are already arguing that, at least for now, they do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.
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Unfortunately for the Obamas, and for the entire nation, once the story hit the news, it became politicized. While the issue was initially raised as a comment on the safety of using sewage sludge as fertilizer – an issue that has no political party – the right soon grabbed a hold of the story as a way to make fun of the Obamas. Some on the left fiercely defended the Obamas in return. But the Obamas are not the villains in this story; they are the victims. They are among many other Americans whose yards and gardens are contaminated with sewage sludge without their knowledge and who, as a result, are exposed to toxic contaminants in the soil. And lead is just a fraction of the overall problem.
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The original “Yes We Can” video set to music Obama’s campaign speech featuring the phrase, “Yes We Can.” In the new mashup, Boehner repeatedly interrupts Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech with his harsh yell of “Hell no you can’t!” The soothing and melodic guitar in the piece only serves to make Boehner’s yell sound harsher. The mashup video has gotten over 445,000 views in the last six days, and prompted an opinion piece from the conservative media outlet FoxNews.com which said Republicans are close to “destroying their brand” and desperately need a new, more positive marketing spin, or else “the Republicans will be in the wilderness for a very long time.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy.
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Many broadband users wonder whether their broadband provider is monitoring and recording their online activity. We get the facts.
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You would think that the owner of every single WordPress site out there would want as many visitors as possible, but you’d be wrong. Not everyone needs Sunday Morning SEO.
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to keep a blog as private as possible. Perhaps you’re using it as an project site in conjunction with the awesome P2 theme and you only want the project members seeing the posts and responding or perhaps you have just set up a site for you newly born and you want to share those early updates with just your family.
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That law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, is notoriously convoluted and difficult even for judges to follow. The coalition hopes to simplify the wording while requiring police to obtain a search warrant to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices–which is not always the case today.
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A GROUP of lawmakers have written to the US Federal Trade Commission and asked it to have a look into Google Buzz.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Newzbin was a members-only website and had turnover of more than £1m in 2009. It provided members with a search engine for Usenet groups. Precise terms of the judgement are still to be decided, but the site is unlikely to continue in its current form.
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The frequency of vertical integration lawsuits has slowed in recent years, thanks to increased studio efforts to negotiate at arms length and new deal language that has kept many disputes in private arbitration rather than public litigation.
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Oscar-winning director James Cameron says the key to combating digital piracy in the movie industry is to use technology to create an experience that is unmatched anywhere other than the theater.
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The House has passed a bill that would prevent government employees from using peer-to-peer file-sharing software either in the office or when accessing government networks remotely from home.
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THE CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE has dropped a legal case against a seventeen year old boy accused of illegally distributing copyrighted material.
The boy in question, Matthew Wyatt, was seventeen when he was accused of sharing three albums and one single and arrested at home in front of his parents despite a lack of evidence.
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Uh oh. It appears that a group of independent filmmakers don’t seem to recognize the kind of backlash they can receive for going to war against file sharers. It appears that a company, ridiculously named the US Copyright Group, has signed up a bunch of independent filmmakers, with the unofficial backing of Independent Film & Television Alliance, to follow in the footsteps of the disastrous European automated copyright infringement threat letter campaign, and have already gone after 20,000 alleged file sharers with another 30,000 about to follow. Five specific lawsuits have been filed, listing the 20,000 IP addresses accused of infringement.
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Warner Bros Entertainment UK is recruiting tech-savvy students to help the company with their anti-piracy efforts. During the 12 month internship the students will have to maintain accounts at private BitTorrent sites, develop link-scanning bots, make trap purchases and perform various other anti-piracy tasks.
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You may have seen the news that Zorro Productions is suing Mars, the makers of M&M’s, over a trademark infringement claim, concerning an M&Ms commercial that apparently involves some sort of Zorro costume. But wait a second… just like Sherlock Holmes, it appears that at least some of Zorro should be in the public domain by now. Pamela Chestek writes in to give her very thorough analysis of this particular case, noting that, in some ways, it may be setting up some future lawsuits concerning the difference between trademark and copyright in characters.
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These days, a lot of that money is up for grabs — and the record labels are upset that they’re not getting more of it. Instead, it may be going to others, such as Apple or an ISP or someone else entirely. But, really, it’s up for grabs — and that’s why we see a lot of smart musicians figuring out how to take advantage and get their share.
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This presages the direction a lot of creators and artists will start to take as they leave the copyright-mired Old Media Dinosaurs behind.
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Digital Economy Bill
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MPs have the opportunity now to take the Digital Economy Bill in wash-up and do just what a wash-up implies: clean it out. If they don’t, and if lobbies like BPI get their way, we’re in for a satyagraha.
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The Liberal Democrats will try to block the Digital Economy Bill from being fast-tracked into law before the election.
On Tuesday afternoon, the party’s chief whip Paul Burstow tweeted that he had told the government the Liberal Democrats will not support the bill as it is drafted because there is “not enough time for MPs to examine it in detail”.
The bill is expected to be become part of ‘wash-up’, a brief period at the end of a sitting parliament when outstanding legislation becomes the subject of back-room deals between the main two parties, the Conservatives and Labour.
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ORG and 38 Degrees are pushing to get national advertising placed just before the debate on Tuesday next week: when Parliament will, in effect, allow the Bill to be passed into ‘wash up’ without proper democratic scrutiny, denying us a national discussion about the rights and wrongs of this Bill.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 2 (2004)
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One could discard such fulminating, except for the fact that Google (with Android) and other open-source communities are increasingly focusing on delivering open-source software that prioritizes ease of use, as Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka Lucid Lynx) release shows.
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Because what Linux needs is people who want to use Linux. I said a long time ago that if Linux was Windows, nobody would need Linux. By corollary, if what you need is Windows, don’t tell me Linux has shortcomings. Linux doesn’t need application X, it needs someone who is so prepossessed with the idea of creating application X that they spearhead an independent movement to duplicate it, gather a few like-minded and talented peers, and as a group they roll up their sleeves and get to work making application X.
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Sony
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Sony has only pinned the change on “security concerns,” but hacker George “Geohot” Hotz, who released the first-ever PS3 hack earlier this year (preceded by several high-profile iPhone jailbreaks), which could ultimately allow piracy or other nefarious uses of the consoles, believes he played a role:
First off, I want to apologize to all the people who use Linux on their PS3. Before releasing, I weighed the pros and cons, and considered the possibility of an impact on OtherOS support. My logic was this. OtherOS support had already been removed from the Slim … The builders had apparently no intention of including it in future products. So for the purposes of openness why not release?
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iPhone hacker George Hotz promises PS3 users a work-around for Sony’s decision to nix OtherOS support.
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It looks like Geohot (a famous hacker) isn’t too happy that Sony will be removing Linux support from its upcoming PS3 3.21 firmware, and the person who demoed an untethered iPhone jailbreak a short while ago, is determined to do something about it.
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Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony’s announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns.
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Desktop
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For years the Microsoft corporation has earned around 70% to 80% net profit from sales of its operating systems and application software. Only in areas like Thailand where Linux on the desktop has just begun to gain a foothold has Microsoft stated that it will release versions of its operating system platform and application software at a lower price to Original Equipment Manufactures (OEMs) and retail consumers than is available in the rest of the modern world. Consumers benefit where real competition exists.
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The quad core processor especially makes a difference for GNU/Linux users because most of the time we are running a lot of separate processes. These can be shared over the available processors, achieving a degree of parallelism. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the 3D graphics and sound software (often major headaches to configure) appear to work exactly as they should on this hardware.
Everything clicks into place and works. The worst problem so far has been a few lock-ups of the X windows system which might be due to video driver issues (or it might just be a flaky hard drive — the one we’re using is pretty old. We’re eventually going to replace that).
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Applications
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With the Lucid Lynx release of Ubuntu just around the corner, we decided to take a look at some alternative browsers for Linux (some of them making their first appearances in the Ubuntu repositories with the 10.04 release). While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it can sometimes be slow and get bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result (and just because it’s fun), some people have started to search for alternatives to Firefox on Linux. Thankfully, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.
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Instructionals
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Graphics cards from different manufacturers are very different beasts, in fact, often different generations of graphics cards from the same manufacturer can be pretty different too. While there’s a great deal of standardisation for things such as resolutions, colour depths and talking to monitors; the software side has almost no standardisation whatsoever.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The KDE developers have released version 4.4.2 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), the latest bug fix release for the popular Linux desktop. In addition to several translation updates and stability improvements, the second KDE 4.4 update addresses a number of issues found in the previous 4.4.1 release.
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GNOME Journal
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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IELO, Mandriva, Nexedi and TioLive join forces to create the Free Cloud Alliance (FCA), an alliance of Free / Open Source Software publishers which provides 100% Open Source solutions for the fast growing market of Enterprise Cloud Computing. The Free Cloud Alliance (freecloudalliance.org) is the first Open Source Cloud Computing Stack which covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) with a consistent set of technologies targetted at high performance and mission critical applications.
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Saw a notice that the subject’s beta 2 for their first KDE 4.4.x release was available. Downloaded, burned and booted it.
First impression: I saw HAL leave a note on the screen about detecting my Intel GM45 chip, setting up its parameters, and configuring the AGP aperture. The result was that when KDE 4.4.1 came it it was lightening fast. Installed Stellarium and got 50-60 fps, which is unprecedented for this GM45 chip in any version of Kubuntu, Mandriva, or several other LiveCDs I’ve tried in the last year and a half. The best Lucid gives me in Stellarium is about half, 25-40 fps. Turning on Desktop effects had NO noticeable slowdown in PCLOS. In Kubuntu it drops my fps to 10-15 fps. Kubuntu’s 3D gives me an occasional tearing over the bottom panel. PCLOS’s 3D is rock solid stable.
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But, all in all, it’s a sour-sweet thing, because my current 2009 installation is absolutely solid, stable, and fast. Everything works as it should, and when rebasing a Linux distribution there’s always the chance of a rough start. I trust Texstar and his team, but something could slip through the cracks. So I’ll be on the safe side and wait a few weeks before reinstalling everything.
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Red Hat Family
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Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday.
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Debian Family
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MEPIS LLC has announced the availability of SimplyMEPIS 8.5 from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.01-rel1_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.01-rel1_64.iso respectively. Deltas are also available.
On behalf of the MEPIS Community, Paul Brooks was on hand to say: “This is one of the best releases ever. The Community collaboration with Warren has strengthened over the past couple of years, with in-depth testing and the contribution of ideas and tweaks. In particular, the Community provided artwork and documentation, which I believe are top notch. Also community member Marcos led the charge to improve MEPIS utilities and to create new Community contributed utilities.”
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Ubuntu
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A closer examination of the libfaac codec, a free software project containing an AAC encoder installable and used by various packages in the Ubuntu repositories, has turned up a conflict: the codec cannot be freely distributed under the LGPL, a common license used for the distribution of media libraries in free software, due to the inclusion of several other licenses’ which are incompatible with the LGPL. This is despite the fact libfaac declares itself as compatible with LGPL.
Ubuntu 10.04 users wishing to play AAC format audio may find themselves out of luck.
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A recent idea by Izo makes a lot more sense than all the previous ideas. Have a look (it’s called “The Workflow Button”)…
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It’s a refined – and do-able – concept that makes use of the current way in which many people use their desktops (i.e. workspaces) but whether it’s ‘innovative’ enough to come to life will remains to be seen.
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MagIC3 W-1 is part of Gemalto’s MagIC3 product family, which incorporates the Open&Sec technology running on Linux.
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DeviceVM Drives Linux Proliferation Across More Than 30 Million PCs;Company Also Will Support the Open-Source MeeGo Project Hosted by the Linux Foundation
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Phones
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The variety of Linux-oriented initiatives and activities in the mobile industry, including the recent announcement from Nokia and Intel regarding the formation of MeeGo, clearly reaffirms the fact that Linux will be the technology that underpins a large proportion of next-generation mobile devices. In fact, leading analyst firms predict that between 30-40% of smartphones shipped will be based on Linux by 2015. This column addresses a few key issues pertaining to this growth in mobile Linux including the need for consolidation at the core level of the mobile software stack, the choice of Linux as the technology that will be common across a large array of mobile devices of various form factors and the business models around mobile Linux.
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MOBILE phones powered by Google’s Android open-source operating system have been scarce in Australia until now.
Occasionally, models from Taiwan’s HTC have bobbed up on Optus and Vodafone, but they have failed to make much impression on a smartphone market dominated by BlackBerry and iPhone.
That may change with a coming explosion of new models, featuring the much improved Android 2.1 version of the OS.
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Sub-notebooks
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The makers of Jolicloud have been on a roll lately. Jolicloud is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu aimed at netbooks. It lays a great emphasis on cloud apps and many believe it to be a true competitor to Google Chrome OS. Several big updates have arrived in the span of just a few days so the team believs the OS is pretty much ready for its final release and have launched Jolicould 0.9 Robby Pre-Final. It’s not quite production-ready, but it is the de facto release candidate.
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Tablets
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The device – previewed on Linux for Devices – has a 10.2in display with a resolution of 1,024×600, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk, and a plethora of connectivity options including both wireless and wired network along with Bluetooth and USB. The main system processor is the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, as found in many netbook devices on the market today.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the ET10TA is the software: Ekoore has announced that the device will ship with both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux as a dual-boot system, giving purchasers the option of running either operating system – or both, for different tasks.
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A new computer game designed by Imperial College London students could open the gaming world to those with severe physical disabilities.
Using the open source game Pong, students at Imperial College London were able to make adaptations so that the player moves the bat using their eyes while wearing special glasses.
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Olivier Thierry (Chief Marketing Officer) and Brian Riley (VP Global Alliances) described several Zenoss business milestones to me earlier today. Among the anecdotes Thierry and Riley shared:
* Zenoss generated roughly 150% year-over-year revenue growth in 2009 vs. 2008;
* the Zenoss customer base grew roughly 40% in 2009 vs. 2008
* for every $1 customers initially spent with Zenoss, the same customer typically spent an additional 40 cents in order to expand their use of Zenoss;
* major service providers and consulting firms embracing Zenoss include Accenture, CSC, Perot and Verizon; and
* VMware itself uses Zenoss to manage virtualized data centers.
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I’m sitting in my office, which once housed all three of the OpenNMS Group founders, drinking some Copperline Amber while listening to the “tap tap tap” of the drums as the guys in the next room play Rock Band on our HD projector.
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SaaS
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xTuple develops a suite of open source ERP solutions that run on the PostgreSQL open source database. Whether they are open core, open source or based on open standards is a question we can answer another day. The truth is probably a little bit of each. But what I wanted to discuss today is their move to offering a hosted version of their software.
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The firm is a user of the memcached open source code system that distributes needed data across a server cluster.
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Databases
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10gen, the company that started the MongoDB project, today announced commercial support and training for MongoDB. MongoDB is an open source, non-relational, document-oriented database used in production at organizations including Boxed Ice, SourceForge, Justin.tv, GitHub, Business Insider and Disqus.
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Oracle
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“This sudden about-face in which Oracle wants a support contract for essentially any use of Solaris will make me think long and hard about deploying Solaris instead of Linux or another free OS in the future,” said Bill Bradford, a senior systems administrator at an energy services firm in Houston, Texas.
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CMS
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concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong.
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“Open source software adoption reached a major tipping point over the past year, and Drupal is leading the charge. From WhiteHouse.gov to the US Department of Defense official memo on open source software to adoption by global organizations like Nike, Intel, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and thousands more, tells us that open source software is changing how enterprises do business,” said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. “The tremendous growth in Drupal adoption is a testament to the talent and passion of the Drupal community, and Acquia is proud to support this community as a Platinum DrupalCon sponsor.”
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From the minute President Obama walked into the White House it was clear that the web team would have to rethink their strategy. “Branding is what the Obama administration and campaign team are all about,” said Klause. The new administration also had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. “We couldn’t keep up with what the new media team wanted,” he said.
The WhiteHouse.gov team needed a fully functional content management system with an improved workflow and blogging features. Klause also wanted to be able to create new content types on the fly and add community-building features. Klause decided it would be helpful to go with a platform with an active and innovative community. “We needed a system with agility and to me, innovation happens in the open-source communities,” explained Klause.
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Government
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Here’s a big win for open source: the Italian Constitutional Court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive:
Just over a year ago, the Piedmont Regional Council passed a law which states: “… the Region, in the process of choosing computer programs to acquire, prefers free software and programs whose source code can be inspected by the licensee” (Article 6, paragraph 2).
This choice was welcomed with enthusiasm by Free Software supporters and civil society, while the Presidency of the Italian Council of Minister contested this law, by referring to the Constitutional Court in order to declare it unlawful.
On March the 23rd, 2010, the Court ruled that the preference for Free Software is legitimate and complies with the principle of freedom of competition.
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The concept of open IT standards, which is central to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), is to be watered down to such a degree that it will fade into insignificance. At least that’s the impression given by a current EIF 2 release leaked to the Free Software Foundation Europe.
The internationally recognised European Interoperability Framework (EIF) for using open standards is to lose further weight and definition during the version 2 revision process. After a first draft became public in November 2009, a new EIF 2 “Release Candidate” leaked in March has added further fuel to the earlier criticism.
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What do you get out of this? The whole EIF2 was a document to be ready and delivered in 2007 latest. We are in 2010 now. It is just a small paper to be attached to a communication.
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Openness
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To freely support open science based on these data resources, it is desirable for the processing tools to be open-source and available for everyone.
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Dr Polly Taylor, a consultant veterinary surgeon and long-standing member of the government’s drugs advisory council, offered her resignation to the home secretary, Alan Johnson, in an email late last night.
Taylor is the sixth expert to resign from the committee since the controversial sacking of the chairman, Professor David Nutt, last October. Several other council members are considering their positions, the Guardian has learned.
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Science
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At 1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, the first protons collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider. These first collisions, recorded by the LHC experiments, mark the start of the LHC’s research program. For more information about this milestone event, the LHC’s physics potential at 7 TeV and American participation in the project, read the press releases below. You can also tune in live to CERN’s LHC First Physics webcast before 12:15 p.m. Eastern time (6:15 p.m. CEST) today.
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HAVE Mars landers been destroying signs of life? Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA’s robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.
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Security
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Want to know what expenses your boss claimed last month? How much your colleague makes? What the co-worker down the hall is really working on? Forget about hacking their computers – you might want to hit the nearest photocopier instead.
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Environment
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As an array of expertise, it is formidable: but then so is the task they have been set by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. In effect, the world’s top financiers have been told to work out how to raise at least $100bn a year for the rest of this decade, cash that will be used to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.
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Finance
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Do you see what happens Larry when you sell CDS on California? You get a Greek-style scapegoating campaign. Cali’s State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, exasperated at his impotence to sell $2 billion in GO bonds, has resorted to the last option: sending angry missives and trying to make a media circus out of it. It is now all Goldman’s fault that California is bankrupt, just because it dares to make a market in Cali CDS. Ring a bell? It worked miracles for Greece, whose bonds are now tumbling a day after everyone said Greek issues were resolved. Also, we can’t wait to uncover, just like in the Greek case, that the biggest buyer of Cali CDS is PIMCO, CalPERS, TCW, Western, Oaktree, or some other California-based fund. Now that would be even funnier than Cali considered a more worthless “asset” than Kazakhstan. At least their potassium deposits are best in region.
From Bill Lockyer’s letter, attached below:
Dear Mr. Blankfein:
I write to request information about your firm’s market activities related to credit default swaps on municipal bonds in general, and State of California general obligation (GO) bonds specifically.
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We suggested recently that the Treasury (Treasury news) really couldn’t select Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) as top underwriter and advisor for its staggered sale of its massive horde of Citigroup (NYSE: C) stock. It just would’ve been way too controversial, red meat for the conspiracy theorists.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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But now the outspoken activist, feared by some to be dead, appears to have re-emerged in circumstances as mysterious as his disappearance. Reporters and friends said he spoke to them by phone today, saying he was living at a Buddhist landmark in Shanxi province.
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A news report in Forbes says that China has blocked Google with its great firewall, now the world waits to see if Australia’s Minister for Censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy, will do the same following his outrageous attacks on Google.
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The Obama administration has questioned the Rudd Government’s plan to introduce an internet filter on the grounds that it runs contrary to stated US foreign policy of using an open internet to spread economic growth and global security.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Newzbin, the Internet’s premier Usenet indexer, has lost its High Court case against several Hollywood movie studios. Justice Kitchin found the company, which turned over more than £1 million in 2009, liable for copyright infringement and will issue an injunction restricting its activities later this week.
Robts Take Over Web!
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Send this to a friend
03.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For this testing of the latest Snow Leopard and Lucid Lynx operating systems we used one of our newer Apple Mac Mini systems that had an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 clocked at 2.00GHz, an Apple Mac-F22C86C8 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP79 Chipset, 1GB of DDR3-1067MHz system memory, a120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics. Mac OS X 10.6.2 uses the 10.2.0 kernel, X.Org Server 1.4.2-apple45, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system. With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS not being officially released for a few weeks we used a daily snapshot from 2010-03-28 with the Linux 2.6.32-17-generic 64-bit kernel, GNOME 2.29.92, X.Org Server 1.7.6, NVIDIA 195.36.15 graphics driver with OpenGL 3.2.0, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Both the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems were left with their defaults.
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Available with Linux and IPv6, the EDS1100/2100 provides simple-to-configure, enterprise-level protection of electronic data using security protocols such as Secure Shell and Secure Sockets Layer.
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· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.9 Comes with GParted 0.5.2 and Parted 2.2
· Announced Distro: Tiny Core 2.10 Comes with Some New Art
· Announced Distro: Trisquel 3.5 Released
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 Switches to Upstart
· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.2 with KDE 4.4.1 and GNOME 2.28
· Announced Distro: SliTaz GNU/Linux 3.0 Has Arrived
[...]
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Product engineering and enterprise solutions company Calsoft, a 100-per cent subsidiary of the US -based Calsoftlabs, today announced its entry into the digital home market.
[...]
The company said it would target services towards software platforms based on Linux, Windows and Android.
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5. My budget is $1400
What? That low a budget for a new, and surprisingly beefy laptop? Sure! Why not? I know this is doable. Granted, it isn’t doable with a vendor like Emperor Linux — as a matter of fact it flatly rules them completely out — but it leaves in plenty of other options for me.
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Server
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Canonical has definitely made some ISV progress in recent months, working more closely with companies like Groundwork Open Source. Still, Canonical insiders starting around September 2009 because to focus quite heavily on even better ISV support heading into the Ubuntu 10.04 launch. ISV support is particularly critical as Canonical strives to compete more effectively against Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux on servers.
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IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) celebrated a decade of Linux on its System Z mainframe by recognizing the top winners, one of whom is Canadian, of the annual Master the Mainframe Contest.
Over the years the number of customers, vendors and use cases for running Linux alongside z/OS have grown, said Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM’s System Z division, during a presentation at the company’s Poughkeepsie plant and the focal point of much of the development and manufacturing of mainframes.
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Applications
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The default image viewer in Ubuntu, Eye of GNOME, now offers up a helpful dialogue when viewing a picture that has been set as your desktop wallpaper.
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All in all, we see Quanta Plus as a web development tool that’s almost there. Given some more time and a steady growth to its user base, this software can become the best free alternative to the IDEs that cost hundreds of dollars.
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Debreate is a graphical utility to aid in the creation of Debian packages. It automates packaging, so there is no need to create a build tree, Debreate will automatically construct one and build the .deb.
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Huzzah! New version of Rhythmbox is released with lots of bug fixes and other goodies!
Rhythmbox holds a special place in my heart: not only is it the best Linux audio player I’ve ever used (and I’ve tried every one I’ve ever ran across), but it’s one of those driving forces that keep me motivated.
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Proprietary
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I have been following the WINE project for quite a few years. These guys are doing an incredibly hard job in trying to keep up with a moving target and basically re-writing an operating system to run natively on top of another operating system.
Many people think of the WINE project as an emulator for windows yet the very name of the project explains that it is not true. The name WINE is, as you most probably know, a typical open source acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. The very goal of the project is to recreate, without breaking any law, the functional equivalent of the windows operating systems libraries so programs written for windows can run natively under Linux.
[...]
When there is equivalent Linux functionality for any available windows program out there, why would people still want to use windows programs? If you must use a windows program, then pay the piper and buy yourself a copy of the operating system. Or even better, learn how to effectively use the equivalent Linux program and wean yourself off of the nipple and be a big boy for a change.
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Back in November there was an official announcement from Skype concerning an open-source Linux client. Details since then have been scarce on what exactly Skype plans to provide as open-source software, with some speculating just the user-interface/front-end side will be opened up.
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Instructionals
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A few weeks ago we looked at some of the GNU utilities that you can use to work with files, check MD5/SHA1 sums and check your disk usage. This time around I want to cover some of the utilities that you’ll use for working with text files.
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While there are quite a few services that offer free blog hosting, there are situations when you’d want to run a blog on your own server. This approach has its advantages, but setting up a server and then installing and configuring a blog system can be a daunting proposition – unless you choose to use Tonido, that is. This solution offers everything you need in one neat , easy-to-install package.
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Desktop Environments
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Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.
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SliTaz 3.0 (release announcement) is upon us and we decided to take this tiny distribution for a spin and see how well it caters to the minimalist crowd. This distribution weighs in at an incredible 30 meg download, but does it contain the applications one needs to have a functional machine? Let’s take a look.
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Element 1.1 is a distribution designed specifically for home theater or media center computers. This is obvious when you boot up Element 1.1 which brings users Firefox, Transmission, XBMC, Decibel Audio Player, VLC, and many other useful multimedia apps together on this customized version of the XFCE desktop.
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Unity Linux is not a conventional distribution of Linux. It’s a core on which developers can build their own distribution of Linux. We’ve set out from the start to provide an excellent minimum graphical environment that gave developers “just enough graphics” for them to create something. The smaller, the better. We elected to go with Openbox because of it’s size and stability. We selected using Mandriva as our base because of the number of packages they provide and the quality of those packages. We pushed lxpanel as a minimal panel because it provides just enough functionality for distro developers to see what they’ve installed after they’ve installed it…it also is familiar to most people whereas Openbox right click menu’s may not be. All in all, our target for the core release is developers. We’re not designing this basic desktop to be used by end users. We’re not trying to win any awards with our awesome minimalistic desktop skills. Why would we do this? To answer this, you have to take a look at our developers.
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Developer Steven Shiau has announced the release of version 1.2.4-28 of Clonezilla Live. Clonezilla is an open source clone system with features similar to Symantec Ghost Corporate Ed and Partimage.
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PCLinuxOS
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One of the reasons why I said PCLinuxOS is “A real distro-hopper-stopper is its ability to auto detect your devices. I have read elsewhere that mostly, only branded tvturner cards can work with linux. To my surprise, this is not the case with tvtime, the native tvturner software in PCLinuxOS and I guess it is available out-of-the-box on every versions of PCLOS (excellent job guys!).
This software (tvtime) is so easy to use. Just right click on it and a menu will pop out for you to select a task. To get your tvturner working, simply click on “channel management” then “scan for signal” and start watching your favorite tv show!
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Looking to dress up your PCLinuxOS desktop? Check out these nice PCLinuxOS wallpapers created by sakasa.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s commercial implementation of its open-source KVM hypervisor, Enterprise Virtualization 2.1 (RHEV) is just four months old, but changes in server hardware and end users’ desire to run fatter virtual machines has compelled Red Hat to kick out another release.
The beta testing program for RHEV 2.2 opened up Monday, and with the next release, Red Hat is doubling up the number of virtual CPUs that a virtual machine can employ to 16 and is quadrupling the main memory that can be addressed by a VM to 256GB.
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Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization Nov. 3 based on yet another hypervisor, KVM. Red Hat had arrived on the scene late, what with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft already partying like it was 1999 all over again. I wondered how long it would take for Red Hat to be able to demonstrate some uptake of KVM.
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Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today announced the beta availability of its next virtualization platform — Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 2.2.
The RHEV 2.2 release is the first public announcement that Red Hat has made about the virtualization platform since its initial public release in November 2009. The RHEV solution suite includes a standalone KVM hypervisor as well as a server virtualization management product.
On the performance side, RHEV 2.2 can now support up to 256 GB of memory for a virtual machine, which is a four-fold increase over the 64 GB that RHEV supported in November. Additionally with the RHEV 2.2 beta, Red Hat is expanding the platform to support both desktop and server virtualization management.
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Linux specialist Red Hat has announced the release of the first beta for version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product. The latest development release of its virtualisation solution adds several new features and capabilities, including support for both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.
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Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2.
Codenamed “Lucid Lynx”, 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
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Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment. It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.
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Ubuntu 10.04 is now about five weeks away, which means the announcement of Lucid+1 (our vote is still for Manky Monkey) is around the corner. To kill the time between now and the announcement of what’s to come in the next version, we decided to take a look at the keywords used to describe previous Ubuntu releases to see how priorities have changed over the years
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Intrepid Ibex users are advised to upgrade to one of the current standard releases, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) or version 9.10 (Karmic Koala), to continue receiving updates.
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Here’s what you need to know. End-of-life (EOL) is a normal part of the software lifecycle, whether it’s an application or a full-blown operating system. Software doesn’t actually die: once the EOL date passes, your application won’t pop up a dialog box with a tombstone on it that says “so long, and thanks for all the data.” In reality, it means that the developers who wrote the software and the community or vendor that supports it simply does not have the resources to keep providing support.
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Empathy is an open source instant messaging client that is built on top of the Telepathy framework. Empathy became a part of the GNOME desktop environment in 2008 with the release of GNOME 2.24 and is gradually gaining acceptance as the default instant messaging client in a number of mainstream Linux distributions.
Although it has the potential to bring a lot of value to the GNOME desktop, Empathy still suffers from some limitations and lacks several key features that can be found in alternatives like Pidgin. For example, it doesn’t support metacontacts or message formatting. It also hasn’t traditionally offered a whole lot of compelling GNOME integration to make it a must-have. The program is maturing, however, and will soon offer some impressive new features.
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USB 3.0 promises up to 5 Gbit data transfers. Manufacturer Lindy now brings two SATA hard drive enclosures and a hard drive docking/cloning station with USB 3.0 to the marketplace.
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Android
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Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
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Why is Android getting such traction? For a couple of reasons, but mainly because it is free. Google is offering Android as free open source software optimized for communications. That combined with an growing library of applications and capabilities makes Android reasonably attractive as an embedded operating system.
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Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
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Tablets
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The JooJoo, originally called the Crunchpad, has a 12.l-inch capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi, a 4 GB solid-state drive and built-in Webcam and microphone for video chat. The device is powered by a proprietary, Web-centric version of Linux that boots in less than 10 seconds, the company says.
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Italy-based Ekoore is shipping a tablet PC that runs Ubuntu Linux or Windows on an Intel Atom N270. The Ekoore ET10TA10 offers a 10.2-inch, 1024 x 600 backlit touchscreen, as well as 1GB of RAM, flash expansion, a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD), and WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and USB connections, says Ekoore.
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‘Year of Linux on the Tablet’
LXer contributor H.Kwint dug deeper into the specifics, even putting together a handy table that compares some of the contenders, including Notion Ink’s Adam Tablet and Always Innovating’s Touchbook.
“It’s safe to say 2010 is the year of Linux on the tablet,” Kwint went so far as to say.
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A first version of an open source tool to help manage electronic petitions has been published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) for European public administrations.
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IELO, Mandriva, Nexedi and TioLive join forces to create the Free Cloud Alliance (FCA), an alliance of Free / Open Source Software publishers which provides 100% Open Source solutions for the fast growing market of Enterprise Cloud Computing. The Free Cloud Alliance (freecloudalliance.org) is the first Open Source Cloud Computing Stack which covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) with a consistent set of technologies targetted at high performance and mission critical applications.
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The Midgard Project has released the eighth maintenance release of Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek LTS. Ragnaroek LTS is a Long Term Support version of the free software Content Management Framework.
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He had ported his software to Digital’s Unix system, and now the workstation hardware only cost 50,000 to run it, so the TCO had been reduced from 2.5 million dollars to 550,000 dollars, and was really only taking twice as long to run on the workstation than it had been running on the mainframe, but at one-fifth the cost. He was selling a lot more copies of his software, and of course he was also selling quite a few of our workstations. That was why Digital had invited him to our booth.
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Despite all that, the FOSS law community is still growing- which is a testament to the power of the collaborative model. To me, the heart of the test for ‘are people a community’ is ‘can I call on a known group of people for help in a pinch, and would they feel comfortable doing the same of me.’ In this informal, unstructured way, there is definitely a growing FOSS legal community of shared interests and relationships. When Mozilla started the MPL process I could list at least a half-dozen people who I knew would want to be involved and would give of their time. A few months in to the process, and the list is now much longer. This informal community- a diverse group including partners at high-profile law firms, counsels at FOSS-using companies, individual practitioners, and others like SFLC- was very helpful in laying the early groundwork for the MPL process, and has continued to be helpful as we’ve gotten further into it.
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Programming
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What can I say? These regional Ruby conferences, they’re all good, based on my experience. This one was only weakly regional; about half the attendees were Scottish, others from all over Europe, and with a strong faction of Americans whom I presume were thinking about the Ruby-and-Whisky combination. If you haven’t been to a Ruby conference, you should go sometime.
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Interested in working with EFF or Tor, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google’s Summer Of Code 2010.
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Standards/Consortia
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The rise of ODF and demand on the part of governments for “openness” in formats and interoperability of applications has coincided – not coincidentally in my view – with a surge in offerings (desktop, web-based, mobile) in the office productivity space, providing the public sector for the first time in recent memory with greater choice and potential cost savings. It is no wonder that more governments are jumping on the ODF bandwagon.
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I think something becomes inevitable when the positive aspects are overwhelming. Consider Marion Marchich’s points in favor of ODF:
* Avoiding lock-in
* Thinking beyond the desktop
* Ensuring long-term access
* Saving money
* Creating meaningful documents
* Enabling interoperability
Not only are these all things that users want, but they are things that are inherent in an open format, and which incur additional effort to achieve (if they are even posssible) in a closed proprietary format!
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I don’t know about you, but the presentations I create today are much simpler in design than those I created ten years ago. For example, I now never create presentations that include
* animation and builds
* slide transitions
* sound
* video
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So just how much is really needed to create and represent presentations like those above? For the representation question, an appropriate query would be “what subset of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is necessary to include all the information necessary, and nothing more?’.
The creation side can vary quite a bit. Assuming you are using ODF, it would be possible though tedious to use a text editor and command line tools to create a file. I wouldn’t want to do that and would expect something with a better user interface to make slide creation and reuse easy.
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With BIS 3.0, your BlackBerry now supports the following: OpenDocument presentations (.odp), OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods), OpenDocument text (.odt), OpenDocument text templates (.ott) and Windows Media Audio (.wma).
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A recent campaign to add more videos to Wikipedia is being used to try and push the advantages of the open source Theora video format over those encumbered by patents. For our imminent podcast, we’re asking whether you think this campaign will work despite poor results in a recent quality comparison, or whether this issue is less about quality and more about freedom.
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Security
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Without significant political changes, none of which appear likely, the United States is going to collapse. When and how it happens is hard to say, but the U.S. government’s spending is fiscally unsustainable, as the Government Accountability Office has been warning since 1992. As one such report said, that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
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Internet cafe users in the British capital may want to watch what they download. Scotland Yard is advising administrators of public Web spaces to periodically poke through their customers’ files and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
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Environment
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Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell’s founder and CEO: “Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!”
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Billionaire tycoon David Koch likes to joke that Koch Industries is, “The biggest company you’ve never heard of”. But the nearly US$50 million that he and his brother Charles quietly funneled to front groups which deny that climate change is a problem is no joking matter. Our new report shows how that cash, between 1997 and 2008, went to groups working to prevent action being taken against climate change.
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Finance
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In 2,615 pages of financial reform legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress, there are no rules to ensure that banks keep enough cash-like assets when credit disappears.
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The Treasury Department announced Monday that it had selected Morgan Stanley to handle the sale of its massive stake in Citigroup, spurning an offer from Goldman Sachs, which was willing to do the job at virtually no cost to the federal government.
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Indeed, the big Wall Street firm has held off on plans for a major publicity plan designed to change public opinion.
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FOX Business Network’s Charles Gasparino reported on Monday that Goldman Sachs’ (NYSE: GS) weakened image may have kept the firm from being chosen to advise the massive government sale of its stake in Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C).
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They see it as counterproductive to issue bonds and then encourage institutions to trade against them, which in their minds might create some market pressure to tank the bonds. Goldman Sachs no doubt smelled some fat fees in the nascent market for CDSs on municipal bonds. In some ways, it was an ideal situation. Lots of hedging and speculative business to be had, and the bonds back then weren’t seen as likely to go belly up. They may have found a way to lay off the risk. The state thinks Goldman should have at least informed it of its efforts to get people to bet against their bonds.
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Goldman Sachs is no longer portrayed as an impeccable monetary binge, but as a greedy giant who continues the bonus party even after taxpayers helped them out of the financial crisis, the Norwegian newspaper observes, adding that the bank has become like a swear word among the bloggers by the name of “Goldman Sucks”.
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Two women have filed complaints against Wall Street banks, claiming they were discriminated against in their jobs after taking time off to have children. They are both seeking financial compensation.
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An auditor had raised red flags about Olson’s dealings in the Congo and referred its findings to the U.S. Justice Department for potential anti-bribery-law violations. As troubling, Terralliance had yet to close its books on 2007. Two lead board members, Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins and Joe DiSabato of Goldman, informed Temasek’s lead negotiator, Nagi Hamiyeh, that they intended to demote the charismatic but free-spending founder to chief scientist.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Facebook has once again decided to tweak its privacy policy, but this time the Mark Zuckerberg-run company has told its users to expect another overhaul ahead of making the changes – presumably in an effort to prevent the kind of protest the Web2.0rhea site suffered last year.
Suddenly (1954)
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Send this to a friend
03.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sony’s spin goes something like this: By removing the feature, the company says it “will help ensure that PS3 owners will continue to have access to the broad range of gaming and entertainment content from SCE and its content partners on a more secure system.”
Translation: You get something you already have (“access to [a] broad range of gaming” etc.) in trade for nothing, while Sony gets to close what it now deems a hacker loophole. What’s good for Sony is good for you, in other words.
Except when it’s not (good for you, that is). Running Linux on the PS3 allows amateur developers to tinker with the PS3′s Cell processor, Sony sanctioned, and cobble together home-baked utilities and games. It’s also been used by researchers to build “discount supercomputers” to run scientific simulations that might otherwise “cost thousands of dollars.” North Carolina State University professor Frank Mueller called it “$50,000 worth of computer power for a mere $5000.”
The majority reaction on Sony’s PlayStation blog won’t surprise anyone.
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Sound works out-of-the-box and so did Compiz desktop effects (once enabled) which is better than I expected for this weak of a CPU and GPU configuration in this machine.
This is not meant to be a review for Mandriva 2010.0, rather some comments regarding Mandriva 2010.0 being installed on a Dell Latitude XT notebook giving insight on what works natively and what doesn’t. I’m impressed with KDE4 and the Mandriva distribution, but I’ll save that talk for another post.
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Graphics Stack
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If you wondered why NVIDIA chose today to announce its canning the xf86-video-nv driver for all future GPUs and diverting users to use the VESA X.Org driver (even though most of them will start out using the Nouveau driver) until downloading their proprietary driver, it’s because they have finally launched Fermi.
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Intel’s Zou Nan hai has published a patch for the Intel kernel DRM code that provides multiple ring buffer support for Clarkdale and Arrandale systems, in other words Intel’s new IGPs that are embedded onto CPUs such as the new Core i3 530 and its stellar integrated graphics.
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Ian Romanick has just released the 7.7.1 and 7.8.0 versions of the Mesa3D open-source OpenGL stack with the DRI/Gallium3D drivers. As planned, this release is coming right on time for the end of March with Intel preparing to make its quarterly Linux graphics driver update and there is also the release of X Server 1.8 coming in the near future.
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Besides the Mesa 7.8 release announcement hitting the Mesa mailing list over the weekend, also catching our interest is a new discussion concerning S3TC texture compression in this open-source software stack. One of the developers working on Spring RTS, an open-source real-time strategy game engine for Linux and Windows, is wanting the open-source Mesa developers to implement S3TC texture compression/decompression. But this is a rather sticky situation.
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Over the past two weeks, we have published a variety of articles looking at different aspects of the open-source Linux graphics stack. These articles range from comparing the Gallium3D and classic Mesa performance to comparing the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting performance. Today we are continuing with this interesting Linux graphics coverage by publishing benchmarks comparing the performance of the Radeon Mesa DRI graphics driver to AMD’s Catalyst 10.4 proprietary driver. Is the open-source driver finally catching up to AMD’s highly optimized driver? Continue reading to find out.
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Applications
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I could spend most of the day just sifting through dockapps.org. I’ll admit that a lot of them look a bit outdated, but some of them are quite smooth. I mentioned two a lo-o-ong time ago that are still very attractive — wmhdplop and wmforkplop.
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Short post to help people get the most out of Gwibber as a lot of readers keep asking me “How I got a ‘multiple columns/tweetdeck style’ Gwibber?”.
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This is the home of libquicktime, a library for reading and writing quicktime/avi/mp4 files. It provides convenient access to quicktime files with a variety of supported codecs.
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As a writer, I can instantly see the benefit of having access to the back side of a window. As a consultant and administrator, the perks of this idea are also readily apparent (imagine slapping a network diagram on the back of the Network Manager tool on your Ubuntu server…you would never forget where that diagram is).
Of course what this very idea does (besides open up huge possibilities) is showcase the flexibility and open nature of the Linux operating system. It is this sort of thinking that keeps Linux at the forefront of innovation. And these types of ideas will continue to make the Linux desktop the single most impressive desktop available.
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Astrology is a set of traditions, beliefs and systems which hold that there is a connection between the movement of heavenly bodies and events that take place on Earth such as human affairs, and personality. Astrologists use the position of the planets to try to predict future events, and to inform the psychological understanding of an individual’s psyche.
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Instructionals
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BackupPC is, well, “BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk.” (BackupPC Website)
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Desktop Environments
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Clementine is a modern music player and library organiser. Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take advantage of Qt4.
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The GNOME desktop environment and its underlying Gtk+ widget toolkit—which provide a user interface and a standard set of applications for Linux—have an elaborate theme system that enables users to customize the appearance of their desktop.
GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. Many custom GNOME themes are published in online galleries so that they can be downloaded and installed by regular end users. The most popular of these repositories is the GNOME-Look.org Web site, which has become the de facto standard home of downloadable GNOME theming content.
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I think that is the audience Igelle is targeting: not the type of people who run Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, but the sort of people who enjoy technology like OS X, iPods and iPads. People who want to find a balance between the simplicity of a dedicated appliance and the power provided by Linux. In short, it looks like Igelle has the potential to make the netbook/tablet/mobile device market a very interesting place in the coming year.
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Minimalist
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Lightweight desktops have a multitude of uses, on netbooks, for mobile devices, for older hardware, for users with limited requirements of their systems, for connecting to applications in the cloud, and for bare knuckled programmers who prefer to work closer to the metal.
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It’s been a year since the last “stable” release of Slitaz, and whether or not the yearlong break is part of the development plan, I have been chomping at the bit, waiting for this new version.
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If I could build an entire system — and I have tried — I would want it to turn out just like Slitaz. Even my lightest, fastest efforts with outdated software in custom-built configurations can’t stand up to what Slitaz gives you for nothing. It’s fantastic stuff.
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Ubuntu
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There has been quite a bit of controversy of late in the Ubuntu and Linux communities regarding the decision by Canonical to move the buttons within the Window Manager of Ubuntu to the left hand side as opposed to the right. A lot of people are upset that this is actually more of a pain than an advance in usability and want it restored but it looks like we can expect it to stay regardless of the feedback from the community. Canonical seems convinced this is a good change and doesn’t seem eager to listen to their community on this particular topic. We’ll have to see how this affects (or doesn’t) the adoption of 10.04.
In the interim, the first beta release has been made available and we decided to take it for a test run and see the changes for ourselves. Come along for the ride why don’t you?
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Ubuntu is set to release their next Long Term Support version at the end of April, and we now have a beta version to look at and see what we can expect. There are some pretty big changes coming in Lucid Lynx, many of which are partly or fully implemented in the current beta. There are the surprising changes, the controversial changes, and the just plain cool. Though the full release is still a month away, Ubuntu 10.04 is clearly shaping up to be an impressive release.
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While not technically a feature of 10.04 itself, the opening of Ubuntu One Music Store will coincide with Lucid’s release, and support for it is already built in. The simplest way to access it is by opening up Rhythmbox, the default audio player. In the panel on the left, you should see Ubuntu One. Clicking that will let you browse the available music.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #186 for the week March 21st – March 27th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: Less is more. But still less, Ubuntu Server Survey 2010 released, Ubuntu One Music Store now in public beta, Ubuntu One Blog: Updates to web contacts, Call for LoCo Council Elections, Launchpad read-only 11.00-13.00 UTC March 31st, 2010, Planning For 10.10 – Growing Our Translations Community, Ubuntu participates in Google Summer of Code, Reviewers Team – Where are we, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – Free Culture Showcase Winners, Full Circle Magazine #35 & Podcast #3, and much, much more!
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Variants
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I was just installed a popular distro in Indonesia called Blankon. This distro is based on Ubuntu 9.04. Off course with all features and capabilities of Ubuntu 9.04. Here I want to write my opinion or self review regarding this Blankon Linux.
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Although not many readers of OMG! Ubuntu! use Xubuntu I thought it’d be polite of us to check in with the Xubuntu team and see what was going on in their forthcoming release of Xubuntu 10.04.
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The Palm Pre Plus and Pixie Plus are coming to AT&T though the timing of the release is up to the carrier to announce at a later date.
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ARM
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The Atomic netbooks are still too pricey, heavy and brutal. Many consumers considering buying a netbook may be waiting for the expected flock of new offerings with ARM power, a kind of hardware-vapourware. The netbook will continue to have a growing market, just not with x86.
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TFA also does hint that with ARM it is conceivable that devices for power users and servers are just around the corner. In the Year of ARM, all things are possible. AMD and Intel are now producing chips with multiple cores each of which is more powerful than necessary. ARM can just walk in and take up slack because there is no way Wintel can offer more than ARM can. We see that in smartbooks now. There are more apps available for ARM on smartbooks than that other OS because developers can move phone apps to ARM on a smartbook very easily. There are tons of phone apps out there.
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This personal change is one of the biggest reasons that I am committed to free software. Using Windows only reinforced my belief in my own incompetence at fixing or improving things. By contrast, free software proved to my that I was capable of far more than I had ever imagined.
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As a new member of the Board (as of 1 April), I thought that it would be useful to explain why I wanted to join the OSI Board and what I hope to achieve during my term. As you can see from my bio (on the Board member page), I’ve been involved with software, both proprietary and open source, for my entire career, both in industry and in the research community.
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Can you see now what the real problem is? Especially considering that even recent law proposals at the national level aren’t so robust after all? This sentence may be just the first confirmation that several laws already approved, even with the best intentions, are in fact weak enough to not be enforceable. At this point, I really wonder how many local Free Software laws in other Countries are in the same situation. If you know the answer, please tell me! As far as Italy is concerned, it will be very interesting to hear what the new Piedmont Regional Council, that will be elected on March 29th 2010, will say about this, since there should be in it at least some of the 31 candidates that had officially committed to support Free Software if elected. Even other italian Regions, however, will have to rethink very carefully their Free Software strategies.
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Oracle
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We’ve known that Oracle is to make some Solaris / OpenSolaris changes, but all signs have been that they would move forward with the OpenSolaris 2010.03 release in March as planned. OpenSolaris 2010.03 will supersede OpenSolaris 2009.06 that was released last June.
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Openness
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Ian White, the CEO of Urban Mapping, makes his living collecting and selling geo data. For next week’s Where 2.0 has put together a panel of government mapping agencies (the UK’s Ordnance Survey and the US’s Census Department) and community-built mapping projects (Open Street Map and Waze). Crowdsourced projects like Waze and Open Street Map have forced civic agencies to reconsider their licensing. They have similarly encouraged larger companies like Google, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas to implement their own crowdsourcing platforms (like Google Mapmaker and Tele Atlas’ MapShare). Ian and his panelists will discuss all of this in Base Map 2.0 on Thursday at Where 2.0 – you can consider their conversation as Part 1 of the panel.
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Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.
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A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.
The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.
Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.
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Programming
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Geany is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that was created to be light-weight and independent as possible. I’ve used Geany for sometime now. I haven’t used it on C or anything like that, but I use it (daily) for xhtml, css, and php. When I learn JavaScript and Python I will be programming those in Geany also.
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Standards/Consortia
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Document Freedom Day is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Every year on the last wednesday in March, we celebrate his day. This year in The Netherlands in conferencecentre “Het Brandpunt” in Baarn, the former residence of the Dutch queen, we will have five speakers who will talk about the importance of open documents and open standards for the Dutch government.
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IBM’s former server chief, Robert Moffat, is heading to court on Monday after he agreed to waive his right to a grand jury in a case related to the Galleon Group insider-training scandal, according to court documents.
The waiver sets the stage for Moffat to enter a plea in the case relating to his involvement in an insider-trading scheme that netted some stock traders millions of dollars in illicit profits.
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Nokia on Friday said it will acquire Novarra, a privately-held company based in Chicago that specializes in mobile browsing.
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BT is annoying business broadband customers by hijacking their browsers to nag them to download a branded desktop utility.
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A two-week old report by the Washington Post is only now gaining traction in the tech section. It appears that Apple has boycotted Fox News based on Glenn Beck and his ludicrous statements, including calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a “cancer.”
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Security
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Zurich Insurance has promised to improve its information security after losing personal financial information on 46,000 British clients through careless handling of unencrypted backup tapes.
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The countries of hackers originating malware-laced spam runs have been exposed by new research, which confirms they are often located thousands of miles away from the compromised systems they use to send out junk mail.
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As Britain heads for the next general election, the Labour government is rushing through a new surveillance law that gives the customs office the right to open your mail without you present, replacing the old system that only allowed the government to read your mail after notifying you, giving you a chance to appeal, and only then could they open it, with you present.
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INSPECTOR PIERRE KNACKER of le Paris Yard has fingered the collar of the 25 year-old unemployed bloke who hacked into US President Obama’s Twitter account.
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Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it’s calling a Pentagon “cover-up” of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory.
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The UK Government holds more data on citizens than it needs to, according to members of the Chartered Institute for IT (the British Computer Society).
Nudging two-thirds (61%) of the 400 IT professional members questioned said the state held more data on citizens than necessary. Only 17% believed that citizen’s rights were adequately protected by the current regulations.
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The leading domain name registrars in the United States appear to be dragging their feet on the deployment of DNS Security Extensions, an emerging standard that prevents an insidious type of hacking attack where network traffic is redirected from a legitimate Web site to a fake one without the Web site operator or user knowing.
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The campaign to freeze accounts associated with former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and former Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko led to the birth of Internet scammers, posing as family members with millions of dollars to hide from the authorities.
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CIVIL liberties groups have condemned a sinister new plan for Scottish police forces to spy on ordinary citizens using unmanned surveillance drones.
The Big Brother-style move will mean the public could be monitored constantly, under the pretext of a crime crack-down.
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The home secretary has revealed plans for primary legislation requiring passport applicants to be fingerprinted and enrolled on the National Identity Register
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Environment
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Greenpeace held protests outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen on Monday, to demand firmer commitments from the company that it will phase out harmful chemicals from its products by 2011.
Officials at Greenpeace said that the environmental group planned the action ahead of a meeting on Monday at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, at which Michael Dell, the company’s CEO, is scheduled to discuss the phasing out of the harmful chemicals.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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If you thought corporate “astroturfing” (fake grassroots activity) was a problem at sites like Yelp and Amazon that feature user reviews of products, imagine how much worse it would be if the U.S. government employed a couple hundred thousand people to “shape the debate” among online political forums. Crazy, right? What government would ever attempt it?
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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I suppose if terrorists were precision bombers who had to place their charges to the millimetre in order to succeed, this would make sense, but given that no one’s ever shown that terrorists attacks involve carefully photographing the attack-site (as opposed to simply walking up to it, finding a likely spot, and blowing up), this is simply a good way of absorbing police/security time that could be spent chasing actual bad guys.
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Back in 2008, Matt Blaze put the push for immunity for telcos that participated in GW Bush’s illegal wiretapping program in context: “As someone who began his professional career in the Bell System (and who stayed around through several of its successors), the push for telco immunity represents an especially bitter disillusionment for me. Say what you will about the old Phone Company, but respect for customer privacy was once a deeply rooted point of pride in the corporate ethos.
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A co-founder of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia praised Google for its decision to stop censoring Internet searches in China and called on other major U.S. companies, including Microsoft and Facebook, to follow.
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It’s been a long time but it seems Commissioner Cecilia Malström is the next person to pick up the poisoned apple of net filtering and apply cynical arguments from the proponents of these measures. Feels like 1996.
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Lost Battles
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A small-scale study shows that some French people are changing their habits and getting pirated music and movies from sources not covered by the law.
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The government could face a public backlash over its plans to switch national radio stations over to digital transmission, peers have warned.
The Communications Committee of the House of Lords says there is “public confusion and industry uncertainty”.
It said people were still buying analogue radios which will be out of date in a few years’ time.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
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Late last year, a draft of the European Union proposal for the intellectual property chapter of the Canada – EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement leaked online. The leak revealed that the EU was seeking some significant changes to Canadian IP laws. Negotiations have continued and I have now received an updated copy of the draft chapter, complete with proposals from both the EU and Canada. The breadth of the demands are stunning – the EU is demanding nothing less than a complete overhaul of Canadian IP laws including copyright, trademark, databases, patent, geographic indications, and even plant variety rights.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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If you believed Rupert Murdoch’s droppings and other offerings from the lamescream press corpse, you’d think the net was a minor event, a passing fancy which, while it’s having a certain effect on traditional media, isn’t terribly important in the overall scheme of things.
The reality is: modern 21st-century communications wielded person-to-person, direct, have already permanently unseated the old-style print and electronic media outlets. Increasingly, ordinary people are talking to each other one-on-one, or group-to-group, via blogs, citizen journalist sites, IM, chat, cellphones and other hand-helds, and so on.
Rupert, et al, don’t stand a chance.
[...]
Bottom line, although ACTA being touted as a trade agreenment, it’s the thin end of a wedge which would ultimately give the cartels what amounts to governmental-type control over what people do and how they do it not only online, but off.
But for the first time in history, People Power rules. And they know it.
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The copyright industries wanted border-searches on anything digital you were carrying that could be used to infringe copyright, from your phone to your iPod to the laptop that had your confidential client documents, your personal email, your finances, pictures of your kids in the bath, etc.
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IFLA and its members are gravely concerned by the extreme secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations and the complete lack of transparency related to ACTA’s procedures, provisions, and priorities, which is unprecedented for a global-norm setting activity among democratic nations. The issues involved have many facets and should be discussed in an open and fair manner at WIPO, the appropriate forum for such topics.
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My latest Guardian column, “Does the BPI want MPs to debate the digital economy bill properly?” addresses the British Phonographic Institute’s weird, vehement silence on Parliament’s debate on its pet legislation, the dread Digital Economy Bill. Vehement silence? Oh yes.
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“No changes in domestic” law promised the partners currently negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A leaked 56-page recent consolidated version of the much-discussed agreement shows that this might not be completely true. The draft version with a lot of bracketed text shows that some countries are more open about the potential need to change their domestic laws than others.
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These three points have been repeatedly documented in each and every piece of information that has been disclosed, since the beginning of the ACTA process:
* ACTA is policy laundering1 in which an international negotiation is used to circumvent democratic debates at national or European level and adopt policy that the Parliaments will have no choice but to reject completely or adopt as a whole. Congress might not even be consulted in the case of the United States2.
* The promoters and drafters of ACTA have created a mixed bag of titles3, types of infringement and enforcement measures, in which life-endangering fake products and organized crime activities are considered together with non-for-profit activities that play a role in access to knowledge, innovation, culture and freedom of expression. ACTA would create a de facto presumption of infringement.
* In the negotiations, the EU is pushing the worse parts of the former directive proposal on criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement (IPRED 2, withdrawn because of uncertain legal basis), that is criminal sanctions for abetting or inciting to infringement.
Till The Clouds Roll By (1946)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Datalight Inc. announced support for Linux kernel versions up to 2.6.29 with new versions of FlashFX Tera, the file-system independent flash memory manager and Reliance Nitro, its high-performance file system. FlashFX Tera version 1.2 offers out-of-the-box support for over 300 different flash memory parts from various suppliers, expanding the choice for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) using flash memory.
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Desktop
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Security software company AVG has released a free Linux-based boot utility that can be burned to CD or DVD as well as extracted to a USB flash drive.
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MAC or PC?: Neither — Linux. I think the best operating system around is Ubuntu Linux and I’ve been using it pretty extensively for the last year or two.
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Server
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During celebrations at its Poughkeepsie plant of a decade of opening its mainframe to run Linux apps, a Canadian student is recognized as a winner of the 2009 Master the Mainframe Contest. An exec explains why the mainframe is “middle-aged”
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Hosting-oriented Linux operating system developer CloudLinux (www.cloudlinux.com) issued a white paper this week, offering the details of a study conducted by the company on server load issues faced by companies in the shared web hosting space.
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In the sequel to “Happy Feet,” the Penguins will be the same size. But the data center will be much smaller. The digital production company Dr. D Studios has packed a large amount of supercomputing power into a smaller package in its new rendering facility in Sydney, Australia.
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Applications
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GnuPG & Gpg4winGNU Privacy is a free software encryption application that is a product of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Software project. GnuPG provides a complete free software implementation of the OpenPGP standard RFC4880, making it interoperable with other OpenPGP complaint systems. Out of the box GnuPG provides a command line interface (CLI) with numerous optional graphical add-ons available for nearly all platforms.
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Browsers
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The results? Opera was slower than the development version of Google Chrome on Linux. Not by very much, but Opera scored 523.2ms vs Chrome’s 394.8ms and didn’t blow past Chrome as expected. Note that I re-ran the tests several times, but the links are to representative results.
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Two years, and this time around no attempts. For the 2nd year in a row, Google Chrome has gotten through the Pwn2Own competition without being hacked.
The competition, which focuses on security holes in mainstream software, is in its 4th year. To commemorate the anniversary, total prize money this year was increased to $100,000, with $40,000 being allotted to the hacking of Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers at $10,000 for the first hack on each respective software.
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Games
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The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.5 and new releases being developed.
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Many believe that Wine and other Windows emulation solutions may be their only recourse for high-quality gaming enjoyment. That, however, it not entirely true. There are plenty of smaller, independent gaming houses developing and releasing premium commercial games for Linux alongside Mac and Windows offerings. Search hard enough and you’ll find games ranging from low-resource puzzle solvers to 3D first-person shooters.
Let’s have a look at some of the games recently released for Linux and a few up-and-coming prospects for the future. Stop Wine-ing. Start playing.
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Any game that is based on the browser alone will work fine in Linux. For browser based games like Farmville, these will all work in browsers as long as there are the Flash and Java plugins. These work the same in Linux as on any other operating system.
The second type of gaming is open source games. There are quite a few free games that are made for Linux as well as other operating systems. Since these are open source, it’s easy for programmers to port various versions of the game for the different operating system choices that exist.
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The MythTV developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 0.23 of their open source digital video recorder (DVR). The latest development preview of the media centre for Linux includes several changes, updates and new features.
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Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a single open source middleware platform integrated into a single, simple SOA integration and business process automation platform. The architecture is designed to find, integrate and orchestrate SOA business services, enterprise applications, and other IT assets into automated business processes.
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“Lucid Lynx” is the codename given to Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux 10.04, now in beta, which adds social networking features and a new look to the popular Linux distribution. A final release is due April 29, the company said.
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Wind River, which is owned by Intel, and Cavium will sell versions of Wind River’s VxWorks and Linux multicore software optimised for Cavium’s OCTEON family of multicore processors.
“Our partnership no doubt sends a strong message to the market about our long-term commitment to support multiple generations of Cavium products,” said Roger Williams, vice president, Alliances and Business Development, Wind River.
In November, Cavium Networks agreed to acquire MontaVista Software for $50m, in a deal which confirms the growing importance of Linux software support for processor suppliers.
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Korenix is pleased to release the brand new embedded programmable Layer3 Routing Computer – JetBox 5430-w with Linux computing capabilities and -40 ~80oC wide operating temperature range designed to provide advanced network performance in front-end industrial control applications.
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With the addition of Paragon NTFS for Linux and HFS+ for Linux, users will be able to attach their Windows and/or Mac-formatted external HDDs to the iConnect Wireless Data Station, thereby turning it into an NAS device.
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Phones
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Palm Pre overclockers will be thrilled to find out that new custom 720MHz and 800MHz Linux kernels have finally been released by unixpsycho and caj2008, and you can check out the demonstration as well as installation instructions from the video above.
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The new e-reader will likely end up working on various Linux platforms, not just Android.
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ST-Ericsson has developed a Linux-based chip platform that could reduce the wholesale price of smartphones to less than €100.
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Nokia
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With MeeGo set to launch on ARM-based and Intel Atom-based devices this month, we grabbed a few minutes with Peter Schneider from Nokia recently to talk about MeeGo, the first fruit from the Nokia-Intel joint venture announced last June.
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Android
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Mentor Graphics, which has developed a set of Android software development tools, will host two talks on Android for embedded systems, including one that will describe how Android or Linux can co-exist with a real-time operating system. A third talk will be hosted by Bill Gatliff, an independent consultant.
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2) Android Operating System
Yes, Android runs on a lot of different phones, but it’s also the operating system for the Nexus One phone. The difference between the Nexus One and all the other phones is that Google owns it and puts its own stamp of approval on it.
The open source Android operating system on the Nexus One phone means that Google will be employing their own engineers to make the Nexus One more efficient. This “in house” approach of Google will more than likely launch the Nexus One far ahead of their competitors that are equally powered by Android.
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“Don’t worry,” Schmidt smiles. There’s another kind of Android, which is totally open source. “Other companies do whatever they want, and we don’t even know about it. So when we go to these conferences, all of these random devices show up with Android in them, that we’ve never heard of. Which is the benefit of open source and very, very exciting. So it looks like we have got a huge, huge success with Android.”
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Android’s smartphone army is at least 20 phones strong, plus a ragtag rear guard of e-book readers, tablets and set-top boxes.
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Sub-notebooks
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Intel has launched a Moblin version of its AppUp Center, offering a storefront for developers looking to sell applications for the Linux-based Netbook operating system.
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The Intel Appup Centre Beta goes live today in the US and Canada and will be coming to 27 European countries at the end of the month.
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Two Asus Eee PCs are currently circulating the news, the first of which revealing that the AMD-powered Asus Eee PC 1201T has finally reached American shores thanks to Newegg.com. The 12-inch Eee PC seems priced just right, costing penny-pinchers $389.99. The drawback is that the device comes naked, baring no operating system whatsoever but can easily be solved with your favorite Linux distro.
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The Google Chrome OS which is a Linux based operating system includes a newly released Chrome OS app launcher which is similar to the Windows start menu.
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Tablets
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In a development that it claims will be a game-changer in education, technology company Marvell has announced the prototype of a $99 tablet computer that students can use to surf the web, interact with electronic textbooks and other digital media, and collaborate with each other around the globe.
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Behold: the OpenPeak OpenTablet 7. It is a Linux tablet running on the Intel Moorestown 1.9 GHz chip. For those of you who don’t remember, Moorestown is an Atom-derived CPU for mobile platforms like smartphones.
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I’m currently in full-on development mode on two projects, a Mac application and a website, and while I’ve been toiling I’ve found some terrific open-source code that has saved me weeks of programming time. So this column is a bit of a goody-bag of assorted open-source utilities that I’ve been using in earnest.
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Also available are a number of “open source” GIS applications. Open source software is usually free, written by a community of users who all have access to the source code. The users constantly refine the software, posting new versions and specialized add-ins to the basic application. Open source products lack the flash of commercial packages, but often work as well or better than the high-priced types. There is an index of open source GIS products at http://opensourcegis.org.
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Nowadays her conceptions are commonplace in the world of technology. Sadly, her gender remains drastically under- represented and that imbalance remains particularly bad in the one area of computing that one would expect to be the most open to new ideas and communities – open-source software development.
Anyone can join an open-source project. Communally run, you need no interviews or prior experience to contribute. All you need is a computer and an internet connection to start work on these free-to-join, free-to- distribute, free-to-use,software and hardware projects.
In practice, open-source lags behind other disciplines in its gender diversity.
A 2006 census of the Ubuntu community, one of the more consciously welcoming of open- source projects, showed only 2.4 per cent who were identified as women. This is profoundly worse than the level of involvement by women in technical professions or academic computer science, which has levels of between 10 and 30 per cent.
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Exadel Fiji extends JSF by allowing the use of Flex with JSF components and within a JSF page. It comes with ready-to-use charting components based on Flash as well as universal wrapper which allows to wrap any Flash component as JSF component.
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This is the version of document viewer we will be releasing as open source software in the very, very near future.
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Going Open Source is another important step in WeWebU’s growth strategy. They have decided to adopt a Commercial Open Source business model in addition to the traditional license sale. Stefan Waldhauser, co-founder and CEO of WeWebU, is excited: “I think Commercial Open Source is a significant trend in the software industry. Since our foundation ten years ago, WeWebU has always been driven by technology and the power of innovation. A Commercial Open Source strategy fits perfectly to our OpenWorkdesk offering and the objective to deliver the best way to build Composite Content Applications.”
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The UTM offering, called Ubiq-Freedom which is available under an open-source licence includes open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall.
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More recently Bletchley Park played host to a national partnership, designed to encourage the UK local authorities to work together to save £60 million a year across their educational ICT budgets, through the use of open source solutions.
“The 17 Local Authorities comprising the North West Learning Grid will now be looking at the feasibility of implementing open source solutions in all areas of their education services,” said the CEO of the North West Learning Grid, Gary Clawson, in October.
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Security researchers on Friday unveiled an open-source device that captures the traffic of a wide variety of wireless devices, including keyboards, medical devices, and remote controls.
Keykeriki version 2 captures the entire data stream sent between wireless devices using a popular series of chips made by Norway-based Nordic Semiconductor. That includes the device addresses and the raw payload being sent between them. The open-source package was developed by researchers of Switzerland-based Dreamlab Technologies and includes complete software, firmware, and schematics for building the $100 sniffer.
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Users are able to program a virtual robot in C++ and modify the virtual environment to suit a wide range of situations.
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Magento (formerly known as Varien), the company behind an open source ecommerce platform aptly named Magento, relaunched their Solution Partner Program in April 2009. And in last year’s Open Source 50 report, Magento was listed in the “Best of the Rest” section based on limited information and feedback from solution partners about the partner program. Fast forward to the present, and the company is showing some partner momentum. Magento’s story offers some important lessons for other open source partner programs.
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Google
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There are other tools and services that you can use for web app scanning. Nikto is one and it is open sourced. The formerly open source tool Nessus is another. There are also software as a service providers such as White Hat security who do web app scanning. NTSpyder is another non-open tool for web app testing.
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Their goal is to cultivate the next generation of open-source software developers in evolutionary biology and promote the open, collaborative development of reusable, interoperable, standards-supporting informatics tools. And for the first time, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a umbrella group that guides the development of BioPerl, Biopython, BioJava, BioRuby, and several other open source bioinformatics projects, has also been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s GSoC.
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Events
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Open source software adoption in the embedded systems domain is gaining growing interest within the European industrial and academic communities. Despite it represents the key towards flexibility, cost reduction and increased competitiveness, it is not easy to assess and evaluate Open Source software quality, thus making industries still skeptic about its integration into proprietary solutions.
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Not familiar with the conference? The Open World Forum is “the leading summit bringing together decision-makers and communities to cross-fertilize free/Open Source technological, economic and social initiatives to build the digital future.” This conference discusses the future of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) projects, presents its Innovation Awards, looks at current trends and examines all of this in terms of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap (news, site).
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This year for the first time, O’Reilly’s Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. The call for participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices, and patient-centered care.
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SaaS
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Coupling open source software with cloud computing expertise could help Abiquo make a big splash with U.S. customers looking to create and manage virtual resources pools on premise or in public environments. And with support for VMware, Xen, Virtual Box, KVM and now Microsoft Hyper-V, the Spanish start-up promises to deliver vendor-neutral, interoperable management at a reasonable price.
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Oracle
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Sun Solaris 10 was previously available for free without support after submitting a valid email. With the Sun acquisition finalized, Oracle has only given customers a 90-day free trial of Solaris 10, hoping to gain some paying customers from those with existing Solaris 10 systems. This change could lead to a mass migration to Linux vendors. Most of Linux’s new customers come from Unix migrations, and Solaris 10 is the largest Unix platform.
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Business
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Alfresco’s cloud efforts are part of a broader channel effort at the company, which has shown momentum in the past year or so. Alfresco landed near the top of the 2009 Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs (the 2010 research is under way now).
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The growth of open-source software in the commercial sector was also noted, and the promotion of open-source projects by commercial open-source companies was cited as a factor. (REvolution Computing promoting the R Project was one example given.) The other theme I spotted was innovation: while lowering costs is still the #1 ranked feature of open-source, access to new methods and the rapid pace of innovation in FOSS compared to proprietary software is now being listed as a critical reason to switch.
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During his seven year stretch as CEO of MySQL, Mickos turned the open source database market on its ear, growing MySQL from a startup to one of the most prominent open source company in the world. He grew MySQL to the point thatSun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) swooped in and acquired it with a $1 billion offer, an unheard of sum for an open source company.
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Openness
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There is no evidence Sunstein’s theories of governmental information control have to do with the apparent increasing persecution of open source leak outlets, but it does seem to stem from the same kind of authoritarian instinct.
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Wikipedia is close to rolling out a new design that it hopes will make the “user-edited” encyclopedia easier to use and navigate, and thus potentially appeal to new users more than the slightly clunky-looking current site.
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FLOSS Manuals, true to its name, produces manuals for free software applications. The manuals themselves are freely licensed and often written in book sprints. This January, as part of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, FLOSS Manuals attempted its first non-manual booksprint — a considerably harder task, as no structure is implied. Only the book title, Collaborative Futures, was given — a collaborative experiment about the future of collaboration.
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In the midst of Treena Grevatt’s twitter reminders of the early start of cycling in Ottawa (and her retweets of wise words and links such as this to remind motorists like me!), it was encouraging to read the recent story entitled Kids traffic safety curriculum goes open source.
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Before Peter Suber became Mr Open Access, he was a philosopher by trade. This is evident in the long, thoughtful essays he writes for the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which help console us for his absence these days from the world of blogging.
Here’s the latest of them, entitled “Open access, markets, and missions”. It asks some deep questions about what kind of scholarly publishing we should strive for: market oriented or mission oriented?
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Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you.
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Apple’s e-book reader application, iBooks, may be more widely available than anticipated, thanks to the inclusion of more than 30,000 free e-books from Project Gutenberg.
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Standards/Consortia
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Internet Wideband Audio Codec (Active WG)
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Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.
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The UK government needs to be “less deferential” towards the US and more willing to say no to Washington, a group of MPs have said.
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Illustration: Markus Hofko
Early this year, the big brains at Google admitted that they had been outsmarted. Along with 33 other companies, the search giant had been the victim of a major hack — an infiltration of international computer networks that even Google couldn’t do a thing about. So the company has reportedly turned to the only place on Earth with a deeper team of geeks than the Googleplex: the National Security Agency.
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Security
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Do this, do that, sit up, shut up and obey, we’re in charge.
[...]
“Anyone who has turned on a commercial radio station recently will have worked out his latest trick: a mass propaganda splurge before an election campaign. Get on a bus, and it can be 100 percent state adverts – advising how Big Brother will help you get a job, buy a car, see off door-to-door salesmen, give you a job in the prison services – anything you want.”
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You may have read about the ‘confusion’ caused when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary crashed like an elephant from a great height on the small social innovation project already known as MyPolice.
That the good Inspectorate a) failed to spot the existence of the MyPolice incumbents, b) demonstrated a complete inability to change anything when it was noticed, and c) thought that two entirely different propositions having exactly the same name wouldn’t confuse people are all pretty damning in their own ways.
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Labour’s plan to allow tax inspectors to open private mail before it is delivered is unacceptable in a democracy
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Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”
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If it could further ram home the point that violent crime is very rare – and its prevalence is something that’s continually hyped-up by those with a vested interest in accentuating negativity for the furtherance of their own agendas – it would be perfect.
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Indonesia has launched a new biometric system to improve security at its airports and seaports.
The system captures facial images and fingerprints of arriving passengers and are checked against the immigration database for clearance.
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Following reports of multiple attacks on the offices of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform over the weekend, Republican House whip Eric Cantor held an angry press conference on Thursday claiming that his office had been attacked by gunshot and accusing Democrats of “dangerously fanning the flames”. But on closer examination the “attack” on Cantor’s office turns out to be ambiguous at the least.
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Of concern to British politicians, too, is that a former prime minister has been stone cold silent about being on the payroll of an immense multinational oil corporation, specializing in oil exploration in Iraq, and one that coincidentally happens to find itself in another challenging part of the globe.
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Science
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Garibaldi, a rock climber in his spare time, did the math to disprove the theory, which involves a mysterious structure known as E8. The resulting paper, co-authored by physicist Jacques Distler of the University of Texas, will appear in an upcoming issue of Communications in Mathematical Physics.
In November of 2007, physicist Garret Lisi published an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Lisi spent much of his time surfing in Hawaii, adding an alluring bit of color to the story surrounding the theory. Although his paper was not peer-reviewed, and Lisi himself told the Daily Telegraph that the theory was still in development and he gave a “low” likelihood to the prediction, the idea was widely reported in the media, under attention-grabbing headlines like “Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.”
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Environment
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Under mounting pressure over illegal logging of its national parks, Madagascar’s transitional government on Wednesday reinstated a ban on rosewood logging and exports.
The decree (no. 2010-141), which prohibits all exports of rosewood and precious timber for two to five years, was announced during a council meeting held yesterday at Ambohitsorohitra Palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital city. Madagascar’s Minister of Environment has already proposed a plan to address the illegal timber trade, according to the Madagascar Tribune.
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Hollywood movies and popular television shows featuring cute monkeys and other primates are driving demand for them as exotic pets, only to leave the animals psychologically damaged.
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To conservationists it was a gratuitous act of provocation; but to the Japanese officials whose embassy served bluefin tuna sushi to guests hours before last week’s UN vote on a trade ban on the fish, it was a show of confidence that their diplomatic offensive had worked.
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Earlier this month, we told you about a WildAid public service announcement starring Chinese basketballer Yao Ming that discouraged people from eating shark’s fin soup.
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Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds in the UK, says the Sunday Times’ “inaccurate, misleading and distorted” story by Jonathan Leake in January left readers under the wrong impression that the 2007 IPCC AR4 report made a false claim by stating that reduced rainfall could wipe out up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest. Lewis filed a formal complaint this week with the UK Press Complaints Commission.
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If investment is, in fact, directly proportionate to results, then you might one day be able to wave goodbye to the lingering cloud of pollution that keeps your skin ghostly white year-round. According to a new report called Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race? China outspent every country in the world, clean energy-wise, in 2009, beating the $18.6 billion spent by the US nearly two-to-one.
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The head of the UN’s climate change panel has accused politicians and prominent climate sceptics of “a new form of persecution” against scientists who work on global warming.
In a strongly worded article published on the Guardian website, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hit out at those in “positions of power and responsibility” who try to portray “dedicated scientists as climate criminals”.
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High court rules that decision to expand Heathrow airport must be reconsidered in respect to UK climate change policy
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Finance
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Charlotte Hanna did. The former vice president of Goldman Sachs Group filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Manhattan this week, claiming that the bank demoted her because she elected to take advantage of its part-time track after her first maternity leave, then fired her while she was on her second.
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Among the banks that rule Wall Street, Citigroup got a bailout that was bigger than the rest. Now the company is about to pay a king’s ransom for its federal rescue.
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Against all the odds, a glimmer of hope for real financial reform begins to shine through. It’s not that anything definite has happened – in fact most of the recent Senate details are not encouraging – but rather that the broader political calculus has shifted in the right direction.
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Just when you thought you’d had enough of Goldman Sachs running things — and running them into the ground — along comes Meg Whitman. Most Californians know she’s using her fortune to run for governor. They probably don’t know that she was once on the board of Goldman Sachs, and most likely still would be if she hadn’t been cited for a practice one law firm describes as “essentially … an illegal bribe … to corporate leaders.” Then came the Congressional investigation, and the investor lawsuit, and … well, it was probably best to just leave the board.
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Goldman Sachs is looking to open a branch office in Warsaw, in a move to take advantage the Polish government’s plans to sell $10 billion worth of assets in share offerings this year, Bloomberg News reported.
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Former Goldman Sachs vice president Charlotte Hanna has filed a lawsuit against the financial giant, claiming she suffered discrimination and then termination for bearing children. Following the birth of her first child in 2005, Hanna returned to work part-time.
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It’s simply excellent how Goldman has managed to dress up xenophobia AND racism as “shareholder value maximization”. Amazing what you can get out of a Harvard MBA.
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In February, major news organizations reported that the Federal Reserve Board is investigating the role that Goldman – a major recipient of federal bailout funds during our own financial meltdown – played in the Greek debt crisis. The firm used complex financial instruments called “derivatives” to help the Greek government hide the fact that it was in debt up to its eyeballs and getting in deeper.
That, in turn, allowed Greece’s participation in the Euro, Europe’s common currency, under what may have been false pretenses. “One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from budget overseers in Brussels,” the New York Times reported. The deal, “hidden from public view … helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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With its roots in software that some classed “spyware”, Phorm proposed helping ISPs make more money and advertisers more relevant audiences. Installed on ISPs’ networks, its technology would monitor consenting customers’ every web visit to build an anonymised profile of their browsing habits against which to target ads.
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Big news from Russia today: RBK Daily, a respected Russian news agency, reports (in Russian) that the Russian government might soon be launching a “national search engine”. According to RBK’s anonymous sources inside Kremlin, it would aim at satisfying “state-oriented” needs such as “facilitating access to safe information” and “filtering web-sites that feature banned content.” It’s going to be an ambitious project: the government is prepared to invest $100 million in this new venture, does not want to allow any foreign funding, and intends to build it in cooperation with the private sector.
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In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I will suggest that we need a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Note that I do not suggest the establishment a Constitution of the Internet; I think that would violate the tenets Barlow so eloquently if grandiosely sets forth. We don’t need government in cyberspace; we need freedom.
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Google’s face-off with Beijing over censorship may have struck a philosophical blow for free speech and encouraged some Chinese Netizens by its sheer chutzpah, but it doesn’t do a thing for Internet users in China. It merely hands the job of blocking objectionable content back to Beijing.
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A recently leaked European Council proposal seeks to create a “Great Firewall of Europe,” instituted to block sites that depict the abuse of children. As with other censorwalls, it’s unlikely that this will performed as intended, since paedophiles will circumvent it with proxies, or by using P2P or email or private websites to trade illegal material. But the creation of a continent-wide network censorship scheme is likely to cause new problems, inviting authorities to shoehorn ever-greater slices of the net into the “illegal” category — this has already happened in Australia and other countries that have built Chinese-style censorship regimes.
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The Canadian National History Society was forced to change the name of its magazine, The Beaver, founded in 1920, because the name of the magazine caused it to be blocked by Internet filters.
One teacher wanted to show students some pictures that would illustrate the effects of atomic testing. “However when I went to bring the wikipedia page up at school during class, it was blocked by our internet filter, BESS. The name of the islands? ‘Bikini Atoll,’” said Doug Johnson, quoting the teacher. Johnson, a director of media and technology at a Minnesota school district, put out a call in July for stories about how Internet filtering hobbles education, and got an earful. (“Censorship by Omission”)
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third-party players. The get-iplayer download page has a good summary of what happened, including links to The Reg articles and the BBC’s response to users’ complaints.”
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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I suggest, is to reallocate copyright’s benefits to give more rights to creators, greater liberty to readers, and less control to copyright intermediaries.
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This talk, delivered at the 2006 AALS mid-year meeting, briefly addresses the politics of copyright legislation before segueing into the politics of intellectual property scholarship. I urge that the metaphor of a “copyright war,” used by both copyright owners and copyright reformers, is uncomfortably apt. It reflects a polarization of the copyright community that has affected copyright scholarship in unhealthy ways, encouraging scholars to choose sides in the copyright wars and to tailor their scholarship to fit.
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The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June.
Users will be charged £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription for access to both papers’ websites, publisher News International has announced.
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An exact date hasn’t been confirmed, but it was made clear that there will be no access to the content of these papers on Nexis from around the time the paywall goes up. LexisNexis hasn’t commented yet.
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So here we go. After much speculation, we now know that News Corporation’s two flagship titles in the UK, The Times and The Sunday Times, will charge users to access online content starting in June. No freebies, no tiered access models, just a paywall. And the price, at £1 per day, is the same as the cover price of the print edition.
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Ofcom’s annual Children’s Media Literacy Audit for 2009 also had bad news for the music industry, finding that 44% of children between 12 and 15 thought downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal.
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Veterans of World War II who sang war songs at a free concert last year have now been told that they must pay fees to copyright holders. A collections society says they are owed money since the veterans sang the songs in public. The controversy has prompted an announcement in Russia’s parliament.
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In an advisory report two economy professors are urging a government to rethink new anti-piracy legislation currently being drafted. The professors argue that harsher anti-piracy measures will only benefit the large media companies and prominent artists, at the expense of users and upcoming artists.
The Spanish Government has recently proposed new legislation under which BitTorrent sites could be taken offline without a judicial order. The new Sustainable Economy Law, sponsored by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, further includes a wide range of measures that are aimed at protecting copyright holders from online piracy.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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For the past two years, most of the ACTA discussion has centered on two issues: (1) substantive concerns such as the possibility of three strikes and a renegotiation of the WIPO Internet treaties; and (2) transparency issues. The leak of the comprehensive ACTA text highlights the fact that a third issue should be part of the conversation. The text reveals that ACTA is far more than a simple trade agreement. Rather, it envisions the establishment of a super-structure that replicates many of the responsibilities currently assumed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Given the public acknowledgement by negotiating countries that ACTA is a direct response to perceived gridlock at WIPO, some might wonder whether ACTA is ultimately designed to replace WIPO as the primary source of international IP law and policy making.
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement negotiated outside of the WTO’s processes and protections, is the biggest set of new laws to hit international Intellectual Property. Many organizations have had serious concerns about the potential civil liberty and economic impact of ACTA. A draft text of ACTA has been leaked here.
[...]
6) Seizure of goods at the border: a potentially injured party may apply for the suspension of the release of potentially infringing goods- and that one application is valid for ONE YEAR from the date of application. This places the work burden on the government as opposed to the private companies who fear infringement (regulatory capture). Singapore proposes an alternative that applies to specific shipments and lasts for 60 days only.
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Last September, as debate raged about the government’s plans to crack down on illegal file-sharing – and the extent to which they might have been influenced by lobbying – the BBC put in a freedom-of-information request to the Department for Business. We requested information about any correspondence relating to online piracy or illegal file-sharing.
Now, after a long wait, we’ve been supplied with a stack of letters to and from Lord Mandelson and other ministers relating to this issue. Those looking for a smoking gun – perhaps a despatch from a Hollywood tycoon warning “Cut ‘em off or else!” – may be disappointed.
But the letters do show a sustained campaign of lobbying in favour of the Digital Economy Bill by music-industry trade bodies – and by opponents trying to persuade Lord Mandelson that some of its measures will be damaging to civil liberties, as well as being costly and ineffective.
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Rather than calling for a full debate on the bill’s provision allowing the record industry to take away your family’s internet access if they believe (but can’t prove) you’ve infringed on copyright, the LibDems have joined the other parties in supporting a short, 45-minute half-day second reading.
After that, the Digital Economy Bill will disappear into “wash up,” a fast-track, no-debate way of passing bills, usually reserved for bills that everyone agrees on and that need to get pushed through before an election.
Will Norris introduces CitizenSpace (2009)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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