Summary: Love it or hate it (Windows and Iran), but a “a well-respected expert on industrial systems security” as IDG describes him says that Windows worms may be spread and used for political purposes
TECHRIGHTS has covered Stuxnet on numerous occasions this year (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]) and at one point mentioned this worm's focus on Iran. Stuxnet is a Windows-only worm (the mainstream press rarely calls out Windows, so people don’t throw out Windows) and IDG has this report whose headline asks unambiguously: “Was Stuxnet Built to Attack Iran’s Nuclear Program?”
Though it was first developed more than a year ago, Stuxnet was discovered in July 2010, when a Belarus-based security company discovered the worm on computers belonging to an Iranian client. Since then it has been the subject of ongoing study by security researchers who say they’ve never seen anything like it before. Now, after months of private speculation, some of the researchers who know Stuxnet best say that it may have been built to sabotage Iran’s nukes.
Last week Ralph Langner, a well-respected expert on industrial systems security, published an analysis of the worm, which targets Siemens software systems, and suggested that it may have been used to sabotage Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. A Siemens expert, Langner simulated a Siemens industrial network and then analyzed the worm’s attack.
Espionage and technical sabotage have nothing to do with whether Iran is right or not. It’s not a political question when posed as, “how much of a risk is Windows to one’s privacy, freedom, and autonomy?” █
Summary: Evidence of Steve Jobs’ impatience leads to some strong responses
A FEW days ago we remarked on the character of Apple's CEO because the vanity seems to be partly rooted in this company’s idol. A Canadian reader of ours, FurnaceBoy who is typically a proponent of some Apple/Mac products, did not appreciate Jobs’ remarks and he referenced this new article from Canada.
The second-last thing Chelsea Kate Isaacs was expecting was a personal email from Steve Jobs.
The very last thing was the iSnub.
Isaacs, a 22-year-old Long Island University journalism student, had emailed the Apple Inc. founder when she couldn’t get a comment from Apple’s media-relations office to complete her school assignment.
[...]
“Nope,” wrote Jobs. “We have over 300 million users and we can’t respond to their requests unless they involve some kind of problem. Sorry.”
I am a customer, Isaacs hammered out on her BlackBerry. I do have a problem. And then came the iSnub: “Please leave us alone.”
Below we put parts of the IRC log which discusses this. █
IRC: #boycottnovell-social @ FreeNode: September 22nd, 2010
“Analysts sell out – that’s their business model… But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with. [...] “Independent” analyst’s report should be issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring them). “Independent” consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting them up as experts in the new technology, available for just $200/hour).”
Summary: Another new example of “independent” consultants being hired to mock GNU/Linux and then cited by Microsoft as “proof” that GNU/Linux is “expensive”
This “recent research” is a study sponsored by Microsoft and executed by the Crimson Consulting Group, which examines the total cost of an HPC deployment consisting of 250 compute nodes and 1,000 desktop nodes. The study compares Windows HPC Server to two Linux scenarios, one involving Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Platform LSF and the other involving Red Hat Enterprise Linux and DataSynapse GridServer.
They are known to be cheating in benchmarks (see the quote at the bottom). HPC domination by GNU/Linux (Windows has around 1% market share in top supercomputers) is a tough nut crack and Novell does what it can to help Windows in HPC (in dual mode, under the guise of “interop”). Mary Jo Microsoft covers the Microsoft news PR by stating that “[d]espite the Linux-interop message, Microsoft’s foremost competitor in the HPC/supercomputing space remains Linux.” Microsoft is just busy lying about it rather than improve its own proprietary offerings. █
“Microsoft did sponsor the benchmark testing and the NT server was better tuned than the Linux one. Having said that, I must say that I still trust the Windows NT server would have outperformed the Linux one.”
–Windows platform manager, Microsoft South Africa Reference: Outrage at Microsoft’s independent, yet sponsored NT 4.0/Linux research
Whenever I perform a 3D benchmark in Linux one of the first questions I get asked about the results is:
Where your desktop effects turned off?
For those who are not aware, desktop effects are the “flash” that is enabled by default in many popular Linux distros (namely Ubuntu and it’s derivatives) such as the wobbly windows, desktop cube, and sleek sliding effects. Something that has always been questioned is whether or not desktop effects slow down your 3D performance in other applications and if so, how much do they slow it down by?
One of the greatest options to test out a Linux distribution is to create a Live CD and use that to boot the operating system from. That way, no changes are made to the current system, and the user is still able to test Linux extensively. Then, when the user feels comfortable using the operating system, it can be easily installed next to existing systems, or even as the only new system on the computer.
Sorry, but your system does not meet the minimum system requirements (Adobe). The all-new Yahoo! Mail has not been tested with your operating system (Yahoo).
What do these two messages have in common? In both cases, they were generated by trying to access the service or software from a Linux-based PC. I wish I could say it was because I am running 64-bit Fedora, or because I want to do something special with the sites, but sadly, that is not the case. In the case of Yahoo, I am just trying to access my mail box. It does work, but it “has not been tested,” which leads me to believe that if some feature fails to work as I expect it to, I am pretty much out of luck. In the case of Adobe, I need to download something called Adobe Digital Editions in order to read an electronic book from Cisco Press I guess this indicates that Cisco admins only use Windows or Apple as their desktop systems.
And this bothers me. It bothers me on a number of levels. Linux is no longer just for servers, nor has it been for more than ten years. Major corporations, like Cisco, are pressing for a larger Linux presence, working with development shops and providing software that interacts or runs on Linux.
When you set up a domain on Virtualmin, you can configure applications to provide a fully featured set of web services from a single interface. Virtualmin will set up Linux users, ftp, email, DNS, web space and database access. Virtualmin uses Apache to host web sites and BIND for DNS. Email support is from Postfix, dovecot Cyrus and saslauthd. Databases services are provided by MySQL.
A disk usage analyzer is a utility which helps users to visualize the disk space being used by each folder and files on a hard disk or other storage media. This type of application often generates a graphical chart to help the visualization process.
When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured. But times have changed and now the Linux platform benefits from players of all kinds: there are replacements for XMMS for both GNOME and KDE (Audacious and Qmmp), collection-oriented players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox. There are less-known players like Quod Libet, Guayadeque or Jajuk, or the client-server oriented ones like MPD. And the ones I just listed are only the ones which came to my mind at the moment. Some would say having so many players for a single task is a bad thing, but I say it’s not. Having enough options to choose from is a great advantage. If you don’t like one style, try the next player, if you don’t like its approach either, try the next one, and so on.
Yet whenever the question of the Terminal is raised, my tendency has usually been to argue that it’s not vital to use it. But I wonder if that’s actually the right answer. Because there are myths to it that, if someone sat and actually spent ten minutes typing in commands, they might actually be able to see past a screen seemingly full of code.
Now, what happens when more of us start producing videos with higher resolutions—say, with a camera from Red? Check out the specs. (And check out how much we’ve covered Linux + movies here in Linux Journal.) Within a few short years many of us will be in the position to shoot and edit cinema-quality video, if we aren’t already. Whether or not we do our editing and rendering in some cloud (surely Linux-based, regardless of our client devices), widespread video shooting and production will turn more and more data paths into two-way streets. Earth to carriers: there is business here.
Having a look at converting doc and html to text on Linux. While these are good for indexing purposes, they aren’t that great for actually presenting the output.
More than a year ago, we reviewed Cairo Dock for Linux and how you can install and configure it in Ubuntu Intrepid. Fast forward to the present moment, Cairo Dock (now known as Glx-Dock) is still very much alive and has become one of the best dock application for Linux. The release of the latest version 2.2 brings much improvement and innovations that we feel it deserves another mention from us.
While some might assert that Linux itself is a religion, there are plenty of religious and spiritual people who use and love Linux. Therefore, there are naturally a number of software packages for various religions. In my search for such software, I have undoubtedly left some out, so feel free to suggest any I have missed. Most of the software is for the two largest religions: Christianity and Islam. Because of this, I have not included every software package for those two religions.
RedNoteBook is a graphical daily journal tool with plenty of features that is sure to please nearly every level of user. It has an outstanding interface that allows for drag and drop support as well as exporting, backup, and statistics. And in this Ghacks entry, I am going to show you how to install and make use of this handy tool.
Remember the Indie Love Bundle, where we banded together with five other independent developers to create an award-winning games bundle? Well, it’s baaaack and on sale again! And this time it brought along a kid brother, a brand new bundle called the Indie ‘Summer of Love’. What better way to head into fall than to curl up and stay warm playing six more fabulous indie games bundled together for $20. Here’s the trailer…
If your heart can stand this sort of thing, then I fully reccommend this game. However, I have read some comments on discussion forums of people that chickened out partway through. The constant tension is a tad much for some people, and quite understandably so. Amnesia: The Dark Descent does what it does well.
I tested on a 64-bit Linux Mint, and am impressed that it includes 64-bit binaries. Frame rate was smooth and flawless on my 3 year old Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS with all the settings turned up.
In the days of old when knights were bold and computers not invented. Men did stocks with wires and blocks and results were not as intended.
Then computers were conceived, with the result of massive sales of pizza, chips and fizzy and/or caffeine loaded drinks. The first computers were, by today’s standards, slow and limited. Programs had to be written to make the best use of available CPU cycles. They had to get the most bang for their buck so to speak.
In this article, I want to share some of the applications I use on a daily basis. Some of the applications are GNOME desktop specific, so whenever possible I have included their KDE counterparts to help even things out.
Yesterday evening I came back from Cambridge where I attended the Telepathy-KDE sprint (note to self: never again fly with easyJet) which was smoothly organized by George Goldberg. A lot has already been said about the work at the sprint: Daniele “drdanz” Domenichelli provided us with nice pictures (I am looking really weird in the group photo), George Kiagiadakis gave a nice overview, and George G. himself spammed identi.ca with tons of comments on the sprint. Thus, obviously I will focus on the Nepomuk parts of the sprint.
Since George G. and, thus, Telepathy-KDE is one of the most fearless (as in: does not fear to try all the broken Nepomuk features and then ask me to fix them) Nepomuk users/developers he had a list of topics for me to look at. There was the issue that the query service did not scale since it created a separate thread for each query. I quickly fixed that using QThreadPool and a predefined number of query threads which made the contact list populate correctly.
While it is easy to focus on many other strong points of KDE software, one aspect that deserves a closer look is the ability for it to support science. Back in July, you may have caught the Dot story on “KDE-Science” discussing the background and initial call for engaging the scientific community. Today we would like to highlight some of the advances that have occurred since then and present a real world example of how KDE software is already helping to support research.
Yakuake does splitting right. You can split several times horizontally and vertically and the resulting terminals are independent. You can also switch the focus of the terminals easily via keystrokes which makes yakuake an invaluable tool when working on the terminal under KDE.
I’ve been doing a fair amount of experimentation on my machines. Been playing with XBMC, Boxee, Ubuntu, and bleeding-edge Xfce and Freedesktop software stacks on Gentoo.
Linpus Lite is the distribution for netbooks and smartbooks developed and maintained by Linpus Technologies, Inc. of Taipei, Taiwan. The company’s flagship Linux distribution used to be Linpus Desktop until it decided to focus on the Lite and QuickOS line. Linpus Lite 1.4, announced on July 30, 2010, is the latest update, and also the first to come with a standalone installer. This article is the first review of the Linpus Lite edition to be published on this website.
Other ways (though with more technical discussions) to stay up-to-date with FreeBSD’s development are:
* Following the FreeBSD Current Mailinglist or
* Checking for changes in the FreeBSD source code and reading the reason for and the backgrounds of those changes.
However, Mandriva is now at the crossroads. Yes, here’s where the road divides for the desktop distribution and the 11-year-old Linux company . The financial situation of the company has pushed a significant group of Mandriva developers to fork and they have started a new project: Mageia. This project comes as winds of hope for those of us who love the desktop distribution and that were puzzled by Mandriva S.A.’s secretism. Mageia’s boat is full of seasoned Linux sailors and this new project was applauded in the community forum.
Shortly after the announcement about Mageia was made, Mandriva S.A. finally posted an official statement on the future of the distribution. Read about it here. So, it seems that the company does not want to let Mandriva (the distro) fall into oblivion.
There’s a certain movement these days in the world of GNU/Linux distributions. I think we are experiencing one of these moments that starts with a question that has been asked and heard many times -should distros differentiate themselves in order to survive? & aren’t there too many distros out there?- and ends with a much more serious question: Innovating in the world of GNU/Linux. Rest assured this is not going to be that sort of rant where we conclude that “Linux is the copycat of other OSes” just like we will not, in fact answer the question of the pretendly too many distributions or their differentiation. That is, I will not really answer these questions; and the reason I won’t is that I think these are all bad questions that either miss the point or show a certain lack of understanding of FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.
I guess by now all of you have heard of Mageia, the Mandriva fork. But these news overshadowed something else that is a developing situation
elsewhere and matters perhaps even more: OpenSuse.
So now we have some things that are very similar to Mandriva like drakxtools that are basically patched to use SMART instead or URPMI. We have become pretty familiar with drakxtools and themed it for Unity etc.. but it’s still drakxtools and we still sync the source (like we would do with any project) to Mandriva when there’s new upgrades that are worth the time in testing. We also follow PulseAudio pretty closely as it’s no secret that Mandriva has one of the best implementations. Even more on our BuildServer we can pull source packages from Mandriva SVN and build some (very few packages) will little or no changes. We tend to shy away from Epochs though, even though we have some packages that still have them. Yet Mandriva has no issues using them.
So is Unity dependent on Mandriva? Yes too a point we are. We like their configuration tools (some times) and with some packages that really are straight forward to build we may import from Mandriva SVN. However these are just niceties. The real question is could we survive without Mandriva.. Yes we could and may have too until they get a clear direction (for that matter survive) or the fork gets off the ground enough so we can pull and push packages for them. What will this mean? In our case packages may not be updated as fast as normal, because packagers may have to take on a few more packages.
I have not done anything with PCLinuxOS for quite some time. First there was some personal / political turmoil in the PCLinuxOS developer community, and then there seemed to be a long time with no activity. When development seemed to pick up again, in the first half of this year, I picked up a copy of the 2010 Beta release, and then through an unfortunate combination of a bug in the installer and my own complacency/inattentiveness, I made a mess of my primary laptop. Now the PCLinuxOS 2010.7 Final release has been out for a couple of months, and I have finally gotten around to loading it up again. It is, as the title of this entry says, like seeing an old friend again after a long time.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter ended August 31, 2010.
Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year.
Commercial Linux and middleware distributor Red Hat continued to grow at a nice clip in its second fiscal quarter ended on August 31, with sales up 19.7 per cent to $219.8m. But even after keeping cost growth under this level, a much higher tax bill compared to the year-ago quarter walloped the company’s net income, which fell by 18.2 per cent to $23.7m.
In the quarter, software-subscription revenues across all of Red Hat’s product lines accounted for $186.2m, up 19.1 per cent, while training and services revenues hit $33.6m, up a slightly better 22.7 per cent. Red Hat had a one-time tax benefit in the year-ago quarter worth 4 cents per share, which made for a tough compare this time around. If you exclude this and look at non-GAAP net income, then Red Hat’s profits were up 19 per cent, almost in line with revenue growth.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) added 0.63% to $38.58 and created a new 52-week high of $39.48. So far this year, the stock has jumped over 23.42% and has recovered over 55% from its 52-week low. The company is scheduled to announce its earnings on September 22, 2010. The analyst are expecting an EPS of $0.18 & revenues of $211.24 million.
Oracle debuted its own version of Linux four years ago, basing the operating system on Red Hat Linux and maintaining compatibility with that OS ever since.
Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has announced the release of the vendor’s own Linux kernel, slamming its existing Linux partner Red Hat for being too slow to update the version traditionally used by Oracle customers.
The put volume today was 3,783 contracts, which is 1x the average daily volume of 3,648. Usually high put volume is an indicator that many investors are looking for lower prices in the near future.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) opened at $38.96. So far today, the stock has hit a low of $38.00 and a high of $39.04. RHT is now trading at $38.32, down $0.66 (-1.69%).
Jefferies & Co. expects Red Hat Inc. to report a solid second quarter earnings results on September 22 after market closes. The brokerage maintained its ‘buy’ rating on the business software company with a price target of $45.
It’s Test Day time once more! Tomorrow, 2010-09-23, will be Virtualization Test Day. Of course, virtualization is popular with many Fedora users and a key area of Fedora development, so this is another important test event.
While the general resolution has met with broad support, there is some debate continuing over what such contributors would be called and what kinds of upload rights they should be granted.
Debian has a fairly stringent process for those who want to join the project; the end result is that while the flow of new blood into the project has not been as high as some other projects, the quality of the distribution has been maintained.
The move to welcome non-packaging contributions is in keeping with trends over the last couple of years where many people have called for contributions other than code to be recognised as making a meaningful contribution to a free software project.
Linux Mint, a Linux distribution whose purpose is to “produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use”, has released an edition based on Debian. This new Linux Mint distribution will track Debian testing, as a more reliable upstream base. Linux Mint appears to be a popular Linux distribution ranking highly at DistroWatch.com as well as other non-scientific measures. Certainly they received a large number of comments to their blog post regarding their new distribution. Anecdotal evidence seems to point to this Debian-based edition as a popular move.
The addition of Linux Mint to the Debian derivatives family is a welcome one, and should the Linux Mint developers wish to be in contact with Debian it has been suggested that they will be warmly welcomed at the Debian Derivatives Front Desk.
A press release dated September 11 came to the community’s attention Monday, September 13 of the renaming or, as some reported, a fork of sidux to aptosid. Due to conflicts with the commercial backer of the Debian-based distribution, sidux developers have separated themselves from the Sidux e.V. association to continue developing aptosid on their own.
aptosid is based on Debian Sid, the unstable developmental branch, with a heavy concentration on the desktop experience. It is a KDE distribution that adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. These guidelines basically enumerate the main traits of the GNU General Public License, although they are not strictly confined to the GPL. sidux, now aptosid, tries to remain solely Open Source, however it is not included in the Free Software Foundation’s list of Free System Distributions due to binary blobs in or accompanying the kernel.
An application review process was announced today for getting your apps into Ubuntu “extras” repository. But like most other announcements of new things, this one was met as well with as much criticism as the praise it got. A lot of the criticism is FUD though, although mostly unintentional and caused by ignorance of some facts behind it. I’ll try to address some of these concerns here to the best of my knowledge from what I’ve been reading over the past some time about this development.
I found Martin Albisetti’s blog announcing the new music streaming features for Ubuntu One’s music store to be some what funny.
The streaming feature will be part of Ubuntu Ones payed plan. So I ask myself “Why would I want to pay for something I can do for free”. I personally prefer to use Ampache to stream my music collection to my desktop and laptops.
I think that enough of the planets have aligned in the shape of a failboat that I have been able to successfully upload a source package of Lifesaver to its PPA for Maverick.
I might be wrong though, we’ll find out shortly when Launchpad processes the ridiculous output of several ridiculous tools.
HP announced a multifunction inkjet printer that incorporates a seven-inch, detachable Android-based tablet. Based on the HP All-in-One printer, the HP Photosmart eStation All-in-One adds web browsing, Barnes & Noble eBookstore integration, and access to HP print apps and widgets via the integrated, removable Android touchscreen, all for only $399, says the company.
And so I can give you, let me give you one anecdote. In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, One Laptop Per Child. That he would do every single child within two years. And as an aside, they completed that a couple of months ago, so every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.
I wouldn’t even say they announced it. Apparently Michael Dell just casually mentioned it at Oracle-related conference. Of course, we already knew there would be larger versions of the streak. What I don’t understand is why they released the tiny version first, and not a larger version with wider appeal?
On a more solid note, Dell also announced that the smaller Streak is heading to Best Buy next month. That’s great, except some of us would rather see the tabletphone getting its share of Froyo sooner — here’s hoping that this bigger tablet won’t disappoint us with an outdated OS.
I am not a real software hacker (a term whose real meaning is not “computer criminal”, thank you very much!). Sure, I only use Free Software like Gnu/Linux or OpenOffice, I write and teach as much as I can about it and I can proudly apply patches to source code and compile it all by myself if I really have to. However, almost always I stop at that much simpler, wonderful way to automate computer usage called scripting. Still, I was probably one of the closest things to a real hacker you could have found in that particular conference.
[...]
For the same reason, many “technologists” should think much more often to the social impacts of their work. It’s necessary to build many bridges soon between the two worlds, and use them often.
Engineers and product managers from device and computer manufacturers and designers will meet in Taipei, Taiwan for a free day-long session hosted by Canonical Ltd. on September 24, 2010.
The commercial sponsor of Ubuntu will host its annual Ubuntu Hardware Summit, (UHS), which includes keynote speeches from various members of the Canonical team, and topics ranging from how Canonical works with Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs), boot time optimizations, hardware enablement, debugging, multi-touch, networking and more. Over 200 attendees are expected to attend from all facets of the PC ecosystem.
Twitter can be as socially brutal as a middle school playground: Half-baked opinions are delivered by some people with questionable authority; reputations may be altered forever with a single sentence; and gossip serves as a valuable form of currency.
Two HP executives who presented at Oracle (ORCL) OpenWorld 2010 conference felt the full force of Twitter’s instantaneous sharing Sunday night—even though the execs hadn’t a clue that the OpenWorld Twitter stream (#oow) had turned on them.
Facebook has open sourced a MySQL utility, OSC (Online Schema Change), which it uses to change server schemas on its live systems. The problem Facebook faced was that when it needed to change the structure of its MySQL databases on live systems, using ALTER TABLE statements took too long.
Written by Facebook engineer Vamsi Ponnekanti, Open Schema Change lets the company update indexes without user downtime, according to Callaghan. “Previously, we could make an update quickly on a small number of machines, but to do it on all of the machines, it took six months,” Callaghan says, explaining that the company could only make updates during off-peak hours. “Now we can do it on all of the machines at pretty the same time and we can do it in about half a day.
Two guests join Alan for this podcast. First is Robin Schumacher, director of product strategy for EnterpriseDB and Selena Decklemann, PostgreSQL major contributor. Topics include the major new release of PostgreSQL and some of its exciting new features; the future of an Oracle-owned MySQL, Java One and the state of open source databases. We also discuss the NoSQL competition.
The Exalogic Elastic Cloud is targetted at Enterprises that want to create their own private clouds. Exalogic installations consist of up to eight 42U racks. Each Exalogic rack contains hot-swappable compute nodes, a disk subsystem, multiple 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a high-bandwidth InfiniBand interconnect for connecting the components to each other and to other Exalogic racks or to Exadata Database Machine racks. Exalogic configurations are designed to be redundant.
I’m not able to attend the whole of Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne, but I have sneaked in to MySQL Sunday, which is a half-day pre-conference event. One of the questions that interests me: is MySQL in safe hands at Oracle, or will it be allowed to wither in order to safeguard Oracle’s closed-source database business?
It is an obvious question, but not necessarily a sensible one. There is some evidence for a change in direction. Prior to the takeover, the MySQL team was working on a database engine called Falcon, intended to lift the product into the realm of enterprise database management. Oracle put Falcon on the shelf; Oracle veteran Edward Screven (who also gave the keynote here) said that the real rationale for Falcon was that InnoDB would be somehow jiggered by Oracle, and that now both MySQL and InnoDB were at Oracle, it made no sense.
Each year, Oracle’s presence looms over this city for a week, during the company’s Open World customer conference. About 41,000 people arrived this week to discuss business software in fine detail and talk over beers. Stretches of downtown streets closed and gave way to makeshift tents housing coffee stands, bars, Lego play areas and candy buffets.
[...]
Oracle built its business by dominating the database market, providing the central repositories of crucial information that businesses must maintain and use to complete transactions. This has given it an unrivaled position of power when dealing with customers. Capitalizing on such an edge, Oracle’s sales representatives have earned a fearsome reputation as hard-line negotiators determined to squeeze customers.
But through its acquisition spree, Oracle moved well beyond the database and into business software, buying up the important products that companies use to keep track of their technology infrastructure, employees, sales, inventory and customers.
With Sun, Oracle has found a way to sell customers hardware bundled wit
I am always of two minds about office suites or applications for children. On the one hand, I can see the value of offering a simplified interface for learning on. On the other hand, I wonder if children shouldn’t start with the interface they will be using as adults, so they don’t how to learn the interface all over again. OOo4Kids balances these conflicting needs better than any application I’ve ever seen — so much so that I think that the main OpenOffice.org project could benefit from adopting its code.
As the name implies, OOo4Kids is a version of OpenOffice.org designed for children between the ages of 7 and 12. Its recently-announced 1.0 release is available in 13 languages, and on all major operating systems, as well as Sugar OS. Source code and .deb packages are available on a web site separate from the main one.
An Oracle spokeswoman said the company had no comment on Gosling’s claims.
Thus, “For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut,” Gosling said.
That in itself was not a showstopper. Indeed, given that constraint, Gosling moved on with his employment with the database giant. However, another annoyance arose when, according to Gosling, Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said.
But, even that was not the final factor in leading to his decision to leave the company. Perhaps the final straw was what Gosling said was Oracle’s move to rein him in. indeed they owned Sun and thus Java, so they also owned its creator and his intellectual property, so it was up to Oracle to decide what Gosling or anybody else had to say about Java.
“My ability to decide anything at Oracle was minimized,” Gosling said. “Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.”
One of the biggest disgraces in this country is the way that computing is taught – or rather, the way it is not taught. I know as a parent from years of interaction with the school system at various levels that what passes for computer teaching is in fact little more than rote learning of where the Open command is on the menu in Word and Excel. That is, instead of teaching pupils how to use computers as a generic tool to solve their particular problems, it becomes instead a dull exercise in committing to memory various ritual Microsoft sequences to achieve one specific task.
[...]
There are representatives from Google, IBM and Microsoft Research, so why not one from Canonical, say, to fly the open source flag? As for the other individuals mentioned, I don’t recognise any names there as being particularly active in the world of free software: I presume (hope) that some of them are in some way. Maybe I’m just too parochial….
A $49,504 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services will enable the Indiana University Libraries to plan the next phase of development for its Variations digital music library system.
Variations is an open-source system providing online access to selected sound recordings and musical scores. It was developed at IU and is now used by multiple college and university libraries.
FreeBSD isn’t as popular as the better-known Linux distros, but it has a strong reputation for reliability and robustness, and it’s still in active development. For my first foray into FreeBSD, I tried out the latest stable version (8.1), which was released mid-July.
As mentioned in my previous post, the event was organized by the Linux Association from Shantou University (STU). It started in the morning with an outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software and followed with presentations in the evening. Fred gave an overview on why Software Freedom matters, a quick history review of Free and Open Source Software and talked about how the audience could get involved and contribute to the community. Then I introduced some cool Free Software that I use everyday and demonstrated how FOSS helped me to get things done. Unlike other events I have been involved with in China, we had the pleasure to talk to very active spectators asking plenty of questions such as:
* How can Free Software sustain without any financial support from companies?
* Which field / area do GNU/Linux systems apply to?
* Knowing that Free Software is so cool, why the market share is so little in China?
* How can we increase the market share of Free Software in China?
* What are the benefits to use GNU/Linux systems and Free Software in terms of software development?
* Do you think Free software will dominate the world market in the future?
Bristol City Council is set to be the first local authority in the UK to implement a council-wide open source strategy.
While other local authorities have implemented open source projects on a piecemeal basis, Bristol councillors are set to consider a proposal that could lead to open source software used throughout the council.
Although Microsoft Office will continue to be used on desktops, open source alternatives will be introduced for email, file and print and other IT functions. The council has already introduced Open Office as a desktop alternative.
While I’m writing this post, my mail box contains 1055 bug reports for the PDFreaders campaign. In other words, if we discard the double reports, at least 1000 institutions have been spotted doing exclusive advertising for non-free PDF readers… While launching this campaign, we knew that this practice was quite widespread. The more we see these advertisings, the more two questions keep coming :
* Is this practice legal ?
* since advertising online presupposes fees, how much money would proprietary companies pay to advertise on a normal website ?
Tools and techniques to help people and organisations preserve their digital holdings were published as open source software earlier this year.
The tools, the result of the EU funded Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval project (Caspar), were highlighted in a press release by the European Commission on 7 September.
As FSFE’s Shane M Coughlan told me several years ago, as projects grow in size, “it becomes more difficult to manage the copyright. Some authors might vanish due to accidents, death, or other factors. When it comes to making decisions about protecting the code, upgrading license, or other legal factors, it can become important to talk with copyright holders.”
By contrast, in projects like the Linux kernel, in which there is no copyright assignment, managing copyright can potentially become difficult. For instance, even if Linus Torvalds had been willing to relicense the kernel under the third version of the GNU General Public License (and he most vocally was not), tracking down all contributors and obtaining their consent would have next to impossible.
As Simon Phipps points out, copyright assignment remains popular among companies involved with FOSS. In particular, it can make dual-licensing — the practice of releasing software with two different licenses, usually one FOSS and one proprietary — and aggregate copyright — the terms of use for bundled software, such as in a commercial box — easier to manage.
So, readers, here are a couple questions: What are the web-based social values that you think are most contrary to the managerial DNA one finds inside a typical corporate giant? And how should we reinvent management to make it more consistent with these emerging online sensibilities?
Taiwan-based notebook maker Pegatron Technology has recently had cooperation with Ingram Micro China and China-based BOE Technology to enter the all-in-one PC DIY market in China.
The smartphone is always taking on new roles – from credit cards to MP3 players and digital cameras to airline boarding passes. Now, your smartphone will begin opening new doors for you, quite literally.
Todd Reichert, a PhD candidate at the university’s Institute of Aerospace Studies, piloted the wing-flapping aircraft, sustaining both altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds and covering a distance of 145 metres at an average speed of 25.6 kilometres per hour.
The northern hemisphere of Saturn’s moon Titan is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been monitoring clouds on Titan regularly since the spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Now, a group led by Sébastien Rodriguez, a Cassini VIMS team collaborator based at Université Paris Diderot, France, has analyzed more than 2,000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan’s weather using observational data that also includes the equinox. Equinox, when the sun shone directly over the equator, occurred in August 2009.
I got pulled up on my password policy yesterday; I don’t tell other people my passwords. The context was arranging that a friend could use my laptop while I was away at work – instead of telling her my login details so she could use that I created a new account. This provoked a “Don’t you trust me?” response.
A 17-year-old boy from Australia claims he inadvertently triggered a chain of events that led to thousands of people being affected by a Twitter security flaw yesterday. But it all may have been started by a Japanese developer a couple of hours earlier.
Pearce Delphin, or @zzap on Twitter, says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a piece of code with an onMouseOver JavaScript function, which caused a pop-up to appear when a user merely moves his mouse cursor over the message.
Very soon, the code was modified to do other sorts of things – perform auto retweets, open pornographic websites and generally create havoc on Twitter, which lasted a couple of hours until Twitter admins patched the vulnerability.
Those hit by the bug included Sarah Brown, the wife of the former British prime minister who has over 1.1 million followers on Twitter, and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who has 97,000 followers.
Lily Allen is launching a legal assault against Apple in an attempt to ascertain the identity of ne’er-do-wells who attacked her laptop.
The news comes courtesy of The Sun, which reports in its Bizarre column that the singer received an unwelcome surprise when her MacBook laptop was cracked and personal information disclosed.
Maybe she should try GNU/Linux and hire someone to harden her system. By the scale in that link, I am not “truly paranoid” but at least I have not seen malware on hundreds of PC-years of usage. Lily Allen may indeed need the paranoid level of security. I do not.
Not perhaps as elegant as Betjeman’s first line, but it does share the following features: a specific target (Robin Hood Airport/Slough), an exclamation mark, and the prospect of a bombing exercise.
As a matter of legal analysis, the CPS position on someone who tweeted Betjeman’s line cannot be distinguished from Chambers’ ill-conceived comment.
They both would be “menacing communications” under section 127.
And so would any “menacing” comment sent by anyone by email, or put on a blog, or loaded onto YouTube; indeed any content sent over the internet whatsoever.
So, this Friday, it is not only Paul Chambers in the dock: it is also the ghost of Sir John Betjeman.
And it is all of us who have ever sent content over the internet which some person at the CPS can somehow deem “menacing” and so commence the horrifying and inescapable bureaucratic procedure which lead to the imposition of a criminal record for simply making a light-hearted comment.
This cannot be right.
So if you are on Twitter at 10am on Friday, why not tweet “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” in support of Paul (hashtag #TwitterJokeTrial) as his appeal begins.
obile fingerprint-checking equipment is already controversial before it has even rolled out widely. An announcement today may presage the next such row, as developers say they will soon roll out a “compact” machine based on “a small, single chip” which will massively reduce the amount of time taken to check a DNA sample.
The RapID™ system was unveiled today at a biometrics conference in Florida by ZyGEM Corp and its partner, US aerospace globocorp Lockheed, nowadays seeking to diverge into homeland-security areas.
A light-gold Toyota Corolla shipped from Kabul, Afghanistan, to a court house in Norfolk, Virginia, was the centre-piece for a jury trial last week on the alleged murder of two Afghan civilians on 4 May 2009 by two former employees of a subsidiary of Blackwater, the private military company.
Fareed Haji Ahmad, the driver of the Corolla that night, was also brought from Kabul to testify. He was injured in a hail of bullets fired by Christopher Drotleff and Justin Cannon, the two US citizens on trial for murder. His passenger Romal Mohammad Naiem was killed, as was a passer-by named Rahib Mirza Mohammad.
The emerging OAuth 2.0 Web API authorization protocol, already deployed by Facebook, Salesforce.com and others, is coming under increased criticism for being too easy to use, and therefore to spoof by malicious hackers.
“The OAuth community has made a big mistake about the future direction of the protocol,” wrote Yahoo director of standards development Eran Hammer-Lahav in a blog post last week. Hammer-Lahav’s criticism may carry more weight than those from the usual naysayer, because he is actually one of the creators of OAuth.
Two years ago, the top honchos at the Fed, Treasury and the Wall Street banks were running around like Chicken Little warning that the world was about to end. This fear mongering, together with a big assist from the elite media (i.e. NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, etc.), earned the banks their $700 billion TARP blank check bailout. This money, along with even more valuable loans and loan guarantees from the Fed and FDIC, enabled them to survive the crisis they had created. As a result, the big banks are bigger and more profitable than ever.
It may be over, but you won’t be hearing any cheers from the millions of Americans who are struggling to find a job. Or are worried about the ones they have. Or have lost their homes. Or are behind on the mortgage.
Soros declares that there was twenty-five to thirty (25-30) years of a “Super Bubble,” which has now burst. It seems from the discussion that Soros believes the SuperBubble was worldwide. Recovery is being hindered by some policies—Germany’s talk about austerity was especially mentioned—by Soros sees strong hope in the Trade Shift that has accompanied the crisis. He noted that the “global economy is a lot better than the US economy,” and that he expects to see it continue growing even if the U.S. (or Europe, due to the German leadership, or even both) fall into a :double-dip.” (In this he is arguably more of an optimist than many.)
There’s not much more to be said about Todd Henderson’s financial situation. But one element of his complaint that hasn’t gotten much attention is what he thinks he’s being taxed for: “I would introduce [the president] to my family and our lifestyle,” Henderson writes, “one he believes is capable of financing the vast expansion of government he is planning.”
Henderson’s taxes aren’t financing the government Obama would like to build. They’re financing the government America already has. George W. Bush passed his tax cuts without offering any offsetting spending cuts. It was apparent then, and is even more apparent now, that he’d brought federal revenue beneath the level of federal spending — and then he increased spending, too. Nothing Obama has signed into law will add as much to the deficit as Medicare Part D, for instance. Or the two wars George W. Bush began. Or, for that matter, the tax cuts Bush passed.
Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.
According to NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, the U.S economy experienced the beginnings of an economic expansion in the middle of last year, marking the end of an 18-month recession that began in December 2007. The findings are welcome news for the White House, which has struggled to make its case that the unpopular steps it took to limit the economic damage have worked, even as the unemployment rate continued to rise above 9 percent well into 2010.
The departure of President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser at the end of the year could provide the White House with an opportunity to revamp its economic team after the November elections, when voters are expected to take out their anxieties on Democrats.
The White House said Tuesday that Lawrence H. Summers, the chief architect of President Obama’s economic policy, would leave at the end of the year, continuing an exodus of top-level advisers at a time when voters are expressing deep dissatisfaction with the president’s stewardship of the economy.
Larry Summers isn’t leaving the White House until the end of the year but President Barack Obama’s team already knows the ideal candidate to replace him on the National Economic Council – a woman CEO.
The pick doesn’t have to fit that bill precisely, but it’s highly likely Obama’s pick will be either a woman or a business leader – and preferably both, said several people familiar with the situation.
The basic facts are:
# The homeowners had a mortgage.
# The homeowners are in default.
# The lender was sloppy and filed inaccurate documents with the court.
This is great for the lawyers (fighting foreclosure), and costly for the lender, but this is nothing new – except that GMAC must not have been paying attention!
Federal Reserve policymakers Tuesday opened the door to new action to try to boost the economy. They just didn’t step on in.
With economic growth sluggish, the jobless rate seemingly stuck near 10 percent and inflation well below the level the Fed aims for, officials of the central bank are “prepared to provide additional accommodation if needed” to support the recovery and get inflation higher, said a statement from the Fed’s policymaking committee. But they stopped short of taking action Tuesday.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler on Tuesday laid out an aggressive timetable for implementing regulations for the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market.
In a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Gensler said the commission will propose a wide array of new regulations this fall, with most of the rules scheduled for final adoption by mid-July 2011.
As its investment portfolio was losing nearly a quarter of its value, the country’s largest public pension fund doled out six-figure bonuses and substantial raises to its top employees, an analysis by The Associated Press has found.
Board member Tony Olivera said the California Public Employees’ Retirement System tried to reduce the bonuses but was under contractual obligations to pay them.
ew rules on how much rainy-day capital banks must keep in reserve are more rigorous than they first seem and create “a road to a much safer banking system,” the chairman of the panel that is writing the regulations said Wednesday, implicitly answering criticism that the proposals are too lax.
TWENTY-THREE years after he first championed greed, Gordon Gekko is back. Michael Douglas reprises his role as the slick-haired financial barbarian in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”, due for release on September 24th.
Half-reformed after prison, Gekko is more anti-hero than villain this time. He is still dazzled by lucre, but also determined to give warning of the dangers of excessive leverage. The real baddies are Bretton James and the securities firm he runs, Churchill Schwartz—perhaps the least disguised fictional name ever. Executives at Goldman Sachs are said to be unamused.
James, played by Josh Brolin, is nothing like Goldman’s top brass. He wields phallic cigars, races superbikes and smashes his copy of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” on a lamp when fingered for manipulating the share price of a rival firm.
Italian authorities seized euro23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account Tuesday and said they have begun investigating top officials of the Vatican bank in connection with a money-laundering probe.
The Vatican said it was “perplexed and surprised” by the investigation.
Italian financial police seized the money as a precaution and prosecutors placed the Vatican bank’s chairman and director general under investigation for alleged mistakes linked to violations of Italy’s anti-laundering laws, news reports said.
Google has released data regarding requests from the UK government for data on individual surfers and to remove links from its index.
The data, which is included in the Google Transparency Report for January – June 2010, also shows that government agencies made 1,343 requests for data about individual surfers in that time period.
The cracking of another content protection technology, comes as no surprise to Bill Thompson
The only real surprise about the news that HDCP has been compromised was that it took so long.
The ‘high bandwidth copy protection’ scheme has been in use since 2004 even though the possibility that someone would be able to reconstruct the master key by examining HDCP-capable devices was known even before any systems were commercially available.
AT&T now has its headquarters in Dallas, and there’s something about the Texas air that appeals to CEO Randall Stephenson. Perhaps it’s the scent of low taxes and deregulation carried on the breeze.
“The environment for doing business in Dallas is really, really strong,” Stephenson told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News this week. “What I like about it is this is a community that not only is it not resentful of business, it likes business. People recognize that profitable companies are companies that hire and help cities grow. And that’s not the case around the country.”
The other view is that copyright is property, like a bar of chocolate or a car, with connotations of ownership, of exclusion of others, and of permanence (actually, in that case the chocolate bar is a very bad example, and the car is not too great, either).
[...]
And since, even after the meltdown, governments are still pretty much committed to free market ideals, whether someone adopts the “property” or “programme” stance can be very telling.
Thus, you’ll find organisations like the RIAA, BSA, FAST and BPI talk a lot about “property”. And you’ll find organisations like the Free Software Foundation railing against that characterisation.
It’s also fairly telling that the organ of the United Nations which deals with these issues is called the “World Intellectual Property Organisation”, and that the relevant government agency in the UK is Intellectual Property Office.
A senior judge has given the clearest indications so far that patience could be running out with “pay up or else” letters currently being sent out in their thousands to alleged file-sharers. At a hearing to authorize yet more, the judge called the schemes “a huge sledgehammer to crack a nut” adding that once the Digital Economy Act is in force, further applications may not be successful.
“The current system does a very bad job. So, I’ve proposed two methods of (supporting artists). One is the government can collect taxes. It can have a special tax on internet connectivity or perhaps use a little bit of general revenue and distribute this money solely to the authors and artists based on their popularity but not in linear proportion to their popularity,” Mr Stallman said.
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Mr Stallman said that the revenue could be distributed to artists in accordance with a mathematic progression. Their revenue would flatten regardless of whether their popularity could be measured as many hundreds of multiples of their peers.
Seems like U.S. legislators noticed the limited scope of such measures as well. This is why there is a new proposed Bill, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which in my opinion will make the DMCA look like a minor administrative decree. I guess we can call the new act the COICA (remove the Infringement and you get an amusing acronym, sorry, feeling rather puerile today). COICA will take over where “In Our Sites” left off. The main purpose of the Bill is to overhaul the civil injunction system in copyright law. The law will create new injunctive relief whereby a court of law can order the registrar of a domain name issued in the United States to temporarily or permanently remove the domain from a site dedicated to infringing activities, including copyright infringement and counterfeiting. The site must be primarily dedicated to commercially pursuing the sale of counterfeit goods, or the illegal downloading of copies of the work. Upon receipt of an order of removal, registrars must suspend the operation of the domain and lock it.
I have always been impressed with how proactive the US legislature is in addressing issues pertaining to the Internet. So, you can understand my excitement when a copy of the “Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” fell on my hands. I have to admit that after reading it, I am not impressed at all.
techflaws.org points us to the news that seven different collection societies in Austria are demanding a private copying levy on all hard drives (Google translation of the original German). Since seven different collection societies are involved, and each needs to get a cut, when you add all their fees up — it means that all hard drives under 500 GB have 21.60 euros added to the bill, while hard drives over 750 GB get a whopping 43.74 euros added (it’s not clear what happens between 500 to 750 GB).
It’s been interesting to watch people’s reactions to the Righthaven lawsuits. Plenty of people find it to be an abuse of copyright law, clearly for purposes outside of what the law is intended to handle. However, some copyright system supporters seem to think it’s wonderful, and they’ve been mocking the various defenses that defendants have been trying out.
Summary: Very poorly-put PR response from Novell, which fears Oracle’s attempt to sell its own ‘version’ of Linux
ORACLE has just done something really sneaky. It bashes Linux (yes, the kernel) in order to sell its own ‘improved’ version of Linux and Red Hat’s PR response is as follows:
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we continue to provide an industry-leading application platform, all based on open source technology, designed with the goal that end customers are and should continue to be the largest benefactors of Red Hat and our product offerings.
Novell’s former manager for the OpenSUSE community (Zonker) has posted the most widely-cited response so far:
Now, watch the tactless response from Michael Applebaum (Novell’s director of Linux and Appliances), who decided to say that “we don’t need a third Linux distro” (i.e. choice is bad and duopoly is good):
Ultimately, the market just isn’t demanding a third Linux distro. The presence of two strong players – Novell and Red Hat – keeps the market extremely competitive, and our respective R&D teams along with the talent of the open source community drive exceptional innovation in areas like virtual appliances, cloud computing, high availability clustering and systems management. While it’s certainly in Oracle’s interests to play in the Linux space, its market uptake has lagged.
This is Novell’s PR response. They try to tell companies to stay out of their way. If that’s not arrogance, what is?
In any event, the bad company in this case is Oracle. What it’s doing will in no way be beneficial to the Linux ecosystem. But Novell too has its own Linux kernel, so there is room for claims of hypocrisy. █
According to Bollingh’s experience, users have a hard time switching to a Linux desktop: “They are used to a certain way of working, and it is really hard to get them to change their habits.”
So, today, Amazon is increasingly competing with the open-source vendors who sell support for a variety of open-source components of its Amazon Web Services offering. In the future, I expect we’ll see Amazon building out its AWS product portfolio in ways that make just about everyone in the traditional software market uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
The problem occurs when everyone tries to use their compute resources fully with an overbooked provider, just like everyone trying to get their money out of a bank. The provider is unable to meet its obligations and partially collapses. The likely effect will be compute units being vastly below their specification or some units which have been sold are thrown off the service to make up for the shortfall (i.e. customers are bumped).
Samsung’s much hyped Galaxy Tab hasn’t even been released yet and people are already speculating on the future of the device. Many are reporting that the next update for the current Tab or the next model will be sporting Chrome OS instead of Android 2.2. It all depends on what Google has in store for Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) if it’s more tablet friendly then it would be the next update. However, if it is still not built with a tablet in mind, like Google has stated was the case for 2.2, then Samsung may consider Chrome OS.
Amazon UK’s updated their listing for the Samsung Galaxy Tab to include a lower price and a hard date. According to their new listing, the device will definitely be released November 1st and will be offered for £599. That’s down from £799 we’ve all seen before. It’s still quite the investment, but at least it’ll be a bit easier to swallow for those of you who were going to be picking this one up anyway. This will be the version with both WiFi and HSDPA support for connectivity.
2.6.36 offers VFS optimisations, has returned to integrating Ext3 file systems with “data=ordered” by default and can store data from shared Windows or Samba disks in local cache to improve performance. Numerous new and improved drivers enhance the kernel’s storage and network hardware support.
The Linux 2.6.36-rc5 kernel is now available after Linus Torvalds has got back on track with the weekly release candidates after being at LinuxCon in Brazil. Of course, this later release candidate just targets correcting bugs and other issues, including a fix for a 14 year old kernel bug.
Radio Tray is an online radio streaming player that runs on a Linux system tray. Its goal is to have the minimum interface possible, making it very straightforward to use.
Development No, it’s isn’t an Ubuntu flavour for computer-aided drafting. It’s a fork of a well-known community edition of QCAD. And thus the month of CAD on Linux continues
It’s hardly news that open source version of QCad long ceased to update, with proprietary version not being financially successful. The CADuntu project is a little over a month old, and the name of the project was picked just for fun and has nothing to do with Ubuntu per se.
The point of this project is in updatiing source code to use QT4, much newer version of QT — a crossplatform development kit, and to improve the actual application.
When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured. But times have changed and now the Linux platform benefits from players of all kinds: there are replacements for XMMS for both GNOME and KDE (Audacious and Qmmp), collection-oriented players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox. There are less-known players like Quod Libet, Guayadeque or Jajuk, or the client-server oriented ones like MPD. And the ones I just listed are only the ones which came to my mind at the moment. Some would say having so many players for a single task is a bad thing, but I say it’s not. Having enough options to choose from is a great advantage. If you don’t like one style, try the next player, if you don’t like its approach either, try the next one, and so on.
I always do my presentations in PDF because it’s a common format. Sometimes however I want to add in a slide or remove a slide when I find out I messed something up but don’t have time to go edit the presentation and re export it.
For Maverick’s Featured Apps we now have PDFMod, for quick an easy manipulation of PDFs.
We’ve added another installment to our free training series on The Linux Foundation’s Training site: An Introduction to Git, the version control system built by Linus Torvalds. Kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation board member James Bottomley does a great job describing the history of Git and how the kernel community now uses it for all kernel development. He also includes a demo.
Life’s no beach for users of ATI Radeon video (especially my Mobility Radeon HD 4200 chip) in Linux these days, with kernel modesetting harshing my proverbial mellow and making things blurry and out of sync.fedora-logo.png
Sometimes turning off kernel modesetting in the bootline (radeon.modeset=0 or nomodeset) helps. Sometimes not.
And I’m a new Fedora users, not exactly well-versed in the ways of Yum and PackageKit.
It’s a pity Luca Barbieri or any Mesa / Gallium3D developers are not at Oktoberfest as they are deserving of more than a few Maß of Augustiner. In fact, today a new Gallium3D state tracker was pushed into Mesa and it’s perhaps the most interesting state tracker for this open-source graphics driver architecture yet. It’s a state tracker that exposes Microsoft’s DirectX 10/11 API on Linux! And it’s already working and can be hooked into Wine!
During the summer we were giving away free beta keys for Heroes of Newerth, a game developed by S2 Games that had a native Linux client. During that time we gave away more than 1,000 keys, but since then the retail version of the game was launched to much excitement for both Linux and Windows gamers. This week we learned from S2 Games about how they view their Linux port.
Last week in Toulouse I learned just how much interest Intel has in Wayland and the active role they are playing in its development. Wayland and related work to bring it up is not limited to just Kristian Høgsberg, who switched from being a Red Hat employee to Intel during Wayland’s development, but Jesse Barnes and other Intel OSTC X developers are also contributing to different areas. Jesse Barnes has been working on the Qt support within Wayland and that’s hit a new milestone.
After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time!
Although it’s a little more than nine months since Qt’s last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1st, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, QtQuick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released. We hope you’ll benefit from the effort and care that went into bringing the implementation of those ideas to maturity.
One of the main objective of the GNOME.Asia Committee, and the summits we’ve organized every year since 2008, has been to build a stronger GNOME community in Asia. Thanks to the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 event in Taiwan this year, we’ve moved a step closer to our goals and recruited five more members from various Asian countries to join our Committee.
For those looking for OS perfect for higher education environment, UberStudent – a Ubuntu-based Linux distro should be the first choice. It has Ubuntu-like functions but has been modified for Students and contains student-friendly tools helping in research and writing, studying and self-management.
It actually means that with the availability of source code and the resulting increase in the chances for more and more people to check out the source code, bugs can be easily identified and quashed. The very availability of source code ensures that the bugs are noticed very fast and it gets patched almost immediately. However, proprietary vendors and people whose thinking are fine tuned by proprietary mindset, get easily excited by such spotting of bugs and resort to FUD.
Are you an application developer who would like to see your application appear in the Ubuntu Software Center and available by millions of Ubuntu users? Today we are announcing a new process we are trialing which is easier and more accessible for application authors to get their apps in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has this wicked content delivery system built into the operating system, something that Apple and Microsoft don’t have on their desktops. It’s obvious that having a lot of fresh applications constantly landing is a boon for platforms, and this would be the perfect area for Ubuntu to whip out a feature that its competitors lack. So what do Canonical do? Make it as hard as possible for developers to get content into the system, of course.
In my personal opinion, it would be better for developers to implement their free software in the Universe repository. Universe has a good and working Stable Release Update policy and process. There are problems with actually getting new packages in to Universe because the package review system, called REVU often doesn’t have enough people paying attention to it and reviewing packages. However, it’s still possible to get packages into Universe without much trouble.
In yet another attempt at making it big with Ubuntu Software Center, Canonical announces new Ubuntu application review process. Canonical claims that the new process will make it easier and more accessible for application authors to get their apps in Ubuntu.
At the moment, Ubuntu is venturing into unknown ground. Never before has an open source operating system attempted to win over the hearts of the mainstream. In fact, with the exception of a few medium sized projects such as Firefox, Moodle, GIMP, Drupal, WordPress et. al., we haven’t really tested how the mainstream would react to open source projects as large as Ubuntu.
As we grow, there will be more people contributing, more people adding comments to bug reports, more people getting annoyed at changes and voicing their opinion. In proprietary software, companies generally develop behind closed doors and then release a product. Consumers either like it or they don’t – in open source, they can have a say during the development of a product.
Although I am not a fan of copying an entire OS look (even though Ubuntu does some of it by default), I’m sure some of you want to get the entire Mac OSX look in Ubuntu. For that, you can use a script called Macbuntu which is very easy to use and can make your Ubuntu desktop look like Mac OSX in seconds.
* Welcome New Ubuntu Members
* Welcome New Ubuntu Developers
* Ubuntu Open Week, request for instructors
* Ubuntu App Developer Week
* Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 10.10
* Fixing Community Processes
* Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption
* Alternative UDS Accomodation
* Ubuntu Cowntdown 10.10
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo News
* Launchpad News
* Ubuntu Forums News
* My role in Ubuntu
* Helping improve Ruby on Debian and Ubuntu
* Ubuntu Server Guide Retrospective
* This week in design – 17 September 2010
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* Canonical announces provisional Ubuntu Developer Summit tracks
* A Canonical Controversy
* Why Red Hat should fear Amazon Linux
* Bazaar team: want to work on Bazaar?
* Canonical ISD: Ubuntu Pay is open for translations
* Ubuntu Hardware Summit in Taipei 11 days away
* Featured Podcasts
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* UWN Sneak Peek
* And much much more
I haven’t been involved with Edubuntu development for a year now. While I miss the work and especially the great people, I’ve come to see that the project is in great hands (better than mine for sure). Edubuntu made some really important strides in 10.04 with the enhancements made to the DVD installer and live system. One of the neat things that has happened a little more recently was a complete revamping of the edubuntu.org website. The work was done by Edubuntu community members Jonathan Carter and Stéphane Graber.
That security hole that no one got fidgety over has been patched up by Adobe today. You can find the now-should-be-more-secure version in the Android market as version 10.1.95.1. There’s really no changelog to be had as this is only a quick fix for that critical flaw. Some other bit of news might have squeaked out of Adobe’s camp, however, and it concerns AIR for Android. According to a tip by one of AC’s forum members, Adobe AIR will be out October 8th in the Android market for users to download.
Orange UK has outed its latest Android smartphone, the somewhat bizarrely named San Francisco, and they’re targeting the budget-minded masses this time. The Orange San Francisco will cost £99 on the carrier’s “Dolphin” pay-as-you-go plan, which gets you a 3.2-megapixel camera, capacitive touchscreen and Android 2.1 Eclair.
Back in July I wrote about an Android tablet computer that I picked up on Amazon for £85. This is a really interesting device and seemed to do quite a lot. A couple of things really let it down though, its speed and the fact that you could not use Android Market with it, making obtaining most Android applications quite difficult. Fortunately a group of enthusiasts have formed a community around this device, the Eken M001, and similar devices over at Slatedroid.com. A couple of people there have put together a new firmware image which is still in beta but I’ve been trying it out and I am impressed so far! The tablet now has a working Market and feels much more responsive.
The 802.1X authentication protocol plays a major role in Wi-Fi security of business networks. It enables the Enterprise flavor of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) encryption for wireless networks, and can also provide authentication on the wired side. Here are six open source projects that deal with 802.1X authentication…
Last week, a team of Yahoo researchers creating a long version of pi set a new record in the field of mathematics using the Yahoo cloud. According to Engadget’s report, “The team, led by Nicholas Sze of Yahoo!, used the company’s Hadoop cloud computing tech to break the previous record by more than double, creating the longest Pi yet.”
The researchers leveraged Hadoop for this project. The widely distributed nature of Hadoop brought clear advantages by taking a divide-and-conquer approach. It cut up the problem into smaller pieces, then set different parts of the computer to work on different sections of the project.
Facebook has open sourced a new MySQL utility that lets the social networking colossus update its database indexes and juice query times without staging the changes on test servers. With the tool – known as Online Schema Change for MySQL, or OSC – it can update indexes on live servers.
In the past, according Facebook MySQL guru Mark Callaghan, the company needed a good six months to roll index updates across its sea of MySQL servers. Now, it needs no more than a few days. “This lets us make schema changes much, much faster,” Callaghan tells The Register. “And the benefit from the changes is that database queries will be faster.”
While Java founder James Gosling has campaigned for Oracle to place Java under the jurisdiction of an independent foundation, Oracle is declining to comment at all on the notion.
Asked about Gosling’s efforts during a press question-and-answer session at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Tuesday in San Francisco, Oracle’s Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development, simply declined to comment.
Perhaps one of the most important political interventions made by hackers is through the production of Free and Open Source Software (such as the web browser Firefox and the GNU/Linux Operating System). We start with the intellectual progenitor of Free Software, uber-hacker Richard Stallman. We read the “GNU Manifesto” published in 1985 where he proposes his philosophical and practical vision for Free Software. To get students up to speed about the fraught three hundred year history of intellectual property law, we read Carla Hesse’s magnificent “The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C – A.D. 2000: an Idea in Balance” — a gem for its ability to convey so much in such economical terms. Finally, we rely heavily on Chris Kelty’s excellent account: Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.
The Totem Arte.tv plugin project is still alive. After Arte changed their video streaming platform we had to switch from WMV to RTMP streams. RTMP support is finally available in the latest (version 0.10.20) gstreamer-plugins-bad release. Nicolas Delvaux added many additional features like GNOME proxy support and asynchronous thumbnail downloading.
7. Q: What advice would you give companies who want to apply Wikipedia’s cultural principles when working within communities both inside and outside of company walls?
A: I conclude the book by writing I don’t believe there is any such thing as “wiki pixie dust.” Wikis do permit asynchronous, incremental, and non-brittle contributions (i.e., it is easy to revert a mistake), but using them is not a guarantee of success. Similarly, there is much to learn from Wikipedia’s collaborative culture, but one shouldn’t approach this as a simple cultural graft or transplantation. The idea of Neutral Point of View doesn’t necessarily make sense for businesses, or even other wikis. Ward Cunningham’s original wiki was not neutral: it advocated for software patterns. However, I do think that there is a general lesson: we should look for ways to facilitate fast and flexible collaboration that is forgiving with respect to what the technology enables and in our attitudes towards our peers. For example, we might conceive of process as being less about reactive strictures and more as a sharing of best practices among collaborators.
At some point in the future, many more everyday objects will have tiny embedded chips that can communicate with networks. But just as we’re debating net neutrality and the value of the open web vs closed client applications, we will have to decide who will control the internet of things, too.
Lines are already beginning to be drawn. Ashlee Vance, writing for the New York Times’ Bits blog, profiles chipmaker ARM’s efforts to bring the internet of things to the masses with its mbed project.
Chiao said HarassMap offers victims “a practical way of responding, something to fight back with; as someone who has experienced sexual harassment personally on the streets of Cairo, I know that the most frustrating part of it was feeling like there was nothing I could do.”
The problem is, this isn’t actually open data. As I argue in the three laws of open data (and the good folks at Berkman seem to share my sense of humour) crime data for cities that contract with Public Engines Inc isn’t open. You can look at the data, but you can’t touch it. Worst still… don’t even think about playing with it (unless you are doing so ON crimereports.com website, in a way that their license lets you – its all quite constraining stuff).
MIT OpenCourseWare and OpenStudy are are teaming up to help OCW users connect and study together. MIT has been publishing the core academic materials—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from the Institute’s courses since 2002, but since inception, the site has been a static presentation of MIT materials with no opportunity to interact with the MIT community or other users of the site.
My name is Cody and I’m a hardware hacker. It started at the age of five, taking apart a toy computer to figure out how it worked. I live for that thrill of discovery and rush of power that I feel when I figure out what makes something tick, then figure out how to bend it to my will. This has led to me hacking everything from game consoles to phones.
Today the European Parliament plenary adopted a report on completing the internal market for e-commerce prepared by Spanish rapporteur Pablo Arias Echeverría (EPP). The reports highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the European Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread.
An Internet standards group has approved an electronic crimes reporting format, which may eventually give security researchers a cohesive, broad set of data to gauge online crime.
If you’re read this far, you’re probably sold on the value of SCAP. There are a few ways to get involved, and move this standard forward.
First, check out NIST’s SCAP website. There’s a lot of great content there, and there are a bunch of mailing lists you can join.
Next, the OpenSCAP project would welcome your help. It’s a low-level library that handles some of the rude mechanics of the SCAP protocol. There’s a wonderland of opportunity for folks who want to create a GUI, a web interface, or otherwise build on the excellent work that’s already been done. The secstate project is a good place to start.
Near the southeastern edge of Cambridge, where this idyllic university town gives way to fields of green, sits the headquarters of ARM Holdings. Neither the modest three-building campus nor its surroundings evoke notions of a thriving hotbed of computing.
[...]
“Our customers sell about 4 billion chips a year,” said Warren East, the chief executive of ARM, during a recent interview.
Last year, I wrote about some issues I had with the way Scribd tried to avoid liability by suggesting that public domain documents couldn’t be hosted on the site or that fair use was not allowed. To the company’s credit, it responded quickly and fixed the situation, but soon after that I switched to (mostly) using Docstoc to host documents. Doctstoc has its own problems as well, but for the most part has worked well for me. Still, in my experience Scribd is still quite popular among folks — especially for uploading and hosting legal documents. Apparently, the company recently made some quiet changes and it’s seriously pissed off law professor Eric Goldman, who has relied on the site for quite some time.
“When I departed the bus, he asked if I took his picture while he was driving,” the passenger who recorded the video told local news channel KGW.com. “I said I had, and he responded that I was not allowed to take his photo while he was driving.”
A lawyer for the bus driver told KGW that although he had the device on the dashboard, he “would not be reading such a thing while engaged in traffic”.
The European Commission today helped to increase the internet capacity available to researchers in the Central Asia region (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan). With the Commission’s €5 million contribution to the Central Asia Research and Education Network (CAREN), the ancient Silk Road has been upgraded to a 21st century high-speed internet highway for research and education. Researchers, academics and students in the region now have access to high-capacity internet connections, offering them unrivalled opportunities to play a major role on the international research scene. With Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also candidate countries to join the network, CAREN will link over half a million users at more than 500 universities and research centres
Tell a friend. Your less tech-savvy friends need to understand what spam is (and is not) and how to deal with it, much the way they deal with blood-sucking telemarketers drinking up their cellular minutes. They need to deal with it themselves, not depend upon you, because their actions can help starve or feed a spammer.
The original discovery of the weakness, known as a “cross-site scripting” (XSS) hack, seems to have been made by a Japanese developer called Masato Kinugawa. He says that he reported an XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14 – and then discovered that the “new” Twitter, launched on Tuesday 14 September, had the same problem.
At about 10am BST (the afternoon in Japan, where he is based) he set up a Twitter account called “Rainbow Twtr”, which showed how the XSS weakness could be used to make tweets turn into different colours.
And it’s worth remembering that, when the Montreal Protocol (the international agreement that phased out ozone-depleting chemicals) was being debated, conservative extremists and industry spokespeople in the U.S. and U.K. said first that there was no need for it, then that it could never work with so many nations involved, and finally that it would destroy the economy if ratified. You might note that these are the same arguments made against climate action in these nations.
Forty years after the passage of the Clean Air Act, it is extraordinary to look at the numbers.
Numbers like 200,000 — which is the count of premature deaths the Clean Air Act prevented in its first 20 years. Over the same period, the Act prevented 672,000 cases of chronic bronchitis and 21,000 cases of heart disease. It avoided 843,000 asthma attacks and 18 million child respiratory illnesses.
1.7 million is the number of tons of toxic emissions removed from our air every year since 1990. In the last two decades, emissions of six common pollutants dropped 41 percent. Lead in our air is down by 92 percent since 1980.
The world’s greatest migration spectacle – the annual charge of nearly 2 million wildebeest, zebra and other mammals across the Serengeti national park in east Africa – is under threat from plans to build a road across their route.
Twenty-seven conservation experts from around the world have signed an article in the journal Nature condemning the plan, adding to growing international concern that includes thousands of signatures on petitions opposing the Tanzanian government project.
Europe’s biofuels policy could cause unwanted side-effects equal to as much as 1.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases – roughly the annual emissions of Russia or India, official reports warn.
The point I try to make in the essay is that the financial system requires economic growth, but oil supply seems to be flat, or even declining in the not too distant future. Because of the many benefits oil provides, this loss can be expected to constrain economic growth. If the economic system cannot grow, there are likely to be widespread debt defaults and other problems similar to the 2008 crisis. These problems can be expected to affect all types of financial institutions, including insurance companies.
In a letter to President Barack Obama seven months ago, 10 Republican senators led by Utah’s Orrin Hatch urged him to use tax relief to bolster the U.S. economy and create jobs.
Top on their list: extend and improve a research and development tax credit for businesses. “We urge you to help us enact a strong research incentive to keep us first in the world,” the senators wrote.
Whoops. Turns out Netflix isn’t actually cool with libraries using the service and doesn’t want early adopting librarians to be encouraging others to do so. Netflix doesn’t offer institutional subscriptions and expects its services to be limited to personal consumption.
Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday introduced the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are “dedicated to infringing activities.” The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It’s easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these “deemed infringing” sites on the second blacklist.)
The Globe story makes an additional point of pointing a finger at WindMobile, the Egyptian financed cell phone service provider for not being Canadian enough.
This week the controversial French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi went live. Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers, and this will increase to over a million in a few weeks. The ISPs have to hand over the identities of the associated accounts to the authorities within a week, or face a fine of 1500 euros per unidentified IP-address.
Government 2.0 Taskforce member Bryan Fitzgerald today credited the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for setting the stage for an open government.
In an overcrowded room at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Fitzgerald described Australian efforts to license public sector data under the Creative Commons license.
A group of senators want to hand the U.S. Department of Justice the power to shut down Web sites dedicated to the illegal sharing online of film, music, software, and other intellectual property.
“The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will give the Department of Justice an expedited process for cracking down on these rogue Web sites regardless of whether the Web site’s owner is located inside or outside of the United States,” according to a statement from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and committee member Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah).
Under the proposed legislation, the Justice Department would file a civil action against accused pirate domain names. If the domain name resides in the U.S., the attorney general could then request that the court issue an order finding that the domain name in question is dedicated to infringing activities. The Justice Department would have the authority to serve the accused site’s U.S.-based registrar with an order to shut down the site.
But there’s worse: the US wants to arrogate these powers to itself even if the Web sites are outside its territory. Since much of the Internet’s infrastructure is run from the US, that’s a real threat. It’s also the strongest argument so far why we need to decentralise the Internet further, and remove it from the influence of any one country – including the US.
There’s another important aspect, too. One of the constant refrains during the ACTA negotiations is that the latter won’t force the US, say, to introduce new laws. It looks like that will be true – because the US is introducing them anyway. But make no mistake, this kind of censorship lies at the hart of ACTA.
Receivers of these letters who have claimed innocence and subsequently had the matter dropped may want to look towards a civil case themselves. Receiving a letter like this can be extremely upsetting for some. Unlike the Police force who by way of their job have the powers in law to arrest/interview people under suspicion, that is not the case for ACS:Law. They are a business which is effectively in my view, interviewing you without caution (if you respond to these letters) and even worse than that you are then signing up to an agreement for future conduct which you may not have control over. The letters state you should seek legal advice, but how many people would look at that as an extra expense if they are already worried about a possible court case.
They are an admittion of guilt and from reports many people have signed them out of fear of going through and expensive court case, not out of guilt.
After all-out assaults on the web presences of the MPAA, RIAA and later the BPI, last night a new company was targeted in a new 4chan DDoS attack. Anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law, one of the most despised and complained about law firms in Britain, had their website taken offline last night and it remains down “Account Suspended” this morning. TorrentFreak has spoken to one of the key figures in Operation Payback for the lowdown.
To celebrate the great collection of Creative Commons tracks on SoundCloud, we’re holding a remix contest… CC style! So in the spirit of “some rights reserved”, upload your best CC samples and loops and then get remixing them into brand new pieces.
The US Supreme Court is weighing in on the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket, requesting that the music labels’ litigation arm respond to a case testing the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement.
Some time back, I planned to post a short review of Bobbi Kwall’s recent book, The Soul of Creativity. The book summarizes a lot of recent thinking (including her own) about the law of moral rights and copyright and offers a new framework for adapting US copyright to international moral rights norms. But Jacqui Lipton beat me to it, and I’ve had to wait for an opportunity to post something distinctive about the book — and about what bothered me about it, despite its abundant strengths.
The opportunity recently presented itself: a pair of outstanding recent papers by Chris Sprigman (University of Virginia) and Chris Buccafusco (Chicago-Kent). One is “Valuing Intellectual Property” ; the other is “The Creativity Effect.” Both are studies in experimental economics. The question that the authors explore, via cleverly designed games, is how “creators” identify and value the “works” that they create. In different respects, both papers suggest that “creators” tend to value their “creations” more than purchasers or third parties do. That finding has important implications for the design of an IP rights system, at least if that design is premised on creating conditions for efficient transactions in IP rights.
There are two or more threads at the Google Book Search Help forum on the topic of making more books “full view” accessible.
Full View is only available for books that are “out of copyright, or if the publisher or author has asked to make the book fully viewable.” The Full View allows you to view any page from the book, and if the book is in the public domain, you can download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace.
Following a lengthy public consultation, a consortium of academics, educators, and musical and digital cultural organizations, known as the Network for Copyright Law Reform in Brazil, recently put forward a list of proposals on domestic copyright reform in Brazil. The most exciting of the 15 contributions proposed to “make sharing legal” (“Compartilhamento legal!”) by collecting a small levy from all Internet subscribers in exchange for legalizing noncommercial file-sharing.
The global access-to-knowledge movement has often looked to Brazil as an ally in intellectual property reform. Back in 2004, Brazil launched one of the first country-specific Creative Commons licenses. That launch received the high-level endorsement of the then Culture Minister, Gilberto Gil, a man who since his appointment in 2003 has successfully married the Brazilian national ideal of “cultural cannibalism” (which he himself embodies as a forerunner of the Tropicalia sound), with the “remix” message of American intellectual property reformers like Lawrence Lessig.
ACTA: Risks of Intermediary Liability for Access to Medicines, Brook K. Baker
WIPO and the ACTA Threat, Sara Bannerman
ACTA and the Specter of Graduated Response, Annemarie Bridy
Flouting the Elmo Necessity and Denying the Local Roots of Interpretation: “Anthropology’s” Quarrel with ACTA and Authoritarian IP Regimes, Alexander S. Dent
Public Interest Representation in Global IP Policy Institutions, Jeremy Malcolm
ACTA and Public Health, Peter Maybarduk
ACTA, Fool: Explaining the Irrational Support for a New Institution, Gabriel Michael
Navigating the ACTA Shoals to a Future Safe Harbor: Library and Hotspot Internet Access Liability in a Post-ACTA Universe, Michael R. Morris
Collateral Damage: The Impact of ACTA and the Enforcement Agenda on the World’s Poorest People, Andrew Rens
Welfare Implications of Intellectual Property Enforcement Measures, Xavier Seuba, Joan Rovira, and Sophie Bloemen
I have written a lot about ACTA mostly in my other blogs. But this little film distills it’s into an easily digestible morsel which beautifully explains what the fuss is all about.
It is hard to conclude other than that the negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, with the Obama Administration in the lead, do not want meaningful civil society input into the negotiation of the agreement.
The latest evidence broke late yesterday afternoon when the USTR announced that the Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations is starting this Thursday September 23, not on September 27 as most had thought. This morning, the Japanese Embassy stated in a personal phone call to me (I don’t know who else they are calling) that there will be a civil society meeting on Friday Sept. 24 in Tokyo at noon to 1pm.
A resolution of the European Parliament calling for more repression of file sharing will be voted upon on Wednesday. European conservatives, led by a pro-sarkozy rapporteur and helped by a diversion from the liberal group, are pushing for the adoption of the Gallo report. If they succeed, blind repression and private copyright police of the Net will become the official position of the European Parliament. Our fundamental freedoms are at stake. In just 5 minutes, you can help rejecting it.
Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on the Gallo report that deals with the enforcement of intellectual property. Drafted by a partner of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the report paves the way for draconian anti-piracy measures to be introduced across Europe, potentially affecting the lives of millions of Internet users.
One of the slightly depressing aspects of fighting intellectual monopolists is that they have lots of money. This means that they can fund their lobbyists around the world in multiple forums and at multiple levels. So, for example, we have the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is being negotiated behind closed doors by the representatives of rich and powerful nations. But we also have a threat at the European level that must be fought just as doggedly.
On Wednesday you are going to vote on the report on enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market by Marielle Gallo, the so called Gallo report.
It has come to our attention that the authors of the petition supporting the Gallo report, Eurocinema, uses fake signatures to support it. They want to give the impression that copyright holders are united to enforce more repressive legislation, that will affect our lives and communications in the future. However, their support is rather empty, and what is left is nothing more than yet another industry smokescreen to convince you to support ideas that jeopardize the fundamental rights of EU citizens as well as the open and neutral character of the Internet.
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