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● 03.10.10

● Links 10/3/2010: Fedora 13 Alpha, Freescale+Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ LB – Episode 51 – Eating the Tonido by Linux Basement

Desktop

=> ↺ Austin Texas – Linux Against Poverty 2010

• It’s spring time in Texas.

• The Bluebonnets are fixin’ to get ready to bloom, today’s temperature is going to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit and a solid date for the second annual Linux Against Poverty is, with a fair amount of certainty… official.

=> ↺ Shutting Down That Other OS

• Clean machines that I installed in these three months are coming back to me. Even my own machine that I use to connect to a GNU/Linux terminal server slowed down. That was the last straw. I cannot afford the time to keep fixing XP. Last night I had an opportunity to shut down that other OS on another PC.

• A teacher who is doing a fine job managing some rowdy junior high school students has lately been working late on his PC. He told me recently that it had lost its connection to the Internet. I looked at it and indeed, it no longer knew about the Atheros chip. There was no sign of malware so I expect it was some automatic update clobbered the DLINK installation. There were .DLLs missing, too. I told him I would install GNU/Linux and it would hold its configuration. He said, “OK”. The guy is only recently a PC user so I doubt he understood the implications but his needs were simple. He said he had no files to back up.

=> ↺ Your way is the right way

• That’s this machine, of course, with a Grub-to-console boot time of 23 seconds (including the time it takes to snap the framebuffer into place), a full-workload memory footprint of less than 18Mb and taking up around 1Gb of hard drive space. Jump in any time.

=> ↺ Lenovo IdeaCentre Q110

• The Q110 is a marked improvement over the Q100 for movie playback and thin-client computing, especially in Ubuntu Remix for Netbooks.

Server

=> ↺ Linux coolness: Linux Cooler, Linux serves you beer

• Linux is cool, Linux users know that much. There are a lot of cool things Linux, and to kick off, here is one of them: A linux beer machine.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 2.6.34 development marches on

• Only 12 days after the release of Linux 2.6.33, the merge window for version 2.6.34 of Linux has now been closed and Linus Torvalds has announced the first preview release of the upcoming 2.6.34 Linux kernel.

=> ↺ 400,000+ lines added in Linux 2.6.34-rc1 kernel

• But wait it gets better, Torvalds noted that approximately 175,000 lines of code were deleted too. Over half of the changes were in drivers and approximately 850 developers contributed.

Store

=> ↺ Linux Store

=> ↺ Wear Your Linux Pride on Your Sleeve, Linux.com Launches New Store

• If you’ve been longing to wrap your baby, significant other, or even your coffee in Linux-y goodness, now you can — while supporting a valuable FOSS community resource at the same time. Linux.com launched a new store filled with all kinds of geeky t-shirts, baby onesies, mugs, and other fun paraphernalia.

=> ↺ Embrace Your Inner Geek At The New Linux Store

• The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, has launched a merchandise store where people can purchase a newly launched line of original T-shirts, hats, mugs and other items that reflect “geek culture.”

Applications

=> ↺ Shotwell 0.5 To Bring PicasaWeb Publishing, Tags, Printing, More [Latest SVN Available In Our PPA]

• Besides the cool new features in version 0.5, Shotwell already had other nice options like: publish photos to Facebook and Flickr, import photos from any digital camera supported by gPhoto, automatically organize events containing photos taken at the same time, reduce red-eye and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of your photos and many more which you can check out @ Shotwell homepage.

=> ↺ Listen Music Player Comes With Lots Of Useful Features, Plugins. Try It!

• In my tests, Listen 0.6.5 used around 30mb of RAM but I didn’t have too many music files on the computer on which I’ve tested it (only around 1000).

=> ↺ StrongVPN on Ubuntu: Simple VPN Solution That Works

• Ask any knowledgeable mobile user, and she will tell you that the best way to securely access the Internet in public places is through a VPN (virtual private network) connection. So if you enjoy sipping coffee at a local cafe while checking email and browsing the Web, a secure VPN connection is a good solution to protect the data traveling to and from your machine. Although you can go the DIY way and set up your own VPN server, using a dedicated VPN service provider would save you a lot of work and time. There are a few reputable VPN service providers out there, but for my money, StrongVPN is the best of the bunch. It offers reliable service and excellent support at competitive prices. I’m not affiliated with StrongVPN in any way, but I’ve been using their VPN solution for almost a year, and it has been a smooth ride so far.

Instructionals

=> ↺ Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

=> ↺ Install Avira Antivir on Linux

=> ↺ How To Share Files and Folders Between Windows Vista and Mandriva Linux

=> ↺ Resuming Broken Downloads with Firefox

=> ↺ Create a Larger than 4GB Casper Partition

=> ↺ Best Lucid Feature: edit-patch

=> ↺ Intro to IO Profiling of Applications

=> ↺ Automated Linux Server Backup Tips and Tricks

=> ↺ How to Create Space Scenes Quickly and Easily in Gimp

=> ↺ Task Coach – Your friendly task manager

=> ↺ Set Up a VNC Linux Server in 5 Easy Steps

=> ↺ Quick and Dirty Backups with rsync

=> ↺ Ignoring Files and Directories in Subversion for Easier Linux Server Management

Desktop Environments

=> ↺ GNOME and KDE: Seven Attractions in Each

• Despite all the talk about the mythical Year of the Linux Desktop, somewhere in the last few years, free software passed a milestone without anyone noticing. At some point, after years of struggling to rival proprietary desktops, both GNOME and KDE have caught up in features and narrowed the gap in usability. We are now at a point where free software is often an innovator on the desktop.

=> ↺ Open-PC will use KDE

• The first Open-PC survey is now finished. Over 12,000 people participated in our survey with interesting results: 48% choose KDE as the Desktop. 42% choose GNOME and 9% choose Xfce. 52% chose Amarok as mediaplayer and 88% choose Firefox as default Browser.

=> ↺ KDE a resource hog?

• In all tests, KDE 4.4.1 had both the highest minimal memory usage and highest average system memory usage, while LXDE 0.5 had the lowest.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

=> ↺ Five Improvements for KDE 4.5 (Part 1)

• 4.) Easier Theme Installation Another issue I had with KDE (even with the KDE3.x series) is that themes are so easy to install in GNOME, but a pain in KDE. While installing new themes is still easiest to do in GNOME (download, drag, and drop) KDE SC 4.4 has made strides in this area, finally. It can only get better from here.

• [...]

• So, there you have it. Those are features/changes I wished for during previous KDE releases that have all materialized into reality. With such progress, it’s clear that KDE is moving at the speed of light, and I predict KDE SC 4.5 will be the height of the KDE4 series. What am I hoping for in that release? Stay tuned next week to find out, and be ready to share your ideas so we can help make KDE the best it can be.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS 2010 Rocks Even in the Beta Stage

• The wait is over! Tex and the Rippers announced PCLinuxOS 2010 on 6th March, 2010. Final iso is very close.

• PCLinuxOS-2010.beta1 has gathered all the goodies: latest 2.6.32.8 kernel with BFS scheduler, full ext4 support, KDE 4.4.1 SC and the latest applications. Besides, users having more than 4Gig of RAM can pull in a PAE kernel from the repo.

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 released

• PCLinuxOS Logo The PCLinuxOS developers have announced the release of the first beta for the 2010 edition of their Linux distribution. The distribution’s goal is to be “radically simple” and easy to use. The latest development release includes a number of changes and updates.

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS 2010 beta review

• Once upon a time, PCLinuxOS was the biggest desktop distro. It came from nowhere straight to the top, beating Ubuntu and other big distros.

• But as fast as it rose to the top, even faster was its decline.

• The next release was no where near as popular as it’s predecessor. The distro seemed to have faded into the giant pool of small Linux distros.

• Is PCLOS once again a serious contender for the desktop with the 2010 release?

Fedora

=> ↺ Rock it – The first pre-release version of Fedora 13 arrives

• One week later than scheduled, the Fedora Project has released the first and only alpha version of its Fedora 13 Linux distribution, aka Goddard, which is scheduled for release in mid May. With the feature freeze having come into effect a month ago, the first pre-release version of the distribution, which is being advertised under the release slogan “Rock it”, now contains all major features likely to find their way into Fedora 13.

=> ↺ F13 Alpha release announcement

=> ↺ Fedora 13: Punny Stuff

Debian Family

=> ↺ Distros and End Of Life

• I like Jaunty. I might decide to stick with it. Given that the truth is that it’ll still be perfectly fine, with only security updates and anything 3rd party repositories provide, I don’t really see much wrong with it. But if I have to change it, there’s only a few options. I’ve gone off Debian and Ubuntu based systems. the DEB package format isn’t bad, but Debian and Ubuntu, along with most of their derivatives, seem to make things too easy.

Ubuntu

=> ↺ Project: Getting Ready For Ubuntu 10.04 – Part 1

• As you have probably heard, the next release of Ubuntu, 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) will occur during the final days of April 2010. My production systems (the ones on which I do my writing and photography) are running Ubuntu 8.04 and I have decided to upgrade them to the upcoming version. This is the first of five-part series that will document my transition to the new version.

• [...]

• In a past life, I ran the QA department of a software company and I often employ these skills to perform software testing on new Linux releases. This case will be no different. The first beta release of 10.04 is scheduled for March 18 so we will begin our work then. Testing is not just something I do for fun (it isn’t) but it’s important to look for problems that might interfere with the deployment. By checking for problems now, we have a better chance of getting them fixed before the final release.

=> ↺ Kubuntu vs Ubuntu or Ubuntu = Kubuntu?

• The official derivative of the Ubuntu is Kubuntu. Instead of GNOME, Kubuntu uses KDE graphical environment, and shares its underlying system along with Ubuntu; Kubuntu is a project of Ubuntu.

• [...]

• Customizations in Kubuntu

• Kubuntu can be totally customized according to the user’s requirement. Kubuntu’s intention is to make the transition easier for the users from different operating systems by giving the allowance to a desktop layout that is similar.

• Architectures like AMD64 and Intel x86 are presently supported by the Kubuntu’s desktop version. As Kubuntu is derived from Ubuntu, any kind of software that is applicable for Ubuntu is available also for Kubuntu!

=> ↺ Wyse Technology Prepares Ubuntu Linux Thin Clients

• Wyse Technology, the prominent thin client company, is preparing a “completely new product in the consumer and enterprise space” that leverages Ubuntu Linux, The VAR Guy has learned. Our resident blogger is nearly sworn to secrecy… Still, here are some preliminary details about the emerging Wyse-Ubuntu effort. Plus, the implications for Canonical (Ubuntu’s chief promoter) and channel partners that focus on thin clients.

Appearance

=> ↺ Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD Installer gets improved look

• The Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD has ditched the boring ‘black on white text’ menu approach and instead delivers up a GUI menu. Whilst we’re still 2 months away from the final installer design, here’s a quick peek at it as it currently exists: -

• So you’ve download and burnt your Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD, you pop it into your disc tray and whirr up.

=> ↺ New Ubuntu Design Created on Apple Mac

• Dave Walker, a Ubuntu community leader who was invited in Canonical’s offices in London to preview the style changes and give opinions on how the community will interpret the new branding, wrote about his ‘behind the scenes’ experience with the design team.

=> ↺ I’m a Mac, I’m an Ubuntu PC

• Now, almost two years later, Shuttleworth seems ready to put his money where his mouth is with the coming release of Lucid Lynx, the first Ubuntu to break out of its dark brown motif and orange “Human” theme since the distribution was introduced in 2004.

• In a blog entry this month, Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager at Canonical, offered the public a glimpse of the new look that the popular Linux distribution will sport when it is launched in April.

• “The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme ‘Light,’” Bacon writes. “We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.”

=> ↺ Ubuntu’s new look

• Good interface design is crucial to making users comfortable with the tools in front of them. It makes it easy for them to find what they want and get the task at hand done. Whether they do this with a black background or a brown one or an orange one doesn’t really matter all that much.

• Having been a long-time user of Ubuntu Linux I can say with certainty that there are far more pressing issues when it comes to interface design than the choice of colours. The menu system, almost entirely based on Gnome, is still incredibly unfriendly to users. I know much has been done over the years to improve this but there is some way to go.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Rebranding

Devices/Embedded

Phones

=> ↺ Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win

• The competitive dynamic between Linux/Android and OS X can be understood in the same way. OS X is playing a control game and Android a ubiquity one. We can expect the outcome to be the same: when the bazaar meets the walled garden, the walls will eventually come down, crushing the life out of the garden.

• This is why Symbian is now open-source in spite of having no inheritance from Unix-land; its backers have figured out that a control strategy collects short-term gains over a ubiquity strategy but simply cannot compete in the longer term against open-source Android and open-source Maemo. Apple will learn this, to its cost, too. Because Steve Ballmer may be an evil maniac, but when he yelled “developers, developers, developers!”, he was right. In the war for market-share, allies are better for your long-term prospects than walls, and ubiquity will always eventually triumph over control.

=> ↺ The Linux Box in My Pocket

• My wife and I picked up new ‘phones’ last week. Penny wanted a phone with a slide out keyboard so she would be able to text more easily. I wanted a Droid.

• The Droid is a 4 inch machine running a slim Linux Kernel called Android. The whole thing is orchestrated by Google. The machine comes with 16 gigs of flash memory, a 5 megapixel camera, audio player that plays several different formats of music including MP3s, GPS, 3.7 inch touch screen, slide out keyboard, WiFi, wireless broadband, a very sophisticated (free) software installation framework, and, oh yeah, a phone.

=> ↺ Cell phones in the classroom

• Teachers from the pilot also tell me that their instruction has changed since they started using cell phones in class.

Android/Chrome OS

=> ↺ Why online resources are not free and ChromeOS will fail

• In the end I think that Android will crush Google’s other operating system, ChromeOS because for the foreseeable future most people will still want to be able to take their applications, data, entertainment and games offline, or at least on a limited connection. That is something that Android is much better designed to do than Chrome.

=> ↺ Chrome OS to get business-grade edition

• Drewry says the Google Chrome OS has auto-updating and sandbox features to reduce malware exposure and will warn users when they come upon a website that is known to have malware. A developer mode can be turned on thanks to a switch under the battery, which would sacrifice the embedded security in favor of freedom to browse wherever one wishes. It’s meant to give developers the range to play with the open source code in order to come up with new ideas and apps.

=> ↺ Parallels Officially Supports Google Chrome OS

• There’s also a bigger story here: Parallels provides the base software foundation for many VARs and software developers that are deploying SaaS (software as a service) applications. Now, that SaaS ecosystem may be more inclined to give Google’s Chrome OS a look.

=> ↺ Ikan Wireless Kitchen Appliance Revolutionizes In-Home Grocery Shopping

• The Jetsons kitchen of the future is upon us with SnS Design’s Ikan kitchen appliance. Either that, or we’re looking at quite possibly the most expensive and glorified grocery app yet. With its 7-inch touch screen, WiFi integration, and voice input capability, the device builds a shopping list from items you scan or input before disposing of them. Oh, and it runs Android. Simply place this on the counter or mount it near the trash can and add +50 productivity point to your life!

=> ↺ Android Phone Grows Up, Becomes Brain for Real Robot

• The bot they recently finished building — Truckbot — is still relatively simple. It’s got an HTC G1 phone for a brain, riding on top of a chassis with some wheels and treads. All it can do is roll around on a tabletop, turn and head off in a specified direction. When I visit the workshop where they’re building it, Heath and Hickman show how it can use the phone’s compass to make itself point to the south. But the duo have much more ambitious plans in mind.

=> ↺ Petition to improve the Android Market. Sign it today!

=> ↺ Google’s Push for Better Games

• The two-day Game Developers Conference kicks off today in San Francisco and Google will be there promoting Android. In fact, members of the Android team will be presenting a handful of sessions including development in Java and/or C++.

=> ↺ Stuck In The iPhone Mindset, AT&T Locks Down Apps On Their First Android Phone

• Our full review of the Motorola Backflip should be up in a few days, but a few words of wisdom in the mean time: Don’t buy it. Between its crazy form-factor and the hidden trackpad tucked on the back of the display, everything we took as merits at face value have devolved into novelties.

Tablets

=> ↺ Freescale’s $200 tablet will support Chromium, Android and Linux OSes

• Earlier this year at CES, Freescale revealed a $200 smartbook tablet reference design that they were shopping around to partners.

• It was a beautiful tablet for the price, powered by a 1GHz i.MX515 ARM processo. Other specs included 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 1,024 x 600 multitouch screen, between 4GB to 64GB of internal storage, a microSD expansion slot, optional 3G WWAN module, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, a USB 2.0 socket, audio in / out, 3 megapixel camera, inbuilt 3-axis accelerometer, an ambient light sensor and a 1,900mAh battery.

=> ↺ HTC Touch Pro2 Runs Ubuntu Linux

• This is probably another development that Microsoft won’t be too happy about, but it’s not like they can stop you from tinkering with your phone, right? Now, after the HTC Touch HD has been hacked to run Android, we’ve got wind of a HTC Touch Pro2 running Ubuntu Linux 8.04. Of course, the OS is really meant for laptops and desktops, but again, nobody can stop you from having some fun, right?

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Haiku OS Hopes For New 3D Stack

• Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There’s a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack.

=> ↺ For teaching touch typing, it’s clearly Klavaro

• Many years ago, Felipe Castro learned to type with the help of the proprietary Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing application. But though Castro is from Brazil, he had to use an English keyboard layout. That got him thinking. When Castro, an engineer by trade, decided to improve his programming skills, he decided to create a touch typing tutor, Klavaro, and make it keyboard- and language-independent.

=> ↺ Xen Hypervisor Monitoring with Open Source Zenoss Core

• This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature, Xen hypervisor monitoring.

=> ↺ Digium Asterisk, Open Source Unified Communications Score Partner Win

• Digium Asterisk, the open source IP PBX platform, just received a major vote of confidence from a key channel partner. Synnex Corp., a distributor that supplies more than 15,000 resellers in North America, has agreed to promote Digium’s Switchvox to channel partners. Here are the implications for the unified communications market and the emerging open source IT channel.

=> ↺ Can free software drive the fourth paradigm?

• The biggest science story to hit the mainstream media in the last year was of course the big switch on at CERN. What made it such a great story for me was not just the sheer and audacious enormity of the enterprise or the humbling nobility of the colossal experiment but the story behind the story. That story was the absolutely central role of free software philosophy at the heart of everything CERN was (and is) doing. Despite the false start, CERN’s search for the Higgs Boson has got into its stride. The same cannot be said for the car crash that is climate science, which may have inflicted terminal damage on the reputation of science. I believe the rigorous application of free software methodology in conjunction with the Fourth Paradigm may save it.

=> ↺ Run Your Own Twitter Clone: Status.net Launches Public Beta

• StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, just announced the launch of the public beta of its StatusNet Cloud Service. Thanks to this, you can now easily host your own Twitter-like community for your blog, club or company.

=> ↺ Free Software is about Freedom

• Cord Blomquist did a good post over at TLF about the USTR/open source software issue. It set off a lively debate in the comments that, I think, reflected a common misconception about what free software is and why it’s valuable.

• Before digging into that, I should be clear that I don’t generally think it’s a good idea for government software procurement decisions to be dictated from the top down. I’ve had first-hand experience with working at the bottom of large IT hierarchies, and so I know it’s incredibly annoying to have distant bureaucrats constrain the tools you’re allows to use. I wouldn’t endorse a proposal for the federal CTO to mandate that all federal agencies use free software.

• [...]

• The same point applies to software. The difference between Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t just that one was produced by humorless suits in Redmond and the other was produced by dirty hippies in Raleigh. It’s not even that one costs a lot of money and the other one is free. (Support costs will often dwarf licensing fees anyway).

• The key difference is that proprietary software comes with a lot of restrictions about how it may be used—restrictions that don’t apply to free software. Probably the most important freedom free software gives provides is the freedom to switch vendors. If a government agency chooses a proprietary software package, the agency is likely to find itself with serious lock-in problems down the road. Switching vendors will mean switching software platforms, which will involve large conversion and training costs. In contrast, if an agency chooses a free software-based solution, the lock-in problems will be less severe. The agency can easily bring in a new firm to provide support for the existing software. Or it may not need to hire outside contractors at all—the internal IT staff may be capable of fully supporting the system internally.

Psychology

=> ↺ Kindness Breeds More Kindness, Study Shows

• Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A single act can influence dozens more.

• In a game where selfishness made more sense than cooperation, acts of giving were “tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more,” wrote political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University.

=> ↺ Open source makes psychological sense

• ACCORDING TO a recent study random acts of kindness have a very positive impact on humans and regularly spread this good feeling to others.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla borrows from WebKit to build fast new JS engine

• Mozilla’s high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

Databases

=> ↺ The history of MySQL AB

• MySQL, the open source database product that puts the “M” in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

=> ↺ Open Source CouchDB Heads to the Cloud

• SQL-based relational database management systems (RDBMS) are beginning to be challenged by a new movement of NoSQL databases. Among those NoSQL databases is the open source CouchDB, which provides an alternative to the relational datastores used by RDBMS vendors — and which is banking on cloud-based deployment options to sweeten its appeal to users.

Oracle

=> ↺ Reconciling Sun’s Java investments with Oracle’s: a simple suggestion

• On the theoretical side the answer starts with a reality most people want to ignore: the java ecosystem that’s grown up around mobile phones, cards, and other smart devices is only marginally related to the java ecosystem that’s grown up around enterprise applications – and there’s no threat to mobile java here at all.

=> ↺ The Post-Oracle Sun Exodus

• So, what does this mean for Oracle? Well, obviously less than it would have meant for Sun. Whenever two large technology companies merge, you always expect some attrition… both voluntary and involuntary. That’s what makes M&A in this industry so difficult, especially when Open Source companies are involved. With an Open Source company, much or what you’re acquiring when you buy a company is the people. If those people start leaving in droves, much of the value of the company goes with it.

=> ↺ ✍ Last Day At Sun

• Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence.

=> ↺ ✍ OpenSolaris Governing Board

• I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.

Business

=> ↺ Open Source Saves the Day (and Lots of Dosh)

• It seems every day we hear about hideous cost overruns on public sector projects in the UK. What makes it even more frustrating is that open source, a real no-brainer for many applications, is rarely given the chance to prove itself here. Which means, of course, that there are no case studies to refer to, so no one gives open source a chance etc. etc.

• Against that background, a new paper by Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at the Open University, which rejoices in the deceptively-bland title of “The Re-development of a Problem System”, is pretty exciting stuff

Government

=> ↺ London Government Accused Of Open Source Inaction

• A Green Party representative has accused the London government of failing to fully exploit open source software, but activists say the Greater London Authority (GLA) is doing well… at least compared to central government.

• Despite a central government commitment to use open source, London’s local government has too many plans “in the pipeline” and not enough actually delivered, said Darren Johnson, a Green Party member of the GLA: “It is clear that nothing is likely to happen without some major push towards progress”.

• [...]

• “If the Mayor wants efficiency savings to balance the budget and avoid frontline cuts, he should be doing more to promote open source solutions,” said Johnson. “Free and open source software could reduce long-term costs significantly, and promote a spirit of co-operation and collaboration within London government.”

=> ↺ Brazil launches new version of their electronic government portal

• Technology: The Brazil Portal is developed with Plone 3.1.7 and runs on Zope Application Server 2.10.6, programmed in Python 2.4.4. “The use of free platforms is the direction of the federal government. And the choice of the tools for the construction of the Portal would not be different. So, we chose Zope/Plone,” explained Silvia Sardinha, Director of the Internet and Events for Secom.

=> ↺ SI: Complaint over government purchase of proprietary software

• Slovenia’s court of Auditors and Slovenia’s anti-corruption authority have received an anonymous complaint regarding the government’s procuring of proprietary software licences for computer operating systems and office applications, Slovenian media reported last Month.

• The complainant, using the pseudonym ‘Kranjski Tux’, is asking the government’s auditors and anti-corruption authority to investigate the ministry’s negotiations and licence agreement between the Ministry for Public Administration with Microsoft between 2002 and 2010. According to the complaint these deals are violating procurement rules, ignore basic economic principles and are hindering competition between software suppliers.

Openness

=> ↺ New Project Puts Open Source Spin on Data Center Design

• A new initiative seeks to give future data centers an open source twist by developing an open and free engineering framework for data center designers and builders. Such standardized approaches could “remove much mystery behind the work that happens in designing facilities,” according to Nokia’s Michael Manos, an adiviser on the project.

=> ↺ Five for Friday: Biggest Breakthroughs in Open Science

• As Peter Suber puts it on his blog, Open Access News, “this is big.” Why? First of all, it’s MIT, and anything that its faculty senate adopts unanimously is likely to become a de facto standard. In this case, MIT’s faculty has agreed that research articles authored by members of the faculty will be made freely available on the web, without permission or payment barriers to the reader.

=> ↺ Scottish Information Commissioner challenges public authorities to “think FOI”

• The 2009 Report, which also celebrates the first five years of FOI in Scotland, is being presented electronically for the first time through an interactive website. Additional features in the report include video commentary, interactive tables, user stories, and detailed chronologies charting the development of FOI in Scotland over its first five years. Hard copies of the report will be available by contacting the Commissioner’s office on 01334 464610.

=> ↺ Truly Open Data

• Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you’ve cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it’s a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn’t bring the same opportunities to data projects.

=> ↺ Filling the Gap: Open Clip Art Library Provides More than 26,000 Images

• Would you like some Libre content to go with those free and open source applications? One of the initial challenges that the open source community has had in supplanting proprietary solutions is not just the software itself, but the entire ecosystem that has built up around proprietary software. Case in point: While you can find top-notch free and open source tools to create artful documents, finding clip art and templates that are free is a much bigger challenge.

=> ↺ Love, hate, and the Wikipedia contributor culture problem

• I love Wikipedia, and I am not alone (a Google search for “love Wikipedia” brings back 109,000,000 entries—almost 10x the number for hate). So if you love Wikipedia too (or even if you don’t), please share some of your ideas below.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly

• Citing anti-competitive concerns, the Justice Department sued Election Systems & Software in order to force the company to divest itself of the voting machine assets it obtained from Premier Election Solutions last year.

=> ↺ Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ

• Clark Hoyt, the NYT’s public editor, has a good post-mortem on l’affaire Zachary Kouwe, and asks whether “the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked” was partly to blame for his plagiarism.

• It’s a good question, but also a dangerous one, because I fear it will help to keep blogs marginalized at the NYT and elsewhere: is there something inherent to the culture of blogging which breeds a degree of carelessness ill suited to a venerable newspaper?

Science

=> ↺ Exclusive: Colorado Doctors Skirt FDA Jurisdiction to Provide Stem Cell Therapies

• The FDA has yet to approve stem cell therapies for general use in medicine, but that hasn’t stopped doctors in Colorado from providing them anyway. Chris Centeno and John Schultz have boldly formed Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado. RSI provides its patients with the Regenexx procedure, an adult stem cell transplant that uses your own cells (autologous) to treat joint injuries and bone damage. There’s no surgery needed. A needle extracts bone marrow, RSI isolates the stem cells and cultures them in your own blood, and then these cells are injected into the area where they are needed.

Security

=> ↺ DNA policy ‘impossible to defend’ say MPs

• “The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle,” the committee says in a report published on 8 March 2010.

=> ↺ More fuel to the DNA debate

• Dnainspect Big Brother Watch has always been opposed to the retention of the DNA of innocent people on the National Database; click here to see the full list of blogposts we have written on the issue.

=> ↺ ID Card for Workers Is at Center of Immigration Plan

• Mr. Schumer said employers would be able to buy a scanner to check the IDs for as much as $800. Small employers, he said, could take their applicants to a government office to like the Department of Motor Vehicles and have their hands scanned there.

=> ↺ U.S. Adding Full-Body Bomb Scanners at 11 Airports

• The government is accelerating use of the scanners after Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on approach to Detroit Dec. 25 by igniting explosives in his underpants.

• The agency purchased 150 machines last year for $25 million from OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan unit of Hawthorne, California. They will be deployed to the 11 airports, starting today with Boston and within a week in Chicago. The devices already in place are made by New York-based L-3 Communications Holdings Inc.

=> ↺ UN Official warns against “ineffective” body scanners

• Interestingly, he also said that technologies that intrude into privacy tend to be ineffective in preventing terrorism. Finally, Scheinin said this:

• Quite.

=> ↺ Bid to scrap right of entry laws

• It may sound like a Monty Python sketch – but an ancient law allowing people on private land without a warrant if they are following a bee might still apply.

• The law, aimed at protecting honey supplies, is one of 1,208 powers of entry in dozens of different Acts of Parliament unearthed by a Tory peer.

=> ↺ Northerners give up ID cards for Lent figures suggest

• The initial rush to join the government’s ID card scheme appears to have eased, with applications from people in the Northwest running at an average of as little as 14.5 per working day.

=> ↺ Waterboarding for dummies

• Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”

=> ↺ Hundreds more town hall staff to get police-style powers

• Under CSAS, a chief constable can give employees of local authorities or private companies limited powers such as the right to hand out on-the-spot fines for offences including disorder, truancy and littering; stopping vehicles for roadside tests and confiscating alcohol.

• They have their own uniform and badge and can demand names and addresses as well as take photographs of offenders.

• There are 1,667 so-called “accredited persons” in England and Wales with 109 organisations, including 31 private companies, involved across 26 forces.

• A further 478 civilians have been given the power to stop vehicles to check for out-of-date tax discs.

=> ↺ All Dogs To Be Insured By Law

• EVERY dog owner in Britain will be forced to fork out up to £600 a year for insurance under new Labour plans to tackle so-called “devil dogs”.

=> ↺ UK slides towards relegation in electronic surveillance league

• US software company Cryptohippie have released a new piece of research (it is available to read by clicking here) addressing the extent to which states are electronically monitoring their citizens and ranking the results to produce a Premier League table of intrusive governments. The findings are typically depressing.

Environment

=> ↺ Europe outsourcing CO2 emissions to developing economies

• China is now the largest emitter of CO2 on the planet, as it powers a large industrial base primarily through the use of coal-fired power plants. However, many of those goods are immediately shipped overseas, often to the US and EU, which generate and use power far more efficiently. A new paper, which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, now takes a look at the impact of outsourcing these carbon emissions by tracking CO2 based on a product’s point of use. For some Western European economies, the result is enormous: anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of their emissions come in the form of imported goods.

=> ↺ Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point

• A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

=> ↺ BNFL memoir revives nuclear safety fears

• The autobiography of a former director of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is likely to reignite fears about the safety of nuclear power, as Britain prepares for a new generation of reactors, by exposing the panic that rocked the industry two decades ago when a link was suggested between radiation and childhood leukaemia.

=> ↺ New hope for mountain gorillas in Congo

• A recent report showed that, of the world’s 634 primate species, 48% are classified as threatened with extinction on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s “red list”.

Finance

=> ↺ More states propose Internet sales taxes

• Jeremy Bray received an e-mail message this morning with an unwelcome surprise: Amazon.com told him it had canceled its affiliate program, which provides small payments for referring customers, for everyone in the state of Colorado.

• The reason? A state law, which Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week, slaps onerous new restrictions on large out-of-state sellers like Amazon, which said it has no choice but to end its marketing program in response.

=> ↺ Europe bars Wall Street banks from government bond sales

• European countries are blocking Wall Street banks from lucrative deals to sell government debt worth hundreds of billions of euros in retaliation for their role in the credit crunch.

=> ↺ Greek workers to stage new general strike

• Greek unions have called another national strike after PM George Papandreou unveiled yet more public-spending cuts in a bid to appease EU officials and international financiers.

• After talks with visiting EU economy commissioner Olli Rehn, Mr Papandreou announced that public-sector salary bonuses at Christmas and Easter will be slashed by 30 per cent, while taxes on fuel, alcohol and cigarettes will be increased for the second time in two months. And he bumped VAT up from 19 to 21 per cent.

=> ↺ Reality TV Star Pushes Financial Reform

• Today the Funny or Die crew took the fight for financial reform to a knew level, tapping the talents of reality TV star Heidi Montag who delivers the message that “with hidden fees and standard interest rate increases, that $11,000 jaw line can end up costing $50,000 dollars!” Montag is famous for her multiple plastic surgeries featured recently on the cover of People magazine.

=> ↺ Is Wall Street bullish on America — or is a Greek tragedy opening soon?

• Now saved, they are back to their old mischief with derivatives and swaps, including in sovereign debt. This may be one reason President Obama keeps Tim Geithner and the “Government Sachs” alums close to him (as in, keep your friends close and your enemies closer) — a reason beyond wanting to convey continuity or even keep Wall Street campaign contributions.

=> ↺ Goldman Paulson Sachs

• 1. Why did Treasury and the Fed allow Lehman Bros. to collapse after they’d bailed out Fannie and Freddie and facilitated the sale of Bear Stearns?

• Paulson does not say. The line at the time was that Treasury had no legal authority to intervene, but that was the extent of the information officials gave out. Paulson tells a long story (which has its own problems) about his efforts to coax different banks into buying Lehman, and then concludes with this: “Some in the group asked if we should revisit the idea of putting public money into Lehman, but Tim said there was no authority to do that.”

=> ↺ Goldman Sachs sued by big pension fund over pay

• The International Brotherhood of Electric Workers fund filed the lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court, seeking to recover money for the company on behalf of other shareholders.

=> ↺ Goldman Sachs (GS) Sued Over Compensation Practices

• The International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, a shareholder in Goldman Sachs (GS), filed a lawsuit in Delaware which accuses the investment bank of overpaying its management and bankers. The union wants Goldman to give some of that money back to shareholders. The action also attempts to get Goldman’s management to make charitable contributions instead of them coming from the firm. Goldman views the giving as way to publicly defuse the outcry over its pay practices.

=> ↺ Dealbreaker.com editor Levin playing Goldman Sachs PR person on Twitter

• Charles Gasparino of the Fox Business Network believes that it’s Bess Levin, the snarky editor of Dealbreaker.com, who is portraying Goldman Sachs PR person Lucas Van Praag on Twitter.

• Gasparino writes, “Bess Levin of the DealBreaker blog is one of several people posting tweets under the name Lucasvpraag, including one that takes aim at Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer who attacked Goldman businesses practices, and another in which Van Praag is alerting people that he is back on his low carb diet of ‘Filet of baby seal, asparagus.’

=> ↺ Goldman Sachs PR – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

• Charlie Gasparino, FOX Business News, recently talked about the Fake Lucas van Praag Twitter page. Lucas van Praag is Goldman Sachs (GS) Global Head of Corporate Communications who has not helped improve the GS image. Yet his “Fake” Twitter page has garnered a lot of attention. The comments are funny.

=> ↺ Pranking Goldman’s Lucas Van Praag

• Goldman Sachs’ head of public relations, the sharp-tongued Lucas van Praag, has gone from deflecting negative publicity about his firm to taking barbs as the subject of a blistering Twitter parody, authored by a group of financial bloggers who are sharp-tongued snarks in their own right. The group includes Dealbreaker’s widely followed Bess Levin and Daily Intel’s Jessica Pressler.

• It’s hard to distinguish their parody tweets from the utterances of the real van Praag, which is part of the fun.

=> ↺ Goldman Sachs Group’s hour of reckoning

• For the bank to restore its public standing, the people running it must acknowledge there is something wrong with the way it does business

=> ↺ Joe Stiglitz Slaps The Invisible Hand

• As always – we request the attention of Christine Varney, and the entire anti-trust arm of the US government, in claiming that Goldman Sachs has to be dismantled forcefully (as it will not happen voluntarily) before the societal implications of Goldman’s size become a destabilizing factor and potentially lead to war: civil or otherwise. In the meantime, Goldman’s warehousing of, and trading on, “asymmetric” information will continue, and be a persistent ridicule to wooden economists, who are still stuck with 18th century concepts of reality.

=> ↺ Senate Said to Weigh $50 Billion Fund to Wind Down Failed Firms

• Senate negotiators are closing in on a deal to create a $50 billion trust fund from fees on large U.S. financial firms that likely will include Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. and be used to wind down failing institutions, said a Senate aide and two people familiar with the talks.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Nutrition experts battle industry groups over sugar

• Before you chug down another regular soda, or spoon sugar into your tea or coffee, consider this: There’s a heated debate going on over the health risks of consuming too much sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other caloric sweeteners.

• On one side: Leading nutrition experts who believe that these sweeteners, including those used in soft drinks, tea, coffee and countless other foods and beverages, add empty calories to people’s diets and promote weight gain. And they say emerging scientific research indicates that consuming too much of these sweeteners may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and other health problems.

=> ↺ High-Fructose Public Relations

• But HFCS manufacturers say their products don’t cause health problems or weight gain. To make their point, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is running a series of TV ads aimed at boosting the image of HFCS and convincing people that they are misled by marketing tactics that imply that products labeled “high-fructose corn syrup-free” are healthier than products with HFCS.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

=> ↺ Newegg Ships Fake Intel Chips; Supplier Threatens Journalists For Reporting It

• You know what’s even better than weird news? Weird news well-flavored with legal stupididy, that’s what. Our saga today starts with a shipping oddity; specifically the fact that Overclockers.com forum member Dreadrok ordered a Core i7 920 from Newegg and received a completely fake processor. It’s a good fake, too—if it weren’t for a few misspellings on the outside of the box, we’d believe it was completely legit, particularly if we didn’t take the time to scour the box looking for the telltales.

=> ↺ Vision Media’s Attempt To Silence Critic May Be Exposing More Questionable Activities

• Of course, none of this would be getting as much attention if the company wasn’t trying to silence 800Notes and its users from saying why they felt the pitches were questionable.

=> ↺ Police get Webcam pictures in school spy case

• Two IT employees at Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District have been put on administrative leave, and pictures taken from Webcams on school-issued computers have been turned over to the local police department, according to the attorney of one of the employees now on leave.

=> ↺ Pa. schools’ tech specialists on paid leave amid spying probe

• Two information-technology workers at a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly activated webcams on students’ school-issued laptops are on paid leave amid an FBI wiretap investigation.

• Lower Merion School District officials insist the move is not meant to suggest wrongdoing by the veteran employees. They have said the webcams were only activated to find missing laptops, and not for any rogue purpose.

=> ↺ CCTV in toilets – again

• In 2008, Toileta school in Plymouth was forced to remove CCTV from toilets after very significant protests from pupils and parents. In November last year, CCTV footage of children changing into sports kits in school changing rooms was seized by the police in Salford. Plainly, it was wrong to record such footage and you would think that such drastic action in these and other similar cases would be heeded by others. But, ironically given their educational mission, it seems that some schools just won’t learn.

=> ↺ Solihull school installs CCTV in children’s toilets

• I wasn’t shocked that it happened, because I have read so many stories recently about people in low level positions of authority who assume they have a ‘right to spy’ that trumps any else’s right to privacy. What shocked me was the headline itself. It didn’t say “Headmaster arrested for installing CCTV in children’s toilets”, or “Headmaster resigns after being caught installing CCTV in children’s toilets.” It didn’t even say “Headmaster apologises after installing CCTV in children’s toilets.” Instead the headline was a plain and unadorned “Chelmsley Wood school puts CCTV in pupil toilets.”

=> ↺ 100 extra CCTV cameras mean more parking fines in Westminster

• The number of motorists fined for parking offences in central London will rise from today as 100 CCTV “spy” cameras are switched on.

=> ↺ Facebook’s Beginnings Likely Shaped Its Privacy Policies

• In Nicholas Carlson’s piece, he tells the “full story” of Facebook’s beginning. He starts with the initial conversations Harvard sophomore Zuckerberg had with the trio of seniors who wanted him to code for a new Web site they wanted to start, called HarvardConnection. Then, complete with instant messages and e-mails that have not been made public until now, he outlines how Zuckerberg appears to have decided to create his own site — thefacebook.com — but not to tell the HarvardConnection founders he wasn’t working on their project until his was almost finished.

=> ↺ MEPs told to vote or else as US data row deepens

• The European Parliament has been asked to vote to approve or reject the Passenger Name Record agreement with the US.

• The Civil Liberties Committee is likely to postpone its vote until a new template has been created, to detail what information is exchanged. The Committee also wants to lay down how the information should be stored and used.

=> ↺ Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention

• Circumvention tools help Turks who want to see YouTube get around a government block. But they don’t help Americans, Chinese or Burmese see Irrawaddy if the site has been taken down by DDoS or hacking attacks. Publishers of controversial online content have begun to realize that they’re not just going to face censorship by national filtering systems – they’re going to face a variety of technical and legal attacks that seek to make their servers inaccessible.

• There’s quite a bit publishers can do to increase the resilience of their sites to DDoS attack and to make their sites more difficult to filter. To avoid blockage in Turkey, YouTube could increase the number of IP addresses that lead to the webserver and use a technique called “fast-flux DNS” to give the Turkish government more IP addresses to block. They could maintain a mailing list to alert users to unblocked IP addresses where they could access YouTube, or create a custom application which disseminates unblocked IPs to YouTube users who download the ap. These are all techniques employed by content sites that are frequently blocked in closed societies.

=> ↺ Brandeis in Italy: The Privacy Issues in the Google Video Case

• I don’t think this is really a case about ISP liability at all. It is a case about the use of a person’s image, without their consent, that generates commercial value for someone else. That is the essence of the Italian law at issue in this case. It is also how the right of privacy was first established in the United States.

• The video at the center of this case was very popular in Italy and drove lots of users to the Google Video site. This boosted advertising and support for other Google services. As a consequence, Google actually had an incentive not to respond to the many requests it received before it actually took down the video.

=> ↺ Columnist Claims Italy’s Google Verdict Makes Sense

• But the really scary thing is that Rall seems to think that basically destroying the freedom to communicate and to express yourself online makes sense, just because the tool might possibly be used to spread a false statement. Does he not recognize the unintended consequences of this? Does he not realize that his “suggestion” for fixing the internet is effectively how much of China’s internet censorship program works? Does he not think there might be more effective ways of dealing with such situations? For example, if Rall were to falsely accuse you of being a drug-addicted child pornographer, and it’s clearly bogus, then you have an opportunity to fight back, and point out that Rall is wrong, destroy his reputation, and make sure he never gets another job again. Why not let free speech combat free speech?

• Instead, Rall seems terrified of free speech, and would prefer that it only come from the “professionals” like himself.

=> ↺ Schneier: Fight for privacy or kiss it good-bye

• If the public wants online privacy it had better fight now for laws to protect it because businesses won’t and individuals don’t have the clout, security expert Bruce Schneier told RSA Conference.

=> ↺ Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad

• The world revolves around Lindsay.

• Lindsay Lohan is suing the financial company E-Trade, insisting that a boyfriend-stealing, “milkaholic” baby in its latest commercial — who happens to be named Lindsay — was modeled after her. And she wants $100 million for her pain and suffering, The Post has learned.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

=> ↺ The internet without net neutrality

=> ↺ Electronics Manufacturers Use US Legal System to Thwart Hardware ‘Hacks’

• In the United States, the First Amendment in the US Constitution protects free speech, even if the information communicated can be used to, among other things, cause harm or to commit illegal acts. These laws, for example, allowed author William Powell to write and publish “The Anarchist Cookbook,” which gave instructions about how to make bombs and to commit other acts of mayhem in the early 1970s. Communicating how to hack OEMs devices and even how to steal services is thus protected under First Amendment laws, said Fred von Lohmann, staff attorney for the EFF.

• “Under the DMCA [US Digital Millennium Copyright Act] and copyright law, users are entitled to reverse engineer and make interoperable products,” von Lohmann said. “And certainly the First Amendment applies if you’re talking about these subjects (even if you’re expressing yourself by writing and publishing software code), which is the point we made when squaring off against Apple on behalf of hobbyists who wanted to sync their iPods using software other than iTunes.”

• However, service agreements can preclude communicating how to hack devices, especially if they involve rented products, such as cable modems, said Bennett. “Most cable modem hardware is owned by network operators and leased to users. In the cases where users own their cable modems, they’re sold with a licence agreement that prohibits reverse engineering,” he said. “Reverse engineering is a predicate to distributing step-by-step hacking guides.”

=> ↺ Letter to the FT (Financial Times) – Amendment 120A Digital Economy Bill

• Endorsing a policy that would encourage the blocking of websites by UK broadband providers or other Internet companies is a very serious step for the UK to take. There are myriad legal, technical and practical issues to reconcile before this can be considered a proportionate and necessary public policy option. In some cases, these may never be reconciled. These issues have not even been considered in this case.

=> ↺ NSFW: Hey, America! Our draconian copyright law could kick your draconian copyright law’s ass

• I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.

• On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.

• [...]

• TechCrunch’s own Devin Coldewey notes that the “persistent offenders” list won’t just affect domestic file-sharers. Internet cafes, hotels and anywhere else that offers public wi-fi access could find themselves taken offline if their customers are found to be swapping copyright files. If anything, these public access points are even more at risk as it doesn’t take many teenagers using your cafe to rack up 50 copyright violations: this despite there being no way for the establishments to police what their customers are doing online. As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it, almost entirely without hyperbole, “UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes“

=> ↺ New amendment gives copyright owners a blank cheque for web censorship

• Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.

Advertising

=> ↺ Daynotes Journal [Ars Technica blocks visitors who use AdBlock Plus]

• Ars Techica opened a can of worms last Friday when without notice they started blocking visitors who were using Adblock Plus. In this followup article, they asked visitors to whitelist their site. The comment thread is approaching 1,500 entries now, and it’s running about half-and-half between those who have either whitelisted the site or paid the $50/year subscription and those who refuse to do either.

• I side with the latter group. I won’t subscribe because Ars Technica simply isn’t worth $50/year to me, or anything near that. I check the headlines every day or two and occasionally read an article. Ars is apparently paid per viewer rather than per click. Even if I were viewing their ads, I doubt they’d be making more than a buck a year from my visits and ad views, and probably nowhere near that much. So that’s my upper limit for what I’m willing to pay them for ad-free browsing. If Ars allowed readers to decide how much to pay for an annual subscription to an ad-free version of their site, I’d happily send them a buck via PayPal. But they don’t, so I won’t.

=> ↺ Don’t Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites

• Every so often we hear about a random blog or website that freaks out and claims that ad blockers are “stealing” or somehow damaging websites. But it’s quite a surprise to see a similar argument from a site like Ars Technica — one of the top techie sites out there, which is now owned by Conde Nast. Over the weekend, Ars wrote an odd post claiming that ad blocking “is devastating to the sites you love.” Ars decided to run an experiment where it blocked access to its content to any user using an ad blocker (with no warning or explanation). Not surprisingly, this pissed off a bunch of readers, and Ars now admits that it was a mistake in how it was handled — but that it still believes ad blockers are harming sites.

=> ↺ DoGood Replaces The Web’s “Evil” Ads with “Good” Ads

• DoGood has recently released their DoGooder plugin for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. DoGood’s main goal is to raise money for donations to charitable organizations and they are doing this with a simple plugin.

• The DoGooder plugin replaces generic ads on websites with “green” themed ads instead of those old generic ones. A lot of people ask whether or not the owner of the website will still get paid for the advertisement even though it’s replaced by DoGooder’s go green ads, and the answer according to DoGood is yes.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

=> ↺ Open Science vs. Intellectual Monopolies

• Well, maybe it creates a tension because intellectual monopolies are fundamentally antithetical to science and knowledge. Maybe the scientific community needs to realise this, and ought to refuse to compromise on its basic tenets of sharing knowledge for the greater good, not least because the shift from analogue to digital is magnifying their importance. Maybe the report should have been less pusillanimous in this respect.

=> ↺ Britain’s other new copyright law

• The lack of public controversy surrounding the Regulations may, in part, be because they don’t affect very many of us in a big way – unless you happen to be a media studies student that is. Mostly they offer copyright exceptions when copying film and music for academic purposes. Students get a fair-dealing exception when using sound recordings, films and broadcasts in research. Schools and colleges can record clips of film and music, and transmit them and recorded broadcasts to distance learners. Libraries and museums can make copies of films, sound recordings and artistic works for preservation purposes. Here’s a summary.

=> ↺ EU ministers want new life for IP enforcement

• European Union minsters have told EU governing bodies to revive plans to create a pan-EU law criminalising intellectual property infringement, and to make more use of a new body to cooperate on the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

• They have also asked the European Commission to create new laws if cooperation does not work.

=> ↺ How to Build a Post-Scarcity Village Using Existing Technology – Marcin Jakubowski (FSCONS 2009)

=> ↺ Marcin Jakubowski – Transformative Economics via Open Source Product Development

• We aim to create a world-class center for open product development, and popularize the open development method as a viable competitor to corporate research and development. In this presentation, we will introduce the GVCS, and its applications relevant to creating a free society. We will show initial results of economically-significant product development with the high-performance Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press as our first product release. We will discuss our goals of producing Open Source Business Models (OSBM) as a route towards distributive economics.

=> ↺ If the shoe fits, they’ll copy it

• Though Suk may think it’s clear why the fashion world needs tighter restrictions, shoppers and even some designers in Boston aren’t all quick to agree.

=> ↺ Music Biz Hopes To End Piracy By Tempting ISPs With Millions

• A new study commissioned on behalf of Universal Music reports that if ISPs got involved in the digital music market, they could make millions in the years to come. But one can’t help wondering that this is less about the music biz helping ISPs to make more profit, but more about giving them an incentive to do something about piracy.

=> ↺ Billions of photos online, Billions of privacy offenders?

• Both freedom of expression and privacy are fundamental human rights. But those rights are not both equally enforced, protected or policed. There are literally thousands of data protection bureaucrats in Europe whose job is to enforce European data protection regulations. As far as I can tell, there is not a single government official in all of Europe whose sole job is to do the same for freedom of expression. Curious, no?

=> ↺ Piracy Rises In France Despite Three Strikes Law

• In the first few months following the adoption of the three-strikes anti-piracy legislation in France, online piracy has increased significantly. Instead of stopping, file-sharers are seeking alternatives to bypass the new law. Perhaps even more striking is that new research reveals that disconnecting file-sharers will actually hurt the revenues of the music industry.

=> ↺ Music industry failing to promote legal alternatives to piracy

• Consumer Focus, the Government-backed watchdog, sees the growth of the legal online music market as the best way to tackle online copyright infringement, but it claims that the music industry is failing to promote the many legal alternatives.

• [...]

• The Government’s Digital Economy Bill, not yet law, contains measures to disconnect persistent offenders through a process of graduated warnings.

• The consumer body has also called for reform of UK’s copyright licensing system to make it easier for online music services to offer copyrighted works to consumers legally.

=> ↺ OK, Computer: File Sharing, the Music Industry, and Why We Need the Pirate Party

• The Pirate Party believes the state and big business are in the process of protecting stale and inefficient models of business for their own monetary benefit by limiting our right to share information. The Pirate Party suggests that they are achieving this goal through the amendment of intellectual property legislation. In the dawn of the digital era, the Pirate Party advocates that governments and multinational corporations are using intellectual property to: crack down on file sharing which limits the ability to share knowledge and information; increase the terms and length of copyright to raise profits; and build code into music files which limits their ability to be shared (Pirate Party, 2009). There are a number of ‘copyright industries’ that are affected by these issues, none more so than the music industry. Its relationship with file sharing is topical and makes an excellent case study to address the impact big business has had on intellectual property and the need for the Pirate Party’s legislative input. The essay will then examine the central issues raised by illegal file sharing. In particular, the future for record companies in an environment that increasingly demands flexibility, and whether the Pirate Party’s proposal is a viable solution to the music industry’s problems.

=> ↺ RIAA Takes The Cake: Equates File Sharing To Children’s Fairy Tale

• Something must be in the water over at the RIAA. After first trying to link the Chinese hack of Google to Google’s position on copyright and then ridiculously claiming that file sharers were undermining humanitarian aid in Haiti (despite neither being even close to true), now it’s resorted to using simplistic fables to try to demonize file sharing. Perhaps it’s part of the RIAA’s propaganda campaign for school children, but in a recent blog post, RIAA VP Joshua Friedlander compared the file sharing situation to the children’s fable Nobody Stole the Pie by Sonia Levitin (by the way, you would think that the RIAA, so concerned about content creators getting paid would at least provide a link to information about that book so you could buy it if you wanted to — but we’ll fix that omission for the RIAA).

=> ↺ Did Ok Go Free Itself From EMI?

• This was the same point that was made back last year by someone from Billboard in dismissing online viral sensations as being unimportant for “real” sales. But, as the band itself noted, the success of the video brought out huge crowds and made the band quite profitable to the label. This is the problem you run into when you only think about the music industry as if “album sales” are everything. Selling music directly is not a very good business model, and focusing on how many album sales there are totally misses the mark these days.

ACTA

=> ↺ Start collecting signatures on ACTA declaration!

• The written declaration 12/2010 regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is now open for signatures. It has to be signed within three months by more than half of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It is a great opportunity for the European Parliament to prove its commitment to protecting fundamental rights and freedoms. Every EU citizen concerned about ACTA and the preservation of an open Internet can participate1 by getting in touch with MEPs2 and urging them to sign the written declaration.

=> ↺ SWIFT now, ACTA next

=> ↺ European Parliament strongly opposes ACTA’s democratic deficit

• The European Parliament massively approved a common resolution1 opposing the current negotiation process regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This resolution2 is an important call for transparency and the respect of democratic processes. In the coming weeks, the Parliament will have the opportunity to go further by addressing the content of the negotiated text through the written declaration 12/20103.

• The resolution, supported by the five major political groups of the European Parliament urges the Commission to establish transparency on the ACTA by releasing negotiation documents. It strongly asserts the role of the Parliament in the EU interinstitutional framework and makes a bold statement, saying that the Parliament will not hesitate to call on the European Court of Justice to defend its co-legislator powers.

=> ↺ Joint European Parliament ACTA Transparency Resolution Tabled, Vote on Wednesday

• A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.

=> ↺ EU Politicians Get Serious Demanding ACTA Transparency And No Three Strikes

=> ↺ European Parliament Declaring War Against ACTA

=> ↺ European Parliament unites against 3 strikes, ACTA secrecy

• The European Parliament is fed up with the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today, representatives from all the major parliamentary coalitions introduced a resolution demanding that the European Commission release all negotiating texts, inform Parliament about the negotiating process, and absolutely refuse to countenance any sort of “three strikes” Internet disconnection penalty for online copyright infringement.

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [1/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [2/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [3/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [4/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [5/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [6/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [7/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [8/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [9/10]

=> ↺ Debate in the European Parliament about ACTA and transparency [10/10]

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