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● 06.14.10

● Links 14/6/2010: OSI Wants Input

Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Not using desktop Linux? You’re wasting your money

• And that’s not the only place where desktop Linux makes sense. If you get right down to it, there are many instances where the only requirements of the desktop are to act as a portal to a Web-based application and possibly run an email client. With the push toward Web-based internal apps, there’s little reason to require Windows at all. Heck, there’s almost no requirement for a desktop or the ability to run anything other than a compatible browser.

=> ↺ Microsoft sells software like its 1984

• The software store I describe is not science fiction. This is reality for Apple “App Store” for Ipad/Iphone, the “Ubuntu Software Center” for Canonical’s Linux-based desktop operating system, the Google “Android Market” for Android Linux-based phones, and Palm “PreWare” for WebOS Linux-based phones.

• Ladies and Gentelmen, the platform-delivered software store is how distributed in the 21st century. Unfortunately for Microsoft, no such thing exists for Windows.

=> ↺ NanoNote

Ballnux

=> ↺ OpenSUSE-Edu Li-f-e(Linux for Education)

• This distribution includes LAMP (LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) that is needed for developing or hosting PHP websites and all other major development tools. An award-winning Sugar desktop for children is also included in this media.

=> ↺ openSUSE Weekly News Issue 127 is out!

=> ↺ Galaxy Apollo surfaces on Samsung Mobile UK website, Orange confirms it as I5801

=> ↺ Samsung’s 7-inch ‘Galaxy Tape’ to run Android 2.2 on 1.2GHz A8 processor?

• More details about Samsung’s new tablet have emerged courtesy of Tinh te and from what it claims is a highly reliable source. This time around, the Vietnamese site is claiming that Samsung’s 7-inch Tab will be running Anroid 2.2 (Froyo) on an A8 processor clocked to a peppy 1.2GHz. It’s all powered by a 4,000mAH battery that contributes to the tablet’s 370-gram weight with 16GB of on-board storage and up to 32GB of microSD expansion.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Volume Shadow Copy For Linux?

• “I was asked to manage a number of Linux servers at work. I would like to use volume snapshots to improve my backup scripts and keep recent copies of data around for quick restore. I normally manage Windows servers and on those I would just use Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy for this. I tried Linux LVM snapshots, but most of the servers I manage run regular partitions with ext3 file systems, so LVM snapshots will not work. I found some versioning file systems out there like ext3cow and Tux3. Those look interesting, but I need something I can use on my existing ext3 file systems. I also found the R1Soft Hot Copy command-line utility, but it does not yet support my older 2.4 Linux servers. What are you using to make snapshots on Linux?”

Applications

=> ↺ 5 of the Best Free Linux Content Control Software

• Content control software, also commonly known as web filtering software, is software which is designed and optimised to determine what content can be viewed by the user. This software is particularly relevant to information supplied by a web browser.

GIMP

=> ↺ Automatic tab style and removed tab title bar

• Along with the removal of the docking bars a while back, the result is that GIMP has gotten a cleaner and more space efficient UI. There’s a lot of things that could be further improved of course, but this is what I wanted to do for 2.8. And the single-window mode. Speaking of, I haven’t had much time for that lately either, but I’m sure it’ll all be fine eventually.

=> ↺ How will a fully GEGL powered GIMP look like?

• Many of you already know that the free graph based library GEGL is still being integrated into GIMP currently. So what about some visions how GIMP could work or look like when integration is finished and new features are implemented?

Proprietary

=> ↺ [Opera] Saturday Snapshot

• It’s a rainy Saturday here in Oslo, so it’s a good opportunity to release a snapshot.

• [...]

• There’s good news for Linux users: Java should now work again!

=> ↺ Firefox vs. Opera

• When it comes to surf the Internet, most people simply does not care for the browser, for example Internet Explorer 6, which until recently remained as one of the most frequently used browser, even appearing to security breaches and slowdown evident. While Microsoft continues its dominance in the world of browsers, competitors weight as Firefox, Opera and most recently the Google Chrome occupy increasingly users.

• [...]

• While in HTML5 test, Mozilla has obtained a score higher on tests that examine the program’s compatibility with navigation in pages that use the HTML 5 (139 points against 129 of Opera, for a total of 300 possible). In addition to the 10 points do not represent any difference, the HTML 5 is still not something widespread and most sites do not work with this system.

=> ↺ Wine-Cellar – new package manager for WINE

Instructionals

=> ↺ Cortina: Yet Another Gnome Wallpaper Changer

=> ↺ Five Audio and video utilities for managing and manipulating media files.

=> ↺ binclock and a screensaver script

=> ↺ How to take Screenshots in Linux Terminal

=> ↺ Configuring port forwarding with rinetd

=> ↺ The Best Resources To Help You Learn MySQL

=> ↺ More screen coolness: The -x flag

=> ↺ GRUB – improving security of GRUB

=> ↺ How to reset your Linux Password

=> ↺ Enable RGBA support in Ubuntu

=> ↺ HOWTO: Installing Ubuntu Packages Offline

=> ↺ Install Bluetile In Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Via PPA Repository [Tiling Window Manager]

=> ↺ Problem after Upgrading GCC from 4.3.4 to 4.4.3 on Gentoo

=> ↺ [How To]: Monitor User Accounts on your system

=> ↺ Manage Your Apple Device on Your Ubuntu Desktop

• The program is open-source (and won’t cost you a dime). If you’re a Linux user who also happens to own an Apple mobile device, I highly urge you to check out libimobiledevice. Let us know how your experience goes.

=> ↺ Minimal Ubuntu Lucid Setup

• To get started get the minimal image here. Then burn the image to CD (USB method didn’t work for me). Make sure you are connected to the internet via a cable as this install will need to get some additional basic packages from the Ubuntu repository.

Games

=> ↺ The Butterfly Effect

• The Butterfly Effect is an open source physics puzzle game about cause and effect, which the developers state is not entirely unlike “The Incredible Machine“. There are 30 now fully playable levels.

=> ↺ Astromenace- A 3D space shooter game for Linux

• AstroMenace is a modern 3D scrolling space shooter with ship upgrade possibilities. You can improve your ship configuration by installing new weapons, defensive systems, power stations and much more. To improve your ship, you must earn money by destroying throngs of enemies on every level.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

=> ↺ KDE SC 4.5.0 – Beta 2 – Another Quick Look

• Obviously, the move from beta 1 to beta 2 won’t bring any new features, however, as I continue to use the KDE SC 4.5 betas, I’m continuing to discover the small improvements that aren’t obvious at first blush. Whilst there aren’t a huge number of new features in this release, 4.5 is bringing a level of polish that will serve as a solid foundation for the next steps in the evolution of the KDE desktop.

GNOME Desktop

=> ↺ Next Gedit release will have a plugin for Collaborative Editing

• We have already talked about a web-based collaborative editing tool today, Etherpad. So, after that I started looking for some native linux applications which do the same thing and came across Gobby and a new collaboration plugin for Gedit. We can talk about Gobby sometime later, I am more interested to tell you about this new plugin in Gedit .

Distributions

Reviews

=> ↺ Comparison: Best 2010 Linux desktop for begginers

• There you have it, a close comparison between these three fabulous Linux distros, resulting in very evenly matched scores. I personally love all three, each having its own character, strengths, but also weaknesses. Having said so, looking strictly for which one offers the smoothest and most intuitive experience, I would probably have to say that Linux Mint 9 is the winner in my opinion.

• Hopefully this comparison will help you make your choice based on your own needs and taste. I am pretty sure any of the choices is a sure winner.

=> ↺ Pardus 2009.2 review

• Recommendations – Pardus 2009.2 is a light-weight desktop distribution. Light-weight because it does not support disk encryption, boot-loader password protection, and LVM and RAID. If those are features you can live without, then Pardus is worth at least a try. It is just like Linux Mint, but with fewer applications in its repository.

• What I’m looking forward to in the next release is for the network interface and the graphical firewall manager to be configured out of the box. I’ll also love to see 3D desktop configuration as a step in Kaptan.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS Gnome 2010 on ACER ASPIRE 4730ZG

• My friend ask to me to install linux to his notebook. And i install it with pclinuxos 2010 my custom remastered. The notebook is Acer Aspire 4730 ZG. This is the specification of Acer Aspire 4730 ZG (look at this pic).

Fedora

=> ↺ Can Fedora be the new Ubuntu?

• Fedora Linux has found its way back into my heart. It will work alongside Ubuntu as my top two Linux distributions. We’ll see just how they place (1 or 2) with the next iteration.

• Bravo Fedora Linux. I tip my hat to you.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Meet Shotwell – The F-Spot Replacement For Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”

• Finally! The much discussed about F-Spot vs Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much needed change and F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on a other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell

• “Finally! The much discussed about F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.”

=> ↺ Shotwell – The Future of Linux Photo Management Software

=> ↺ Ubuntu Making Moves

• Word on the street is F-Spot is out and Shotwell is in for the next release of Ubuntu.

• It’s always been obvious to me that the so-called “best-of-breed” Mono apps were anything but, and it’s nice to see that Team Apologista spin isn’t getting the job done any longer.

• It’s always struck me as seventeen kinds of absurd that a simple note-taking application can justify bringing in a huge run-time framework – and the after-the-fact rationaliztion of adding more Mono apps “since we’ve already paid the price” was a PR dance worthy of Team Apologista’s Redmond Puppet Masters.

• Of course, Mono infestation is not purely an Ubuntu problem – GNOME has deep shame staining its hands in this matter as well – but because Team Apologista has targeted Ubuntu so hard, it’s significant -and encouraging – to see their efforts fail.

=> ↺ Improve Software Quality

• Today I and some hundred others on LinuxTag in Berlin attended a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, the “head dreamer” of the ubuntu Linux distribution.

=> ↺ Proposed Ubuntu 10.10 installer changes will make installation faster, friendly, intelligent

=> ↺ Cardapio menu applet gets web search and preferences

• Our favourite alternative to the main Ubuntu menu applet has received an update today which makes it easier to configure settings and also includes a new plugin to perform Google searches right from your desktop!

=> ↺ Meritocracy vs. Democracy

• The definition for ‘Informed’ is: “To supply (oneself) with knowledge of a matter or subject.” How do you do this without coming to a consensus with the community? I don’t care who makes the decisions in the end, but to be informed you must listen to the community. And to “fix” a problem you must first understand the problem and know the best solution, the users must not still have a problem, otherwise it’s not a proper solution and the “decisionmaker” was not “informed.”

• Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t make good decisions. As for Jono, the community manager job is NOT to make excuses for bad decisions, it is to represent the community (just as we in the U.S. elect each person to represent us, this is democracy, and this is how good software is developed.)

=> ↺ Mark Shuttleworth’s business concept is flawed

• Last week an old discussion flared up once again when TildeHash published “Meritocracy vs. Democracy”, a long lament for.. the position of a few buttons!

=> ↺ Ubuntu a Work in Progress

• I didn’t get to see Jono Bacon’s post Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy until today. Shame I missed it, I like reading this stuff.

• [...]

• Of course scale that up to 12 million users and you suddenly see why some people want to start having democracy or at least hierarchy. Users can’t reasonable expect to be listened to, even though their input is vital to drag Ubuntu out of the programmer paradise and into the mainstream.

Devices/Embedded

Android

=> ↺ Motorola’s 2GHz Android Phone Means Business

• Motorola’s turning up the heat on the smartphone market — and this time, it’s not only casual consumers the company’s eyeing.

=> ↺ Motorola’s Milestone XT720: Is This The Next Droid?

• Motorola’s poppin’ out Android phones Kate Gosselin-style this month. Just days after announcing its new Motorola Flipout, Moto has taken the wraps off the Milestone XT720, dubbed as “one of the most powerful phones” in the company’s current Android lineup.

=> ↺ Battleship of an Android phone sets Sprint sales record

• According to a statement from Sprint, Friday sales of the HTC EVO 4G topped the single day sales of any other phone in the company’s history — though the company didn’t give exact numbers. The previous record was held by both the Samsung Instinct and the Palm Pre.

=> ↺ Touchless Gesture Control Coming to Android Devices

• Looking to put a little more “Minority Report” in your life? Or maybe you’re just tired of smudging the screen on your Android device? eyeSight Mobile Technologies may have the answer: Touchless gesture control.

=> ↺ It’s time to make gestures at your Android smartphone

• Eyesight develops natural user interfaces for mobile phones. Its gesture technology allows Android devices to use the device’s built-in camera, advanced real-time image processing and machine vision algorithms to track the user’s hand motions and convert them into commands.

=> ↺ China, Taiwan Agree on Android, Ophone, WiMax, TD-LTE, More

• It’s official. China and Taiwan have signed an agreement to promote a number of telecommunications technologies, including Google’s Android mobile software and networking technologies for wireless cities.

=> ↺ Google’s Android may win backing from China and Taiwan

=> ↺ Mobile Payments Startup Boku Launches In-App Billing Library For Android

• Fresh off an announcement of a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, mobile payments platform Boku is taking its mobile strategy one step further by launching an in-app mobile billing library for Android.

=> ↺ The Apple-Google Mobile Battle Continues As Other Platforms Sit and Watch

• Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch may currently be the most popular mobile browsing devices in North America, but handsets using Google’s Android operating system are quickly eroding Apple’s lead. Over the past year, Android browser share on mobiles has increased 12.2 percent and is now used by one in five mobile web users in North America, according to Quantcast, a San Francisco-based web analytics firm. While browsing is down on nearly all other platforms, Apple’s drop is the steepest, down 8.1 percent in the last 12 months. But Android’s gain can really only take a bite out of Apple as everyone else is essentially sitting on the sidelines.

Sub-notebooks

=> ↺ High School XO-1.5 – a New Laptop Build for Teenage Students!

• We all know OLPC as an amazing educational tool for primary school children in the developing world. But is it appropriate for high school students? Will teenagers flock to the XO’s kid-friendly design and child-centric Sugar OS?

Free Software/Open Source

OSI and FSF Ideals

=> ↺ Your Chance To Change OSI

• When I said recently that we still need the Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a flood of comment. There’s no doubt that we need OSI – but we need a better OSI. The one we have now is just too small to be effective and too mired in past successes; a renaissance is needed. You can help.

• Yesterday and Today

• OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing problem. The founders embraced the ideals of software freedom, but saw that businesses – being non-persons – lacked any way to embrace a philosophical principle. To advance software freedom, it needed to be pragmatically “projected” onto the surface of the computer industry of 1998, creating rules that could be followed without demanding ideological “purity”. The result was a focus on a certain kind of advocacy, plus an enormously valuable effort to analyse, categorise and selectively endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the pragmatic projection of software freedom onto the computer industry of 1998.

=> ↺ Open Source? Free Software? What we need is Open Projects

• Most of these questions are well understood within the free software community itself. But we generally communicate it poorly by focusing the discussion on license technicalities. I guess this is because we’re so used to working in this open manner that we take the it as a given. But users, especially in the public administration only see the licensing side of things because that is the only aspect we talk about and have definitions for.

• A good exception for this is the Apache Software Foundation that has a well-defined set of rules that projects must follow before they can be adopted under the ASF umbrella. Maybe FSF and OSI should also publish some understandable guidelines and definitions for project openness?

=> ↺ Opinion: Binary firmware and your freedom

• I suggest that instead of these scapegoat tactics and acting as if they solve any real issue, efforts should be focused on encouraging manufacturers to publish open specifications for their chips and open the source code for their firmware, whether it lives inside the hardware or gets loaded by the kernel. And let’s commend those manufacturers that allow their binary firmware to be conveniently distributed with the Linux kernel instead of punishing them by blacklisting their devices. That could be a first step toward improved communication with hardware manufacturers, which in turn might make truly free firmware more likely in the future.

Business

=> ↺ Why there are no billion-dollar open source companies

• This is a suggestion that has come up before (Dave Neary’s post from 2008 springs to mind). As he stated: “Free software doesn’t get developed like proprietary software, why should the free software industry look like the proprietary software industry?”

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ More than 6,500 comment on coalition policies online

=> ↺ Evening Standard almost in profit after going free

• It seemed barely credible that London’s evening paper would succeed as a giveaway. But the power of old-fashioned print advertising revenue has moved it to the brink of profitability

=> ↺ How does “public service” work for media and culture in the 21st century?

• With digital technology and internet distribution, we are all producers. The outputs of our diverse cultural institutions are converging in the digital domain. Public funding policy needs to be reformed and converged to match.

=> ↺ Should the U.S. support Internet freedom through technology?

=> ↺ How Open Web Developers Are Trying to Make Social Media Better for You, the User

• Last week, a new open protocol called OExchange was released with the aim of simplifying sharing. Right out of the door, it had names like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn signed on. WebProNews spoke with Google’s Open Web advocate, Chris Messina about how the protocol could benefit businesses and site owners.

=> ↺ Abundance Obsoletes Peer Review, so Drop It

• Recently, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Cameron Neylon, probably the leading – and certainly most articulate – exponent of open science. Talking with him about peer review helped crystallise something that I have been trying to articulate: why peer review should go.

• [...]

• For me what’s particularly interesting is the fact that peer review is unnecessary for the same reason that copyright and patents are unnecessary nowadays: because the Internet liberates creativity massively and provides a means for bringing that flood to a wider audience without the need for official gatekeepers to bless and control it.

=> ↺ Free Wi-Fi is Just a Small Part of Starbucks’ Plan: Free Access to Paid Content Coming Fall 2010

• Starting July 1st, Starbucks will finally begin to offer free and unrestricted Internet access over Wi-Fi in its stores. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made this announced at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference today. With this, Starbucks finally joins the ranks of neighborhood coffee stores all over the world that have long offered free and easy access to Wi-Fi. By Fall 2010, Starbucks also plans to give Internet users in its stores free access to paid sites, including the Wall Street Journal.

Open Data

=> ↺ Launch of it.ckan.net for open data in Italy!

• The following guest post is by Stefano Costa and Federico Morando. Stefano Costa is a researcher at the University of Siena and Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Federico Morando is Managing Director & Research Fellow at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society and a member of the Working Group on EU Open Data.

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Peer review provides £209,976,000 public subsidy to commercial publishers

• The Open University’s Martin Weller looks at the Peer Review Survey 2009′s numbers on free participation by UK academics in the peer review process for commercial science journals and concludes that 10.4m hours spent on this amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions for access to the journals.

Programming

=> ↺ Python GUI Proposal

Leftovers

=> ↺ Unix in the UK: Mission critical!

• Hewlett-Packard has blades on the brain for both “industry standard” and “mission critical” servers, but IT managers in the United Kingdom seem to be more worried about the cost of their mission critical platforms, generally Unix boxes, according to a report released by Coleman Parkes Research.

=> ↺ Hey, Remember The Searchbag?

=> ↺ Mind Over Mass Media

• NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

Science

=> ↺ Arctic microbes ‘could survive on Mars’

• Canadian boffins say they have discovered a strange form of microbe living in remote Arctic springs which would, if taken to some parts of Mars, be able to survive there.

Security/Aggression

=> ↺ Face-to-face passport interviews catch only eight fraudsters

• A multi-million pound scheme to tackle passport fraud has been branded a failure after it was revealed that only eight people have been caught as a result of the project.

=> ↺ Gary McKinnon and Flat Earth News

• My interest in the Gary McKinnon extradition case was based on a sense of mismatch.

• The case as routinely portrayed in the media did not seem to relate to the case as set out in the relevant legal judgments.

• Moreover, the discussion of the case in the media rarely, if ever, referred to the case as it would appear to someone who had read the judgments.

=> ↺ U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

• The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

=> ↺ Geopolitics in the raw

• I have been wondering for a while just what we — the west in general — are doing in Afghanistan.

• Iraq was pretty obvious: oil. (Don’t listen to the mouth, watch the hands.) It wasn’t anything as crude as grabbing the oil — stealing around ten billion tons of anything is pretty much impossible — but about exerting control over the manner in which it is sold in order to maintain a competitive advantage (a choke-hold on energy supplies) over economic competitors such as Germany and China. That was the core vision of the Project for the New American Century think tank in the late 1990s, and those folks later formed the top tier of the previous administration.

=> ↺ Tequila botnet auto-destructs

• A botnet targeting Mexican surfers has been dismantled just weeks after it first appeared, apparently by the cybercrook who established it rather than by any action by the federales or ISPs.

=> ↺ ‘Shady’ porn site practices put visitors at risk

=> ↺ South African Bill to block all porn

=> ↺ Somali militants threaten World Cup TV viewers

• Somali militants have threatened football fans they will be publicly flogged – or worse – if they are caught watching the World Cup on TV.

=> ↺ Will the cloud have its own Deepwater Horizon disaster?

• A new Pew Internet survey of 900 Internet experts leads with a headline finding that will surprise few: the experts largely agree that, by 2020, we’ll all be computing in the cloud. But an even more interesting notion is buried in one corner of the report, and it’s an idea that came up in two of the three cloud interviews I did in the wake of Wired/Ars Smart Salon. This notion is that, at some point, there will be a massive data breach—a kind of cloud version of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but pouring critical data out into the open instead of oil—and that this breach will cause everyone from private industry to government regulators to rethink what cloud computing can and cannot do.

Environment

=> ↺ New Emissions Measurements Show “Green” Consumerism Failing

• The most intriguing part of his presentation was his exploration of ‘consumer emissions,’ which are not usually included in emissions reporting. His central question was, “Who’s responsible for emissions: the producers or the consumers?”

=> ↺ Big trouble for bluefin tuna

• By now it ought to be obvious to anyone – if we want bluefin tuna tomorrow we need to stop catching them today. But despite the clear scientific evidence and predictions of the bluefin’s demise – our activists faced a 2 hour confrontation at sea today when they took action to ensure fish for the future.

=> ↺ Whale heroes face jail on World Oceans Day

=> ↺ Revealed: Japan’s bribes on whaling

• A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.

=> ↺ James Cameron: US shouldn’t be relying on BP’s underwater intel

• James Cameron offered to help BP find a solution to their leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico but the company turned him down. Now the Academy Award-winning director is taking his suggestions directly to the media.

=> ↺ BP Disaster: The Gulf is not The Gulf, it is a giant grid carved up by hungry oil companies

=> ↺ Obama wants to know ‘whose ass to kick’ over oil spill

• President Barack Obama would have already fired BP CEO Tony Hayward if it were up to him.

=> ↺ Days After BP Denies Blocking The Media From Covering The Spill, Reporter Is Harrassed On A Public Beach

• Walker was eventually able to go over to the tent after an intervention from an official in the sheriff’s office, but none of the workers would talk to him, since the security official was telling them that they didn’t have to say anything.

=> ↺ BP Tries to Distance Itself From Twitter Parody

• More than 150,000 people get a few chuckles every day from @BPGlobalPR on Twitter, a satirical take on BP and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. But BP, the company behind what has been called the biggest ecological disaster in U.S. history, isn’t laughing.

=> ↺ BP targets Twitter to clean up oil spill

• BP has complained to Twitter about one of the very many parody feeds mocking its efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

=> ↺ Supercomputer oil slick sims predict greasy Atlantic

• Supercomputers are good for more than just designing nuclear weapons or making doomsday predictions about climate change. They can depress us in other ways, like showing us the extent of the damage that could be done by BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

=> ↺ Boehner: Government–i.e. Taxpayers–Should Help Pay For Oil Spill

• Congressional Democrats and the White House are toying with different ways to force BP to cover the costs of damages from the Gulf oil spill. But they face stiff opposition from industry…and it seems leading Republicans. In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up.

Finance

=> ↺ Lighting Africa: Outstanding Products and Distribution Issues

• When the World Bank and International Finance Corporation started the Lighting Africa program in 2007, it was estimated that Africans spent $17 billion (€12.5 billion) a year on lighting sources such as kerosene lamps that are inefficient, polluting and hazardous, and that 250 million people in sub-Saharan Africa had no access to power.

=> ↺ A lobbying tempest engulfs financial overhaul

• Congress’ final tinkering with Wall Street overhaul this month offers lobbyists a last-ditch shot to reshape the package on behalf of clients with billions at stake.

• Even as the legislation gets tougher on banks by the week, agents of influence are hardly strangers on Capitol Hill. Many once worked for the lawmakers they’re lobbying.

=> ↺ Key FinReg Components Under Threat

• Mike Konczal (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the America’s Future Now conference) has written a report outlining his dream scenario for the Wall Street reform conference committee, coming up with the best of both the House and Senate bills. He has four topic headings:

• Making Resolution Authority Credible Getting Our Banks Capitalized Bringing Derivatives Into the Sunlight Audit the Fed

=> ↺ US banks set to lose swaps desks

• Banks are likely to lose a key lobbying battle in the US over whether they will be forced to spin off their lucrative swaps desks, according to people familiar with financial reform negotiations in Congress.

=> ↺ Don’t Forget The Kanjorski Amendment

• A great deal of discretion would remain with the regulators, and of course this is a potential danger. But the heightened public awareness of the idea that “bailouts are bad” at least increases the chances that management and directors would be replaced in a failing megabank. Whether creditors would face any losses remains a more open question – but at least the Kanjorski amendment, if applied properly, would put that possibility firmly on the table.

• Brown-Kaufman was turned back on the Senate floor, but the Kanjorski amendment is an integral part of the financial reform bill that passed the House. And Congressman Paul Kanjorski is a formidable member of the House conference delegation.

=> ↺ Dealmakers or dealbreakers face financial overhaul

• They are the sticking points that would gum up the Wall Street overhaul.

• From big banks’ exotic trades to the plastic in people’s wallets, it only take a few of the most contentious issues to upend a careful political equilibrium as lawmakers try to blend House and Senate bills into a single rewrite of banking regulations.

=> ↺ Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall Street

• For the financial crisis, it has become clear that many chief executives and corporate directors were not aware of the risks taken by their trading desks and partners. Recent accusations against Goldman Sachs suggest the potential for conflicts of interest among banks, investors, hedge funds and rating agencies. And it is clear that regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency staffed primarily with lawyers, are not well positioned to monitor the arcane trading strategies that helped produce the crisis.

=> ↺ Goldman’s Stonewall Is Bad Business

• Goldman Sachs (GS) has always had a reputation for being above the fray, aloof from the concerns of mere mortals. This reputation has served the bank splendidly as it fends off the pleas, hearings, and subpoenas of federal regulators. To the experienced (or simply jaded), it appeared that the 141-year-old Wall Street stalwart is just, well, being Goldman.

=> ↺ BP’s Mess, and Wall Street’s

• Just because you can do something, does that mean you should? It’s a question that might have saved us a lot of pain in recent months if both Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum had asked it of themselves during the last decade.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

=> ↺ Wikileaks/Manning: “Are America’s foreign policy secrets about to go online?”

• Following up on an earlier post about the uncloaking and arrest of Army Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is believed to have leaked the “Collateral Murder” video to Wikileaks, Philip Shenon reports in the Daily Beast about anxiety over more sensitive material Manning may have downloaded and stored. At issue are some 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks that, by some reports, he has admitted to have accessed and was planning to make public.

=> ↺ Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag website

• American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.

=> ↺ Video: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg at Personal Democracy Forum

=> ↺ Wikileaks site unfazed by arrest of US army ‘source’

=> ↺ Wikileaks’ US army ‘leaker’ arrested

• Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, has reportedly been held in Kuwait for almost two weeks on suspicion of leaking a video of a helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that killed civilians.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

=> ↺ Freeview Allowed To Use DRM To Curtail Online Piracy

• Ofcom is allowing the BBC to operate its Freeview HD multiplex in such a way that only TV receivers and set-top boxes with built-in digital rights management (DRM) can see programmes’ electronic programme guide (EPG) data.

=> ↺ Shame on Ofcom, Double Shame on the BBC

• Rather interestingly, this “consultation” closed almost as soon as it opened: it was hard to resist the impression that it was being railroaded through. Fortunately, due in part to the prompt actions of Computerworld UK readers in submitting critical responses, Ofcom was forced to extend the consultation period, and then carry out a completely new consultation.

• [..]

• If the decision is not overturned (which seems unlikely), it will give the content industry control over what people can do with the content they watch on the BBC. Shame on Oftel – and double shame on the BBC for betraying in this way the audience that has faithfully funded it for all these years.

=> ↺ Ofcom agrees to allow the BBC to hobble HD receivers

• Ofcom have today dealt a serious blow to UK consumers and licence-payers by allowing the BBC to impose DRM for HD broadcasts.

=> ↺ Finland mulls legalizing use of unsecured Wi-Fi

• When it comes to the unauthorized use of open Wi-Fi networks, the Finnish government may say: If you can’t beat them, join them.

Copyrights

=> ↺ The Economics of Copyright

• One of the problems with the debate around copyright is that it is often fuelled more by feelings than facts. What is sorely lacking is a hard-nosed look at key areas like the economics of copyright. Enter “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” [.pdf].

• As you can tell from the rather tentative title, this is just a first step, but it is an important one, and the UK’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP) is to be congratulated on commissioning it. This is exactly the kind of thing that it should be doing – not simply taking political positions, but establishing the basis for rational debate before then moving on to the framing of appropriate legislation.

=> ↺ Music industry lobbyist calls for death penalty for piracy

• Here’s Fran Nevrkla, Chairman and CEO of Phonographic Performance Ltd, a UK music industry association, addressing the group’s AGM.

=> ↺ New District law group tackles movie file sharing

• The US Copyright Group, a District-based venture backed by attorneys from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, has sued in federal court at least 14,000 John Doe plaintiffs who allegedly downloaded independent movies from the peer-to-peer file-sharing site BitTorrent. The scope of the litigation, which if successful could generate upward of $20 million even if settled out of court, is expected to expand as action is taken on behalf of more film producers against additional groups of defendants.

=> ↺ The World’s 5 Largest Public BitTorrent Trackers

• In the fall of last year The Pirate Bay took its tracker offline. Luckily, for the stability of the BitTorrent ecosystem several new trackers emerged to take its place. Time for us to provide an overview of the largest public BitTorrent trackers currently around.

=> ↺ RIAA wants LimeWire shut down over ‘rampant illegal conduct’

=> ↺ Video explains Canada’s DMCA

=> ↺ What Happened to my Creative Commons License?

• I don’t blame Google so much as I blame the Neanderthal book publishers who are breathing down Google’s neck. Or perhaps it’s Google’s wallet. Google will probably get to this kind of fine tuning eventually, but at the moment they are dealing with folks insisting on locking books up for fear non-payers will read them. But if you have a paper copy of the book, or go to the copyright page online, you’ll see that the book’s copyrighted by the editors, but it says right on the same page that the individual essays are licensed under a Creative Commons license, Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs 2.5. That means that everyone in the world is free to read my essay, for starters. It also means they are free in a noncommercial context to copy and redistribute it with attribution, as long as they reproduce it accurately and without changing anything or adding anything. That is my intent. But ironically, I can’t even reproduce it for you here unless I want to type it all out by hand, because it won’t let me even see all the pages, let alone copy them. I’m mentioning it because it’s my hope that Google Books, and other such services, will make a note and tell the computers to look for Creative Commons licenses, and loosen up.

• [...]

• I don’t think the process would work as well for a less, shall we say, inspiring case. Volunteers responded because they seriously cared about the outcome, not because they found learning to do legal research fascinating. I have gotten a lot of email about enjoying the learning, actually, but I also know that SCO was an inspiration. For some, watching an attack on Linux is like watching someone kick Dorothy’s dog, Toto: people get mad and want to do something about it. You don’t get the same response in all cases or by paying people. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay me for the amount of work I donated to Groklaw, the nights without sleep, the anxiety, or the jerks I had to deal with sometimes, if I may speak plainly.

=> ↺ Accused of file-sharing? The EFF can point you to help

• If you’re one of the 14,000+ US citizens targeted by the US Copyright Group for allegedly sharing movies with BitTorrent, a letter has already arrived or will do so shortly. That letter will contain a polite request: pay us around $1,500 within the next few weeks or run of the risk of a federal copyright lawsuit, where lawyers will demand the maximum $150,000 penalty.

=> ↺ Film Director: File Sharing Only Hurts Bad Or Mediocre Films

• TorrentFreak asked independent film director Sam Bozzo to comment on his experiences having his two most recent films leaked to BitTorrent. The stories in both cases were different. The first film, Blue Gold: World Water Wars was released normally, and then leaked online. The second, his documentary Hackers Wanted was shelved after internal disputes — but has now leaked to BitTorrent. Originally it was an old cut that was leaked, but now Bozzo’s “directors’ cut” has been leaked, and Bozzo seems fine with it. In fact, he claims that if you make a good film, having it leaked to BitTorrent can only help. It’s only bad if your film isn’t very good:

ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

=> ↺ WD12 on ACTA: 150 signatures to go, time to call!

• Only two weeks of plenary in Strasbourg are left for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to have a chance to sign Written Declaration 12 (WD12) on ACTA. 150 signatures are still missing, mostly from Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland. Every EU citizen is encouraged to call Strasbourg offices of non-signatories MEPs until thursday, 12:00, to urge them to sign WD12.

=> ↺ Eastern Europe – land of digital freedom?

• Now, the Baltic sea neighbors Finland and Estonia have declared Internet access to be a legal right. So I’ve been wondering… What are the chances of Southeast European countries, for once, not being late to the show but actually leading the race? What do I mean by that? First of all, Croatia and its neighbours would be wise to take advantage of the situation. While the UK, for example, is being mired down with a disastrous “Digital Economy Act”, perhaps our country and maybe even our neighbors could go the other way.

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