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● 11.30.10

● Links 30/11/2010: Zeitgeist in KDE, New Gnome Shell Coverage, RHEL 6.0 Benchmarks

Posted in News Roundup at 12:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ A history of viruses on Linux

• We recently gave you a brief history of viruses on the Mac and as requested by a user we wanted to give you a history of viruses on Linux. Given the tight security integrated into Linux, it is difficult to take advantage of a vulnerability on the computer, but some programmers have found ways around the security measures. There are several free options for anti-virus on Linux that you really should use, even if it isn’t always running – a weekly or monthly scan doesn’t hurt. Free anti-virus solutions include: ClamAV, AVG, Avast and F-Prot.

Desktop

=> ↺ The good and bad news about Dell and Ubuntu

• In short, from a Windows user’s viewpoint, Ubuntu Light is a feature. I find it really annoying that Dell isn’t just not advertising Ubuntu Light; they’re not even telling their internal staff about it. My friend knew on seeing the Ubuntu Light setup windows appear knew what Ubuntu was and she had some idea what it would be good for. Most users would find it puzzling at best.

Applications

=> ↺ Best Media Players for Ubuntu Linux

• For all Ubuntu lovers, I have gathered a list of best media players for Ubuntu and how you can install them.

=> ↺ 16 Music Players for Linux

• Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users – XMMS has to be mentioned here – well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user’s taste. Without further ado, here are no less than 16 graphical music players for Linux.

=> ↺ Faenza Cairo-Clock theme

• Faenza fans – adds even more squares to your desktop with this Faenza theme for Cario-Clock, which is based on the actual Faenza clock icon.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Google Releases A Free, Interactive Book On Browsers and The Web

=> ↺ Send and streamming video to web

=> ↺ Fix HDA Intel (Realtek ALC887) No Sound Issue In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

=> ↺ System-wide Performance Profiler for Linux – Sysprof

=> ↺ My desktop backup solution

=> ↺ 20 essential virtualization tips & techniques

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure Monit on Linux for Process Monitoring

=> ↺ Check the version of numpy

=> ↺ Fix HDA Intel (Realtek ALC887) No Sound Issue In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

=> ↺ Manage CD and DVD images in Ubuntu using AcetoneISO

=> ↺ Five tips for a smooth migration to Ubuntu’s Unity desktop

=> ↺ Tip of the day: Don’t remember Git clone URLs

=> ↺ Export Variables in Bash

=> ↺ Suspend to RAM slackware or Arch Linux

=> ↺ Add a quick-access shortcuts to the GNOME right-click menu

=> ↺ Speed up your Centos box by using the pdnsd caching name server

=> ↺ How to logout, stop or kill a user session

=> ↺ Best Networking Tweaks for Linux

=> ↺ Spice up your desktop with Gnome Colors

=> ↺ In house audio streaming (Android and Linux)

• Lots of users have gigabytes of music in their personal computer, but every time when we want to listen to music on our portable device, we need to copy selectively some songs to the device and then listen. You can listen to all the songs from your PC itself. But what if your girl friend wants to watch videos and you have only one computer in your house? Now stop fighting, leave the computer with you girl friend and start your music stream to connect from your Android or any mobile with streaming audio playback support.

Games

=> ↺ Five awesome native Ubuntu First Person Shooters you may not know about

• There’s nothing like shooting up some bad guys, be they zombies, terrorists or aliens, everyone loves a good FPS.

• Luckily for you, and thanks in part to the open-sourcing of a number of Quake engines, there happen to be a few high quality First Person Shooters available in Ubuntu’s Software Center – and they’re all native and completely free of charge.

=> ↺ Tycoon Games Super Bundle !

• What’s in it? Well, there are the two Heileen games (two visual novels with over 80k words combined), Summer Session (a very fun and replayable dating sim) and Bionic Heart (a fully voiced dark-sexy-creepy sci-fi visual novel with 24 different endings). So as you can see, there’s a game for every taste! Every game has a native GNU/Linux client.

=> ↺ Indie side-scrolling shooter BEEP hitting Ubuntu shores soon (with video)

• Independent Games Festival participant BEEP by indie developers Big Fat Alien is on track to be released for Linux in the next couple of months.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

=> ↺ Zeitgeist coming to KDE

• The KDE desktop has taken the lead to bring the semantic desktop to users with their KDE 4.0 release. Although it had a rough start back then, IMHO Nepomuk always stood out as a major and remarkable service/technology.

=> ↺ GNOME’s Zeitgeist Is Coming To The KDE Desktop

=> ↺ Zeitgeist coming to KDE

• The KDE desktop has taken the lead to bring the semantic desktop to users with their KDE 4.0 release. Although it had a rough start back then, IMHO Nepomuk always stood out as a major and remarkable service/technology.

=> ↺ How a “Welded-to KDE 3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE 4.4 – Part 2

• In this second part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. In this installment he configures media players, K3b, Crossover Office, Lucid and Post Script and his final thoughts on his adventures.

=> ↺ Last Week in Amarok

• Similar artists applet now shows artist tags from Last.fm, and the full artist biography is shown when the artist image is clicked. It’s very nice to be able to listen to a stream from Last.fm, go to the Artist’s page in Last.fm, or even check out similar artists to any that sound interesting! A great way to Explore Your Music.

GNOME Desktop

=> ↺ The new look Gnome-Shell ‘Relayout’ branch lands

• Just a quicks heads up to those following the development of GNOME-Shell – Florian Müllner has just announced that the new-look relayout branch – which we cooed over lovingly several weeks back – has landed in the GNOME-Shell Master branch.

=> ↺ Gnome Shell Overview-Relayout Branch, Merged Into The Master Branch [Screenshots]

• The Gnome Shell overview relayout has been merged into the master branch. That means it is now officially part of Gnome Shell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include any elements from the Tiled View mockups we’ve seen a few days ago but it’s probably too soon for that.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ Computer Janitor for Mandriva

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Benchmarks

• There’s been a number of individuals and organizations asking us about benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, which was released earlier this month and we had benchmarked beta versions of RHEL6 in past months. For those interested in benchmarks of Red Hat’s flagship Linux operating system, here are some of our initial benchmarks comparing the official release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian.

=> ↺ Red Hat to Present Technology Announcement via Webcast on November 30

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that members of the Red Hat executive team will host a press conference that will be broadcast live via webcast on Tuesday, November 30 at 11am ET.

=> ↺ Red Hat Closing in to Resistance

• New York, November 29th (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $43.68 with the current price action closing at just $43.32 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora board election results

• I’m happy to announce the results of our recent round of elections for at-large seats on the Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAmSCo.

Debian Family

=> ↺ How to find the right Debian packages: high-level search interface

• The Debian archive is known to be one of the largest software collections available in the free software world. With more than 16,000 source packages and 30,000 binary packages, users sometimes have trouble finding packages that are relevant to them.

=> ↺ An Invitation to Debian Novice Night – December 1, 2010

• It may be short notice, but if you are new to Linux, interested in Debian and live or work in the New York metro-area, check out Novice Night. It’s coming up this Wednesday. Info below is from Debian-NYC.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu 11.04: Network Manager Finally Gets AppIndicator Support

• Even though there was already work for getting ConnMan in Ubuntu (since 10.10), an update today in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal brings appindicator support for the Network Manager applet (you can see the changelog here). This is very important since Ubuntu will ditch the notification area soon, therefore the connection manager has to use an indicator applet.

=> ↺ Unity – What is it good for? An in-depth review.

• Unity could work, if it meets several important requirements: beauty and functionality.

=> ↺ Unity in Natty Evaluation 1

• Today I am finally finding Natty to be usably stable. So long as I stay away from Open Office, it seems to be running quite fine. So, I updated my maverick spider diagram in an attempt to capture where I think Unity is in the journey to being the Ubuntu desktop.

• In this first natty diagram, yellow is the target, blue is maverick, and that orangy color is my subjective assessment of Unity as it is today. You can review the criteria that I chose from assessment in a previous post.

=> ↺ Natty: Off To a Great Start!

• A little while back I blogged about the work planned for Natty in the community team. I just wanted to provide a quick status update to summarize progress so far in the cycle.

=> ↺ Testing Natty and Unity Safely With a USB Stick

• There is quite the buzz in the community about the new Compiz-driven Unity, and I know many of you are keen to play with it. Of course, do remember that it is incredibly early in the cycle and more things are likely to be broken than fixed as the transition is made. Some of you will be bummed out with the announcement that there will be no Maverick PPA for Unity, but fortunately, it is really easy to try Natty and Unity in a way that won’t involve sacrificing your current stable installation, or even touching your hard drive. You simply install and boot from a USB stick, and I wanted to share how to get this running.

=> ↺ LXC: Ubuntu Working to Improve Containers

• I’m not familiar enough with Ubuntu Development to know just how far this might go but at the very least it appears that some Ubuntu developers have identified as a goal to make LXC usable for production stuff and to put it on par with KVM.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Kubuntu 10.10 Review

• A few years back, Ubuntu was my first taste of Linux. As I spent more time using it, I found there were other “flavors” available (namely Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) Sharing many things with its big GNOME brother, it felt natural for me to get my first cup of KDE through Kubuntu.

• Unfortunately, back then KDE was going through some major changes (KDE 4.0), which added to the questionable stability of Kubuntu itself made the whole experience frustrating and disappointing. Initially, I thought it could be down to my lack of understanding of KDE, or perhaps that I didn’t install Kubuntu correctly. After reading many forum posts, though, I quickly realized that most people agreed that Kubuntu was not a good implementation of the KDE desktop. The average reply was recommending other alternatives, such as OpenSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, etc.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

=> ↺ The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand

• Case Android: Nokia takes up Android.

• Case MeeGo: Nokia implements MeeGo across its whole product line.

• Case Windows: The Microsoft alumnus now running the company brings in Windows Phone 7.

Sub-notebooks

=> ↺ No silver lining in Chrome OS delays

• Schmidt reiterated at the Web 2.0 conference in November that Android is optimized for devices where touch-screen input rules, while Chrome OS is meant more for devices with traditional keyboards. The last time Google provided a significant update about Chrome OS, Sundar Pichai, the leader of the Chrome OS project, said Google was drawing up specific Netbook hardware requirements for partners that were likely to involve larger screens and keyboards than the industry standard Netbook.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ What’s wrong with proprietary IM (ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN/WLM)

• To conclude, I’d suggest either joining a trusted XMPP server or better yet run your own server. Personally I’m very happy with Gabbler since they promise not to log any data about you and would recommend them (sadly they don’t accept new accounts at the moment). There are quite a few XMPP servers though that provide a smilarly sane privacy policy out there.

=> ↺ Migrations From MATLAB to GNU Octave

• If you are interested in converting fellow staff and their students to Octave, remember that it suits an educational environment much better as it encourages sharing and collaborating, not asking for permissions, paying heavy fees/fines, and begging developers to fix bugs rather than have access to the source code, which in turn enables participation. Additionally, most of the basic functions are truly compatible with MATLAB’s and the lack of JIT optimisation, for example, should not matter much in an educational setting. Not many people create MATLAB GUIs either, so there is hardly a need for such advanced functionality. At a later date I hope to make some screencasts about Octave.

=> ↺ Open source software more suitable for Oxford

• Open source software is more attractive and better suited to traditional education needs, the IT head of Oxford University has said.

=> ↺ Five reasons to be grumpy about 2010

• Last week, at least for those of us in the United States, was time to give thanks. And while I have plenty to give thanks about personally, I can’t say the same thing when it comes to FOSS developments. Looking back on 2010, it’s been kind of a crappy year.

=> ↺ An Environment to Test Linux and OpenOffice? What about an Academic Dissertation?

• The members of the tribunal were very satisfied…I ended my degree in Education successfully thanks to Open Source. THANK YOU, LINUX; THANK YOU, OPEN OFFICE!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Apple, Microsoft and Google attacked for “evil” plugins

• A leading Mozilla executive has attacked Google, Apple and Microsoft for installing browser plugins without permission.

=> ↺ Mozilla is Designing a New Programming Language Language Called Rust

• Mozilla is designing a new multi-paradigm programming language called Rust. According to the Rust Project FAQ, the Rust team’s goal is “To design and implement a safe, concurrent, practical, static systems language.”

=> ↺ Crowdsourcing Project: Conceptualising a platform for the Community Concepts channel

Oracle

=> ↺ New: OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 7 (build OOO330m17) available

• OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 7 is now available on the download website. Unfortunately, not all Windows builds are complete yet as the remaining still needs to be signed. Please be patient.

=> ↺ Time to Move On

• I joined Sun over 20 years ago; since then I’ve worked on many projects, enjoyed Sun’s culture and had a blast during the GlassFish years. The interregnum between the IBM rumor, the Oracle announcement and the Change in Control was way too long, but by February we started integrating the team and the products into Oracle.

=> ↺ Moving Java forward through the JCP?

• Mark Reinhold recently pointed out that he, Joe Darcy and Brian Goetz had submitted their OpenJDK work on features for JDK7 and JDK8 to the JCP for standardization. Normally I am somewhat sceptical about the JCP. I don’t believe the JCP fosters a truly open process and discourages Free Software implementations. But Mark, Joe and Brian seem to be proving me wrong. Of course that shouldn’t have surprised me, since they have shown themselves to do everything in the open and actively involve the community in all their OpenJDK work. All their code has been published under the GPL for everyone’s free use.

=> ↺ Oracle erects mystery Sparc SuperCluster

• It looks like Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison is getting ready to whip out his hardware again and measure it up against wares from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

• While the United States was getting ready to stuff tens of millions of turkeys last week, Oracle put out a teaser saying that on December 2 it would announce the details of a “New Sparc Solaris Sunrise SuperCluster,” which will sport “world record database performance.”

CMS

=> ↺ WordPress welcomes Microsoft refugees!

• Of course WordPress gets new users out of this agreement and the blogging service which I think is the definitive choice for blogging on the net will expand with the mass migration of the refugees from Microsoft.

Project Releases

=> ↺ A New Clutter Development Release

• A month ago we reported on a Clutter 1.5 development release bringing a back-end for Wayland so that this tool-kit can run atop this lightweight display server, among other features it brought. In the past month there’s been the Clutter 1.5.6 development release too and just this morning Clutter 1.5.8 was released.

=> ↺ CLI Companion Reaches Version 1.0 RC2

=> ↺ Python 2.7.1 and Python 3.1.3

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Manufacturing Contempt through the Commoditization of Practically Everything

=> ↺ Summary theses on the emergence of the peer to peer civilization and a new political economy

• 1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization:

• a) it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources

• b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc…

Open Data

=> ↺ Open Bibliographic Data: How Should the Ecosystem Work?

• The following guest post is from John Wilkin who is Executive Director of the HathiTrust, a Librarian at the University of Michigan and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data.

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Almost 60% of Wellcome-funded papers in PMC are fully open access

• The Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy has always made it clear that it considers dissemination costs as legitimate research costs and as such provides grantholders with additional funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges.

• In view of this I thought it would be interesting to see how many papers, attributed to the Wellcome Trust and available through PMC and UKPMC, were “fully” open access papers, in accordance with the Bethesda Principles.

Programming

=> ↺ Migrating to Distributed Version Control

• A few weeks ago I migrated two major projects to distributed version control systems (DVCS), leaving only one project in Subversion, the one hosted on Savannah. As you can read in my prior posts, I have resisted switching over to DVCS. However, recently I’ve understood the benefits propounded by DVCS adherents, and I’ve found that it has more features than most tutorials let on.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Complaining about information overload in the time of Ecclesiastes

=> ↺ Xinhua, NBC forge business partnership in TV news service

• Xinhua News Agency and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) here Tuesday to establish a multi-level business partnership in the area of international TV news service.

=> ↺ 490 – Map of the World’s Countries Rearranged by Population

• What if the world were rearranged so that the inhabitants of the country with the largest population would move to the country with the largest area? And the second-largest population would migrate to the second-largest country, and so on?

=> ↺ Picasso’s Electrician Claims to Own Hundreds of Works

Science

=> ↺ Spanish woman claims ownership of the Sun

• After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner — a woman from Spain’s soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property.

=> ↺ The mismeasurement of science

• Albert Einstein’s greatest scientific “blunder” (his word) came as a sequel to his greatest scientific achievement. That achievement was his theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, which he introduced in 1915. Two years later, in 1917, Einstein ran into a problem while trying to apply general relativity to the Universe as a whole. At the time, Einstein believed that on large scales the Universe is static and unchanging. But he realized that general relativity predicts that such a Universe can’t exist: it would spontaneously collapse in on itself. To solve this problem, Einstein modified the equations of general relativity, adding an extra term involving what is called the “cosmological constant”, which, roughly speaking, is a type of pressure which keeps a static Universe from collapsing.

=> ↺ CERN … fascinating insight into scientific collaboration

• The end of a busy week. I promised to write about CERN, so here we go (there is a full set of photos of the visit here). CERN is a unique organisation, a truly global corporation where people from all over the world work together on nuclear research. Often they are working together virtually, but often also “on-campus” so to say near the French border outside Geneva. Having seen it now I fully understand why people strive to go there, if only for a few weeks of summer school. It is obviously a defining experience.

=> ↺ RNA, obey

• Scientists are one step closer to learning how to program cells the way other people program computers.

• Researchers led by Christina Smolke, a biochemical engineer at Stanford University, report the accomplishment in the Nov. 26 Science.

• Smolke and her colleagues created RNA devices that could rewire cells to sense certain conditions and respond by making particular proteins. Such technology might be harnessed for creating cell-based therapies and cancer-fighting treatments. Someday, scientists might also be able to flip an RNA switch to make plants more tolerant to drought or coax yeast to produce industrial chemicals.

=> ↺ science@creativecommons T-shirts now available in the CC store!

• November has been an exciting month for science at Creative Commons. Earlier this month we hosted a Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco on the promises and pitfalls of personalized medicine, which you can now watch online. We met a matching giving challenge by Hindawi, the open access scholarly journal publisher (disciplines from neuroscience to pharmacology), who doubled $3000 in donations to our annual fundraising campaign. We also saw BioMed Central, the world’s largest OA publisher, provide in-kind support for our fundraising campaign.

=> ↺ NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2

• NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

=> ↺ Ray Kurzweil’s Slippery Futurism

• His stunning prophecies have earned him a reputation as a tech visionary, but many of them don’t look so good on close inspection

Security

=> ↺ Debian Security Advisory

=> ↺ The cost of wifi and wifi security

=> ↺ Security advisories for Monday

Defence/Police/Aggression

=> ↺ WikiLeaks: the revolution has begun – and it will be digitised

• Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.

• Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.

=> ↺ Trial to begin December 7th in TSA checkpoint case

• We’re reported before on the arrest of Phillip Mocek just over a year ago at a TSA checkpoint at the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his prosecution by local authorities on trumped-up criminal charges.

• Now, after several postponements, Phil Mocek’s trial is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Tuesday morning, December 7th, 2010, in Albuquerque. The trial is expected to last 2-3 days. There’s more information here.

• (The trial has been postponed several times, and might be postponed again, but this date appears to be for real, and Mr. Mocek is making firm travel plans — by land, not by air — to be in Albuquerque.)

=> ↺ Robert Redford, the Newsmedia and the WikiLeaks’ Cablegate

• WikiLeaks was gifted with a heap of really important information. In order to ensure dissemination, they passed them around to five major news outlets located in 5 different countries. Each were aware the others had the story, so they ALL had no CHOICE but to publish, with or without corporate or government approval.

• In this way, WikiLeaks guaranteed that the story broke and spread.

• UK: The Guardian US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis

• SPAIN: El Pais The greater infiltration of history reveals the secrets of American foreign policy (Google translation to English)

• USA: New York Times: Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels

• FRANCE: LeMonde WikiLeaks: Behind the Scenes of American diplomacy (Google translation to English)

• der Spiegel: Greatest Data Leak in US Military History

=> ↺ US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

• Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation’s secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing’s snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.

=> ↺ China directs local media outlets to stop reporting WikiLeaks content China stops WikiLeaks reporting

• While the world’s media are afire with yesterday’s WikiLeaks data release of secret US diplomatic cables, the local media in China are strangely quiet.

• The reason, according to a Twitter update by Al Jazeera English’s correspondent in China, Melissa Chan a short while ago, is that China’s Propaganda Department have directed all domestic media outlets to stop reporting the WikiLeaks content.

=> ↺ Can Wikileaks be stopped?

• The entire world seems to be looking at Wikileaks after the release of some of the almost 250,000 diplomatic wires from U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. Endless lines will be written about this, my own view is close to what Simon Jenkins writes in his commentary piece in The Guardian, the media has the right to embarrass the powerful.

=> ↺ Why I Will Not Analyze The New WikiLeaks Data

• The latest leak typifies the identity and culture of WikiLeaks and by continuing to analyze new disclosures I am tacitly supporting this, which is something I will not do. WikiLeaks’ motivation is that of a court jester, to mock and ridicule the contradictions of a state. However, they present themselves as a sage with the wisdom to adjudicate the public relevance of all information, which is the greatest contradiction of all.

• To be clear, this is an entirely personal decision, and is not meant to discourage others from endeavoring to glean insight from this new data. The substantive value of the day-to-day machinations of diplomats, however, is dubious at best—even at aggregate.

• Openness of information can lead to great things, not the least of which is the democratization of knowledge in ways never before possible. Shoving private messages into the public sphere without any context or care for the consequences can lead to misunderstanding, fear, and aggression. Unfortunately, WikiLeaks appears to be in the business of promoting the latter.

=> ↺ Oregon mosque attended by bomb plot suspect target of apparent arson

• The FBI announced a $10,000 reward Sunday for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for an apparent attack on an Oregon Islamic center that was attended by the man authorities say was behind a foiled bomb plot at a recent Portland Christmas tree lighting.

• A fire appears to have started sometime early Sunday morning at the Salman AlFarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, authorities said. The building suffered some fire and smoke damage.

• Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was seized in connection with the plan to detonate what he thought was an explosives-laden van at a Portland tree-lighting ceremony Friday night, occasionally attended the center, the mosque’s imam told CNN.

• The blaze – discovered by a police officer who was driving by – was likely set intentionally, said Carla Pusateri, a fire prevention officer with the Corvallis Fire Department.

=> ↺ Congressman wants WikiLeaks listed as terrorist group

• The incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization.

• Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel’s presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to “determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization,” putting the group in the same company as al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

=> ↺ Wikileaks removed from ACMA blacklist

• No parts of whistleblower website Wikileaks are now on the Australian blacklist of banned websites, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

• In March 2009 the ACMA revealed that a number of pages on Wikileaks were put on the blacklist of banned websites because the pages linked to websites on Denmark’s blacklist.

=> ↺ Cablegate: Journalists in defence of WikiLeaks [Update 1]

• John Kampfner, The Independent / Index on Censorship: Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority

• “All governments have a legitimate right to protect national security. This should be a specific, and closely scrutinised, area of policy. Most of our secrecy rules are designed merely to protect politicians and officials from embarrassment. Documents are habitually over-classified for this purpose. The previous government made desperate attempts to stop legal evidence of its collusion in torture from reaching the public. Ministers argued, speciously, that this was to protect the “special intelligence relationship” with Washington. It will be intriguing to see how much information is allowed to be published when Sir Peter Gibson begins his official inquiry. Precedent suggests little grounds for optimism.

=> ↺ Wikileaks: the Web Watches and Waits

• It’s also not hard to see US hardliners calling for Wikileaks to be “taken off the Web” by blocking its address (the COICA approach). Of course, that wouldn’t stop people accessing Wikileaks – there are plenty of ways of getting around this. That might then prompt the US to attempt to wipe the address off the official Internet completely, with the support of other governments around the world that are already increasingly unhappy with the threat that Wikileaks poses to their control.

• That collusion is likely to be forthcoming. Indeed, Australia has already put Wikileaks on its own censorship blacklist once – ironically for daring to reveal details of Denmarks’ censorship blacklist. Apparently, though, it is currently off Australia’s (but it will be interesting to see for how long once the revelations from the cables start flowing…)

=> ↺ The Guardian gave State Dept. cables to the NY Times

• New York Times editors said Sunday that although the paper’s reporters had been digging through WikiLeaks trove of 250,000 State Department cables for “several weeks,” the online whistleblower wasn’t the source of the documents.

• But if WikiLeaks—which allegedly obtained the cables from a 22-year-old army private—wasn’t the Times source, than who was? Apparently, The Guardian—one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables—supplied a copy of the cables to The Times.

=> ↺ TSA Scanner Proof Underwear Protects Your Privates from Government X-Rays

• A special, lead-free powdered metal is decoratively affixed to men’s boxers or briefs. When TSA screeners try to check your most personal space, the X-ray will reveal a less embarrassing natural shape, a fig leaf. You can pick these up in a “USA Patriot 3 Pack,” one red, one white, one blue for $50. A one pack goes for $18. (Click through the sideshow to see X-ray views.)

=> ↺ WikiLeaks degenerates into gossip

• More broadly, though, this release seems to me to mark another step down for the WikiLeaks concept. WikiLeaks’s release of the “Collateral Murder” video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.

=> ↺ China Trying to Plug Wikileak?

• Can the world’s most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the Internet’s most prolific source of confidential information?

• A day after WikiLeaks began to release a quarter-million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.

=> ↺ Wikileaks: US sought DNA, passwords of world leaders

• The big story circulating around the globe is that Arab nations have been urging the US to bear down on Iran.

• “King Hamad pointed to Iran as the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan,” one November 2009 cable discloses.

• According to the memo, Bahrain’s Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was speaking to General David Petraeus. “He argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear program, by whatever means necessary. ‘That program must be stopped,’ he said. ‘The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.’”

• But the cables are also chock full of intelligence-gathering bombshells.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks cables: ‘Rude’ Prince Andrew shocks US ambassador

• Prince Andrew launched a scathing attack on British anticorruption investigators, journalists and the French during an “astonishingly candid” performance at an official engagement that shocked a US diplomat.

• Tatiana Gfoeller, Washington’s ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, recorded in a secret cable that Andrew spoke “cockily” at the brunch with British and Canadian business people, leading a discussion that “verged on the rude”.

=> ↺ TSA Terrorize A Disabled 4 Year Old Boy By Removing His Leg Braces, Then Forcing Him To Walk

=> ↺ Israeli Government Documents Show Deliberate Policy To Keep Gazans At Near-starvation Levels

• This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are “putting the people of Gaza on a diet”.

=> ↺ Who is killing Iran’s nuclear scientists?

• Assassins on motorbikes have killed an Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded another in identical attacks this morning. They drove up to the scientists’ cars as they were leaving for work and attached a bomb to each vehicle which detonated seconds later.

• The man who was killed was Majid Shahriari, a member of the engineering faculty at the Shahid Beheshti in Tehran. His wife was wounded. The second attack wounded Fereidoun Abbasi, who is also a professor at Shahid Besheshti University, and his wife.

=> ↺ GOP nutbars out over WikiLeaks … and Dems?

• The only life I see in imminent danger is Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the country’s former president, will probably have Berlusconi whacked in an omerta-style hit now that it’s been revealed we see Silvio as Vlad the Impaler’s sock puppet.

• I can’t wait for the full 250,000 pages to be sorted through and commented on; I “can’t wait” with baited scare quote breath for GOP wingnuts and ball-less Democrats to try to outdo each other in either real or fake hysteria.

• And, given its recent missive, I can’t wait, and “can’t wait,” for The Nation to bury its head further up Obama’s ass by saying the Koch brothers are funding Julian Assange.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks re-taunts feds with US Amazon mirrors

• WikiLeaks is hosting its cache of confidential US Statement Department cables on US-based Amazon servers, just as it did with with the classified Iraq War documents it released last month.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks US embassy cables: as it happened

• 7.15am:

• So wrote Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former intelligence analyst, suspected of being behind the leak of more than 250,000 dispatches from US embassies around the world.

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ BP sued in Ecuador for violating the “rights of Nature”

• Ecuador’s recent constitutional recognition of the “rights of Nature” is getting its first major workout in a groundbreaking lawsuit against BP: “This morning we filed in the constitutional court of Ecuador this lawsuit defending the rights of nature in particular the right of the Gulf of Mexico and the sea which has been violated by the BP oil spill. We see this as a test case of the rights of nature enshrined in the constitution of Ecuador–it’s about universal jurisdiction beyond the boundaries of Ecuador because nature has rights everywhere.”

Finance

=> ↺ Mind the gap: bumper bonuses are back, yet millions struggle on welfare in US

• Growing inequality at the heart of the US economy is being laid bare this holiday season.

• Conspicuous consumption is back on Wall Street, in anticipation of bonuses close to pre-recession levels. Some American companies have just posted the largest quarterly profits ever. Meanwhile, one in five families is relying on food stamps to get by and unemployment remains stuck at around 10%.

=> ↺ Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its

• It’s a cheerless truth about the post-Thanksgiving start of the Christmas season, traditionally the bell lap in America’s year-long steeplechase of buying. There has been a rebound in consumption since the grimmest days of the Great Recession, but that has not been joined by an uptick in hiring or a robust expansion.

=> ↺ How Congress’ tax-cut decision may affect economy

• On this, economists agree: Extending tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush for low- and middle-income people would strengthen the weak economy. The question is what to do about the highest-paid 3 percent of taxpayers. Should Congress let their tax cuts expire at year’s end as scheduled? Extend them for only a while? Or make them permanent?

=> ↺ Next Financial Crisis May Start in Washington, Says Bair

• You can add one more item to the list of problems keeping Sheila C. Bair up at night. The nation’s capitol, she fears, will be ground zero of the next financial crisis.

=> ↺ Attention: Deficit

• Do you consider yourself a deficit alarmist? No, I’m a deficit realist.

=> ↺ Trustee for Madoff victims files 40 lawsuits in NY

• Relatives of both Bernard Madoff and his wife are among those being targeted in 40 lawsuits announced Friday by the trustee endeavoring to recover money for victims fleeced by the disgraced financier.

• Twenty-two of the lawsuits were filed against relatives of Madoff and his wife, trustee Irving H. Picard said in a news release. Eighteen lawsuits were filed against former employees of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, he said.

=> ↺ Big New York insider trading probe spawns another

• An insider trading case last year that federal authorities said was the biggest ever is providing a recipe for another case that may be even bigger.

• The current case is largely an extension of work that led to the arrest of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in October 2009. The Galleon investigation marked the first time that federal authorities used wiretaps in an insider trading probe.

=> ↺ Don’t Just Tell Us. Show Us That You Can Foreclose.

• Some in the industry believe that questions about this issue — known as “legal standing” — are trivial. They say it’s just a gambit by borrowers’ lawyers to throw sand in the foreclosure machine. Nine times out of 10, bankers say, the right institutions are foreclosing on the right borrowers.

=> ↺ The Give and Take of Liar Loans

• This same company is now insisting that other lenders that made stated-income loans — loans that Countrywide eagerly bought to fatten its balance sheet — must repurchase them on the grounds that, golly, the loans turned out to be fraudulent. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

=> ↺ The Irish Non-bailout

• So, a credit line at 5.8 percent interest. Considering that Ireland was able to borrow at that rate as recently as mid-September, and was falling off a cliff then, why is this supposed to solve the problem?

=> ↺ Imperious Institutions, Impotent Individuals

• Whatever happens to the economy, the threads that weave individuals and institutions together will continue to fray until leaders of all sorts rethink their fundamental assumptions about the relationship between human beings and organizations.

=> ↺ The bill for PFI contracts is an outrage. Let us refuse to pay this odious debt

• You’ve been told that nothing is sacred; that no state spending is safe from being cut or eroded through inflation. You’ve been misled. As the new public spending data released by the government shows, a £267bn bill has been both ringfenced and index-linked. This sum, spread over the next 50 years or so, guarantees the welfare not of state pensioners or children or the unemployed, but of a different class of customer. To make way, everything else must be cut, further and faster than it would otherwise have been.

=> ↺ Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal

• First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

• In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

=> ↺ Anti-Allah outburst earns EDL supporter £200 fine after protest in Leicester

• A man has been fined for making offensive comments about Allah during the English Defence League protest in Leicester.

• Lee Whitby was found guilty of using racially aggravated abusive words during the protest in the city centre on Saturday, October 9.

=> ↺ Home Office concedes to meeting

• The Home Office, after several weeks of requests from ORG and others, has agreed to a meeting of civil society representatives next week concerning their review of enforcement of RIPA’s interception laws.

=> ↺ Peter Sunde Wants To Create Alternative To ICANN

• “According to Peter Sunde’s Twitter feed, he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. The non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

=> ↺ In praise of dead trees

• The important aspects of e-reader devices come from the restrictions which digital text place on the reader. Because of the digital restrictions management put on e-book files, you cannot share books with your friends. You cannot borrow them from the library. You cannot make a copy in a different format. That is exactly what the publishers and proprietors of e-readers want. Content providers want each consumer to be in a silo. Every good and work they want to consume would be purchased directly, and sharing would not be possible, since every purchased would be bound to the original consumer.

=> ↺ Netflix Partner Says Comcast ‘Toll’ Threatens Online Video Delivery

• Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.

• Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”

=> ↺ Level 3 Alleges Comcast Demanded Fees To Deliver Internet Content

• Network services provider Level 3 Communications on Monday alleged Comcast forced it to pay recurring fees to transmit Internet video and other content to cable customers, but the MSO countered that Level 3 misrepresented negotiations between the two companies and was trying to get a “free ride” on its network.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Intellectual Property Appears to Figure Prominently In Wikileaks Cablegate

• Intellectual property policy has long been closely linked to U.S. trade policy, so it should come as little surprise to find that it appears to figure prominently in the cables obtained by Wikileaks. Although only a couple hundreds have been posted thus far, the Guardian has supplied a full list of all 251,287 cables. The list includes tags for each cable, so that the subject matter can be decoded. The Guardian has also posted a glossary of the tags, but omits KIPR, which appears to be the intellectual property tag (I base this conclusion on the correlation between the KIPR tag and the WIPO tag, to a specific reference to copyright in one of the cables, and the fact that IPR is a common acronym for intellectual property rights).

Copyrights

=> ↺ Warp Speed at the Copyright Board – Towards an Interim AC Tariff?

• If you think that the Copyright Board has been moving quickly on the AC proposed $45/$35 1,300% increase tariff up to now, it has just pushed the warp speed button.

=> ↺ AC’s proposed $45/$35 Tariff – Board Ruling of Nov 25 2010 on Intervenors etc.

=> ↺ A Brief History of Copyright

=> ↺ YouTube Reinstates Ally ASL’s Account

• Allyson Townsend, better known to her fans as Ally ASL, made headlines earlier this month when YouTube shut down her account after Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group complained that her videos, which featured Ally translating pop songs by Kesha, Owl City and others into American Sign Language, were violating those songs’ copyrights.

=> ↺ Anti-Piracy Lawyers Sued For Fraud, Abuse and Extortion

• The US Copyright Group thought it had found the ideal scheme to turn piracy into profit when it started filing lawsuits against tens of thousands of BitTorrent users this year. But the defendants in the Far Cry lawsuits have now become the plaintiffs in a class action filed against the anti-piracy lawyers and their partners. Among other things, the lawyers are accused of fraud, extortion and abuse.

=> ↺ US Copyright Group Sued For Extortion, Conspiracy & Fraud

• Well, the whole mass automated “pay up or we’ll sue” legal business may be getting a bit more interesting as Evan Brown notes that one of the folks sued by US Copyright Group has struck back with a class action lawsuit alleging that the law firm behind USCG, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, is engaged in extortion, fraud and conspiracy. The lawsuit looks to include in the class the nearly 5,000 people sued by USCG for sharing the Uwe Boll film Far Cry. The lawsuit highlights — as we pointed out earlier this year — many of the alleged infringements happened prior to registration, meaning that there would be no statutory damages available.

=> ↺ The Pirate Bay Decision, or the Political Persecution of Sharing

• The decision to sentence the co-founders of The Pirate Bay to jail is both absurd and unfair. It illustrates how an obsolete copyright law and its indiscrimate application are harmful to society as a whole. Such an incomprehension of technological, economic and social realities should not mask the fact that this decision is above all political.

=> ↺ French Author Plagiarizes Wikipedia; Does That Mean His Entire Book Is Now CC Licensed?

• PrometheeFeu alerts us to a fascinating situation happening in France. Apparently, a successful French author, Michel Houellebecq, recently came out with a novel, La Carte et Le Territoire. However, it turns out that Houellebecq copied decent chunks of three separate Wikipedia articles in the novel, without any credit or indication that he was quoting another source. This is what is normally referred to as plagiarism — or, in some views, sampling. This isn’t all that surprising, and we hear stories of plagiarism in books all the time. In fact, we tend to think that people get way too upset over such things in books. After being called on it, Houellebecq appears to have admitted to copying those sections.

=> ↺ Supreme Court refuses innocent infringement P2P case

• The US Supreme Court today refused to hear the case of a file-swapper who claimed she was an “innocent infringer,” but one justice at least understands the absurdity of the current law.

• The case concerned Whitney Harper, who shared some music on the family computer when she was a teenager and was subsequently hit with a lawsuit from the RIAA. Harper claimed that she was an “innocent infringer” who went straight when she learned about copyright law, and that she had thought P2P use was basically like (legal) Internet radio.

=> ↺ EFF Asks Judges to Protect Identities in Porn-Downloading Lawsuits

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked judges in Texas and West Virginia to block requests to unmask accused file sharers in several predatory copyright troll lawsuits involving the alleged illegal downloading of pornography.

• The cases were filed by two different companies and involve different copyrighted adult material. However, the tactics are the same. In both cases, the owners of the adult movies filed mass lawsuits based on single counts of copyright infringement stemming from the downloading of a pornographic film, and improperly lump hundreds of defendants together regardless of where the IP addresses indicate the defendants live. Consistent with a recent spike in similar “copyright troll” lawsuits, the motivation behind these cases appears to be to leverage the risk of embarrassment associated with pornography to coerce settlement payments despite serious problems with the underlying claims.

=> ↺ After Police Raid, Mulve File-Sharing App Operator Cleared Of Wrong Doing

• After being in quiet development for some months, in September the Mulve music downloading app hit the mainstream. Very quickly everything went sour, with British police swooping on the guy who registered the Mulve domain and placing him under arrest on a range of charges from copyright infringement through to conspiracy to defraud. Today we can report the outcome. For once it’s good news.

=> ↺ US Government Responds To Domain Seizures, Ignores The Big Question

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have just confirmed the seizure of 82 domains as part of Operation in Our Sites 2. The authorities claim the actions were targeted at websites that were involved in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit and copyrighted goods, but fail to explain why a BitTorrent meta-search engine was included.

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