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● 01.21.11

● Links 21/1/2011: Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) 6, Parrot 3.0.0

Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Ask the Experts: How to Get Paid to Work on Linux

• But it’s looking like there is some light at the end of the tunnel, at least in the industry in which we all work and play. According to Dice.com, a career website for IT and engineering professionals, job postings on its site are up 40 percent year-over-year. What’s better? Dice.com says that postings asking for Linux knowledge are up 47 percent over last year, while Windows-related postings are only up 40 percent.

Ballnux

=> ↺ “Age of Milk”: first professionally-made movie shot with a Samsung Galaxy S

• Looks like it’s not just the iPhone 4 that’s capable of making professionally-made movies. Korean director Kim Dae-Woo is poised to show off his filmmaking skills by shooting an entire movie using a Samsung Galaxy S, the first ever, titled “Age of Milk.”

=> ↺ THREE unannounced HTC Android phones pictured

• Mobile news site PocketNow has secured an EARTH-SHATTERING trio of exclusives today, with rendered images of three possible new HTC Android phones currently up on the site.

Applications

=> ↺ A look at some free RSS readers

• In short, Newsbeuter can be configured every which way from Sunday. The color scheme, how feeds are displayed, how articles are bookmarked or saved for later — it’s one of the most flexible feed readers that you’ll encounter. It’s also one that requires a certain amount of dedication — configuring Newsbeuter to work just right can take quite a lot of experimentation. Like Mutt, this pays heavy dividends for users who spend a great deal of time skimming feeds. For casual users, Newsbeuter is probably overkill.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Opera chosen by Sony for LCD television and Blu-ray Disc players

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ OpenSSH Tips and Tricks: Beyond Secure Shell

=> ↺ Barnes: Debugging display problems

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt

=> ↺ Developing my first plasmoid Part 1

• Recently the wife wanted to go to JoAnne’s so I went to Borders and the latest issue of Linux Format Magazine (which I used to be subscribed to) had a QT programming example. I bought the issue solely for that. It had this neat tutorial on QT Quick which is this semi-new prototyping language based on Javascript. In just a few lines of code (less than 100 for sure), Graham Chapman showed how to create a program that would take a geo feed from flickr and map the photos onto Google.

=> ↺ Resolving QtScript’s “Legacy” APIs

• We want Qt to have the best possible JavaScript technology. To make this happen, we need the ability to make drastic changes to the implementation — even replacing it — underneath our public APIs. If an API exposes implementation details, that will cause us to limp.

=> ↺ Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview released

Distributions

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ EPEL-ANNOUNCE Announcing EPEL 6

• The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is happy to announce the release of EPEL 6 today!

• EPEL 6 is a collection of add-on packages available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and other compatible systems, maintained by the community under the umbrella of the Fedora Project. EPEL 6 is designed to supplement RHEL 6 by providing additional functionality and does not replace any RHEL 6 packages. As a community project, EPEL is maintained and supported by volunteers via Bugzilla and mailing lists. EPEL is not commercially supported by Red Hat, Inc.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Cobbler Accepted Into Ubuntu Archive

• Cobbler, a linux installation server originally developer by Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies group to accelerate setup of network installation environments, has been accepted into the Ubuntu Archive according to Chuck Short on his blog earlier today.

=> ↺ Docklet API ‘coming’ to Unity Launcher

• Unity’s launcher could get some added oomph with the release of a new Launcher API for developers to use.

=> ↺ Free Culture Showcase

• For the 11.04 Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase we (the attendees at the UDS session) thought it would be really good to set a theme. The decision was made in order to encourage people to create content with wider artistic merit.

• The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is designed to help all of us show off the beauty of our creative work. We want the brief to inspire people to explore and celebrate their interpretation of Freedom.

• The Brief: To create photography, illustration, music and video which express Freedom.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Wallpaper Required for Edubuntu 11.04

• The Ubuntu Artwork team has been going through a revival over the last few months, which is great, they now offer services to other Ubuntu teams in a structured way.

• We took them up on their offer and requested a wallpaper for the next release that we can also use to base the rest of the artwork on.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

=> ↺ Pingus – free Lemmings clone for the N900

=> ↺ QTv – TV series watcher

• QTv by Harri Kovalainen is a TV series searcher, a Qml interface for searching TV show information from thetvdb.com.

=> ↺ MyAgent-IM – instant messaging application for Mail.ru

=> ↺ Video: Amino Freedom MeeGo TV – Work 3 times faster with MeeGo than any other platform.

• As you know, MeeGo isn’t just for phones and tablets, it’s pretty much for everything that has a screen or can be viewed on a screen. Here’s the first generation of Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo for the TV on the Amino Freedom OTT Hybrid Media Centre box, brought to you by the MeeGo Experts folks who went to CES 2011. (Cheers for the tip Jim!)

=> ↺ Gtk+/MeeGo Handset bidders selected

• The GNOME Foundation Board is happy to announce that following the call for bids for MeeGo/GTK+ integration work, Igalia was selected as the preferred bidder to perform the work set out.

• We received a number of very interesting bids for the project, but Igalia’s bid was the one that focused the most on integrating elements of Hildon into GTK+ upstream. This should mean easier porting of older Hildon/Maemo applications to the new MeeGo Handset platform, as well as easier porting of existing desktop GTK+ applications to the handset.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ With Page as CEO, Open Source is stronger than ever at Google

• Who, after hearing about Android, the Linux-based smartphone and tablet operating system for the first time decided that Google didn’t want to just support it, but buy Android and keep it open? That was Page.

• When I spoke with Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source program manager, a few years back when Google was big but not yet Google, DiBona told me, that Page was “passionate about open source.” DiBona added, that Google also supported its engineers working on “open-source and Linux,” and that “many of them use part of their time to work on open-source projects.”

Events

=> ↺ Linux Security Summit 2011 – preliminary info

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ Chromium release management explained

• Some people seem to be confused about the Chromium release management, the weird x.y.z.t versions, the channels, the PPAs… I often receive questions about those subjects from end-users, but also from fellow Ubuntu developers. In this post, I will try to explain and demystify a few things. In order to do that, I also need to cover Google Chrome.

=> ↺ Last.fm Free Music Player Google Chrome Extension Works Like a Charm

• Tech Drive-in has covered several posts on useful Google Chrome extensions before, the most prominent being the one where we featured useful Chrome extensions for a more secure browsing experience. But this one is special. A Last.fm music player extension for Google Chrome that does exactly what you expect it to.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Blocking the Skype Toolbar in Firefox

• The Skype Toolbar for Firefox is an extension that detects phone numbers in web pages, and re-renders them as a clickable button that can be used to dial the number using the Skype desktop application. This extension is bundled with the Skype application, and is installed into Firefox by default when Skype is installed or, in some circumstances, updated. As a result, a large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly.

Oracle

=> ↺ LibreOffice Release Candidate 4 available to download

• This release contains translation and branding updates, bug fixes and general performance improvements. The full list of changes since RC3 can be found online here.

Project Releases

=> ↺ Parrot 3.0.0 “Beef Stew” Released!

• On behalf of the Parrot team and an enthusiastic but undiscriminating dachshund that followed me home last week, I’m proud to announce Parrot 3.0.0, also known as “Beef Stew”, or at the insistence of a shadowy government organization, “Snowflake”. Parrot is a virtual machine that dreams about running all dynamic languages everywhere, even the one you’re think about right now. Parrot has big plans, even if needs a haircut and sometimes goes outside with its shoes untied.

Government

=> ↺ All Sides Of The Political Divide Should Support FOSS

• It just occurred to me that both sides of the political arena should be supporting and promoting FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) software for different reasons.

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Canada’s Grassroots National Digital Library Takes Shape

• Several European countries have set very ambitious digitization goals. The National Library of the Netherlands has committed to digitizing everything – all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals dating back to 1470. The National Library of Norway set a similar goal in 2005, setting in motion plans to digitize its entire collection that now includes 170,000 books, 250,000 newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of television and 500,000 photographs.

=> ↺ Knowledge Workers & The Commons – A Reflection

• I began to understand something about the nature of this gap when Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation made a comment about the place of knowledge workers (programmers, architects, designers, writers, salespeople, managers) in the commons movement. To paraphrase, he said they have a different world view than common activists on the left or right but share a similar vision. I thought that this might explain the reception of my ideas on the listserv. It also resonated with what I learned about the differences between the social organization of moderates and those at the political extremes while writing white papers for a political consultancy.

=> ↺ BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol

• Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol that revolutionized file-sharing, is finalizing the code for his new P2P-live streaming protocol. With his efforts he aims to develop a piece of code superior to all other streaming solutions on the market today. The release of the application is still a few months away, but Cohen has shown a demo exclusively to TorrentFreak.

=> ↺ U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education commit $2 billion to create open educational resources for community colleges and career training; CC BY required for grant outputs

=> ↺ Open Grantmaking in Practice, Not Just In Principle

• The Department of Labor in partnership with the Department of Education announced two billion dollars in grants to support educational and career training programs for workers. Known as the “Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant” – or TAA CCCT inside the Beltway – the program is precedent setting in its magnitude of support for 21st century job skill training and for making the default-setting in grantmaking much more open.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Belarus Accuses EU States Of Plotting ‘Poll Coup’

• Belarus today accused EU members Poland and Germany of seeking to topple President Alyaksandr Lukashenka by organizing the December mass protests against his reelection.

• “Sovyetskaya Belorussia,” the official newspaper of the presidential administration, today said that the German and Polish secret services had devised the plot and Poland had even trained opposition activists.

=> ↺ How Facebook Beat MySpace

• Giving dedicated people permission to do whatever it takes, and resources, then holding their feet to the fire to demonstrate performance. Letting dedicated people learn from their successes, and failures, and move fast to keep the business in the fast moving water. There is no manager, leader or management team that can predict, plan and execute as well as a team that has its ears close to the market, and the flexibility to react quickly, willing to make mistakes (and learn from them even faster) without bias for a predetermined plan.

=> ↺ The EU will not disintegrate: it will integrate further

• Euro-sceptics have had great fun in recent weeks tracking the bond markets’ onslaught on the euro in European Union countries. Some, more excitable, bond market vigilantes and euro-sceptic ideologues have predicted the eventual break up of the 17-member euro-area. Others have even suggested that the disintegration of the euro might undermine the economic and then the political foundations of the European Union itself.

• There is no denying the shock the euro-area has received as a result of the crises first in Greece, then in Ireland and more recently in Portugal and Spain. Even the most dedicated supporters of “the European project” have warned that a combination of political indolence at the highest level of euro-area governments and antiquated ideas about how to respond to the bank generated crises could put the entire Union at risk.

=> ↺ United States: Buckeye Socialist Network launched

• The emergence of the right-wing Tea Party movement and the general rightward shift in political discourse created an urgent need to articulate a left alternative. Thus far, the left has largely been unable to capitalise on the widespread confusion and anger that working people feel.

Science

=> ↺ i.Materialise Metalises

• This very advanced process seems unique to i.Materialise, and involves a powder based process. Powedered titanium metal is laid in a very thin layer. An extremely powerful laser then traces the solid portions by melting the powder. A second layer of titanium powder is deployed and the process repeats, gradually building up a whole object.

• The strength of titanium is legendary, of course – but this means that the minimum wall thickness can be quite small. In this case, i.Materialise is able to print with a minimum wall thickness of 0.2mm, enabling very fine structures to be printed.

=> ↺ Italian scientists claim to have demonstrated cold fusion (w/ Video)

• Few areas of science are more controversial than cold fusion, the hypothetical near-room-temperature reaction in which two smaller nuclei join together to form a single larger nucleus while releasing large amounts of energy. In the 1980s, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have demonstrated cold fusion – which could potentially provide the world with a cheap, clean energy source – but their experiment could not be reproduced. Since then, all other claims of cold fusion have been illegitimate, and studies have shown that cold fusion is theoretically implausible, causing mainstream science to become highly speculative of the field in general.

=> ↺ Peer review: Trial by Twitter

• Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.

Defence/Police/Aggression

=> ↺ The third world war

=> ↺ Plain-clothes Metropolitan police officers were at G20 demonstrations

• The Metropolitan police was forced to admit today that one of its senior commanders gave false information to MPs when he denied having plain-clothes officers in the crowd at the G20 demonstrations in London in 2009.

• Giving evidence to the House of Commons home affairs committee a month after the protest – in which thousands of demonstrators clashed with police – Commander Bob Broadhurst insisted there were no plain-clothes officers among the crowd, saying it would have been too dangerous to do so.

=> ↺ On-duty cop rapes woman, pleads sentence down to one year

=> ↺ Undercover Agitators Everywhere – G8/G20 Too?

• There’s been rumors going the rounds that the ‘Block Bloc’ protestors who trashed parts of downtown Toronto were actually police officers. For example, why, exactly was a police cruiser left unattended where protestors could destroy it?

=> ↺ BombRot

• Every single technology except one: explosives. Explosives do have limited beneficial uses: mining, quarrying and demolition come to mind. However, the principal use of explosives is the opposite of beneficial – it is killing. What’s more, virtually every machine that we make for killing relies on explosives. These machines range from those such as the suicide vest or the nuclear bomb that have killed comparatively few people, to viscously lethal weapons of mass destruction such as the assault rifle.

• [...]

• What has the selective breeding of microbes to do with alleviating the misery caused by explosives? Well – explosives are organic molecules with a lot of energy locked up in their chemical bonds. In other words they are an ideal potential food source for yeasts, bacteria and archaea. But explosives haven’t been around for long enough for such explosive-eating microbes to evolve by natural selection.

=> ↺ 25 Tons of Bombs Wipe Afghan Town Off Map

• An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.

=> ↺ Daniel Hamilton: Join Big Brother Watch’s campaign against the EU’s INDECT surveillance project

• In the project’s own words, the EU has tasked scientists with creating a system which will allow for the “registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information” accessed online in the EU in order to detect terrorists operating online.

Cablegate

=> ↺ WikiLeaks: the latest developments

• The latest newspaper to get access to the WikiLeaks cables appears to be Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat.

=> ↺ Swiss banker linked to Wikileaks is found guilty

• A former Swiss banker who said he gave Wikileaks details of rich tax evaders has been found guilty of breaching Switzerland’s strict bank secrecy laws.

• A judge in Zurich did so even though the leaked documents referred to accounts in the Cayman Islands.

• Judge Sebastian Aeppli fined Rudolf Elmer, 55, more than 6,000 Swiss francs ($6,250; £4,000).

=> ↺ Claim: WikiLeaks Published Documents Siphoned Over File Sharing Software

• Music and movie pirates may not be the only ones trolling peer-to-peer networks for booty. The secret-spilling site WikiLeaks may also have used file sharing networks to obtain some of the documents it has published, according to a computer-security firm.

• The allegations come from Tiversa, a Pennsylvania peer-to-peer investigations firm, that claims it passed information of WikiLeaks’ file sharing activity to U.S. government officials, according to Bloomberg.

=> ↺ Former Quantico Commander Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower

• Via WarIsACrime.org, here’s a powerful letter to General James F. Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, by retired Marine Corps captain David C. MacMichael, the former commander of Headquarters Company at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, where Pfc Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of providing a trove of classified US government documents to WikiLeaks, is being held in conditions that amount to prolonged solitary confinement, as I explained in a recent article, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?

• Capt. MacMichael makes a number of valid and powerful points, in particular asking why Manning is being held for so long before trial (in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights), and also questioning his conditions of confinement. On the first point, he states, “I question the length of confinement prior to conduct of court-martial. The sixth amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing to the accused in all criminal prosecutions the right to a speedy and public trial, extends to those being prosecuted in the military justice system.” On the second, he notes, “I seriously doubt that the conditions of his confinement — solitary confinement, sleep interruption, denial of all but minimal physical exercise, etc. — are necessary, customary, or in accordance with law, US or international.”

=> ↺ Sign Our Letter: Stop the Inhumane Treatment of Bradley Manning

=> ↺ Obama administration keeps new policy on Miranda secret

• The Obama administration has issued new guidance on use of the Miranda warning in interrogations of terrorism suspects, potentially chipping away at the rule that bars the government from using information in court if it was gathered before a suspect was informed of his right to remain silent and to an attorney.

• But the Department of Justice is refusing to publicly release the guidance, with a spokesman describing it in an interview as an “internal document.” So we don’t know the administration’s exact interpretation of Miranda, even though it may have significantly reshaped the way terrorism interrogations are conducted.

Finance

=> ↺ Goldman Fails to See Hype That Derailed Facebook’s Private Sale

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s decision to scuttle a sale of Facebook Inc. shares to U.S. investors shows the bank miscalculated by trying to privately offer stock in a company with more than 600 million users.

• In a statement yesterday, New York-based Goldman Sachs said the sale, first reported Jan. 2, will be restricted to non-U.S. investors because “the level of media attention might not be consistent with the proper completion of a U.S. private placement under U.S. law.” The firm planned to sell as much as $1.5 billion of closely held Facebook to clients of its private wealth unit.

=> ↺ Blame the Victims and Enrich the Perpetrators

• The same banks that supplied money — and in some cases now own — suspect mortgage lenders also packaged up and sold those loans to investors. These banks also own or owned “servicers” that are supposed to act as stewards for investors. But if servicers cannot recover foreclosure costs combined with the costs of maintaining and reselling the house, they often abandon the property. After pumping up appraisals and falsifying borrowers’ income on applications, banks are walking away. Once again, American taxpayers will foot the bill…

=> ↺ The SEC Just Hired This Woman To Oversee Asset Managers — Guess Which Bank She’s From

• Goldman Sachs’ former Asset Management CIO, Eileen Rominger, just got a new job as the head of the SEC division that oversees asset managers and hedge funds, Dow Jones reports (via FoxBusiness).

• Rominger managed equity funds at Goldman before she was made chief investment officer for its global portfolio management teams.

=> ↺ Richard Trumka v. Goldman Sachs: Different Visions of America

• Even back in “the good ‘ole” days of Wall Street — before the 2008 collapse — we, the people, suffered from the Goldman Sachs ethos. Wall Street has been the financial engine behind the unwinding of the American Dream. It financed leveraged buyouts and corporate takeovers based heavily on debt — which resulted in the shedding of millions of good-paying jobs and will continue to create the same sick dynamic in the financial system whereby the “health of a company” is measured by its stock price, not by how well the workers are doing.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ CRTC proposes easing ban on broadcasting false or misleading news

• The CRTC is proposing a regulatory change that would give Canadian TV and radio stations more leeway to broadcast false or misleading news.

• Current regulations contain a blanket prohibition on broadcasting “any false or misleading news.”

=> ↺ CBC wants file footage yanked from Conservative ads; Tories say no

• The federal Conservatives are rejecting a demand by the CBC to withdraw file footage from the national broadcaster that appears in new Tory ads targeting their political opponents.

• The Conservatives did not seek permission to use CBC content in three ads that were posted online and broadcast on TV on Monday, said CBC spokesman Marco Dube said.

=> ↺ Poll: Trust in Fox News in Sharp Decline; PBS is Most Trusted

• Particularly interesting in light of (1) past results from PIPA/WorldOpinion.org showing Fox most misinforms and PBS least misinforms their respective viewers and (2) conservatives’ resurgence in desire to defund PBS/NPR for firing Juan Williams.

=> ↺ The imaginary Chinese vocabulary of Rush Limbaugh

Censorship

=> ↺ Threats block anti-Iran movie screening

• A suspicious package and a rash of phone calls threatening protests shut down the planned screening of an anti-Iran documentary at Library and Archives Canada Tuesday night.

• Iran’s embassy in Ottawa had tried to censor the film, Iranium, by complaining to the national library, which cancelled it until Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore stepped in.

=> ↺ Paulo Coelho Books Banned In Iran… So He Offers Them As A Free Download

• There are few successful authors who have jumped in and embraced what the online world allows you to do more than Paulo Coelho. Three years ago, we wrote about his efforts to “pirate” his own books and how he found that it only served to help his sales. He’s also talked up the importance for authors of setting ideas free to help them spread. He’s also gone even further than that with cool experiments like having his fans make a movie out of one of his books, via a sort of crowdsourcing methodology.

Privacy

=> ↺ DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard)

• DuckDuckGo, a one-man-band search engine based out of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is aiming at Google’s privacy practices with an unusual tactic: a billboard in San Francisco that proclaims “Google Tracks You. We Don’t.”

=> ↺ Social Media and Law Enforcement: Who Gets What Data and When?

• This month, we were reminded how important it is that social media companies do what they can to protect the sensitive data they hold from the prying eyes of the government. As many news outlets have reported, the US Department of Justice recently obtained a court order for records from Twitter on several of its users related to the WikiLeaks disclosures. Instead of just turning over this information, Twitter “beta-tested a spine” and notified its users of the court order, thus giving them the opportunity to challenge it in court.

• We have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site’s users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Destruction of ID card data to cost £400,000

• The destruction of the National Identity Register (NIR) and the personal data held on the controversial ID card system will cost about £400,000.

• The NIR was designed to hold the biometric and biographic details of ID card holders. But last May the ill-fated project was shelved.

=> ↺ How truly liberal is the coalition government?

• The two parties – then in opposition, now in government – seemed to find common ground in defending the rights of the individual against the increasingly shrill demands of the agencies charged with upholding our safety and security. Whether it was the introduction of national identity cards, and the gargantuan accompanying database, or three months detention without trial for terror suspects, Cameron’s and Clegg’s parliamentary troops seemed conjoined in civil libertarianism.

• But has entering government changed them? We have seen in the past how politicians can change in government. Back in 1994, Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, proclaimed the merits of ID cards. Labour railed against the plans. But seven years later – in the wake of the 9/11 outrage – senior Labour figures, by then in government, found merit in the proposals.

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ CRTC Says Rogers Not Complying With Net Neutrality Disclosure Requirements

• CRTC concerns with Rogers and its response to net neutrality complaints escalated this week when the Commission sent a letter to the company advising that it has received a growing number of complaints and that its public disclosures have not been compliant with CRTC Internet traffic management policy requirements. The case began last fall when the CRTC received a complaint over changes to Rogers’ practices that affected downstream P2P traffic.

DRM

=> ↺ iDOS emulator back on App Store, requires hack to load games

• iDOS, a repackaged version of the open source DOSBox emulator, is back on the App Store after getting rid of the ability to load games and other software using iTunes file syncing. While that might make the emulator seem far less useful, users have discovered a simple, no-jailbreak-required hack to load any old DOS software they want to run.

=> ↺ Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers — and Its Customers

• For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest they be accused of circumventing a technological protection measure. We’ve also been concerned that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ How ‘Cyberlockers’ Became The Biggest Problem In Piracy

• Since Napster exploded into the public consciousness when it was founded 12 years ago, the world of digital piracy has been associated with a particular type of software—“peer-to-peer” download services. (Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.) Either way, 2011 is likely to be the year when P2P is finally eclipsed by “cyberlockers,” a wildly popular type of site that many in the entertainment industry see as a new threat that could be even bigger than P2P. So what are cyberlockers, anyway? Why are they so popular—and so alarming to those who fight against piracy?

Copyrights

=> ↺ Broadcasting Notice of Consultation CRTC 2011-14

• Call for comments on amendments to the Radio Regulations, 1986, Television Broadcasting Regulations, 1987, Pay Television Regulations, 1990, Specialty Services Regulations, 1990, and the Broadcasting Information Regulations, 1993

=> ↺ URGENT: Canadian Copyright Bill C-32 Another Step Closer To Becoming Law

=> ↺ Send A Letter To Ottawa To Stop The Canadian DMCA

=> ↺ Copyright development in China: writers transferring digital copyright

• During a signing ceremony held on January 10, writers Zhou Guoping and Deng Xian transferred their digital copyright to Zhongnan Media.

=> ↺ Brazil’s Copyright Reform: the tip of the iceberg?

• Sister of acclaimed composer and singer Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Ms. Ana de Hollanda is herself a singer and composer as well. As soon as Brazil’s new president Mrs. Dilma Rousseff nominated Ms. Ana de Hollanda for the Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for Brazil’s copyright agenda, several academics, activists and civil society have been voicing concerns against the twist of policy that she might implement from now on.

• Over 1,000 signatures have been gathered thus far on an Open Letter from the Brazilian civil society that is concerned that “the broad and open participation by society might be replaced by “commissions of notables” or “lawyers” giving their biased views on the subject”.

=> ↺ Blaming Piracy, Music Industry Says It’s Lost a Third of Its Value Over Past 7 Years

• While digital music revenue has grown 1,000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing – only 6% last year, down from 9.2% growth in 2009. Digital sales comprise about a third of the industry’s total revenue.

ACTA

=> ↺ Where to get the detailed response to Question E-8847/10

• Where is the “detailled response” to Marietje Schaake’s question? The Dutch MEP is not aware of it. Does De Gucht have something to hide? Will Pedro Velasco-Martins carry along a printed copy of the answer for participants of his stakeholder meeting on ACTA to demonstrate their unprecedented openness?

=> ↺ FFII requests answer to Parliamentary ACTA question

=> ↺ Opinion of European Academics on ACTA

• A group of prominent European academics has released today an opinion on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The opinion identifies the most critical aspects of ACTA and invites European and national institutions to carefully consider the opinion before ratifying the Agreement or withholding consent.

=> ↺ ACTA resolution contains fundamental flaws

• Contrary to what De Gucht said, whether border officials can do something or not is not part of material law, but is part of procedural (enforcement) law. The EU IPR Customs Regulation and ACTA both are about enforcement law. By saying that the EU law is in another field, De Gucht wrongly created the impression ACTA can not touch upon EU law. De Gucht mixed up basic legal concepts. The Parliament copied this misconception.

• Conflicting with its earlier statement, the resolution later on acknowledges the existence of EU enforcement legislation. The resolution emphasises that ACTA will not change present EU laws in terms of IPR enforcement, because EU law is already considerably more advanced than the current international standards – following another Commission statement.

Digital Economy (UK)

=> ↺ ORG will intervene in Digitial Economy Act Judicial Review

• Some excellent news: ORG has been given permission to intervene in the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. The review was granted to BT and Talk Talk late last year on four specific points (there’s a good roundup of the background here). Having permission to intervene means that we’ll be able to put forward our case, in court, in clear terms, to outline why we think the Act is so badly flawed. Across all four points we will be making arguments that the Act threatens to curtail people’s rights to freedom of expression, endangers their privacy, and will have a disproportionate impact not only only the public but on businesses too.

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