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● 01.24.12

● Links 24/1/2012: Cinnamon 1.2, Ubuntu Versus Menu Bar

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux to rule the world then, basically

• If the Linux Foundation releases a survey suggesting that open source is poised for growth, is that hard to get excited about? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

• If the Ovum Research team releases a study suggesting that Android is soon to become the top developer platform, is that hard to get excited about? Well, they have, haven’t they?

• The Linux Foundation sees open source technology set for its grandest age yet based on low total cost of ownership, technical features and security. Comments are based upon a new survey entitled “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.”

=> ↺ Linux fate lies in the hands of many

• When someone presses me about the state of Linux on the desktop, I usually respond with a tightened brow and pursed lip and start talking about the current commercial push to move beyond the desktop platform and into mobile.

• And while that’s a valid observation, I also have to pause and recognize the strength of the Linux community, remembering that this collective voice has huge potential in shaping the direction of Linux and open source projects.

=> ↺ Linux: Moving from the Fringe to the Center

• One of the popular perceptions about Linux is that somehow the open source operating system is the IT equivalent of the anti-establishment candidate. But a funny thing usually happens to almost every anti-establishment trend given enough time: It moves from the fringe to the center.

• If a recent survey of 428 respondents at organizations with $500 million or more in annual revenues or greater than 500 employees conducted by The Linux Foundation is any guide, that’s exactly what’s happening with Linux. Although different distributions of Linux are more accepted by mainstream IT organizations than others, the server makes it clear that large numbers of mission-critical applications and new application workloads are finding their way onto Linux platforms. Part of that expansion can also be attributed to independent software vendors pushing Linux adoption if for no other reason than it leaves more of the IT budget available for application software licenses.

Desktop

=> ↺ Why oems should avoid not (possibly) making it harder to install Linux

• There has been a lot of worry lately about windows 8 secure boot making it (possibly) much harder or impossible to install certain Linux’s (possibly all) on pcs with windows 8 secure boot. So I decided to list the arguments against making it possibly harder or impossible to install Linux’s.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Audio Blog #12 Ancient Unix

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Preview: Intel’s Open-Source Driver Can Beat Mac OS X

• Thanks to recent advancements by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, the open-source Linux graphics driver not only supports more OpenGL 3.0 functionality than Apple’s Intel graphics driver for Mac OS X, but the performance is more competitive. In some cases, the OpenGL performance is now superior under Linux with the open-source driver that is developed by Intel in conjunction with the free software community. This article is looking at the performance of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” and Ubuntu Linux.

=> ↺ XFS Developer Takes Shots At Btrfs, EXT4

• Chris Mason of Btrfs fame wasn’t the only Linux file-system developer talking to the public last week. While the Btrfs talk was going on in Los Angeles at SCALE 10x, Dave Chinner was down under in Australia at LCA2012 talking about XFS. His talk included some controversial shots at EXT4 and Btrfs.

• During his Linux.Conf.Au 2012 presentation in Barratt, Australia, Chinner first talked about the XFS meta-data problems of the file-system’s meta-data modification performance being terrible. EXT4 can be 20~50x faster than XFS with certain workloads like unpacking a Linux kernel source tar-ball package. However, with one major algorithm change and various performance optimizations, the XFS performance is now scaling much better (Dave recommends the Linux 3.0 stable series or newer for the best XFS support).

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Reverse-Engineered NVIDIA Driver Works On Re-Clocking

• While Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA support in Mesa 8.0 is mixed, the developers behind this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver are making some progress and hope to have more positive information to report soon.

Applications

=> ↺ Linux / Open Source For Kids: A Feast of Riches

• Linux and free/open source software are the best computing environments for children because they can get under the hood and learn to control and shape the technology, rather than be trained like lab rats to click buttons and be good little unquestioning consumers. Here is a batch of excellent educational and creative software for children, and for beginners of any age.

Proprietary

=> ↺ With Resara Server 1.1 Release Comes a Real Alternative to Active Directory and Novell

• On January 15th, 2012, Resara LLC released the much awaited 1.1 version of Resara Server – the hassle-free Linux domain controller based on Samba4. This is the biggest release since 1.0 was launched in March of 2011, and offers features like multi-server replication and load-balancing, dynamic DNS updates, a new installable ISO, and many other new features and refinements. This release makes Resara Server even easier to install and manage, and a great fit for small businesses, chain offices, and large corporations.

=> ↺ Opera 11.61 for UNIX changelog

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ From Zero to OpenVPN in 30 Minutes

=> ↺ Optimising Website Performance on Apache with Cache Control Settings

=> ↺ Object and Camera Path Tracking in Blender – “Monkey See Monkey Do”

=> ↺ Ubuntu to feature command line shortcuts

=> ↺ VBoxHeadless – Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.1 On A Headless Ubuntu 11.10 Server

=> ↺ How to Browse From the Linux Terminal With W3M

Games

=> ↺ Desura goes open source as Desurium

• The creators of the Desura digital distribution platform have made a surprise announcement that should help differentiate the software from the pack: it’s now available under an open source licence.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

=> ↺ Digia: Committed To Qt, Will Take “Extremely Active Role”

• In an email to Phoronix, Digia has clarified their Qt Commercial releases and further affirmed their commitment to the public Qt Project.

• Katherine Barrios, the head of global marketing at Digia, fired off an email to Phoronix on Monday. She sought to clarify Digia’s Qt Commercial releases and to make it known to Phoronix readers that they are committed the community project built around the LGPL version of the Qt tool-kit.

=> ↺ fine tuning the trajectory

• One of the most significant results of all the pondering in relative silence is this: My role within KDE and my relationship to the F/OSS community is going to be changing this year in fairly significant ways.

• I will be writing more on this over the course of the week, culminating in an announcement on Friday that I hope you will find as exciting as I do.

GNOME Desktop

=> ↺ Cinnamon fork of GNOME Shell gets stable release

• Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project’s fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable by Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre. Created last year to streamline the Mint developers’ changes to the GNOME 3 environment, the Cinnamon fork brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell. Among the enhancements in the stable version is easier customisation through a “Cinnamon Settings” tool which includes, for example, the ability to set the date format for the calendar applet and change panel launchers’ icons.

=> ↺ Cinnamon Fork Of GNOME Shell Is Tasty At v1.2

• Cinnamon, the fork of the GNOME 3.x Shell by Linux Mint developers to make it more like the GNOME2 desktop, is now at version 1.2. This latest stable, major release does bring some tasty changes.

=> ↺ Cinnamon 1.2 Released With Desktop Effects, Multiple Layouts, More

=> ↺ Customize your Cinnamon desktop with Javascript

=> ↺ Cinnamon 1.2: The New Linux Desktop Is Now Officially Stable

• Late last month the Linux Mint developers announced that they were working on a brand-new desktop environment designed to offer an alternative to the controversial GNOME 3, and on Monday they officially released the first stable version of the software.

Distributions

=> ↺ REMnux 3 review – a treasure chest for the malware-curious

• Analyzing and reverse engineering malware is a difficult task, which should be meticulously done in an isolated environment with specialized tools. In the last few years an interesting Linux distribution has surfaced with the aim to bring malware analysis to the masses. REMnux is the brainchild of security consultant Lenny Zeltser, who recently announced version 3 of his specialized Linux distribution, full of open source tools for analyzing and reverse engineering Flash malware, obfuscated JavaScript, shell code, malicious PDF files, and so on.

• Zeltser makes the REMnux 3 release available as a VMware virtual appliance and as an ISO image of a Live CD. The idea is to run the distribution in a virtual machine and then analyze the malware in its isolated environment. REMnux 3 is a trimmed-down version of Ubuntu 11.10 with a hand-picked treasure chest of useful malware analysis tools and is using LXDE as its lightweight desktop environment.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

=> financial decision delayed again ↺ Mandriva’s financial decision delayed again

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Numecent unveils Application Jukebox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Virtualization 3.0

• Saves virtualisation resources by reducing the size of desktop images, number of desktop images

• Parent company of Endeavors Technologies, Numecent has released new Application Jukebox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 in line.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu rips up drop-down menus

• By Barry Collins Ubuntu is set to replace the 30-year-old computer menu system with a “Head-Up Display” that allows users to simply type or speak menu commands.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Is Killing The Menu Bar With New Tech That Is Part Alfred, Part Siri

=> ↺ Ubuntu Announces A Heads-Up Display For 12.04

• Mark Shuttleworth has announced a “heads-up display” that Canonical has been working on for its initial debut to be made with the release of the 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release.

• The Ubuntu plan is to eventually have this heads-up display, which was developed in-house, to “ultimately replace menus in Unity applications.” The Ubuntu HUD is about a way for the user to express their intent and to then have the HUD respond appropriately based upon the interpreted intent.

=> ↺ Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu.

• The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70′s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years.

=> ↺ Beyond the desktop: Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years.

• Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70?s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years. We can do much better!” This new interface, which will first appear as a beta in April’s Ubuntu 12.04 release, is called Head-Up Display.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Linux’s New ‘HUD’ Interface Will Do Away with Menus

• A new kind of interface is coming to Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” that will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications and recognize voice commands.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Boxee Live TV first impressions

• The moment our Boxee Live TV adapter arrived, we connected it to our Boxee Box and investigated its capabilities. The screenshots below demonstrate Boxee Live TV’s setup, channel editing, watching broadcast HDTV channels, and more.

=> ↺ Get the Perfect Cup of Java with a DIY Linux-Powered Coffee Roaster

• If you’re a Linux user and just happen to have a bread machine laying around, you can make your very own Linux-powered Corretto Roaster. Now you can use your favorite distro to roast your own beans before consuming your java.

Phones

Android

=> ↺ CyanogenMod May Start Selling Forbidden Android Fruit

• The makers of CyanogenMod Android firmware may be readying an app store to sell software for rooted Android phones, including wares that have been banned from the Android Market. Rooting an Android phone gives the user a new level of control over the device, though it’s generally frowned upon by phone makers and carriers, and only a very small portion of buyers pursue the operation.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

=> ↺ Rugged, biometric smartphone and tablet run ICS on OMAP 4 CPUs

• Elektrobit (EB) and startup Raptor Identification Systems (Raptor ID) announced two ruggedized biometric devices that run Android 4.0 on TI’s dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4460. Raptor ID’s RaptorOne smartphone offers a four-inch touchscreen; the RaptorPad tablet features a seven-inch display; and both offer iris cameras, fingerprint scanners, and CAC/smartcard readers.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Application Development: Top 13 New Open-Source Projects of 2011

=> ↺ Liferay’s Open Source Community Thrives

• If you were wondering if growth and interest in open source was just hype, Liferay provided a little additional evidence today that open source is thriving. The open source portal maker has announced its community expanded to 56,000 members in 2011 — an almost 40% increase over the previous year.

Events

=> ↺ Looking Back on SCALE 10x

• A lot of things change in 10 years. Many of the Linux conferences we were going to in 2002 are no longer around, but the Southern California Linux Expo has not only survived – it’s grown into a major event for anybody interested in Linux. Whether you’re brand-new to Linux or using Linux to power cloud solutions, SCALE 10x had something for everybody.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla to Crowdsource the State of the Union with Multilingual Subtitles

• If you haven’t tried language translation technology in a few years, it’s worth revisiting it. As we covered here, it’s become much easier to automate multilingual websites, there are very useful translation programs for mobile phones that you can use to communicate in foreign languages on the fly, and open source machine translation tools are flourishing. So it’s notable that Mozilla will help deliver Tuesday’s U.S. State of the Union Address from President Barrack Obama in multiple languages worldwide, translated in real time.

Databases

=> ↺ Joomla content management gets multi-database support

• The newly released edition of the Joomla open source content management system now comes with a new search engine, and can use Microsoft SQL Server or PostGreSQL, in addition to MySQL.

=> ↺ Joomla 2.5 courts corporate, enterprise users

• Joomla is extending support beyond MySQL to increase its penetration in businesses and enterprises.

• The upgraded 2.5 version of the content management system (CMS), which becomes available on Jan. 24, offers multi-database support, notably Microsoft SQL Server out of the gate, and Oracle support in the near future, as well as an enhanced natural language search engine and automatic notification and delivery of updates and extensions.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ JavaFX makes it across platform to Linux

• A new Developer Preview of JavaFX 2.1 has been released by Oracle and now the cross platform user interface toolkit is available to download for Linux. When JavaFX 2.0 was released as a beta at the end of May 2011, many developers noted that the cross platform toolkit only ran on Windows. The problem was partly resolved with the release of JavaFX 2.0, which added Mac OS X support, but Linux support was still missing in action.

CMS

=> ↺ Why government needs open source

• The tough economic climate has forced a radical rethink on public sector IT procurement, with decision-makers now on the look-out for more efficient, cost-effective solutions.

=> ↺ Acquia Announces Two New Board Members

Semi-Open Source

=> ↺ Lynden Uses FuseSource’s Enterprise-Class Distributions of Open Source Integration and Messaging Solutions to Improve Shipment Tracking and Reporting for High Volume Customers

=> ↺ Gorilla Logic Opens New York, Bangalore Offices

• The company–which is known for its open source, testing tools for Flex, iPhone, and Android–said it also has moved to its new headquarters in Boulder.

Project Releases

=> ↺ Mozilla releases version 0.1 of the Rust language and compiler

• Mozilla has released the first public version of the compiler and development tools for the Rust language, which is described as “a safe, concurrent, practical language”. According to the announcement, this first release is targeted at “early adopters and language enthusiasts” and has been described by the developers as “nifty, but it will still eat your laundry”. Rust is a programming language and open source toolkit aimed at the development of client and server programs.

=> ↺ Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++

=> ↺ Google Brings Open Source to the Sky – Why Now?

• One of the very first things that I ever downloaded onto my Android phone was Google Sky. It’s fantastic app the lets you just point your phone at a section of the sky to see a map overlay of the stars/constellation above.

=> ↺ GDB 7.4 released

• Release 7.4 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.

Licensing

=> ↺ How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers

• For most of the 2000s, copyleft licenses (in particular the GPLv2) were the most popular choice for new open source projects. In the last few years, developers and companies seem to be trending away from the GPL in favor of permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind that, does it impact your business and what licenses should you choose for new projects? Let’s take a look.

• The GPL is in decline, sort of. As Matthew Aslett reported last year, the number of projects using the GPL family has increased in real terms.

• However, the usage of the GPL as a percent of all open source projects is in decline. According to Aslett, in 2008 the GPL family was 70 percent of licenses. As of December of 2011, it was 57 percent. Clearly, there is a trend at least for now towards permissive licenses.

=> ↺ A permissive bubble?

• I remembered this after reading two articles by Matthew Aslett – “On the continuing decline on the GPL” and “The future of commercial open source business strategies“. The data this research is based on appears to me mostly correct, and I couldn’t find fatal logic flaws in them. However, my logic still couldn’t agree with some of the conclusions, and tended to see other in a different light. Something have to be wrong here.

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Cambridge University joins Lilly’s open-source discovery platform

• The University of Cambridge in the UK has become the latest academic institution to sign up to an open-source drug discovery programme set up by Eli Lilly.

• The Open Innovation Drug Discovery Platform (formerly known as PD2) was set up by Lilly in an attempt to overcome the challenges posed by rising costs and declining productivity in pharma R&D by increasing its interactions with academia.

=> ↺ Aero-engineers debut open-source fluid dynamics design application

• Each fall at technical universities across the world, a new crop of aeronautical and astronautical engineering graduate students settle in for the work that will consume them for the next several years. For many, their first experience in these early months is not with titanium or aluminum or advanced carbon-fiber materials that are the stuff of airplanes, but with computer code.

Programming

=> ↺ From Old To New Python GTK

• I am a pretty terrible programmer. Anyone who has read my code can see that. Unfortunately, I tend to have lots of ideas about how we can use technology in different ways, hence why I write some code. Examples of this have included Lernid, Acire, RaccoonShow, and Jokosher.

=> ↺ Google App Inventor Resurrected as Open Source Project

=> ↺ Open source Ruby on Rails framework gets 3.2 point release

=> ↺ Ruby on Rails 3.2 aids the developers

• Those who maintain Ruby on Rails have released a new version of their popular open-source Web application development framework, one that features a number of improvements to help developers build applications more quickly.

• First released in 2004, Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework for rapidly assembling Web pages based on the Ruby scripting language. This is the first major release of the open-source package since version 3.1 was released last August.

=> ↺ Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Election preview: The Oval Office and the tech agenda

• In 2006, Romney won applause from open-source advocates by appointing Louis Gutierrez as state CIO and using the occasion to emphasize his support for an ongoing project to implement OASIS’ OpenDocument Format (ODF) in state government.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Julian Assange is set to host his own TV show focusing on “the world tomorrow”

• Despite an extradition to Sweden hanging over his head, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to host his very own TV show, which will see him interview “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” from around the world.

=> ↺ HTC Partners With IBM in Enterprise Initiative

=> ↺ HTC Catches the Train

• HTC is also fighting the battle from one individual to the next by opening the boot-loader to run GNU/Linux or other stuff for geeks.

Security

=> ↺ Chrome 16 update closes security holes

=> ↺ Linux Vendors Rush to Patch Privilege Escalation Flaw After Root Exploits Emerge

Finance

=> ↺ Gretchen Morgenson on Corporate Clout in Washington

• Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top.

Privacy

=> ↺ Decreasing America’s Dependence on Google.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Supreme Court holds warrantless GPS tracking unconstitutional

• All nine justices of the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police officers violated the Fourth Amendment rule against unreasonable search and seizure when they attached a GPS device to a suspect’s car and tracked it for 28 days without a warrant. But the court was split down the middle on the reasoning. Four justices focused on the physical trespass that occurred when the police attached the device, four focused on the violation of the suspect’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and the final justice, Sonia Sotomayor, endorsed both theories.

=> ↺ Fourth Amendment Lives? Supreme Court Says GPS Monitoring Is A Search That May Require Warrant [Updated]

=> ↺ Rand Paul’s Pat-Down Standoff With TSA in Nashville Ends

• Sen. Rand Paul told his communications director this morning he was being detained by TSA at the Nashville airport.

• The Twitter account associated with Paul staffer Moira Bagley, @moirabagley, tweeted around 10 a.m., ET, “Just got a call from @senrandpaul. He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville.”

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Adding Your DNA To A Biobank Is A Noble Move — But Is It A Wise One?

• Anything that brings us closer to understanding and treating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people is obviously to be welcomed. But DNA is special: for a start, it is unique for each of us (even “identical” twins seem to have different DNA.) This has made DNA of particular interest to the police, since it appears to offer a perfect way for identifying those at a crime scene (not necessarily the perpetrators, of course.) Which raises the question: what happens when the police realize that biobanks offer a great way to get DNA they can’t obtain in the usual ways?

=> ↺ Ownership Mentality: Art Gallery Prohibits Sketching

• I’ve always been a bit baffled by No Photography signs in museums and art galleries. Presumably they exist to make the exhibits more exclusive and attractive, but that misses the point of why people visit museums: they want to see these things in person, which is a vastly different experience from simply knowing what they look like. Nobody has ever seen a photo of a dinosaur skeleton or Michelangelo’s David and thought “oh good, now I don’t need to go see that for real.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ Closing Megaupload unlikely to even slow piracy down

• The U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies has taken down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload. So, since Megaupload has been shut down, Internet piracy has gone down significantly, right? Right? Well, probably not, NPD market researcher Russ Crupnick said, “Only about 3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience relied on digital storage for legitimate purposes or piracy in the third quarter.”

• So where is the file piracy going on? The same place it always has been: over BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer software powered networks. According to Crupnick, “Peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, which have little central coordination and are harder to stop, still have about three times as much usage among consumers as digital lockers.”

=> ↺ Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers

• Julian Sanchez has an excellent piece in Ars Technica which takes a look at the claim that content creators are being discouraged from creative pursuits due to online piracy – a claim that has fueled the recently stalled anti-piracy legislation in congress.

• Whether SOPA and PIPA would have actually worked is an open question, but whether they were ever even necessary to begin with is even more important.

=> ↺ Petition Asks White House to Probe MPAA’s Chris Dodd Over Warning

• More than 5,000 signees are asking the White House to investigate comments made by MPAA chief executive Chris Dodd, who warned in an exclusive interview with Fox News that politicians who failed to back anti-piracy legislation could see Hollywood dollars dry up.

=> ↺ How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA

• Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

=> ↺ Canada’s bid to join TPP threatens access for blind, print disabled

• There is a danger that, in Canada’s quest to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), Canada may cede whatever leadership it has gained in the field of progressive copyright provisions. Canada’s Bill C-11, the proposed “Copyright Modernization Act”, includes provisions that would allow people who are blind and print disabled to circumvent Technological Protection Measures(TPMs) to access works (s. 41.16). These provisions, while they have been criticized as not going far enough, at the same time could put Canada on the map as being among the first to enact such provisions for the benefit of the blind and print disabled. Under the last leaked text of the American proposal for the TPP, these types of provisions would not be allowed as a permanent exception. The proposal enumerates (Art. 4, 9 (d)) the various possible permanent exceptions to TPM infringement, and these do not include a specific exception for the benefit of people who are blind and print disabled. The proposed TPP allows for temporary exceptions, which could include an exception for the blind and print disabled, but these would have to be subject to review or renewal every 3 years (Art. 4, 9(d)(viii)). Bill C-11 does not provide for such a review/renewal process.

=> ↺ Full Interview: Cory Doctorow on the War on General Computing

• The black outs of Dark Wednesday are over and the United States Congress has listened, shelving the contentious anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA indefinitely. Now, you would think that the internet was finally safe from corporate control. Huzzah! Bring on the cat gifs!

=> ↺ Creative America Restocks… Hires Former DHS/ICE Spokesperson

• We’ve talked plenty of times about CreativeAmerica, the astroturf group that keeps pretending that it’s a “grassroots” group. It was setup mainly to push for SOPA/PIPA in an attempt to pretend that “normal people” rather than just Hollywood fatcats supports SOPA/PIPA. Just one problem: it was so obviously run by Hollywood fatcats that no one ever took it seriously. It was slickly produced, was backed by the big studios, and all the big movie studios promoted it directly as well. Its executive director, Mike Nugent, came directly from Disney, where he was the company’s Senior VP of anti-piracy. Meanwhile, its “communications director,” Craig Hoffman came straight from… you guessed it… the MPAA. And before that he worked at Warner Bros. Grassroots!

=> ↺ Bloggers in China sound off on SOPA blackout

• Watching from China, where web censorship is practically a national hallmark, some can’t help but smirk and crack jokes about the controversy raging over Internet freedom in the U.S.

• “Now the U.S. government is copying us and starting to build their own firewall,” wrote one micro-blogger, relating China’s chief censorship tool to the U.S. plan to block sites that trade in pirated material.

• The Relevant Organs, an anonymous Twitter account (presumably) pretending to be the voice of the Chinese communist leadership, quipped: “Don’t understand the hoopla over Wikipedia blackout in the U.S. today. We blacked it out here years ago. Where are OUR hugs?”

• Humor aside, the brouhaha has generated some strong opinions in the country Google fled, not the least because opponents of the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills are conjuring Chinese web censorship to promote their case.

=> ↺ Dan Bull Raps About How Megaupload Takedown Screws Indie Artists Like Him

• Independent musician Dan Bull, who we’ve written about a number of times, is one of many independent artists who used Megaupload on purpose, to distribute his own album. All of the links out there to download his album

=> ↺ Megaupload Indictment Shows That Google Does Actively Police Against Its Ads Showing Near Infringement

=> ↺ Meganomics

• The Megaupload case has important legal implications. Mike Masnick has a very good rundown, but let’s focus on two. The case will certainly challenge the scope of the “safe harbor” from liability afforded online storage providers—a very important issue in an era of cheap, ubiquitous cloud services. It will also be a front in the government’s (and, more particularly, MPAA’s) push to shift from an ex post model of enforcement, involving notification and takedown requests when infringing content is identified, to an ex ante model based on the surveillance and filtering of user activity. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is also fundamentally at stake in SOPA, and raises all the same censorship and free speech issues. Holding Megaupload liable for failing to monitor and filter user activity for infringement, for example, would compel monitoring across a wide range of web services, from search to social media. And that would mark a very fundamental shift in the freedoms associated with the Internet. SOPA and the Megaupload case are part of this long game.

=> ↺ Jonathan Coulton Destroys The Rationale Behind The Megaupload Seizure With A Single Tweet; Follows Up With Epic Blog Post

=> ↺ Megaupload Shutdown Means Other Companies Turning Off Useful Services

=> ↺ Hollywood regroups after losing battle over anti-piracy bills

=> ↺ Hollywood Unions: Now That You Lying Hacking Thieves Have Won, Can We Set A New Conciliatory Tone?

=> ↺ Bill Maher Comes Out In Support Of SOPA/PIPA Despite Knowing Nothing About The Bills

=> ↺ The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

• It’s been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down. Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads. A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don’t even have access to their own files anymore.

• This blog post isn’t about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There’s plenty of debate going on about that, and it’s something that I’m not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let’s be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you’re one of those people, and you’re angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

ACTA

=> ↺ Blocking The Net ‘Not The European Option’ — EU Commissioner Reding

=> ↺ Polish government defends support for copyright treaty that sparked Internet attacks

• Polish officials vowed Monday to stick to plans to sign an international copyright treaty that has outraged Internet activists and prompted an attack on government websites.

• A government minister, Michal Boni, defended the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. He said that signing the international treaty would not hamper Internet usage and that Poland will sign it on Thursday, as planned.

=> ↺ Polish Government’s Plan To Sign ACTA Gets The SOPA Treatment

• We received an amusing email over the weekend chiding us for never having covered ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Of course, we’ve actually written 247 articles that mention ACTA (yes, I just counted). It seems that among some folks who just joined the “worry about copyright legislation” bandwagon, they’ve just discovered ACTA as well. ACTA stories are quickly taking over the SOPA channel on Reddit. I’m happy that more people are coming around to these issues, but they might want to take some time to actually read up on things before they start screaming. For example, someone there put together a White House petition to stop ACTA, without even acknowledging that the US government already signed ACTA back in September.

• The petition also ignores the most obvious line of attack for the US’s participation: the questions about whether or not ACTA really qualifies as an “executive agreement.” Instead, it takes that as granted, ignoring (or, more likely, simply not knowing) that there are serious constitutional questions about the claim that this is an executive agreement — and that Senator Ron Wyden has already asked the White House to justify the claims that it’s an executive agreement, rather than a treaty. Also, it’s worth noting that other countries, including the EU, have already claimed that ACTA is a binding treaty, even as the US continues to deny that fact.

=> ↺ ACTA: Letter to the EU Parliament Development Committee

• Today, La Quadrature du Net sent a letter to the Members of the Development committee of the European Parliament. All citizens should also call on the committee to carefully consider the many serious issues raised by ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement aimed at establishing extremist standards in copyright, patent and trademarks worldwide.

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