● 06.09.09

● Links 09/06/2009: Fedora 11 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Red Hat got publicity in the market share place. Being called “Linux” on Television, they watched as the term “Linux” as an operating system was spread on Television. And they continue to do so.

• That should of been GNU/Linux, that should have been Stallman watching with the Red Hat developers.

• Content creation used to be the stronghold of Apple and it’s OSX operating system, but recently there have been signs that content producers are more and more attracted to Linux. What made me realize that creative software on Linux had made it with the content creation crowd is this poll on the DAZ Studio forums: more than 150 Daz Studio users would like to see a Linux version.

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• To conclude I would say that content producers like the idea of Linux: its stable, comes with a lot of free creative software and do not require much administration after the machine is installed. It is also much cheaper to purchase a Linux desktop that an Apple Mac, but what currently let these users down is the lack of intuitive, easy to use and expendable creative software in some fields.

• And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bogacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux.

• At the same time you don’t need to know that Google runs Linux, that most top Web sites run Apache servers under Linux, or that your office may be running Linux right now, while what looks like your Windows desktop is actually a virtualizer.

• Summary: Editorial: The NILFS Filesystem Distributions announced last week: · OpenSolaris 2009.06 Is Here · grml 2009.05 Improves USB Installation · Elive 1.9.28 Fixes Macbook Boot Issue · Untangle Gateway 6.2.0 Released

• Asked if Linux could do as good a job in a Netbook as Microsoft XP, ARM’s East replies: “Today the Linux world is not as good as Microsoft from the point of view of the user, but it’s getting rapidly better. So it will get to be as good as Microsoft and, when that happens, the genie will be out of the bottle. Because Linux is much more cost-effective than Microsoft, people will ask: ‘Why do we use Microsoft?’”

Desktop

• And, I must add, have it your way at a price almost anyone can afford. The new Linux netbooks will crowd the $100 price barrier. And, as Dell just showed with its Inspiron 15n and Ubuntu Linux you can have a full-powered Linux laptop for $299.

• Or, as some of my readers have pointed out, you can jazz it up and still be under $500. “I bumped it up to a core 2 duo 2.0GHz processor and 4GB RAM for $459. Now that’s a pretty sweet laptop for under $500.”

• Exactly.

• And that’s why, if you want to save money and still have a great computer, you’ll want to consider Linux. For the price, you simply can’t beat it.

• Business thrives on mobile computing. And with mobile computing comes a need for solid, reliable, secure hardware. What better match for the on the go professional than a laptop with the power to handle any task, an operating system secure enough to work on the road, and an infrastructure offering multiple lines of support. The System 76 Pangolin Performance laptop is all that and more.

Server

• That said, all Unix variants (and even Linux distributions) do differ a lot in the locations and format of their configuration files, which is what Webmin is primarily focused on managing. So there is still quite some work involved in supporting new operating systems.

• Companies are growing more comfortable with the concept of open source development, but they don’t always approach it in the same way. Some try to build communities; some try to work in-house first then slowly branch out, and some just jump in with both feet and swim in the deep end from day one.

Kernel Space

• There is hope for Ubuntu users with Intel graphics. As it appears, the current 2D drivers solve most of the recent graphics problems with Intel chips, according to Ubuntu developer Bryce Harrington in a developer mailing list. Jaunty users should profit it from them as well.

• LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s brand new conference intended to draw “the best and brightest…including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts,” is still several months away. What isn’t several months away, however, is the deadline for Early Bird registration — if you want to catch that worm, you’ll have to get to running.

• The first annual LinuxCon, to be held in Portland, Oregon, will run from September 21 – 23, immediately before the second annual Linux Plumber’s Conference, to be held September 23 – 25. The conference is one of, if not the, first Linux Foundation conferences to feature an open invitation to all Linux users — most of the foundation’s events are by invitation only.

• The Linux Foundation has added another member to the fold. mimio, creator of the only interactive teaching platform available for Linux, joined the foundation and plans to “use popular tools such as the ‘App Checker’ to ease code development as it makes Linux applications more portable than ever before.” Having educational software and appliance vendors on the membership roster of the Linux Foundation is a terrific way to reinforce that open source technology is indeed compatible with the needs of educators and learning institutions.

• After a year-and-a-half’s worth of work, Intel hacker Sarah Sharp announced that Linux will be the first operating system supporting USB 3.0.

• Linux kernel “Geekess” Sarah Sharp announced in her blog of June 7 that the first groundbreaking driver for USB 3.0 devices are now available. The driver supports the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) for the new USB 3.0 standard.

Applications

• It is still in alpha so it should only be used for testing for now. The Sourceforge wiki for Freeplane says “Our main goals for Freeplane are: Better Mind Map editor than FreeMind”.

• Now Certified: Sims 3

• We are pleased to announce the release of Cedega 7.3 with day and date support for The Sims 3. With Cedega 7.3, Members don’t have to wait to play one of 2009′s most anticipated games, you can play on Launch Day!

• Today, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we added a brief news about Alien-GUI which is an interesting software developed to grafically (and automatically) convert tar, deb in RPM.

KDE

• The rumour of KDE on Windows stopping is not true and just harms our project. This clearly was not the intent of the blog post and we hope those reports will be corrected. At this point we also want to thank Christian for all the hard work he has done, for fixing bugs, making packages and of course also for making the platform accepted by KDE developers.

• The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia’s Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

• The other day I blogged about creating a shared “meta” brand we could all use to amplify our combined marketing weight. Here are a few clarifications and comments based on reading feedback here and elsewhere.

• It’s Not About Logos

• Some people thought I was talking about logos. Logos are certainly a usual (though not inviolable) part of branding, but they aren’t the totality of successful branding. As such, the idea is really not about logos, though some logo work may happen. For instance, integrating the downstream logo (if that’s how they do things) into a wallpaper or elsewhere may occur. That would be a way to satisfy and align with the distributor’s practices, but it’s not what creates or destroys the shared brand image.

• For as long as the personal computer has existed, users have championed their favorite software. But FOSS users are often contributors to their favorite software and tend to have a larger stake in it. Consequently, FOSS users can be much more fanatical about software than proprietary users. The result is endless flame wars — for instance, vi vs. emacs or GNOME vs. KDE, or free software vs. open source.

Distributions

• Team Tiny Core is pleased to announce the release of Tiny Core V2.0 and introducing MicroCore a 7MB no X environment iso based on Tiny Core

• Only eight days after the fourth release candidate was made available for testing, Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the final release of Tiny Core Linux 2.0 and Micro Core Linux 2.0. Tiny Core is only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6.29.1 Linux kernel. Micro Core is a new 7 MB separate ISO that’s based on the same core as Tiny Core, but does not include the X environment.

• After some time in the making, the Source Mage Cauldron team would like to present you with the 0.10.0 stable ISO! This is the latest stable ISO release for installing Source Mage GNU/Linux. It comes with many improvements over the previous 0.9.6 series of ISOs.

• We are pleased to announce that Untangle 6.2 is now available for download. Highlights of the release are our new multiWAN services: WAN Balancer and WAN Failover. Also included in this release is Ad Blocker, for filtering out banner advertisements.

xPUD

• The xPUD developers have announced the release of version 0.9 of xPUD, a fast, lightweight, Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a simple web-based user interface. The new release includes several improvements and new features, including an updated Wi-Fi and Ethernet network manager.

• We’re proud to announce a new version of xPUD, a small and fast Linux with easy-to-use user interface, is now released. Version 0.9 is full of improvements and exciting new features.

Red Hat

• Linux distributor Red Hat and its affiliated Fedora Project, which creates the development release that eventually becomes Red Hat’s commercially supported Enterprise Linux distro, have gone one louder this morning with the release of Fedora 11.

• The new release has incremental improvements to lots of features, much as prior Linuxes have had, and the fact that there are no earth-shattering feature changes is really a testament to the fact that the Linux kernel and its related systems software and application stack (yes, I know Linux is not an operating system, strictly speaking, but to some ways of thinking, neither is Windows) has become a mature and credible alternative to Windows and Unix. Even on laptops and desktops.

• The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT – News) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system. The community’s eleventh release includes the broadest feature set to date, spotlights developments in software management and sound, improves key virtualization components and introduces Fedora Community, a portal project beta.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the world’s largest independent tire and wheel retailer Discount Tire Company has achieved success with a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite for its rapidly growing e-commerce business. With Red Hat solutions, Discount Tire has experienced increased performance, reliability, staff productivity and scalability for its critical IT infrastructure.

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Server is a fast, free, no-frills Linux distribution that fills a niche between utilitarian Debian and the GUI-driven and, some would argue, over-featured Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• In our business transactions benchmarking tests, Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 9.0.4 was nearly as fast as the closest Linux cousin we’ve reviewed recently, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

• UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) for Karmic Koala took place this year, between the 25th and 29th of May, in Barcelona, Spain. There were 270 blueprints that needed to be discussed during the summit, like the new professional look of Plymouth (an application that takes care of the graphical boot animation) for Karmic Koala, which will not become reality very soon. However, some of the ideas discussed at UDS will be implemented in the next version of the Ubuntu operating system, due for release in late October 2009. One of these was the “grub2-as-default” discussion, and Colin Watson had the pleasure to announce last night that GRUB 2 would definitely be the default boot loader in Ubuntu 9.10.

• Canonical’s Scott James Remnant has now outlined more on their plans for the Ubuntu boot performance targets with Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 LTS. The main areas that developers will be working on is speeding up the X Server start-up process and improving initramfs.

• Starting with Ubuntu 9.10 (and beginning with tomorrow’s daily CD builds), GRUB2 will be the default boot-loader on new Ubuntu installations. GRUB2 will bring internationalization support, support for newer systems, and many other improvements considering this GNU boot-loader has been in development for a number of years.

Devices/Embedded

• We’ll admit it, we expected to be knee-deep in Android gear by now. However, it seems like the consumer electronics industry wanted to build more mature products around versions 1.5 and 2.0 of Google’s open source OS instead. Regardless, we’re in the thick of it now having just witnessed a deluge of Android-based smartbooks / netbooks (expected before October) at Computex and Google’s own announcement that at least 18 new Android handsets will launch this year.

Phones

• Atmel is sampling a faster version of its low-power ARM926EJ-S-based processor, offered with a free Linux BSP. The SAM9G10 ramps up to a 266MHz clock rate compared to the SAM9261-S’s 188MHz, boosts bus frequency to 133MHz, up from 94MHz, and consumes only 100mW in full-power mode, claims the company.

• Perhaps the most significant mobile platform to appear on the scene since Mr. Jobs and his team at Apple introduced the iPhone, Google’s Android offers a very compelling platform for cellular providers, mobile developers and end-users.

• Hping is open-source network testing software, and some time ago one our software gurus compiled a version of Hping to run on the Sharp Zaurus, which is a fairly ancient Linux based mobile device.

Sub-notebooks

• Freescale and Qualcomm have coined the term smartbook to describe Linux+ARM systems, ditching Atom+Windows for good.

• We loved the Xandros based OS the Asus put on the original Eee PC for its simplicity and direct access to applications. Likewise Acer’s version of Linpus, installed on the Linux versions of its Aspire One netbook. For 90 per cent of the tasks anyone’s likely to perform on a netbook, they’re spot on and allow the machines to boot up in under 20 seconds.

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• Instant messenging is also integrated, but only supports Google Talk, Jabber and Salut. The exclusion of Skype and MSN will certainly get in the way for some users. There’s no word processor as standard, but Abiword is in the repositories – but that’s about it. There’s no sign of OpenOffice and a lot of other common software.

• The interface is really nice to use, but we can’t help but feel teased as this is from a complete product. Yet another distribution to keep an eye on, but not really ready for use.

• Founder and former CEO of Netvibes Tariq Krim is moving forward with his ambitious Jolicloud project, looking to build a better operating system for web workers with netbooks (or smartbooks or cloud computers, whichever term you prefer). A couple of days ago, we got a couple of exclusive screenshots from the team, and just a day after the startup started sending out a handful of invite codes for early adopters who wanted to get a peak at the alpha developer release. I also got hold of one and have been using Jolicloud on my Acer Aspire ONE for about four days now. These are my initial findings.

• I’m a little tongue-in-cheek with my post title, but watching the video of Kinpo’s Android tablet raises a good question about UMPCs in general. Why shoehorn a desktop operating system onto a mobile device? Obvious answers to that question mainly involve applications: support, availability, compatibility, and the like. The downsides are generally worse battery life due to X86 processors and inefficient user interfaces. That particular issue is lessening with Intel’s next-genration Atom platform in the works though.

• While I installed and run the netbook version of Ubuntu, I typically always switch over to ‘Classic Desktop’ mode (under Preferences and Switch Desktop Mode in either UNR or desktop mode). This offers an environment that’s familiar to my desktop and notebook Ubuntu, and also, I believe, offers a more advanced experience, with multiple workspaces and, after some minor tweaking, access to more tools and applications.

• Certainly, odd combinations of hardware, software and service providers were everywhere at Computex. In addition to the traditional systems consumers have known for years — those that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system on top of an Intel chip — computer makers showed off devices that rely on glorified cellphone chips and Google’s Android operating system.

• Elektrobit Corp. (EB) demonstrated a cellular-voice-enabled mobile Internet device (MID) reference design that will run Intel’s next-generation Moorestown mobile processor on the “Moblin v2 for MIDs” stack sometime next year. Meanwhile, Red Flag (Midinux) and Move Netorks (Media Player plug-in) announced support for Moorestown/Moblin MIDs.

• BenQ is readying a netbook boasting an 11.6-inch display, optional HSPA, “eight hour” battery, and the largest (500GB) HDD (hard disk drive) we’ve heard of. In addition to offering the “Joybook Lite U121 Eco” for Linux and Windows XP, BenQ also announced an upcoming Android netbook.

• Linpus is one of several Linux distributions that developers are reworking to run on top of Intel’s Moblin V2. Here is Linpus Linux Lite with the Moblin interface running on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook. Linpus also showed a Moblin version with a different Linpus user interface.

• What should really terrify Microsoft, though, is not Linux but … yes, Google. Last week at a computer trade show in Taiwan, Asus and Acer revealed that they’re working on launching netbooks that run on Android, the free operating system Google originally created for cellphones.

Free Software/Open Source

• The shift among local organizations toward open source software (OSS) is driving more IT professionals to undergo additional training to equip themselves with the right skills.

• For example, Yuma Tejima, telecom manager for Asia at Genesys Conferencing, was keen on the Certificate of Performance in Enterprise Linux Administration (Copela) because his employer was preparing to move from SCO to the Red Hat Linux platform.

• Now this is, after 5 minutes of fiddling with pretty much every toolbar possible, how OpenOffice.org 3.01 looks on my Fedora 10:

• I just came back from OpenRemote’s one year old birthday party, a community meet-up arranged by Jean-Luc Vanhulst from Holland. We were staying outside of Amsterdam in a hotel called citizenM.

• This is where open source software offers an attractive option as it is legal and affordable.

• Copy? Go right ahead

• Unlike proprietary software, users are encouraged to use, study, copy, modify and re-distribute open source programs.

• The software can be legally used on any number of computers with no restrictions.

• In practical terms, this means users do not have to pay licensing fees for each and every user and program used.

• For businesses that want to use open source programs, they should buy those which come with comprehensive support for customisation and assistance in installing new programs or security patches for new security threats.

• Linux is one open source software used as an operating system. Many companies offer different versions to suit different needs.

• Linux is also available as a subscription service, which means that business users subscribe to a comprehensive range of services and product updates.

• At Research In Motion’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando last month, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of the BlackBerry maker candidly shared with ZDNet Asia’s sister site, Silicon.com, about touchscreen devices, CIOs and the future of the BlackBerry.

Databases

• Last week I spent a bit of time looking at The State of MySQL and mentioned some of the “outside innovation” taking place in the community. This week I’d like to focus on one of the more significant developments: XtraDB and xtrabackup, both developed by Percona.

• Now you may not have heard much about Percona before. Founded in 2006 by Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko with the goal of providing consulting for MySQL users, the company has grown in the last few years to employ some of the leading experts in MySQL and InnoDB internals. Several of the employees work on enhancing MySQL and InnoDB to meet the needs of their [paying] customers as well as the community at large. They’ve contributed numerous patches and ideas as well as writing on their popular MySQL Performance Blog and presenting at various conferences.

• Pricing was not disclosed. According to Greenplum, the software runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.2 (64-bit), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x (64-bit), CentOS Linux 5.x (64-bit) and Sun Solaris 10U5+ (64-bit). Greenplum Database 3.3 is supported on server hardware from a range of vendors, including HP, Dell, Sun and IBM.

• Monty Widenius is waiting for a call from Oracle Corp. that he knows will very likely never come.

• The Finnish software pioneer, who founded open-source database management software company MySQL AB and sold it last year to Sun Microsystems Inc. for $1 billion, has offered his services to Oracle now that his brainchild is to be nestled inside the business software giant.

Statistics

• This is a presentation by George Dafernos at the Oekonux Conference (Manchester 2009). Some interesting statistics with regards to FreeBSD developers, releases, productivity etc etc.

• The Joomla Project is excited to celebrate a remarkable benchmark in the world of open source—our 10 millionth download.

Fog Computing

• “Hadoop is going to find potential markets in any industry where there are large data sets that need complex analysis,” Mike Olson Olsen, chief executive officer and one of the four co-founders of Cloudera, the startup that’s commercializing the open-source software framework Hadoop, told me earlier today. I spoke with Olson after the Burlingame, Calif.-based company said it had raised $6 million in new Series B funding from Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.

• Eucalyptus Systems, the startup behind the open source cloud computing software, has identified its first two customers: NASA and Eli Lilly. That’s an impressive start for a company that’s barely three months old.

• Executives from Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are calling for developers to create an open source software standard for cloud computing. They showed their work on the effort—some of it still at a very early stage—at a gathering of researchers creating a test bed for cloud services.

• The trio joined with three academic research institutes to form the Open Cirrus group in July 2008, each dedicating computer servers with a total of 1,000 cores to form a distributed network of systems as a research platform. On Monday, three more research groups joined the effort—the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a R&D arm of Malaysia’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Events

• An open source development team in Portland, Oregon has released OpenConferenceWare, a sophisticated free package for processing event session proposals and displaying event schedules.

• The Central American Open-Source Software Festival [es] (ECSL09 for its initials in Spanish) will take place on June 17-21 in Estelí, Nicaragua. This will be the first opportunity for many enthusiasts of open-source and free software from across Central America to come together to share experiences, promote their projects, establish common objectives, and to find ways to work together. The schedule of events [es] includes workshops and panels where different members from communities will lead and participate in these activities.

• As in certain commercial Mainframe solutions found in the market, but often at a dissuasive price, the Cobos Project enables developers to work locally: the required source files (Cobol, CICS, DB2) are downloaded on Eclipse then reloaded on the mainframe following the intervention of the developer, who can work totally autonomously on an economical workstation.

Google

• We’ve seen plenty of awesome Firefox wallpapers here before, and I know some of you out there loved it. But since everybody’s talking about Google Chrome web browser, I decided to collect some cool and interesting Chrome wallpapers which users and fans have created. So without any more delay, here they are:

• In the previous post I discussed a workflow using Wave to author and publish a paper. In this post I want to look at the possibility of using it as a laboratory record, or more specifically as a human interface to the laboratory record. There has been much work in recent years on research portals and Virtual Research Environments. While this work will remain useful in defining use patterns and interface design my feeling is that Wave will become the environment of choice, a framework for a virtual research environment that rewrites the rules, not so much of what is possible, but of what is easy.

• OpenX has developed its ad server through the open-source developer community over the last nine years, It has already secured $20.5m (£12.7m) in two rounds of funding.

Sun

• A Linux/Solaris/BSD distribution is a whole ecosystem, and that’s one of the problems with the state of the whole thing right now. It’s got too little in common, by design, with other distributions. The sheer weight of the project, the burden of maintaining things that by all rights should have been made at least halfway automatic ages ago, falls on too few shoulders.

• The vendor launched the open-source testing tool at its annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco.

• One cannot expect from OpenSolaris what one gets from GNU/Linux; a project that has been running for a short time cannot be expected to match a much older one in terms of software offerings. With each release, OpenSolaris offers more packages.

Mozilla

• Mozilla is readying a program that will allow companies to build their own customized browsers based on the next version of Firefox, which will be out in a few weeks.

• The Mozilla Labs team has announced that in only ten short weeks since the Personas launch, the Personas community has welcomed more than 5 million downloads! The downloads have been worldwide, with approximately 60% of them coming from outside of the United States. The community has welcomed more than 13,000 designs from nearly 9,000 artists.

• Please note: This Firefox 3.5 Preview is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that most users wait for the official Firefox 3.5 release, which is coming soon.

• Students from Toronto’s Seneca College have made a stellar contribution to Firefox’s 3.5 release candidate, overhauling the infrastructure and localizing the browser to many different languages. The win-win partnership between Seneca and Mozilla has led to huge improvements in the firm’s software, and jobs for Seneca graduates.

Business

• University was recognized among the top 100 organizations in the nation by CIO magazine for its leadership in new software development models for higher education. The 22nd CIO 100 Awards recognized the IU Office of the Vice President for Information Technology (OVPIT) for its leadership in developing open source software with dozens of colleges, universities, and commercial partners.

• Information Systems have played an increasingly visible role over the past several years in improving the competitiveness of business. Integrated management software is today very often a key source of significant competitive advantage. Risks and integration costs are important barriers to all the advantages you gain from such systems. That’s why, today, few small- and medium-sized companies use ERP.

• The significance and usage of Open source platform is increasing more than before in the current recessionary times.

Government

• It’s time for the City of Hamilton to start publishing its publicly available data in an open, accessible format instead of today’s hodgepodge of closed, clunky and idiosyncratic legacy formats that are hard to find and even harder to use.

• Negotiations between the State Services Commission and Microsoft for a new, three-year software licence deal failed last month, leading to Christie, who is president of the New Zealand Open Source Society, to call on the Auditor-General to vet agencies buying Microsoft software. Christie says such agencies risk lock-in, fail to consider alternatives and become too reliant on a single multinational vendor.

Open Access

• To illustrate, here are some results based on the catalogue of Cambridge University Library which is one of the UK’s “copyright libraries” (i.e. they have a right to obtain, though not an obligation to hold, one copy of every book published in the UK). This first plot shows the numbers of publications per year up until 1960 (when the dataset ends) based on the publication date recorded in the catalogue.

• Picture the lighting and chillers of commercial buildings being controlled by a system designed in the same way as Mozilla’s Firefox — through open source, the collaborative method of developing software source code. While we’ve covered open source-based home area energy management systems, the OpenLynx project, started by Anno Scholten, vice president of business development for NovusEdge, is looking to tackle the underlying software that controls the energy consumption of massive commercial buildings.

• Today, Amanda Coolidge (British Columbia Institute of Technology) joins us and talks about what’s happening with Open Educational Resources (OER) in Africa. Down the line, she’ll be blogging about OER in other parts of the world as well. Take it away Amanda.

• Wow – the MPs’ expenses story has taken off in a way I never predicted. That’s part of the reason I’ve not been posting regularly (not that I’ve ever been a prolific blogger). But in the past month, I’ve been inundated with interview requests from all over the world. Apart from the British media, I’ve been in Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, CNN and the New York Times in the USA plus various other newspapers, TV and radio from Japan, Italy, Germany, Romania, New Zealand, Australia, Greece and Chile.

• We’ve written about free e-learning resources and tools, such as Moodle, several times here on OStatic, as well as collections of open source tutorials. Many universities are picking up on the fact that it is easy to use free, open source tools such as Moodle to provide classes online that anyone can take. U.C. Berkeley provides free online classes based on Moodle, and M.I.T. has a collection of over 1,900 free courses on its MITOpenCourseware site, many on tech topics. MITWorld also has a searchable database of free, educational videos. Here are some notable examples of classes and seminars that may be of interest to you.

Hardware

• According to the project page, Keykeriki is intended to enable “every person to verify the security level of their own keyboard transmissions, and/or demonstrate the sniffing attacks (for educational purpose only)”. Yes, “educational purposes.” In case you don’t know, keyboard sniffers allow the user to eavesdrop on what is being typed by analyzing the electromagnetic signals produced with each keystroke.

Leftovers

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Greens and IND/DEM get a boost, and PSE dwindles, but the position of the UK Conservatives could be crucial for the Telecoms Package and the future of the open Internet

• It’s been pointed out time and time again, that if a government (or a corporation) puts together a big database of information on people, that database will be abused.

• If true, this is a pretty serious escalation in the Net Neutrality wars. Someone using Comcast, please replicate the simple experiment spelled out in the article and confirm or deny the truth of it.

Copyrights

• As P2P file-sharing defendant Jammie Thomas prepares for her retrial this month, her lawyer has sough to have the main evidence against her thrown out. In its response, the recording industry says that the complaint is based “on an entirely fictional set of facts and law.”

• From July however, all this will change and PC, Mac and Linux users will be able to watch Channel 4’s complete programming history on Channel4.com.

• The GPL is a license that restores liberty to the public (otherwise suspended by copyright and patent), albeit at the expense of friction (easily surmountable by coders used to it). CC-SA is somewhat similar.

• You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions” said the Sun. “MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”

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