● 10.08.09

● Links 08/10/2009: Freedomware Introduced, Firefox 3.6 Soon in Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 2:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Available immediately, the Universal Desktop Converter is simply a USB stick that carries a version of Igel’s Linux-based firmware from its own thin client systems, plus one or more licences.

• Savage, a systems administrator at backcountry.com in West Valley City, said groups will gather mostly on Friday to discuss programming with software such as Linux or Java.

• People are actually realising that it is a great alternative to Windows and Mac OS. They are installing Linux and sticking with it. The future for Linux looks very bright and promising.

Audio/Video

• The Linux Foundation has now posted the video of my LinuxCon keynote “Regarding Clouds, Mainframes, and Desktops… and Linux” from a couple of weeks ago. You can view it on their site or see it below.

Desktop

• Thanks to PulseAudio, the Linux audio experience will become more context-aware. For example, if a video is running in one application the system should automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished.

• I also want to say that Linux is absolutely mainstream across many devices. Set-top boxes, TiVo, all these electronics are loaded with embedded Linux. So it’s just not visible. It’s not merchandized or marketed. But Linux is extremely mainstream across many, many devices today.

• Dell’s U.S. website has finally made good on a promise to re-introduce an Ubuntu desktop PC. The move should silence critics who were worried that Dell wasn’t committed to the growing Ubuntu desktop and mobile markets. Here are the details.

• Even if we look only at the traditional desktop and notebook PC market, I was given renewed optimism for ‘desktop Linux’ last week when Dell rolled out its latest Latitude notebook computers. Sure, the laptops ship with Windows as the primary OS, but they also feature an instant-on Linux option, based on SUSE Linux and Firefox browser software, that is booted and run off a separate system-on-chip with ARM processor.

• [...]

• When users must have Windows for special applications, devices or media that are not supported on Linux, they will only be reminded of the wait, hassle and frustration that a few more seconds can bring. In the meantime, Linux application and driver support continues to broaden out to cover most common tasks and activities.

• In short, the quick-boot auxiliary Linux is among the free operating system’s fastest and most direct routes to desktop respectability and market share.

• It was about six weeks ago that, frustrated by the reams of viruses that my kids unwittingly downloaded onto my home computer, I finally downloaded and installed Ubuntu Linux, after years (literally a decade) of thinking about it.

• If you are also wondering about installing Ubuntu, I would advise you to go ahead and give it a try. I am trying to convince P that he should replace Vista on his 1GB laptop with Ubuntu but, while he is interested, he is still a little hestitant to take the plunge. Maybe one day!

• You should really check it out some time. Really, you should. Plus you can even keep the OS you have installed now. It’s called dual booting, now get out there and try something new today.

Supercomputers (HPC)

• ClusterVision is a Linux cluster integrator that builds commodity HPC systems for the European market (more broadly, the entire EMEA region). The company uses hardware from a variety of manufacturers — white-box manufacturers, but also IBM and Dell — and packages the clusters with its home-grown Linux-based ClusterVisionOS and software stack. As of this week, though, ClusterVisionOS is replaced by Bright Cluster Manager, which makes ClusterVision just another reseller of the software.

• Everybody knows Linux as an open-source operating system – available today for many different hardware architectures – which has become the de facto alternative to the Redmond’s product, especially in the servers segment. Linux versus Windows, Windows versus Linux: this diatribe on which of the two is the best solution has been literally filling most of the computer forums and computer magazines. We are not going to add some fire on that already “hot” discussion, but rather analyze some real facts and take the appropriate conclusions.

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• The operating system family share rank is as follows: Operating system Family Count Share % Linux 443 88.60 % Windows 5 1.00 % Unix 22 4.40 % BSD based 1 0.20 % Mixed 29 5.80 % Totals 500 100.00 %

Server

• This article briefly introduces cloud computing platforms like Amazon EC2, on which you can rent virtual Linux® servers, and then introduces an open source MapReduce framework named Apache Hadoop, which will be built onto the virtual Linux servers to establish the cloud computing framework. However, Hadoop is not restricted to be deployed on VMs hosted by any vendor; you can also deploy it on normal Linux OS on physical machines.

• The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to host an elastic computing service that is interface-compatible with Amazon’s AWS, but can also support multiple interfaces such as Google’s AppEngine and the Sun Cloud open API. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems, will discuss this and more in a breakout session to be given at SYS-CON’s 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (GovITExpo).

Kernel Space

• Sun’s open-source ZFS file system has some amazing features. It was originally designed for Solaris and unveiled in 2005, but you’ll also find it in OpenSolaris and related distributions. In the future it may well become a popular file system to run with Linux and BSD as well.

Applications

• I have been using Chromium in Ubuntu for the past two months or so and i am already loving it! Chromuim web browser, which even have flash support enabled, has changed by a huge margin, and definitely deserves your default browser status. New updates are coming almost everyday and we have already seen how to install Chromium in Ubuntu the right way. Now it is time to theme your Chromium in Ubuntu.

• Avid downloader? You’re probably scouring the entire internet for the things you need. Whether it’s images, text files or music or something else, you could use MultiGet to manage your downloads. There’s a graphical user interface for you unlike wget which is something you run on the command line.

• This afternoon after I got home from work, I fragged my online enemies! What makes this remarkable is that I use Ubuntu Linux, and as everyone know gaming doesn’t work on Linux (tongue-in-cheek comment there). What is even more amazing is that I didn’t install an application to do this.

Desktop Environments

• While carrying the “2.28″ tag, these releases of Mutter and GNOME Shell are only to serve as previews with their code still undergoing very active development. The stable releases will not come until GNOME 3.0, which will come next March.

KDE

• You will hardly remember of me, since I’ve not being so active recently (my job takes me lots of time resources). Anyway, stay calm.. It’s been proved that knowing who I am will not make you feel any better Smiling That said it’s not about me that I want to talk but about a great coding team doing a great job with a very promising application. That application is.. imagine.. you already know since it was in the title.. It’s KGet.

• Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux: K3b, the popular open source full-featured CD, DVD, Blu-Ray burning and ripping application gathers momentum and heads towards version 2.0 after a year or so of no-growth. The last stable release, version 1.05 was out in late May 27, 2008. The good news is K3b 2.0 has been ported KDE 4 thanks to two developers from the Mandriva project.

• This is my first post intended for the planet so I should introduce myself. My name is Andrew Lake (or Jamboarder if you prefer). I grew up in Jamaica and currently live in Seattle. I’ve been a linux user since around the turn of the century but only started dabbling in KDE code about a couple years ago. Much of my limited contribution has been to the plasma project. As I learned more about the other Pillars of KDE I became more interested in doing up an app of my own. I’m especially excited about the possibilities provided by Nepomuk.

Distributions

Gentoo Family

• Gentoo, the most popular source based distribution, has turned ten years old. What benefits does a such a system provide over its binary distros? As Linux becomes more and more popular, is there still a place for source based distros?

• Newbie problem: finally, there is another note: both Emacs and VI (and respective clones) aren’t exactly the most user-friendly editors. A newbie user who has no clue how to work in Gentoo is unlikely to guess at first sight how to use either of them, while nano is pretty much the easiest thing you might find around. You can fight as much as you want about powerfulness (Emacs and VI are obviously much more powerful than nano) and you can fight about relative easiness of use (:w versus C-x C-w) but nano is going to win over both of them in that regard.

Red Hat Family

• The interoperability pact was inked in February of this year, leading the companies to “synchronize testing” in counterpart validation programs over the months. Starting today, businesses can mix and mingle Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on visualized environments with joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat.

• In response to customer demand for interoperability in their IT environments, Red Hat and Microsoft have completed testing and validation for mutual customers using server virtualization. Joint support from Red Hat and Microsoft for these configurations is available today.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will host a series of briefing sessions across Australia based on ‘Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Make Virtualization a Breeze’.

• Hosted by Red Hat, two briefing sessions will be held in New Zealand regarding the use of open source in enterprise virtualisation.

• For the quarter ending August 31, its profit jumped 37 percent relative to the year-ago quarter, besting analyst estimates.

• As my analyst colleague Gordon Haff covers, the vendor has finally left the management software sidelines, and appears committed to those capabilities via the RHEV-M component. Meaning that Red Hat offers just about every piece of infrastructure software an enterprise could need…except a database. Pressed on a similar question during the day, Whitehurst assured the audience that Red Hat “was not looking to move into new markets,” with a database the given example.

• The world’s biggest free and open source software company will hold a boot camp in Singapore next month for those who teach courses in open source software at institutes of higher learning.

• FOSSCOMM (FOSS Community of India) will hold its third meeting in Mumbai at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education, Mankhurd (Near BARC/Anushakti Nagar).

• Sun Microsystems’ xVM server virtualization hypervisor has not yet seen the light of day as a commercial product, but the company is continuing to enhance the management tool. Now, the latest version of Ops Center has arrived featuring enhancements for running Solaris-based virtualization.

Debian Family

• Christian Perrier (Bubulle) issued statistics in his blog that show which countries of the world have the largest per capita Debian developers. First place goes to Finland.

• However, after a morning and afternoon screwing around with this in between doing my regular work, I’m ready to seal up the box and let Debian Lenny ride.

• I’ve been using some version of Red Hat Linux since about 1996, but decided to give the Ubuntu distribution a try on my Laptop. The compelling thing to me about Ubuntu was that I kept seeing information on the web about how to do various things in Ubuntu. Ubuntu seems to make it easier for others to contribute and thus has surpassed Red Hat in terms of number of packages and available information. One company can never keep up with thousand of individuals that are all eager to contribute.

• I just found out that there’s a brand of soft drink with the same name as the popular Linux distribution. For those of you who don’t know this yet, let me introduce you to Ubuntu Cola. Also named after the African philosophy, it is made in the United Kingdom and with a key ingredient that is Fair Trade Certified.

• Ubuntu Cola’s sugar came from Fairtrade worker cooperatives in Kasinthula, Malawi and Kaleya, Zambia. Farmers who are members of the Fairtrade cooperative at Kasinthula receive an income of $4 a day, which is really good considering that it is six times bigger than the national average income.

• Exhibit: Linux Mint. This is Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) done right. Mint is based on Ubuntu 9.04, the old Jaunty Jackalope. It uses the Ubuntu repositories so in essence, it is Ubuntu, with a little extra (contained in Mint’s own repos). The reason Mint is so cool is that includes all those pesky codecs and plugins right out of the box, er, uhm, live DVD. No need to download and install a Java plugin. It’s there. Flash? It’s there too. That video? It works.

• A total overhaul of the Ubuntu look will have to wait for future releases. But for the time being, the touch-ups to Karmic should help placate users who worry that Ubuntu’s default look is ugly and outdated.

• Karmic’s GDM received some small updates today that brought with them a new HumanLoginIcon set full of beautiful glowing icons – much more akin to the mock-up than the previous humanity icons used in it’s place.

• The Ubuntu project has released the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which has already been favorably previewed, especially for its fast boot time. Based on Linux 2.6.31, Karmic Koala offers GNOME 2.28 and Ext4 as defaults, and adds “cloud” features and improved installation.

• I recently installed the beta version of the upcoming version of Ubuntu codenamed Karmic Kuala. The changes since 9.04 are somewhat subtle yet significant. Already in the beta you can feel the polish that went into it. Below, in no particular order, I shall rant about a few improvements that puts a smile on my face.

• Ubuntu Karmic Koala is still in Beta status, but looks very promising. To some extend it beats the Release Candidate of Microsoft Windows 7, especially in Wireless networking support.

• The big win of Karmic Koala are its even further improved speed, less resources hungriness and improved hardware support.

• I tested Microsoft Windows 7 RC1 (build 7100), Kubuntu GNU/Linux Karmic Koala Alpha 5 and Ubuntu GNU/Linux Karmic Koala Beta 1 last week and I’m afraid Windows 7 will (b)eat the dust.

• AG: What goals did you have for this event? Did CLS meet, exceed or fall short of those goals?

• JB: The goal was simple: bring those passionate about community together in an environment that is vendor neutral. I wanted to attract community managers, leaders and enthusiasts from all walks of life, inside and outside of technology. We really seemed to get this and there was an incredible diversity of attendance, and a lot of people: around 250. The entire event far exceeded my expectations.

• The point is that Ubuntu works and there is little motivation to change to something else. Some will say that this makes me a “fanboy”. Not really. I have simply not found anything that justifies a change. If something better comes along, I’ll change in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, I’m staying with Ubuntu.

• If you have a netbook and do not care for a sub-optimal Windows installation and do not wish to wait for Moblin to come out of Beta, Ubuntu Netbook Remix seems like a good idea. I believe you will like the result. The combination of free price, lots of good programs, stability, usability, and decent looks are really hard to beat.

Devices/Embedded

• SSV has launched two x86-compatible, Debian Linux-based embedded development kits equipped with access to Amazon’s S3 cloud services. The first two SSV/ECC (SSV Embedded Cloud Computing) Starter Kits are the DNP/SK29-ECC, based on SSV’s DIL/NetPC DNP/2486 module, and the eSOM/EK1-ECC, which incorporates SSV’s eSOM/EK1-ECC module.

• IC Nexus announced a Linux-compatible development kit that includes a RISC processor and a choice of touchscreen displays. The “NXC2620 DVK” version 4.0 comes with a SODIMM-sized CPU module, a compact baseboard, and a free BSP (board support package), the company says.

Phones

• We managed to get a little quality time with the Nokia N900 smartphone running Maemo and Linux. This smartphone, sporting killer specs and 3G HSDPA for T-Mobile US and Europe should begin shipping in the next few weeks. Notice how quick the device is when switching between desktop screens and applications– the multitasking is very impressive thanks to 256 megs of RAM and virtual memory that brings it up to 1 gig of application RAM.

• The smartphone will run the Android flavor of Linux, and include a touchscreen and a camera, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed people familiar with Dell plans.

• On the day that Microsoft Corp. is launching phones that will run on its latest version of Windows Mobile, Motorola Inc. is singing the praises of open-source software, specifically Google Inc.’s Android.

Sub-notebooks

• The availability of netbooks that ride on the maturity of cloud infrastructure is heralding the return of the thin client, says Jolicloud founder and CEO, Tariq Krim.

Free Software/Open Source

• Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into interesting programming languages. In the past we have spoken to Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, Don Syme, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, who developed F#, Simon Peyton-Jones on the development of Haskell, Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth.

• There were numerous core tracks within the conference schedule; eGov, Start-up and Investors, Open CIO Summit, FLOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source Software) Communities Summit and FLOSS Competence Centres Summit, along with ancillary events.

• In honor of today’s Google Doodle celebrating the 57th anniversary of the first barcode patent, I’ve decided to take a look at barcode software.

• With costs for academic mathematics software approaching $1,000 for a single license, it doesn’t take a numbers whiz to realize that a free, open source option is probably a better alternative. Sage is an entire mathematics system licensed under the GPL and available as a free download for Windows (running VMWare), Mac OS X, and Linux.

• Free software is a matter of of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, improve the software. Like open source software, a free software license requires that the source code be made available – otherwise the user would not be able to study, change, improve the program. In this usage, the term “free” refers to freedom, not price. This is also the origin of the meme “Free as in speech, not as in beer.”

• Mozilla’s stated goal for its next version of Firefox, first and foremost, is a perceivable improvement in the time it takes to do things, not just render pages. We saw a big performance jump in JavaScript execution and page rendering in Firefox 3.5; but for 3.6, the developers want to apply the same level of improvement to responsiveness and process activation.

• Objectivity, Inc. announced today the launch of the Objectivity Developer Network (ODN), a comprehensive website that includes free open source applications, code snippets, tutorials, and a community forum designed to accelerate the application development cycle for Objectivity/DB users.

• Karen Copenhaver, a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, and one of Mass High Tech’s 2008 All-Stars, is an expert on technology licensing, particularly in software licensing and open source. Recently she spoke with Rodney Brown about open source as a business model, where it came from and where it is headed.

• This article is about OpenERP – a fully featured, free and open source ERP software suite. But before describing the features of OpenERP there are some background points to make about the use of ERPs by enteprises and the scope of the post needs to be clarified.

• Open Source and free UTM solutions have most features which commercial UTM appliance have and at the same time are also far cheaper. Not only that, as these Open Source UTMs are installed on commodity machines we have the luxury to upgrade and scale the hardware whenever required. We selected three free and Open Source UTMs: Endian, Cobian, and Untangle.

• Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the availability of Ingres Database 9.3, the latest version of the company’s flagship open source database product.

• I’ve blogged about building native mobile device applications using a Web technology-based framework such as PhoneGap from Nitobi in the past. When I first wrote about the open source PhoneGap project in March 2009, I concluded: “If I worked at RIM, I’d take a trip out to Vancouver to talk to the Nitobi dudes. This framework is exactly what RIM needs to counter the trend of developers targeting the iPhone/iPod as the premier environment for mobile device applications.”

• Newspapers are either a dying breed or a changing breed, depending on who you talk to. The New York Times wants to adapt, not go extinct, and one of the little ways they’re adapting involves a software tool they’re releasing as an open-source application for their fellow news organizations — or anyone else, really.

• [...]

• That’s all going to depend entirely on what kind of licensing the Times uses to release this thing. If they use a license model which allows people to keep changes to themselves (e.g., GPLv2), then guess what — people aren’t going to hesitate to do so, and they’re going to have no one to blame but themselves.

• BonitaSoft, first provider of open source BPM solutions, and OW2, the international consortium which promotes best technologies for open source middleware, announced today that BonitaSoft has joined the OW2 Consortium.

• Terracotta has acquired the assets of the open source project, Ehcache, and has merged its code into the Terracotta caching system for clustered Java applications. No amount was disclosed in the deal, which occurred two months ago.

• Another aspect of Asterisk that helps IT departments is the fact that it runs on Linux. IT administrators who are already familiar with scripting, network administration, and the architecture of Linux systems, will find using Asterisk to be a lot easier than having to learn a brand new interface that a proprietary PBX might use.

• The platform enables management of mobile devices, and synchronization of diverse mobile media, over WiMax and LTE with social networks, email systems and PCs. The company’s software leverages the prevailing Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards for device management (DM) and data synchronization (DS). Funambol is working with some of the largest companies in the industry to deploy innovative 4G mobile cloud sync services over the coming months.

• Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc (FTSE:MSY.L), today announced a new carbon management trading solution, the Misys Environmental Trading Platform (METP), to help organisations prepare for the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme – a mandatory emissions reduction scheme expected to affect about 5,000 non-energy intensive private and public organisations that account for ten percent of the country’s carbon emissions.

• I use Torque3D. Indie rather than Hobbyist price, but there are lots of cheap or Open Source engines.

• One of the innovations in the free GNU Debugger, GDB 7, is “Reverse Debugging”. On platforms that support this function, the debugger can also look through the code in reverse from its current position – even incrementally. At present, this only works on platforms such as i386-linux and amd64-linux.

Government

• At the moment, teachers are trying out OpenOffice in two schools. The suite will be made available to all schools in November 2009. “We plan to make OpenOffice the default office application for schools”, said Citeq’s spokesperson Stefan Schoenfelder.

• During September 2009, the city reported that 140 of its 360 servers are running GNU/Linux. In a press statement published on 23 September 2009, Citeq stated that using open source is making it easier for the departments to share information.

• Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps has laid out his vision for local authority plan-making in a speech at the Conservative party conference.

• The shadow housing minister has unveiled a scheme to give local people more influence over planning.

• Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps has unveiled proposals for a more interactive ‘open source’ planning system.

• Government procuring open source IT should consider how to benefit from collaborating with open source communities, says Alasdair Mangham, head of Information Systems and Development of the London Borough of Camden in the UK. “We need to learn how to become experts at being members of communities rather than experts at governing them.”

• According to a French market survey, almost the entire public sector (96 %) is using open source. The most used applications are database management systems and content management systems.

• The research firm who carried out the survey presented a summary of its report on the use of open source in France on 17 September in Paris. The report is based on an online survey conducted during the summer of 2009 and followed up by interviews with 160 IT project directors, heads of procurement and other IT decision makers, half of which are employed in the private sector and the other half representing the public sector. Another fifty interviews were held with IT vendors.

• “Everywhere I go, no matter what else people have to say, they ultimately ask one question: ‘Why should we work our hearts out if the fix is already in?’” Pelosi said during a keynote speech at a fundraiser last week held to benefit Open Voting Consortium (OVC). “When we look at the elections and look at how close everything is, you know that there’s something happening in that machine that we need to know about.”

Openness

• The big news is that this may be broadening. Sage is now trumpeting a “major donation” (amount unspecified) from Quintiles, a contract researcher with 21,000 employees. Friend is now going around the world in search of more.

• Sage didn’t disclose how much the donation is worth in its statement announcing the news. But Friend, the founder of Rosetta Inpharmatics and former senior vice president of cancer research at Merck, said he had received $5 million of commitments from anonymous donors when he first publicly unveiled the Sage effort back in March.

• A recession.

• The open source movement was launched in 1998, and the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement came much earlier, but it was the millennial recession I call the “dot-bomb” that put it into overdrive.

• In addition to software focused on sensing technology, such as Pachube, the open source community is also involved with the many social, privacy and government issues surrounding it.

Standards/Consortia

• Analysis of open source WebKit usage shows high degree of incompatibility across WebKit-based browsers, including Safari and Chrome

Leftovers

AstroTurf

• This week’s issue of Rolling Stone has an illuminating article, “The Lie Machine,” by Tim Dickinson on anti-heath reform spin. Dickinson’s article quotes internal corporate memos showing how Big Tobacco spun media stories about health care reform in 1994 and how its progeny are striking again.

• As a CNN investigation revealed, the senators who voted against the public option have received millions of more dollars in campaign contributions from the health care industry than those who voted for it. If the Senate Finance Bill reaches the president’s desk, it might as well be called the Health Insurance (and Underwriters and Brokers and Agents) Profit Protection and Enhancement Act of 2009.

• WIth all the company’s riches, why is a Goldman Sachs (GS) subsidiary getting a $3 million earmark from Washington?

• As the article notes, Molycorp’s mine is a rich source of elements used to produce powerful magnets for precision-guided weapons, hand-held communication devices, wind turbines and hybrid cars.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Free file hosting provider MediaFire seems to think that, when you follow a link to download a file from its service, it has the right to control your browser. This is yet another example of a web site owner forgetting that it’s your computer, and it’s none of their business how you choose to experience their web pages.

• Boing Boing put up a post about it, along with the tag line “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis.” While some have questioned whether the ad is even real, one thing is clear: Ralph Lauren was not pleased. The company’s lawyers at Greenberg Traurig sent DMCA takedown notices concerning both posts. Despite Blogger’s new DMCA policy, Google still quickly took down the post at Photoshop Disasters, causing the site to ask whether or not Ralph Lauren or its lawyers have ever heard of the Streisand Effect (yay). BoingBoing’s host, however, doesn’t automatically take content down and passed along the info to BoingBoing, who quickly pointed out that this was clearly fair use (commentary, criticism, etc.) and the DMCA takedown wasn’t being used to stop infringing content, but to stifle speech.

• This is a classic case of the problems with copyright laws, especially as it pertains to music. Below is a completely entertaining student film feature over 100 performers doing a one-take lip-dub to the Black-Eyed Peas’ song “I Gotta Feeling.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• A few weeks ago, reader cofiem sent over a blog post from musician Darren Hayes complaining about recording studios shutting down and blaming “piracy” for it. This morning, our submissions engine is getting overwhelmed with submissions about Wil Wheaton’s rant against someone who posted a copy of Wheaton’s audiobook, saying the guy is “stealing” from him.

• Over the past year, we’ve noticed an explosion in ridiculous attempts by music collection societies (often totally clueless about technology) to extend their ability to collect for positively ridiculous things (while also looking to significantly increase their collection rates). The latest, sent in by Dennis Laumen, is that the Dutch collection society, Buma/Stemra, is claiming that it’s going to start charging bloggers 130 euros for every 6 videos they embed. This is, of course, technologically clueless. The embedding of a video doesn’t change the fact that it’s actually playing from and hosted at the original site (such as YouTube). All embedding does is allow the video to appear via the other page, even though, technically, it’s all still happening at its original location. Claiming that this is somehow a “new” publication of the content is technologically incorrect.

Dying Newspapers

• The Times and Sunday Times yesterday revealed plans for a readers’ club with a £50 membership fee to non-subscribers, another example of newspapers attempting to develop new revenue streams from loyal readers rather than following a high-volume strategy.

• After a summer of establishing blogger guidelines and fair use, the Associated Press is considering charging online customers for a 20-30 minute head start on breaking news stories. According to a report by the AP’s Jeremiah Marquez, the AP’s chief executive Tom Curley made the announcement at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Curley suggested that because the AP licenses stories to major hubs like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, these outlets would be willing to pay for scoops.

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