● 11.19.09

● Links 19/11/2009: Chromium OS, Lots of Fedora 12 Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 8:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Since that post, I got in contact with Intel who clarified a few of the points surrounding the issue of using TRIM under Linux. Sure, this is a topic that bores most people, but as a full-time user of the OS, I care about it quite a bit, and I’m sure a lot of others out there are in a similar situation as me. And as frustrating as I’ve found tracking down the information to be, I’m hoping this investigative sleuthing will affect a lot more than just me.

• Here are just a few of the miscreants mentioned, who either clearly stated they don’t support Linux or any browser other than Internet Explorer; whose services can be used, but not necessarily initiated by any other than a Windows system; or who are just generally difficult to get along with:

• * Citibank * AT&T * Illinois government sites * Verizon DSL * EarthLink DSL * Juno/NetZero * Juniper Networks * UPS CampusShip * Department of Defense systems (U.S.)

• This week on the show: Source for Android 2.0 has been released, Microsoft admits GPL violation, SAP disses Sun, Microsoft patents sudo?, Windows 7 runs bad on netbooks, Fab tries out Gnome Shell and much more.

Desktop

• When I got this drive, I formatted as an ext3 drive but that’s not 100% necessary if you are going to dump compressed backup files on that disk. Modern distributions like Ubuntu/Kubuntu should just see the drive and give you an opportunity to mount the drive. Clicking on the drive icon lets me open up a file manager. Using the file manager, I can just drag and drop into that folder. Easy.

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• For the curious among you, the Buffalo LinkStation runs a version of Linux called Fahrenheit.

• Windows 7 turns to face its latest challenger in the form of Ubuntu 9.10, the latest and greatest flavour of Linux to be released.

Google

• While Google is remaining mum about all the details, I’ve learned that they will be demonstrating the new Linux-based Chrome desktop operating system on Thursday, November 19th.

• Today, via webcast from its Mountain View headquarters, Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director Matthew Papakipos unveiled an early version of Chrome OS, the much-discussed browser-based operating system the company first announced this past summer. This initial build has been open-sourced as the Chromium OS, with Pichai saying that outside developers will be able to work hand-in-hand with internal Google coders on the same code tree.

• Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

• Google will finally take the wrapper off its highly-anticipated Chrome operating system during a presentation at Google HQ on Thursday. The event will include a complete overview of the product featuring a Chrome OS demonstration and Q&A session. Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, Google engineering director for Google Chrome OS, will speak at the event, according to TechCrunch.

• While the software does not currently appear to be in an easily installable state, requiring developers to build their own Chrome OS environments for the time being, the OS does look quite promising and Google’s “Stateless” objective where all user data resides in the cloud reflects an extremely modern concept in OS design.

• Google Chrome Extensions are here and really doing great. If you are thinking about what is Google Chrome extension and how to install then (eligibility), then read our coverage on Google Chrome Extension launch. There are loads of extensions released by different parties but here we are going to take 7 extensions which you should install on your google chrome to make your life much easier.

Server

• The fact that a new supercomputer runs Linux should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. What else would it run? W7? ROFL. Well, if it did run W7 I’m pretty sure someone would have been all over the reporters for the Sydney Morning Herald making sure that they mentioned it in their article “Australia’s new supercomputer outflops the lot“. However, since it isn’t, the reporter had a discretion on what to report, and they didn’t mention what operating system it ran. I had to look the thing up on Wikipedia, where it told me that it runs Linux – Centos actually.

• HP expands its app blade switch effort with new partners and programs. And does the fact ONE is Linux-based matter?

• Solid state drives (SSDs) — also known as flash — are everywhere. In fact, they may even have done a great service to mankind by diverting messaging away from green IT. The big server and storage OEMs seem to have gotten over their fixation with green IT, courtesy of their enthusiasm for SSD.

• A home computer makes an ideal appliance to store and stream music. The purpose of a music server is to deliver tracks when requested by a client. The server can deliver music to machines over a local area network as well as computers connected over the internet.

Kernel Space

• Canonical’s Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codenamed Lucid Lynx) is taking place this week in Texas, but happening right now on the Ubuntu-X mailing list is a discussion about what the X.Org plans are for Ubuntu Lucid.

• One of my favorite activities is to compare new hardware with old after an upgrade. One of yours might be to show your best friend how much better your machine rocks than his (or vice versa). Remember, the best feature of the Phoronix Test Suite Desktop is the FUN!

Applications

• Goggles Music Manager is a music collection manager and player that automatically categorizes your music files based on genre, artist, album, and song. It supports gapless playback and features easy tag editing.

• For years I have watched in amazement as most articles highlighting various Linux backup solutions merely point out the same old list. While their authors enjoy their “FoSS-ness,” they fail to realize that, in the real world, not all of the solutions provided make sense for the casual user. Half of them are really enterprise only.

• GMPC is a GTK2 client for Music Player Daemon. I’m not going to talk about Music Player Daemon again, because we covered it when we talked about Sonata (including how to configure Music Player Daemon – MPD).

• Email archiving is an application that accumulates, index and provide quick, searchable access to email messages independent of the users of the system using a couple of different technical methods of implementation. The primary function of email archiving software is to capture and maintain all email traffic flowing into and out of the email server so it can be accessed immediately at a later date from a centrally managed location. If you are looking for an open source email archiving software, then read on.

• Here is a genuinely useful Web-based application — SimpleText. It is, indeed, a rather simple online note-taking application that is positively light on features. It doesn’t offer any fancy text formatting tools, and you won’t find any advanced sharing capabilities in it either. So what’s so “genuinely useful” about it, then? Again, it’s simplicity.

Proprietary

• Fluendo is an established leading provider of multimedia plug-ins for the GNU/Linux Market, and has succeeded in offering legal end-to-end solutions working with multiple formats and platforms.

• Despite a crazed assault of zombie playtesters on their headquarters, CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announced the release of CrossOver Games 8.1 for both Mac and Linux, available immediately.

• Linux Command Reference (FREE) – This iPhone app is a handy command reference for the Linux Terminal. Perfect for situations when you need to reference a command but you’re in the server room without your computer.

Games

• More digital Swiss Army knife software, including Linux utilities and tools that are so useful you won’t know how you ever did without them

Desktop Environments

KDE

• We have been quite quiet the last weeks on blog posting, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not working on kamoso. So if you are one of those who think that kamoso is “yet another dead kde webcam project” you’re wrong Here we have some heads up.

GNOME

• While GNOME 2.30 will not be the release that goes on to become GNOME 3.0 (instead it will be GNOME 2.32 in September that grabs the “3.0″ tag), the second development release for the 2.30 series is now available.

• There is a tangible confusion around as to what Zeitgeist is and what it isn’t; what it can do and what it can’t do. This is partly our own fault because we could have communicated this whole thing better, for instance we have some very outdated wiki pages lying around that you should probably stay away from until we updated them. In this post I aim to give a semi technical run down of the core Zeitgeist functionality and how we expose it for you to work with. This should hopefully clear out some confusion.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• I’d like to thank Kerrin Catallozzi, Andy Cathrow and Jim Brennan from Red Hat for taking the time to indulge a rather small Linux oriented website with an interview.

• SDC selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its interoperability, which allows it run on the organization’s IBM and Dell servers, as well as for its Red Hat Network Satellite console, which allows centralized management of all resources.

• his was made publicPDF in a hearing at the US Senate’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Fedora

• Although last in this line of releases, Fedora is perhaps the most interesting of the releases. While it is the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora is not nearly as conservative and prides itself on its just-out-of-beta features. This time around Fedora introduces features such as Bluetooth audio support, multi-touch input for tablet PCs, better package management and broader network support.

• On the desktop Fedora includes Empathy, a new generation of instant messenger that supports chat, video and audio on most popular IM platforms including AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber, Live (MSN) and MySpace. Using Empathy users can share their desktop with friends and use a webcam to create audio and video chats.

• On the desktop, Fedora 12 offers the latest versions of GNOME and KDE, complete with all the usual updates to the standard GNOME and KDE applications. On the GNOME side that means the new Empathy IM client and the slightly revamped, somewhat more polished theme we mentioned in our review of the Fedora 12 beta release.

• This new release certainly feels very solid and is definitely worth the upgrade, today. Due to Fedora’s stance on free software, users might not get the same “out of the box” experience that other distributions might offer. Even so, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Either way, using only free software certainly helps to make Fedora more stable and it’s great for users who don’t need proprietary software.

• That aside, Fedora 12 “Constantine” continues the tradition of pushing the envelope of free software and could just be, the very best Linux distribution of 2009.

• Fedora 12 was released yesterday by the Fedora Project, marking a dozen releases over the past six years.

• Fedora 12, codenamed Constantine, is released! Just for the info, Fedora is an RPM based Linux Distribution, an Operating System in other words, developed by the community supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora contains only free and Open Source software. Some of Fedora’s 12 new features are Gnome 2.28, KDE 4.3, better web cam support!, and many others. Finally presto is enabled by default which means smaller updates to be downloaded and faster updates also!

• With the release of Fedora 12 we’ve given the spins.fedoraproject.org a bit of a facelift. (What did it look like before? Pre-facelift spins.fedoraproject.org.)

Debian Family

• The other day, I blogged about the Debian Installer, and I stated that I find it to be one of the most flexible and possibly most powerful operating system installers. Well, continuing with a series of posts on Debian, I want to mention how flexible the operating system is by itself, from installing to running. The claim from the Debian project that it is “The Universal Operating System” is spot on, and I hope this post shows you really how universal it truly is.

Knoppix

• Klaus Knopper has updated his Live Linux Knoppix to 6.2 and chose LXDE as the desktop environment. Also included is ADRIANE, the talking menu system for the sight-impaired, in version 1.2

• The Knoppix developers have released version 6.2 of their popular Linux distribution. Knoppix is a bootable CD distribution of Linux incorporating automatic hardware detection and can be used to demo Linux, as an educational CD, a rescue system, etc. Knoppix uses on-the-fly decompression so it can have up to 2 GB of data and software installed on a distribution CD. The latest release is based on the “Testing” and “Unstable” branch of Debian and includes several bug fixes and updates.

Kubuntu

• This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 9.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 9.10 is derived from Ubuntu 9.10 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, was officially released last month. In this comprehensive review, Ars takes you under the surface for an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes.

• So you’ve read our Complete Beginner’s Guide to Linux and have decided to adopt an open-source operating system–congratulations! But diving right into a new OS is daunting, even if it is as polished and stable as Ubuntu. That’s OK though, because we’re here to help. We’ve compiled a list of the 20 most important skills that every Ubuntu user should have. These tips, ranging from basic GUI manipulation to advanced system recovery, are essential to your Windows-free computing experience.

• While this pace of development has given Ubuntu a goodly portion of the small number of GNU/Linux desktops worldwide, and also had an effect on many other distributions in that they have tended to release more often in order to compete with Ubuntu, there are indications that it is better for Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, to rethink its strategy.

• The biggest factor in choosing (or not choosing) games is based on their size. An Ubuntu LiveCD has to fit on a 700mb CD and room is at a premium.

• If you are using Ubuntu, you probably know there is some 2000+ applications you can install on your system. Obviously you would not need to install all of those to get the best out of your system, the following 7 applications will help give you more from your setup in case you have not installed them already. Some of them are available in the revised software management hub called the Ubuntu Software Center.

• Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) has come out now, and I’m still getting 70 hits a week on my original article concerning PulseAudio. The situation has changed radically, and so that people will get correct information concerning it, I felt it necessary to revise my previous findings.

Qimo

• After a short hiatus I’m back with the NGO interviews. This time I spoke with Michael and Michelle Hall of Qimo 4 kids.

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• LC: So what is your experience of this good or bad , have you picked up any nice tips?

• LC: What would you suggest to our readers that are interested in an initiative like yours?

Devices/Embedded

• HP announced two thin clients that run its Linux-based ThinPro distribution. Using Intel’s Atom N280, the t5745 offers 1-2GB of DDR3 RAM, 1-2GB of flash, and eight USB 2.0 ports, while the t5325 incorporates a 1.2GHz Marvell/ARM processor, 512MB each of RAM and flash, and four USB ports.

• MIPS Technologies announced the availability of an Arriba for Android Porting Kit (APK) for the MIPS architecture, co-developed with Viosoft. The Arriba APK includes a suite of tools for porting Android to MIPS-based platforms, and includes Android versions of Viosoft’s Arriba Linux debug and profiling tools, plus MIPS Technologies’ System Navigator EJTAG probe, the companies say.

Phones

• Verizon Wireless sold 250,000 units of its Droid by Motorola phone, according to eWEEK, which has also given the Droid a rave review. Meanwhile, the rumor of a Google-branded Android phone refuses to die, Palm’s CEO trash-talks the Droid, and tomorrow Google will unveil its Linux-based Chrome OS, say various reports.

• Trends in app development are also starting to look more promising for Android-based devices in the Droid’s wake. Flurry said it’s seen a “sharp increase” in new applications being developed for the mobile OS — an increase of 94 percent from September to October.

Sub-notebooks

• As I mentioned the other day, the folks behind the netbook-friendly Jolicloud operating system are in the process of adding support for machines with Intel Atom Z5xx processors and integrated GMA 500 graphics. For the most part, systems with GMA 500 graphics don’t perform as well as laptops with the more common GMA 950 graphics chipset. But GMA 500 does have a few tricks up its sleeve. It can handle hardware decoding of some HD video, for instance. And the Atom Z5xx/GMA 500 combo uses less power, which helps prolong battery life.

• In line with the national drive to arm the younger generation with the knowledge of English and Information Technology, the Education Ministry has taken steps to issue laptop computers to each and every student in thirteen schools. The program is carried out under the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program conducted by the Education Ministry in collaboration with the University of Colombo. The program is funded by the World Bank. Under this program, 1,250 laptop computers will be distributed to students in 13 primary schools.

Free Software/Open Source

• 4. So What Does It All Mean? If the company’s policy clearly permits the sale of genomic information in the kind of transaction that could be consummated in a bankruptcy case, then such a sale can go forward. But if the policy prohibits such a sale, or if the policy is unclear or does not address the subject at all, a transfer may still take place–subject to the ins and outs of bankruptcy law, including provisions specifically applicable to personal information. We’ll turn to that in the second part of this series.

• Over 500 participants from 15 countries will join one of the Asia’s top events on free and open source software (FOSS) to be held in Ho Chi Minh City this Friday.

• The VAR Guy met EUS Networks CTO Jeronimo Romero yesterday. Since jumping into the Asterisk market in 2005 or so, EUS has lined up more than 1,000 Asterisk customers. But this isn’t your usual VAR. The 24-person company has four Linux developers who customize Asterisk deployments for customers.

• At release 0.9.52 the program is very stable and I experienced no crashes during my tests. In my opinion OpenShot is well on its way to becoming an attractive and powerful editor. Presently it lacks some features I like in other NLEs, but I suspect its developers will add those and other features in due time. Like many similar projects OpenShot is in need of external assistance, so if you’d like to help produce a high-quality GTK-based NLE for video you might consider hopping on to the OpenShot train. Coders are welcome, but other aspects of the program need love too. Check with the devs to see how your talents can be employed by the project.

• Open source network monitoring software vendor Zenoss announced the release of Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, the company’s commercial version of its flagship product. It sports several new features, most notably Amazon EC2 monitoring that provide users with dynamic snapshots of performance and the ability to drill down on performance issues with “inside the instance” monitoring.

• That’s the news coming out of Hannover, Germany the permanent home for the CeBIT show, where the CeBIT Open Source 2010 event will be taking center stage at one of the largest expo halls according to show organizers Deutsche Messe. According to Britta Wülfing, CeBIT Event Manager, the shift of the Open Source exhibition to the more prominent Hall 2 is a direct response to the huge popularity this segment of the show enjoyed in 2009.

• As you may or may not know Haiku OS Alpha 1 was recently released. It is a full featured and improved clone of the old BeOS. OSNews has a nice review starting with a bit of history.

• I downloaded and burned a live cd, but it doesn’t seem to support my hardware since the kernel stopped the boot up and threw me into a debug console. I then decided to run and install it in VirtualBox and take many screenshots as I explore the OS. Overall I would say that it packs quite a punch for a revival of an old operating system in a first alpha release. It looks better than the last BeOS release (R5) and comes with some improvements including support for modern hardware (albeit not all as my example would imply).

• “Free and open source software enables more effective actions, with a very low cost, when financing small projects for public administrations”, says Osvaldo Gervasi, president of Umbria’s Open Source Competence Center (CCOS) and professor of Computer Science at University of Perugia. “This type of software is key to the re-use of applications by public administrations.”

• IF YOU watched the 15Malaysia (www.15Malaysia.com) independent film collection, you would have noticed a unique entry called Rojak! that combined live action with computer graphics.

• What is even cooler is that the filmmakers used open-source software to achieve this effect on the near-five-minute film. The fact is that the filmmakers — brothers Jordan, 29, and Mussadique Suleiman, 32 — are open-source software diehards.

• The duo have been using open-source software for animation and editing TV commercials, documentaries and music videos for the past eight years.

• Better known as the Suleiman Brothers, they specialise in hand-drawn animation, 3D and 2D motion graphics, video compositing as well as image processing.

Office Suites

• Italian firm NSEC is offering IBMs Open Office variant as a VMware ThinApp on a credit card sized USB device.

• The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

CMS

• Lodz, November 18th 2009 — The Midgard Project has released stable release of Midgard2 9.09 “Mjolnir” – second release of the new generation of the Midgard content repository.

Mozilla

• The Personas movement continues to grow with over 10 million people choosing to personalize their Firefox.

• The browser war in China is heating up but not quite in a way that resembles the Western markets, as Mozilla’s Beijing chief explains.

• While browser makers in overseas markets often tout their products’ Web page rendering speeds and ability to run richer apps, China’s browser landscape calls for customized browser versions that bring additional features in order to demonstrate value to users.

• Continuing with its new quick beta turnaround strategy, Mozilla has released a third beta just a week after Beta 2

• Nightingale said from Firefox 3.6 onwards – including future beta releases of that iteration of the browser – it would prevent third party applications from adding code directly to the components directory.

• Mozilla will add a new lockdown feature to Firefox 3.6 that will prevent developers from sneaking addons into the program, the company said.

FSFE

• For this year’s round of fund-raising, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has cooked up something special. The biggest donor of 2009 will share a cooking session with FSFE’s President and other members of the organisation’s executive team. FSFE is looking to raise 100,000 Euro during the last quarter of 2009.

Openness

• Could open source help realise this long-held dream? That’s the question a project called the “Interactive Knowledge Stack” (IKS), funded by the European Commission to the tune of 6.57 Euros, is trying to answer.

• This suggests that people in government are gradually beginning to understand that they can give away much of their data – well, actually, *our* data – and still generate revenue by targetting particular remunerative sectors.

• For Australia water (or the lack of it) is a big deal. So big in fact, that the Commonwealth Government saw the need to establish a national initiative for monitoring and publishing water data. Charging the Bureau of Meteorology with the task, their Improving Water Information Program will aggregate hundreds of other government departments’ and agencies’ information into the National Water Account, an integrated, national water monitoring and data collection service. And the Bureau are encouraging their partners to release their data under Creative Commons.

• Over the past decade, a good number of studies have attempted to demonstrate that open access journal articles have higher citation rates than traditionally published ones.1 These open access articles are either published in open access journals or are made publicly available through open access repositories. More methodologically sound studies, however, are needed to pinpoint more exactly the impact, if any, of open accessibility on citation rates and to look at the issue of impact (or non-impact) more closely. For instance, of those journal articles that have been made openly accessible, about what percent of them benefit from open online availability? What percent of them do not?

• If we can accept the fact that under-25-year-olds will not own content and stop the nostalgia for “the good ol’ days,” we can create a new economy that is even greater than the economy that we are leaving. Then the content owners and the eco-system around it will all become much more profitable and be able to re-invest in the creation of even better content that feeds this whole system.

• Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

• When we in the summer launched this project, today was a rather firm launch date (#egov2009). So it was very satisfactory, at midnight, to launch the digital version. Download the PDF here or here (1,1MB).

• Government data is a valuable resource that we have already paid for. We are not talking about personal data but data that tells us, for example, about the amount and type of traffic on our roads, where the accidents are, how much is spent on areas where these accidents occur. This is data that has already been collected and paid for by the taxpayer, and the internet allows it to be distributed much more cheaply than before. Governments can unlock its value by simply letting people use it. This is beginning to happen in a number of countries, notably in the US under the Obama Administration, and in June Gordon Brown asked us to advise the Government on how to make rapid progress here.

• As regular readers will know, I write a lot about the related areas of openness, freedom, transparency and the commons, but it’s rare to find them literally coming together like this, in the Free Culture Forum:

• [...]

• All-in-all, this is an extraordinary document with which I find myself in pretty much total agreement. It’s an great achievement, and will be a real reference point for everyone working in the fields of digital freedom, openness and transparency for years to come.

Standards/Consortia

• I’ll be attending the Grid Interop conference today through Thursday (they were kind enough to give me a press pass), which serves as the venue for the SGIP launch, and will blog on the conference, as well as the voting outcomes, as events unfold, so stay tuned.

Leftovers

• More than 90 per cent of parents want more control over their sprog’s texting habits, and would buy more phones if they had it.

• Messaging company Acision spoke to 1000 mobile phone users and established that parents would be happy to equip their ankle-biters with mobile phones at an even younger age, if only they had more control over the kind of person with whom they were communicating.

• An Arkansas cop has been suspended after tasering a ten-year-old girl who repeatedly “screamed, kicked and resisted” when her mother attempted to get her to have a shower before bed.

• For the past year, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana has traveled the world offering to place his nation’s forests under international supervision if other countries paid his citizens not to deforest the tropical landscapes.

• The campaign received major support last week when Norway announced a $30 million commitment on Monday for the small South American nation to implement an “avoided deforestation” plan. If the program demonstrates success, Guyana will receive an additional $250 million through 2015.

• To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.

• The world is about to enter a period of unprecedented investment in nuclear power. The combined threats of climate change, energy security and fears over the high prices and dwindling reserves of oil are forcing governments towards the nuclear option. The perception is that nuclear power is a carbon-free technology, that it breaks our reliance on oil and that it gives governments control over their own energy supply.

• That looks dangerously overoptimistic, says Michael Dittmar, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who publishes the final chapter of an impressive four-part analysis of the global nuclear industry on the arXiv today.

UK

• MI5, MI6 and the police will be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers in civil cases for the first time, the high court ruled today.

• In a move that has widespread implications for open justice, Mr Justice Silber agreed with the security and intelligence agencies that “secret government information” could remain hidden from individuals who are suing them.

• I’ve been asked (by pacifists and others concerned that the 2011 census is managed by a US defence contractor) what are the legal options for non-participation. I know it’s not a question you’ll welcome, [however] I believe I fully understand the arguments about why it’s safe and a good thing to do, and that Lockheed Martin will process the data in the UK and lawfully etc.

• Gordon Brown has announced that the government plans to open up map data from the Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency. The announcement was made by the Prime Minister in a speech at a Smarter Government seminar held at Downing Street where Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt also talked about the work being done with the “Make Public Data Public” project. According to The Guardian, the opening of map data will be part of a wider move to publish over 2,000 sets of data, which could include, for example, road-traffic counts, property prices, and motoring offence statistics.

Finance

• You get the sense that at this point in the game, Smith would not be satisfied by anything less than a firing squad. What she sees as uncritical reportage others could interpret as “leaving the Fed hung out to dry.” For example, the audit reports that Fed was worried about “violating the principle of the sanctity of contract.” Come on! The financial world was falling apart and the U.S. government was on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in a frantic effort to stave off utter disaster. In that milieu, the supposed sanctity of contracts is a bogus excuse, mere cover for doing nothing.

• Now on dissecting the returns that he will be earning from his Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) investment, Barron’s says we can realize that he has beaten the US treasury also to earn a handsome return from investing in the same company, during the same time period and almost at the same price.

• What could the Fed have done? It could have abused its regulatory authority: threatened the banks that wouldn’t play ball with some sort of retaliation. But this would probablyhave created deep problems with the French. It would also have further devastated a shaken banking sector. Leaving aside the morality of using regulatory authority for unauthorized purposes, countries where the regulator arbitrarily uses its authority to secure sweetheart deals for the government do not have robust, thriving financial sectors.

• Presumably, Blankfein is sorry for the role Goldman Sachs played in “cycling cheap credit.” In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs sold $40 billion in securities backed by 200,000 risky, exotic, and sub-prime mortgages. The company promoted the securities as triple-A rated investments – the safest kind of investing except for government bonds and T-Bills.

• “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,” Blankfein, 55, said at a conference in New York hosted by the Directorship magazine. “We apologize.”

• Former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain, who was fired after a scandal over the payment of billions of bonuses to Merrill traders, argued on Tuesday that big payouts played no role in triggering the financial crisis.

• Such a simple and direct admission should have been made by a number of financial executives months ago, but it is to Blankfein’s credit that he has made it even as the pressure on Wall Street from Washington seems to be diminishing.

• As Timothy Geithner was struggling to keep the mega-insurance company afloat last year—and save all the other companies that would have gone down with the A.I.G. ship—UBS of Switzerland offered a two percent discount on what it was owed. OK, so maybe accepting 98 cent on the dollar wasn’t going to change the fate of the world. But at least it was something.

• In 2006, employees at the firm earned an average of $622,000 each; in the first 9 months of this year, the bank set aside compensation of $16.7 billion, or $527,192 per employee. If Goldman Sachs continues to allocate a similar amount of money to compensation of employees in the fourth quarter, the average payout at the firm will amount to around $688,000 per capita, or a massive 10 percent increase over individual earnings for 2006.

• During AIG’s bailout, Goldman had influence over the decision to use public funds to pay 100 cents on the dollar for these CDOs (the underlying risk of the credit derivatives), but none of the information about the volume of Goldman’s trades with AIG–or the Goldman CDOs hedged by AIG’s other counterparties–was made public.

• “People are wondering why Goldman is making such bumper profits… What they don’t realize is how little competition there is left in certain areas…

• Lots of banks just want to get rid of ‘funny’ assets at whatever price to please their freaked-out shareholders. Goldman operates under no such constraint, and there’s no end to golden opportunities to make money.”

• It’s going from obscene to disgusting. Each day reveals how we’ve traded away our sense of decency and the common good in exchange for pure, unadulterated greed.

• Unemployment is a statistic. We hear it so often that, unless we are without work, it loses its meaning. Even when we learn that the U6 jobless rate hit 17.5 percent it doesn’t really register. After all this isn’t the 1930s. We have few bread lines or Hoovervilles. We’re not lined up outside of banks praying we can get our savings. We’ve come a long way…or have we?

• Getting capital flowing back into the real economy will require capturing these outrageous profits while reducing risky speculation on Wall Street. A good way to do this would be to impose a small financial transaction tax on all profitable stock transactions. A study by Dean Baker’s Center for Economic and Policy Research show that a tax as small as .25 percent per stock transaction would raise $140 billion dollars for the government. Millions of jobs can be created by investing that money in projects and programs that would put people to work: jump-starting the green economy, rebuilding our infrastructure, assisting struggling manufacturers, and aiding struggling states so they aren’t forced to lay off teachers, firefighters and police officers.

AstroTurf

• I just got word that Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is planning on protesting a presentation Al Gore is making tomorrow night in Portland, Oregon.

• Under the guise of the “teabagger movement” AFP will do what it does best, which is protesting clean energy and green jobs.

• It’s hard to believe this is much of a grassroots “teabagger” movement when the organizers get so much money from the largest private energy company in the United States.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

• Opinion: the cable industry’s top man in Washington wants to make his case to Ars readers over Selectable Output Control (SOC)—Hollywood’s ability to shut down specific outputs on your A/V gear to prevent piracy. Far from opposing it, geeks should love SOC, he says; it’s technological progress in action, it won’t break your (current) TV, and it’s good for consumers.

• Complaints about continuing US government control of Internet domain name issues surfaced again this week in Egypt at the UN-backed Internet Governance Forum. Should the US government step even further back from the Internet?

• This afternoon (4pm local time, 9am EST, 9pm Beijing) I will be speaking on a plenary panel about social networks. I and the other panelists have been told very clearly by people in charge that we can’t mention specific U.N. member countries, and we’re discouraged from “naming and shaming” any other kinds of specific entities as well. It’s going to be rather difficult to discuss emerging issues related to social networks without being able to give any specific examples of specific countries and companies. More broadly, it’s rather difficult to make progress in global Internet governance without being able to discuss specific cases in the public meetings, or applying any value judgments to what any of the actors are doing. But that’s the United Nations for you. Last night I considered whether it even made sense for me to remain on the panel. I decided to stay on it because I hope that I can get a message across – albeit generically – about free expression concerns on social networks, and how the Global Network Initiative is one way to help companies navigate these concerns.

• Spanish citizens will have a legal right from 2011 to be able to buy broadband internet of at least one megabyte per second at a regulated price wherever they live, the country’s industry minister said on Tuesday.

• The telecoms operator holding the so-called “universal service” contract would have to guarantee it could offer “reasonably” priced broadband throughout Spain, said Miguel Sebastian in a statement sent to media.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• The copyright industry lobbyists absolutely love to throw around the bogus and debunked stat that copyright contributes $1.52 trillion to the economy. That number is derived by taking any business that kinda sorta maybe touches copyright (including things like furniture and jewelry) and then assuming that all of the revenue they make is entirely due to copyright. Yes, that’s ridiculous. But, if the copyright lobbyists are going to use such bogus methodology to push their agenda, it seems only fair for those on the other side to use the same methodology. Last week, we wrote about a biased editorial by two newspaper industry lawyers in the WSJ (who failed to note the conflicts of interest), claiming that Google violated copyright law, and attacked the concept of fair use.

• Reader Robin Trehaeven alerts us to a fantastic opinion piece in the Library Journal by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in which she does a superb job mocking what she refers to as the “accessibility paradox” where those who are used to being gatekeepers to information at the same time as they’re supposedly promoting the benefits of greater information, suddenly start whining when information really does get more accessible.

• If you thought that the entertainment industry would stop at having the ability to force ISPs to kick people they accuse (not convict) of file sharing offline, you might want to pay attention to what’s happening in South Korea. South Korea, of course, is home to very high broadband penetration, with exceptionally high speeds. And, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of unauthorized file sharing going on there. Of course, if you looked at the Korean cultural world, you’d immediately learn that smart entrepreneurs and entertainers quickly learned to adapt and take advantage of this new world. Entrepreneurs like JY Park recognized the changing marketplace, and adapted — and the massive success he’s had with artists like Rain and Wonder Girls, suggests that perhaps “piracy” wasn’t a big deal. All you need is some smart business people who can adapt.

• Now, of course that sounds ridiculous, to hear that record labels can get a new copyright on just remastering a work… but, that sounds an awful lot like the argument made by Bluebeat.com, concerning its “psycho-acoustic simulation” re-recordings of famous songs, that enabled it to claim a new copyright.

• At some point, musicians and songwriters need to learn that these organizations are not doing things in their best interests at all. They’re simply bureaucracies to funnel money to big names, while limiting the competition.

• After the death of a relative, Mike put together a photo tribute for the funeral, in order to “remember the good times,” he says.

• The moral is simple. We are not a nation of thieves, but if a supermarket leaves its doors open and shuts down the tills, it should be unsurprised if people help themselves. The music industry lets illegal downloading thrive because it didn’t provide an easy, affordable way to pay. That was left to Apple’s iTunes, the likes of Last.fm and now a new generation of sites, which offer music at prices that reflect more fully the near-zero cost of distribution. While the music industry was lamenting that users wouldn’t pay for tracks, the same people were paying up to £3 a pop for ringtones on their phones. Why? Because phones have an easy payments system.

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