● 12.09.09

● Links 09/12/2009: Thundebird 3 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 1:05 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The best part about being a grownup is you can be your own favorite Linux/FOSS geek and buy yourself nice things. Here are some cool gift ideas for this holiday season. Or any time of year, because excellent adult toys know no seasons.

Desktop

• 10. Linux, You mean that CLI thing?

• 9. My hardware doesn’t meet the requirements.

• 8. It is so restrictive, can’t do anything without root password.

• 7. Whenever I’m settled on a particular distribution, a new one appears.

• 6. Its incomplete. It lacks the Disk De-fragment Utility

• Now…for the important stuff. Lynn Bender of geekaustin.com has announced that he is beginning preparations for LInux Against Poverty 2010. I was pleasantly surprised to find that 25 people volunteered for the event within an hour of the announcement.

Server

• The use of computational grids, also known as ‘grid computing’, facilitates people’s lives by combining computer resources from various domains for a common task. An EU-funded team of researchers has developed and launched its second Linux-based grid operating system. Under the motto ‘Making Grid Computing Easier’, the XtreemOS project has released the second version of its Linux-based Grid operating system. XtreemOS, which is scheduled to end in May 2010, has received over EUR 14 million in financial support.

• IBM on Tuesday debuted new hardware, software and services packages for enterprise customers that want to consolidate and virtualize Linux-based data loads on their System z mainframes.

Google

• If I said Google’s been getting a lot of press lately, that wouldn’t mean much. Google always seems to get a lot of press. It could be my imagination, of course, but it really feels like there’s been an uptick of chatter about Google these days. Motorola’s Droid was released, running Google’s Android OS. Google unleashed a new programming language called “Go” on the world. Then there was also the excitement over the Chrome OS that’s in development. I’m pretty sure it isn’t my imagination. In the midst of all this Robert Strohmeyer suggested that the future of Linux is Google. Hmmm…maybe, but I’m not so sure.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that for every new individual member who joins the organization between today and January 31, 2009, the Linux Foundation will give a free membership to a student for one year.

Applications

• Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. It is heavily utilized in many applications, including animation, automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many others. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics (both hardware and software), and discrete differential geometry.

• Empathy is a IM/voice /video client that uses Gossips’s UI and Nokia’s MissionControl

• The main goal of empathy is is libempathy and libempathy-gtk libraries which permits desktop integration. The widgets made in libempathy-gtk can be used to embed into any GNOME application

• I haven’t used Rhythmbox for the longest time because Listen met my needs. Well, it was Listen, Sound Juicer and Ex Falso. I am not sure when was the last time I used Rhythmbox but I sure remember using something else to rip the files. There was Sound Juicer back then and that was it. I almost had no choice but to use it. So yeah, right now, Rhythmbox looks better.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

• In a session at the FUDcon Fedora Linux user and developer conference this week, contributors showed off some preliminary work for GNOME 3, the next major evolution of the GNOME platform.

• For now I’m gonna stop this as there is plenty more but I guess ya’ll get the drift – plenty of cool KDE related blogs and people who care about what we do. I consider them part of our community. Not hardcore developers for sure, but part of KDE.

Distributions

• SliTaz has potential and the active community required to take things to the next step. SliTaz isn’t fancy but it provides a wonderful environment to log in and accomplish most tasks. SliTaz (Simle Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone) is definitely the distro I will think about next time I need something for older hardware or a small rescue utility. SliTaz simply does not have what it takes, though, to be my new desktop Linux of choice. Ubuntu and Slackware will continue to own that title. Fortunately, none of what I see as necessary improvements impact the usability of the distro. Keeping track of SliTaz (http://forum.slitaz.org) is easy and I really look forward to hearing more as time goes on.

• The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2009 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Andrew Strick, Assistant Editor. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Red Hat Family

• From spending a good week and a half with Fedora 12, I couldn’t find anything broken or out of place. The entire experience feels polished and well thought out. As I’ve mentioned before in past articles it seems to me that every even-numbered Fedora release is exceptional, and given the quality of this latest release, I’ll have to say that the tradition still holds strong.

• If someone wants to switch from Fedora to something else, by all means, go for it… have fun… but for me I’m sticking with Fedora… on my personal desktops anyway. I’ll just be quiet about servers for now.

Debian Family

• Lucid alpha 1 is due this Thursday, so the soft freeze is now in effect for main. Please be considerate with your uploads, and watch for any release blocker bugs.

• Thoughts? How can we get people using Ubuntu and calling it Ubuntu (not Linux, because that brand is burnt/toxic) or if your dealing with some other distro how can we communicate that distro without marketing deals and educational packs for each of these companies?

• Can a Windows server do that? A version upgrade, in place, without taking down the server, and with minimal offline time? I don’t think so. I never really appreciated the convenience of being able to continue to use a Linux system during an upgrade until I needed to upgrade a working server. It’s nice.

• Data Ltd Incorporated (DLI) has announced an Ubuntu Linux-ready tablet PC designed to allow retailers to accept payments anywhere in a store. The DLI 8800 includes a 7-inch touchscreen display and magstripe reader, survives four-foot drops, and is available with a barcode scanner and RFID reader, the company says.

Devices/Embedded

• Ottawa, Canada-based Crank Software is shipping a Linux-ready, cross-platform GUI development suite for embedded R&D designers. The Eclipse-based Crank Storyboard Suite includes an embedded GUI design and prototyping application called Crank Storyboard Designer and a runtime component called Crank Storyboard Embedded Engine, says the company.

• The Crank Storyboard Suite is built on C, but its Eclipse-based GUI programming environment enables UI designers “with no programming experience to drag-and-drop their UI designs” into a working storyboard, says Crank.

• Open-source gaming fans will certainly be glad to hear that project lead Michael Weston and his team have uploaded the first pictures of a manufacturing test unit of the Pandora handheld built using mass production parts.

Phones

• The Optima-made device doesn’t have the sliding keyboard that the N900 has and the former boasts to the the first device to run Maemo Linux outside of Nokia.

Sub-notebooks

• Sugar Labs, the organisation behind the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop software, has released Sugar on a Stick version 2.0 – a.k.a. Blueberry. Sugar on a Stick is a version of the free open source Sugar Learning Platform that can be installed on a bootable USB flash drive to run on a conventional desktop, notebook or netbook computer. Blueberry, the latest release of the child-friendly operating system, is based on Fedora 12 and includes a number of new features.

• Asked how Microsoft could claim that 93 percent of netbooks had its operating systems on them, Orr said the figures they were drawing on were only for the United States.

• And he added that Microsoft did not include Dell in its figures as the company was selling directly to the public.

• He said it was not possible to extrapolate figures for one region based on those of another as the usage patterns were totally different.

• The Netbook World Summit (NWS) is coming to town. That is, if you live in Paris, France. December 8th 2009 will mark the 2nd year of the annual Netbook Summit. It’s an international conference designed to chat, engage and examine the emerging netbook market. This year, it’ll be at the swanky Parisian “Cyclone – Le Studio.” But is there really a need for a big event about a tiny computer? We sure think so.

Free Software/Open Source

• For open source software, the most important thing is having good code. Every project needs more users and more developers, but without the proper technical foundation to absorb them, an open source project could easily hit a wall. (I actually wrote about this almost exactly two years ago under “The Limits of Open Source.”) A successful open source projects must be extensible, stable, and technically interesting — otherwise, who would want to work with your code base?

• The wonderful wonderful manual about Ardour is done! It was produced in a Book Sprint / Workshop held at moddr_ in Rotterdam and lead by Derek Holzer. Its a super good manual and designed to help the newbies get to grips with Ardour.

• On 1st December Olswang held their third and final Open Source Summit in London. For one reason or another I’d been unable to attend the 2007 and 2008 events and was glad to last week be finally able to make it along. Olswang are a law firm and so as you would expect the summit focused on open source legal matters. We were treated to a keynote from Bruce Perens and the overall quality of the event was very high. Numerous topics were covered over the course of the morning and a few notes follow.

• Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain’s resource centre on open source and open standards.

• Cenatic on Friday published a brochure ‘Ten reasons for using open source in education’, meant to show the country’s autonomous regions the benefits of open source software, and to ensure they consider the use of this type of software when schools modernise their programs.

• The brochure will be sent to all of Spain’s secondary schools.

• In favour of free and open source software are objective arguments, technical, social and cultural, explains Miguel Jaque, Cenatic’s director in a statement. “Open source is a model in itself, free, democratic, sustainable and technologically competitive. It helps to educate people to be free, independent and critical and shows them that they are able make their own technological choices.”

• Open source caching startup Gear6 has entered the cloud fray by releasing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of its memcached distribution server, dubbed Gear6 Web Cache Server.

• Open source file system vendor Gluster released its Storage Platform, integrating a file system, an operating system and a management UI to create a cluster that can store petabytes of information and provide failover for virtual machines.

• Barack Obama has chosen it for the White House web site. The London Stock Exchange replaced its previous trading system with it. And Germany has just awarded its most prestigious decoration to Matthias Ettrich for producing it.

• So what makes people opt for open-source software?

• For many, it’s the price. For others, it’s the freedom that open-source licences offer: the freedom to inspect the code, modify it and distribute it, and the freedom from potential vendor intransigence, incompetence and deliberate lock-in.

• Looking forward to what the next 10 to 20 years hold in store, it’s clear to me that open source will be the default mechanism for software development.

• Consider this, jQuery just beat out some serious competition. In the category for open source web applications the entrants, jQuery was competing with Firefox and WordPress.

• Tell them the software is free. Many open source advocates are sure that the way to any boss’ heart is through her budget. While developers and other techies may love open source because of such things as its strong community or the philosophy of open source, they also acknowledge that the best way to appeal to the boss may be the bottom line. This attitude may be cynical — “They are always trying to save because they know that whatever is left in their account at the end of the period will go to their pockets,” wrote a guy named Al — but I dare say there’s plenty of justification in some firms. As a developer named Jason wrote, “I simply insisted that I will make and save them more money. And I did!… It didn’t take much to persuade my boss at all.”

Web Browsers

Chrome/Chrome OS

• Google has released Speed Tracer , an open source Chrome extension which visualises data gathered from within a browser to find performance bottlenecks. It can analyse and visualise JavaScript parsing times, layout and CSS recalculations, DOM event handling, resource loading, timers and XMLHttpRequests, displaying all the information in an easy to read timeline.

• A project that could bring an unofficial version of Google’s Chrome OS to 64 bit computers has launched.

Mozilla

• Mozilla Messaging, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla dedicated to developing products that encourage choice, innovation, and opportunity in messaging on the Internet, today announced Thunderbird 3, the latest version of its free and open source email application.

• The outfit’s free alternative to Microsoft’s Outlook was made available as a download for Windows, Mac and Linux users on Tuesday. It comes less than a week after Mozilla pushed out a second release candidate version of the email client, in a move to fix a memory-hogging bug in Thunderbird 3.

• Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence.

• Mozilla is celebrating the fifth anniversary of Firefox 1.0, released 9 November, 2004. The project began as a fresh start intended to be leaner and faster.

Business

• I was researching the product suite offered by Talend at the request of a client. It seems to be a very rich and robust solution and is based on open source which makes it that much more interesting.

• Separately, Zenoss recently announced Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, which the vendor says provides features to support scalability, reliability and security demands typical in enterprise IT environments. For instance, the software includes an agent-less distributed collector architecture and support for “distributed collector non-root installs” that the vendor says keeps customer environments compliant with corporate security policies while installing Zenoss Enterprise. This version also includes Amazon EC2 monitoring and VMware Ready support.

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• I think we also need to send Richard Stallman to meet with new Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, to discuss our government’s obligation to use free software. Stallman told me, himself, that he would like an opportunity to meet with Mr. Kundra. So, if any of you have any connections or contacts in that realm, let’s help RMS go to Washington.

• We deserve a voice in Washington because we know there are those in the opposing camps with lobbyists and representatives to promote their side of the story. We need ours.

• Karen and Bradley discuss Eben Moglen’s letter to the European Commission regarding the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

• Barnes and Noble’s new nook ebook reader is now shipping to people. Mine[1] is due to turn up tomorrow, but the instruction manual is available for download already.

Releases

Government

• Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, and FreeSoft PLC, Hungary’s leading service provider in the software development sector, have won the Hungarian government’s open source software tender that has a four-year, $22.3 million budget.

Licensing

• I’ve been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed.

• Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn’t have all the GNU extensions.

Hardware

• This column mainly talks about open source software, for the simple reason that code dominates the world of openness. But open source hardware does exist, albeit in a very early, rudimentary form. Last Friday, I went along to NESTA for what was billed as an “Open Hardware Camp”. Fortunately, I didn’t see any tents, since that’s not really my kind of thing; what I did see was a huge amount of enthusiasm, and some interesting hints of things to come.

• European researchers have created the architecture, hardware and software that will enable super-agile distributed corporations capable of reconfiguring themselves on the fly. It promises to make ‘made-to-order’ a reality for consumers.

• People Power plans to distribute OSHAN (Open Source Home Area Network)—its free, open source wireless software —and SuRF (Sensor Ultra Radio Frequency)—its low-cost hardware and software development kit —to engineers early next year.

• The open source software company debuted its new hardware device at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Monday. The new device, essentially a TV set-top box, will augment the current beta software that’s available so far only to invited testers. Boxee officials expect to have the first consumer TV boxes on sale for around US$200 during the second quarter of 2010.

Openness (Data/Transparency)

• On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.

• The White House on Tuesday instructed every federal agency to publish before the end of January at least three collections of “high value” government data on the Internet that never have been previously disclosed, an ambitious order to make the administration as transparent as President Barack Obama had promised it would be.

• Reading maps is pretty easy, creating them is not. MapBox is an online open source toolkit and database of custom tile sets that let you build great-looking maps in Amazon’s cloud.

• [...]

• Data is plugged into the maps via OpenStreetMap, a free and editable map of the world, or TIGER US Census Data. TIGER provides a tremendous amount of geographical data, including states, counties, subdivisions, districts, and more.

• The government is planning to give anyone free access to postcode data.

• There have been various murmurings from the UK government about openness without much substance – except for the recent announcement that Ordnance Survey data would finally be released. Now we have the “Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government” plan that includes further moves in this area as part of a larger government transformation.

• In the news coverage over the President’s Open Government Directive, two stories being overlooked are the release of an “Open Government Progress Report to the American People” and the announcement (in a press release) that every Cabinet department will launch new open-government projects, details of which will be made available tomorrow.

• The Australian government is emerging as one of the leaders in the sphere of open government. It has now published a draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, entitled “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0″ (hmm, not quite sure about that phraseology).

• Will it be another 15 years before the remaining 10,000 universities and research institutions (or at least the top 1000) wield the mighty pen to unleash the even mightier keystrokes (as 68 Institutions and Departments, and 42 Funders have already done)? Or will we keep dithering about Gold OA, publishing reform, peer review reform, re-use rights, author addenda, preservation and the other 38 factors causing Zeno’s Paralysis) for another decade and a half?

• The Prime Minister said that “there are many hundreds more datasets that can be opened up – not only from central government but also from local councils, the NHS, police and education authorities.”; and the Secretary of State for Communities said “we plan to give local people far better access to information held by local public organisations so they can challenge, compare or scrutinise their local services in order to drive up standards in their area.”

• Now the Dundee-born actor Brian Cox is to take on a role rather closer to home, playing fellow Scot Michael Martin, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, in a forthcoming BBC satirical drama about the MPs’ expenses affair.

• The pilot phase of P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) ended in October, after having run for six weeks with seven courses and approximately 90 participants. Last month, the pilot phase volunteers, including the course organizers, met in person for the first time at the first ever P2PU Workshop in Berlin.

Leftovers

• Open access and open source are just the first step in the opening of the wireless industry.

• Roche, the manufacturer of Tamiflu, has made it impossible for scientists to assess how well the anti-flu drug stockpiled around the globe works by withholding the evidence the company has gained from trials, doctors alleged today.

Police State (UK)

• From the Lancashire Evening Post we learn that police in Preston have been closing down popular pubs and clubs on account of them having ‘inadequate security camera coverage’.

• A new generation of average speed cameras that will police 20mph zones in residential areas are to come into force in the New Year after they were approved by the government.

• At a Downing Street news conference earlier this year, Gordon Brown found himself flummoxed by a question from a foreign journalist. He was asked what impression the rest of the world was getting of civil liberties in Britain now that tourists could be arrested for taking a photograph of a building. Mr Brown responded: “I don’t accept that is the true picture of Britain at all.” He then moved on, having dismissed the question as beneath contempt.

• The Daily Mail are reporting that Manor Community College in Cambridge is to ban any visitor who has not been checked by the Criminal Records Bureau.

• After I read Norman Baker’s book on The Strange Death of David Kelly I was convinced that he was probably killed – and not by his own hand. Baker’s own theory of who did it struck me as implausable and the book is uneven and frustrating and includes unworthy inuendoes. But the defining and scandalous fact is this: there was no coronor’s inquest into what was a highly significant death. We know that Blair took us to war and misled the country to justify his decision. We don’t know why and how Kelly, the UK’s foremost active weapons inspector in Iraq who hated Saddam and also hated the way the evidence to justify invasion was being tampered with, died.

• Therefore as a result of MPs now finding themselves liable under the libel law I conclude that libel reform is set to become a top priority on the legislative agenda. You read it here first!

• Schneier believes a step change is coming. We live in a unique time: cameras are everywhere AND we can see them; identity checks happen all the time AND we know they’re happening. However technology is a great distrupter of equilibriums and Moore’s law is a friend of intrusive tools. Soon face-recognition software will obviate the need to carry ID – when you walk into your workplace they’ll already know who you are and whether you’re supposed to be there.

• The government’s plans to limit DNA retention from those arrested but not charged or convicted may not go far enough, according to the body that ensures human rights rulings are obeyed.

• But have things now changed? Are people in general less happy now with identifying themselves and cooperating with the police? Is there any research on this?

• This play was unsupervised by mum or dad and children were free to go on adventures far from home. Sadly this world of independent child’s play has today largely vanished. One of the important reasons for this decline is the inexorable rise of stranger danger and child abduction in modern Britain.

• A study published Monday in The Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.

Environment

• Since 1990, greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping have increased by 85 percent, or approximately 50 percent if the base year of 1997 is adopted. Either way, greenhouse gas emissions from the maritime sector are rising steeply and are likely to go far, far higher.

• News Corporation media outlets have been at the forefront of championing the views of the climate change skeptics.

• I have no expertise in environmental science, and have never made an intensive study. I realise that what I write here is so simple as to be taught to a six year old. But there is a reason I write it.

• I am however trained as a historian. That mankind has changed the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is indubitable from a moment’s consideration of the evidence.

• Other scientists point out that we are still not clear on how many sulfates are being emitted, particularly in the rapidly industrializing developing world. It is clear that sulfates (particulates) provide a cooling effect, even while carbon dioxide levels keep growing. In another post, the scientists discuss why NASA results show higher global temperature than the Hadley results from the UK. One conclusion is that the Hadley data does not have as many Arctic data points. Warming in the Arctic is 2-3 times faster than the global average.

• Conservationists have condemned Norway’s decision to increase the number of minke whales it can kill by 45 per cent, describing the move as unjustified and “political posturing”.

• Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN’s negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol

Finance

• Christmas is a waste of money because people who give presents overestimate how much recipients will enjoy their offerings, economist Joel Waldfogel said.

AstroTurf

• As the battle for health care reform rages on in the Senate, the powerful insurance consortium Blue Cross Blue Shield appears to have embraced some rather unorthodox methods for achieving its goals.

• After months of fierce insurance industry opposition to the bill, Blue Cross is working secretively with conservative front group American Legislative Exchange Council to use the issue of states’ rights as a pretext to declaring health reform unconstitutional.

• [...]

• Former insurance executive Wendell Porter, who now favors reform, declared that private insurers have become “consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.”

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• Consumers will be at the core of the European Union’s ‘i2015′ action plan for the future of the digital economy, which the EU institutions are beginning to shape and plan to deliver by spring 2010.

• The FTC said Tuesday that it has filed suit against three firms for allegedly making “hundreds of thousands or even millions” of robocalls to consumers in violation of the Do Not Call rule and other laws. The three groups targeted allegedly called consumers in a bid to sell “worthless credit-card interest-rate reduction programs for hefty up-front fees of as much as $1,495,” the agency said in a statement. The groups have been ordered to stop making the calls pending trial.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• We were just talking about how SOCAN, the Canadian copyright collection society, was going after gymnastics clubs for kids using music in their practice routines. Now they’re getting some well-deserved attention for other antics. Michael Geist explains how SOCAN tried to keep its submission to the government copyright consultation secret. The organization apparently requested that its submission not be posted online, even though that was part of the consultation process. The government made it available anyways, but only by email upon request. Of course, it’s now available online elsewhere [PDF].

• If you want to use Iger’s logic, you could just as easily claim that copyright laws allow them to charge monopoly rents on products, thus depriving many other industries of money and jobs. Thus — again, using Iger’s own logic — copyright contributes to unemployment and the harming of our economy. Not sure he really wants to go there.

• All too often, the public policy world focuses on subtle legislative distinctions and on regulatory details. But once in a while, an issue comes along that strikes to the heart of the big principles. Such an issue erupted last week in the UK – an issue that incorporates two of the most important subjects on these pages: privacy and innovation.

• MIT business professor Renee Richardson Gosline has conducted research suggesting that people who buy counterfeit bags are highly likely to purchase non-counterfeit versions of their treasures at a later date (even though the two bags can’t be distinguished from one another by casual observers). Gresham’s Law repealed for status goods?

• 1999: The Recording Industry Association of America sues Napster, the online, peer-to-peer file sharing service that’s allowing millions of computer users to score free, copyright music. The rules are about to change.

• Peter Mandelson, in his infinite stupidity, goes for lunch on a yacht in Corfu with the entertainment industry lobby and the next thing we know he has declared war on every single person in the UK who uses the Internet – whether they be guilty of undesirable behaviour or not.

• The Liberal Democrats are to oppose a clause in the Digital Economy Bill that would let the business secretary amend copyright law without parliamentary debate.

• The Conservatives have accused Business Secretary Lord Mandelson of “empire building”, calling for his department to have a cabinet minister in the Commons.

• I met with Detica last Friday, at their suggestion, to discuss what their system actually did (they’ve read some of my work on Phorm’s system, so meeting me was probably not entirely random).

• I have noticed recently while playing around on YouTube and Google Video seeking exam question fodder that many fans of popular movies and TV shows who make mash-up videos of material from the shows post a notice at the beginning or end of their video saying “no copyright infringement intended”. It strikes me that this is actually a really good example of the disjoin between what the law says and what people think the law says. If copyright is basically a strict liability statute, then the intention to infringe is irrelevant. However, the everyday potential infringer doesn’t know this.

• This isn’t to downplay the importance of music, or say that the quality of music doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But the music is not the scarcity, and you don’t make money off of selling something that’s abundant. You use the abundance to figure out what other scarce goods it makes more valuable and you sell those. So, people can complain and shout all they want, but it doesn’t change the basic fact that until you recognize that selling music directly just isn’t a very good business model, you’re limiting your market tremendously.

• Far from being a cure for the industry’s woes, substituting streams for downloads wastes bandwidth, reduces privacy and slows innovation

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayStormy Peters, HP open source strategist 03 (2004)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.