● 12.12.09

● Links 12/12/2009: More KDE 4.4 and SPICE

Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Speaking as a Linux/FOSS user, none of this comes as any surprise to me at all. Since my move from Microsoft in the home (as a result of repeatedly being let-down, then blamed for failing software) I have experienced first hand the advantages of migrating to FOSS. This is not because the software is free (to me thats just an added bonus) but the days of me constantly fixing, correcting, scanning, cleaning up my system have come to an end.

• One only has to look at any IT related forum to see users running many different FOSS projects. For some its on a Windows platform, for others they have, like me moved away completely.

• It’s not just the big-time robber barons, but all the way down the foodchain. I just know that someone is going to comment “But businesses care only about maximizing profits, otherwise shareholders will sue them and bad stuff like that.” Please. Don’t bother because it’s garbage. It’s excusing unethical behavior. Businesses are run by people with plenty of values, though sometimes the wrong ones. It’s akin to saying that businesspeople must lie, cheat, and exploit because that is the only path to success. Hey everyone does it.

• Rip off the artists, musicians and creators because they’re too stupid and weak to protect their own interests. Gouge the freelancers, abuse employees, rip off your own customers, buy yourself favorable legislation. I don’t call success that comes at the expense of damaging other people success. That is failure.

Desktop

• Check Dell’s page for home laptop buyers and there’s a menu (see image, left) offering Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and … drum roll, please … Ubuntu options. Thank you to a number of readers who pointed out Dell’s decision to highlight the Ubuntu option.

Kernel Space

Applications

• Not to sound like a Luddite, but sometimes the old ways are best. When it comes to Web browsers, that’s not very often, but knowing your way around a text-mode browser like w3m does come in handy from time to time. You probably won’t want to switch, but after taking a look at what you can do with w3m, you might want to add it to your toolbox.

Instructionals

Games

Distributions

Red Hat Family

SPICE

• Regarding the lack of support for open source products and protocols… that is an opportunity. If you aren’t happy with the fact that open source product X doesn’t have anyone offering commercial support or that the existing support offerings are poor, someone else (even you) can change that and start a new support service. What it takes is massive adoption of product X to make the opportunity into a lucrative no-brainer. IBM has shifted a certain portion of their business to become a support company for open source… and they are a big lumbering company that takes forever to change direction. Imagine what a flexible, well run, smaller company could do.

• SPICE can be used to deploy virtual desktops from a server out to remote computers, such as desktop PCs and thin-client devices.

Fedora

• So what comes next? Fedora 13 is tentatively scheduled for release on May 11, 2010. The proposed feature list for this release is just beginning to come together, and some possible features (such as Btrfs-based rollbacks) do not yet appear there. Unsurprisingly, improvements to the Nouveau and Radeon graphics drivers are on the list. Better online telephony support is a possibility for F13 as well.

Debian Family

• Announced today by Ubun-student team that the name has been changed to “Ailurus”…

Devices/Embedded

• The Chumby is one of those strange little gadgets that defies easy categorisation. If we absolutely had absolutely to try to sum it up in half a dozen or so words, it would be: Wi-Fi internet radio alarm clock with widget support.

Phones

• Though it’s only been available for a few weeks, Verizon Wireless already has released an update package for the Motorola Droid, an Android-based smartphone. A Verizon spokesperson said the update started Monday and will continue for about a week.

Sub-notebooks

• Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.

• The lawsuit comes on the heels of news late last month that the alleged CrunchPad had allegedly died an alleged death at the hands of Fusion Garage – only to be revived by the Garage band as the JooJoo.

Free Software/Open Source

• SaVi runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin) to simulate satellite orbits in two and three dimensions. Unlike other satellite visualization software, this app focuses on helping users understand how satellites move together in a constellation formation to provide reliable global coverage without gaps in data transmission.

• Personally, even if I only use Free Software and always write about it and recommend it as much as I can I don’t worry that much if few people already use it and above all I do not care at all if almost no Free Software user contributes to it in any way. I care much more, for example, that everybody demands as soon as possible that only open formats, even before Free Software, are used by Public Administrations and that public data of public interest are made available online with open licenses. I’ll regularly cover these topics here and recommend the same priorities to all FOSS advocates, without stopping promoting Free Software, of course!

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• Unix was a good choice in that it was compartmentalized and it was relatively straightforward to replace each Unix component with it’s GNU replacement. (For anyone who doesn’t know: GNU is a recursive acronym that means ‘GNU is Not Unix’). Bit by bit RMS worked and by the early 1990′s he had almost a complete system. Only one major part was missing and that was the kernel.

• As we know Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel and then people started to use the GNU utilities to create a complete operating system. Of course there were many contributions from different places, but the two most important parts were the GNU utilities and the Linux kernel.

• Nevertheless, the historical narratives of the digital spaces could benefit from a critical reflection and inspection, just think of the origins of free software as narrated e.g. by Grassmuck in Germany. According to the narrative in the beginning all software was freely shared and source code exchanged but then corporate greed took over, and Richard Stallman quit his MIT job. Of course you also find other narratives of the history of computing and the net or could make up your own.

Openness

• The European Commission has released a report [.pdf] with the rather unpromising title “Trends in connectivity technologies and their socio-economic impacts”. Despite this, and a rather stodgy academic style, there are a number of interesting points made.

• Ryan’s article is an extended argument for why MIT should continue to support OCW after its grant funding runs out in two years. I (and I expect most readers of this blog) agree with the importance he places on the project and the very important public good it has become. More importantly, MIT OCW is terribly important to the broader field of open education.

• One of the heartening trends in openness recently has been the increasing, if belated, release of non-personal government data around the world. Even the UK is waking up to the fact that transparency is not just good democracy, but is good economics too, since it can stimulate all kinds of innovation based on mashups of the underlying data.

• It’s significant that books about the commons are starting to appear more frequently now. Here’s one that came out six months ago:

• Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, has now been published by oekom Verlag in Berlin. (The German title is Wem gehört die Welt – Zur Wiederentdeckung der Gemeingüter.) The book is an anthology of essays by a wide range of international authors, including Elinor Ostrom, Richard Stallman, Sunita Narain, Ulrich Steinvorth, Peter Barnes, Oliver Moldenhauer, Pat Mooney and David Bollier.

• “If you take this stack of video stories about a region and you create a kind of syndication model – it’s probably a free syndication model – you actually create an enabling mechanism for people to access this video content and do something with it,” Ofcom’s content and standards partner Stewart Purvis told the regulator’s Have We Got News For You? conference in Cardiff on Friday.

Programming

• So, can Eiffel come next after Java? Maybe. It is definitely not worse as a language, it is almost for sure better and at least is not just same Java again as C#. Also, Eiffel code is compiled into C and has no bytecode layer that separates Java from the “C world” so strongly. It may be an attractive alternative to try if your tasks require you to stay in this ‘C world’ and you just want to have a more convenient language rather than periodically switching into Perl, Python or something similar. And having C layer allows to create executables for ARM or even more exotic platforms; something that seems not working out of box with EiffelStudio but surely deserves investigation. This may allow to use Eiffel on Gumstix-like devices where currently Java is just *very* “ok”, C is still a king and Linux is that’s expected when you put your device out of box. Eiffel is not lots faster then Java neither it uses a lot less memory but it really seems a little faster and uses a little less memory – this still leaves a great impression as Eiffel provides more, not less programming comfort.

Standards/Consortia

• 3D graphics became ordinary first in games, then in operating systems, and on Thursday, it took a significant step toward being built into Web browsers as well.

• The Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, announced that its work with Mozilla to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web has reached draft standard form. The standard, called WebGL, lets programmers who use the Web’s JavaScript language take advantage of the fact that video cards can handle 3D graphics with aplomb.

• Agner Fog, a Danish expert in software optimization is making a plea for an open and standarized procedure for x86 instruction set extensions. Af first sight, this may seem a discussion that does not concern most of us. After all, the poor souls that have to program the insanely complex x86 compilers will take care of the complete chaos called “the x86 ISA”, right? Why should the average the developer, system administrator or hardware enthusiast care?

• In short, the world is moving to the ePub standard, with Amazon as, apparently, the primary holdout. That means that it will be in everyone’s best interests to optimize every device (except the Kindle) to the ePub standards, and to convert every book to the ePub standard. Amazon, on the other hand, will need to support its hardware and format standard all by itself. Of course, not being a hardware or software company, it will need to rely on…oh yes…the Taiwanese to supply them with the sort of cutting edge technology to be able to beat….Hmmm. That may be a problem.

Leftovers

• We’re not sure how many judges out there are avid Facebook users. But those that are might want to think twice before hitting the “confirm” button on all those friend requests from lawyers in your districts. At least, we should add, in Florida.

• Department of Homeland Security has placed five transportation security employees on leave following the inadvertent leak of a sensitive manual detailing security procedures for screening passengers at airports.

• On the desk in my office I have a sign that says: “Don’t steal — the government hates competition.” Indeed, any power a government arrogates to itself, it is loathe to give back to the people. Just as we have gone from a constitutionally-instituted national defense consisting of a limited army and navy bolstered by militias and letters of marque and reprisal, we have moved from a system of competing currencies to a government-instituted banking cartel that monopolizes the issuance of currency. In order to reintroduce a system of competing currencies, there are three steps that must be taken to produce a legal climate favorable to competition.

Abuse of Power

• A controversial scheme to hand police powers to civilians has been extended to include guards in one of Norwich’s main shopping centres.

• Democracy is made up of an informed electorate.

• It sounds simple but let me deconstruct this. We need information to be informed and we need the ability to exercise our vote in a meaningful way to be a valid electorate. In the current set up we get neither and thus we cannot honestly call the UK a democracy.

• Durham police last week put the final nail in the coffin of the Home Office mantra “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, with a clear announcement that DNA and fingerprinting could harm an individual’s career prospects – even if they are otherwise totally innocent.

• As we know, the UK government intends to force UK ISPs to store vast amounts of data about our online activities. The idea that this might be an undue burden is dismissed out of hand. But what do we now read about using intercept evidence in court?

• United States law enforcement agents and partners reported “encounters” with suspected terrorists 55,000 times in the last year; a check against the terrorist watchlist found a match 19,000 times, according to testimony presented to the Senate on Wednesday.

• The letter to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, from the seven main representative organisations for school and college leaders, says they take very seriously their duty to protect youngsters but the newly introduced system is “disproportionate to risk”.

• Computer hacker Gary McKinnon is mounting a fresh High Court challenge to stop his extradition to the US.

Environment

• The standard answer to a question like this is that “we all suffer.” While that’s probably true, it misses the point — we may all suffer, but we don’t all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.

• There is, I believe, a non-zero chance that an extended period of climate instability could induce a state that believes itself to be better able to adapt to global warming to slow its efforts to decarbonize in order to gain a lead over its more vulnerable rivals.

• Hear me out.

• Warmed, overfished and polluted, the small Mediterranean Sea is giving scientists a look at what the future may hold for the rest of Earth’s oceans — and it’s not pretty.

• To mark the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’m trotting out some maps I made a while back. This one has states labelled with the names of countries that are their greenhouse gas equivalents.

• A hi-tech “cryo-Egg”, which will help predict sea levels changes, is to be created by experts at Bristol university.

• The device will be sunk into the depths of the Greenland ice sheet before beaming back data about how frozen water is moving into the sea.

• Police detain 200 activists at their Copenhagen accommodation and seize items they claim could be used for acts of civil disobedience

Finance

• Government-backed venture capital funds worth £776m have generated only £11m in net income so far, according to a damning report by the National Audit Office.

• His first piece was a polemic against Goldman Sachs, which triggered a backlash against the venerated Wall Street firm due to its incestuous relationship with Washington. Afterwards, he took on health care reform. Now, he is taking on the Obama Administration and its status quo bias. I have an excerpt below and a link to the full article. But, first, let me say a few words.

• As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration’s leadership on financial reform. While I think they ‘get it,’ it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.

• It’s not enough that they have brought the US and Europe to their financial knees. Now banks, under the guise of the WTO’s free trade treaty, want to expand the casino to the new big emerging powers with their trillion-greenback reserves. A derivatives crash in those markets could easily trigger a financial China Syndrome—a second meltdown from New York to Beijing to Brasília.

• Last year, the American people overwhelmingly voted for a change in our national priorities and for a new direction on the economy. After eight long years of trickle-down economics that benefitted millionaires and billionaires while leaving the middle class behind, Americans demanded a change that would put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few.

• What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.

AstroTurf

• Tentative plan leaves public healthcare option, which was touted by liberals, effectively abandoned

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards on Tuesday. I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London and called Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She worked her contacts to get in touch with civil rights lawyers in Michigan, and we mobilized with Caitlin Sweet (Peter’s partner) and David Nickle (Peter’s friend) and Peter was arraigned and bailed out later that day.

• But now Peter faces a felony rap for “assaulting a federal officer” (Peter and the witness in the car say he didn’t do a thing, and I believe them). Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty.

• But JWZ has the kicker, when he reminds us that Eric Schmidt’s Google blackballed CNet’s reporters after CNet published personal information about Schmidt’s private life: “”Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story…” “To underscore its point about how much personal information is available, the CNET report published some personal information about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt — his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations — all obtained through Google searches….”

• Hey, Eric: if you don’t want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn’t have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?

• Evony’s owners, who boast that the game has more than 11 million players worldwide, have accused Everiss – a 30-year veteran of the computer games industry – of damaging their reputation with a series of claims made on his blog. Among the allegations that Evony is objecting to are claims that the game is exploitative and has links to another company that is already being sued for fraud by Microsoft.

• Golfer wins injunction banning reporting of new details about personal life that were widely available in US

• A crack squad of London cops — three cars and a riot van — converged on a famous architectural photographer who was taking a picture of Christopher Wren’s 300 year old Christ Church spire. Grant Smith, the photographer, refused to tell a Bank of America security guard what he was doing (he wasn’t on B of A property) and so the guard called in the police. When the police arrived, Smith was searched and questioned under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act.

• We were not especially impressed by their sending of seven officers in three cars and a riot van to deal with architectural photographer, Grant Smith, caught filming a church in the City of London. This was overkill, but alongside Kent’s arrest of a photographer for being too tall, as well as interference by various forces with assorted schoolboys, trainspotters and Austrian tourists, it was but small beer.

• Leading security expert Bruce Schneier was in London this week on a whirlwind lecture tour. ZDNet UK caught up with the ex-NSA man, who is now BT’s chief security technology officer, at lectures in parliament and at University College London.

• Schneier talked to ZDNet UK about his views on behavioural advertising, the efforts of various governments to tackle unlawful file-sharing, cyber-warfare and vendor lock-in.

• Hidden away inside the Bill, there’s unlimited – and arbitrary – censorship of any site the Secretary of State takes against:

• If this goes through, we are in deep trouble, people….

• Three Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Homeland Security what can be done to bar or criminally penalize whistleblower sites that reposted a sensitive airport-screening manual that was published on the internet by a government worker.

• If Redbox is set to destroy the Hollywood with $1-per-night DVD rentals, what’ll happen if Big Box DVD kiosks start appearing around the country, charging just 6 cents an hour? We could find out if Big Box parent Mosquito Productions is able to expand its kiosk DVD rental business.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• William Patry: Patry, the author of the book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars and the scholarly treatise Patry on Copyright, defines copyright as a social program that is a means to an end.

• As devotees of our hit video series Five Minutes with Harold Feld (or as the cool kids call it “5MWHF”) will no doubt recall, on the eve of Thanksgiving MPAA dropped a lengthy filing into the Selectable Output Control (SOC) docket. Among other things, it called Harold a liar. Harold immediately took five minutes to tell MPAA to chillax, and yesterday we filed our official response with the FCC. Although I urge you to read our full reply (I promise it is much shorter than the MPAA’s), if you are in a rush here is the short version. Our response basically made three points.

• [...]

• Public Knowledge does not know which of these groups should be satisfied. More importantly, neither does the FCC. The FCC’s job is not to choose winners and losers in the marketplace. Instead, the FCC’s job is to advance the public interest. MPAA produced plenty of information in its most recent filing, but none of it suggests that SOC is in the public interest.

• Oh, and just in case you were wondering to yourself “who owns these millions of HDTVs that will be broken if the FCC allows SOC?” I can’t tell you everyone who owns one, but I do know that at least one of them is on the ground floor of the FCC.

• The irony is that the Government has put libraries at the forefront of its campaign to push services online in order to improve efficiency and reach more people.

• My Mum says that libraries are increasingly reliant on their provision of Internet access to attract visitors, and that if they were no longer able to provide such access, it’d be difficult to put together a case for their continued existence.

• Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion.

• The first rule of Usenet is, you don’t talk about Usenet. This rule kept Usenet providers and users out of sight from anti-piracy organizations for years. Ironically, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN are now the first ones trying to enforce this rule in court.

• Famous boxing announcer Michael Buffer has filed a lawsuit against a Borderland radio station.

• Buffer alleges XHNZ 107.5 used his copyrighted catch phrase “Let’s get ready to rumble” without his permission.

• SoundExchange has at times in the past been a bit lax about finding artists owed part of the money it collects from webcasters and satellite radio stations. Integration with other databases is changing that, albeit slowly, to SoundExchange’s credit.

ACTA

• This purpose of this site is to provide information about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and its potential impacts in New Zealand.

• ACTA is a ‘plurilateral’ treaty, currently being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.

• The opposition movement that formed in response to the “three strikes” rule is ready to take action on ACTA, to make sure that New Zealand’s information policy is made democratically, and not through secret meetings in back rooms. They are organizing their response to the ACTA negotiations next April, and given their amazing mobilization against “three strikes” the last time around, I expect great things. If you’re from .nz or live there now, tell your friends and loved ones about this: your family’s ability to communicate, earn a living, get an education and participate in civil society could be jeapordized by the decisions the elite plan on making in your country.

• And hey, Mexico! There’s an ACTA meeting headed your way in January. Got anything planned?

• I’ve written several times about the trick that ACTA uses to blur the distinction between large-scale, criminal counterfeiting, and domestic, personal copyright infringement. Sadly, the EU seems to be following the same script…

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