● 12.16.09

● Links 16/12/2009: LinuxCon 2010 Coming, Mandriva One XFCE 2010

Posted in News Roundup at 9:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux Foundation — the non-profit organization dedicated to all things Linux — is involved in a number of conferences throughout the year. Among those, the newest is LinuxCon, which will be celebrating it’s second year in 2010.

• Most impressively, the machine can flawlessly stream a 1280×528px 1536kb/s *.mkv file over my wireless network.

• As a comparison, I have a Windows Vista machine with a 2.3GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 512MB video card upstairs that can’t play the same file without special codecs and the help of a program called CoreAVC. Even with these, it plays the file imperfectly.

• I can’t explain how this is possible, but needless to say, I am astounded at the ability of Linux.

• About a year after it first appeared as a Windows application, Google’s Chrome browser is finally available in beta for Linux. Google had to limit its compatible distro list to a handful of popular Linux versions, but those who can use it will likely enjoy its speed, features and the hundreds of extensions Google has made available.

Kernel Space

• Last month Phoromatic went into public beta, which is our remote test management software for the Phoronix Test Suite that allows a wealth of possibilities including the ability to easily build a benchmarking test farm.

• I decided to do a screencast of how I apply patches to the Linux stable tree to give people an idea of my patch workflow.

Graphics Stack

• A week ago we shared that the first of the slides and videos from VMware’s recent Gallium3D workshop were now posted on the Internet. This morning some more of this content is being published, which covers the VMware SVGA driver status, a Gallium3D state tracker overview, and the status of the OpenGL ES state tracker. The content from the previous video/slides push along with today’s uploads can be found here. Unfortunately we have found out that some of the videos from the Gallium3D workshop have been lost.

• Only 11 code commits have been made to the xf86-video-nv driver (that only touch about 100 lines of code) since the 2.1.15 driver update back in September, but coming out this afternoon is xf86-video-nv 2.1.16.

Applications

• I created this script to run at start up of a login. so make a file in your linux machine and chmod +x tha file. Put the text below in it. bash filename and see it work, if everything looks good go into your .bashrc or .bash_profile and tell it to bash filename this will cause the script to run when you login and make your motd blank so this somewhat replaces it.

Games

• Charlie’s Games today announce the immediate release of Irukandji for Linux! Irukandji is a fun score attack shoot-em-up, set in an abstract underwater trench. You fly your ship against the flow of hundreds of amazing procedurally animated sea monsters, blasting your way to the final showdown, a Giant Enemy Crab!

K Desktop Environment

• At the end of November, the KOffice developers met in Oslo for their semi-annual developer sprint. You have probably read some of the many blog entries from that meeting or read some of the news articles that Jos Poortvliet wrote on the dot.

• Many things were discussed during the meeting, and one of them is how we can make KOffice mature enough for real users. If you have followed KOffice development, you have probably noticed that in all our release announcements, the latest of them for KOffice 2.1, we always labeled KOffice as not yet ready for real production usage. This is now about to change.

Distributions

• Please remember, this edition is not a Mandriva product (so do not expect any kind of support directly from Mandriva), but has been completed with a great cooperation between the company and the community.

• On the 19th November 2009, the mandriva community has released the One XFCE 2010 Live edition to the world. We tried to ensure the XFCE experience is even better than before, do not hesitate to contact us if you think more polish is needed.

• This is the second distro that I know of that is using entropy as their main package manager. Cuba came out with a distro called Nova a while back and they are using entropy. I have no experience with their distro. We currently have another guy developing another linux distro based on Sabayon tools also. This is all good and exciting stuff to see. Sabayon Linux is making a difference for many. I would like to hear from those that are currently using our tools to build their distros. Drop us a line and let us know. If you are looking to do something like this, I suggest looking at molecule. Fabio should be proud of himself and the best part, he is willing to help these developers. He will take the time out of his busy day and answer questions.

Debian Family

• ONE of things that might disconcert Windows users after they’ve switched to Ubuntu Linux is the frequency with which the operating system is updated.

• As per their report, the new Ubuntu will come with a decreased number of games, cutting short the number to just 5. The Update Installer gets a new button that when clicked, will update the Updater itself, so that a broken Update installer shall not cause problems for other installations. Amongst other things, the Software Center has earned itself breadcrumbs for smoother navigation and a new application called Byubo comes pre-installed. Although not revolutionary changes, the updates are worth checking out, as it is said, ‘small steps makes up the complete run’.

• The Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS), held November 16-20 in Dallas, while kicking off the development cycle for the next Ubuntu release, “Lucid Lynx”, had a surprising amount to interest a kernel hacker with embedded tendencies. The Summit covered a wide range of topics from low level kernel details, to best community practices, but the ARM netbook support sessions were particularly interesting. At this UDS, the Ubuntu ARM developers set out to enable support for many ARM machines in a single distribution, a difficult task due to the lack of a standard firmware interface on ARM systems; a familiar problem to embedded developers. This report covers the solutions debated at UDS — including Kexec bootloaders and the flattened device tree — and the choices made for the next Ubuntu release.

Devices/Embedded

• txtr, a Berlin-based startup, is building an e-reader that it hopes will be Europe’s answer to the Amazon Kindle. Christophe Maire, CEO of the company, sat down with me in Paris earlier this week and gave me the details. He is one of the co-founders of gate5, a German navigation/mapping service that was acquired by Nokia in 2006. While Maire went to work for the Finnish phone giant, his co-founders started txtr, and Maire only just joined as the CEO.

• Diamond Systems announced software development kits (SDKs) that include solid-state IDE flashdisk modules. Preloaded with Linux 2.6.23, the bootable modules plug directly into Diamond’s boards, supplying all required drivers, the company says.

• Cisco announced a Linux-based WiFi router touted as the first 802.11n dual-band clustering access point for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The Cisco AP 541N Wireless Access Point includes 802.11n, gigabit Ethernet, “robust” security, voice roaming, and clustering technology, enabling a single point of administration for multiple access points.

• If you somehow get your hands on a Nook, the process for getting at it’s secrets is a little involved – you’ll need a screwdriver, a microSD card reader and a computer running Linux – but if you’re keen you can read through the process over at the Nookdevs Wiki.

Devices/Embedded

• txtr, a Berlin-based startup, is building an e-reader that it hopes will be Europe’s answer to the Amazon Kindle. Christophe Maire, CEO of the company, sat down with me in Paris earlier this week and gave me the details. He is one of the co-founders of gate5, a German navigation/mapping service that was acquired by Nokia in 2006. While Maire went to work for the Finnish phone giant, his co-founders started txtr, and Maire only just joined as the CEO.

• Diamond Systems announced software development kits (SDKs) that include solid-state IDE flashdisk modules. Preloaded with Linux 2.6.23, the bootable modules plug directly into Diamond’s boards, supplying all required drivers, the company says.

• Cisco announced a Linux-based WiFi router touted as the first 802.11n dual-band clustering access point for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The Cisco AP 541N Wireless Access Point includes 802.11n, gigabit Ethernet, “robust” security, voice roaming, and clustering technology, enabling a single point of administration for multiple access points.

• If you somehow get your hands on a Nook, the process for getting at it’s secrets is a little involved – you’ll need a screwdriver, a microSD card reader and a computer running Linux – but if you’re keen you can read through the process over at the Nookdevs Wiki.

Pandora

• The long awaited British-made (well, designed) open-source handheld platform, Pandora, is one of Pocket Gamer’s most eagerly awaited devices. We saw footage of one of the first mass production models just last week, and now the Open Pandora team is celebrating as the first batch arrives on British soil.

Phones

Nokia

• Mobile giant Vodafone will make the N900 available to its users from January.

• Overall, it’s good, and Maemo is showing real promise. For non geeky users, it’s probably best to give it a couple of months to wait for the infrastructure to be there, and some bugfixes to be released.

Android

• Some very positive news for Motorola (NYSE: MOT) as we head into the weekend … Online retailer eXpansys says that the Milestone—the U.K.-version of the Droid—sold out in just three hours. eXpansys is the exclusive seller of the handset; the company said it had received well over 1,000 pre-orders for the Milestone a week before it went on sale. eXpansis expects a second shipment of Milestones to arrive in time for holiday orders.

• Over the last 12 months Acer has been spitting out smartphones like there is no tomorrow. Some of them, like the Tempo F900, have been quite good while others, like the beTouch E101, have been, ahem, less impressive. Yet none have really scored as a hit in our book, but that may be about to change with the release of the A1 Liquid, Acer’s first Android phone.

• Evidence is mounting that Google’s smartphone will be called the Nexus One, following the appearance of a video showing the phone’s packaging and OS.

• As Android starts appearing on more devices, so developers are getting together to exchange notes on how to develop on the rapidly changing open source mobile phone platform. At the first droidcon London, subjects ranged from alternate languages, programming audio and implementing Android on devices to reverse engineering programmes, testing Android applications and the future of mobile devices.

• As you’ll probably know by now, the Hero runs Google’s Android operating system, which – like the iPhone – is built around a Unix-based core OS, in Android’s case that core being the ever popular Linux kernel.

• Google Inc plans to sell two versions of its own-branded cell phone: one with a service contract with T-Mobile USA and another that is unlocked, a source familiar with the matter said.

Sub-notebooks

• Cherrypal has added a new netbook to their range, which will cost just $99, the Cherrypal Africa Netbook, which is named after Cherrypal’s recent community building initiative in Ghana.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s reasonably clear that open source is the heart of cloud computing, with open-source components adding up to equal cloud services like Amazon Web Services. What’s not yet clear is how much the cloud will wear that open source on its sleeve, as it were.

• Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into.

• Web design is an increasingly important aspect of media and business. Because the Internet has become essential to the way we do business, find information and accomplish a number of other tasks, Web design truly is vital. And someone who understands Web design and can do a good job with it is valuable in a number of ways. If you are interested in improving your web design skills, here are 50 great open courseware classes for web designers

• China intends to nurture the development of open source software in 2011-2015, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

• Open source code is steadily seeing growth. WordPress, Opera and Mozilla are companies making significant financial inroads in the software industry. With thousands of open source developers and volunteer programmers adding features and plug-ins, open source software continues to rise in popularity and is for many a profitable industry. Using a variety of software licence options within GNU – GPL, vetted by several organizations such as Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation, the genesis of a software application now flourishes, creating a never ending ecosystem of growth and updates.

• The find bar consists of an edit field which contains the search text and buttons to search down and upwards. A hidden button to open the find & replace dialog can be configured via the context menu.

• The tenth annual Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is scheduled to take place on the 6th and 7th of February, 2010 at the University of Brussels. The KDE Developer Room (DevRoom) organisers have announced that they are now accepting submissions for talks on any KDE related topic. All proposals must be submitted before the deadline of the 3rd of January, 2010. More details about submitting talks, including available times and requirements, can be found on the KDE FOSDEM 2010 wiki.

• For instance, the five-year-old FreeSWITCH platform recently came out with its 1.0.5 release and, working with its parent, developed the standalone Cudatel Communications Platform, featuring FreeSWITCH as the core technology, along with integrated Sangoma hardware.

• What are the options for developers constructing intensive data churning software systems that need to overcome the hurdles of compliance? Surprisingly perhaps, if you simply Google “BI” for business intelligence, the third result (at the time of writing) comes in US open-source vendor Pentaho.

• BitNami also offers development environments for LAMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP on Linux), Ruby on Rails, JRuby and others.

• Perhaps Mike Olson, Sleepy Cat founder and now Cloudera CEO, said it best when he told Network World earlier this year, “At Sleepy Cat, we were proud to be an open source company. At Cloudera, I think of us as an enterprise software company that happens to be built on open source software.”

• Versant Corporation (Nasdaq:VSNT), an industry leader in specialized data management software, announces a new customer, RSSOwl.org and a case study on its product, the Atom & RSS Newsreader RSSOwl. The case study provides an overview of the compelling reasons for which RSSOwl.org selected Versant’s db4o object database for its next generation newsreader, RSSOwl 2.0.

Mozilla

• With the launch of Google Chrome and Chrome OS, Mozilla and Firefox are knee deep exploring alternative business models, ones that don’t rely on Google.

Databases

• Like a tea kettle, the ongoing acquisition of Sun by Oracle, objected to by the EU, has gone from cold to boiling to cold to boiling and back again these past few months. The diversity of opinions, even amongst the those considered to be experts on the subject, is remarkable and has led to a wide ranging, passionate debate.

• The MySQL developers have released milestone 2 of MySQL 5.5, on the path to a general release in mid-2010. The new milestone release incorporates semi-synchronous replication in MySQL 5.5 based on patches to InnoDB developed by Google. This is designed to ensure that when a change is committed in the master database, at least one slave has confirmed that the data has arrived and been buffered before the commit is complete.

• EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, today announced that the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the UK’s largest examination board, has selected and deployed Postgres Plus Advanced Server to create a business-critical extranet application. Utilizing Postgres Plus as the database solution for its ‘Examiner Extranet,’ AQA empowers its users with reliable, real-time access to core business data in a secure and highly cost-effective manner, ultimately saving the non-profit organization valuable capital and ongoing operational expenses.

• Another indication that the database market is ripe for commoditization is that specialized, open source database management systems are appearing on the horizon to address niche markets. Derby (pure Java) and Hadoop (for data-intensive, distributed apps), for example, are gaining traction for unique applications.

• Cautious optimism. This was the basic reaction shared this week by open-source business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing vendors commenting on ten commitments Oracle announced December 14 on how it would handle MySQL. Issued in hopes of winning approval of its acquisition of MySQL owner Sun Microsystems by the European Commission, the commitments made a favorable impression on open-source database partners and OEM licensees.

BSD

• Today, when too many companies bring out various distros, it is hard to tell which of them best suits our needs and you may become mixed-up in such a huge list. If companies invest money to a software solution, they may become disappointed if its licensing policy changes. OpenBSD has one sturdy feature above everything – the system and packages are perfectly audited for security holes.

• I would like to give FreeBSD 8 two thumbs up. It really lives up to its name in terms of stability and sleekness.

• I’m very glad to see that someone has created a BSD variant that is easy enough for the masses to install. PC-BSD allows anyone to give one of the most solid, reliable, and secure operating system available a try.

Licensing

• An idea that is suggested every now and then is to look at software licensing and give it a kind of “Creative Commons” feel; that is, present the terms of the license in a pleasant and orderly way by means of icons. Now, we’ve already come to the realization that calling something “Creative Commons licensed” is vague to the point of being useless (just “some rights reserved“). Calling something “Free Software” is also vague, but there is a rock-solid guarantee at the bottom: the term guarantees you, the recipient of the software, at least the Four Freedoms. Any Open Source software you receive usually means at least the Four Freedoms as well. So you need to say which CC, which Free Software license, which Open Source license.

Openness

• Commons Speaker John Bercow claimed MPs had started to behave better over their expenses, saying many of the revelations of wrongdoing published on Thursday preceded parliament’s decision to publish the expenses.

• Over the last weekend of November 2009 a group of 21 mySociety staff, volunteers and trustees went to a house outside of Bristol to wrestle with the question of what mySociety should build over the next 12 months.

• Legal certainty is crucial when it comes to build business around new technologies. The Open Knowledge Foundation has started to tackle this problem with respect to Linked Data. Tassilo Pellegrini spoke to the Open Content Lawyer Jordan S. Hatcher about licensing issues in Open Data and got some practical advice to get started on a complex but crucial topic.

Programming

• At the centre of all Qt graphics is the QPainter class. It can render to surfaces, through the QPaintDevice class. Examples of paint devices are QImage’s, QPixmaps and QWidgets. The way it works is that for a given QPaintDevice implementation we return a custom paint engine which supports rendering to that surface. This is all part of our documentation so perhaps not too interesting. Lets look at this in more detail.

Leftovers

• As yet another senior copper reads the riot act to his fellow officers over the policing of photographers, concerns are growing amongst senior ranks that this is all too little too late – and that serious damage has now been done to relations with the public over this issue.

• John Yates, Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, put out a message yesterday reminding all Met Police officers and staff that people taking photographs in public should not be stopped and searched unless there is a valid reason.

• Police have released footage which they say was made by a suspected terror cell filming potential targets.

• They believe an Algerian gang was conducting reconnaissance for a plot to target train stations in London.

• I’ve taken care to keep much of the private data on my Facebook account properly private; my public profile is quite limited and only friends can see anything I want to keep personal. Seeing no reason to change this, I kept the settings as they were and left it that. But then a few days later, in our conversation Kathryn warned that there were new privacy settings added in, so I checked it out. And lo and behold, there’s a section I hadn’t seen before, in the “Applications and websites” section, called “What your friends can share about you through applications and websites”

• A bunch of data nerds from inside and outside NASA will gather this Saturday at a house in Cupertino, California, called the Rainbow Mansion to hack through the agency’s data jungles.

• Slow DNS servers can make for a terrible web browsing experience, but knowing which one to use isn’t easy. namebench is a new open source tool that helps to take the guess-work out of the DNS server selection process. namebench benchmarks available DNS services and provides a personalized comparison to show you which name servers perform the best.

• The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible. Who is any longer naive enough to accept that the then Prime Minister’s mind remained innocently open after his visit to Crawford, Texas?

• Project Canvas, the BBC’s proposed connected-TV EPG standard, is facing a couple of challenges next year…

• Not only has the project been delayed from 2009 to late 2010 by the regulator’s request for a more detailed proposal (meaning it won’t get to piggyback the launch marketing of Freeview HD) – many of the very same TV makers that the BBC is trying to convince to use Canvas are busy actually selling tellies with their own built-in internet services…

• Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

Data

• The Chancellor suggested that biometric passports, which carry the same information as ID cards, would be sufficient.

• In an interview in The Daily Telegraph today, he said there was “probably no need” to “go further” than the new passports, paving the way for ID cards to be scrapped. Although he claimed later that he wasn’t going beyond existing plans, his intervention could spell the death knell for the project.

• Personal data belonging to nearly 40 million UK motorists is likely to be abused by foreign officials under new automatic access powers, according to a restricted report.

• Drivers’ details such as name, address, motoring convictions and some medical information will be available to more than two dozen European countries around the clock under the Prüm Convention.

• Hillier blamed her forgetfulness on the demands of looking after her baby.

Environment

• Negotiators have all but completed a sweeping deal that would compensate countries for preserving forests, and in some cases, other natural landscapes like peat soils, swamps and fields that play a crucial role in curbing climate change.

• Of course, everyone should have known that Canada wouldn’t do anything like accept massive emission reduction targets, or agree to reparations.

• Canada’s highly unconventional resource (heavy oil from sand or rock) lies under a forest area the size of England (140,000 square kilometers) and is arguably the world’s last remaining giant oil field. Almost every major private and state-owned oil company has a presence in the tar sands. The project could make Canada the world’s fifth largest oil exporter by 2020.

• There is a huge amount of oil which theoretically can be extracted, but the question is whether the cost will be cheap enough for us to be able to afford to extract it. If the oil is too expensive to extract, the shortage of oil seems to cause a recession, similar to what we are having now. I discuss this in purely monetary terms, but it is also an issue with respect to low energy return on investment (EROI), for those of you used to thinking in EROI terms.

• “Climategate” has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions.

Finance

• A filing in the Washington Mutual bankruptcy case says that new evidence supports allegations that JPMorgan Chase used access to inside information about WaMu to drive down the bank’s credit rating and share price, scare away other suitors and arrange to buy the ailing Seattle bank from regulators at a bargain price.

• Washington Mutual, the bankrupt holding company whose banking business was sold to JP Morgan-Chase (JPM) last year, requested a U.S. federal court to ask the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury Department and others to turn over documents it believes are relevant in its suit against JPM. Wamu filed suit against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in March asking for $13 billion in damages. A Reuters piece tonight says Wamu has a JPM email from the week before the sale to JP Morgan showing the FDIC talking with the bank about whether it might be interested in Wamu.

• The report looked into allegations made in an anonymous letter that Linda Thomsen, who was SEC enforcement chief at the time of the Bear Stearns takeover in March 2008, improperly gave information about ongoing SEC investigations involving Bear Stearns to a lawyer for J.P. Morgan who was also Ms. Thomsen’s former supervisor. The report exonerated Ms. Thomsen, concluding that she didn’t violate any rules and didn’t provide specific information about the SEC’s investigation into Bear Stearns.

• The $440 billion market for CLOs, which pool loans and slice them into securities of varying risk, largely disappeared at the end of 2007 as losses on subprime mortgages led investors to flee bundled debt. While new sales would signal Wall Street’s return to investments that contributed to $1.7 trillion of writedowns and credit losses worldwide, they may help companies refinance $1.5 trillion of high-yield loans and bonds maturing by the end of 2014.

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. gave banks including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. a reprieve of at least six months from raising capital to support billions of dollars of securities the firms will be adding to their balance sheets.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• 2 weeks after launching a consultation, la Quadrature du Net is submitting to the European Parliament a set of questions to be asked to the Commissioners designate.

• They cover a broad range of issues that are essential to people’s right to access a free and open Internet. All these topics should be a core component of the upcoming European digital agenda.

• All questions directly relate to the portfolio of Neelie Kroes, Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. Other Commissioners designate whose Directorate-General are competent for specific issues are indicated below.

• Just over a week ago I wrote a fairly dry legal analysis of the Digital Economy Bill. I spotted an extremely serious provision — clause 11 — in the version being discussed in the House of Lords. Having looked at the amendments (which you can find on the Bill’s document page) I am worried that no-one in Parliament appears to be taking the problem serious.

• Zoran sez, “Earlier this week (12th Dec), a massive, peaceful protest of 100,000 people — the largest demonstration for climate justice in world history — was met with a heavy-handed response by the Danish police. Thousands of riot police swarmed the march route, blocked off streets surrounding large groups of protestors, and arrested almost 1,000 people. Arrestees were cuffed and forced to sit in rows for hours, as the temperatures dipped below freezing; numerous people urinated on themselves after being denied use of toilets.”

• This file contains a deleted BBC news article on the toxic-waste dumping of commodities giant Trafigura. According to a September 2009 UN report, the dumping drove 108,000 people in the Ivory Coast to seek medical attention.

• Trafigura and their lawyers Carter Ruck had been pursuing an ongoing libel case against the BBC over a news story from on the case that aired in May 2009[1].

• In the story “Dirty Tricks and Toxic Waste in the Ivory Coast”, the BBC’s Newsnight programme stated: “It is the biggest toxic dumping scandal of the 21st century, the type of environmental vandalism that international treaties are supposed to prevent. Now Newsnight can reveal the truth about the waste that was illegally tipped on Ivory Coast’s biggest city, Abidjan”. The programme alleged that a number of deaths had been caused by the dumping of this toxic waste, which had originated with Trafigura.

• Until this week the story was still available on the BBC website.[2]

• The link stopped working some time on December 10th or 11th, but at the time of writing the Google cache is still available[3].

• Trafigura took a very aggressive stance, using the UK’s outdated libel laws to gag the media, and questions in Parliament. When the Guardian reported that it had been served with a “super-injunction” that didn’t allow it to name Trafigura, or Carter-Ruck, *or* the fact that they had taken out an injunction on them, the Internet took up the case and plastered the details everywhere.

• Children’s rights groups have spoken out against the Federal Government’s plans to introduce mandatory ISP-level filtering, saying it will not effectively protect children.

• International child rights group, Save the Children, said while it congratulates the government on its attempt to improve the safety of children online, an ISP-level filter is not the best way to offer protection.

• There had been plans for some 11.3 million adults to be vetted – but after criticism from school leaders and children’s authors the rules on frequency of contact have been eased, reducing this to an estimated nine million.

• Outraged Italian ministers have threatened action against dozens of Facebook groups which have sprung up praising the actions of the man who allegedly attacked Silvio Berlusconi.

• Facebook said Tuesday that it would monitor content on its Web site dealing with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy following an attack at a political rally that left him hospitalized.

• Police community support officers (PCSOs) stopped Italian student Simona Bonomo under anti-terrorism legislation for filming buildings in London. Moments later, she was arrested by other officers, held in a police cell and fined. She talks Paul Lewis through the footage she recorded of her conversation with the PSCOs. Source: guardian.co.uk Link to this video

• Internet-only publications are to face the same regulations as newspapers for the first time under an extension to the powers of newspaper industry self-regulator body the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

• Google has criticised the Australian government’s forthcoming mandatory ISP censorship system for targeting a “too wide” a range of content.

• Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to websites containing criminal content.

• The banned sites will be selected by an independent classification body guided by complaints from the public, said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Recently it became clear that Chinese authorities were going ahead with their planned video site purge. Many BitTorrent sites fell including some of the country’s largest, but of course none of this changes the demand for free or near-free media. So will the crackdown force those seeking cheap movies back onto the streets?

• First, in what sense is providing more access to the visually impaired not compatible with US copyright laws? The proponents of this change have gone out of their way to make sure that the access given is within current copyright regimes, which are not serving this huge, disadvantaged constituency properly. And how would it undermine expanded access? It would, manifestly, provide access that is not available now; the publishers have proposed nothing that would address the problem other than saying the system’s fine, we don’t want to change it.

• But the most telling – and frankly, sickening – aspect of this post is the way its author sets up the rights of authors against the rights of those with visual disabilities, as if the latter are little better than those scurvy “pirates” that “steal” copyright material from those poor authors.

• In fact, *nothing* is being taken, it’s simply that these people wish to enjoy their rights to read as others do – something that has been denied to them by an industry indifferent to their plight. And which author would not be happy to extend the pleasure of reading their works to those cut off from it by virtue of physical disabilities?

• Justin Hughes of the US delegation asked that I pass on his email address, so that people can communication with him if they want to express views on the WIPO treaty for disabilities being discussed at the WIPO SCCR 19 this week.

• I represent the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), which works to serve the 2 million people with sight loss in UK.

• As part of this work, RNIB has a library of some 40,000 books in audio, large print and Braille, which we distribute to reading disabled people.

• Most accessible books are made by specialist organisations like ours, even in cases where publishers provide licenses or the source files. These specialist organisations have limited resources, and are very often charities.

• It should be noted that we cannot even use all our funds to make accessible books! We provide many vital but costly services, such as emotional support and employment advice.

• The New Zealand government has released a revamped three strikes proposal that incorporates full court hearings and the possibility of financial penalties. A prior proposal, which would have resulted in subscriber access being terminated without court oversight, was dropped earlier this year following public protest. The new proposal is essentially a notice-and-notice system where ISPs would be required to pass along alleged infringement notices to the subscriber. After the third notice, the rights holder could seek up to $15,000 at the Copyright Tribunal for damages sustained. If the infringements continue, the rights holder could go to court to seek suspension of the subscriber account for up to six months.

• Then we heard that Attorney General Eric Holder was reinvigorating the Justice Department’s “task force” on copyright. Why? There’s still no indication of any actual harm (both the movie and music industries are growing). Then, Commerce Secretary Locke noted that anti-camcording efforts are an important part of the anti-piracy effort. Funny timing, given the recent fiasco over a young woman arrested for incidental capturing of snippets of New Moon.

• So it started out just great. And then? Well, then the press got kicked out.

• Vice President Joe Biden led a round table meeting of high ranking government officials and entertainment industry executives at the White House conference center today, where he pledged that the Obama administration would work to combat piracy in the rapidly changing technological age.

• What the MPAA wants is for ISPs, for example, to change their businesses “to reflect current realities and adopt modern, flexible systems where they do not exist”: how strange, then, that the MPAA is not prepared to do the same by working according to the new digital rules instead of clinging to the old analogue ones…

• Back in October, we wrote about how various newspapers, under the auspices of the “Newspaper Licensing Agency” were threatning NewsNow, a UK news aggregator that is (in my experience) one of the more comprehensive aggregators out there, but which only shows headlines and links to full stories. It’s difficult to see how that would be a copyright violation in anyone’s definition of the term or why that should require any kind of license.

• Recent studies have shown that — despite a massive recession — both the music and movie industries are having fantastic years. However, both industries are complaining about how they’re being “killed” by “piracy.” There’s no evidence of this of course, but when it comes to copyright, politicians don’t seem to believe evidence is necessary.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayComputer science student Josh Abraham 02 (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

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