● 02.15.10

● Links 15/2/2010: Mobile World Congress

Posted in News Roundup at 6:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Always on top The ability to keep any window on top of all the others at any given time is a blessing Linux that I am yet to see on Windows. It comes in really handy when you need to have more than one window visible to get things done or when you want to be working but have VLC lurking on the lower part of the screen.

• [...]

• Multiple desktops On a typical day, I have about 6 worksheets open, with Google Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some other folders open. On Linux, in order not to clutter my desktop, I just move some of he open windows to another desktop and all is well with the world. Windows? Well I do not know of any such function.

• Reboot, Reboot and reboot Again, lots of applications I install tell me to reboot before the installation will be complete. If I make an installation of 5 such programs, it means for 5 times I have to reboot my system. Linux? Sudo-apt get install XYZ and bam, its done.

• The HTC Hero has been around for a while now, so I’m not planning to write a detailed review of it here, except to say that I am absolutely delighted with it in every respect. And then things got even better.

• Polaris Software Lab said that its wholly-owned subsidiary Polaris Retail Infotech (PRIL) has launched a Linux-powered retail store management solution called ‘ iStore Linux.’

• It only took 126 career hops — the first one being a soulless teen model — for Barbie to land a job as a computer software engineer. All we know now is that she has a dual monitor setup and a picture of Ken at her cubicle. Oh, and she uses Linux on the world’s smallest netbook.

• Barbie and her dual monitor set-up with laptop (pink) running Linux, geeky binary t-shirt, smartphone, Bluetooth headset and of course, glasses, will hit the shelves Winter 2010. I’ve heard on the grapevine that you can pre-order so I’m currently trawling the Mattel store for the goods but I’m not having any luck so far.

Server

• IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled its entry in the growing market for clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

• It did not take me too long to find the first offering that met my needs: TurnKey Linux has, among several other free virtual appliance offerings, a full Joomla! instance running on top of a LAMP stack. Everything is put together for you: the Joomla! configuration, the PHPMyAdmin front-end, Postfix MTA configuration, and Apache, PHP, and MySQL modules for Webmin.

• SGI says Cyclone is backed by the industry’s fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, including SGI Altix scale-up, Altix ICE scale-out and Altix XE hybrid clusters, all based on Intel Xeon or Itanium processors. Customers can also choose between Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux, with further performance offered by SGI ProPack. Altair PBS Professional and SGI ISLE Cluster Manager provide system scheduling and management.

Kernel Space

Applications

• Following are additional firewalls mentioned by readers along with the total number of votes it received.

• * CheckPoint FireWall-1 5 * pfsense 5 * Firestarter 5 * Netfilter 4 * SmoothWall Express 3 * Guarddog 3 * ipchain 3 * Endian 2 * Susefirewall 1 * Cisco ASA/PIX 1 * ClearOS 1 * APF 1 * Firewall Builder 1 * Auto firewall in Puppy Linux 1 * Drawbridge 1 * Monowall 1 * Firehol 1 * SuSEfirewall2 1 * Plesk 1

• Nanny is a pretty good software and probably the only Parental control system for Linux I know. But it connects the tasks with the respective applicaitons e.g. pidgin with chatting, thunderbird with emails and browser with web surfing. This seems logical but now a days each of these activities are possible on the browser. You can’t expect a 10-12 year old kid to use a mail client . There are tons of social networking sites out there that can keep him “busy”. Although my point seems a little vague here because you can manage and control websites the user can access using Nanny’s web content filtering system.

• Movial, the company that inspires rich and intuitive Internet experiences today announced it will demo an innovative contextual version of its Movial IXS Browser — which provides desktop-like browsing on mobile devices — showcasing the blazing speed and power of the latest OMAP(TM) platform from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) at Mobile World Congress (MWC).

Instructionals

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Amarok user and enthusiast Abhishek has made a great video, showing off some features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.

• The most exciting prospect of KDE 4.4 is the social desktop and the netbook Plasma. The social desktop will bring your social network to widgets on your Plasma desktop. And the netbook Plasma will offer a much more modern desktop to those adorable little mini-laptops.

• But with KDE 4 finally reaching a point where it is once again one of the most solid desktops available, the innovation it forces will make the Linux desktops a temptation many simply can not pass up.

• Welcome to part 5, the final article in our little series on the KDE 4.3 System Settings control panel. I first off want to thank the KDE devs for creating such a great desktop environment (DE) and for simplifying the control panel (now known as “System Settings”). The last time I had to do an article series like this, it took me 10 articles and nearly a month to pull it off.

• We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition.

Distributions

New Releases

• Skolelinux / Debian Edu is a complete and free “out of the box” software solution for schools that reduces costs, prolongs the lifetime of hardware and covers almost every aspect of the schools’ IT needs.

• We are pleased to announce the release of paldo 1.21 with many bug fixes and updates.

• Enhancements to point out:

• * GNOME 2.28.2 * Firefox 3.6 * Linux 2.6.32.7 * GCC 4.4 and glibc 2.11 * X.org server 1.7.4

• We are proud to announce the release of PC/OS VirtualServer System 8.5. VirtualServer System 8.5 is a release of PC/OS OpenServer System 8.5 designed to be run on Sun Virtualbox. Its a virtual hard drive image with the Sun Virtualbox tools preinstalled. This takes out the necessary step of having to install the Virtualbox toolset.

• 3.1.6 is released! See the download page.

Gentoo

• SCALE 8x is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

Mandriva Family

• I’ve been happily using Mandriva 2010 as my desktop system since its release last November. The few issues I’ve had could be traced back to KDE 4.3.2. I had run the Update Manager a couple times at the beginning, but soon became lax and haven’t updated since. Honestly, I just didn’t want to risk an upgrade ruining what was essentially a completely enjoyable experience. But when Juan Luis Baptiste posted that KDE 4.4 packages were available for Mandriva 2010, it seemed worth risking a re-install.

• # KDE has been updated to final version 4.4.0. New features since KDE 4.3 include integrated desktop search in Dolphin, a new Plasma desktop interface optimized for netbooks, Palapelli (a jigsaw puzzle game), Cantor (a scientific maths application) and many others.

• No distribution has all the features in this list. The only one that comes close is Mandriva Linux. The task for the next few weeks is to identify a list of desktop distributions that come close to being “perfect.” Will your distro make the list? Keep in mind that because of their philosophical stand on freedom in software, some distributions will never make the list.

Red Hat Family

• Scientific Linux Fermi 5.4 has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architecture.

Ubuntu

• The blog post had listed a number of reasons why the writer thought Ubuntu was allegedly becoming the new Microsoft: the inclusion of Mono as a default; the creation of Ubuntu One, a proprietary software repository; removing the GIMP and other applications from Ubuntu; changing the default search engine to Yahoo!; discussion about what proprietary applications should be included in the Ubuntu repositories; and the appointment of Matt Asay as chief operating officer.

• Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is an LTS (Long Term Support) release. This means that this version of Ubuntu will be supported for five years after its release. The last LTS was Ubuntu 8.04.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #180 for the week February 7th – February 13th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week: Call For Participation, Interview With Jono by Joe Barker, Interview with Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Core Developer about encryption in Ubuntu, Upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam and your Loco Team, Ubuntu Honduras Loco Team at the T3 conference, Call for feedback on preferred desktop fonts, and much, much more!

Mint

• Linux Mint is one of the most popular Ubuntu based distro’s, possibly for the fact it brings something new to the table rather than just a different set of wallpapers. Its always been one of my favorite distros, and like the main Ubuntu project, it has more than one ‘flavour’. The main edition, which features the GNOME desktop has been out for a while, but the latest KDE release, was released about a week ago.

Devices/Embedded

• French consumer electronics firm Sagemcom has joined with Belgian software company SoftAtHome to collaborate on an MPEG4-ready HD set-top box combining IPTV, satellite, and terrestrial delivery. The “Universal Set Top Box” offers DLNA-compliant content sharing, removable storage, and an open Linux SoftAtHome development environment.

• The router’s firmware (operating system) is a Dharamsala-brewed Linux clone, based on multiple open-source projects. Thanks to the amazing and promising development of the OpenWRT project, we now need very little additions of our own. The core of OpenWRT is based on UCLIBC and Busybox. With so many supporters and contributors, today one can find a very rich selection of pre-compiled packages and tools. This allows people on the ground to focus on local issues, while enjoying pre-tested and fully functional OS. Multiple Mesh routing protocols were tested and are supported optionally.

• ST-Ericsson announced an ARM9-based chipset designed for low-cost smartphones running Android or Linux.

Phones

LiMo

• U.S. software firm Adobe and three other firms joined the wireless Linux group LiMo on Monday, underlying the growing role of the Linux computer operating system in cellphones.

• SRS Labs (Nasdaq: SRSL), the industry leader in surround sound, audio, and voice technologies, announced today that it has joined the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation™ to become the first sound technology company to join the ranks of the mobile industry’s global consortium.

• Adobe will also announce that it is joining the LiMo Foundation in order to support Flash on mobile Linux and name new partners for its Flash-based Open Screen Project including the Symbian Foundation, Freescale and Opera.

Android

• Not content with releasing one Xperia X10 smartphone, Sony Ericsson is planning to offer two more.

• The two additions to the Android phone family are the X10 Mini and the X10 Mini Pro. Both were said by SE to be “smaller than a credit card” and to sport an “intuitive four-corner touchscreen user interface”.

• Motorola today took the wraps of yet another Android smartphone, this one called Quench and based around a 3.1in touchscreen.

• If the Quench seems familiar, it’s because its already been annouced, kind of. Recently, Motorola unveiled the Cliq XT in the US, and the Quench is the same handset, tweaked for the European market just as it renamed the US-oriented Droid as the Milestone over here.

• Android 2.1 entered the world with the release of Google’s Nexus One last month. At the time of the launch, Motorola said the software update would be reaching the Droid and other Android phones at some point in the near future.

• Garmin-Asus announced a multi-touch enabled Android version of its navigation-focused Nuvifone smartphones for the European market. The Nuvifone A50 appears to have similar specs to the earlier Linux-based Nuvifone G60, but adds a comprehensive suite of Google apps, as well as new styling and a touchpad.

• CSR is supporting the Android open-source mobile operating system with its embedded wireless system software.

• ST-ERICSSON AND ARM have been telling the Mobile World Congress that their cunning plan to optimise Android to take advantage of Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) on the ST-Ericsson U8500 platform is nearly ready.

• We talked extensively about why Android is better than some other smartphone OSes, its openness, its multitasking characteristics, but have you ever thought that its customization features could actually save lives? Well read on.

Nokia

• I am a big fan of the Maemo 5 platform as you can see in my Definitive Nokia N900 Guide so the news that Nokia and Intel are combining Moblin and Maemo to create the MeeGo Linux-based software platform for future mobile computers, notebooks, tablets, and more is quite exciting. MeeGo will also offer the Qt application development environment and allow developers to feature applications in the Ovi Store and Intel’s AppUpSM Center. Looking at the Nokia plot of their operating systems it looks like Maemo is out while MeeGo replaces it moving forward too.

• We’ve been busy with our friends @ Intel.

• We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

• Third, Intel and Nokia announced they would merge their Moblin and Maemo software projects to create MeeGo, a unified Linux-based platform that will run on pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media-rich smartphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle “infotainment” systems, ideally but not exclusively all based on Intel’s Atom microprocessor.

• This promises to be the West’s answer to LiMo, the Linux Mobile initiative that has drawn support from Asia-Pacific handset makers.

• It seems like not a week goes by without some clever hacker finding something unusual to do with their Nokia N900, and the device itself is proving more versatile than ever. The latest hack is the ability to hook up a Bluetooth PS3 controller, and play your Nokia N900 games with complete control. Read on after the break to find out more…

• Besides the design and the speed, many of its functionalities strongly depend on the phone’s operating system. Nokia always uses Symbian OS for high-end mobile phones. Symbian enables installing applications, and also managing your agenda and email account is easy and straightforward. Besides Symbian, Nokia also uses a further developed Open Source operating system, the Linux-based Maemo.

• Joikusoft Ltd. today announces the next wave of mobile WiFi Tethering by extending JoikuSpot Mobile 3G HotSpotting to new Linux based Maemo devices from Nokia.

Sub-notebooks

• Jolicloud is the most distinctly netbook-oriented operating system in this Hive Five. It’s not just pretty good on a netbook—it was actually designed from the ground up to be a netbook operating system, so it’s a great fit. (For the curious, it’s a combination of Debian and Fedora Linux with WINE mixed in to support Windows-only apps.) Jolicloud has been tweaked and tuned to make it shine even on systems with low resources and small displays. The emphasis is not on a traditional computing experience but on harnessing web-based applications and storage services so that much of the heavy lifting and deep-storage of the netbook is transferred from the netbook to more powerful and larger servers. The application launcher—see in the screenshot here—makes it easy to organize and select your applications. The launcher emphasizes easy to read and identify text and logos, and all applications launch in full-screen mode by default. In addition to the default applications, you can browse the app directory to find new applications—the Jolicloud team curates the list to ensure compatibility.

• Instead of Windows or Linux, the AirLife uses the same operating system and device drivers as many smartphones, Google Android. The AirLife’s screen will measure 10.1 inches, be touch-sensitive, and be able to display images at a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The keyboard will be 92 percent as large as a standard-size, and will include a touch pad.

Tablets

• The truly revolutionary component on this tablet is its screen, which incorporates Pixel Qi technology to give a similar experience as e-Ink when the backlight is off. This gives the tablet its godly battery life, and allows it to directly challenge the reading experience of eReaders. It is a powerful tablet, and the device’s multitasking with Flash support is undoubtedly a response to the iPad’s inability to do either.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’m delighted to be writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) for Practical eCommerce! When I started in the Internet industry, the few eCommerce stores were custom-programmed, they cost millions of dollars and employed large teams of programmers. osCommerce changed all that at the turn of the century with the first free, open source eCommerce program.

• Over at cool-stuff blog Cool Tools, former TV commercial director and producer Jeff Bragg gives TeleKast a runthrough in the video below:

• TeleKast if a free download for Windows and Linux only. It’s currently an alpha release, so you might expect a little bugginess—but it worked like a charm in my tests. If you’d prefer a little teleprompter action without installing an application, check out previously mentioned CuePrompter.

• KnowledgeTree (news, site) is joining Open Tech and taking their document management software to thousands of resellers worldwide.

• hSenid Mobile Solutions, a leading mobile solution provider, will be launching their latest revolutionary products mChoice Soltura, community VAS platform, and mChoice Vishma, an open source application store at this years Mobile world congress held in Barcelona.

• The company is now planning to use the Open Source Bit Tornado torrent client to distribute updates from a seed server to a swarm of peer servers.

• Toronto-based Enomaly severed its links with open source software with the release of the latest version of its Elastic Computing Platform (ECP). Not only did the company remove all traces of the open source Community Edition from the product but it also moved ECP from the open source repository, SourceForge, moves which caused great disquiet among the company’s customer base.

• CA announced it has extended its world-class Web access security technology to include support for Web applications and Web services hosted on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

• Zenoss, Inc., a leading commercial open source provider of Unlegacy enterprise IT management products, today announced that the City of Houston is using the company to manage the mission-critical network infrastructure at the Houston Airport System (HAS), the world’s sixth largest airport system. Using Zenoss Enterprise, The City of Houston has been able to reduce the total cost of operating its large and complex HAS network by over 500% while more efficiently meeting the demands of managing a network consisting of hundreds of Cisco routers, switches and firewalls spread across the city’s three airports.

• I had a good long chat with Pete Cittadini, CEO of open source business intelligence firm Actuate recently. The company is doing somewhere between $120m and $140m a year, having founded and still co-leading the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) open source project.

OpenOffice.org

• Canonical has done a fine job of making the Linux user experience more coherent, and for the kind of dinky 3lb laptops that Apple doesn’t make, Ubuntu is preferable in many ways to Windows 7 or XP for reliability and ease of use. So there are high expectations for the official NetBook-specific distro, originally called NetBook Remix but now called NetBook Edition. It promises all the benefits of Google’s ChromeOS, but without the mandatory built-in Google creepware.

• OpenOffice.org, the open-source office software package, has released version 3.2 of its free Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access replacement tools. Simultaneously, the team also revealed that it’s hit 300 million downloads since the suite launched in 2002.

• The impressive open source office software suite Open Office a free alternative to Microsoft’s office desktop software has reported over 300 million people have downloaded the application since its debut in April 2002. Eat your heart out Microsoft.

• Microsoft-bating open source software maker OpenOffice.org has announced the latest release of its ‘anything you can do we can do cheaper’ suite of office productivity tools.

• More than 300 million downloads later, OpenOffice.org – the world’s leading free personal productivity software — is updating its office suite to make it faster and more compatible with other office software programs.

Mozilla

• In an upcoming version, Firefox will be a multiprocessing browser. The developers of Firefox at Mozilla are preparing for one of the most important changes in the history of this browser. It will not be the version of Firefox 3.5 which will make the Firefox browser a multithreaded one. But it is expected to be so in any of the following versions, such as version 3.6, which we have already spoken of. Or in version 4.0 Firefox can become a multi-browser. For those of you who do not know what a multithreaded browser means, you can keep an eye on the post explaining what a multi-browser is all about.

CMS

• WordPress, the gold standard in blogging platforms, has just announced that they now have WordPress applications for RIM’s BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) platform, Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Android, and the iPhone. They’re all free, and they’re all open source, so the community can help make them better. They’ve also announced that in a few weeks they’ll be playing with Qt and releasing a beta for not only Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Symbian platform, but the Linux based Maemo too.

Intelligence

• Accuity, the leading worldwide provider of payment routing data, AML screening software and services, is pleased to announce that it has acquired a significant minority stake in World Compliance, Inc., the Miami, Florida-based Open Source Intelligence company.

• Infrastructure company Swissport is to use Pentaho’s open source business intelligence (BI) suite as its standard corporate management reporting environment, claiming the rollout will cut the cost of flying.

Business

• Nuxeo, the open source enterprise content management vendor, released a new digital asset management system last week with support for the most current OASIS CMIS specification. This should make it easier for companies using the Nuxeo solution to share multimedia content across different repositories whether or not they are using Nuxeo tools.

• In fact, as the economy stabilizes, Digium firmly believes that the momentum the open source community has gained will continue. After all, though the recession helped boost the open source space to its current market position, the growth of the open source community and the stability of open source platforms (Asterisk is a decade old now) have helped create a new market dynamic that is driving interest in alternative vendors, including those in the open source community, as well as Skype,Microsoft ( News – Alert), and others.

• Chandhok: Open source has become increasingly important to mobile, and QuIC was formed to bring increased focus to open source initiatives. Qualcomm is unique in its market reach, powering the vast majority of 3G handsets as a whole as well as smartphones that are commercially available today. This puts us into a very good position to drive innovation forward for the wireless industry.

• Cynapse, provider of open source Enterprise 2.0 software for small, medium and large organizations, today announced a partnership with Virtual Network Consult GmbH (VNC), a Value Added Distributor for Commercial Open Source & Cloud Solutions, to deliver its product Cyn.in in the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets.

• Yesterday, Equinox Software, which has built its name and business supporting the Evergreen open source integrated library system (ILS) its founders helped develop, announced plans to support Koha, the other major open source ILS.

Funding

• By facilitating text donations to several non-profit organizations, XIPWIRE would like to give back to the community, stated the company. Currently, donations can be directed to the Apache Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, GNOME Foundation, KDE e.V. and the Linux Foundation.

BSD

• Since the inception of Opera Dragonfly, we planned for it to become an open source project. It has always been released under an open source BSD licence, but the source repositories were on Opera servers. Starting today, Opera Dragonfly is a fully open source project, hosted on BitBucket. Since the previous version of Opera Dragonfly, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes replacing the existing architecture with a modern version of the Scope Protocol – STP-1. Opera Dragonfly has been rewritten to use this faster and more efficient version of Scope. Now that we believe that the underlying protocol is stable and performant, and a public desktop build has been released with this included, it is time to put Opera Dragonfly on a public Mercurial repository.

Releases

• eXo Platform today introduced xCMIS, an open source implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Fully compliant with the latest CMIS 1.0 – cd06 specification, xCMIS supports eXo’s standards-based Java content repository (JCR) and works with third-party CMIS clients as well as a new eXo CMIS client based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

• Cubeia Ltd, a technology solutions provider for the online gambling and gaming industry, are pleased to announce the ground-breaking release of Firebase Community Edition – a scalable, enterprise server for multiplayer games. Firebase Community Edition is the first ever open-source game server in the online gambling industry.

• Version 1.7 of the free Git distributed version control system (DVCS) is now available to download. The new release offers numerous changes that have been discussed for some time, changes that have made the new version incompatible with its predecessor, Git 1.6.6, but the repository format is unchanged. The changes appear to have been important enough for the developers to choose to introduce them rather than maintain the system’s backward compatibility with previous releases.

Government

• Since early 2004, it has been the government’s stated policy to use open-source software in the public sector wherever possible, as long as it offers the best value for money.

• To date, the policy has had little impact. So will the latest tweaks to its open-source action plan make a difference?

• Software is “open-source” when the source code is freely available to be viewed, shared or changed — things that you can’t do with conventional proprietary software. Crucially, open-source is also the cheaper option in many cases.

• When I blogged about the UK government’s open source initiative (or rather the lack of it) a couple of weeks ago. It was obvious to me – and to many of the people in the open source community that the government wasn’t exactly pulling out all the stops in its attempts to cut waste in the tendering process.

• [...]

• So, the open source commentators who say that the government has not been enthusiastic about pursuing are completely missing the point. It’s not about inertia; it’s not about the influence of proprietary software companies; it’s not about the perceived lack of maturity of open source companies – it’s simply that those newer competitors aren’t expensive enough. Those pitches proving cost savings have been going down the wrong path – it’s as if they were setting off to play golf and keeping under par the whole way round, only to be told at the end of the game that the object was to take as many shots as possible.

• Finally, Cameron had a populist swipe at lobbyists. Which is fine. No-one likes lobbyists. But Cameron’s attitude towards lobbying is instructive, for it demonstrates the extent to which, despite his rhetoric, he remains a centraliser. The problem with lobbying is a “lack of transparency” and so he’ll also slow down the revolving door, making it harder to ministers to move seamlessly into lobbying. Which is also fine but no more than tackling a symptom while ignoring the cause of the disease. Which is, silly, government.

• “No ICT project will be commissioned without first seeing if it can be done for free or at very low cost. We will set open standards to encourage interoperability between ICT systems and open up ICT procurement to more companies by creating a level playing field for open source software throughout government.”

• Vice president and general manager of Red Hat in EMEA Werner Knoblich talks about how open source is going down in the UK and what 2010 has in store.

• With a population of over 31 million, the Indian state of Kerala — home to the IT@school initiative — has more people than all but two of the countries listed here. IT@school, which provides ICT-enabled education to 1.6 million students per year in the state, is considered by some to be the largest educational program of its kind utilizing primarily free and open source software.

Openness

• Yes. Free open source textbooks are alive and well at both the college and k-12 level. Check out CK12.org. Initial free STEM textbooks are available now and more digital materials will be forthcoming as the company progresses and leverages more of an open source community for standards-aligned open digital materials.

• The Cyberinfrastructure for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CYCORE) project for cancer research will be scalable, open-source and user-friendly. CYCORE will aggregate data from clinical trials, patient medical records, self-reported and objectively monitored social and behavioral data, data on cancer outcomes from regional cancer registries, and cost-benefit analyses.

• Cesar Harada is the coordinator of Open_Sailing, the open-source group developing the International Ocean Station.

• In contrast, the Copenhagen “anarconomy” vision of anarchy is not particularly anarchistic. In fact, it is rather rule-based, albeit the collectivist social rules of open source copyleft communities. Jaron Lanier has called fundamentalist manifestations of this “Digital Maoism”, which is catchier than it is historically accurate, but you get the idea… Another variant is expressed in the sometimes fickle wrath of the tough love inflicted by open source gatekeepers when cool new ideas conflict somehow with “community standards.”

• Matthew Todd, a chemist at the University of Sydney has obtained funding amounting to US$350,000 to support his project. He intends to go about the work using an approach known as “open-source science”.

• Process: While the curriculum will be “open source,” in that permission will be given to modify, add, etc. to the educational products in process, there will have to be a screening process for collaborators to avoid the wikipedia fallacy, otherwise known as the blind leading the blind. Those who collaborate will have to have been trained and perhaps credentialed in recognized ways so that there is a serious element of quality control.

Programming

• While dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python dominate Web engineering, the signs that they are breaking Java and .Net’s hold on the enterprise are less clear. Forrester recently reported that PHP claims the highest instance of open source use within enterprises, at 57 percent penetration.

• Oracle has issued a call for papers for a rescheduled JavaOne conference, to be held this year alongside Oracle OpenWorld, Sept. 19-23, in San Francisco.

• Potential presenters have until March 14 to submit their proposals.

Leftovers

Security

• Home secretary blasts Lib Dems and media after Guardian revealed how government suppressed scathing court ruling

• Torture is revolting. A man can retain his human dignity in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold: not in a torture chamber. Torturers set out to break their victim: to take a human being and reduce him to a whimpering wreck. In so doing, they defile themselves and their society. In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years. Shortly after torture was abjured, we stopped executing witches: all part of a move away from medieval legal mores and their replacement with the modern rule of law. Until recently, at least in the UK, torture and witch-finding appeared to be safely immured in a museum of ancient atrocities.

• Yet men cannot live like angels. However repugnant we may find torture, there are worse horrors, such as the nuclear devastation of central London, killing hundreds of thousands of people and inflicting irreparable damage on mankind’s cultural heritage. We also face new and terrible dangers. In the past, the threat came from other states. If they struck at us, we knew where to strike back. Now, we can almost feel nostalgic for mutually assured destruction.

• Iraq has ordered former employees of the private military contractor once known as Blackwater to leave the country, its interior minister announced Wednesday.

Environment

• Shell has been hit by a massive data breach – the contact database for 176,000 staff and contractors at the firm has been copied and forwarded to lobbyists and activists opposed to the company.

Finance

• Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

• As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

• [...]

• Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal. Few rules govern how nations can borrow the money they need for expenses like the military and health care. The market for sovereign debt — the Wall Street term for loans to governments — is as unfettered as it is vast.

• If we are to believe the G7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full “forgiveness” of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told al-Jazeera English, but: “It’s time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt.” In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor – and it is we, in the west, who are deeply in arrears.

• [...]

• A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the road to repair begins – by recognising the right of Haitians to reparations.

• For all the power and spectacle of the Olympic Games, the down-sides may seem to some a necessary evil. But not to all.

• “The Olympics have a history of leaving host cities in debt, and relocating the poor and homeless away from the sanitized corridors of host cities,” The Christian Science Monitor noted on Friday. “Vancouver is no exception.”

• PayPal does not have authorization in India to provide cross-border money transfers, a spokeswoman for the country’s central bank said on Thursday.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• An activist group that temporarily blocked access to key Australian government websites plans to continue its cyber attacks, the BBC has learned.

• Today we got a message from Youtube informing us that the ability to post new videos on Youtube has been temporarily disabled for violating the YouTube Community Guidelines because of a video deemed “inappropriate.”

• [...]

• And while we are not complaining about all the censorship and attacks targeting us, as we are totally aware that these are the consequences of the fight we are waging against the Tunisian regime to win back our freedom of expression, we really don’t want and don’t expect to see this battle front extended to Google services.

• Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco programmer with the long-time open source Tor Project, a cloaking program used by corporations and free speech activists alike, said closed systems like Haystack concern him. He said it has no peer review the way the Tor Project does, which has been created and vetted by programmers around the world over many years.

• Shoppers will have internet adverts displayed to them based on their offline shopping habits in a new scheme being developed by internet publisher Yahoo! and customer loyalty scheme Nectar.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The ability to visit big or small websites equally is coming under attack from critics of “net neutrality” in America.

• This principle means all web traffic is treated equally regardless of the type or origin.

• But while Google may intend for its network to serve as a model for other carriers, there is no guarantee that it will lead the incumbent carriers to follow suit. After all, the success of the open source Android operating system hasn’t made proprietary operating systems such as the iPhone OS or BlackBerry any less popular or profitable. What remains to be seen, then, will be whether the Google network will lead to a revolution or will remain just a pretty model.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• The task force will work closely with the recently established White House Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), which has the responsibility of drafting a strategic plan on IP for President Barack Obama’s administration. The task force will recommend ways to improve IP enforcement, the DOJ said.

• [...]

• There are some indications that the DOJ may target peer-to-peer file sharers, however. The DOJ, under Obama, has hired five former lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America, and the DOJ this year supported a US$675,000 file-sharing verdict in Massachusetts.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayChristian Einfeldt’s DTP presentation in Berlin 2004 04 (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.