● 02.24.10

● Links 24/2/2010: Many Distro Releases; FOSS in Health

Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• 6.Free support: Linux is open source and it has a real community of users and developers who really are out there to help you. If you run into a problem you can head over to the forums or even talk to the developers who will be glad to help you.

• 7.More customization options: In windows or Mac if you change the wallpaper you will still end up with pretty much the same desktop. In Linux it’s you choice. There are several customization options. You even choose different desktop environments such as Gnome and KDE on a single system. You just have to install it them.

• This isn’t a perfect solution for my particular need – I’m still looking for something more like media hive but with transcoding-on-the-fly, and a little cleaner client UI – but that’s not the point here.

• The point is so many times I’ve seen Linux users express interest in a port only to be dismissed out of hand. I was very glad to see a developer make the effort.

• I also found it funny that the Linux users and the developer quickly agreed that a CLI-only version was just fine and dandy!

• While Chuck Norris runs on Linux-based DSL modems and routers, it doesn’t actually attack Linux at all. Instead, it runs as a normal Linux application. So how does it get there if it doesn’t try to crack Linux? It infects routers by trying common and default passwords. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

• According to ComputerWorld, the botnet spreads by malware that installs itself on routers and modems by guessing the default administrative password and seizing control due to many devices being configured to allow remote access.

Desktop

• I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn’t really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

• [...]

• In 2005, I graduated High School, got myself a 64bit machine, installed Slackware on it, and joined the Marine Corps. I was injured and discharged ’07. I came home went to college, graduated, and built a new machine. Guess what. I still use Slackware. Everyone tells me that I’m stuck in the past, but at least I installed the 64bit version

• I started at the beginning. I told her why Linux was put on the computer and how these problems were non-existent on that system. I spoke to her for 3 minutes without her saying anything. I kind of figured it out.

• “Is he standing right there.”

• she answered simply.

• “Yes”.

• They were frightened of him.

• This Thursday, I am going back there to fix this problem. I am going to set up the old Optiplex in the bedroom for him to use and I’ve told her that the computer we gave her is HER property. He is not to touch it. Linux will be installed on that computer.

• The Habey BIS-6620 is petite, and it certainly does offer options for connectivity and integration, but is it ready to compete with the big boys as a digital entertainment center?

• Aimed at companies that want to protect corporate bank accounts, Trusted Access for Banking is actually a standard IronKey USB drive that runs a walled or ‘hardened’ Linux virtual environment inside the PC’s OS. It comes complete with its own browser hardwired to access only a particular bank service, and incorporates RSA Secure ID tokens for authentication.

• Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux desktop virtualization, today announced that 30,000 schools worldwide have chosen Userful virtual desktops to reduce computing costs and improve computer-to-student ratios. Microsoft recently announced its own multi-seat solution, Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, seven years after Userful pioneered the technology on Linux back in 2002. Another classic case of Linux vs. Windows, only this time Linux has the upper hand with Userful having already sold 750,000 seats.

Kernel Space

• The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) announced the release of the “Latest Stable” Linux mainline real-time kernel, based on Linux 2.6.31. The “PREEMPT RT”-based release will be demonstrated on Mar. 2-4 at Embedded World 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany, which offers a number of sessions on Linux and Android development.

Applications

• If you use Linux in any depth, you’re eventually have to install a program from source code. Normally the process is pretty quick and painless, but it still has some drawbacks, especially when it comes to upgrading or uninstalling that program. To help resolve this, we’ve got checkinstall, a useful tool that adds some cleverness to the process by keeping track of file changes and generating binary packages from your tarballs. With checkinstall, you can generate a RPM, deb, or Slackware package that can be ported between systems for easy install and removal.

• GNU Midnight Commander (MC), Vifm and Last File Manager (Lfm) are 3 visual file manager applications for the Linux console. All of these 3 applications will remind you of Norton Commander – with the main interface consisting of two panels which display the file system -, but each has something special. Read about these 3 great console file managers for Linux and let us know your favourite in the comments!

Instructionals

• You will have to answer a single question when you get to the MySQL portion of the install (what you want to use for the admin password). That’s it.

• Your LAMP server is ready for you. Of course all you have is a bare-bones LAMP server. Since this article does not dive deep into the trenches of any of the packages, you will want to familiarize yourself with these tools before you really start playing around with them. But – even with what you have, you can now overlay a tool like Drupal, Joomla, or Xoops! on top of your LAMP server.

• In the past we have looked at using OpenVZ for container virtualization on Linux. OpenVZ is great as it allows you to run compartmentalized “servers” within an operating system so you can separate systems, much like running virtual machines on a host system. With OpenVZ, you can get the benefits of virtualization without the overhead.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• The 4.4 release will be come with Kubuntu 10.04, that old Lucid Lynx, but it was backported to 9.10 for those of us who prefer to run a stable release over alpha code. I’ll tell you how to add those repositories to your system in a moment, but let me start by telling you about KDE 4.4.

• It’s so beautiful, I think I’m going to cry (see Figure 1 — click for a full sized image).

• Today Tokamakers have been flying in all directions getting probably more done than we’ve ever achieved at Tokamak. There was a great meeting about animation extensibility (including the ability to change them, ala SVG themes, at runtime), a conference call with the company behind gitorious.org get the next steps in the git migration process sorted, huge strides forward on the mobilizing of kdelibs, the first runs of the Plasma Mobile proof of concept using QML and Plasma together on the N900, more bugs fixed in netbook as well as Javascript, the start of work on the new activities switcher, integration of context with Nepomuk and much more.

GNOME Desktop

• Gnome Shell is the new core user interface for Gnome 3 which provides switching windows and applications but you’ve probably already heard of it by now so I’ll skip the introduction. However, I would like to mention that this is still a VERY EARLY version of GNOME Shell and should not be taken of indicative of the final user interface or performance.

• A few days back we reported on a new Mutter release, which is the window and compositing manager for GNOME 3.0, and now with the GNOME 2.29.91 beta release coming up on Wednesday there is also the release of another new GNOME 3.0 component. Perhaps the single biggest new component for the GNOME 3.x stack is the GNOME Shell and this is the package that just reached version 2.29.0. GNOME 2.29.0 brings a lot of improvements.

• This morning at the GNOME 3 UX Hackfest in London, Willie Walker gave us some tips for ‘painless’ accessibility.

• [...]

• Calum asked Willie a really good question – how do assistive technologies handle dynamic UI elements? As Willie explained, we handle it okay but we could do better. Some common dynamic UI elements are progress bars, or monitoring graphs (eg the CPU usage monitor), or checkboxes that disable based on selections elsewhere on the screen. For the latter case – dynamically-disabled elements – when they are disabled, they are not accessible until the selections on the screen enable it again, so this case is handled okay. For progress bars and graphics, one thing we can do is announce every time it changes, or we can put some time constraints in there for announcement – announce every 3-5 seconds, for example. For progress bars in particular, we have a progress bar setting for orca: announce updates (yes or no.) This enables orca to announce every so many seconds the current status of the progress bar. For example, for a download progress bar: “10 percent. 25 percent. 73 percent.” We could handle these better, though.

• Ubuntu and other GNOME-based Linux distributions have their own built-in file preview tool, sure. But that previewer doesn’t act on every file type, leaving you sometimes regretting a double-click as GIMP or another heavy tool loads up with your file. And thumbnail icon previews aren’t available for every file you can create or download. Gloobus aims to provide universal file previews inside its dark, stylish interface.

LXDE

• Three years ago, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) was a faltering project — so much so that, when I wrote about it, one commenter questioned whether the project was still alive. However, since then, accounts of LXDE’s death have proved greatly exaggerated, and the project is once again flourishing.

• [...]

• In many ways, LXDE is where Xfce was a couple of release ago: polished in some places and rough in a couple of obvious ones. It could use another few months of development before it is as user-friendly as it could be.

• Meanwhile, LXDE is ideal for intermediate users who prefer a graphical interface, but do not object to some simple one-time configuration at the command line. Appealing to both old-time users and the users of modern hardware alike, it provides a unique bridge between free software’s past and present — and possibly its future as well.

Distributions

• 10. Devil Linux

• It is a small, customizable, secure Linux distribution that runs with 32MB RAM. Devil Linux’s is small and customizable Linux distribution. Traditionally, Devil-Linux was used as a Router/Firewall. However, now it is used as a server for many applications. By adding an optional hard drive many network services can be included in the distribution. The system can be installed without a hard drive. It can be installed using a CDROM and a write-protected floppy. The system can be fully configured, but the running system has no writable device.

New Releases

• The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.5

• The new PAIPIX 9.10 uses Debian Lenny development, xwindows and kde with kernel (2.6.30), openoffice 3.1.1 and many more applications. New scientific applications were included but a special emphasys was put on including a set of videoconference tools. With very fast networks available everywhere and a planet acking ion all possible ways, we should not travel anymore just to convey information by meeting. A set of tools including updated versions of sipproxd, opensips, ekiga, linphone, ffmpeg, palantir, and teamspeak, may be hepfull to come up with a strategy to bring virtual conferencing ta a convenience replacement of travel.

• Team Development Epidemic is pleased to announce the launch of Epidemic GNU / Linux 3.1 (Codiname Freedom).

• Hi! Without further explanation I present the second stable PLD-LiveCD and LiveUSB with K Desktop Environment… For more details visit http://kde4.livecd.pld-linux.org/

• Igelle has announced that its Linux flavor for desktops, laptops and the likes, Igelle DSV 1.0.0, is now complete and available for anyone wanting to give it a spin. The developers say the Linux distribution is production-ready and have granted it the 1.0 label. The main feature of the release is the new Esther Desktop, a customized desktop environment, which Igelle states it’s lightweight enough to work on underpowered machines without compromising in the looks department.

• PapugLinux-10.1 is finally available for download, this is a major release in term of package update.

Red Hat Family

• Last week, eWEEK Labs published their picks for the top 25 technologies that changed the decade. They judged their selections on the impact the technologies had on the past 10 years, while also considering the affect that these technologies will have on the future of IT. Among the winners – which included innovative technologies such as the iPhone, the Blackberry, Blade Servers and Bluetooth – was our leading operating platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. eWeek noted,

• Red Hat is making plans to beef up its virtualization management software so it can compete with VMware on a more equal footing in the future.

• The Raleigh, N.C. based Linux vendor launched its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers (RHEV) bare-metal hypervisor solution in November last year, two months after the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 — with-KVM-based virtualization built-in. RHEV is made up of two components: the KVM-based hypervisor itself, which is essentially a stripped down RHEL kernel, and RHEV Manager for Servers, a Windows Server 2003-based virtualization management system that gives administrators control of virtual machines running on the RHEV hypervisor or RHEL-with-KVM hosts, and the hosts themselves.

Fedora

• The bleeding edge of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux community has long been the branch of Fedora code known as Rawhide. New contributions land in Rawhide first, marking the tip of new Linux development for Fedora, though activity there slows down during Fedora release cycles.

Debian Family

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Artwork pool in flickr is busy with contributions from everyone in and around the community. There is simply a lot to choose from. This is a collection of 15 beautiful wallpapers for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx from Ubuntu Artwork Pool. You may also want to give a shot at wallpapers that you could download via ubuntu repositories.

• Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical (maker of the Ubuntu Linux Distribution) spoke with me at the PyCon 2010 Python conference in Atlanta, GA. We discussed Python, PyCon, and also about effective software design and development.

Devices/Embedded

• Habey USA announced an ultra-compact PC with a choice of Intel Atom processors. The BIS-6620 has a 4.7 x 4.7-inch footprint, runs at 1.1 or 1.6GHz, comes with CompactFlash and SD expansion slots, and uses just nine Watts, the company says.

• Habey’s little BIS-6620 has a heatsink and case design strongly resembling Icop’s similarly tiny eBox PCs (variously based on CPUs from Via and DMP Electronics), but we’re unaware of any actual relationship between the products. According to Habey, the PC has a footprint of just 4.7 x 4.7 inches, targets digital signage and media playback applications, and comes with Intel’s original Z5xx Atoms — either the 1.1GHz Z510 or the 1.6GHz Z530.

• Cortus is pleased to announce uCLinux for the APS3 family of processors. This version of Linux is ideally suited to low power, high performance, embedded systems. The APS3 family of processors are modern, powerful processors, specifically designed for embedded systems, featuring a tiny silicon footprint.

• The APS3 architecture is ideally suited for uCLinux. The clean, uniform, architecture means that the ported kernel code is straightforward, easily implemented and understood. There are no hidden pitfalls due to inconsistencies in the architecture which could reduce performance or trip up unwary programmers. Developing application programs is uncomplicated and creating drivers for new peripherals and hardware is simple.

• With turn-by-turn navigation rapidly becoming the favoured give-away on smartphones, it’s reasonable to ask what the future holds for the dedicated in-car satnav makers.

• Complementing Waspmote, the Meshlium multi-protocol, Linux-based, outdoor router enables mesh networks to be deployed in buildings, arenas, transport hubs (such as railway stations and airports), open spaces and by emergency services.

• This well-specified box of Linux-powered tricks sells for £340 (with a 320GB hard disc or £300 without). Other welcome features include hardware blind search, two CI slots, full DiSEqC compatibility for multi-satellite flexibility, the potential that networkability brings and multimedia playback.

Phones

• Nokia’s first Maemo (now MeeGo) device, the N900, uses OMAP, but the OS will presumably be heavily geared to Atom in the wake of the Intel deal announced last week. This convergence of the two Linux-based OSs will take the OS formerly known as Maemo beyond Nokia – LG has already said its GW990, the first Atom-based smartphone, will evolve to run MeeGo.

Android

• As a long-time Windows Mobile user who finally gave up on it and switched to an Android phone, I’ve been thrilled with the new operating system. Now, it looks like others who are fed up with WinMo might be able to switch a little more easily.

• Over at XDA-developers, a forum where developers post hacks, tips, and software, a developer has released a beta ROM of Android 2.1 for four Windows Mobile phones, all by HTC: the Tilt for AT&T (AKA the HTC Kaiser), Vogue, Niki, and Polaris. That means that four phones that aren’t built with Android at all have Android 2.1 before some native Android phones, like the Hero and the Droid Eris.

• Telus’ version of the Motorola Milestone currenly runs Android 2.0 and is upgradeable to 2.1.

• Companies and ad agencies looking to get more of their message in front of mobile users just got a new tool.

• Following its debut on Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone, iVdopia, a mobile-video ad platform, has now released its software development kit (SDK) for Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system.

• Android, officially became the “darling of the masses” – the mobile phone operating system was made open source with Google releasing most of the Android code under the open source license. The ANDROID Software development kit – aimed at making applications for ANDROID was released complete with a debugger, emulator, documentation, a tutorial handbook and code samples. It is adaptable to handset models of various sizes, support for graphics libraries. It makes use of SQLite, a sql engine for data storage purposes, provides java support, Bluetooth/WiFi/GSM connectivity, threaded messaging services and multimedia support.

• VirtualLogix announced an Android-optimized version of its virtualization software for handsets, plus related design wins with ST Ericsson and Infineon. VLX MH 4.0 makes it easier for mobile silicon vendors and OEMs to design smartphone functionality into lower-cost, single-core, ARM-based phones, says the company.

Sub-notebooks

• I’ve been running UNE on my desktop with a largish monitor since yesterday morning. Because the Desktop Team now also manages the UNE distro, I figured I should get in the habit of using UNE daily, but I don’t use my netbook as much as my desktop during the course of a normal week. Above is the launcher ready for me to get started.

• Hewlett-Packard is launching a Google Android-based netbook. Shipping under the Compaq brand, HP calls it the AirLife 100. It will debut in the United Arab Emirates (no word on a U.S. launch). The big question: Is Android for netbooks a good computing solution?

• ABI Research is projecting that 165 million “smartbooks” will ship in 2015. The secret for success for these non-x86-based, “always on” netbooks and MIDs is to keep the price under $200, says the research group.

• [...]

• Indeed, in ABI’s research, smartbooks appear to be subsets of netbooks and MIDs. In an ABI report from last year, the rise of low-cost ARM-based netbooks (i.e. smartbooks) sold in developing countries was considered to be a chief reason why the research firm projects that Linux will take the lead from Windows in the netbook market by 2013.

• As Intel moves into its heartland territory in smartphones, processor firm ARM is extending its reach in turn. With Intel’s efforts to reduce power consumption dramatically in Atom as yet unproven, ARM hangs on to its power advantage, and is moving more aggressively into embedded wireless and the ‘internet of things’.

Free Software/Open Source

• The universe of open source tools is large and rapidly expanding. If your desktop doesn’t look and perform exactly like you want it to, you really have no excuse.

• We found dozens of great open source tools that let you customize your desktop environment, whether you’re ready to try out a whole new operating system or just a new screen saver.

• While many of these tools add new features to software you probably already have on your system, others offer brand new functionality, like the Florence virtual keyboard and the PNotes sticky notes. You might even find a open source tool or two that you just can’t live without.

• Version 3.2 of the open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite delivers a handful of file format compatibility enhancements alongside feature tweaks for the suite’s Calc spreadsheet application and continued gains in startup speed for the suite as a whole.

• Dhir decided that he would go in for an open source IT infrastructure management tool, after making all the necessary tests. “We were treading on a new path where few organizations in India had walked on.

• One of the leading open source statistical machine translation systems is Moses, whch is funded partly by the European Commission. The project is being led by Philipp Koehn at the University of Edinburgh, and he’s just written a book about the topic.

• The former CTO of Dopplr has hacked together an algorithm to find the best (open source and public) coders in whatever location he’s in. A taste of the future?

• [...]

• And, inevitably, he’s put the source code on Github.

• Your task: see how you would rate against that system. And consider: is the future going to be about doing more in “social programming”, where what you’ve contributed becomes key to your hiring?

• How has your experience been with open source?

• There is a big misconception that open source is cheap and free. I would rather say its virtues are flexibility, robustness and its capability to address any kind of business challenge, which is what, is often missing in other options. For one, security loopholes are less of a concern with open source. Many applications and the email platforms have now been virtualized and powered with open source at the company. And that has interestingly been with purely in-house efforts. That has helped us save a lot of capex and operational costs.

• From the vantage of Bleacher Report’s partners, the open-source model seems to be something of a hit.

Events

• The Summer School in Open Source GIS is organized jointly by the Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing Centre of the University of Girona, the Lahti Centre of Aalto University School of Science and Technology of the Aalto University, the Centre for Geospatial Science of the University of Nottingham and the Institute for Research on Urban Sciences and Techniques from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes.

• After a long weekend at SCaLE 8x with some of my favorite people, Linux Journal’s Kyle Rankin, Bill Childers and Shawn Powers, I have officially become a huge fan of the annual Southern California Linux Expo. Shawn, Kyle and I had the opportunity to give talks at the conference, and were able to talk with many readers and meet lots of fellow open source enthusiasts. It is always gratifying to hear positive feedback from so many readers in person, and it is fun to see people all over the conference kicking back with a Linux Journal in hand.

Health

• Open source has come a long way in the past few years, and great stories of open source’s success are abound.

• For example, OpenMRS has been utilised in Haiti, addressing the need to rethink medical records. In the mobile industry ‘open’ is a common theme used to help combat a highly tilted competitive landscape. And the desktop space, although not champion, is still brewing with a very large community of enthusiastic users.

• This effort has proven that Open Source is all about passion. This time, it was the passion of helping. As for other times, it is always the passion of free and open thinking.

• The site allows users to comment on and discuss each specific project and each of the projects is published under one of the popular open source licenses, such as the GPL, LGPL, MPL or the Apache license.

• The OpenEMR Project releases their newest version of the popular FOSS software, 3.2.

• Misys Open Source Solutions (“MOSS”), a division of Misys Plc (FTSE:MSY.L), today announced a partnership with Markit, a leading, global financial information services company, to promote the Misys Environmental Registry System (“MERS”), the new carbon management emissions reporting solution that will be released March 31, 2010.

• Axial Exchange, Inc. — the open source solution to sharing health care information for hospitals and doctors, payers, pharma and researchers — has been invited to present at this year’s HIMSS Health IT Venture Capital Fair in Atlanta on February 28th.

• Mirth Corporation, the leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, working with partners at regional Health Information Exchanges and Hospital Systems, announced a successful demonstration of “the Health Internet” — a network of networks through which patient data can be safely and rapidly exchanged to place critical information at clinician fingertips where and when it’s needed.

• In summary: As a physician running a GNU/Linux only shop such as e.g. cardiologists who constantly receive or send CDs there is no good option to view the data.

Apache

• Apache Software Foundation (ASF) member Matthieu Riou has announced that the open source Cassandra database has been accepted as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP). The move marks the end of Cassandra’s time in the Apache Software Foundation’s Incubator.

• ASF Flagship Project is World’s Most Popular Web Server, Powering More than 112 Million Websites

Databases

CMS

• Optimation has joined open source content management system (CMS) provider SilverStripe’s global partner programme to provide web and intranet sites for its customers.

Mobile

• WordPress bloggers will be interested in the Open Sourced blogging client being developed for Maemo and Symbian using Qt. The blog for the client can be found here, along with the relevant downloads for the latest version. The software is still being developed, but you can get the latest builds and contribute to the project at dev.nokia.wordpress.org.

• Not only are the libraries available to any developer; Galbraith says Palm will open source the Facebook app, so that other developers can see how they did and build on top of it. (There are very few open source Facebook apps even for the desktop and Palm’s Facebook app appears to be the first open source mobile Facebook app of any kind).

Business

• Importantly, these communities are highly additive to the companies associated with them. Zimbra, for example, has more than 50 million paid mailboxes and counting. Alfresco, for its part, has grown every quarter since its formation in early 2005, with its last quarter seeing a 30-percent quarter-over-quarter increase on an already large base.

• While there’s still plenty of room for Red Hat and other commercial Linux vendors to grow, especially as the overall Linux market’s growth outpaces the 1 percent decline in paid adoption, this trend toward self-support (which trend is also evident in other mature open-source markets) could imply that charging for open-source bits (and packaging it as a subscription) may not be the ideal model in the long term.

• nacamar GmbH, one of the leading streaming and media hosting providers in Germany, and Kaltura Inc., developer of the first open source online video platform, have joined forces to offer Kaltura’s video management solution to broadcasters, publishers, content providers, multimedia agencies, enterprises and educational institutions in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Hosted in nacamar’s Frankfurt-based data center, the Kaltura solution serves as the basis for nacamar’s online video service medianac® 2.0. The combined service will be presented at CeBIT 2010 for the first time.

• Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, and ReadSoft, a leading provider of global document process automation solutions, today announced an international partnership to develop a new connector to seamlessly integrate hard copy data with Nuxeo open source document management solutions. Integration of ReadSoft and the Nuxeo ECM platform is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2010.

• Jaspersoft passes 10 million downloads, contributes to 350 open source BI projects and attracts nearly 120,000 registered members globally

• A company like Facebook obviously wants to be there, and at past FOWA events it’s used the soapbox opportunity to market developer initiatives like its application platform and Facebook Connect log-in tool. But this year the focus was instead on open source, with relatively recent hire David Recordon taking the stage rather than a platform evangelist. Recordon, who spearheaded the launch of the Open Web Foundation, is Facebook’s first really prominent open-source guru, and when it comes to Facebook’s marketing pitches, the open-source guys have taken a little more coaxing than the iPhone developers or widget-builders.

BSD

• Opera has announced that Opera Dragonfly a fully open source project, is now hosted on BitBucket. Since the inception of Opera Dragonfly, Opera had 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.

Government

• The US General Services Administration (GSA) has unveiled details of a $74m programme to modernise the system that federal agencies and their suppliers use to source equipment, supplies, information technology (IT) and telecommunications services.

• Their policy paper Open Source Planning said the proposals would restore democracy to planning while the incentives would prevent it being captured by ‘nimbys’, the party said.

• Proposals to fast track schemes that do not attract objection from local people are also included in the party’s long-awaited planning green paper, Open Source, published today (Monday).

Openness

• This is a intriguing proposition for a number of reasons. By releasing its software to the open source community, they could become key participants in the growing open source car ecosystem. By doing so, they could potentially benefit from the collective intelligence of that community looking at their code. Sure, Toyota may scoff at sharing what they consider to be proprietary IP with potential competitors, but in this case, Toyota could stand to gain more than it would potentially be giving away. After all, while software definitely is playing a critical part in automotive systems, by itself, it is not the selling point of a car. Even the e-voting industry is coming around to open source, after balking at the idea for years. For a variety of reasons, the automobile industry seems ripe for the exploration of new models right now. Programs like CityCarShare and ZipCar could be seen as “Automobiles As A Service” — so maybe we’ll start to see a Red Hat-like automobile company emerge in the near future.

• Champ Schuyler Towne, 26, can pick a lock in two seconds. Next month, he’ll launch a series of locksport workshops at sprout in Somerville.

• “We think it’s a fresh approach to the publishing model; its the best of the open source approach and it will enable teachers, protect the author’s version and the teacher’s edits,” said Marshall.

• None of the software I have will convert files to this e-book format: Apple should add this to Pages and Text Edit. Instead I looked at Open Source software, focusing on three applications: Sigil, Stanza Desktop and Calibre.

Ruby

• Ruby is an open source, dynamic programming language that runs natively on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. It runs on the Java and .Net platforms as JRuby and IronRuby respectively. It offers an ideal development environment for Agile practitioners with one of the most active open source communities worldwide which produce and support tools and projects like “Ruby on Rails” – a powerful web application development framework that significantly reduces time-to-market and is used by top web companies like Twitter and Shopify.

• The team at Reductive Labs recently announced the release of version 0.25.2 of Puppet, the open source Ruby-based configuration management and automation tool for Linux and Unix servers. In this software bug-fix release, 123 open tickets were closed, and the developers claim a reduced memory footprint, improved error reporting, threading, and lock contention (the latter apparently a source of reported system hangs).

• Rhomobile has announced the release of version 1.4 of its open source Ruby-based framework called Rhodes. Rhodes allows developers to create platform independent applications using HTML code that can be translated into device-optimised native mobile application for a number of smartphone operating systems, including Google’s Android OS, Apple’s iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and RIM’s BlackBerry.

• After a long pause in releases, a new version of Ruby/AWS is available for developers looking to work with Ruby and Amazon’s product advertising API. Ruby/AWS makes it possible to access carts and catalogs on Amazon.com, and a number of the regional sites as well. This release supports most of the AWS v4 API, though some operations are not entirely implemented.

• The Hobo team has popped the cork on Hobo 1.0, a mere three years after its original beta release. Hobo is a collection of extensions for Ruby on Rails to greatly simplify Web application development using Ruby on Rails.

Leftovers

• Latin American and Caribbean nations have agreed to set up a new regional body without the US and Canada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has said.

• The new bloc would be an alternative to the Organisation of American States (OAS), the main forum for regional affairs in the past 50 years.

• Health officials are considering a radical shift in the war against HIV and Aids that would see everyone tested for the virus and put on a lifetime course of drugs if they are found to be positive.

Science

• Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded.

• The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which released its report on homeopathy on Monday, also urges governments in other European countries where homeopathy is popular – notably Germany, France and Austria – to be equally wary of funding homeopathy. “We feel there’s a real message, not just in the UK,” says committee chairman and Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis.

Security

• Police are investigating if the New South Wales Government fell victim to hackers in the lead-up to releasing its $50 billion transport blueprint.

• On Saturday, one day ahead of the blueprint’s launch, the Sydney Morning Herald reported it had obtained key Government announcements that it said had been uploaded accidentally to a new website.

• You know a government is in trouble when it starts accusing aging Sydney Morning Herald hacks like me and my colleague Andrew West of engaging in high level cyber crime.

• London councils routinely take themselves to court over disputed parking tickets their wardens issue to their own vehicles, it has emerged.

• I’ve posted on my blog before about Martha Giraldo and her family’s very brave struggle to tell the truth about how the Colombian army killed her father, a campesino, and dressed him up to look like a “combat kill” (a so called false positive, a fake guerilla killed in combat death). As my previous posts recount, they have used video to tell their story in a powerful way that is an inspiring example for others to follow.

• A new study reveals that the popular film portrayal of computer hackers is actually quite accurate, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

• IF YOU don’t like the idea of a scholarly paper on the trail of hackers in films, then take it up with Damian Gordon’s parents. “I have to blame my parents – the only films we were ever taken to were science fiction and futuristic kinds of films,” says Gordon, a lecturer in computer science at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

• An Austin lawyer threatened to pursue a new federal lawsuit Monday after learning that some newborn blood samples in Texas went to the U.S. military for potential use in a database for law enforcement purposes.

• Despite a marked absence of thoughtful analysis of either the technology’s safety or effectiveness, full body scanners are coming to an airport near you. With 19 already in place, the Department of Homeland Security intends to have 300 scanners installed by the end of the year and President Obama’s budget request for nearly a billion more for 1,000 additional scanners is a slam dunk. No one in Congress wants to be accused of standing in the way of America’s security, particularly in an election year. (It matters not that they voted overwhelming against full body scanners just last year.)

• A judge telephoned a radio phone-in programme from his chambers to say that film from CCTV cameras was often “completely useless” as evidence.

• Listeners to a BBC Radio Cleveland debate on security systems were told by Judge Peter Fox, QC, that the images produced by such cameras were almost invariably poor and a waste of money.

• A “COMPREHENSIVE” CCTV system failed to capture the vital moments a Teesside engineer was struck, crushed and crippled in a car crash.

• Teesside Crown Court heard that cameras were broken or facing the wrong way at the time of an alleged murderous attack on Kevin Harland.

Environment

• The top Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have asked eight oil-field companies to disclose the chemicals they’ve used and the wells they’ve drilled in over the past four years. Last week, Waxman also revealed two of the largest gas drilling companies have pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel-based fluids into the ground in violation of a voluntary agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency.

• A new report by a United Kingdom industry taskforce predicts steep oil price rises and gasoline supply shortages by 2014-2015, which will put the global economy at similar risk to the 2007-2008 rapid rise in oil prices that helped trigger the Great Recession.

Finance

• Employment in the securities industry in New York City declined by 31,500 jobs between November 2007 and August 2009, a decline of 16.7 percent. Since then, the industry has added 3,900 jobs through December.

• It’s Sunday, so here’s today’s sermon. Young firebrand Matt Taibbi has written another installment in his all encompassing indictment of bailed-out banks. Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle, published in Rolling Stone last week, uses con artist terms to explain how Goldman Sachs and other banks pocketed trillions of dollars from one government “rescue” program after another. Taibbi concludes by showing how Wall Street is re-creating the conditions for another big crash in the not-so-distant future.

• In a speech before the UK Treasury Select Committee the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Bank, Gerald Corrigan, who also happens to be a former New York Fed President (and people still wonder where Tim Geithner will end up) noted that it is not Goldman who is at fault in the whole Greek swap fiasco but Eurostat, “which was consulted on the transaction at the time it was entered into and which offered no objection.” What is troubling is Corrigan’s revelation that “Goldman Sachs was by no means the only bank involved with countries in these types of transactions…These transactions were not limited to Goldman Sachs and Greece.” Just whose debt numbers will be put under the microscope next?

• Yes, GS has come along way since the days of Sydney Weinberg. In fact, many of our large corporations have succumbed to greed and left morailty in their gold lined trash cans. I doubt that we will ever see a return to business even the way it was in the latter part of the Twentieth Century. Back in those days even the banking industry served the public and their customers. Rmember when you knew your banker and your banker knew you? Of course, technology and the internet have changed and removed a lot of the personal aspect but it has not changed morality. Only greed and the ever growing greed amongst large corporations has changed the changed and often eliminated the moral boundaries they operate within.

• American International Group Inc.’s plane unit is seeking a $750 million loan arranged by Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in the subsidiary’s first debt issuance through capital markets since AIG’s 2008 bailout, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

• [...]

• “We anticipate selling some ILFC assets in the future,” Robert Benmosche, AIG’s chief executive officer, said in a statement this month when the company announced the departure of Steven Udvar-Hazy as leader of the Los Angeles-based plane unit. “We continue to review other options, including accessing the capital markets through secured debt financing.”

• When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got the most attention.

• Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.

• Just look at how they have already done this in many other countries, and then look at the “bailout.”

• The success of the coup is clear by the control of the US Treasury by Goldman Sachs criminal masterminds Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and the continued control of the Federal Reserve by Ben Bernanke.

• European leaders have not shied away from directly criticizing the market’s behavior, when they don’t like it. This has been especially true while the Greek fiscal crisis has wound on. There’s been a lot of talk, for instance, of a “speculative attack” on Greece, and thinly veiled warnings directed at market participants. After the Eurozone Finance Ministers’ meeting last Friday, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde went so far as to warn off speculators. They “had better be careful,” she said, “There is clearly a statement of solidarity—we are closing ranks. Whether we are big member states or small member states we are all in this together and we are not going to let any of us down.” She even followed this with an implicit regulatory threat. “What we are going to take away from this crisis,” she added, “is certainly a second look at the validity, the solidity of [Credit default swaps] on sovereign debt.”

• Colleagues say 46-year-old Antigone Loudiadis, who has a given name from classical mythology but goes by the nickname “Addy,” was the woman behind the deal.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The 55-year-old chief executive of Goldman Sachs — three-plus years into his tenure — recently turned to a Texas corporate p.r. firm to buff the image of the tarnished Wall Street powerhouse.

• According to the New York Post, Goldman is using Public Strategies, a firm headed by former George W. Bush and Karl Rove confidant Dan Bartlett, to gauge the bank’s “perception in the marketplace.”

• So Blankfein brought in Public Strategies, a Texas-based PR firm that’s run by Dan Bartlett. Bartlett was President Bush’s longest-serving aide and, more importantly, the press’s official “Senior Administration Official speaking on the condition of anonymity” of 2001-2007.

• What kind of work does Public Strategies (most recently in the news when MSNBC decided not to inform its viewers that Richard Wolfe was a “strategist” there) specialize in? According to their website, they’re a good friend to have when your natural gas company is responsible for killing old people in an explosion.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The science writer Simon Singh is in court today to appeal against a preliminary libel ruling over a Guardian article in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).

• Gadget maker MagicJack recently lost a defamation lawsuit that it filed against Boing Boing. The judge dismissed its case and ordered it to pay us more than $50,000 in legal costs.

• The Florida-based VOIP company promotes a USB dongle that allows subscribers to make free or inexpensive phone calls over the internet. I posted in April 2008 about its terms of service—which include the right to analyze customers’ calls—and various iffy characteristics of its website.

• We had no idea that it would file a baseless lawsuit to try and shut me up, that CEO Dan Borislow would offer to buy our silence after disparaging his own lawyers, or that MagicJack would ultimately face legal consequences for trying to intimidate critics.

• Neither Red Bull nor Verizon Communications is an Olympic sponsor, but both have posted items about the Vancouver Games on Twitter and Facebook.

• In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

• But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• A government proposal to charge people with fixed phone lines 50p per month to help fund ultra-fast broadband has been condemned as “unfair” by MPs.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• At the box-office the major movie studios are raking in record profits, but their continuing refusal to widely adopt online business opportunities are hindering progress. According to the head of the Blockbuster video chain, the movie industry’s greed is to blame for holding back innovation.

• An 88-year old man, carrying a walking stick and a camcorder, has been caught by movie theater personnel when he tried to make a private copy of the movie Avatar. The man was planning to show the film to his wife who could not make her way to the theater.

• Now, for any compassionate human being, this is a tale of sweetness. What a thoughtful thing this guy wanted to do for his wife.

• But the industry doesn’t see it that way. To them, it’s still “piracy” and a problem. To be honest, if the movie industry stopped with its silly “windowing” concept, this wouldn’t have been a problem at all.

• Russian collecting society RAO is suing a company it identified as the promoter of Beyonce’s November 2009 Moscow show for allegedly violating public performance rights by not obtaining a license from RAO.

• The global film festival circuit has been buzzing about RiP! A Remix Manifesto — a documentary that resists the traditional definition of copyright by chronicling the success of Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), a mash-up artist who rearranges a myriad of pop, indie, and hip-hop tracks to create infectious and dance-worthy remixes.

• “Remix culture is a return to folk culture, where everyday people are involved in creative practice,” said the film’s director, Brett Gaylor, by email. “Having a generation that knows how the media sells them things, attracts their votes, changes their minds is going to be a vital part of 21st century democracy.”

• The Open Rights Group and TalkTalk, who have jointly campaigned against the measure, have both issued press releases today to point this out the Downing Street petition response makes no difference to the substance of the Bill. They correctly point out that by denying it will do something it never planned to do, the government has spun the press into believing whatever it wants to believe.

• Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has issued a 20-page opinion expressing concern about ACTA. The opinion is a must-read and points to the prospect of other privacy commissioners speaking out. Moreover, with the French HADOPI three strikes law currently held up by its data protection commissioner, it raises questions about whether that law will pass muster under French privacy rules.

• Given the secrecy associated with the process, the opinion addresses possible outcomes based on the information currently available. The opinion focuses on three key issues: three strikes legislation, cross-border data sharing as part of enforcement initiatives, and transparency.

• Here is the meat:

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayDr. Hoang Le Minh, Deputy General Director, Department of Science and Technology, Ho Chi Minh City 01 (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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