● 04.08.10

● Links 8/4/2010: New Mandriva CEO, Debian Mini Conference in Germany

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This is not even close to Fedora’s claims of its desktop installation user base of 24 million. The new Ubuntu marks a milestone with its LTS release. This release will be supported for the next three years.

Sony

• Noted iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, or GeoHot, told the gaming community not to update their systems until he was able to release custom firmware allowing them to continue using their Linux partitions, and it looks as if he’s close to his goal. A new video posted today shows the hack, although a release date hasn’t been given for the rest of us to download his work.

• “This can be installed without having to open up your PS3, just by restoring a custom generated PUP file, but only from 3.15 or previous,” he writes. “It’s possible this CFW will also work on the slim to actually *enable* OtherOS; I’ll know when my infectus gets here.”

• Sony-bating hacker GeoHot reckons he can restore the ability to run Linux on Sony’s flagship console, despite the fact that the company has removed the functionality.

• A recent firmware upgrade to version 3.21 killed the ‘Install Other OS’ option in fat versions of the console’s operating system, angering academics and hackers alike.

• As no surprise to anyone, someone has figured out how to restore Linux support once again.

Server

• You don’t want to throw your server hardware away, but using the AWS sounds cool to you? Maybe you want your own private cloud that is interface-compatible to the AWS. With Eucalyptus, an open source solution exists. Eucalyptus provides the EC2, S3 and EBS functionality and you can use the same open source tools for managing your private cloud that you already know from the AWS. The Eucalyptus team provides packages for CentOS, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Debian, as well as source packages. The easiest way to install Eucalyptus is the Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition because this distribution already contains Eucalyptus. Give the cloud a try.

• The implication is that Cray is in the running now for the next big upgrade at NCAR. And since NCAR is dabbling with Windows HPC Server as well as Linux in addition to its big production AIX supers, you can bet that NCAR would love to have a box that could run either Windows or Linux, which a super based on Xeon or Opteron processors can do. (IBM’s Power-based supers can run either AIX or Linux, except for the BlueGene machines, which are restricted to Linux.)

• The Linux partition runs Cognos 8 analytics and InfoSphere Warehouse; these are the special mainframe Linux editions of those programs. This partition is capable of doing the analytic work for between 5 and 10,000 users, depending on how many processors in the System z10 box you dedicate to it. The bundle includes some base DS8000 storage arrays as well, but does not include the Linux license, which you need to buy separately from Red Hat or Novell.

Applications

• Creating patches is usually handwork; fixing one specific issue at a time. Once in a while though, there is janitorial work to be done or some infrastructure to change. Then, a larger number of issues have to be taken care of simultaneously, yet all of them are following the same basic pattern, e.g. a replacement. Such tasks are often addressed at the source-code level using scripts in sed, perl, and the like. This article examines the usage of Coccinelle, a tool targeted at exactly those kinds of repetitive patching jobs. Because Coccinelle understands C syntax, though, it can handle those jobs much more easily.

• Visualization is a critical tool for exploring and understanding large amounts of data. Thanks to the computer power of the 21st century it has become possible to visualize ever-expanding amounts of data. Because the open source development model is massively decentralized and network-centric, it is by its nature the perfect domain for graph-based visualizations. Connections or dependencies between projects, communities, and code commits can be explored and displayed in a lot of ways. These visualizations can give us a unique perspective on open source projects and communities, such as fundamental differences in their approach.

• One thing that’s taken me a while to find is a suite of programs to create video DVDs from scratch for home videos. From capturing, editing, authoring, and burning to a DVD. Finally, I’ve found a solution that is 100% done on Linux from start to finish, and it works better than the proprietary products I’ve used in the past that cost hundreds of dollars. Here’s what I have found to work very well:

• Capturing – Kino. Kino is a great and lightweight program. It works flawlessly and can capture to AVI, DV, or Quicktime DV. It integrates perfectly to my video camera that is connected by firewire (Kino can preview and control the video camera right within its own interface). I can even do other tasks while it is capturing, which I could NOT do in Windows programs like Adobe Premier.

• Kleo Bare Metal Backup has finally made backing up a machine just about as simple as it can be. And the restoration is just as easy. If you are looking for a free, easy to use backup solution give Kleo a try…you might never turn back!

• [...]

• Kleo comes in a handy live distribution. So what you need to do is download the ISO image, burn it onto CD (or you can put it onto USB with the help of Unetbootin), boot it up, and walk through the wizard.Now before you think Kleo is going to offer some clunky, kludgy ncurses-like interface, think again. When you boot up Kleo you will be surprised to find it boots into a typical GNOME desktop (see Figure 1). In fact, I am writing this article from the Kleo desktop!

Proprietary

• German developer SoftMaker has announced the availability of SoftMaker Office 2010 for Linux, an application suite claimed to have superior compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, yet low hardware requirements enabling it to run well even on netbooks and older PCs.

• The release candidate version of Flash Player 10.1 is available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Those for Android, Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile WebOS are in preparation.

Instructionals

• There’s a problem with the state of Linux audio, and it’s not that it doesn’t always work. The issue is that it’s overcomplicated. This soon becomes evident if you sit down with a piece of paper and try to draw the relationships between the technologies involved with taking audio from a music file to your speakers: the diagram soon turns into a plate of knotted spaghetti. This is a failure because there’s nothing intrinsically more complicated about audio than any other technology. It enters your Linux box at one point and leaves at another.

Distributions

• While it’s hard to make the claim that there aren’t enough Linux distros out there, it’s also hard to escape the fact that no distribution is all things to all people. There are all kinds of reasons to consider rolling your own, but many people never make the attempt because it seems like such a huge undertaking. Fortunately, with modern software we can create new distros, remixes, and custom configurations in a matter of minutes instead of months. Here, we’ll showcase some of the current software tools that make this so easy.

Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva today announced that its board of directors has named Arnaud Laprévote on the 24th of March to serve as the company’s Chief Executive Officer.

• Arnaud Laprévote succeeds Stanislas Bois. Arnaud will surround himself with Hervé Yahi, Chief Stategic Officer and Stanislas Bois, Chief Financial Officer at Mandriva.

• Arnaud Laprévote will also hold the position of Chief Technical Officer and of Director of Research and Development.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian operating system, is pleased to announce that the first Debian Mini Conference in Germany will take place on the 10th and 11th of June in Berlin as a subconference of this year’s LinuxTag. LinuxTag is one of the most important Open Source Events in Europe and takes place from June 9th to 12th on the Berlin Fairgrounds.

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 10.10 will be codenamed Maverick Meerkat, as Canonical pushes social-networking services to the forefront of the popular open-source distro.

• Unitrends, the leader in affordable, vertically integrated, disk-based all-in-one data protection appliances, today announced that all of its backup appliances have been certified for use with the Ubuntu operating environment through a partnership with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Unitrends now supports Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, and Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and is actively working to certify Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

• – Unitrends announced that all of its backup appliances have been certified for use with the Ubuntu operating environment through a partnership with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Unitrends now supports Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, and Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and is actively working to certify Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

• The new Ubuntu will have a much more stylish design which seems to have influences from both Microsoft and Apple. According to Ubuntu’s branding page, the overall design theme from 2004-2010 was “human”, while the new version uses “light” as its overall theme.

• The upcoming release of Ubuntu, i.e Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, is already showing signs that it boots fast – very very fast if you are using SSD. The Ubuntu developers will probably not be able to achieve the 10-second boot that they were aiming for in Ubuntu 10.04, but an Ubuntu Developer, Benjamin Drung, has managed to boot Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx in 3.6 seconds using SSD. On a normal spindle-based hard disk, such booting times, of course, cannot be achieved due to the mechanical parts that are involved.

• Providing an alternative to the Microsoft-dominated desktop, Canonical later this month will offer a version of its desktop Linux OS featuring a new look and feel, faster boot speed and accommodations for social networks.

Devices/Embedded

• Shipping initially with Linux, with a Windows CE version due later this year, the AM1x SoCs support applications ranging from smart metering and Point-of-Service (PoS) devices all the way up to home and industrial automation with the high-end AM1808. In addition, the processors offer pin-compatibility with the OMAP-L1x line of DSP-enabled SoCs, such as the OMAP-L138 model, which shipped last year with a TI TMS320C6748 DSP.

• Texas Instruments has spun a new IP camera system-on-chip (SoC) that enables 1080p video and analytics for the video surveillance market. The TMS320DMVA1 SoC combines an ARM9 core, a new Vision analytics co-processor, and a codec co-processor, and is offered in a Linux-ready DMVA1 IP camera reference design, says TI.

Android

• Android, the mobile operating system from Google, is on a tear. Because it is free and open source, there are now 24 different Android devices available from 61 operators in 49 countries. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that Android is selling 60,000 handsets every day. At that rate, and if Google continues to double sales every quarter, we can expect to see 25 million Android handsets this year. Most of this market share expansion is at the expense of Windows Mobile.

Sub-notebooks

• Ubuntu Netbook Remix

• Also known as Ubuntu Netbook Edition, this is one of the earliest and best known netbook-optimized OSes. UNR basically contains optimizations for Intel Atom processors which are used in most netbooks today, as well as a new application launcher and other tweaks that make it easier to use on small screens. However it’s still very recognizable as a full Linux OS and nothing is stripped out, as opposed to other oversimplified PDA-style interfaces with icons for programs and nothing deeper.

• In an interesting hook-up, IBM collaborated with Indian outfit Simmtronics to make a netbook which runs the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix operating system.

• Somewhat to my surprise, I’m equally as excited about the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) release for netbooks as I am by the iPad. The iPad is not yet a netbook-killer.

• The huge problem is that there is no multithreading technology. This means that your $600+ tablet computer can only run one application at a time just like your iPhone. For some who like multitasking while using a computer this is a big let down. Even the cheapest sub $300 netbooks running Linux can handle multiple applications at one time and that hardware is quite a bit less powerful than what the iPad has.

• So the Android operating system seems to be catching on with many folks these days in a myriad of devices, so why not adorn your little netbook with fonts from the Google Android OS instead? Developed by Ascender Corporation’s Steve Matteson, this custom family of fonts including Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono, and Droid Serif are sure to spruce up your netbook whenever you type out a geeky document.

Free Software/Open Source

• Written completely from scratch, ReactOS will run all softwares that are supported by Windows XP. An initial pre-launch version (alpha) has been launched and the final version is expected in the next few months. Users such as Nirmalya Mukherjee, a programmer based in Kolkata, said using free software is better than downloading pirated version of the Windows software.

• The Think Tank is hosted by Olliance Group, the leading independent open source business and strategy consulting firm and DLA Piper, the leading global legal services practice providing services to the open source industry. This year’s event focuses on the next evolutionary phase of commercial open source and will address customer adoption trends, the impact of SaaS and cloud computing, the growing complexity of the ecosystem and industry consolidation.

• The security researcher who invented malware known as Blue Pill has come up with a secure open source operating system called Qubes OS that is available for alpha-testing downloads.

• Everywhere I go, I am constantly asked, “which open source cart is the BEST?” But that’s not fair; it’s like asking which child is my favorite.

• StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, announced the launch of the Shit My Dad Says website yesterday afternoon. The site will run on the service’s SatusNet Cloud Service, which also powers a community-driven microblog for the Mozille Foundation.

• According to StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou, the main point to move a service like SMDS to StatusNet is that the site owner can take control of advertising revenue, while still being able to send out content to other services.

• Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class, open source portal, announced a new partnership with Aegif, a leading provider of solutions and services to the Japanese market. In partnering with Aegif, Liferay will leverage the Tokyo-based firm’s expertise in the Japanese enterprise market and gain a local provider of training, consulting and support.

• Washington County Public Library is the first known library in Kentucky to go live with Evergreen, the consortial, open-source library automation software. Equinox Software provided assistance with the migration and will continue to provide ongoing technical support.

• The recessionary period witnessed last year gave a big boost to the adoption of open source technologies. With customers looking to lower the total cost of ownership for their IT projects, players in the software services industry have been steadily adding open source components to their overall portfolio. A case in point is mid sized player, MphasiS, which has seen a gradual rise in the usage of open source technologies.

• This year’s Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, will be accepting the award in Atlanta today at the NTEN 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. He’ll be accepting on behalf of a team of University of Washington doctoral students who have crafted, in Open Data Kit, an open source application that unleashes the mobile phone’s social change potential.

SaaS

• Though both GroundWork and Eucalyptus have open source versions of their products and the pair are now soliciting users to participate in a beta program, the cloud monitoring solution itself is not entirely open source.

Oracle

• “We’re looking forward to outlining our plans for MySQL and providing the development community with deeper insight into the enhancements they can expect right now and moving forward,” Screven said in a statement released Thursday.

• MySQL “is strategic to Oracle,” he added.

• [...]

• Oracle released a list of pledges regarding MySQL in December, including promises to continue making the database available through the General Public License; to not require customers to buy support from Oracle in order to get a commercial MySQL license; and to boost spending on research and development.

Funding

• But the good news is that open source vendors pulled ahead of the pack. Aslett writes that “OSS-related vendors fared better in terms of investment compared to software as a whole.” This takes into account 67 deals, with a dip of 25% year over year from 2008. The total investment bill came in at about $375 million.

BSD

• This is one of the great things about FreeBSD: They make a release, and you know right then how long it will be supported by the security team.

Education

• The second reason was that it was based on the principle of “open source”, meaning that the software is free to install and use. Open-source software is fundamentally different to the business model used by most 20th-century software companies, who still write software and then sell licences.

• If you want to change the software to suit your needs, you pay the originator of the software to make the changes and the software remains the property of originator. Open-source software, on the other hand, is available to anyone to take, change and enhance as they need and then share their experiences.

Transparency/Government

• Want to investigate — er, research — the Obama administration?

• The White House announced “open government” plans today for all Cabinet agencies, calling them road maps “for making transparency, citizen participation and collaboration part of the way they work.”

• One of President Obama’s major campaign promises was to bring more transparency to government, and the administration has launched several Web sites–including the stimulus-tracking recovery.gov, and the IT Dashboard, which tracks government spending.

• The Tories also say they will encourage departments to use open source software, and work on the assumption that projects should not cost more than £100m. A Conservative government would also publish all Gateway reviews. In the past, the party has also pledged to scrap the child database Contactpoint and ID cards.

Openness

• Open-source culture. What does this bring to mind? For some, it represents freedom: freedom to speak, freedom to share, and freedom to change. Yet, to others, the words sound a death-knell. To them, anything open-source is dangerous. Sherman Alexie, a novelist, was quoted in an interview: “With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away… it terrifies me.” I must respectfully disagree. Artistic ownership can not go away simply by sharing it freely with the world, by allowing others to contribute their own ideas and solutions. When you freely share your own creativity with the world, it is still your own property. Licenses similar to the GPL for software, or Creative Commons licenses preserve original thought, while still freely sharing your creations. Others may make their own changes, just so long as they attribute the original work to you. Of course, this is a decision to be made by the content creator; if you do not want others messing with it, you have that legal right.

• Makerbot, the affordable open-source 3D printer, has begun to experiment with the Open Prosthetics database, creating a prototype for the Trautman Hook, and posted the designs to the wiki.

• The Open Source Washing Machine Project (OSWASH), an innovative project developed several years ago by Jean-Noel Montagne, takes a different “spin” on washing machines for people in developing countries.

• Montagne developed the concept during an Open Source Hardware workshop for artists in Paris in 2008. The project was created in order to help the billions of people across the globe that do not have access to clean water, electricity and other basic amenities.

• Open Source Music will also lead you to contemporary music that includes New Age, Ska, and Indie Rock. The team beind the Web site makes regular podcasts of music they enjoy. Be sure to also check out the with-permission rebroadcasts of the populr radio show “Selvin on the City,” that features interviews wtih big name entertainers like Steve Miller and Sammay Hagar.

Leftovers

• Recently, we have seen two projects come under considerable criticism for the development directions that they have taken. Clearly, the development space that a project chooses to explore says a lot about what its developers’ interests are and where they see their opportunities in the future. These decisions also have considerable impact on users. But, your editor would contend, it’s time to give these projects a break. There is both room and need for different approaches to free software development.

Security/Aggression

• The_lives_of_others Although this story emerged over the weekend, there can be little doubt that it requires full exposure and investigation.

• As reported by the Sunday Telegraph:

• The home secretary today accused the Tories of being “soft” on crime and threatened to throw the reforms out of the crime and security bill, should the Conservatives pursue their efforts to limit retention to three years.

• He said he would pull all provisions from the amendment bill today if the Tories refuse to sign up to the government’s plans – including a six-year retention limit – in full. The bill is destined for this afternoon’s wash-up session to complete the government’s legislative programme ahead of the dissolution of parliament for the election.

• Johnson told Sky News: “This is a basic example of how they [the Tories] talk tough on crime but act soft.”

• A feature documentary, Erasing David is the story of what happened when Filmmaker David Bond received a letter informing him that his daughter Ivy was among the 25 million children whose details were scandalously lost by HMRC in 2007.

• David decided to find out just how much of our personal information is floating around in government and corporate databases by disappearing for a month and setting two of the world’s top private investigators the task of tracking him down, using only publicly available data.

• Customers are being asked to leave a thumbprint when trading in second-hand goods for cash in order to stop criminals making money out of stolen items.

• A number of second-hand stores in Norwich have agreed to take part in the scheme, launched by local police.

• A police spokeswoman said the prints would help detectives trace sellers if goods turned out to be stolen.

• Jason Hadlow, chairman of Yarm Town Council and owner of the Simply Dutch store in Leeming Bar, North Yorkshire, was left gobsmacked at the confiscation.

• Now he faces an £80 fine to get his 4ft high masonry manhood back – something he has refused to do.

• Mr Hadlow has instead ordered 150 more of the garden ornaments from Indonesia, 10 of which have already been sold.

• Identity theft is on the rise nationwide, yet in a report released Tuesday, federal investigators lament that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to combat such crimes have to some degree “faded as priorities.”

• According to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (IG), many of the suggestions pitched in 2006 by then-President George W. Bush’s task force on identity theft have yet to be implemented fully. As of March, the agency had not even appointed an official to oversee those efforts, according to the report.

Environment

• On 11 June 1770, six weeks or so after becoming the first European to make landfall on the east coast of Australia, Lieutenant James Cook unexpectedly ran aground. His ship, the Endeavour, had struck a reef now known as the Endeavour Reef, within a manifestly far bigger reef system, nearly 25 miles from shore. Only the urgent jettisoning of 50 tonnes of stores and equipment (including all but four of the ship’s guns), a delicate operation known as fothering (in which an old sail was drawn under the hull, effectively plugging the hole), Cook’s expert seamanship and a great deal of hard pumping saved the vessel and her crew.

Finance

• Almost every day, I read in the paper that the goverment is making money off of the bank bailout. Papers love good news, even if it is has little to do with reality. Today, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. made $10 billion off bank repayments on the bailout funds. $10 billion, hooray! We are in the black!

• Unfortunately, our recent comprehensive bailout accounting puts taxpayers $2 trillion in the red. That is right, $2 trillion. While most of this money was in the form of loans, and American taxpayers might recoup those funds one day, it is foolish for the press to declare “Mission Accomplished” based on a thin study by the SNL Group. (Saturday Night Live strikes again?) Especially when taxpayers also lost $14 trillion in wages, retirement, college savings and housing wealth.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A classified CIA memo (pdf) obtained by Wikileaks.org outlines public relations strategies that could be used to shore up French and German support for continuing the war in Afghanistan. In February, the Dutch government effectively collapsed over a dispute about whether the Netherlands should continue to keep its 2,000 troops posted in Afghanistan.

• An egregious example of this occurred on February 12, 2010, when NATO’s joint international force issued a press release that bore the headline Joint Force Operating In Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery. The release said that after “intelligence confirmed militant activity” in a compound near a village in Paktiya province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged “several insurgents” in a fire fight. Two “insurgents” were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.”

• While some Tea Party members accused Palin of “flip-flopping” on health care reform, Sean Hannity of FOX News disagreed: “Sarah Palin is not the extremist that much of the media likes to portray her and she supports bipartisan solutions when they make sense.” On the heels of last weekend’s campaign appearance for John McCain, Palin appears to be moving to expand her base in preparation for her expected presidential run in 2012.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• A criminal inquiry is under way in France to find the origin of internet rumours that President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, his wife, were having affairs.

• The investigation was made public because the President’s advisers suggested that the rumours might have been started in an attempt to destabilise Mr Sarkozy’s position at a time when he is seeking to regulate global capitalism.

• A computer failure at NHS Forth Valley led to the loss of records for all patients being treated at its audiology department, the BBC has learned.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• To see what’s wrong with this, imagine if we implement a “property rights” regime in which we clear out the entire electromagnetic spectrum and auction it off to a single owner. You could call that a “property rights” system, but most people would just call it a monopoly. And this monopoly would be subject to precisely the same knowledge problem as the FCC. Central planning is hard regardless of whether you’re a private company or a government agency.

• Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission say the federal court’s decision regarding Comcast has renewed their resolve to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service in order to enact net neutrality regulations.

• “The only way the Commission can make lemonade out of this lemon of a decision is to do now what should have been done years ago: treat broadband as the telecommunications service that it is,” said Michael J. Copps, the senior Democratic member of the panel. “We should straighten this broadband classification mess out before the first day of summer.”

• It’s never nice to hear about the demise of a piece of simply brilliant software. when I discovered that get_iplayer was being pulled by its developer I was, to use a cliche, gutted. The potential loss of a piece of software that did just what it said on the tin is bad enough but it was impeccably free and open. What’s more, it was an example to the BBC about how things should be done. It was the work of one lone, unpaid developer, not the product of professional developers subsidised by the BBC licence. What happened exemplifies everything that is wrong with proprietary software.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• WiMP, which is already available to Telenor customers in Norway, allows subscribers to stream unlimited music to PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile handsets powered by the Android OS for 99 kroner a month.

• Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

• Recent profiles of Murdoch have suggested he doesn’t use the web, so perhaps he doesn’t realize it, but there’s always somewhere else to go, and if News Corp. is so short-sighted to lock itself away from the open web, well that just opens up a much greater opportunity for his competitors to make sure they’re the place to go.

• All the big music sellers may have moved to non-DRM MP3 files long ago, but the watermarking of files with your personal information continues. Most users who buy music don’t know about the marking of files, or don’t care. Unless those files are uploaded to BitTorrent or other P2P networks, there isn’t much to worry about.

• The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is heavily involved in the Special 301 process, filing submissions every year on behalf of its member organizations, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It’s only natural that these trade associations would be concerned with intellectual property laws and their enforcement around the globe, since copyright is where their members make their livings. It’s less understandable, though, when they seem to argue that their exclusive economic rights should have priority over others’ basic human rights.

• [A] really troubling aspect of all of this is that some newspaper industry lawyers have been pushing for massive changes to copyright law on the false belief that stricter copyright law for newspapers will somehow magically save them. One (but certainly not the only) aspect of this is an attempt to bring back the “hot news” doctrine, a concept that had been mostly considered dead. However, with some recent lawsuits, “hot news” is suddenly making a troubling comeback, much to the delight of some very short-sighted newspaper industry lawyers.

• Sadly, the “hot news” right is not as racy as it sounds. It does not offer legal protection for scantily clad celebrities. This is a legal right that extends far beyond copyright law to cover the facts of the news themselves; if I break the story, the hot news right allows me to stop competitors from repeating the facts – at least for as long as the story has immediate currency.

Digital Economy Bill

• You would be hard pressed to find a better example of how broken our current political system is than the passage of the digital economy bill through parliament. A vast sprawling bill made to order on behalf of the so-called creative industries in the face of opposition from pretty much everyone else, it has all the hallmarks of legislation carved up between Sir Humphrey and a minister with an ego of monstrous proportions (only Lord Mandelson would consider Henry VIII-style powers as something to aspire to in the 21st century).

• Stallman’s blog reheats a number of long-argued controversies ranging from the curbing of ‘digital rights’, the extension of copyright, and the way legislation such as the DEB will in his view work to restrict access to content.

• And there you go. The entertainment industry gets its ridiculous anti-consumer copyright law with no real attempt at debate or amendment in the House of Commons. Concerns raised about how this bill could force the blocking of Wikileaks or the shutdown of internet access at small business? Ignored.

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