● 04.16.10

● Links 16/4/2010: Nouveau Power Management, New GNU/Linux Game

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Sony

• Sony says that it has no intention of reimbursing retailers if they offer fat PS3 users partial refunds because of the removal of the Install Other OS function.

• Last week, the first PS3 user successfully secured a partial refund from Amazon UK as compensation for the removal of the ability to run Linux on the console.

• Taken from the Playstation.com forums (nice work!): —————-

• CREDIT goes to Xrobx who posted these in another thread and i wanted to make sure that everyone sees them…

• Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.: “In addition to playing games, watching movies, listening to music, and viewing photos, you can use the PS3 system to run the Linux operating system. By installing the Linux operating system, you can use the PS3 system not only as an entry-level personal computer with hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use, but also as a complete development environment for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.).” http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html [playstation.com]

• (http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:byasL-PxEiMJ:www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html+http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=cln k&gl=us&client=safari) – google’s cached page of the above hyperlink from March 30th 2010 which does not say anything about FW 3.21 removing Other OS. I’ve saved the page in case it goes offline, copy http address into browser as link probably won’t work. Or, just search google and get the cached page. – kiyyto.

• Phil Harrison, February 2007, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008: “One of the most powerful things about the PS3 is the ‘Install Other OS’ option.” http://kotaku.com/235049/20-questions-with-phil-harrison-at-dice [kotaku.com]

• Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., 2006-2009: “The Linux Distributor’s Starter Kit provides information, binary and source codes to Linux Distribution developers who wants to make their distro support PS3.” http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux [kernel.org]

• Izumi Kawanishi, Sony, May 2006: “Because we have plans for having Linux on board [the PS3], we also recognize Linux programming activities… Other than game studios tied to official developer licenses, we’d like to see various individuals participate in content creation for the PS3.” http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9290 [gamasutra.com]

• Geoffrey Levand, August 2009, Principal Software Engineer at Sony Corporation: “Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue the support for previously sold models that have the “Install Other OS” feature and that this feature will not be disabled in future firmware releases.” mailing list to PS3 customers using Linux

• Phil Harrison, May 2006, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008: “The Playstation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC.” http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,418642,00.html [spiegel.de] SONY Make.Believe… you didn’t see that

Desktop

• Those who want to use Linux, Unix, or any one of the BSD distributions, are expected to know how to read with comprehension, know how to use a search engine – using actual arguments – and, above all else, have some level of patience.

• Today’s average user has none of those skills.

Server

• At peak, Akamai supported more than 12 million requests per second –- a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the U.S. every 30 seconds, the company said.

IBM

• The story starts with the Hercules emulator, which lets PC-type systems pretend to be IBM’s System/370 and ESA/390 mainframe architectures. Hercules is good enough to run systems like z/OS or z/VM, and, according to the project’s FAQ, it has been used for production use at times, even if that’s not its stated purpose. The project is licensed under the OSI-certified Q Public License.

• Enter TurboHercules SAS, which seeks to commercialize the Hercules system. The company offers supported versions of Hercules – optionally bundled with hardware – aimed at the disaster recovery market. Keeping a backup mainframe around is an expensive proposition; keeping a few commodity systems running Hercules is rather cheaper. It’s not hard to imagine why companies which are stuck with software which must run on a mainframe might be tempted by this product – as a backup plan or as a way to migrate off the mainframes entirely.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Collabora Ltd., has become a member and will participate in the MeeGo project (http://www.meego.com).

• Linux is in a strong marketplace position, despite the graying of some of its key maintainers, thanks to cloud computing and other trends that favor it over Windows and older versions of Unix, claimed Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation.

• Zemlin didn’t bring up the fact that key maintainers of the Linux kernel are getting older. That was for Jonathan Corbet, editor in chief of the Linux Weekly News, to point out later during a panel Wednesday at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, in San Francisco.

• Morton does have a solution for the problem. In his view, Linux kernel developers need to document the work that they do better. He wasn’t talking about offline documentation, but rather documentation within the code itself.

Graphics Stack

• This morning we talked about the real need for Nouveau power management as with a notebook bearing a NVIDIA GPU this open-source NVIDIA driver can easily consume 10~30% more power than using NVIDIA’s official binary driver. While power management is more important on the mobile side, a quick test was carried out on a desktop too.

• For this Nouveau desktop testing of the power consumption a AMD Sempron box was used running a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was used comparing its Nouveau KMS driver (using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel but with the 2.6.33 DRM back-ported, and no Gallium3D driver in use) to the NVIDIA 195.36.15 binary driver. Ubuntu 10.04 was used for some variation in the test results and the Red Hat Anaconda installer with Fedora 13 Beta would hang with this AMD system when it came to detecting the Serial ATA hard drive.

Applications

• Bombono DVD is easy to use program for making DVD video discs. This program allows you to get video on optical discs without knowing many technical details. It provides the full authoring sequence: making chapters while browsing videos, custom menu creation, authoring, and optionally burning on DVD. Also, it features the interesting feature of re-authoring, which allows one to get video back from DVDs.

Instructionals

Games

• Ok back to my point. The point is, if you really want to learn or use Linux as your main OS, but don’t feel you can because of gaming, give up the kiddie PC games and get a console and use a computer for what it was meant for. Stop hunting down gnomes and trolls and hop on the Linux train! Personally, I can’t believe I let a game of gnomes and elves keep me from switching to Linux.

• Out of the Park Baseball has recently been developed with support for Linux in mind. This program is not available free of charge and is sold for 39.00 per download.

• If you’re old enough to fondly remember playing Space Invaders on a giant arcade kiosk or tabletop console, you’ll probably want to check out DSI, a classic Space Invaders clone. The game play is like that of the Carter-era video game, but with smooth scrolling and faster modern aliens and graphics, and a traditional high score sheet.

• [...]

• He recently registered the project on SourceForge.net in order, among other things, to take advantage of version control software. “It generated immediate interest,” Brasher says. “A really skilled retired coder from the USA has worked with me to clean up and debug the code and bring it to v1.0.1 beta2 at a rate of knots! SF is the natural place to house, disseminate, and locate open source software. The facilities are great.”

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• I’m not going to make a detailed post, just a screen-shot based overview of the new features you can expect in KDE 4.5.

Distributions

Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• I just learned that Phil Lavigna, author of the nice ulteoadmin.com website has passed away on April, 1st. Phil was a very talented, humble and perfectionist guy. He wrote several books on Linux, including “Test driving Linux” at O’Reilly. I knew him for a long time, we spent many nights on writing contents and press-releases for Mandrakesoft.

Red Hat Family

• RHT options saw interesting call activity today. A total of 251 put and 1,292 call contracts were traded raising a low Put/Call volume alert. Today’s traded Put/Call ratio is 0.19. There were 5.15 calls traded for each put contract.

Debian Family

• Linux distributions don’t simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren’t involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian’s ftpmasters team.

Ubuntu

• Open source operating system Ubuntu 10.04, otherwise known as LucidLynx, slated for availability end of April as a Long Term Support (LTS) release, will be particularly appealing to enterprises dealing with large server deployments, said one analyst.

• Enterprises running data centres or managing many servers will welcome the new LTS release because they’ll be “more interested in stability and less interested in updating,” said Jay Lyman, open source analyst with research firm The 451 Group.

• Every time I tried to use Ubuntu, it felt like I’d stepped into a kiosk machine: it looked like Linux, but the functionality I needed just wasn’t there. Sometimes that absence was drastic: I remember having great hot docking support for my laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 that somehow vanished in 8.10.

• I turned on my laptop running the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid beta (I think we’re still technically on “beta 2″) and found more than 100 updates ready for me.

• I did these from the console with apt, and I had to remove Thunderbird before the apt-get upgrade would work. I hadn’t started using Thunderbird yet, so that was no problem. Once I removed Thunderbird, the upgrade went forward without incident.

• But when I rebooted, I noticed that the button order in application windows changed again. The picture above shows what the buttons look like at the time of this entry.

• I’ve been asked why I use Ubuntu a few times. When asked I ask why not. The answers to that are usually different but always follow the lines of, “Well, I was just curious because you know everything about Linux.” That answer makes me laugh a little. My follow up is, I use Ubuntu because it works and does what I want it to. Thats not the only reason though. It’s not that I haven’t tried other distributions. It’s not even that I haven’t liked certain things in others more. The real reason is much deeper than that.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• About two months ago, Harald Welte announced a project called OsmocomBB which intends to close what might be called the missing link between the free GSM network implementations and the free mobile phone operating systems. When accomplished, the projects aims to have a fully functioning and free GSM baseband software stack in the mobile phone.

Nokia

• The two companies’ goal is to press forward on MeeGo, the joint project resulting from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and Nokia’s (NYSE: NOK) move to combine their respective mobile Linux efforts. Even before they joined forces earlier this year, Intel and Nokia have been working closely with a number of high-profile open source projects — putting the two in prime position to share some insight on productizing open source.

Android

• According to a report on a site identifying itself as Phone Report, HTC’s South African MD Quinton Leigh came out with a huge shopping list of next-gen features the smartphone giant is planning to add to its forthcoming models.

• The Boston is expected to ship with Google’s Android 1.6 operating system on board, which might not sound that great, though it seems that software updates are set to arrive after launch. I can’t wait to hear more about this phone, it looks very attractive.

• Verizon Wireless users with Android-based devices – most notably the popular Motorola Droid – are not able to run the new Skype Mobile client with the phone’s Wi-Fi radio turned on. The consequence: Users can either turn Wi-Fi on the device off completely, forcing all data services to run over the Verizon 3G network, or leave Wi-Fi on and be unable to use Skype Mobile to make calls or even have it running in the background, the major of appeal of the app in the first place.

Sub-notebooks

• ZaReason is shipping a Linux-ready, 10-inch netbook that uses the Intel Atom N450 processor and is claimed to offer eight hours of battery life. The ZaReason Teo Netbook offers 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD), 802/11n wireless networking, Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• The new Sugar 6 release includes a revamped user interface and other tweaks that aim to make the system more efficient for users. To SugarCRM, the project’s chief commercial backer, the new version marks the latest step in the evolution of both the company and its core CRM offering, though to the layman, the improvements might at first seem relatively minor.

Crowdsourcing

• A while back, I wrote an article about why the term crowdsourcing bugs me. Another thing that drives me nuts? When people confuse crowdsourcing and open source. My friend David Burney wrote an interesting post on this subject a while back highlighting the differences.

• It finally hit me the other day just why the open source way seems so much more elegantly designed (and less wasteful) to me than what I’ll call “the crowdsourcing way.”

• Digital artist Aaron Koblin has a fantastic knack for creating innovative, beautiful, fascinating works that merge the worlds of data and technology with art. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, he created The Sheep Market by commissioning 10,000 online workers each to draw a left-facing sheep. Ten Thousand Cents created a representation of a $100 bill, also drawn by 10,000 turkers. Now, he’s back with a video project, and is creating a crowdsourced music video for Johnny Cash’s song, “Ain’t No Grave.”

• What’s different, immediately, about a hyperconnected world is that information flows much faster and more freely. So it’s less costly to ascertain who’s really evil — and who’s really good. So the first force is information.

• [...]

• Google’s just climbed back up to the third rung, competition — by leaving China, it is once again competing not just to gain more share, but to do more good, by offering higher quality services, instead of compromised ones (in turn, amplifying pressure on rivals like Microsoft).

• Apple’s on the fourth rung, disruption. It is utilizing radical new building blocks, markets — the Apps Store, iAds — and their great promise is to reinvent the deep economics of media and advertising. Will they live up to it? Only time will tell whether Jobs’ insistence on heavy-handed control is hubris — or whether it really does radically rewrite the balance of good and bad. If the former, Apple will likely stumble back down the ladder of next-gen strategy.

• One of the goals of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation is to harness science and technology to address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century in areas such as health, clean energy, national security, and education and life-long learning. Grand challenges are important national goals like putting a man on the Moon or sequencing the human genome that require advances in science and technology to achieve. They also have the potential to drive sustainable economic growth and the creation of quality jobs.

• Twitter’s fundamental tenet, Williams said, is that “The open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world. Our goal as a company is to maximize this impact, that’s what we’re about and it’s what drives everything we do.” That’s why Twitter made those deals with Google, Bing and Yahoo, though investors worried that the licensing deals would be “giving away the farm.” Williams said his team was swayed by the idea that putting the Twitter firehose in front of those engineering teams and their millions of users would “maximize value for end users.”

Mozilla

• You may have heard the saying “If you can’t open it, it’s not yours.” Because Firefox is open in so many flavors of Open, you can really say it’s totally yours.

Education

• One of the miracles of free software is that it always begins with one or two people saying: “hey, how hard can it be?” The miracle is that they say that even when “it” is an operating system like GNU, or a kernel like Linux, or a graphic image manipulation package like the GIMP. Despite the manifest impossibility of one person writing something that usually requires vast, hierarchical teams, and months of planning, they just start and the miracle continues: others join in and the thing grows until one day, with the help of a few hundred friends, they achieve that impossibility.

Releases

• I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of GNUmed 0.7.0 (server v13).

Government

• The visitors and users of the European Union’s Open Source Observatory and Repository, OSOR.eu, want the project to do more to promote itself.

Licensing

• TOP 5 most reused components from Apache Commons

• * Logging: Wrapper around a variety of logging API implementations. * Collections: Extends or augments the Java Collections Framework. * Lang: Provides extra functionality for classes in java.lang. * BeanUtils: Easy-to-use wrappers around the Java reflection and introspection APIs. * Httpclient: HttpClient is a HTTP/1.1 compliant HTTP agent implementation based on HttpCore (Httpclient is now an independent project)

• More details about the release, including limitations of the tool and a demonstration video, are available on the project web site. The Binary Analysis Tool is available to download from the project’s web site and is released under the Apache license. Documentation is also provided. The project is sponsored by the Linux Foundation, the NLnet Foundation, Opendawn and Loohuis Consulting.

Open Data in Governments

• Quite a lot has happened since last September, when we founded the “Open Data Network”, a non-profit organisation to promote open data, open government, transparency and citizen participation here in Germany. This new initiative gained a lot of attention and positive feedback from all across the society: among the founding members we have representatives from civil society organisations, the public sector, private companies and representatives from all 6 major german political parties. Since then we have established a wide network, continually reporting on open data issues on our well known Open Data Blog, and have been invited to present at a wide variety of meetings, workshops and conferences.

• The Europeana Foundation has published a policy statement, the Public Domain Charter, to highlight the value of public domain content in the knowledge economy. It alerts Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections to the fact that digitisation of Public Domain content does not create new rights in it.

• Why does open data matter? Rather than talk in abstract terms, let me share a well documented but little known story about how open data helped expose one of the biggest tax frauds in Canada’s history.

• A couple of weeks ago at Transparency Camp, I gave a talk on using search data to help ensure that the information the organizations in attendance were opening up could be found by the right audiences. It’s awesome that organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, Open Congress, and Follow the Money are making details about government actions easily accessible by citizens. And the government itself has made great strides in opening up data with sites such as recovery.gov and data.gov.

• Today I’m really pleased to announce that we’ve launched datadotgc.ca, a volunteer driven site I’m collaboratively creating with a small group of friends and, I hope, a growing community that, if you are interested, may include you.

• As many of you already know I, and many other people, want our governments to open up and share their data, in useful, structured formats that people can actually use or analyze. Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial…) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data.

Transparency

• Dan Froomkin has a good write-up of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) failure to release certain notes related to violations that Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine was cited for in the past year. The Upper Big Branch Mine was the site of the worst coal mining disaster in the United States in the past forty years.

Programming

• But there does appear to be a definite expiration date on these old-school programming languages. Interest in dynamic languages like PHP and Ruby is not complementary to Java and .Net, as Savio Rodrigues found, but rather is happening at their expense.

• The “youthquake” threatens to shake up old hierarchies.

• This demographic shift is indicative of much more than a passing fad in lightweight development, reflecting, rather, a deep and abiding interest in open source, as I’ve written, but one that is maturing.

• We are proud to announce the release of IcedTea6 1.8.

• The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK7 using Free Software build tools. It also includes the only Free Java plugin and Web Start implementation, and support for additional architectures over and above x86, x86_64 and SPARC via the Zero assembler port.

Standards/Consortia

• Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”

Leftovers

• ­Twelve US broadcast firms have announced plans to form a standalone joint venture to develop a new national mobile content service. Utilizing existing broadcast spectrum, the service will allow member companies to provide content to mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming.

Schools

• “Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 teachers?”

• “That money could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers…with benefits.” The wealthy will have placed an estimated $2 trillion into hedge funds by the end of this year, while schools experience cutbacks everywhere. “That’s about $6,500 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.” To add insult to injury, they pay only a 15 percent tax rate on their “earnings” while an experienced teacher will be paying 28 percent-plus.

• Students in introductory biology don’t need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university’s administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor’s right to set standards in her own course.

Security/Aggression

• The police tasering of a man having an epileptic fit has sparked an investigation into claims of officer brutality.

• The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) confirmed it was investigating officers at Greater Manchester police for using “excessive and unnecessary force” in firing the stun gun at the unnamed 40-year-old man in November last year.

• At one level, scrapping identity cards is a fairly trivial activity as the card is simply a piece of plastic, currently with limited functionality (there are very few ‘readers’ available that the card can be used with, and no online verification capabilities for card holders, so current advice on security checks for the card involve visual and physical inspection of the card and, potentially, phoning a telephone hotline to check that the card has not been reported as lost or stolen). There are no current plans to upgrade the cards either to provide more useful functionality.

Environment

• Proposals to resume commercial whaling have been dealt a blow by DNA detective work showing that restaurants in the US and South Korea illegally sold whale meat from Japan.

• In June, Japan, Iceland and Norway are expected to ask the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for permission to resume commercial whaling. They say they can prevent smuggling by matching the DNA of whale meat sold in markets to a register of all legally caught whales. But all have refused to make their DNA registers public.

• To find out the origin of whale meat being sold outside Japan, Scott Baker of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues secretly took samples from two restaurants, one in Santa Monica, California, and another in Seoul, South Korea.

• Tar sands extraction in Alberta, Canada is already the world’s largest industrial project, requiring the removal of vast areas of ancient forest and consuming enough natural gas per day to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes. Extracting usable fuel from the oily soil emits 3 to 5 times as much carbon dioxide as conventional oil drilling, the lakes of toxic waste it produces are so large they are visible from space, and the pollution from the project is poisoning the Indigenous people who live in its shadow. There is enough oil in the Alberta tar sands to push us over the climate tipping point even if we keep all other fossil fuels in the ground. Grassroots resistance has been taking place on the ground in Canada for years, led largely by Indigenous communities, but has attracted limited international attention – until now.

• Does a “gasoline-powered alarm clock” qualify for the EnergyStar label, the government stamp of approval for an energy-saving product?

• Most of the applications were approved without questions or challenges, leading auditors to conclude that the EnergyStar program is highly vulnerable to fraud. Another problem auditors found with the program is that once a company gains registration as an EnergyStar partner, it can download the EnergyStar logo from the government’s Web site and paste it onto products for which it had not even requested approval.

Finance

• While the New York area has long been one of the world’s major financial centers, it was also preeminent in a number of other major areas, including health care, law, arts, entertainment, publishing and media. But then, over the past twenty years, financial services started to dominate the NY economy to an unprecedented degree. While the numbers employed in the industry grew modestly, their overall compensation went up significantly. For example, according to NY State Department of Labor statistics:

• “In 2007, [Wall Street] was responsible for almost 30 percent of private sector wages in the City. Between 2003 and 2007, total wages paid on Wall Street more than doubled, increasing from $35.8 billion to $73.9 billion. Similarly, average salaries in the industry jumped more than 77 percent over the period to top $400,000 in 2007; the rate of increase in average wage level was more than three times faster than growth in the rest of the City’s private sector economy. During this period, Wall Street accounted for almost one-half of all private sector wage growth in the City as well as approximately 20 percent of the tax revenue for the state as a whole.”

• The concerns expressed in this NY Times article from November of 2006 seem prescient in retrospect: “The 280,000 workers in the finance industry collect more than half of all the wages paid in Manhattan, although they hold fewer than one of every six jobs in the borough. The pay gap between them and the 1.5 million other workers in Manhattan continues to widen, causing some economists to worry about the city’s growing dependence on their extraordinary incomes.”

• As stock markets surge, debt markets thaw and corporate deal-making picks up pace, trading floors are back at near record levels of profitability even if, as JP Morgan’s figures showed on Wednesday, the financial environment for the general public at high street banks remains bleak. Most of those who work at financial institutions think it’s only fair they should be rewarded – and they want more than last year’s average bonus of $123,850 (£80,000).

• In a portion of the Lehman examiner’s report unsealed Wednesday, Anton Valukas, appointed to investigate the circumstances surrounding Lehman Brother’s collapse and liquidation, says that the failed investment bank might have cause to sue Goldman Sachs and Barclays for what might be a “fraudulent transaction.”

• Add another name to the long list of companies reportedly tied to the federal prosecutors’ continuing investigation into the Galleon Group: Goldman Sachs.

• A Goldman Sachs director, Rajat Gupta, is now under investigation for passing inside info to Galleon head Raj Rajaratnam, says the WSJ.

• Gupta is also a board member of Procter & Gamble and American Airlines parent, AMR. He is the ex-head of consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

• A Goldman Sachs (GS) board member may have passed sensitive data to Galleon hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam (pictured), according to The Wall Street Journal.

• Rajaratnam has been accused of insider trading by the government and, as part of its investigation, “the government is examining whether Rajat Gupta — a current Goldman director, former head of McKinsey & Co. and close associate of Mr. Rajaratnam’s — shared inside information about Goldman, the people close to the situation say,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Another former McKinsey employee has already been charged in the case.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s role in the Galleon hedge fund insider-trading probe is great headline fodder, but the takeaways from the case shed light on an industry-wide issue.

• [...]

• Whether Goldman had a role in the alleged insider trading or was just a bystander is something prosecutors will determine. But the Feds are employing more tools in trying to find out. If suspicions turn to convictions, Wall Street will feel the chill. Phone conversations and other communication could come with a question: who’s listening?

• Rajat Guptatold Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in March he wouldn’t stand for re-election as a director, after receiving notice from prosecutors that they were reviewing recorded conversations between him and Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, people close to the matter say.

• A Goldman Sachs real-estate fund, Whitehall International, has incinerated almost all of the $1.8 billion invested in it.

• Remarkably, it’s not just Goldman clients who have gotten hosed: Goldman itself invested $436 million in the fund, 98% of which is now gone.

• The culprit?

• Highly leveraged bets on international real estate.

• Earlier today actor Alan Cummings told New York magazine that he’d taken his money out of Goldman Sachs because he was disgusted with how they conducted themselves before during and after the crisis. Cummings knew writing to Lloyd Blankfein and telling the CEO how disappointed he was would accomplish nothing, and that the only way to send a message that would actually penetrate senior management was to speak their language. The language of cash-money.

• White House officials have urged the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) to stop lobbying against a financial regulatory bill in Congress, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday on its Web site, citing unnamed people who attended a meeting on the matter.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and their biggest rivals would be forced to wall off derivatives trading operations from their commercial banks under a measure to be introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln, a congressional aide said.

• Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, will propose a “no-bailout provision” as part of an overhaul of derivatives regulation she plans to unveil today, according to the aide, who declined to be identified because the plan isn’t public. The measure aims to ensure banks don’t endanger depositors’ money with risky trading of over-the-counter derivatives, the aide said.

• Last week, in the middle of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), the lights went out.

• According to Greenspan, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were to blame for the housing bubble. The Fed may have noticed, but it couldn’t really do anything about it. “Regulators cannot successfully use the bully pulpit to manage asset prices, and they cannot calibrate regulation and supervision in response to movements in asset prices. Nor can they fully eliminate the possibility of future crises,” said Greenspan.

• After that self-serving drivel, no wonder the God’s zapped the electrical system. There was a lot Greenspan could have done to rein in the housing bubble, not the least of which was simply telling people there was a bubble as housing prices began following an unprecedented and unsustainable path.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, Monsanto, Blackwater, Bank of America, Citigroup, Cigna, Aetna, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Mercury Insurance, Philip Morris …These are just a few corporate names that engender feelings of distrust, anger and betrayal. They represent scandals, greed, blatant disregard for public welfare, lavish spending of taxpayer money and other negatives, and serve as reminders about how corporate wrongdoing has brought shame on our country and harmed millions.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• It has been kind of entertaining (some would say frightening) watching the Australian government’s futile efforts to clean the Internet of its naughty bits. As part of their filtering plans, the government conducted trials with a handful of ISPs, many of whom have been very vocal in their beliefs that the filters won’t technically work. These ongoing trials had no quantifiable metric to determine whether the trials were a success or failure, so obviously, Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proudly announced that the trials proved the filters to be 100% effective. Political leaders in favor of the filters haven’t exactly been open to feedback on the dangers of filters, and the country learned nothing early on, when a teenage kid hacked their original filter system in all of half an hour.

• Guy from Power2010 sez, “Power2010 have released a brief report showing examples of hypocrisy by UK ministers and MPs when it comes to privacy and personal information. We are timing the release of the report alongside a ‘speak out’ campaign targeting all parliamentary candidates which allows people to message their candidates asking them to take a different approach to privacy and transparency and end the ‘one rule for us, one rule for them’ approach. ”

• The Criminal Records Bureau has paid out compensation of £290,124 to people wrongly labelled criminals during background checks by the agency.

• The BCA today served a Notice of Discontinuance bringing to an end its ill-fated libel claim against Dr Simon Singh arising out of criticisms he made of its promotion of treatments for childhood ailments.

• In my diplomatic career, I spent a great deal of time assessing the democratic merit of elections in various countries abroad. That gives me a peculiar perspective in looking at elections in the UK, and wondering what a foreign observer would make of them. I can do this also with the insight of having twice run as an independent parliamentary candidate.

• Gary McKinnon’s mum is standing for Parliament against Jack Straw in the UK’s upcoming general election.

• [...]

• McKinnon faces the latest in a long series of court hearings on 25 and 26 May, three weeks after the general election. The next two months promise to be extremely busy and stressful for Sharp, a point she readily acknowledges. “It’s something I feel I have to do. If we don’t stand up we all might wake up in a Nazi style police state,” she said.

• Businesses have had VAT cuts and the Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme to help them access loans, as well as increased capital tax allowances in 2009/10. For the future, there will be a number of different support measures, such as reduced business rates for start-up.

• Good news stories aren’t so frequent here in the Caucasus region, so when they do come along, they’re worth celebrating. Last year, Armenian environmental activist Mariam Sukhudyan was facing a possible five-year prison sentence for slander after exposing alleged abuse at a children’s home. The charges were finally dropped a few weeks ago, and in another welcome development, Sukhudyan and her colleagues won first prize at the Social Innovation Camp event here in Tbilisi last weekend with their web project aimed at combatting ecological damage to forests.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Basically, the M.P.A.A. believes that such a movie exchange would not just be purely a speculative prediction market that operated in isolation, but that it could actually harm the filmmaking and distribution process itself. Some of the movie industry’s biggest headaches over the exchange seem to come from concerns about “market manipulation.” With so many investors/speculators invested in box-office numbers, studios are worried this could be just another incentive for pirates to steal an advance copy of a movie and post it on YouTube. Last year’s Wolverine debacle was a case in point: it’s one thing to keep the latest comic-book blockbuster from the eyes of curious fans, another to withhold it from a million Gordon Gekkos betting that a given film will fail and then making that happen by leaking a copy to YouTube.

Copyrights

• Opposing the upcoming amendment to the Copyright Act, 1957 that proposes to exempt only the ‘specially designed’ formats like Braille to help the disabled read, a group of disability rights activists on Thursday said that the move is “discriminatory” to people not knowing Braille and will be “counterproductive”.

• The National Access Alliance (NAA), an umbrella body campaigning for an appropriate amendment to the copyright Act, said it believes that the proposed clause, 52 Z (a) will hamper rather than help the print-impaired (people with any form of visual, cerebral or orthopaedic disability that deters normal reading) in accessing books.

ACTA

• We are writing to bring to your attention the European Parliament Resolution of 10 March 2010 on Transparency and State of Play of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) [1], showing the growing concern of European citizens regarding ACTA. We are aware that this is an unconventional request but considering the circumstances, we would like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to provide an expert assessment and analysis of the current provisions of ACTA from your institutional viewpoint as one the two specialised organisations entrusted with the issue of norm-setting in the field of intellectual property rights and related issues.

• Alongside the UK’s Tom Watson, New Zealand’s Clare Curran is shaping up as one of the leading net-savvy politicians in the world. Here’s a typically clueful post about ACTA and her country’s role in the negotiations, concluding:

• With the release of leaked versions of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), opposition to the drafting process continues to grow. Recently IFLA issued a statement arguing that while it is appropriate for governments to act to stop commercial counterfeiting, the copyright and patent issues at stake in ACTA would be better addressed through the World International Property Organization (WIPO). They also object to the secrecy of the negotiations. The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) has also been active in its opposition to ACTA, most recently joining in a letter complaining about provisions in the leaked text and issuing a statement of LCA concerns. Earlier, Janice Pilch had prepared an issue brief on ACTA for the LCA.

Digital Economy Bill/UK

• This section only specifically names BBC iPlayer for TV downloads, and – somewhat remarkably – tells alleged infringers: “You may be interested in the following links [sponsored links]”…

• “Sponsored links”? Surely the government isn’t expecting that online services – let’s say, Spotify or Lovefilm or ITV.com – could advertise in warnings sent to ISP subscribers?

• Today, anti-piracy group DigiProtect are again quoted by the BBC as having no regrets about their controversial campaign file-sharing hunt in the UK. Nevertheless, their actions don’t come without cost. Their lawyers, ACS:Law, have had more than 280 official complaints filed against them with the UK legal regulatory body, dwarfing all comers in the IP sector.

• The firm employed ACS:Law, a company that has been widely criticised for its carpet-bombing approach and bullying tactics for extracting money on behalf of its client, Digiprotect. Again talking to the BBC, the firm justified its disgraceful behaviour simply by saying that its approach is the “the only proven effective proceeding”.

• Unsurprisingly, the law firm has a statement on the recent passing of the Digital Economy Bill, saying it is “delighted” and hailing it the start of a “new age of prosperity”, no doubt for the firm rather than the artists, who are well known to get shafted out of their dues.

• Bad statistics are not the basis for good law, and this latest analysis from the US is just one more reason why the extraordinarily ill-thought out Digital Economy Act needs to be repealed in its entirety, and the entire process of drawing up legislation that will truly stimulate the UK’s digital economy started afresh.

• This post has been two years in the making. I had the insight for it about two years ago and have been meaning to blog about it since then, all the time wondering why no one has twigged this yet, or whether they have and were too scared to say, or whether I just didn’t know that they had. Anyway, what with the Digital Economy Bill having become the Digital Economy Act last week, it’s about bloody time I get my act together and put this out there.

• The Digital Economy Act (the Act) has created new responsibilities for Ofcom to adopt measures aimed at significantly reducing levels of unlawful file sharing via peer-to-peer online networks. The Act has set out two initial obligations on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in order to secure a coordinated approach, involving both copyright owners and ISPs. Should those initial measures fail to significantly reduce levels of unlawful file sharing the Secretary of State may require that ISPs implement technical measures against serious repeat infringers.

• Sutton, who at 22 is a first-time voter with little prior political experience, organised the Stop Disconnection Demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament on 24 March. Hundreds of young people assembled, wearing gags and holding black placards to symbolise their fear of being “silenced”. Yet despite this pageant of political passion, many young voters intend to remain silent on election day.

• Most of the available polling data predicts that turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds in 2010 will follow the dismal pattern established in 2005, when only 37 per cent of young voters went to the polls, down from 39 per cent at the previous election.

• For rather than passing crucial parts of the Digital Economy Bill, and leaving out the controversial ones that are likely to have a major negative effect on the British economy, the government chose to do precisely the reverse, using a three-line whip to force the worst measures through. The result was a travesty of the Parliamentary process that any tin-pot dictator in a banana republic would have been proud of.

• This means that the longer-term goal has to be to reform the system itself. Fortunately, the very flaws that made the passing of the Digital Economy Act possible also map out for us what needs to be done.

• For example, that fact that some clauses were pretty much drawn up by the media industries, and that much of the rest was framed purely to shore up outdated recording industry business models based on scarcity, means that we must address the issue of lobbying.

• In an apparent attempt to stop piracy from bankrupting the music industry, the UK Government passed the Digital Economy Bill last week. Despite their good intentions, the lawmakers have come up with a legislative equivalent of DRM that will not have the slightest effect on seasoned file-sharers.

• Maybe it’s because of the events leading up to the Digital Economy Bill becoming an Act here in the UK. It’s been a bit like Chinese water torture for many months; then, more recently, as the BPI saw their chance to corrupt parliamentary process and took it, it felt more like being waterboarded. I have had it up to here with people who think the internet was built to become a distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music and David Geffen.

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