● 04.23.10

● Links 23/4/2010: Mandriva Linux for Education, Android Beyond Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 4:05 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Back in 2006, I wrote that the Free Software community and disabled users must learn to communicate and invited Free Software developers to do their part. Last week I interviewed Tony Baechler, an active member of the Blinux mailing list, to check how things are going in 2010, and to know more about a very interesting project for Linux vision-impaired users he’s trying to launch.

• And it actually gets worse. I assumed that you could get by with the cheapest possible servers, and with one hundred users, that would be pretty unlikely. The hardware costs for those three Windows servers probably should be about $3000.00 per server higher, and that assumes that you can get by with only three servers – depending upon your operation you might need two or three times as many, and additional Backup Power Supplies. The hardware cost for the single Linux server should probably be about $10,000.00 which is still far less expensive.

• The point of course is that spending money on a Windows solution is an inefficient use of funds. Do you want to be the person reporting to your board of directors that you’ve wasted that much money?

Server

• We’d all love to have a supercomputer, but sadly, most of us will never have the chance to put that much umph in our computing. If you happen to be in the market for a sweet little Linux box with a half-million cores or so, though, Cray may have just what you’re looking for.

Audiocasts

• Shawn Pearce joins FLOSS Weekly to talk about Git, Gerrit, code review tools, and more.

Applications

• As they say, even if the energy savings on individual computers are relatively small, the cumulative effect across millions of machines will be significant. I’ve had this software running on many different machines around our home and on laptops & netbooks with no noticeable impact on performance. Please try it out and tell your friends and family.

• I should know better than to mention console programs any more, because as soon as I do, someone tosses out another one and I have to try it. Curiosity gets the better of me and I can’t help myself.

Instructionals

• Security in Linux (as with any operating system) is a matter of habit, then we will list some tips that will facilitate good security habits on Linux.

Distributions

Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva.Ru together with the project EduMandriva and “GNU/Linukstsentrom announced the release of Linux distributions for the Russian educational institutions. Line of software solutions company added to the operating system, Mandriva Academie and EduMandriva, presented in two versions.

• EduMandriva kit includes single-disk distribution EduMandriva One LXDE for low-productivity computers, which works with both disk and lets you install on your PC or flash drive and a DVD with additional educational software EduMandriva Addon, which can be installed on all the official build Mandriva 2010. Among the products included in EduMandriva – programming environments, mathematical packages, CAD/CAM-system, bitmap and vector graphics editors, tools for the layout of the text, the system of testing and distance learning applications to work with sound, music and videos, and other software designed for use in the educational process.

• As you probably expect at this point, I absolutely recommend PCLinuxOS 2010. I have been using it for only a couple days, but I have the feeling that it is the best Linux release I have tested in years.

• PCLinuxOS 2010 is excellent for any kind of user, but probably most recommended for new comers. It brings down the need for CLI typing to almost zero. In my case, I actually have only opened Konsole because I like it, not because there was no other choice.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has launched a beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 6.0 with increased power and performance for the KVM hypervisor, greater Linux server scalability and a new version of the Enterprise Linux file system.

• The priorities in Version 6 in effect set an expanded agenda for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “This release sets the scene for the next decade,” said Nick Carr, Red Hat marketing director in an interview. The beta release of Version 6.0 became available for download on April 21. General availability will come at an unspecified time later this year.

• Companies that are creating massive value typically aren’t building a better mousetrap. They’re not improving on existing technologies or simply adding new features. Instead, they’re changing the business model. This was the message behind Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s keynote at today’s CED Venture 2010 Conference.

• Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $30.25 with current price action closing at just $31.29 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.

Fedora

• The folks at fedora Project have been working hard to release yet another release of the Fedora OS. Fedora 13 codenamed Goddard is all set to launch on 18th May 2010. As always Fedora has been always on forefront to implementation of latest updates from the Open Source World. Let’s have a look at the features which are expected to be included in the final release of Fedora 13.

Ubuntu

• For embedded and lower-cost devices, I think Ubuntu (or similar distros) are the way to go. However, I just don’t feel it’s there yet for the desktop environment. What are your thoughts?

• If you’ve been following the Ubuntu 10.04 testing releases you’re probably aware of some significant changes to the appearance of Ubuntu. Among the top changes in question are the new black theme, black/purple gradient background and Mac-style title bar buttons that appear on the left side of the windows. These are just a few of the changes/improvements of this release but some of the most controversial. Today’s release of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release candidate sets these changes in stone for the release at the end of the month. Is this a good change? Here’s a few screenshots to help you decide.

• One of the common questions I get for my Ubuntu User column is what is my desktop or what is a good desktop for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks ago I got a Dell Inspiron 560 on sale at Best Buy. It was a great deal, and ended up being a near perfect Ubuntu desktop.

• Well guys, what do you think? Is Ubuntu 10.04 as amazing as I’m making it out to be, or am I just a hopeless fanboy raving about a shiny new toy? If you’re trying the beta, is there a great new feature that I’m missing? Should I wipe my hard drive and install Gentoo, like a real man? Commenting doesn’t kill kittens, so feel free to do so!

• I’m very glad that Linux distributions in general (and Ubuntu in particular) have matured to the point where I get the luxury of talking about shiny new features and visual tweaks to the OS instead of getting bogged down in system errors and wonky configurations.

• We have a mere 7 days until Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS is released and this morning I got an email from Steve Langasek through the Ubuntu Announcement email list letting me know that they now have a release candidate available for testing.

• Canonical, the company that distributes the Ubuntu flavor of the Linux operating system, is set to drop a new Long Term Support (LTS) version of its popular distro on April 29, 2010. Canonical will make its 10.4 distribution available for download on the Ubuntu Web site (Server version link, desktop version link). LTS versions are guaranteed to be supported by Canonical for at least five years.

• Mythbuntu 10.04 Release Candidate has been released. With this release, we are providing mirroring on sponsored mirrors and torrents.

• If you use Ubuntu’s latest release Lucid Lynx and you enjoy to chat with your friends using Skype, then you might have noticed that Skypes default theme clashes with Lucid’s dark theme. Personally, I think the new theme is kick-ass, but I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t read any of the menus in Skype. I’m taking about the kind of menus you get when you right click on the Skype icon in your top taskbar. The dark text on dark background makes it unreadable.

• A few days before the release of the new Ubuntu, here’s a guided tour through the Ubuntu family album with some annotations telling my story with the different versions.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Greg Kroah-Hartman delivered some “tough love” to Android in his keynote at this year’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC). He is very clearly excited about Android and what it can do—uses it daily as his regular phone—but is unhappy with Google’s lack of community engagement. There is hope that things will change, he said; there has been a fair amount of “introspection” at Google that he hopes will lead it in a more community-oriented direction.

• [...]

• There were several things that Google did right, Kroah-Hartman said, starting with its choice of Linux. In an aside, he noted that all phone manufacturers bring up their phones using Linux, including Apple with the iPhone; “a little-known fact”. He also lauded Google for following the kernel license, which is something that Palm didn’t initially do with WebOS, he said. He pointed to android.git.kernel.org as a “wonderful site” that contains all of the Android code in easily accessible Git repositories. But “that’s all the good”.

• It’s like Dell’s making up for lost time with smartphones: while “Lightning” is the company’s answer to Windows Phone extravagance, the Dell Thunder that’s leaking out along side does up Android 2.1 with similar aplomb and a 4.1-inch WVGA OLED screen. There’s a heavily custom Dell “Stage” UI on top, which seems much different (and classier) than what we’ve seen on the Streak or Aero.

• We’d already heard that Dell was working on larger tablets, and tonight’s huge leak brought us tons of info on the Looking Glass, a seven-inch big brother to the Streak 5 that’s due out in November.

• Okay, I’ve had the X10 since 8:30pm last night now (but I had to sleep some) so here is my initial GutReactionReview™. This will be quick, and mostly point form. It’s possible that any “problems” I list might have solutions, but the whole point is what the reaction of a first-time smart-phone buyer might be, especially if they aren’t too savvy, or know how/where to solve these things on their own.

Sub-notebooks

• HP Compaq gave us a sneak peak at their Android-powered netbook at the most recent CES and Mobile World Congress, but they’ve remained rather tight-lipped on the device’s specifications (even after it’s passed FCC). We’ve already gotten our taste at an initial list of expected specs, but HP has officially confirmed them today.

Tablets

• Audio and video features have also been mentioned by the AllThingsD sources and suggest Kakai’s project will use LCDs rather than e-paper, although this doesn’t rule out a mixed-display device like the Entourage eDGe (pictured).

• With the market for Android-based tablets slowly picking up steam, Velocity Micro, a high-performance custom computer producer out of Richmond, VA, is entering the fray.

Free Software/Open Source

• Most IT staff and developers have no problem technically evaluating open source software. However, they often overlook other considerations that could mean success or failure of a production system.

• Here are some of the top non-technical issues you should consider for any open source that will be running in your production environment.

• I fancy myself to be what some would call a “Free Software Advocate” and as such when I am making recommendations of free software to people I hear many of the same common misconceptions day in and day out. Lets separate some of the fact from the fiction shall we?

• #1 Free software is Illegal

• This is easily the most common phrase I hear when recommending free software to new people. (Not just the un-educated make this mistake either, one of my college professors made this assumption when I brought up the topic in class) Let me assure you that free software is 100% legal, you are not breaking any laws by downloading and using it. Most free software is typically released under the GNU license or some similar license.

• The recent survey of 1,700 open source software users, conducted as part of our recent CAOS report Climate Change: User Perspectives on the Impact of Economic Conditions on Open Source Adoption, provided us with an opportunity to generate some quantitative evidence to support our qualitative research.

• Benerator addresses these issues. It makes it easy and fast to configure data generation in early project stages, so you can start performance testing as soon as you have running code. You can run Benerator from a nightly build system and trigger nightly automatic performance tests. As your project evolves, you can fine-tune data generation, or extract and anonymize real production data.

• If there’s one thing business leaders can learn from open source developers, it’s when you begin disrupting the comfortable ways that people do business, you’ll experience the power of FUD—Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. And your ideas, in all their brilliant, open-minded glory, will be the target. Open source software developers have heard it all. Open source is risky. It will destroy your profitability. It will turn you into a communist. Worthy of inclusion on an international watchlist. And you should probably be quarantined.

• So if you’re facing opposition to bringing the open source way to your organization, find an established open source community and ask what has worked for them—and what hasn’t.

• Drupal developer Bryan Ollendyke likes to point to successful implementations of Drupal, like Penn State or the White House. This is an excellent strategy for silencing the nay-sayers. Arm yourself with examples of respected companies who embody the open source way.

• Rob Weir of the OpenDocument Format looks carefully at the lies and half-truths and then formulates a concise response that sets the record straight. It’s hard to argue with facts.

Mozilla

• Recently we came across some information that Firefox would be getting restart-less add-ons sooner than we expected, and it prompted us to take a look at the future of Firefox add-ons.

• [...]

• Jetpack started off as a Mozilla labs experiment for the future of Firefox extensions. It was meant to be a simple new way to get started writing extensions for Firefox using web standard technologies such as HTML, Javascript and CSS. The Jetpack system was supposed to eventually become an alternate — perhaps a replacement — for the current way of writing extensions for Firefox.

• Jetpacks were restart-less extensions for default which used the Jetpack APIs to do all the work. This meant that Firefox could make as many changes as they wanted between two versions of Firefox, and as long as they ensured that the Jetpack API does not change no add-on functionality will break.

• After 8 iterations, the Jetpack project came to an end, as the original project had lost clarity in its goal. However from its ashes the Jetpack SDK has arisen, which takes into account some of the lessons learnt while creating Jetpack.

• It’s been a while since we last took a look at worthwhile Firefox extensions. Well, it’s time again. But now, Firefox has added collections to the mix. Extension collections are exactly what they sound like — collections of related extensions. In this list, we have a few worthwhile collections (since they’re new, there aren’t many) as well as some stand-alone extensions.

• After a lot of talk about a possible event somewhere in South-Eastern Europe, we finally did it. We are now organizing a whole new and somewhat experimental event in the Rocky Balkans. Leaders of local Mozilla communities from the Balkans have joined their efforts to organize this event, the first of this type in the Balkans.

Oracle

• Occasionally I get an interesting, off-the-beaten-path suggestion on the Request A Review page. This time around somebody suggested doing a review of OpenSolaris. Why do a review of OpenSolaris? Well why the heck not? It’s always fun to check out a different kind of desktop operating system. Sometimes you can find an unexpected jewel when you least expect it. Is OpenSolaris a jewel? I’ll try to answer that question in this review.

CMS

• WordPress is a full featured and simple to use publishing platform, and it just gets better with each release. But even as good as the standard WordPress release is, you can always make it just a little bit better. In this guide, we’ll look at five plugins that will help protect your blog from spam and malware, simplify keeping backups, and even help you make a little cash off your blog if you’re so inclined.

• The WordPress community has developed thousands of plugins and themes. If you haven’t tried out WordPress plugins yet, you owe it to yourself and your blog to give them a try. They’re amazingly easy to set up and can boost the functionality of WordPress by quite a lot.

Releases

• The program compiles statistics in which log messages can be evaluated by server host, destination, pattern database classes and rules or tags. Encryption and hashing can also be set up separately for each storage location. The open source version under the GPL2 license is available to download from the development website for various Linux and FreeBSD versions.

Open Access/Content

• From Simon Clayson’s Flickr stream, we learn that OSM iz in yer tranez. I’m sure that’s what the cool kids would say. More from Simon:

• Great Western Trains have some seats with airline style LCD “entertainment” screens. More interesting than paying £1.50 to watch an episode of Friends is the “You are exactly here” screen which is free. And it uses Open Street Map! Good work Volo TV.

Standards/Consortia

• Even if Google opens VP8 there are slim chances that arch rivals like Microsoft, especially Apple, will adopt Ogg format, despite its superior quality and openness.

• Google should add more weight to Ogg by dropping support for proprietary H.264 and encouraging usage of Ogg. Considering its ownership of YouTube, Chrome browser, Android and upcoming Chome OS, Google is in a very strong position to boost deployment of Ogg over H.264. IE is weakening; Firefox is gaining market, Chrome is picking up; Opera already supports Ogg, this would be the best move for Google to ‘force’ a free format.

Leftovers

Science

• The cameras, which combine number plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver, are similar to those used in roadworks.

• The world’s largest study on the safety of using mobile phones has been launched by researchers in London.

• The project will recruit 250,000 phone users across five different European countries including the UK.

• It will last between 20 and 30 years and aims to provide definitive answers on the health impacts of mobile phones.

Security/Aggression

• The European Union has put forward a proposal for a continentwide search warrant, which could be issued in any state, and which would be binding on all police forces.

• Under the proposals, authorities in countries such as Poland would be given the power to demand that British police seize the bank account details of a suspect living in this country.

• Warrants could also be issued which would force police to intercept phone calls, set up CCTV surveillance, monitor bank accounts, and even demand body samples such as fingerprints or DNA.

• A teacher has been left traumatised after his identity was confused with a convicted drugs offender.

• Gareth Thomas taught English at the Archbishop’s School in Canterbury for seven years.

• But he was left stunned when he couldn’t return to the profession after taking a career break in 2007.

• The reason was the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) found his details closely matched those of a man convicted and jailed for a drugs offence in Winchester 29 years ago.

• We are clearly on an uphill struggle with body scanner technology, as the dubious poll from airport security firm, Unisys, showed last week – people are more blasé about body scanners than other intrusive technologies. However, if the government have lied they need to be brought to account.

• Figures released by London Mayor and TfL boss Boris Johnson show that while staff have ticketed 950,000 times in the last five years, CCTV has overtaken them and broken through the million barrier.

• Plaid Cymru has launched its election manifesto and promises to end the identity card project and the national DNA database.

• The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

Environment

• Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, California in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It’s unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars — the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out — established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.

• We begin with the state of globalised civilisation that we argued in sec: 4.1 has been in a relatively stable dynamical state for the last century and a half or so. In its broadest outline we might say that declining energy flows reduce economic activity which further reduce energy flows. A series of increasingly severe processes are set in train which start to cause cascading collapse in major hub infrastructures and the operational fabric of the global economy. These processes have different time-scales, some could evolve over years, some could be relatively abrupt but because of coupling between them, the faster processes are likely to lead the overall collapse rate.

• Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.

• Hollywood is coming together to spread the word about the brutal slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan. In the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, these practices are exposed from the perspective of those that are working to put a stop to it.

• The volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull has caused travel chaos and misery. But we were lucky. An eruption in the future could wipe out the human race

• Biofuels such as biodiesel from soy beans can create up to four times more climate-warming emissions than standard diesel or petrol, according to an EU document released under freedom of information laws.

Finance

• President Obama is traveling to the shadow of Wall Street on Thursday to counter what he calls “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists” trying to weaken or kill new financial regulations that he says are needed to stave off a second Great Depression.

• While the SEC is busy investigating Goldman Sachs, it might want to look into another Goldman-dominated fraud: computerized front running using high-frequency trading programs.

• On Wednesday, Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman unveiled a “SAFE banking Act” with a clear and powerful purpose: Break up the big banks.

• Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of 13 Bankers.

• On Wednesday, Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman unveiled a “SAFE banking Act” with a clear and powerful purpose: Break up the big banks.

• So let me get this straight. Goldman Sachs is now relying on the character reference of a Wall Street sharpie who notoriously snookered investors into buying non-controlling shares of a private equity firm at the very moment when a credit-induced takeover bubble was about to burst.

• Investors are paying record high rates to protect bonds of banks in Europe from default relative to the rest of the market as the region’s fiscal crisis deepens, while payments tied to the debt of U.S. financial companies soar on concern about tougher regulation.

• Greece asked Friday for the activation of a financial rescue plan by the eurozone and International Monetary Fund, in the hope it will help the heavily indebted country out of a major crisis and give it the breathing space to put its finances in order.

• Goldman is trying to protect its standing among clients, while the Securities and Exchange Commission is hoping to buff its tarnished image as the regulator that couldn’t catch Bernard Madoff.

• It’s no secret that politicians constantly travel to Wall Street to raise money from the deep-pocketed financial industry executives. It happens all the time, and the financial crisis didn’t change much. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-CT, recently reiterated that this is a good reason to enact public financing of campaigns!

• Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s campaign said Wednesday it will no longer accept contributions linked to Goldman Sachs, the major investment bank facing federal fraud charges.

• President Obama said today he’s not embarrassed by the political contributions he received from Goldman Sachs employees, nor the fact his former White House counsel is now defending the firm against fraud allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• President Barack Obama called on the financial industry to drop the “furious effort” to fight his regulation plan, saying a failure to impose tougher rules on the market will put the U.S. economic system at risk.

• President Obama and SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro have said outright that there was absolutely no political influence in the decision.

• German lender IKB said Wednesday it is considering suing US giant Goldman Sachs after losing €150 million in a fund that is the subject of fraud charges in the US.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration wants to avoid awarding new business to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. pending the outcome of U.S. regulators’ fraud suit against the firm, a government official said.

• Bayerische Landesbank, Germany’s second-biggest state-owned lender, ended its relationship with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. after the firm was sued for fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Gupta, 61, is being examined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Rajaratnam, according to a person familiar with the Galleon investigation who asked not to be identified because the matter is ongoing and confidential.

• Commentary: Bank sure to exploit loopholes in current derivatives bill

• Goldman Sachs’s (GS) Lloyd Blankfein is on the attack against the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s started a telephone campaign to assure clients that all is well in Goldman land. One client told the Financial Times that Blankfein said the SEC suit against Goldman would “hurt America.”

• The agency’s fraud suit against the Wall Street giant may foreshadow similar cases against other financial firms and trigger a wave of private litigation.

• Vermont Congressman Peter Welch is calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation into Goldman Sachs.

• The Wall Street giant is already facing a civil suit from the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly misleading investors about the risks surrounding securities backed by subprime mortgages that it managed.

• As investigators in Massachusetts considered charging Wall Street firms for their role in the financial collapse, they focused on Goldman Sachs because it had bundled and sold the shoddiest of subprime mortgage loans, setting up the housing market for a greater fall by continuing to sell shaky securities even as other banks withdrew.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Referring to the Commission’s lobby register, Hugo Lueders at the Brussels office of CompTIA, an association representing the global IT industry, said “we are not registered and have no interest in doing so while the scheme remains voluntary”.

• Lueders said some of the association’s members are registered with the European Parliament in order to get access badges.

• Speaking ahead of the report’s launch, co-author Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe said “in its current form the European Commission’s lobby register fails in its goal to safeguard reliable information and to end the culture of secrecy around lobbying in Brussels”.

• “To give the public an accurate picture of big company lobbying, a joint Parliament and Commission mandatory register is needed that includes names of individual lobbyists, the specific dossiers they are lobbying on, and has stringent financial disclosure requirements,” de Clerck concluded.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Brazil is going through a remarkable procedure for the establishment of a civil-rights based legal framework for the use of Internet. The Ministry of Justice, in partnership with the Center for Technology and Society from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV/CTS), has launched a collaborative process to try to underline how Brazilian society is willing to structure rights and responsibilities for using the web, as well as providing access and content.

• UK-based Tibboh proudly states that it “protects your family with cinema style ratings for the internet developed with the BBFC. Providing all the benefits of the internet whilst minimising the risk for your children.”

• Wikileaks Claims Facebook Deleted Their Fan Page Because They “Promote Illegal Acts”Secret-sharing website Wikileaks is at it again, tweeting allegations against people who have pissed them off. Previously, it was Robert Gates, whom they called a “liar”. Tonight, it’s Facebook, which Wikileaks claims deleted its 30,000 member-strong fan club.

• The thousand-year reich of Downfall parodies has ended in ruins. Constantin Films, the German producer of the 2004 film Der Untergang, has compelled YouTube to start taking down the popular Hitler-rants-about-funny-thing-X clips.

• Since this video, which uses the same Downfall clip in question, can be considered parody, then it should be covered under fair use. Since its creator filed a dispute after it was taken down, for now, the video is viewable on YouTube (and on Vimeo, as in the link above), awaiting review from Constantin on the copyright claim.

• That some of the same governments that have recently enacted strict new laws that will give media companies greater control over the Internet are the same ones complaining about Google violating users’ rights is somewhat ironic, said privacy expert Lauren Weinstein of Vortex Technology.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• One of US telcos’ favorite talking points is the “free ride” that Google and other content providers get on their networks. It’s fundamentally wrong, since Google and others obviously pay their bandwidth bills, but it’s also conceptually flawed, as telco execs seem to think it’s their networks, rather than the content which travels over it, that consumers value. The stupidity isn’t bounded by this country’s borders, though, with the head of a UK broadband-via-satellite provider saying that “Neither consumers or providers are bearing the cost” of data traffic over broadband networks. With that, we’d like to extend our usual challenge to the exec: if neither consumers or content providers are paying, how about paying their bandwidth bills for a month?

• Net neutrality skeptics routinely point out that only a pair of ISPs, Comcast and Madison River, have been FCC targets for willfully interfering with specific Internet content—so what’s the problem?

• We’ve been covering how Ubisoft’s new DRM requires that users be constantly connected to the Internet if they want to play even the single-player portion of the game. That didn’t exactly thrill customers to begin with, but the DRM was made considerably worse by the fact that many paying customers couldn’t play the game they owned because Ubisoft’s servers initially kept going down or their connection wasn’t particularly reliable. Of course like all DRM’d games Ubisoft’s games eventually wind up being cracked anyway — which makes all the annoyances customers experience all the more pointless.

Murdochmania

• Basically, the complaint is similar to TheFlyOnTheWall complaint from last month that successfully claimed “hot news.”

• Well, well. I heard something about this on the radio this morning, but wasn’t clear about what’s going on. This post makes things a bit clearer.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Starting last year, I started receiving reports from folks at the GAO that they were getting massive resistance from the entertainment industry when it came to their attempt to look more deeply into the actual economic impact of unauthorized file sharing. Some even told me that industry pressure had resulted in the GAO never releasing a particular report. However, last week, as everyone knows, the GAO came out with its extremely damning report, showing that industry figures on the impact of unauthorized file trading were totally bunk. The numbers — which were regularly used by politicians in pushing for entertainment industry-supported legislation — had little basis in fact, greatly overstated the issue and totally ignored the benefits of file sharing.

• But the GAO never got all of the information it requested from the Motion Picture Association of America, according to GAO administrators, including Loren Yager, the author of the summary report that ensued and director of the GAO’s International Affairs and Trade efforts. The agency said as much in the report: “It is difficult based on the information provided in the study to determine how the authors handled key assumptions.”

• In the UK, the recent Digital Economy Bill was rushed through without any real debate — but with plenty of typical claims of how piracy was going to lead to economic armageddon if the bill wasn’t passed. Just like in the States, the UK government never actually bothered to study whether any of these claims were accurate. If they had, they would have found that — also just like in the United States — the claims weren’t based on real science but on the usual combination of flawed logic (assuming a copy shared naturally equates to a lost sale) and skewed, industry-supplied data.

• The results, however, showed that the runaway winners of the contest were those that used “social learning” the most. In other words, they were the ones who took what, on the face of things, appeared to be the most “costly” move — and focused on what was working best for others and then using it successfully themselves. In other words, yet again, we see that the strategies that make the most sense for the greatest output tend to be those where participants in a market have the ability to copy others. Now, this upsets those who may have come up with the results first, but as other studies have shown, it’s rarely the exclusivity of patents that leads to that invention in the first place. So if you don’t need exclusivity to invent, and a more open solution of copying leads to greater overall output and social benefit… what, exactly, is the reason for creating these kinds of monopolies anyway?

• The United States government is still wrestling with the tricky problem of intellectual property rights in the digital age, and so the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (also known as the Copyright Czar) has asked the big players in intellectual property to submit proposals full of steps the government could take to curb pirates and other copyright infringers.

• The joint proposal from the MPAA and RIAA is, as one might suspect, the sort of thing that wouldn’t seem amiss coming out of the mouth of a black clad man with one cataract-filled eye, who sits in a swivel chair at one end of a glossy conference table and strokes a white Persian cat. Once he finishes speaking, his henchmen drag you away from your computer, screaming.

• In February I covered the story of Cecilia Gonzalez, who was one of 261 people across the country–51 in the Chicago area–accused of illegal downloading in the first wave of civil suits brought by record companies and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, in 2003. In a summary judgment in January a district court judge ordered Gonzalez to pay five major record companies a total of $22,500 for 30 songs she downloaded using Kazaa.

Copyrights

• Belfast ecologist forced to hand over tree-ring data describes order from information commission as a ‘staggering injustice’

• The Government of India has just introduced a major new copyright reform package. Of particular note from a Canadian perspective are the approaches to fair dealing and anti-circumvention. On fair dealing, the provision is expanded to cover “private and personal use.” On anti-circumvention, the bill is consistent with implementing the WIPO Internet treaties in a manner that retains equal rights both online and offline. The provision specifically targets circumvention for the purposes of copyright infringement and does not target the distribution or marketing of devices that can be used to circumvent.

• Along those lines, a few folks have submitted a writeup by Canadian intellectual property lawyer Richard Owens, who claims that the public consultation on copyright in Canada last year was not fair because it was dominated by evil pirates and “shadowy organizations.” Seriously. The article dismisses the public consultation because sites like TorrentFreak (which he mischaracterizes, ignoring that the site is a well-respected journalistic endeavor) encouraged people to make their views known, and that many of the submissions came via a submission system put together by the Canadian Coalition of Electronic Rights — which he also mischaracterizes as “a clandestine group of mod-chip manufacturers.”

• We get asked a lot if we’re cool with filesharing, and downloading our album “illegally”…..so here’s the deal. We’re totally cool with it. As any of you who have taken us up on our free sampler CD offer know, we spend a small fortune on printing and postage just to send out our music for free. We’re pretty broke too, and like listening to tons of music that we can’t always afford….and in the end the most important thing to us is that you get to enjoy our music.

• [...]

• So here is our win/win proposal to people who download the record from a filesharing site: If you like the album, pick your favorite song and email it to 10 of your friends.

ACTA

• So, the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released. Much of what I’ve read so far brings me back to an earlier comment I made regarding one of the early drafts. If you don’t feel like reading the link, the gist of what I said is that the agreement was not particularly cumbersome, but that it contained two points of concern, the export of American punitive and statutory damages, and the criminalisation of a wider range of copyright infringement. Not much has happened to change my mind from that opinion. I have been advocating a “wait and see” approach to ACTA. Some of the leaks have worried me, but personally I do not think that the agreement will have the wide-ranging nefarious effect advertised. There is however, room for concern.

• Today the first public draft of the ACTA text was released. A copy is available here. Earlier leaked versions of the text, which include country positions, are the January 18, 2010 consolidated text, a February 2010 EU memorandum of the selected sections, and seven documents from 2008.

Digital Economy Bill

• Peter Scargill, National IT Chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses has said that members providing wifi in pubs, restaurants, guesthouses and hotels have already started switching off their facilities.

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