● 05.15.10

● Links 15/5/2010: Haiku OS Second Alpha; Ubuntu 10.10 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• So, there’s another example. If kicking a dead whale down the beach is your thing, then just keep on using Windows, and fighting it at every turn. But if real, continuing, useful development is more what you are interested in, and if you want every new release to be really better than the previous one, not just arbitrarily different from the previous one, then you really need to be using Linux.

• So I am seriously contemplating migrating other relatives to Linux as well. There is the initial learning curve, but I think most users will adapt and find their way. Linux (Gnome desktop environment; I haven’t touched KDE in years) is laid out in a very logical manner. And, the reduction in support calls to me adds the winning touch. One of the more aggravating things is the time wasted not only on their end, waiting while their computer is down and being fixed, but my time that is flushed down the drain fixing these constant problems.

Server

• First, the hard news: Canadian Web Hosting, in business since 1998, has embraced CloudLinux as one of the hosting company’s standard Linux platform offerings. The reason apparently involves Cloud Linux Inc.’s Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology.

• [...]

• Can CloudLinux carve out its own niche among hosting providers? Canadian Web Hosting sure seems to think so.

Audiocasts

• In this episode: Mandriva is up for sale while Android phones are outselling iPhones in the USA. Judge our TuxRadar content challenge and we ask, should distros license codecs?

• This morning I had the opportunity to play co-host on the FLOSS Weekly show with Randal Schwartz. We had a really nice discussion with two of the Haiku project team members and despite a couple fairly minor hiccups (I rather forgot FLOSS Weekly includes a video component!) it was really a enjoyable experience. We talked about the recent alpha release of Haiku, what their goals are, the design concepts of Haiku and even touched a bit on the availability of Qt as well as Webkit on their operating system.

• Join Ziff Davis Enterprise, IBM, Novell and CitiGroup for an Executive Event Broadcast from the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City that will explore the economics of business-critical virtualized workloads running on Suse Enterprise Linux and IBM System Z mainframes.

Ballnux

• Verizon Wireless and LG Electronics MobileComm U.S.A. have launched the first U.S.-destined Android smartphone from LG, previously promoted with the movie “Iron Man 2.” The mid-range LG Ally offers a 3.2-inch touchscreen, slider QWERTY keyboard, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, S-GPS, and a 3.2-megapixel camera, says Verizon.

Kernel Space

• Hundreds of new and improved drivers significantly improve hardware support in the 2.6.34 kernel.

Applications

• Sometimes in life, you have to get it where you can. In that spirit, I got to thinking about which smalls apps or utilities really made things great on my (X)Ubuntu systems. These are all in the repositories or out of the box.

• If you’re like me and use Gnome-Do on ctrl-space, make sure you close it before running Kupfer, as they get in each others way. If you take a look at the Kupfer Tip page, you can get an idea of how to use all the keyboard shortcuts and what not.

• Gwibber 2.30 should also ship with openSUSE 11.3 GNOME, and is available in the repositories for Fedora 13 when that ships, but not installed by default.

• PhotoFilmStrip is an opensource software that help you create movies out of your pictures in just 3 steps. First select your photos, customize the motion path and render the video. There are several output possibilities for VCD, SVCD, DVD up to FULL-HD. Creates animated slideshows.

Instructionals

• You’ve loaded the Ubuntu Live CD to salvage files from a failing system, but where do you store the recovered files? We’ll show you how to store them on external drives, drives on the same PC, a Windows home network, and other locations.

Games

• Searching “game” quickly turned into “game -warcraft -framework -iPhone -life -cocos -Invaders” and I gave up such a general approach. Next up “fps”.

• Today the DOTA mod remake Heroes Of Newerth from S2games has gone retail ! S2Games made GNU/Linux clients for their Savage series and HoN is no exception ! It runs pretty good on GNU/Linux and offer a native 64-bit client.

• Back on October of last year I did a comparison of Cedega and CXGames. As of yesterday Codeweavers launched their CXGames 9.0. If we had heard any news or updates from Cedega in the last five months this would be an updated comparison, but since Cedega has not changed I simply am going to be reviewing the newly released CXGames.

• One constant complaint about the Linux desktop is that it doesn’t have enough games. That’s actually not true. Linux has plenty of games. What these people usually mean is that it doesn’t have their favorite Windows games. Now that’s changing.

• Granted, Linux has never been a big gaming platform. Some have suggested that it might be a good idea for vendors to work on making Linux a gaming platform for its own high-end games, but little has come of this idea. Of course, it’s always been possible to run many popular Windows games on Linux. I play Guild Wars, a Windows-based MMORPG (Massively multi-player online role-playing game), competitively in player vs. player mode on Linux all the time.

• I’m excited. I mean really excited. Excited to the point that I can hardly think. I’m talking six-year-old trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve excited. But before I get to why, let’s take a trip back to 1999.

• Raise your hand if you like molecular structures! ‘World of Goo’ goes where not many physics-based games have gone before, asking you to erect scaffolding out of, well, goo. This is going to sound NSFW, but we swear that playing with these oily balls is the most fun you’ll have all week. But where does your goo matrix lead? Some kind of vacuum sucks up your goo balls for the benefit of the World of Goo Corporation. Plot-wise, we’re not sure how much deeper the story gets, but balancing your goo structure on the lip of a precipice is no small feat.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• This year’s Akademy conference program includes many exciting talks regarding the KDE community, development, applications, platforms, mobile computing, and cloud computing. The conference will open on day 1 with a keynote from Valtteri Halla (Nokia) who will speak about MeeGo redefining the Linux desktop landscape. On day 2, long-time KDE contributor and visionary Aaron Seigo will give the midday keynote and discuss the future of Free Software and the KDE community.

• We’re now into the complete-and-stabilize phase of the 4.5 development cycle, so things are settling in a bit more and blogging about some of the features becomes easier. I’m writing an article for publication on TheDot about the new activities features that we’re working on, but I also wanted to say something about another feature set that’s not quite so user-visible: using Javascript for animations.

Distributions

• There are those who say that Slackware Linux doesn’t really have a package manager. BAH! I say. It has two package management systems, actually.

• The developers of Tiny Core are clearly doing a very good, innovative thing here. I’ve met Robert Shingledecker at a couple of SCALE shows in L.A., and I’m glad to see him working on this project and being able to do it the way he wants.

• this my pclinuxos 2010 operating system. on TOshiba satellite a100

Debian Family

Ubuntu

• I’m utterly pleased with Lucid Lynx. It is a professional, commercial-grade Linux distribution on par with anything Microsoft and Apple can offer, except it comes for free, a huge bonus.

• Lucid Lynx has been done with style, grace and care, and it shows in every little detail. Hardware support and compatibility are phenomenal. Performance has been improved compared to previous version and there are no stability issues. Furthermore, Ubuntu 10.04 sports beautiful new looks that make it a daring rival to Mac’s poshness and leaves the Windows baby-blue sickness a light year behind.

• Lucid Lynx offers three years of support for desktop, which means that you can install now and think about upgrading only in 2013. This is extremely important for more conservative users, like myself.

• This is by far the best Ubuntu release since I started taking interest in the distribution, way back with Dapper in June 2006. While you do not get everything out of the box as some other distributions like Mint or PCLinuxOS offer, the overall quality and integration surpasses the slight inconvenience of the extra few minutes of downloads and configurations. And you still have a better, faster, more secure system than other market rivals, for absolute zero cost.

• My RD510 laptop currently sports three Jaunty installations. I will soon be phasing them out and have them replaced with Lucid. The long wait for perfect Ubuntu has been worth waiting. Lucid Lynx is that Ubuntu.

• As a business consultant, web designer and photographer my technical know-how around doing system administration on my Microsoft desktop is limited and sometimes I do require the assistant of my computer engineering son to get it right. In a Microsoft Environment, keeping updated with respect to potential security breaches and patches is a constant vigil. The rigor of keeping current with OS updates, Norton updates and Spyware updates is time consuming. Valuable business hours each week are spend and lost on this task of self-administration dictated by the Microsoft Operating Environment.

• [...]

• Now the Linux called Ubuntu is installed on my notebook. Ubuntu by Canonical is a full Open Source Linux based on Debian Linux. Ubuntu is now available on Dell systems and Federal Governments are adding this Linux operating environment to their list of standard available OS’s for all desktop and notebook computers.

Ubuntu 10.10

• The talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit surrounding the X.Org plans for Ubuntu 10.10 just wrapped up. Compared to the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release, Ubuntu 10.10 should provide a much more recent and up-to-date graphics experience.

• We’re hearing that Kubuntu 10.10 will see Rekonq installed as the default browser.

• Earlier this week we reported that Ubuntu has plans for the Btrfs file-system in 2011 and 2012 by providing support for installing Ubuntu Linux to a Btrfs file-system. This information was based upon documents coming out of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels, but it turns out that Canonical may actually deploy Btrfs this year. Not only to provide an installation option within the installer for Btrfs, but to make it the default file-system.

Variants

• Peppermint OS, a lightweight distro based on Ubuntu, launched on Monday. “The decision was to concentrate on speed over everything else,” said Kendall Weaver, lead developer for Peppermint OS. Toward that end, the development team preintegrated the major Web apps and got permission from Seesmic to integrate its Web app as a Twitter client.

Devices/Embedded

• All seven of the thin clients are also available in similar versions that run Windows CE 6.0, Windows XP Embedded, or Windows Embedded Standard, says the company. The Linux thin clients run a Linux GIO2 distribution based on Linux 2.6, which appears to be a VXL creation.

• QNAP VS-5020 VioStor NVR (Network Video Recorder) is a high performance network video surveillance system for high-end IP-based real-time monitoring and video recording. Powered by Intel 1.6GHz CPU and 1GB DDRII memory, the Linux-embedded NVR supports 20-channel H.264, MxPEG, MPEG-4 and M-JPEG recording

• Linux development partners include Wind River, and Cavium’s own subsidiary, MontaVista Software, LLC. The latter announced specific support in MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) Linux for the new processors.

Nokia

• MeeGo has been given its first proper outing at Intel’s Developer Forum in Beijing.

• While Nokia and Intel announced the merger of Moblin and Maemo back at Mobile World Congress in February, there were no demos at the event and only minimal details.

• Future Electronics and Nokia will host six full-day, hands-on workshops across the North America on using Linux and Nokia’s Qt development framework to develop user interfaces (UIs) for Freescale’s ARM-based i.MX system-on-chips (SoCs). Starting in Boston on May 18, the workshops will use the Freescale i.MX23 SoC as its sample platform.

Android

• Ive been a happy user of Android for a while now and thought it would be interesting to look at my choice of “must have” apps for the OS and importantly ALL THESE APPLICATIONS ARE FREE!

• I am hoping this will stimulate a little debate and also I get a few suggestions for things to try.

Sub-notebooks

• It is a proven fact that most Linux operating systems, if not all run like a duck soup on the netbooks now. That is why, it makes perfect sense to install them as a secondary operating system. We have compiled a list of compatible distros for the netbooks which support the hardware of the netbooks; are easy to install and run at acceptable speed.

• Acer is preparing to launch devices based on Google’s Chrome OS at next month’s Computex trade show, according to reports.

• The VentureBeat website claims it’s been told by “multiple sources” that Acer plans to unveil the Chrome devices at the Taipei show, which runs from 1 to 5 June.

• South Africa-based mobile provider Vodacom has begun selling an Ubuntu Linux based netbook. The Linkbook, which was developed by a South African company of the same name, is equipped with 16GB of flash storage, HSDPA, WiFi, two USB ports, and an 8.9-inch display, says Vodacom.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s been a while since we here at OStatic checked in on FLOSS Manuals, an ambitious effort to produce free, online documentation for open source software that we initially covered in this post. FLOSS Manuals is an excellent learning and reference resource for titles such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Blender, Inkscape and more. Here are some of the details on what’s new there.

• The Suricata Engine and the HTP Library are available to use under the GPLv2.

• The HTP Library is an HTTP normalizer and parser written by Ivan Ristic of Mod Security fame for the OISF. This integrates and provides very advanced processing of HTTP streams for Suricata. The HTP library is required by the engine, but may also be used independently in a range of applications and tools.

• Buffalo Technology which makes good WiFi routers has decided to use open source firmware. Instead of their own firmware, they are going to be using DD-WRT instead.

• Now we’re seeing the next evolution in data deduplication technology, open source deduplication, with several established open source storage vendors (Bacula, Nexenta, Sun/Oracle and Zmanda), as well as some new players like Opendedup, challenging proprietary solutions and literally giving away the technology.

SaaS

• Open APIs, not open source, will protect future freedom of action — so beware so-called open source cloud offerings

CMS

• For those of you who are interested, I have here a list of some of the most well-known and perhaps the best free and open source content management systems (CMS) available…

Openness

• Several people involved in the initiative are also on our Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development!

Crowdsourcing

• The funding comes from Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. More details in the release.

• The guys behind such amazing works like Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Yo Frankie! is yet again in the news. Blender foundation recently released the trailer of their next open movie, Sintel. And it looks super hot. Watch and enjoy.

• Although the final CGI for the new Discovery Series: Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking, was created with Maya, Blender was used for pre-vis and concept tests. Nathan Williams, one of the directors, found Blender a valuable tool in creating this ambitious series.

Programming/Google

• 145 of the students this year also completed projects as part of Google Summer of Code in 2009.

• Many of us here at Google, along with the open source community, use the Eclipse IDE when we develop for Android, App Engine, and Google Chrome. We also have a lot of Google engineers that use Eclipse to build our own internal products. So, when the Eclipse Foundation approached us with an idea to encourage the Eclipse ecosystem, we were very happy to help.

• Google itself has already migrated two projects to the new repository — Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse and Project Hosting Connector for Mylyn. Both are aimed at easing the way forward for Eclipse developers and Eclipse-related developments.

Browsers

Mozilla

• With new HTML tags for browser extensions, Mozilla believes Web site owners can promote wider use of add-on software.

• If you are into eye-candy and are always looking for ways to impress your non-geek friends with 3D graphical effects, here is another one to add to your collection. FoxTab is a Firefox extension that transforms Firefox into a 3D browser with Compiz-like graphical effects.

Standards/Consortia

• Create a book by selecting Wikipedia articles and adding them to the Book Creator (we talked about that here). Your articles will be turned into a PDF (or OpenDocument) file so you can easily take Wikipedia wherever you go.

Leftovers

Science

• Managers at NASA headquarters are “pursuing” a robotic landing on the Moon or “other planetary body” within about four years to test precision landing and perhaps other technologies that will be needed to enable deep space exploration under the Obama administration’s emerging space policy.

Security/Aggression

• In a wide-ranging video interview with Truthout, former CIA counterterrorism official John Kiriakou reveals new information about the capture and torture of “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah and discloses, for the first time, his role in the events that led to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

• A Ukrainian national has been arrested in India in connection with the most notorious hacking incident in U.S. history.

• Sergey Valeryevich Storchark was one of 11 men charged in August 2008 with hacking into nine U.S. retailers and selling tens of millions of credit card numbers. He was arrested in India earlier this week, according to a spokesman with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

• The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress many times over, and authorities have failed to stay ahead of the threat, a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.

• More than 100 foreign spy agencies were working to gain access to U.S. computer systems, as were criminal organizations, said James Miller, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy.

• Terrorist groups also had cyber attack capabilities.

• [...]

• Miller took an example from the Cold War playbook to explain how the United States military would need to prepare for fallout from a cyber attack, which could leave cities in the dark or disrupt communications.

Environment

• I’m going to bet you’ve never heard of a GLOF. I hadn’t, until last week, when I was introduced to the idea of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, a direct impact of climate change in the Himalayas, and specifically in the tiny kingdom of Bhutan.

• If you’ve heard of Bhutan, it’s probably because the country measures the health of its society by Gross National Happiness rather than by Gross National Product. More interesting to me is how the Bhutanese people are attempting to manage some of the near term dangers from climate change, specifically those caused by glacial lakes bursting their natural dams. It’s a poignant example of how short term adaptation is the only path available to countries and people already feeling the pain of climate change.

• Tony Hayward, the beleaguered chief executive of BP, has claimed its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is “relatively tiny” compared with the “very big ocean”.

• Documents suggest BP, Transocean and Halliburton ignored tests indicating faulty safety equipment, says committee

• New video showing largest hole from pipe 5 feet in diameter spewing oil and natural gas at ~4 barrels per second, along with analysis of the amount of oil on the surface, supports the estimates closer to 1 million barrels per day erupting from this hole BP popped in the ocean floor that contains trillions of barrels of oil and natural gas.

Monsanto

• Farmland struck by infestations of bugs following widespread adoption of Bt cotton made by biotech giant Monsanto

• THE world’s most popular herbicide is losing its knockout punch. More and more weeds are evolving resistance to glyphosate – originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup – but the problem could have been forestalled by farming practices enriched by a better understanding of evolution.

• This is a serious problem. “Glyphosate is as important to world food production as penicillin is to human health,” says Stephen Powles, a plant scientist at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Finance

• President Barack Obama Wednesday went from his White House to Main Street tour of Buffalo to raising money for Democrats from Wall Street executives in Manhattan, even as he continued to blame them for the economic crisis and to seek sweeping industry reforms in Congress.

• “We’re engaged in a debate right now about common-sense Wall Street reform,” Obama said at the $15,000-a-person fundraiser Thursday night. “I was in Wall Street just a few weeks ago, and I said I believe in the power of the free market. … But when these institutions operate irresponsibly, they … threaten the entire economy, along with the dreams of millions of Americans who worked so hard to make a life for themselves.”

• The regulators are still trying to figure out just what set off the crazy trading a week ago Thursday, but some facts are obvious. If a stock goes from $40 to one cent to $40 within a few minutes, somebody messed up.

• It is starting to feel as if everyone on Wall Street is under investigation by someone for something.

• New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo has launched a probe into eight large banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to credit-rating agencies, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation.

• Democrats say they’re just waiting for the Senate to start moving the pile of legislation that’s stacked up on its doorstep, and, with little of substance left on the agenda, they’re letting their members go home to prepare for the November election.

• Tyler Hurst swiped his debit card at a Walgreens pharmacy in central Phoenix and kicked off an international odyssey of corporate tax avoidance.

• Hurst went home with an amber bottle of Lexapro, the world’s third-best selling antidepressant. The profits from his $99 purchase began a 9,400-mile journey that would lead across the Atlantic Ocean and more than halfway back again, to a grassy industrial park in Dublin, a glass skyscraper in Amsterdam and a law office in Bermuda surrounded by palm trees.

• Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

• Nearly three-quarters of Wall Street employees say they have been approached at least once by headhunters since the beginning of the year, according to a survey from eFinancialCareers, a recruitment Web site. Also, 44% of respondents said the number of calls they have received is up from last year.

• There is one other flaw in the EU plan. In 1992, when George Soros attacked the Bank of England, he did so by selling Sterling and buying dollars. This forced the Bank of England to do the opposite which was to buy Sterling and sell dollars. Since the Bank of England had a finite amount of dollars to sell, Soros knew he could beat them by buying more than they had. However, he needed real money to do this and he was perhaps the only speculator in the world at that time with that much money. Today you do not need money to destroy national finances, you can do this by the creation of synthetic short positions in Euros through the use of credit default swaps (CDS) and other derivative instruments. Goldman Sachs are experts at this. And they can create CDS in potentially infinite amounts since there is no regulation and no margin requirements. In effect, Goldman could create a short position equal to ten times the amount of Euros in the guarantee fund. Goldman can create synthetic short positions faster than the ECB can print money. Therefore, the ECB’s plan is doomed to fail because they cannot beat the speculators who can use CDS instead of real money.

• Yale Professor Robert J. Shiller spoke to the National Economists Club at lunch today in Washington, D.C. He expressed concern of slow growth until the next recession, his definition of a double-dip. His 20-city Case-Shiller real home price index declined 35% from its 2006 peak until early 2009, when Fed mortgage backed securities purchases and the homebuyer tax credit pushed it back up just over half as much, but he expects further housing price declines with the expiration of those government interventions on March 31 and April 30 respectively.

• To help restore investor confidence, José Sócrates, the Socialist prime minister, will rely on tax increases and cuts in wages and corporate subsidies to erase an additional €2.1 billion, or $2.7 billion, from the deficit. “These measures are necessary to obtain what’s essential, the financing of the Portuguese economy, but also to defend the euro,” Mr. Sócrates said.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• From the group’s press release: “The Working Party emphasised the need for a default setting in which access to the profile information and information about the connections of a user is limited to self-selected contacts. Any further access, such as by search engines, should be an explicit choice of the user.” Unclear what steps the Article 29 Working Party could take next; the group has also criticized Google (NSDQ: GOOG) over Street View and has taken a hard look at behavioral ad targeting practices.

• After 312 days of life under the murky veil of heavily restricted (and mostly non-existent) Internet, Xinjiang is plugged back into the world wide web. The local government announced today that Internet connection was restored to “meet the needs of maintaining stability, boosting social and economic development and the calls from all ethnic groups.”

• Google, Facebook and the pressure group Privacy International this week welcomed the raft of civil liberties measures announced by the UK’s incoming Conservative-Liberal coalition government. But some of the plans could founder on the rocks of what Privacy International calls the “real opposition”: not the Labour party, but an intransigent, security-obsessed civil service.

• The British government, mainstream parties and the mainstream media never mention Israel’s nuclear weapons, even when pontificating about the effect of potential Iranian nuclear weapons on the balance of power in the Middle East.

• Consistent with that, no amount of googling brings up any British mainstream media mention of the fact that whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has just been jailed again in Israel. This is for breaching the terms of a military edict – not a court order – restricting his movements and contacts.

Intellectual Monopolies

• DMCA, Patriot Act, ACTA, and other attacks on free speech and fair use; the RIAA gets away with statutory damage claims of $750 per “pirated” song and never have to prove actual harm; patents and “intellectual property” double-talk swallowed and regurgitated whole by a gullible, uncaring tech press; the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA for short) get to order the makers of DVD-players and home theater systems to cripple functionality; kids perpetrating unimportant cracks get felony convictions, while it’s OK for Sony to install rootkits–twice–Amazon can reach into your Kindle and pluck your books back out; we can’t buy the most trivial item without it being plastered with safety warning stickers, while Microsoft and the “security” industry continue to get a free pass for their corrupt symbiosis; Sony can remove features from PS3s years after they have been sold, Apple has an elite taxpayer-funded police force for their personal use. Facebook, Google, and hordes of marketing companies get away with outrageous invasions and abuses of our personal data and privacies… And on and on…

• The parallel between digital content and software is obvious enough, which makes it relatively easy to see how media companies might function against a background of unrestricted sharing. But we are fast approaching the point where it is possible to make copies of *analogue* objects, using 3D printers like the open source RepRap system. This raises some interesting questions about what might be permitted in that situation if businesses are still to thrive.

• We already wrote about the Limewire decision, which didn’t seem particularly surprising at all, given that LimeWire was basically doing the exact same things as Grokster. However, some people are noticing a few problematic parts to the ruling. While these parts alone certainly won’t change the ruling, it’s still worth noting what the judge said and questioning whether or not they’re proper. As Eric Goldman notes, he tells his students that when it comes to copyright law there’s normal copyright law, and then there’s “P2P file sharing” copyright law “and it’s a mistake to think those two legal doctrines are closely related.”

• [...]

• The second big problem is that the court says part of the reason it found inducement was because LimeWire didn’t put in place filters. But that would mean the court’s interpretation of the DMCA means that the law requires user-generated websites to install filters. The law says no such thing.

• Britxardo alerts us to an amazingly ironic story coming out of Argentina. It seems that an elected politician there, Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse, has introduced some new legislation against plagiarism (Google translation of the original). It seems odd enough that he would be outlawing plagiarism (here in the US plagiarism is socially shunned, and could cost you your job, but isn’t against the law unless it also reaches the point of copyright infringement, which is different), and it’s made even worse by the fact that it looks like he’s confusing plagiarism with copyright infringement — noting in the explanation of the bill that “plagiarism” is harming the recording industry.

Drugs

• The Spanish Government has challenged the price of patented medicines as it has taken a number of major steps announced this week to reduce the pharmaceutical expenditure of the public health system (23%). The new measures together with Spanish regional policies announced last March will mean savings of between 4 and 5 billion euros and a major reduction in the Spanish public debt that has been an important factor in shaking the confidence of world financial markets. Last Tuesday President Obama personally called Spanish President Zapatero to request major austerity measures in Spain in order to avoid a domino effect of the Greek debt crisis. The Spanish budget cuts have also been a condition demanded by the European Union.

• The EU seizures of medicines in transit from India to countries in Latin America and Africa were made under the European Union’s rules regarding customs measures. We are deeply concerned that these rules, and many other rules being proposed in a plethora of new trade agreements, do not protect legitimate sellers and buyers of generic medicines, when those goods move in global trade.

Copyrights

• That being said, I am extremely concerned about ASMP’s recent interactions with Lawrence Lessig. He was one of the speakers at the recent Copyright Symposium and, although I can understand giving “the other side” a voice, I think he needs to be ignored/silenced as much as possible. Mr. Lessig is a brilliant man, but he has done more harm to small creative businesses than any other single human in the US, in my opinion. And he continues to be dangerous.

• [...]

• Recently, however, Mr. Lessig has (sort of) changed his tune. He is now claiming that he was trying to get the idea of licensing to the masses and that his intention was to fight against the big business corporate “abuse” of copyright. I’m skeptical. While he may be anti-corporatism (a good thing in my book), I think he still does not see the needs of the little guy and, thus, his idea of balance is off.

• [...]

• I hope, most sincerely, that Mr. Lessig has indeed seen the errors of his ways and that he will now contribute to improving the lives of creative professionals. He owes it to them after the damage he has caused via CC, etc. But he has not fundamentally changed his tune, just his spin. And until he proves himself no longer a real enemy to the best interests of photographers and other small creative businesspeople (and I do not use the word “enemy” lightly!), we should not entrust him to be anything other than that which he has proven to be.

• A court in The Netherlands has banned a Usenet community from publishing the names of files which allegedly infringe copyright. According to the judges who handled the case, Dutch site FTD – who weren’t even present at the hearing – must stop publishing the names and Usenet locations of files connected to a particular movie or face penalties of 10,000 euros per day.

ACTA

• In a letter dated 4 May 2010, the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy has responded to questions and concerns of the European Parliament regarding the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Several MEPs had written to the WTO Director General on April 15 requesting the “World Trade Organization (WTO) 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.”

Digital Economy Bill

• The Digital Economy Bill will provide an immediate test for the UK’s new coalition government. Will the LibDems keep their pledge to repeal it?

• Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat economic spokesman, has been made Secretary of State for Business under the new conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK.

• Remember the Digital Economy Act? Yes, I thought you might. It’s still there, hanging like a proverbial sword of Damocles over our digital heads. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, er, Houses of Parliament: that nice Mr Clegg found himself catapulted to a position of some power.

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