● 05.28.10

● Links 28/5/2010: GNOME Shell 2.31.2, Ubuntu Redesigns

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

Desktop (GNU/Linux Versus Windows)

• With the latest releases of both windows and Linux there is really not much to separate them in terms of ease of use and eye kandy. They both look really pretty at first glance and even have similar features. I would go so far as to say that both Linux and windows have “borrowed” ideas from each other. Personally I am quite happy with that as it makes it easier for people to migrate from windows to Linux ;P

• Since some people have learned to look at the bright or should I say funny side of life, they have decided to create something out of those error messages. They have Photoshopped or edited some Windows error messages and made them look so realistic to try to tickle our funny bone.

Server

• 1. Debian

• Surely a seasoned pro with more than a decade of development. The distribution is entirely based volunteers bound by Debian social contract. There are leaders elected annually from and by members of the Debian project.

• Those using the up-to-date and they age rapidly, especially since the new stable releases are only published. The users who prefer the latest packages and technologies are forced to use the potentially buggy Debian testing and unstable branches.

Ballnux

• Food for thought when you’re using that HTC EVO 4G front-facing camera: it records everything backwards. I first noticed someone mention that the camera recorded “backwards” but I thought they were just experiencing an error because of the Qik app. Then today I discovered that the “problem” is indeed the 1.3 megapixel camera at the front of the phone. Take a look at this test video I shot using the EVO.

Kernel Space

• It’s been a hectic few months narrowing down the content for this year’s LinuxCon. Craig Ross and I have been working on this schedule for what seems like years, but we are very proud to announce it today. You can find it here.

• I think the program has an amazing mix of business, operations and of course developer content that reflects the growing ecosystem that is Linux. I’m especially proud of the technical content that features many of the best minds behind the kernel and other upstream Linux projects. But LinuxCon is much more than just technical kernel topics: it also has content touching mobile computing, cloud and legal and business issues facing enterprise IT managers today. Linux is now becoming dominant in mobile and cloud computing so it’s no surprise LinuxCon’s content matches those themes.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• The world of open source software has lots of options for editing and manipulating audio and video media files. However, when you want to just sit back and watch, Gxine will get the job done, usually with minimal fuss. Don’t look to the app for a built-in help file, though — if you need to work out a problem with this community-supported project, a little online leg work will be in order.

• Since there are still several excellent free and open source backup software that I failed to mention the last time, I decided to once again gather another list of some of the best backup software that are available for Linux.

• If you’re tired of the same old “match three” games, we have a fun alternative for you. In Zaz, you control a vehicle or a grabber on a predefined path, and by dragging and dropping you arrange different colored balls in triplets to make them explode and disappear. The game can be played in sequential mode, where the player proceeds through one level after another, or survival mode, where the battle is fought on a single level with more and more different balls appearing over time and the game speeding up until the player can no longer handle the pressure.

• I only have a few minutes this evening, so rather than share something of my own creation, I shall borrow the words of BoneKracker, who had this to say when discussing a preference for the command line over a file manager.

• A few days ago we blogged about a simple wallpaper slideshow generator called, somewhat un-surprisingly, ‘wallpaper slideshow’.

• Well… forget that application as the following wallpaper slideshow maker is easily more capable, configurable and darn-right cool.

• Video editing is the process of editing motion video footage. In the new age of personal video, video editing is becoming a central function of the desktop, with the popularity of video editing software ever increasing.

• This is something I always asked myself. How is Google Chrome different from Chromium. Apart from the logo, there is hardly any difference visually between the two. So I decided to dig further. Here are some of the interesting facts you should know.

• PhotoRec is a recovery software for data and files, designed to recover lost files including video, documents and files on hard disks, CD-ROMs, pictures and images (hence the name Photo Recovery) from digital camera’s memory.

Proprietary

• LightZone has come a long way from its previous versions and is probably the finest option Linux users have for photo editing. Extremely useful features include the Regions and Zones support. It’s great value for money, although those familiar with Photoshop or Aperture might find it lacking in terms of usability and power features.

Instructionals

Games

• With the recent success of The Humble Indie Bundle that managed to rise over 1 million dollars in donations, elecorn the developers of the Caster game also jumps on the trend.

• Basilisk Games Announces the Availability of Eschalon: Book II for Macintosh and Linux Indianapolis, IN – May 26, 2010 – Basilisk Games, Inc. today announced that Eschalon: Book II for Macintosh and Linux based computers is now available.

• Technology provides today’s school with numerous avenues to provide quality education to kids while making learning fun. With schools increasing the use of technology to deliver learning, parents are faced with embracing technology to provide learning and fun experiences for kids growing up in a technology saturated world after school.

• When I joined my first SC2 game on Windows I had just selected my workers to start mining when the lag started, around two minutes later I was dropped from the game and it counted as a loss in my ladder league. I figured it was just something funky with my internet line, even though I had not had any issues in SC2 under Wine in the last three weeks, as such I promptly selected “find match” to start another game. Two minutes later I had “lost” another ladder game due to “connection” issues.

• Fan-flipping-tastic.

• Just out of curiosity I decided to boot in Linux to see if the issue existed there as well (I’m hoping the irony of rebooting into Linux to play a game isn’t lost on anyone). Needless to say the problem was not present there, after sweeping two ladder games without any connection issues on Ubuntu I can indeed confirm that it was a “connection” issue with the SC2 was only happening under Windows.

Distributions

• If you have an old machine that no longer has an operating system, you don’t have to throw that machine away. You can put it to good use with an operating system that doesn’t require a fast processor or big disk drive. Fortunately there are plenty of Linux distributions that will work on your old hardware and run at fairly moderate speeds even if your machine is really old. There are quite a few Linux distributions that don’t demand too much resources so that your computer will run relatively fast.

• First of all, you need to stay away from distributions that use Gnome and KDE. These tend to use too many resources for old hardware and will cause the machine to lag way too much for basic applications. Look for these distributions that don’t use these graphical interfaces.

• Here you can see that Linux Mint and PCLinuxOS do actually exist in Google’s eyes, but not compared to Ubuntu’s search rankings. Still they only have a fraction of the googles of OpenSUSE, which only has a fraction of the googles of Ubuntu.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Here are the results of the contest Mandriva launched one month ago. Thanks everybody for your interest and for contributing, we had almost 150 photos submitted (rules were more strict this time for submission, explaining why submission pool was smaller).

• We had to pick 10 photos, choice was really hard. You will find below the 10 winners. Note that we have a 11th photo we wanted to add as we found it really nice (and it is from one of the 10 winners). Again congrats for all contributers and especially to the winners.

Red Hat Family

• Matthew Szulik, chairman of Red Hat’s board of directors, is stepping down in August after his term expires, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Fedora

• As far as I am concerned, I consider Fedora a distro suited for experienced and advanced users, and Fedora13 is no exception.

• Summary: Fedora 13 adds social media to the desktop, the GNOME Color Manager and numerous other updates and enhancements. It’s definitely worth an upgrade if you’re currently using Fedora 12.

• Rating: 3.5/5

• Overall: 4/5 (Good)

• A few months ago, I talked about mintMenu being ported to Fedora. I was excited to see it happen. Using technologies such as Git and GitHub.com we can easily fork projects and keep track of the improvements and bug fixes done on each fork. Commits can be selectively applied and so the more our technologies are forked, the more momentum they get, the more communities provide feedback and ideas for them, and the faster they improve.

Ubuntu

• Shuttleworth will need similar help to keep Canonical moving in the right direction, especially as new rivals potentially step in to acquire Novell and/or Mandriva.

Design

• As these results suggest, our methodology should help us develop a systemic representation of icon attributes from which we can build a coherent design language and it promises to provide pointers to problem areas as it suggests alternative interpretations. Some of the learnings from this first effort…

• Quite often, designers work on a design for something they’re unlikely to use themselves. This is a situation I’ve found myself in the past few weeks, designing a new keyboard menu for Ubuntu.

• [...]

• At UDS earlier this month we discussed the new menu. We’d also like your feedback on the full specification, especially if you use input methods or multiple keyboard layouts.

• The official Ubuntu.com website has finally gone live with its new re-branded design.

Ubuntu Control Center

• I was reading about the Ubuntu Control Center-UCC fever from a lot of blogs and twitter from people linked to the Ubuntu Community.

• The author did a very good job. He made glowing lights come out from people’s eyes staring at the application layout looking very Ubuntuish.

• Ubuntu Control Center or UCC is an application inspired by Mandriva Control Center and aims to centralize and organize in a simple and intuitive form the main configuration tools for Ubuntu distribution. UCC uses all the native applications already bundled with Ubuntu, but it also utilize some third-party apps like “Hardinfo”, “Boot-up Manager”, “GuFW” and “Font-Manager”.

Reviews

• Ubuntu improves a bit with each release. This release is no exception. I recommend that all Ubuntu users do the upgrade as long as their equipment permits it.

• KMS would be especially nice in a server environment without X installed.

• We are in the middle of another release cycle. Folks in the community are busing updating their systems, and demoing distributions that hold promise. Should Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, be on your demo list? I can’t answer that for you. The best I can do to help you decide, is present to you a list of features that should make you smile and also ones I think will not be good for your blood pressure.

Variants

• In addition to the use of SLAB, Mint has its own Software Manager as well as its own Software Updater that look different and are more streamlined than Ubuntu’s. Mint also includes its own software/file backup tool.

• After much hard work, and some delay, we are pleased to bring your the second version of our popular Linux Desktop for Kids!

Devices/Embedded

Nokia

• ConnMan (which is sponsored by both Intel and Nokia) is used for connection management – application which Ubuntu will also use for its 10.10 Netbook Edition, as well as Telephony APIs (oFono) for telephony services.

• Finally, we have our Bootchart numbers for the four distributions. With Fedora 13, prior to collecting the boot metrics, we set the GDM to automatically login to the GNOME desktop, since the three other desktops all use auto-logins as well.

• Fedora 13 had a boot time of 23 seconds, Moblin 2.1 had a boot time of 18.45 seconds, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 came in at 17.31 seconds, and MeeGo had a boot time of just 8.151 seconds.

Android

• Leave it to the very same poster who teased the Motorola Shadow’s Getting Started manual, wnrussell of Howard Forums, to provide a pretty clear shot of the device itself — yep, that’s a HDMI out port — and reveal some purported specs. Here’s the claimed technical details: 4.1-inch screen, TI OMAP 3630 processor (a 720MHz ARM Cortex A8), 8GB internal storage, 8 megapixel camera.

OLPC

• It’s time to take the old meme of $100 computing seriously.

• One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the organization is accelerating its development of the XO-3 tablet computer and will have a working prototype by December 2010, two years ahead of projections. Negroponte said the final product would cost US$75.

• One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a global organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, and Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, have agreed to jointly develop a family of next-generation OLPC XO tablet computers based on the Marvell® Moby reference design. This new partnership will provide designs and technologies to enable a range of new educational tablets, delivered by OLPC and other education industry leaders, aimed at schools in both the U.S. and developing markets. Marvell is also announcing today it has launched Mobylize, a campaign aimed at improving technology adoption in America’s classrooms.

• The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is looking to launch a prototype of its XO-3 later this year. The real advantage of having the OLPC around is as a product conversation starter and design influence.

• IDG News Service reports that the OLPC is speeding up the development of the XO-3 tablet, which wasn’t supposed to land until 2012. The idea is that this tablet would cost $75. OLPC also provided details on its blog.

Tablets

• Dell introduced the Streak, a tablet with a 5-inch touch screen and the Android OS, May 25. Unlike the Apple iPad, the Streak is also a phone, offers multitasking and can support Adobe’s Flash for viewing video and animations. Its size, however, may give some consumers pause. Some analysts have called it an oversized Android smartphone targeted at high-end consumers wanting a tablet-style Web-browsing experience.

• It houses two screens – one with an eInk display, and the other an LCD – for maximum functionality and flexibility. You can use one side exclusively to read, the other side exclusively as a tablet, or both sides to create a netbook-like experience. It would be perfect for students and teachers alike to use in a class-room (especially considering the cost of books and the probability that they’ll be beat up over a short period of time).

• Via Technologies Inc., the Taiwanese computer-processor company, expects $100 tablet devices containing its chips to reach the U.S. in the second half of 2010, offering a cheaper alternative to the iPad.

• About five different models, ranging in price from $100 to $150, will be available, Richard Brown, vice president of marketing at Via, said in an interview. The new computers, made by the company’s Chinese customers, will run Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

Acer

• Acer has shown off an Android-based iPad alternative.

• Acer has created a new 3D user interface that features animations and a ‘peeling’ gesture to unlock the phone. The lock screen lets users read information without having to open applications and a History panel provides quick access to often-used apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• The obvious reason to use open source software is cost savings, says Mark Madsen, president of market research firm Third Nature. But, whether you actually save when it comes to license and support costs is the question among many.

• Using public sources and vendor information, Madsen created a Pentaho-sponsored cost comparison report (“Lowering the Cost of Business Intelligence With Open Source”), comparing BI software and support costs from Pentaho, IBM (Cognos), MicroStrategy, Oracle and SAP (Business Objects).

• In open source, the idea that the endgame for a project won’t necessarily closely resemble the origin is a given, not a surprise. It’s part of the point of open source. If you look at what’s going on on the open source scene, now, you see this concept being played out all around.

• Free and open source projects provide an amazing example of what volunteer contributors can do. While many folks are paid to work on open source, there’s still an enormous amount of work done by volunteers. Like any volunteer work, though, contributions can be disrupted by more pressing work and personal issues. What do, or should, contributors commit to when volunteering with a project?

• BitTorrent has decided to open source its new uTorrent protocol, which has now entered a public beta.

• The software is available at GitHub and the license can be viewed here. Reportedly this is the MIT License.

Mozilla

• Firefox parent company Mozilla Corp. has hired Tantek Çelik, a well-known figure in the developer and open-Web community, for the role of Web standards lead.

• But as Mozilla deals with internal issues and a continued threat from Google’s Chrome, where exactly does this hire fit in? CNET spoke with Çelik on Tuesday, on the eve of his first day at the new job, and rather than talking about keeping ahead of Chrome or dealing with Facebook’s increasing dominance, he said that what’s really in his crosshairs is the iPhone–and how pretty it makes everything.

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman has agreed to answer your top ten questions. RMS will answer the top ten comments in this thread (using “best” comment sorting) as of 12pm ET on June 2nd. This will be a text only interview (no video). Ask him anything!

Government

• Turkey’s ministry of Justice, all of its institutions and all law courts are considering to move or partly move to a complete open source desktop, according to judge Cengiz Tanrikulu. That migration would complete the implementation of an information system built on open source software, the National Judiciary Informatics System (UYAP, Ulusal Yargi Aği Projesi).

• Judge Tanrikulu, involved in the development of UYAP, said the government’s law offices are considering a move to Pardus, a Linux distribution primarily developed by Turkey’s Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. “We are already using OpenOffice on all of the desktops. We began using OpenOffice in 2007 and it has helped us to save billions.”

• The judge presented UYAP in Amsterdam in a workshop organised by NOiV, the Dutch government project on open standards and open source, on Wednesday.

• Development of UYAP started in 2000 with a document management system, built using open source components. It offers access to legal documents to civil workers at the ministry, at law courts, police, prisons, prosecution, Home Office and to the Land Registry. The system can also be accessed by any mobile phone.

Licensing

• Google’s open source programs manager, Chris DiBona has asked the Open Source Initiative to delay consideration of Google’s WebM license, and in doing so has called on the OSI to be more open. Specifically, DiBona said Google “will want a couple of changes to how OSI does licenses” and that he thinks “that OSI needs to be more open about its workings to retain credibility in the space”.

• DiBona statement came in response to Bruce Perens’ request for the OSI’s License Discuss mailing list to consider the WebM license introduced by Google for its VP8 video codec, and follows the declaration by Open Source Initiative board member, Simon Phipps, that WebM is “not open source”.

Openness

• CC Korea prepares “The 1st Shared Film Festival” for showing and sharing global movies with CC License. The festival, lasting from June 3 to June 9, will be held at Cine-maru located in Seoul, South Korea.

Open Data

• The Guardian isn’t the kind of tech-savvy enterprise one would normally look to for guidance on digital issues or Internet-related topics. For one thing, it’s not a startup — it’s a 190-year-old newspaper. And it’s not based in Palo Alto, Calif., but in London Manchester, England. The newspaper company, however, is doing something fairly revolutionary by simply changing the way it thinks about value creation and where that comes from in an online world.

• I should make it clear that although I campaign gently for Open Access publishing (as opposed to frenetically for Open Data) I accept that there are closed-access publishers. My concern there is that they make it clear what they are providing, what rights they have extracted from the author, what restrictions they have placed on the reader (sorry, enduser-customer) and whether they provide reasonable value for money. For example, a closed-access publisher usually has an Open Access option where authors can pay – in some cases this is very good value (e.g. Acta Crystallographica) and in others (ACS) it’s very poor (the freely visible material is not open and festooned with restrictions).

• In a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy successive governments have regarded the data they, or government-supported monopolies such as the Post Office, collected as the government’s property to be monetised to the hilt. They have also kept many details of their own working practices secret. In this article I will deal with the case for as much openness as is possible in both these areas: government produced data and data about government.

• So, first on government produced data. The previous government had some good track record on the principles here, passing the Freedom of Information Act and setting up data.gov.uk. The principles were right here, but they failed to go the distance and truly change the attitudes embedded in government that data by default should be kept secret and only opened up when necessary. the incoming government need to work hard to change this attitude and free the data. Unless it is PII (see Lilian’s article on the challenges for the new government on privacy) government data should be free (as in speech). Very narrow lines requiring significant work to justify closure should be put in place otherwise.

Open Access/Content

• The very mission and identity of academia is implicated in the future of digital technologies, the Internet and copyright law. At stake is the ability of colleges and universities to act as inter-generational stewards of knowledge… to assure that their own scholarly output is freely accessible and usable…. to curate knowledge in better ways and to disseminate it as broadly as possible….and to foster innovative research and learning.

Open Hardware

Programming

• The Django Web framework got a major update this week with the release of Django 1.2 on Monday. This release brings some security improvements, better email handling, performance improvements, and better localization support.

• We consider everyone who attends ESE to be a participant. When you come to the conference, you’re learning and teaching about Eclipse by attending the sessions, talking with colleagues, and joining in the networking at the social events.

Leftovers

• Last summer we skeptically directed your attention to a carrier by the name of Zer01, which was promising users unlimited voice and data on smart phones for $69.95/month, without a contract. The service claimed to use a VoIP application to route all calls. According to the founders, the service tunneled over GSM networks, though Zer01 claimed to have their own IP network — and claimed to be using interconnect (roaming) agreements to make calls. In short, Zer01 was supposed to be a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE).

• So what kind of code names are developers out there coming up with? Here is a collection of code names for software products from companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, Adobe, Mozilla, Automattic and more. We’ve tried to give some background information where possible. You’ll notice that some code name schemes are definitely more out there than others.

• In a rare move, a Wyoming judge has blocked two newspapers from publishing stories on an internal report about a college president’s trip to Costa Rica, saying the report was improperly taken and that releasing details could prompt the federal government to cut college grant money.

• The Chicago judge’s inbox was flooded with hundreds of messages, and his Blackberry froze. He promptly found Trudeau — who was being sued by the Federal Trade Commission — in contempt of court and sentenced him to jail. The term was stayed pending appeal.

• As Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. get ready to begin their latest paywall experiments with the Times of London and the Sunday Times, the company has revealed a few more details, and it looks like this particular paywall will be fairly complete. Unlike the WSJ, this won’t be a “leaky” paywall. The content will be opted out of Google, and there will be no way to get to it, unless you subscribe at the rather hefty price of £1 per day. What’s amazing is that the folks behind this experiment still think it’s going to be a huge success — even as nearly all of the papers’ competitors are remaining steadfastly free.

Science

• The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials. (Editors’ note: A separate Air Force News Service report had initially cited a higher speed, but was amended to give the Mach 5 figure.)

• It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.

• [...]

• But George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes. Moreover, he made fertile hybrids between maize and teosinte that looked like intermediates between the two plants. He even reported that he could get teosinte kernels to pop. Dr. Beadle concluded that the two plants were members of the same species, with maize being the domesticated form of teosinte. Dr. Beadle went on to make other, more fundamental discoveries in genetics for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1958. He later became chancellor and president of the University of Chicago.

Security/Aggression

• Threats to sensitive computer networks lurk everywhere and with a few mouse clicks, organized criminals and hackers could shut down vital networks that run the U.S. government, industry and military.

• Ch Insp Topping added: “The cameras can help bring about earlier pleas of guilty and potentially less time in court for our officers and the victims of crime.”

• Trials of the cameras in other forces have shown they reduce the amount of time officers spend on paperwork.

• Dozens of CCTV cameras have been scrapped in a huge overhaul by Havant Borough Council.

• Of the 76 cameras covering the town, 32 have been switched off following a review into the system.

• Thousands of people who bought identity cards will not receive refunds under a Bill to be unveiled tomorrow scrapping the eight-year project.

• The Government has decided it will be too costly to administer a scheme to pay back the £30 to each of the 13,000 people who bought a card.

• A good day. The ID card scheme’s demise is one in the eye for the authoritarian busybodies. Nobody wanted them and they were an intrusive waste of money.

Environment

• In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

• By now there’s little debate that the technology used to obtain oil in deeper waters was developed and rapidly put into use before safety technology could keep up. As we’ve noted, that’s a development that regulators allowed, despite their concerns.

• Who is going to pay to clean up BP’s disastrous oil spill, besides BP? After all, they made $14 billion in profit last year alone. BP has asserted it will pay all “legitimate claims” for damages — talk about a lot of wiggle room there — but beyond actual cleanup costs, BP’s economic damage liability is legislatively, and outrageously, capped at $75 million, a pittance to a company that made 186 times that amount in profit in 2009. Senate Democrats attempted to increase the liability cap to $10 billion by proposing and passing a bill, but their efforts were thwarted by Senate Republicans. The current tally for the cleanup cost stands at $760 million, but that is surely understated.

• Fishermen hired by BP to help with the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico are coming down sick with “severe headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing” after working long hours in oil- and dispersant-contaminated waters, according to the Los Angeles Times.

• Crisis Commons has released a new open data initiative to enable response organizations to report from the oil spill. Oil Reporter allows response workers to capture and share data with the public as they respond to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

• There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades.

• A national group that thinks global warming is “junk science” and that teaching it is unnecessarily scaring schoolchildren brought its first petition effort for “balanced education” to Mesa County Schools on Tuesday night.

• Rose Pugliese, an unsuccessful candidate for a District 51 school board seat in the last election, presented a petition with 700 signatures to the board asking that science teachers stop giving lessons on global warming.

• A new group called “Balanced Education for Everyone”(BEE) is rolling out a national effort to stop the teaching of global warming in schools, calling it “unnecessary.”

• Why throw away valuables as waste? That is the simple yet profound idea behind Daily Dump. As of May 2010 Daily Dump customers keep 4095.8 kgs of organic waste out of landfills every day. Simply because Daily Dump enables them to do so.

• Among conservationists, policy-makers, and the public, there is great debate about whether the establishment of national parks and reserves in developing nations causes poverty or helps to alleviate it. While opponents claim that protected areas limit agricultural development and the harvesting of natural resources, supporters contend that protected areas generate tourism income and improve infrastructure in the surrounding areas. A new study in PNAS this week suggests that, in the long term, establishing protected areas in developing nations does reduce poverty in local communities.

Finance

• A European Union official proposed Wednesday that member states tax banks to raise money for a fund that would be used specifically to manage future financial crises.

• Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in Berlin on Thursday that the United States and Europe were in “broad agreement” on the need for stricter market regulation but stressed that they would take different paths when necessary.

• A threatening TV commercial appearing in Pennsylvania has residents of the state spooked by its “Orwellian” overtones, and critics are calling it a government attempt to scare delinquent citizens into paying back taxes.

• The group that sets corporate accounting standards proposed an overhaul Wednesday of the way lenders record the value of their assets, hoping that more stringent and consistent reporting rules might help avert another financial crisis.

• There is a fifth way to improve the financial reform bill that has received scant notice. Both the House and Senate versions are almost identical on this point, because the authors of the pertinent section were evidently not familiar with current industry practice. The bills require that the packagers of asset-backed securities that fail to meet certain underwriting standards (which have yet to be specified) retain ownership of 5 percent of those securities. The basic idea is that by requiring issuers of subprime securities to have some “skin in the game” (a phrase used in the Senate bill summary), they will have the incentive to be more careful underwriters.

• The fees in question are honour and dishonour fees on overdrawn bank accounts and over-limit and late payment fees on credit cards. Financial Redress refers to these as “exception fees” and alleges that the banks have been charging customers an “unfair” amount. Customers are both individuals and businesses.

• Or look at the lifetime contributions by the financial sector to (some) senators who voted for and against the Brown-Kaufman amendment, which would have imposed a hard size cap and a hard leverage cap on the biggest banks – over $2 million per senator by this one partial count.

• But wait. This is actually very little money considering what is at stake. For an individual large firm actively engaged in derivatives trading, the stakes could easily be in the billions of dollars. For the big banks as a whole, the amount they will be allowed to earn (and pay themselves) as a result of the failure of these financial reforms is – conservatively speaking – in the tens of billions of dollars.

• Not long after the financial crisis, it was clear that the “solutions” that would emerge from the administration would be weak. With Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in the driver’s seat it was clear that there would be no bold transformative vision, no “New Deal” for the 21st century, but tweaks like a “systemic risk regulator” that would somehow endow failed regulatory bodies with the foresight needed to predict the next crisis and the back bone needed to take decisive action.

• The federal prosecutors investigating Goldman Sachs are focusing on Timberwolf, the infamous “shitty deal” repeatedly cited in a tense Senate hearing last month, according to people who have been contacted by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.

• Legal authority against market manipulation would be greatly strengthened and there would be more protection for whistleblowers. And the kind of transaction that Goldman entered into with Greece – a swap transaction with the goal of reducing measured debt levels, effectively deceiving current and future investors, would become more clearly illegal. All of this is entirely reasonable and responsible – and completely opposed by the most powerful people on Wall Street.

• Of course, most of the anti-Lincoln fire has been directed against the idea that “swaps desks” would be “pushed out” to subsidiaries – i.e., the big broker-dealers could still engage in these transactions, but they would need to hold a great deal more capital against their exposures, thus making the activities significantly less profitable.

• It is striking that while Treasury argues that increasing capital is the way to go with regard to financial reform, they are adamantly opposed to what would amount to more reasonable capital levels at the heart of the derivatives business.

• This is beyond disappointing.

• Goldman Sachs is preparing to file a full-blown, point-by-point defense against the fraud allegations filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the matter.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google is nearly everyone’s best friend. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much Google knows about you?

• There’s so much wrong with Mayor Lynch’s resolution that I can’t quite get my head around it. Even if the gripe site has published false and defamatory statements about the mayor or his family, shutting down the entire site would not only be ham-handed, it would be blatantly unconstitutional.

• It is hard to understand why some enterprising TV company hasn’t already created a game show called “Breach of Privacy.” This would entail people telling their stories of the most egregious ways in which their privacy was removed from them, with viewers voting for the winners.

• Google has balked at requests from regulators to surrender Internet data and fragments of e-mail messages that it collected from unsecured home wireless networks, saying it needed time to resolve legal issues.

• The European Commission today adopted a draft mandate to negotiate a personal data protection agreement between the European Union and the United States when cooperating to fight terrorism or crime. The aim is to ensure a high level of protection of personal information like passenger data or financial information that is transferred as part of transatlantic cooperation in criminal matters. The agreement would enhance the right of citizens to access, rectify or delete data, where appropriate. EU citizens would receive a right to seek judicial redress in the US if their data is unlawfully processed. Independent public authorities would be given a stronger role in helping people exercise their privacy rights and in supervising transatlantic data transfers. The Council must approve the Commission’s negotiating mandate before talks can begin. The European Parliament will be fully informed at all stages of the negotiations and will have to give its consent to the outcome of the negotiations.

• While there’s no way to defend what this guy did, so far this whole case seems to go in dangerous directions, both from the standpoint of free speech questions, as well as overly aggressive internet bans, due to one particular activity done on the internet.

• Censoring websites used by terrorist groups to recruit supporters is counterproductive, according to expert testimony on the Hill Wednesday.

• Any laws or regulations aimed at blocking or removing extremist web content could hamper law enforcement’s ability to collect information on the groups, according to civil liberties advocates at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• This time around we’ve learned that the DRM and app protection is unlike anything we’ve seen on the platform.

• Short version: Any games you purchase from them are good for only one install on one device. That’s it.

• His company – which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft – is to release Starcraft 2 on July 27th and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won’t be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late.

• In recent times, it seems to be an increasing trend for anti-copying software DRM systems to install invasive privileged software. For example, there’s the ever so infamous “Sony DRM Rootkit” that Mark Russinovich publicly exposed some time ago. Unfortunately, software like this is becoming commonplace nowadays.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The thing that disappointed me about the presentation, frankly, is that while it’s titled: “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” Blakely never really gets that deeply into the lessons. She does talk about a few other areas of creative endeavors where copyright is not allowed for the most part (recipes, cars, furniture, etc.) and has an amusing slide that compares the revenue generated in industries with copyright and those not protected by copyright (the “not protected by copyright” part vastly outweighs the “protected by copyright” side). I’d like to see that slide in a bit more detail, because, while amusing, it threatens to fall into the same trap as the recent Chamber of Commerce report that tries to claim the exact opposite. It says that copyright protected industries contribute a lot more to the economy than non-covered industries. In both cases, though, I fear that there’s some cherry-picking of data and questionable classifications.

• I do think that there’s a ton to learn from industries like the fashion industry — including suggestions on ways those lessons can be applied to industries like music and movies. Hopefully we’ll start seeing a deeper analysis on that soon.

• Politically engaged and disarmingly geeky, Cory Doctorow is one of the better-known faces of the digital revolution: co-editor of the celebrated blog Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”), he is also author of half-a-dozen science fiction novels and a journalist. Born in Canada, the 38-year-old writer now lives in London, although when we speak, he’s in the US, promoting his latest book, For the Win. This tells a story of teens rebelling against global corporations and is pitched at the “young adult” market. As with all his fiction, the book has been released simultaneously in bookshops and, for free, online.

• That said, I agree with you that there is no “religious” reason for a given individual or firm to use open source over non-open — whatever works better and is the better deal for you, of course. And in fact the “open source” model is not without problems: it also relies on copyright, and has insidious aspects — that’s one reason I, as an anti-copyright type, prefer public domain or creative commons attribution only instead of the share-alike/GNU type model (which I explain in Copyright is very sticky!, Eben Moglen and Leftist Opposition to Intellectual Property, and Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement).

• Albert Einstein is among the world’s top-earning dead people, and an Israeli university that holds rights to his image is asking General Motors Co. to pay for putting the physics pioneer in a magazine ad.

• As I wrote recently in my Open… blog, copyright is about making a fair deal: in return for a government-supported, time-limited monopoly, creators agree to place their works in the public domain after that period has expired. But that monopoly also allows exceptions, granted for various purposes like the ability to quote limited extracts, or the ability to make parodies (details depend on jurisdiction.)

• The industries based around copyright’s intellectual monopoly don’t like those exceptions, and fight tooth and nail against any extensions of them. Naturally enough, you might say – after all, they’re businesses, and it’s they’re duty to shareholders to maximise their profits. But sometimes this reflexive refusal to compromise a jot because of concerns about the bottom line goes too far. As, I would suggest, in this case.

• A draft treaty has been prepared by the World Blind Union, and put forward by the WIPO Delegations of Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay in May 2009. In essence, this treaty seeks to allow those with visual impairments to read books that are currently unavailable to them – a staggering 95% of the total market.

• Industry Minister Tony Clement has an admission to make: He built his impressive music library on his iPod in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law.

Copyrights

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a complex and highly controversial statute, and the anti-circumvention provisions in section 1201 are some of its most complex and controversial components. Despite more than a decade’s worth of judicial interpretation, there remain plenty of unsettled questions about just what constitutes circumvention and just what constitutes a protected technological measure. And what we do know for sure makes a strong case that the anti-circumvention provisions are overbroad and have significant and harmful unintended consequences.

• David Byrne is suing the governor of Florida, alleging that he used the Talking Heads’ 1985 single “Road to Nowhere” without permission or proper licenses.

• Some have already commented on their scruples arising from the large economies of scale approach to copyright litigation that’s being undertaken by lawyers with the U.S. Copyright Group to go after Bittorrent movie sharers. See, for example, what Mike Masnick and Eriq Gardner have had to say. And the ISPs aren’t all that happy about the work required to respond to a bunch of subpoenas.

• Lawyers ACS:Law in the UK are now into their second year of threatening alleged pirates with legal action. Since they don’t have a good case when people deny their allegations, for some time now the firm has been sending out questionnaires which allow people to build a case against themselves. As a UK consumer magazine is pointing out, people don’t have to play this game.

• The legal campaign that targets tens of thousands of alleged movie pirates on BitTorrent is getting more interesting. Now one of the nation’s largest ISPs could be held responsible for facilitating copyright infringement.

• Yesterday, Thomas Dunlap at the U.S. Copyright Group filed his response to Time Warner Cable’s motion to quash or modify thousands of subpoena requests. TWC had asked the court to require no more than 28 IP address lookup requests per month, citing the burden of having to comply with discovery requests that were “far out of line with other comparable copyright infringement cases.”

• Popular self-help author Wayne Dyer has been accused of helping himself to someone else’s book.

• In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed today in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, author Stephen Mitchell says Dyer “copied verbatim a significant portion” of his interpretation of the ancient Taoist scripture Tao Te Ching in two separate books.

• A consortium of independent film producers is hitting a stumbling block in its plan to simultaneously sue thousands of BitTorrent users for allegedly downloading pirated movies. Time Warner Cable is refusing to look up and turn over the identities of about a thousand of its customers targeted in the lawsuits, on the grounds that the effort would require three months of full-time work by its staff.

• Recently, we’ve noted some similarities between Amanda Palmer and the band OK Go, in that both had been signed to major record label deals, both had built up an amazing (and amazingly loyal) group of fans through various means (different for each) using methods totally outside of their major label marketing effort (which was somewhat lacking in both cases)… and last month, both were officially dropped from their label deals.

• The filing talks about those three reports — all of which we’ve discussed here previously — to reiterate some of the key points made in the original filing. The first, of course, is the GAO report that debunked the claims from industry studies about all of the “losses” caused by infringement. Amusingly, that GAO report was required by the same law that created the IP Czar position in the first place, the ProIP Act. The filing notes, by the way, that the GAO’s mandate for the report didn’t even say it had to investigate copyright infringement — just counterfeiting. However, the GAO appears to have been so troubled by the bogus reports out there that it decided to publicly call those studies into question. As this new filing points out, many of the comments filed by groups in support of strong copyright enforcement, relied on those reports that the GAO has since debunked. This should call into question the legitimacy of those filings entirely.

ACTA

• U.S. copyright official Steven Tepp said Tuesday he doesn’t understand many of the current objections to the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a 37-nation effort to enforce copyright and counterfeit laws across international borders.

• Tepp, senior counsel for policy and international affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office, dismissed objections to ACTA voiced by representatives of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), an intellectual-property research and advocacy group, during a debate on the trade agreement at the Future of Music Coalition’s Washington, D.C., policy forum.

• The session kicks off with U.S. Copyright Office official Steven Tepp defending ACTA, by saying right from the outset, “Quite candidly, we’re in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of copyright piracy.” What kind of epidemic? Well, he uses that old line about how organized crime groups and terrorists are being funded by copyright infringement — a claim that the industry keeps making, but which makes little sense. Even if it were true that some crime operations are selling bootleg DVDs and such, aren’t they under the same, if not more, pressure from unauthorized internet file sharing?

• U.S. Copyright Office official Steven Tepp appeared at a Future of Music Coalition debate on ACTA yesterday, arguing that the release of the ACTA text proved the prior concerns wrong. The full debate is available online as Tepp offers gruff responses to fellow panel members, but refuses to answer many other questions on the grounds that the USTR leads on the file.

Digital Economy Bill

• It is also wholly wrong that customers should be footing the Bill of this enforcement scheme. The vast majority, even by copyright holders’ estimates, do not infringe their copyrights, yet they will be paying for a quarter of this scheme. A small number will be priced off the Internet by even a small rise in broadband bills – Consumer Focus estimate perhaps 10,000 households.

• BT also drew attention to the lack of a Privacy Impact Assessment for the scheme. Privacy concerns could scupper the acceptability of letter writing. Yet the engagement from the government and ICO on this issue has so far been less than acceptable.

• ORG and other groups have been willing to accept the principle of letter writing, but this current consultation shows the weaknesses in the legislation that was rammed through in the dying hours of the last Parliament. Already the Act threatens to punish innocent people with additional, unwarranted costs and bars to clearing their name.

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