● 06.29.10

● Links 29/6/2010: New Fedora Project Leader

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Another initiative from our side was to make the Microsoft IT support guys and companies comfortable with linux . We had started conducting the free workshop on open source solutions targeting them. Last workshop was on Zimbra mailing solution.The workshop was designed in such a way that the attendees(mostly MS guys) after the workshop said to us . They never knew giving mailing solution in Linux was so easy. In this workshops we do not stress to much on ideas behind OS.We show them a solution which they can use, or sell.Here Linux is propagated through this MS IT support guys

• As I mentioned in an earlier Linux Journal article, I decided to cut the apron strings with my television provider over a year ago. Bye bye, DISH Satelite TV!

• Man, you should have heard them whimper. “But sir, is there anything we can do to keep your business?”

• “No, thanks. I get all of my content off the internet now. Have you tried Hulu.com*? It’s great!” I can be a real jerk sometimes.

Server

• The Bureau of Meteorology claims to have saved considerable sums on software licensing by embracing open source software during a server virtualisation drive.

• When the Bureau of Meteorology shifted to using server virtualisation, one major benefit for scientists was the ability to deploy individual servers for specialised processing tasks.

Graphics Stack

• Sadly, the Nouveau driver remains to be just a community effort with no official support from NVIDIA even though the popular GPU company had dropped their open-source 2D driver. As such, the Nouveau driver has not been maturing as quickly as the open-source ATI Radeon driver stack that has more active developers along with official support from AMD. For our testing of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver today, we ran the open-source driver (and then NVIDIA’s binary driver) on a NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT, GeForce 8800GT, and GeForce 9800GTX graphics cards.

Applications

• Both Fillmore and Lombard come from Yorba, the non-profit software group behind Shotwell with a goal to make it as “easy to work with media using Linux as on a Mac or Windows computer”.

• It seems like Yorba is focused on using Vala to bring a suite of media apps to GNOME. It seems to me that Vala has taken some FUD for being underused, so it’s interesting to see an organized effort adopt it and produce some nice looking apps.

• According to OpenShot creator Jonathan Thomas, the long awaited feature will “bring the power of Blender, the creativity of the Blender community (in the form of templates) to OpenShot in the most intuitive interface possible”. After selecting a 3D template, users can customise their settings, such as the text, colour, size and font, and render the animation (created as a RGBA image sequence) so that it can be added to their OpenShot project as a clip. The developers consider the new feature to be at an “alpha” stage of development and note that it will not be available until the next version is released.

Instructionals

Games

• Best is subjective. My best may not be your best. Still, I wanted to share with you my perception of the best Linux games you can have installed on your machine, in year 2010, Gregorian Calendar. These games offer an unrivaled mix of storyline, attention to detail and a balance between realism and plain ole fun. These are more than just games you will play for a few minutes and then toss away forever. These are games that you will keep returning to, even if they sit abandoned on the digital shelf for a a few months or even years. They are special.

Desktop Environments

Qt

• As powerful and comprehensive as Qt is, it requires C++ skills. We are aiming very high with Qt, and Qt Quick came from a desire to open the framework up to even more developers than what is possible now. To do that we needed to build something within Qt that allows developers or UI designers with diverse skill sets outside of C++ – like JavaScript or Flash for example – to use Qt to build nice, rich, touch-enabled UIs .

• Qt Quick works by combining an enhanced Qt Creator IDE, a new easy-to-learn declarative language that will be instantly familiar to many developers (QML) and a new module in the Qt library called QtDeclarative.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Hopefully with the porting of the KDE PIM suite of applications to akonadi in 4.5.1, all of the necessary frameworks for delivering on the KDE SC 4.x promise, will be in place. But I don’t think that 4.5 will deliver the full bloom referred to in the release notes. Hopefully the stabilisation of KDE SC 4.5 will lay the foundation for things to bloom fully in 4.6.

• On June 1st, 2010, KDE Blog, one of the foremost KDE-focused blogs in Spanish, celebrated the publication of its 1500th post. The occasion seemed to be the perfect excuse to chat with its author, Baltasar Ortega, and to ask him a few questions about himself, blogging, and how KDE is going to take over the world. Read on for his insightful and passionate answers.

• Several weeks ago, I ended a comparison of the KDE 4 and 3 desktops by saying “Unless a project takes over KDE 3 development, sooner or later it may become unusable with the latest generation of computers.”

• What I had missed — free software being a large place where events move at near-light speeds — was that a project had already taken over KDE 3 development. It’s called Trinity KDE, and is organized by Timothy Pearson, who has been releasing Kubuntu releases that use KDE 3.5 for some time. According to Facebook rumor, he has been planning to revive KDE 3 for some time.

• Linux is certainly available for everyone. And with the right tools, it is even possible to make it available to those with disabilities. Both KMag and KMouseTool makes Linux possible for those who might not have been able to without such tools.

• Desktop applications for ‘Information Management’ that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

GNOME Desktop

• This is a nice collection of themes for ubuntu and Gnome

Distributions

• 8 More Linux Distributions for Web Server: I’ve already shared with you a list of some of the best and most well-known Linux distributions used on web servers. However, there are still plenty of excellent server-oriented Linux distros that I failed to mention there. So I think it is important to make a follow up post and bring you another round of Linux distributions for web server.

Reviews

• Puppy Linux. One of the most iconic Linux distros out there. I have played around with them for what seems like ages, and have found reasons to both love and hate them over the years.

• As of recently Puppy has been built from Ubuntu, and I take a look at the newest release…

Red Hat Family

• In a conversation with MSPmentor, a the recent Red Hat Partner Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst clearly said that his company is not pinning its fortunes on desktop Linux. He made clear that Red Hat will continue to develop and support its desktop Linux offering, but won’t make a substantial push with it.

• In his keynote speech at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the case that of the $1.3 trillion USD spent in 2009 on Enterprise IT globally, $500 billion was essentially wasted (due to new project mortality and Version 2.0-itis). Moreover, because the purpose of IT spending is to create value (typically $6-$8 for each $1 of IT spend), the $500 billion waste in enterprise IT spending translates to $3.5 trillion of lost economic value. He goes on to explain that with the right innovations—in software business models, software architectures, software technologies, and applications—we can get full value from the money that’s being wasted today, reinforcing the thesis that innovation trumps cost savings.

• Red Hat’s virtualization pitch is pretty simple: The company claims RHEV is more scalable and lower cost than VMware. But Red Hat concedes it has to improve the management tools surrounding RHEV. It sounds like Red Hat eventually hopes to leapfrog VMware with a potent combo (the forthcoming RHEL 6 and RHEV 2.3 releases) over the long haul.

Fedora People

• A leadership change is always momentous, and the Fedora Project is no exception to this rule. I wanted to share some thoughts about being the Fedora Project Leader, tell the community about the person who will be taking over that role soon, and to let you know what to expect over the next few weeks and months.

• Every Fedora release provides an opportunity for renewal and change. Our recent release of Fedora 13, which is being hailed by many as one of our best releases ever, is no exception. As we embark on another exciting development cycle, we also have the opportunity to renew the leadership of the Fedora Project as part of our commitment to change and evolution. In July, Jared Smith will join Red Hat as the new Fedora Project Leader, taking over the role from Paul Frields.

• Congratulations, Jef, on a job well-done! By the way, Jef is a second-year industrial design student from the Netherlands, and this was his first contribution to open source. Also worth noting, Jef has since taken on two other design tickets as well as worked on some mockups for Design Hub, so he is whooping some serious behind (or skulking stealthily about with a Gimp katana or Inkscape nunchucks at the ready, as ninjas prefer to do)!

Debian Family

• Debian and Ubuntu are distributions that lend themselves naturally to comparison. Not only is Ubuntu a continuing fork of Debian, but many of its developers also work on Debian.

• Even more important, you sometimes hear the suggestion that Ubuntu is a beginner’s distribution, and that users might consider migrating to Debian when they gain experience.

• However, like many popular conceptions, the common characterizations of Debian and Ubuntu are only partially true. Debian’s reputation as an expert’s distribution is partly based on its state a decade ago, although it does provide more scope for hands-on management if that is what you want. Similarly, while Ubuntu has always emphasized usability, like any distro, much of its usability comes from the software that it includes — software that is just as much a part of Debian as of Ubuntu.

• My portable music player only plays MP3 and WMA format files, so I rip CD’s into MP3. I hadn’t ripped a CD since installing Debian, so coming across this post on the Debian forum, I checked and found that MP3 in Audio CD Extractor was not enabled. Following the instructions in the post, I was able to enable ripping into MP3.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 9 KDE RC.

Devices/Embedded

Nokia/MeeGo

Android

• Based on the Android operating system, Cisco Cius is an open platform for communication and collaboration whose form factor and applications are designed to more securely connect employees on-the-go with the right people in real-time, and to provide those workers with the ability to access and share the content they need from any place on the network.

Free Software/Open Source

• A novice climbed the mountain and asked the guru for advice. The guru said, “when I hire, I want to know you’re a good developer. I am much more likely to hire you if I can see public commits in an open source repository. I love to hire open source developers and recommend you do it too.”

• Google’s choice a few weeks ago, to use a modified version of the BSD open-source license for its WebM format and VP8 codec raised the discussion of open-sourcing to a level that it was covered by more than just the tech media.

Mozilla

• Mozilla and Firefox are in uncharted territory in Indonesia because we enjoy being the dominant browser. Firefox’s share on many of the top Indonesian websites is between 65-75%. It’s not clear exactly why Firefox is so popular (I go into more detail below), but I believe Mozilla needs to be more active in Indonesia moving forward in order to keep the market share that we have today, and to understand why Firefox is as popular as it is for both the Indonesian market as well as other emerging markets (other parts of S. E. Asia and S. America at the very least.)

• If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should feel already comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes.

• Students around the world love Mozilla’s products and embrace our mission. Our 2,100 student evangelists have a global presence, reaching schools in 77 countries around the world. To more effectively communicate with our student leaders, we are going international with our student guide as well.

SaaS or Fake/Obscure Open Source

• When I spoke at the Transfer Summit in Oxford last week, I invited the delegates to join me in reforming the Open Source Initiative (OSI). I repeated the explanation I made here, that OSI needs to be rebuilt in the light of a re-projection of software freedom for a new decade. In articulating the challenges facing open source after ten years of success, I asserted – as I usually do – that “open core” is one of the big challenges facing open source. This surprised some delegates.

• Last week Mårten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL and new CEO of cloud technology company Eucalyptus, indicated in an interview that he considers open core to be the best model for a new business exploiting open source software. He said

• On that first point, I would argue that tons of companies are, actually, billion dollar open source companies: Google, IBM, Facebook and many others, for example, all rely heavily on open source software and are valued at well over a billion dollars. It’s unlikely that any of the three would be anywhere near what they are today without open source software. It’s just that all of these companies were smart enough not to be in the bad business of selling an infinite good. Instead, they all looked for ways to use an infinite good — for free — to make something scarce massively more valuable. With Google it was user’s attention and all of the information out on the web. With IBM it was services to support enterprise technology. Even Redhat, the company that kicked off this discussion, really makes its money from services and expertise.

Oracle

• Zack Urlocker, a board member and executive for several open source companies, points out the trade-off between the degree of sharing and revenue: “Apache has a great license model that enables the wide adoption of open source software, but there have been few significant businesses — none approaching even $100 million in revenue — based on a permissive license model” such as Apache’s.

Openness/Sharing

• Junto is an environment for open discussion, combined with a public backchannel. it’s not about being a platform – it’s more of a meme and a mindset of collaboration and cooperation. Junto was a club started by Benjamin Franklin for mutual exchange of knowledge and information and personal and business development. When I proposed the concept of Junto, it was in that spirit that the community of people who believe “we can’t do it alone” would model the behavior online of what generative dialogue and open innovation looks like.

Open Data

• Rufus Pollock, founder, The Open Knowledge Foundation

• How, in your experience, have web technologies been employed to make the world a better place?

• The internet and new digital technologies have had and will continue to have a huge impact on the way that knowledge is disseminated in society. Sharing knowledge more effectively has the potential to improve the world in all kinds of ways — from closing the loop between citizens and public bodies, allowing for greater accountability and improved service provision, to improving large-scale collaboration in science, e.g. on the development of life-saving drugs and treatments. Better knowledge sharing enables us to understand some of the world’s biggest problems — from our changing climate to our troubled economies — and to respond to them more effectively. In addition to these extrinsic merits, digital content can also be intrinsically valuable — such as in the case of classic literary or musical works which have entered the public domain or recordings of lecture courses which anyone can freely listen to and share.

Open Hardware

• For the third meeting we’ll be asking the question “what factors contribute to the success of an open source hardware project?”, and using Arduino and derivatives LilyPad Arduino and the concurrency.cc board as the basis for an informal case study

Standards/Consortia

• Listening to marketing messages from companies such as Apple and Google, one might think HTML5, the next-generation Web page standard, is ready to take the Net by storm.

• But the words of those producing the specification show an HTML governance process that can be stormy, fractious, and far from settled down. The World Wide Web Consortium’s return to HTML standardization after years of absence has produced tensions with the more informal Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG) that shouldered the HTML burden during that absence.

• Some examples of language that’s cropped up this month on the W3C’s HTML Working Group mailing list: “childish,” “intolerable,” “ridiculous,” “shenanigans.” And there’s a concrete manifestation of the divisiveness: The WHATWG and W3C versions of the HTML5 specification, though both stemming from the same source material, have diverged in some areas.

• [..]

• But where will those developers look to find that standard? The W3C, a recognized standards body that includes the participation of Microsoft and carries patent policy that attempts to ease patent-infringement worries?

• [...]

• But where will those developers look to find that standard? The W3C, a recognized standards body that includes the participation of Microsoft and carries patent policy that attempts to ease patent-infringement worries?

• [...]

• The HTML disputes come at a time when the W3C, under the leadership of new chief executive Jeff Jaffe, is trying to reclaim some of its power.

• “There is much new innovation, and the Web will benefit if the community brings their work to W3C,” Jaffe said last week in a blog post, adding that the W3C is trying to become more agile and open.

• Developers Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and Jason Garret-Glaser are creating a native VP8 video codec implementation for the open source FFmpeg project. The aim of this effort is to bring first-class VP8 support to FFmpeg and demonstrate the feasibility of producing an independent VP8 implementation.

Leftovers

• After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.

Security/Aggression

• An independent study on the previous government’s controversial child protection database highlighted significant security and privacy risks.

• Despite fine words from high-ranking police officers, an unpleasant incident in Romford last week suggests that officers on the ground are no nearer understanding or respecting photographers’ rights.

• In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.

• [...]

• The name “HTTPS Everywhere” is a bit misleading. Besides Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook this extension also works on the EFF and Tor sites, Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle, other small search engines, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Paypal, and many other sites that offer HTTPS encryption. But that’s hardly everywhere.

Finance

• A Virgin Islands-based financial manager ran a $105 million Ponzi scheme that defrauded 400 investors by falsely claiming to invest in foreign currencies, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Monday.

• President Obama warned Sunday that the world economic recovery remains “fragile” and urged continued spending to support growth, an expansionist call at the end of a summit marked by an agreement among developed nations to halve their annual deficits within three years.

• A number of commenters have pointed out that unemployment has been falling in Germany over the past few months. Um, yes — but not in the eurozone as a whole. And that is what we’re talking about here, aren’t we? Or is European monetary and fiscal policy to be run solely based on how things are going in one country?

• An organization bringing together the world’s major central banks warned Monday that the global economy risks a replay of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, with massive public debt in Europe and the United States replacing the private debt that fueled the credit crunch two years ago.

• OUR nation’s Congressional machinery was humming last week as legislators reconciled the differences between the labyrinthine financial reforms proposed by the Senate and the House and emerged early Friday morning with a voluminous new law in hand. They christened it the Dodd-Frank bill, after the heads of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees who drove the process toward the finish line.

• An organization bringing together the world’s major central banks warned Monday that the global economy risks a replay of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, with massive public debt in Europe and the United States replacing the private debt that fueled the credit crunch two years ago.

• LAST week in Washington, the House and Senate reached agreement on a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s architecture of financial regulation.

• Well before Congress reached agreement on the details of its financial overhaul legislation, industry lobbyists and consumer advocates started preparing for the next battle: influencing the creation of several hundred new rules and regulations.

• To keep taxpayers from having to bail out giant banks again, lawmakers faced two choices: design rules to try to prevent them from failing, or shrink them so that if they do fail, they won’t threaten the financial system.

• Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase Co. lost a major battle as U.S. lawmakers crafted a final financial overhaul bill Friday that will cut into their trading and derivatives profits.

• A sweeping overhaul of financial regulations faced new obstacles in the Senate on Monday – the loss of one and potentially more crucial votes to guarantee its passage.

• The financial overhaul bill set for passage sometime next week is supposed to “bring accountability to Wall Street.” In announcing an agreement between the House and Senate last week, Senator Christopher Dodd noted that “the American people have called on us to set clear rules of the road for the financial industry to prevent a repeat of the financial collapse that cost so many so dearly.”

• The next Great Crash is coming. Guaranteed.

• Not since the Great Depression, when the mighty House of Morgan was cleaved in two, have Washington lawmakers rewritten the rules for Wall Street as extensively as they did on Friday.

• Morgan Stanley, the sixth-largest U.S. bank by assets, agreed to pay $102 million to settle claims by Massachusetts that the firm financed and securitized unfair residential loans, state Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

• The New York delegation’s role in changing the Wall Street reform bill to alter the provision regulating derivatives was a rare political moment — much of the heavily Democratic group was actually on the same page.

• A former hedge fund manager, Williams would not discuss the substance of the call. But he said the conversation eased any lingering concerns he had over the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 16.

• Britain’s new bank levy will have a “minimal” impact on U.S. investment banks with operations in London, with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. likely to pay only a sixth of the bill it faces for the bonus tax.

• Three of the five U.S. banks that dominate swaps trading already perform most transactions outside their depository institutions and would face minimal disruption from a congressional proposal to reorder the derivatives business, financial statements and banking records show.

• The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will focus on the role of derivatives in the financial crisis, particularly the relationship between Goldman and AIG.

• Cassano, Goldman Sachs’s Cohn to Testify to Crisis Commission

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) is considering advertising for first time in a bid to improve its battered reputation, and has even discussed placing Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein on the “The Oprah Show,” a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

• Weinstein Co., the film studio run by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, reached an agreement with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to eliminate its $450 million in debt, a person with knowledge of the terms said.

• Movie studio The Weinstein Co has agreed to a major debt restructuring that gives Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and Assured Guaranty Ltd (AGO.N) possession of as many as 250 films in its library, the Wall Street Journal said.

• Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could have been following in the footsteps of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, in using an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show to attempt to revitalise his and the bank’s tarnished image.

• Time was, if you were, say, a hedge fund client of Goldman Sachs, you knew not to expect much in the way of bedside manner. No coddling, no hand holding, no Shmoopy Talk. You could try getting them on the phone, but that was generally futile, as all client calls were automatically rerouted to the Rejection Line. Oh, you felt like you weren’t getting enough attention? You wondered if maybe there was a chance they were sometimes screwing you? Too bad. The way GS saw it, you were lucky if they didn’t nut in your eye. Your only recourse was to roll over and take it, or GTFO. Since the whole “SEC fraud charge,” however, things have changed.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was ordered to pay $20.6 million, the largest arbitration award levied against the securities firm, to unsecured creditors of Bayou Group LLC who accused Goldman of ignoring signs of fraud at the hedge-fund firm.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. spent $1.15 million lobbying the government during the first quarter on issues tied to financial regulatory reform and the housing market, according to lobbying disclosure filings.

• The $1.15 million the Wall Street bank spent during the first three months of the year is 72 percent more than it spent during the same quarter last year. It is also 67 percent more than Goldman spent lobbying the government during the final three months of 2009.

• Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co., the lender to the owners of Florida’s Sawgrass Marriott Resort, failed to win bankruptcy court permission to take over and sell the company’s assets.

• While Congress puts finishing touches on its financial-regulatory overhaul, Wall Street lobbyists are preparing for a new battle out of the public spotlight and inside nearly a dozen federal agencies.

• Its excoriating takedown of Goldman Sachs last summer was one of the most provocative and widely debated pieces of journalism to come out of the financial crisis. In the article, the writer Matt Taibbi described the investment bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google Inc. has announced a “new approach” in China after the government said the company could no longer automatically redirect users to the unfiltered Hong Kong site.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Companies opposed to Network Neutrality spent more than 4 times as much money on lobbying last quarter than organizations in support of it, according to a report on new hearings on the subject by watchdog organization Sunlight Foundation. Net Neutrality opponents spent $19.7 million in lobbying in the first quarter of 2010 -supporters only $4.7 million.

Copyrights

• As the US Copyright Group continues with its plans to force settlements from thousands of individuals who they claim illegally shared copyright movies using BitTorrent, opposition to their turn-piracy-into-profit scheme grows. Tomorrow the EFF steps up to the mark in a federal court to argue for the breaking up of the lawsuits. If successful they could strike a significant blow to this operation.

• A few months ago, Britain’s archivists, educators, independent artists and technologists were up in arms over the digital economy bill, a dreadful piece of legislation that ignored all the independent experts’ views on how to improve Britain’s digital economy; instead, it further rewarded the slow-moving entertainment companies that refused to adapt to the changing marketplace and diverted even more public enforcement resources to shoring up their business-models.

• The bill was passed despite enormous public outcry, without real parliamentary debate, in a largely empty house, hours before parliament dissolved for the election. Despite reassuring promises to their constituents, huge numbers of MPs just didn’t bother to show up for work that day, allowing the bill to slip through (my own MP, Meg Hillier, sent me a letter to tell me that she was “concerned” that the bill was up for a vote without debate, but she voted for it anyway).

• In 2003 a group of friends from Sweden decided to found Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy), a lobbying organization to promote the sharing of information and culture. A few months later the group took a decision that would change the Internet – the launch of a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today marks the end of an era with the announcement that Piratbyrån has disbanded.

• The Dutch public broadcasting organization NPO has launched a trial project which will see it publish all recent video broadcasts via BitTorrent downloads and streams. With the trial NPO wants to gauge the demand for BitTorrent downloads, and whether P2P technology can cut down distribution costs significantly.

ACTA

• Just as the G8-G20 meetings conclude in Muskoka and Toronto, another round of negotiations on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resumes in Switzerland today. In the aftermath of the last round of discussions in New Zealand, a draft version of the ACTA text was publicly released, temporarily quieting criticism about the lack of transparency associated with an agreement that currently touches on all forms of intellectual property, including patents, trademark, and copyright.

• A group of intellectual property experts have warned that search engines, web hosts and e-commerce sites will be stripped of protections if the proposed draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is endorsed.

• La Quadrature du Net, along with access to medication NGOs, met in Luzern with 20 negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). No answer was given regarding the concern that ACTA would hinder fundamental freedoms online, by turning Internet operators into a private copyright police. More disturbingly, negotiators showed a profound lack of understanding and competence, close to disdain, regarding Internet and the digital environment.

• [...]

• “The profound disdain of the ACTA negotiators, and their blatant lack of knowledge of Internet and the realities of the digital environment, show how flawed the whole process is. With ACTA, unelected public officials will force private actors into censoring the Internet in the name of copyright. Citizens worldwide must react by holding their government accountable.” concludes Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net.

• Rather than admitting how secret and closed off the negotiations have been, the negotiators are just passing the blame, by saying it’s not their issue to actually engage representatives from civil rights groups and civil societies. Besides, the response is again off-base. If the whole point of meeting with these groups is to understand the concerns of them and their constituents, it should be the negotiators who are seeking out such meetings. Once again, this response makes it clear that the negotiators’ marching orders are not to come up with the best solution for each of the societies and countries they represent, but of a very narrow group of special interests. This is no surprise, but the answer basically confirms that they know this. Very sad.

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