● 07.07.10

● Links 7/7/2010: Mandriva Alive

Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.

Desktop

• As a sidenote on Linux lack of success in China on the desktop, I have to mention a discussion end of last year with CS2C that has been doing OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals for quite some time, which was just a way to avoid the Microsoft tax for some PC makers. For the first time in the company’s history, people are actually keeping the preinstalled Linux system and using it, “forcing” CS2C to start a customer support line.

• Fedora is second most popular Linux Distro next to Ubuntu. Even the Linux God Linus Torvalds uses it (an old claim, not verified). The latest Fedora 13 (Goddard) as usual has lots of goodies like OpenOffice, KDE, and much more. A versatile operating system for home and office users.

• In Windows, the process goes like this:

• 1. Temporarily Disable System Restore. 2. Reboot computer in Safe Mode. 3. Locate nice.exe virus files and uninstall nice.exe files program. Follow the screen step-by-step screen instructions to complete uninstallation of nice.exe. 4. Open the registry editor. 5. Delete/Modify any values added to the registry related with nice.exe. 6. Exit registry editor and restart the computer. 7. Clean/delete all nice.exe infected files :nice.exe and related,or rename nice.exe virus files 8. Delete all your IE temp files with nice.exe manually. 9. Run a whole scan with antivirus program. 10. Run the antivirus program in your USB drive.

• Very easy, right? The process can take more than an hour (that is, if you know where to start!)

• In Mandriva Linux, you say good-bye to Mr. Nice by doing this:

• 1. Select nice.exe from your USB drive. 2. Delete it. If you get a message saying you cannot do it, 3. Change the permissions of the file and delete it.

Graphics Stack

• Qualcomm has found itself unwittingly annoying the open-source community by posting the source code for OpenGL ES 2D/3D Linux kernel driver for its Snapdragon chipset, as found in the Nexus One, Dell Streak and many other devices. However, while the kernel driver is open-source, Qualcomm’s user-space driver remains closed; that prompted David Airlie, who maintains the DRM for the Linux kernel at Red Hat, to tell Qualcomm – and anyone else considering doing the same half-hearted thing – “If you aren’t going to create an open userspace driver (either MIT or LGPL) then don’t waste time submitting a kernel driver to me.”

Applications

• A new GIMP Plugin Registry version was released today in Debian – 3.5, which failed to build under Ubuntu (because of a Python bug in Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid). After exchanging lots of emails with Bernd Zeimetz, the Debian maintainer of the GIMP Plugin Registry, he was able to locate the issue and fix it so Ubuntu users can enjoy these new plugins already. That’s why he released yet another version today – 3.5.1. And as always, the latest version is now available in the WebUpd8 PPA.

• The Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) is a MIDI event generator – a program that converts mouse actions and keystrokes in your computer into MIDI events, which can be sent to other programs or devices that understand MIDI and produce sound. It also receives MIDI events from other programs or external devices, displaying note events as highlighted piano keys, indicating control change events by moving the knobs in the toolbars, and so on.

• The Linux Foundation’s Open A11y (Accessibility) Workgroup has announced the release of IAccessible2 for Windows version 1.2 under a BSD licence.

Instructionals

Games

• Winter Wolves which I posted about earlier, is a very friendly company towards GNU/Linux users and released many games for our beloved platform (and many are yet to come).

• They are now working on a Japanese style Sci-Fi RPG game which resembles the old (2d) Final Fantasy games a little (at least in turn based battle mode gameplay).

GNOME Desktop

• In the following Q&A, OSCON speaker and GNOME foundation executive director Stormy Peters discusses the risks of cloud computing, the continued importance of desktop computing, and the interesting relationship between new mobile form factors and free software adoption.

Distributions

• I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin. I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do. I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated. I’m still trying to figure that one out yet. Scripting isn’t my strong point at all. I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics. I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva is one of the cornerstones of Open Source, a technological pioneer offering the sole independent Linux distribution on the European market. Nevertheless the company has been faced with a mounting financial challenge for several years due in part to its size and lack of a clear publishing strategy.

• Mandriva also plays a strategic role in the Paris Saclay innovative ecosystem centred on the Pole System@tic Paris Region and Cap Digital. The company is involved in a dozen R&D projects in partnership with some 60 research and industrial laboratories working on themes such as the semantic desktop, Linux Real Time distribution, shared infrastructures or cloud computing.

Red Hat Family

• Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Debian Family

• At keyring-maint, we got a request by our DPL, querying for the evolution of the number of keys per keyring – This can be almost-mapped to the number of Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, retired and deleted accounts over time since the keyrings are maintained over version control.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’ve been using Ubuntu as my distribution of choice for VM’s and server instances, and on a lark I took a swag at installing Ubuntu desktop onto a VM yesterday. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty usable setup.

• Fixing poor descriptions of Software Centre applications is listed as a papercut milestone for Ubuntu 10.10 because, as one tester during Canonicals’ user testing day put it: “Software centre descriptions are geeky.”

Devices/Embedded

• Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Paz’s five-year-long personal project is an attempt to realise the recently stated goal of Tomomasa Sato, director of the Japanese Robotics Association, to develop “an open source Model-T robot in which all global standards may be applied to achieve a result as revolutionary as Ford’s Model-T was for the car industry.”

• As with other projects in the growing open source hardware space, Qbo will be made, as far as possible, from off-the-shelf components, and all design plans, firmware and control software will be distributed under an open source licence.

• An estimated 20 billion ARM processors are installed worldwide, around four per person and up to four or five per device.

• For Sophie Wilson (pictured at left), who wrote the original instruction set back in 1983 for what was conceived as a co-processor for Acorn’s BBC Micro computer, they are still a “little bit awe-inspiring.”

• Almost everything that ARM could be doing it is except for widespread use in PCs.

Nokia/MeeGo

• The MeeGo open source project merging Intel’s Moblin project and Nokia’s Maemo into a single Linux distribution has just initiated what it is calling “Day 1″ of its MeeGo Handset User Experience Project.

Android

• Android is now activated on 160,000 phones daily, that’s almost 5m every month, demonstrating a significant take-up of the operating system and Android app Marketplace. Google has also just announced plans to expand into emerging markets in a bid for a further slice of the mobile market.

• “Adoption of Android-powered devices is growing globally by leaps and bounds. We want our users to have the enhanced experience that the Galaxy S Android 2.1 offers, whether for browsing the Web or tracking important tasks on your phone,” said Cathy Santamaria, Globe brand head.

• Apple wins the battle with Android for hosting the most paid applications, which are also on the whole more expensive than its open source rival’s.

• According to a report by Distimo, the iPad store boasts the largest percentage of paid-for apps, at 80%, with the iPhone commanding 73% of costly applications, in contrast to Google’s Android store where the majority of apps are free.

• Ever since Google officially launched their open source mobile operating system entitled Android, handset manufacturers like HTC and Motorola have seemingly been scrambling to get as many smartphones onto the market, powered by platform, as humanly possible.

Adobe

• Adobe says it works directly making contributions to projects including the SQLite embedded relational database management system and the Eclipse software development environment, which is primarily rooted in Java but extensible to a variety of other languages via plug-ins.

• A new open source project dubbed frash will allow iPad users to experience Flash in the Web browser as Adobe begins demonstrating its own efforts to port Flash 10.1 to the newly released Android 2.2 “Froyo”.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Open Source Initiative has worked hard to show that open source software, which are products primarily known for offering access to software source code, can provide economic value and strategic advantages to business practices around the world.

• Twelve years ago, open source was implemented by software developers, and the importance of this non-proprietary software has only been compounded as open source developers and users have tailored their codes to truly evolve and grow as needed by individual companies and users.

• [...]

• According to the Open Source Initiative Web site, “the prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture.” While the hacker culture may have been the birthing place of open source, different companies, users and communities have come to heavily rely on open source for several reasons.

• This may seem obvious to some, but there are lots of commercial open source companies that don’t grok the importance of the “support first” mantra. Many commercial open source companies spend a lot of time detailing the feature-specific advantages their products have instead of detailing support options. It’s a cart-before-horse issue. Like Red Hat, Cloudera, Acquia and other commercial open source startups increasingly understand all of this. Their understanding will definitely make a difference over time.

• Originally, it was called the Fedora Directory Server, introduced in 2005, but it was later renamed to 389 Directory Server. It can interface with Microsoft’s Active Directory, and since it is LDAP based it is extremely fast and powerful, and can be interfaced with from other devices that support LDAP authentication. Even client authentication is possible (in Linux, configuring PAM to use it as an authentication service). It also offers a full featured console for easy remote administration.

Mozilla

• Last week the Mozilla community had quite a few releases, and the MPL team, not wanting to be left out, is excited to announce the first Alpha draft of the next version of the Mozilla Public License.

SaaS

• Recently Adobe released Puppet recipes that they are using to automate Hadoop/HBase deployments to the community. InfoQ spoke with Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs, to learn more about what this means.

Oracle

• Through the deal, Oracle acquired the Java software language that underpins its Fusion middleware, as well as the Solaris open source operating system and open source database technology MySQL. The deal also saw Oracle acquire Sun’s hardware business including servers, storage and desktop workstations.

CMS

• The Guardian has released a free tool that allows owners of WordPress blogs to publish articles from its archive onto their sites.

• The free plugin, called The Guardian News Feed, allows users to browse the archive of Guardian content and then either post articles directly to their blog or store them in the drafts folder for later publication.

• Barebones CMS is an open source product. It is dual-licensed under both the MIT and LGPL licenses and is therefore free for both personal and commercial use. Financial donations to the project go toward future development.

Healthcare

Business

• By contrast, Schott notes, open source may cost time (i.e. money) to set up and evaluate, but you save that on the back-end, on lower subscription costs and no initial license cost. You have to sell yourself, in other words, but you save big.

Semi-Open Source

• Don’t mention “open core” to Larry Augustin. Trust me, not a good idea.

• He gets a small twitch in his face and enough clouds build that, even though I’ve got a few inches, a lot more pounds, and some martial arts training on him, I felt it prudent to take half a step back when I stupidly lumped SugarCRM in with open core products in a barroom conversation with him last month.

Project Releases

• Following five release candidates, IPFire Project Leader & developer Michael Tremer has announced the release of version 2.7 of the IPFire open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.

• Foresight been using stable release of Gimp until 2.7.1 released. 2.7.0 was too unstable to update to.

• Now users can easily use the “Single-Window mode” of gimp, it will make all windows in Gimp to be one. Looks more like photoshop.

• The Yorba developers have released version 0.6.1 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes a number of bug fixes, language support improvements and several new features compared to the previous 0.5 release from mid-March.

Government

• But this can be taken one step further. By applying the principles of shared services to the exchange of best practice and technical knowledge, web teams from across the country can benefit from each other’s innovation and experience. And this is where open-source software is critical, particularly for applications such as web content management.

• The question for local authority leaders is whether the enthusiasm for efficiency savings will be enough to overcome traditional barriers to open-source uptake. These have been well documented and include shortage of vendor support, lack of control and worries over cost transparency. Potential users can also be put off by uncertainties about product road maps and, with so many parties involved, over where responsibility lies when things go wrong.

• Jeremy Allison of Google and Terri Molini of Initmarketing, both presenting on behalf of Open Source for America (OSFA), joined us for the first Open Your World Forum. OSFA is organized to advocate for open source technology use in the US Federal government, and represents well over a thousand members, including tech industry leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academic research institutions.

Licensing

• As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman’s great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.

• That so-called copyleft approach has allowed a vast and thriving ecosystem to arise, but one that depends critically on the validity of the GNU GPL. If the GPL were shown to be unenforceable, then its terms would be void, and free software would have some problems. For that reason, every time somebody is threatened with legal action for allegedly violating the GPL, lawyers’ hearts beat a little faster at the prospect of a definitive ruling on whether it is valid or not.

Openness/Sharing

• Google-owned video sharing service YouTube is creating a movie titled Life in a Day with director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott, besides roping in hundreds of its online open-source contributors, reports said.

• This got me thinking that this social largesse was not unlike the open source movement. When left to their own devices people will help for free for the sake of helping and the social web helps drive this desire.

Open Data

• As these examples show, the license under which data is originally released can have significant consequences on its downstream use and commercialisation. The open source software community has know this for years, of course, which is why organisations like GNU have two different licenses – GPL, which keeps software open by tainting other software that includes GPL libraries, and LGPL, which allows libraries to be used in closed/proprietary code. There is a good argument that by combining data from different open sources in a particular way valuable results may be created, but it should also be recognised that work may be expended doing this and a financial return may need to be generated (so maybe companies shouldn’t have to open up their aggregated datasets?) Just how we balance commercial exploitation with ongoing openness and access to raw public data is yet to be seen.

• (The academic research area – which also has it’s own open data movement (e.g. Panton Principles) – also suggests a different sort of tension arising from the “potential value” of a data set or aggregated data set. For example, research groups analysing data in one particular way may be loathe to release to others because they want to analyse it in another, value creating way at a later date.)

Open Access/Content

• The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. Open content licenses or some explicit statement attached to the article when it is published in an open access journal or deposited in an open access repository help to refer to a specific type of libre open access.

Open Hardware

• “That’s one of the beauties of open source,” said Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot Industries, a company in Brooklyn, NY. What are Makerbots? Inventor Bre Pettis talks about how a Makerbot is like Ikea furniture, here are the reasons why it may be the next personal computer.

Leftovers

• European Digital Rights has prepared a “frequently asked questions” document to explain the changes between the SWIFT agreement previously rejected by the European Parliament and the current text under discussion.

Science

• Another study in 2007 showed that men who took two-hour walks in a forest over two days had a 50-percent spike in levels of natural killer cells, and a third study found an increase in white blood cells that lasted for a week in women exposed to phytoncides in forest air.

• Doctors have made their views about homeopathy clear, but their position on whether placebos should be knowingly prescribed is distinctly vague

Business Models

• The role of the disruptor is not to make life easy for the disrupted. Swisher and these execs seem to be confusing the role of certain folks in the legacy industry with the overall entertainment industry itself. As noted, the entertainment industry is thriving. More movies, music and books are being created. More money is being spent. It’s just that it’s going to different players. There’s no reason to “figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future.” The opportunities and wide open path are there. The problem isn’t that tech leaders haven’t made it easy for them. They have. It’s that these guys are so myopically focused on the way they used to make money they don’t realize that the new opportunities are already there and have been embraced widely by others.

• Longer hours, more pressure, decreasing quality and less enjoyable work. Old media is a dark, dark place for journalism – at least that’s the mood of many of the journalists who were interviewed for the annual Oriella digital journalism study.

• There are some reasons to be cheerful, which include journalists not being quite as pessimistic as the previous year. Are things really that bad?

• Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Time.com didn’t go behind a paywall this week and there aren’t plans for that to happen. Technically, Time magazine didn’t put one up for its online content either—that is, you can’t pay to read the contents of current issues of Time (NYSE: TWX) online. What the Time Inc. flagship did was slip on the magazine equivalent of a condom, a barrier between online readers and the full content of the magazine.

Security/Aggression

• Britain’s fight against terrorism has been a disaster, because its “flawed, neo-conservative” direction alienated Muslims and increased the chances of terrorist attacks, a former leading counter-terrorism officer has told the Guardian.

• There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.

• It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.

• “The United States is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing,” said former NSA director — and current cyberwar contractor — Mike McConnell. “Cyber 9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it happened slowly so we don’t see it,” said former National Cyber Security Division director Amit Yoran. Richard Clarke, whom Yoran replaced, wrote an entire book hyping the threat of cyberwar.

• General Keith Alexander, the current commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, hypes it every chance he gets. This isn’t just rhetoric of a few over-eager government officials and headline writers; the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.

• What’s far, far more serious is the suggestion that the government be allowed to set up a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. This sounds good. The plan is to create an Internet-based identity ecosystem, “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”

• Last month, we discussed a bill nicknamed “Katie’s Law” that would give states financial incentives to collect DNA samples from individuals arrested for certain crimes. At the moment, less than half of the states currently collect DNA samples from these arrestees. If Katie’s Law were enacted, the remainder of the states would likely expand the scope of their DNA collection practices, greatly increasing the number of samples collected.

Environment

• As temperatures rise, smart-assed tweets about Al Gore from Republican senators appear to fall

• Living in Berkeley, Calif., it can be difficult getting excited about the weather back East. Every blogger on the East coast in my RSS feed has been moaning and bitching about the record-breaking heat wave, but in Berkeley, I was wearing a sweater in the mid-afternoon and the thermometer hadn’t broken 60. And guess what, the exact same conditions prevailed during the great Snowpocalypse-ageddon earlier this year. So while Washington and New York convulse in cataclysms of sweltering heat and pounding blizzards, in the Bay Area we just hope the fog lifts, eventually.

• The launch of environmental disclosure rules was hailed as a turning point for eco-protection in China’s business world. But two years on, they have all but been forgotten, says Huo Weiya.

• When chinadialogue organised a talk last May to mark the first year since publication of China’s environmental transparency regulations, “Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information” (or “Measures” for short) Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), said the biggest problem had been “the almost total lack of action from business”.

• China’s firms may be unwilling to reveal environmental data, but when it comes to green marketing, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. In public, top executives never doubt the importance of environmental protection, nor do they deny their social responsibilities.

Finance

• If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemics. Congo, then, is not a place you’d normally associate with a yuppie.

• China tried Wednesday to allay concern about the political impact of its $2.5 trillion foreign reserves, saying they are not a “nuclear weapon” to control other nations and its vast holdings of U.S. Treasury debt “should not be politicized.”

• Agricultural Bank of China’s $22 billion initial public offering is making headlines as potentially the world’s biggest. It is also underlining the cash squeeze Chinese banks are facing after a massive lending binge.

• Financial shares pulled the stock market higher Wednesday after State Street Corp.’s second-quarter profit forecast topped analysts’ expectations.

• Unemployment in rich countries may have peaked – but there are still 17 million more people out of work than at the start of the crisis, the OECD said Wednesday.

• In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still-sputtering recession, experts say financial desperation has played a significant role in increased calls to suicide-prevention hot lines — and likely has led to increased suicide rates.

• The European Union’s executive says Greece is “broadly on track” with budget cuts and economic reforms linked to euro110 billion ($138 billion) in bailout loans from EU nations and the International Monetary Fund.

• In the study’s white paper, “When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations,” professors from Harvard, Rice and the University of Utah argue that rising income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in “power asymmetries in the workplace such that top executives come to view lower level workers as dispensable objects not worthy of human dignity.”

• Some Wall Street firms aren’t waiting until the Volcker rule kicks in to shake up the trading desks that wager the banks’ own money.

• Goldman Sachs reported an increase in the number of signs of slowing U.S. economic growth and China. Specialists Goldman Sachs warned of worsening situation in the U.S. housing market. Regarding China, the experts reported that the intensity of the recovery of the Chinese economy is now the most important factor to which regulators should pay special attention.

• Apparently there’s massive growth ahead for nappies, but we’re not sure if Goldman’s Ontex will target young children or European debt traders.

• TPG Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) private equity business are close to buying Ontex NV, Europe’s biggest private-label nappy manufacturer, for more than EUR1.2 billion. The deal to purchase Ontex from Candover nearly collapsed when Goldman Sach’s original equity partner pulled out, but the late addition of TPG has kept the deal alive, and the belief is the deal could be completed as soon as this week.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google Inc (GOOG.O), which runs the world’s largest search engine, is in a pickle as it could lose its licence to operate a China-based search page, while trying to hold onto its anti-censorship stance.

• In a bid to appease Beijing and keep its China license, Google said this week it will stop automatically redirecting China users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.

• Australians may not be censored online after all.

• Under new leadership, the Oz government’s commitment to instituting what’s euphemistically called a net ‘filter’ is starting to look a little shaky.

• Mandatory ISP filtering legislation will be “out by November”, Aarnet has the scheme’s frontman, Stephen Conroy, stating. And “Sooner rather than later.”

• Labour overstepped the mark on civil liberty issues, leadership candidate Ed Miliband has admitted.

• The shadow energy and climate change secretary made the comment in an interview with Liberal Conspiracy in which he came close to endorsing gay marriage and branded himself a feminst.

• Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who leaked the “Collateral Murder” video of US pilots shooting down Iraqi civilians (including two Reuters photographers) in cold blood, is finally being charged. For revealing to the American people the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, Manning faces horrendous legal consequences – nearly sixty years in prison if convicted on all counts. One of the charges, incredibly, is espionage. He was a “spy,” according to the US government – for letting Americans in on the “secret” that we are committing war crimes in Iraq, and around the world.

Copyrights

• The major digital issue, with the still to be resolved Google Book Settlement, is Orphan Works. These are works that are still in copyright but where the rights owner can’t be traced, or fully determined and many believe is a goldmine of works that can’t be legally digitised today. Different countries have different rules over length of copyright and the criteria under which they get impacted. Some claim the number of titles impacted is relatively small and that there is little value in them, other would suggest the opposite. Now a review involving responses from 22 cultural institutions and published by the European Commission claims, that not only books are affected but that there is a significant high percentage of orphan works among photographs and audiovisual collections and the numbers are high.

• We’ve pointed out many times just how ridiculously complex various licensing collection agencies are in the music space, especially when multiple collection societies cover the same music. The whole system seems designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to actually play music legally. Take, for example, this situation in the UK, pointed out by reader mike allen, involving a hairdresser who had paid for a license from PRS For Music just to be allowed to turn on a radio in his shop… only to discover that he failed to pay the other UK collection society, PPL (home of the infamous CEO who insists that “for free” is a bogus concept). So even though this guy thought he was legit, he still ended up with a fine for £1,569.

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