● 08.29.10

● Links 29/8/2010: GNU/Linux Jobs Demand, Archos 7

Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The demand for Linux administrators is on the rise, but CIOs have trouble finding IT pros with all of the qualities needed to run an open source environment.

• There is a finite supply of developers in the world, and app developers don’t grow on trees. Specifically, I think desktop Linux application developers are soon going to be in short supply: an unintended consequence of the fact that Android and MeeGo are each Linux-based.

• Sony today took quick action to shut down PS3 modders with legal action against PS Jailbreak. The console maker was granted a temporary ban on PS Jailbreak in Australia that will prevent the USB mod, which ‘unlocks’ the PS3 to allow unapproved software, from being sold in the country until a final decision from courts on whether it remains legal. The terms discovered by PS3Hax also give Sony control over current inventory and will likely see it reverse engineer the hack to patch against it as well as destroy the stock.

• However, when IBM broke out data for “Critical and High Vulnerability” disclosures, Microsoft is king of the heap, with 73% of disclosures involving Windows. Linux was #216%, and Apple was #3 with 9%, as you can see in the figure below.

• As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.

Kernel Space

• The problem was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk of Invisible Things Lab (ITL) while working on Qubes OS, ITL’s virtualization-based, security-focused operating system. ITL’s CEO Joanna Rutkowska describes the flaw on the company’s blog and Wojtczuk released a paper [PDF] on August 17 with lots more details. In that paper, he notes that he reported the problem to the X.org security team on June 17, and by June 20 the team had determined that it should be fixed in the kernel. But it took until August 13 before that actually happened.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Devices/Embedded

• Aluratek’s Libre e-reader comes in different colors and is priced at $169 on the company’s website. The device can open e-books in the PDF, ePub, MOBI, PRC, RTF and text electronic book formats.

• But how many Kindles have you sold, Amazon? Strangely enough, the company won’t say. It never has.

Phones

• Now that Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to release a webOS tablet early next year, its next big goal–in addition to building the device–is to persuade software developers to write apps for the mobile gadget. Given the early popularity of Apple’s iPad, as well as the imminent arrival of numerous tablets running Google’s Android OS, that task could prove challenging.

• Since the recent HP buyout of PALM we have been waiting for what HP may have in store for us. Well HP’s CTO Phil McKinney has tweeted some pictures of 3 new devices that could be released in the near future. The picture has the devices blacked out so we can only see their outlines but 1 seems to be a tablet, other a phone, and 3rd is something on his wrist maybe a media player? The second link on his twitter status leads us to a SXSW panel that he will be speaking at about devices of the future. So these devices may be further off than we think, or he might bring the future to us now.

Nokia/MeeGo

• Early this year, the MeeGo project was introduced by Intel and Nokia and brought the market a distinctive concept of using the Linux platform in the mobile device.

Android

• While developer interest in Android is finally starting to catch up to iOS, the open-source OS is far from the most convenient system to work with. Joe Hewitt, the extremely talented developer behind the iPhone’s Facebook app, recently switched over to Android due to his frustration with the restrictive nature of App Store policies.

• Dominating the front of the 7 is a resistive 16 million colour 800 x 480 7in LCD screen with a matt finish. Archos has a tradition of quality displays and the 7 Home Tablet doesn’t disappoint; it’s crisp, bright and colourful although the viewing angle is not exactly robust in the vertical plane.

• I’ve written before about the challenges of making money on Android apps.

• Well, Arron La, maker of the Advanced Task Manager app has released some interesting data that suggests that, even with its problems, Android can make a decent amount of money for someone. No, it’s not crazy iPhone app money, but it’s a start.

• U.S.-based Android users are an active (and likely multiplying) bunch, according to new data from a mobile payment specialist called Bango. The company’s determined that, between the first and second quarters, the volume of Web browsing conducted on Android devices increased by a whopping 400 percent.

Tablets

• Apparently, the Taiwanese component makers have it pegged for an early Autumn release with between 40,000 to 50,000 units forecast.

Free Software/Open Source

• Despite recent economic improvement, 82% of organizations are facing flat or falling IT budgets in 2011, up from 78% in 2010. As a result, implementation success comes from providing strategic value while minimizing both capital and operational expenses. Alternatives such as cloud-based services and open-source derived products have the potential to reduce these costs while meeting business application requirements.

Events

• We have an awesome schedule line-up with Free talks: Jon Maddog Hall to deliver the kick-off keynote Friday September 10, Stormy Peters to answer the AM keynote question Who is stealing your desktop and closing keynote of Christopher “Monty” Montgomery on the The Digital Media Frontier.

• Maybe you need some time learning Linux on the desktop skills. Even if you have always used Windows, by the end of the Ohio LinuxFest Linux Basics class, you will be savvy enough to install Linux and transfer your daily work into the GNOME desktop environment with Ubuntu. This class is a great too for anyone who wants an overview of Linux to broaden your IT knowledge. Either way, you will have a hands-on experience which will turn you into a bug-one crushing warrior.

Web Browsers

• Google OS spotted a new addition to the Chromium browser: an about:labs page. Load it up, and you’ll see experimental browser features which you can enable — like side tabs on Windows and tab expose on Mac.

• Bugs are nothing new to the developers version of Chrome, which is intended to be a rougher version of the browser than the beta or stable channels. A new bug indicates that the new developers version is incompatible with streaming Netflix movies, while another appears to be affecting the rendering of extension fonts. Some users are reporting that the search function in the location bar is no longer working for them, although that doesn’t appear to be affecting all users at this time. Because these bugs are in the developers version, it’s expected that they’ll get fixed before the beta and stable versions receive updates.

Oracle

• Oracle MySQL end users say it’s still too early to see how Oracle will invest in the open source database platform, but they won’t hesitate to migrate to other MySQL forks if Oracle MySQL hits a dead end.

• In November 2007, Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his blog “Congratulations Google, Red Hat and the Java Community!” praising Google’s use of Java in Android.

CMS

• The Android build, now at version 1.3.5, has a longer change list, including: more stable preview of blog posts, a fix regarding multi-language support which made long strings of text break the interface, a patch for an issue which caused the option to turn off the Mobile Theme to randomly disappear, and another one for the occasional adding of random extra paragraph HTML tags when editing a blog post.

Healthcare

• At VA Hospitals nationwide, the government was deploying VISTA. No, not Microsoft Windows Vista, VISTA – the open source medical records system. It keeps track of all of information concerning a patient’s care – no matter where in the country they go. Medications, pharmacies, doctor visits, dates, diagnosis.. it is all there. Nurses recommended that VISTA work with scan-able wrist bands. Now patients’ wrists are scanned prior to medicating and procedures with immediate feedback for the medical professionals who are providing the care as the care is administered. It saves lives and the government money. This is change that I can believe in.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Earlier this month, the National Archives of the United Kingdom launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens. Legislation.gov.uk covers more than 800 years of legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

• This is not the first chunk of geo code that SimpleGeo has opensourced (just go check Github). They are in the business of selling geodata and geo cloud services. By releasing these tools they make it easier for companies without geoexpertise to get hooked on their services. As SimpleGeo opens up it’s market and takes on more customers we’ll see that happening. Along the way it’s a great benefit to the mapping and mobile commmunity.

• After launching just over a year ago with only 47 data sets, the “Raw Data Catalog” catalog on Data.gov now has 2,326 entries that have been collectively downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times. Of course, even these sizable download counts understate the actual impact of this data, which is being embedded in a variety of sites and apps, like those being developed for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.

Standards/Consortia

• Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced broad and comprehensive support for Google’s new WebM project, along with Adobe, Microsoft, and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, is immediately available to all users of Panvidea’s cloud based video encoding and processing service (www.panvidea.com) at no additional charge as part of the company’s already extensive list of the highest quality video and audio codecs and containers.

• MOBILE HTML5 VIDEO is now accessible at Youtube through a website dedicated to the format for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

Leftovers

• But if you use Google’s new, free phone-calling option (http://gmail.com/call), that figure drops to zero.

• On Wednesday, the Web giant announced that American users of its Gmail Web service could call numbers in the United States and Canada for free from within their browsers. Calls elsewhere cost less than many traditional long-distance domestic calls: You pay 2 cents a minute to call Ireland, Korea, Argentina and many other countries. (Google’s rates top out at 99 cents a minute for those calling the island nation of Nauru.)

• There is very little evidence, if any, that Sarah Palin hates teachers, or that Andrew Breitbart is a racist. Yet a recent flood of viral stories propagated by internet journalists allegedly catch prominent conservatives red-handed in acts of hate.

• A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.

• Many readers say that’s happening with The Post. This summer, and especially over the past month, there has been a spike in complaints about inexcusable “little” mistakes.

• [...]

• Many complaints involve mistakes online, where editing sometimes seems minimal. Several readers have said inaccurate information has remained even after they alerted writers or the Web site.

• What Digg may benefit from is the new seamlessness of the submission and consumption processes. Users that are looking for a curated stream alongside the popular content can do it on Digg. The majority of Digg’s userbase will likely find the new design refreshing and it very well may gain some traction among users that feel overwhelmed with the real-time news stream or the pontifications in their news feed. Better yet, Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources.

• The former BBC and ITV chairman Michael Grade has called for the corporation to be reduced in size, claiming it is “almost unmanageable now” and “too big”.

• Grade, who was BBC chairman for two-and-a-half years from May 2004, also said he thought that some of the licence fee should be shared with Channel 4.

• Already explorers have documented caved-in roofs, weakening decks, a stern perhaps on the edge of collapse, and the disappearance of Titanic’s crow’s nest—from which lookout Frederick Fleet spotted history’s most infamous iceberg. (Watch an animation of Titanic’s iceberg collision, breakup, and sinking.)

• obert Moffat, once tipped for the top job at IBM, has blamed his mistress for encouraging him to give her information which she used for insider dealing.

• He is facing securities fraud and conspiracy charges, and prosecutors are asking for a six month prison sentence.

• Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, is close to an agreement to buy Infineon Technologies AG’s wireless business, three people with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

• The former chairman and founder of Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services was released on bail on Wednesday by the High Court in Andhra Pradesh, state of south India.

• Three people were sentenced to prison terms Thursday for their roles in a multimillion-dollar scheme targeting payments to IT and consulting services vendors from four state governments, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Science

• Imagery from a NASA spacecraft has revealed that the Moon has shrunk significantly in recent times: indeed, instruments placed by the Apollo astronauts are thought to have recorded the rumbling, crunching sounds of lunar shrinkage carrying on in just the last few decades.

• The Mars Hoax is once again showing up in emails all around the world. It states that the planet Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon on August 27, 2010. This will not happen! It is all a hoax! And, many of you are perpetuating this email falsehood.

• A third impact of a body onto the planet Jupiter in thirteen months has been recorded by two amateur astronomers in Japan. The resulting flash is shown on a video taken by one of the Japanese astronomers.

• Good news today for sufferers from jet lag, bipolar depression, interstellar or interplanetary colonists and others plagued by disorders relating to the circadian rhythm – or body clock.

Security/Aggression

• The leak is the third to hit Wikileaks since Assange faced a storm of allegations in Sweden, just four days ago.

• Proving there’s not much new under the sun, McAfee is warning travellers to the US to be aware of the danger of fake visa waiver websites.

• Japan’s justice minister Keiko Chiba has invited the press to enter the Tokyo Detention Centre execution chamber, shortly after she personally attended the hanging of two convicted murderers.

• More than 40 percent of the world’s spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec’s MessageLabs’ division.

• Rustock’s use of TLS is now averages between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all spam, peaking at 0.5 percent, a tiny fraction of the levels seen in March when it reached averages of around 25 percent with a peak of as much as 77 percent.

• British Airways has apologized for telling 275 passengers en route from London to Hong Kong that their Boeing 747 was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Regardless of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or not, nuclear programmes breed mistrust and constitute a major proliferation threat. The international community is failing to address this problem. A lasting solution to the spread of nuclear weapons should include an end to enrichment, the phase-out of nuclear power and complete disarmament by all nuclear weapon states.

• Unfortunately for the Gulf’s fishing and shrimping economy, many of us will choose not to feed ourselves from its supply for a while, but the decision to stop feeding our voracious addiction to petroleum with deep sea deposits is more controversial. Even as the fishing industry, wildlife, and wetlands that were hit by the Gulf spill remain in a desperate condition, offering a bleak reality check on the consequences of our oil dependence, one can still hear “Drill Baby, Drill!” echoing through the halls of Congress.

• Kristina Hill, PhD, Affiliate ASLA, is Chair of the Landscape Architecture department at the University of Virginia. Recently, the American Society of Landscape Architects interviewed her about how best to manage the effects of climate change, especially in designing cities.

• U.S. energy use fell in 2009 and Americans used more wind and solar power and less electricity generated by burning coal and natural gas, according to a survey by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• A team of economists from the University of Munich recently released a study examining the effects of mandatory parking minimums on development in urban and suburban Los Angeles. The team found that parking minimums “significantly increase” the amount of land devoted to parking, to the detriment of water quality, pedestrian safety and non-automotive modes of transportation.

• A group of scientists have found that up to 79% of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico may still remain, contradicting earlier findings by a U.S. government study that found nearly 75% of the oil had dissipated.

• People who make an effort to be eco-friendly – for instance by recycling glass bottles, turning off lights and unplugging cellphone chargers – have no idea what they’re on about, according to a new survey. Those who don’t bother are more likely to know what actually saves energy and what doesn’t.

• More than four out of five Australian IT departments have never seen their power bill – a stark example of how a lack of metrics has led to Australia falling behind the UK and US when it comes to greening ICT.

• In case you’ve ever wondered just how far a Mars rover might have wandered if it had set out from your front door, or indeed the exact area covered by the Chernobyl radiation cloud, if that ill-fated nuclear facility had been built at your mum’s house, then look no further than BBC Dimensions.

• Louisiana fishermen’s activist Kindra Arnesen says dock owners are asking fishermen to sign waivers that put the full responsibility for toxins found in the catch on the fishermen themselves.

• Spanish fishermen who took part in a clean-up operation after the Prestige oil tanker spill in 2002 have shown symptoms of chromosomal damage and respiratory problems, a study released Tuesday said.

• The study, conducted by Spanish researchers between September 2004 and February 2005 on 501 fishermen who helped clean up Europe’s worst oil spill, was published in the American review Annals of Internal Medicine.

Finance

• As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.

• QE in 08/09 has been applied. Basically the FED prints money and buys stuff. Note that this is no different from how the modern banking system works. Banks create money out of thin air (that is the money multiplier) and PEOPLE buy stuff with it. Market centric wisdom says that markets will allocate that money to the most productive use. SO let the banks create money, lend it and let the people make the smart decisions.

• That’s where the Cringely Startup Tour stopped recently to visit Maverick Software Consulting and find out where’s the beef. This Maverick (the consulting company) has come up with an amazing business model for software consulting services — one that employs American programmers yet meets or beats the cost of using programmers in India or China. But it is much more than just a price-competitive service: Maverick Software Consulting also gives prospective technical employers a newer and better way to directly recruit good programmers.

• [...]

• While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.

• Saturday was Invisible People.tv day at YouTube. InvisiblePeople.tv is a site/project that utilizes social media tools like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to spread awareness about the growing homelessness problem.

• The channel was featured on YouTube’s home page over the weekend, and YouTube discussed it in a company blog post, speaking with Founder Mark Horvath.

• Sales of previously occupied homes plunged last month to the lowest level in 15 years, despite the lowest mortgage rates in decades and bargain prices in many areas.

• Former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld hit out on Saturday against the “corrupt” US judiciary which sent him to jail even though he was the whistleblower who led to the US tax fraud case against the bank.

• “The Department of Justice’s corruption is evident today — why am I the only one in prison when I had revealed everything?” the US banker asked in a French-language interview with Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

Lobbying

• A new U.S. law that increases visa fees to pay for border security is a national issue for India rather than one that only affects Indian outsourcing companies, according to India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Are you a privacy lawyer? Would you take pride in working for a company with “a real soul”? Is your brain impervious to cognitive dissonance? Could you grow a brass neck?

• The Australian Sex Party has charged that anti-filter corporate campaigner Google censored its lampoon advertisement “Jerk Choices,” reclassifying it as Adult Only despite the parody already having been played in prime time on free to air television.

• The Greens propose spending the $40.8m the Labor Government has budgeted for cyber-safety initiatives on range of measures including mandating the supply of PC-based filtering by ISPs, further research into cyber safety risks, strengthened law enforcement, and net literacy education.

• MSNBC rejects ad from liberal MoveOn.org calling for Target boycott over political donation

• A Facebook account established by a North Korea-linked Web site was deleted by the social networking service on Friday, but a new group sprang up over the weekend to take its place.

• The account belonged to Uriminzokkiri, a Web site that provides Korean-language news and propaganda from North Korea’s central news agency. The Web site appears to be run from servers in China but is ultimately controlled from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

• The Facebook group appeared on Thursday and carried links to articles on the Uriminzokkiri Web site and videos on the site’s YouTube channel. In its short life the Facebook group managed to attract a handful of Facebook friends before becoming unavailable during the Friday U.S. business day.

• “The page in question was removed because it violated our terms of use,” said Kumiko Hidaka, a Facebook spokeswoman by e-mail.

• For the second time in less than a week a Facebook account created by a North Korea-linked Web site has been deleted by the social networking site.

• “It is clearly a smear campaign,” Assange told Arabic news network Al-Jazeera in a live telephone interview Sunday. “… The only question is, who was involved?”

• CUSTOMER DATA IN SKIPS has been PC World’s idea of secure financial information disposal and it has got the retailer into a spot of bother with the authorities.

• DSG, which owns PC World, has been found in breach of the Data Protection Act by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• In a TV advert, a voice-over said BT is “rolling out up to 20 meg speeds” to give “consistently faster broadband”.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Epson has been pursuing the alleged patent infringement since 2006. It has issued cease and desist demands to Medea International to no avail and now wants its day in court.

• “It is likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published and a decision on format will be taken at that point,” she said.

Copyrights

• Founded in 2006 as Project Playlist, the revenue-lite operation made widgets for social network sites as Facebook and MySpace, and in its heyday boasted almost 40 million users.

• The largest amount, $16.6m, is owned to Universal Music; but independent network Merlin is also owed $1.68m, with songwriters’ association ASCAP out of pocket by $377,323, according to Chapter 11 documents.

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