● 09.03.10

● Links 3/9/2010: Wine 1.3.2, Great Fedora Site Redesign

Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• LinuxMCE is a complete smart home platform combining lighting control, media control, climate control, security and telecomm for the entire home in a single package.

Desktop

• Although my brother was reluctant to try Linux at first, he discovered SimplyMepis and fell for it. And, despite his somewhat tardy start, he is still two steps ahead of me.

• In the end, it will all be down to money. Linux needs to experience the right financial backing to be able to build up the momentum to hit the distribution channel hard. Despite the “commercially licensed and supported” versions of many of the main distros, there is still a gap to be filled here. One can only hope that the industry views Google’s patronage of Android as an example to carry forward to the desktop — whatever shape or form factor that desktop looks like!

Applications

• A personal information manager (often known as a PIM tool) is a type of collaborative software that can help you manage your life by offering personal organising functionality. This type of software enables you to more efficiently manage and plan your business and personal life by keeping track of contact information, appointments, tasks, diaries, to-do lists, and birthdays.

• Some PIM tools offer additional functionality including project management features, email, and RSS feeds, offering a more integrated solution to your needs and requirements.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• Two weeks have passed since Wine 1.3.1 was released, so Wine 1.3.2 has been pushed out this Friday afternoon. Though there isn’t too much to get excited about in the Wine 1.3.2 release with there only being a few noteworthy changes.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Surprisingly, there were no Plasma crashes. I think the KDE developers have finally gotten this stability thing down.

Distributions

Reviews

• This is a really short review of sidux 2010-01 “Hypnos”. In fact, there will be more background information than review content. Why is this so? First comes the background: sidux (yes, it is all lowercase) is a distribution built off of Debian’s unstable “sid” branch of development (as is Ubuntu, but sidux stays closer to its Debian roots in terms of tools and customization of the system). It uses KDE by default, though Xfce (and maybe even other DEs) is (are) available. It is a rolling-release distribution, so the latest and greatest packages are available on sidux when they are released.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• If you are still holding on to an old Fedora CD, T-shirt, logo-emblazoned mouse pad – or pretty much anything bearing the trademark – Red Hat would appreciate your assistance in asserting the Fedora community’s legal rights.

• So this is the course-correction to attempt to mistakes of the previous mockup, hopefully making for a mockup that better reflects Fedora’s values of freedom & community. The initial feedback we’ve gotten on it has been positive; what do you think, does it work?

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There have been many changes and updates in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat since Alpha 3, so let’s take a look at what’s new – in both Desktop and Netbook editions. We’ve already posted most of these changes when the packages were updated in Maverick, but as always, we’ll take a closer look at what’s new with each alpha/beta release. Watch out, huge post ahead!

• Wow – I’ve already been amazed at learning about some of the great things happening with Ubuntu in Education. At every level, Ubuntu in schools and learning just makes sense. Yesterday I was pointed to this great map showing school deployments in Finland: http://bit.ly/amFiOO . Greece is right behind them and lots of schools in the US are reporting success using Ubuntu as well. The work is being done by both volunteers and Solution Providers.

• Some criticism was raised in the Lucid cycle, with the revolutionary theme developed quietly and dropped into the archive towards the end of the cycle. The design team made great efforts to rectify this, with working more publicly, and documenting their work on the Ubuntu Planet, via the new design blog. The new Ubuntu font has occupied much of their time, and the end result is now quite pleasing to the eye. Some of the subtle improvements include window button design enhancement, a slight emphasis on what menu item is selected and a nifty Rhythmbox widget bundled under the Sound volume indicator App.

• Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Upgraded Successfully From Ubuntu 10.04.1

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Android is still Linux underneath, albeit a somewhat limited and strange Linux. But one could argue that much of the Android core is no longer GPL-licensed. So, while Android is based on the Linux kernel, the rest of the system more closely resembles BSD from a licensing point of view. That might make Android more susceptible to fragmentation; perhaps Android heralds the return of the Unix wars. Or it might not; most vendors do eventually realize that the costs of straying too far are too high. In any case, it’s hard to imagine manufacturers going too far afield as long as Google continues to put resources into pushing Android forward at high speed.

• These builds are unofficial and are purely for demonstrative purposes, but they seem to work pretty nicely.

• ViewSonic announced the “world’s first” dual-boot Android/ Windows 7 tablet earlier today at IFA 2010. The Android side of things is 1.6 which might turn away tech savvy early adopters, but the rest of the tablet sounds good on paper. The Viewpad 100 comes with a 10″ capacitive LED touchscreen (1024×600), an Intel Atom N455 1.66GHz processor, 16GB SSD, and 1GB DDR3 RAM. There are also two USB ports, Bluetooth, WiFi, A-GPS, an accelerometer, and a 1.3MP front-facing camera. Like us, you’re probably wondering why two operating systems for the tablet.

• Google, denying a report from Ausdroid, the Australian Android community Web site, says that it has not lent its support to Australian developers for the submission of paid applications to the Android Market.

• A construction worker walks past a logo next to the main entrance of the Google building in Zurich May 25, 2010.

• The Web site earlier reported that Google had included the country into its list of supported countries for developers to sell applications. The company quickly took out Australia from the list. Google attributed the listing to a mistake and has denied any plans of supporting local developers.

• In an interview with Computerworld Australia, a Google spokesperson said, “we hear loud and clear that Australian developers want to see paid apps in the android market here, but we don’t have anything to announce right now.”

Free Software/Open Source

• Users will need to know what they’re doing, but the hack is achievable with a $25 Teensy++ USB development board or a $30 AT90USBkey loaded with the PSGroove files – which are available here.

• The hack is essentially similar to the PS Jailbreak technique.

• Open Source has matured to the point where it is now used to some extent in every company. 98 percent of respondents to a survey said that their organizations make use of Open Source in some way. The people answering the survey were IT professionals in areas like network operations, server management and engineering.

• Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production.

• “Wave in a Box” will include a server and web client using the same structured conversation system that appeared in Google’s own Wave service, complete with support for threaded conversations in the web client and a refined version of Wave’s client-server communications. The server is based on the FedOne example server which was released on waveprotocol.org as a basic client/server prototype. Patches that have already been contributed allow “Wave in a Box” to implement a MongoDB based persistent store which supports searching and the server will also feature the gadget, robot and data APIs which allow for external applications to offer inline information or automated services within a Wave conversation.

• Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team, wrote on a blog, “We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we’ve already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or “Wave in a Box.”

• Open source enterprise content management experts Nuxeo have announced that, as part of the IKS European project, they are working with partners in the project to develop an open source semantic engine with a RESTful interface, dubbed fise. Fise, which stands for Furtwangen IKS Semantic Engine, was initially created in March at the IKS Semantic Engine Hackathon and now Nuxeo have made a demonstration system available for users to get a feel for what a semantic engine can achieve.

• And recently, I became aware of the debt I owe to the Open Source movement. Open Source software freed my PC and turned it into a sleek, fast, secure, stable and powerful machine. I feel I owe much to Open Source software.

• Showing how seriously OSS is now being taken at management level, nearly two thirds of the respondents said that their organisations now have a documented strategy for open source adoption with the remaining 32 percent currently developing a strategic plan.

Events

Web Browsers

• Google recently demonstrated some highly experimental tab features that offer insight into how Chrome tabbing might eventually be enhanced. Compared to something like Mozilla’s Panorama feature, Google says it wants to create something more automatic that doesn’t require much user intervention.

Mozilla

• 1. Hello Kerim. To start out with, could you give us a little introduction and tell us a little bit about you?

• Hi. I was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am 25 years old, I have an Engineer’s degree in Telecommunications and am currently working as an IT Director in a local company called Triland Development.

• The project is now to be officially hosted on GitHub to allow developers to fork the project more easily. Previously, Skywriter was officially hosted using Mercurial which led to developers only installing Mercurial for access to Bespin and the creation of unofficial mirrors. The new GitHub repository is a work in progress though as it will only contain an “all JavaScript” version of the Skywriter system, and that is currently incomplete. The older bespinclient Mercurial repository is being kept open for now to give developers access to “something that works today”. The project also has a new home page on Mozilla Labs reflecting the name change.

SaaS

Oracle

• Next week JavaZone, the conference that brought you Lady Java and Java Forever will be held in Norway. To celebrate the opening of the new ForgeRock Norway office, we’ve arranged for a party just before the conference starts, on Tuesday evening. If you are in Oslo and would like to attend, please send an RSVP to the address on the web site.

• It’s not easy to pin down the exact date of the birth of OpenSolaris, but it’s really easy to nail the date of its demise: Friday, August 13, 2010. This was the date a leaked Oracle internal memo was released on the Internet: a memo that effectively announced the end of the OpenSolaris Project, just over five years after the general release of the OpenSolaris code and 830 days after the first official release of an OpenSolaris distribution from Sun Microsystems.

• I’m tired of hearing questions about the future of Java, OpenOffice and MySQL (to limit myself to only three projects), and even more tired of trying to talk to people with whom I have contact in Oracle and always hear the same history (invest more and do better), that simply doesn’t translate into any concrete action. I’m tired of living in a world of uncertainty and rumors in this area.

CMS

Education

• EduCat is powered by an open source course system called Moodle, a software package for creating internet-based courses and websites. NMU is switching because the vendor that supports WebCT will no longer be licensing the software, said Smock. NMU’s license with WebCT expires in July 2011.

Healthcare

• The FreeMED Software Foundation has been involved with a medical clinic and teaching project in Guatemala for some time. The project, hosted by Pop-Wuj, a non-profit Spanish language school in Xela (Quetzeltenango), Guatemala, hosts a medical clinic for the poor in the city and surrounding pueblos.

• The European Commission is planning to spend 3.344 million Euro until 2016 to continue the services provided by its projects – such as OSOR.eu and Semic.eu – on open source and on electronic data exchange.

• The EC published the budget details last week Thursday for its e-Government project. Apart from the 3.344 million Euro planned for the new platform to provide collaborative services for current Semic.eu and OSOR.eu users, another 8.8 million Euro are foreseen to provide support for existing and future communities around eGovernment in general, including the growing Open Source community on OSOR.eu and the community around interoperablity assets on Semic.eu.

BSD

• FreeBSD has benefited from and ported some of OpenSolaris’ advanced features such as DTrace and ZFS. Beside that, FreeBSD contains other technologies similar to those found in OpenSolaris.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• As it is common in football since some time to bribe the referee, this is also possible: Just transfer the money to FSFE’s bank account with the subject “donation for Free Software European championship [Country name]” and announce your bribery via microblog with the above mentioned hashtag

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Want to get the bus and underground timetables, in a zippy XML format? You can, right now, via the London Datastore.

• One of the heartening trends that I’ve noted in recent years is a gradually opening up of government around the world – in both directions. As well as making more data available, the UK government too is also beginning to realise that the public wants – and can – help by providing input on the things that affect and matter to them.

Open Access/Content

Leftovers

• Craig Smallwood sued Lineage II maker NC Interactive late last year, claiming that his compulsive urge to play the game caused him to sink more than 20,000 hours into it. As a result, he had to be hospitalized and continues to suffer extreme and serious emotional distress and depression that requires treatment and therapy three times a week, according to court documents.

• A Florida lawyer has sued Avvo for libel, arguing that the Seattle online attorney rating service published inaccurate information about him and engaged in a practice of blackmail in order to get him to participate on the site. Larry Joe Davis Jr., a St. Petersburg lawyer who has a 3.7 rating on Avvo, argues in the suit that the site inaccurately listed him as having a practice in the “employment/labor” area when in fact he specializes in health law. He also alleges that Avvo engaged in unfair acts of trade or commerce.

Security/Aggression

• While sites such as Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com might save you time and money, the true cost could be higher than you think courtesy of a basic flaw when it comes to securing customers’ personal data.

• A DEVICE which targets young people has been banned following a campaign by junior politicians.

• The officers were on a junket in the USA, and had been travelling extensively; one of them said words to the effect of, “I hope this is my last flight.” This was interpreted as a terrorist threat by a flight attendant.

• Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

• Security researchers using hardware hacking techniques have unearthed generic flaws in supposedly ultra-secure quantum cryptography systems.

• A German TV programme showed hackers from the Chaos Computer Club using off-the-shelf equipment to extract personal information from the government’s new “secure” ID card, which stores scans of fingerprints and a six-digit PIN that can be used to sign official documents and declarations.

• Good to know that there are so many people out there who care. But better to know what the most common scams look like. Here is security vendor Panda’s new list of the biggest Web scams of the decade.

• Microsoft is warning about a new piece of malware, Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, that auto-detects a user’s browser and then imitates the relevant malware warning pages from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. The fake warning pages are very similar to the real thing; you have to look closely to realize they aren’t the real thing. The ploy is a basic social engineering scheme, but in this case the malware authors are relying on the user’s trust in their browser, a tactic that hasn’t been seen before.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy had nothing to do with Lehman Brothers, according to Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ former CEO.

• Instead, Fuld argued at a public hearing today, Lehman went bust because the financial world wrongly lost confidence in the bank, and the government failed to effectively intervene.

• In fact, a recent report from Planet Money and Pro Publica, that came out just last week, showed how ridiculous levels of self-dealing among banks not only prolonged the mess, but actually made the eventual impact much, much worse. Basically the banks created fake demand for the very worst parts of the mortgage-backed securities they were trying to sell, in order to keep on selling.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) is the bank many Americans love to hate, but one group just plain loves it: its employees.

• The firm’s employees are among the most fiercely loyal in the financial services industry, according to a survet by glassdoor.com, a career website. And Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein had the highest approval rating of any CEO in the financial sector.

• Glassdoor.com’s survey was done online, which means it is not exactly scientific, but any good news is surely welcome at Goldman, which is fresh off settling civil fraud charges with U.S. securities regulators. The lawsuit set off a public relations nightmare that led some inside the bank to question whether Blankfein should be ousted.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• He comes to us from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Joey brings extensive experience from a range of online activist efforts, including the T. Boone Pickens alternative energy campaign, and an in-depth knowledge and understanding of how to use technology to galvanize and engage a community. He will lead our digital grassroots efforts towards change in Washington.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

• A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted, according toThe New York Times.

• Andy Coulson, currently media advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is accused of having encouraged the hacking during his tenure as editor of Murdoch’s News of the World paper.

• On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• News has surfaced that warning letters, allegedly from HADOPI, are being sent to an untold number of French citizens who are accused of copyright infringement. The problem? Neither HADOPI nor rights holders actually sent those e-mails.

• Distribution of digital content has only gotten easier over time. In the early years of web sharing, distribution happened over the client-server system. The more people using it, the slower the system was. But now with peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, speeds and access actually increase with a greater number of users. Trammell demonstrated with the following list, a history of how, since P2P arrived, the two big players in the fight against sharing, the RIAA (Recording Industry of America) and MPAA (Motion Picutre Association of America), have fought it:

• * 1999 – RIAA labels sued Napster * 2002 – RIAA sued Aimster * 2003 – MPAA studios sued Grokster * 2006 – RIAA labels sued the developers of LimeWire

• [...]

• The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (which has its own session for discussion at Dragon*Con) is an international treaty to create standards for IP rights enforcement. It’s supposed to be a response to the increase in pirated works and is a framework for companies to voluntarily join outside of WTO, WIPO, and the UN. It’s also held in secret. Many in the US have sent FOIA requests seeking transparency. There have been leaks and a condensed version that have come out. And earlier this year, they confirmed that mandatory graduated response for signing companies is off the table.

• In this video James speaks to Open Rights Group volunteer Nitya Rajan about the importance of the public domain, and why it should be treated with care and respect.

• U.S. District Judge Philip Pro rejected a defendant’s argument that the case should be dismissed because Righthaven didn’t own the copyright to the story at the time of the alleged infringement.

• Latinos for Internet Freedom, a new coalition of more than 40 organizations and groups, is advocating for an open and accessible Internet. And bloggers and nonprofits are now targets of a “lawsuit mill” that shakes down people for big sums of money for sharing articles and links.

• Some commentators are wondering why the Las Vegas Sun, and our sister publication In Business Las Vegas, have published so many stories about the Las Vegas Review-Journal/Righthaven LLC copyright infringement lawsuit campaign.

• Are we covering the R-J/Righthaven lawsuits, which through Monday totaled 107 complaints against defendants throughout the United States and Canada, because they involve our competitor?

• Because we’ve reported criticism of Righthaven by defense attorneys and others, do the Sun and In Business condone and encourage copyright infringement?

• And as I’ve been the writer of most of these stories, one reader said it appears I’m “outraged” by Righthaven and asked me if that was the case.

ACTA

• The “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” known as ACTA, has been shrouded in controversy since its inception in the Bush Administration, because of the secrecy surrounding the negotiations, and the suspected anti-consumer, anti-civil rights, and anti-innovation measures that were thought to be included.

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