● 09.19.10

● Links 20/9/2010: “Sent Using Ubuntu”, OpenOffice.org Succeeds at Fullerton India

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Ballnux

• LG Electronics today launched two new member for the Optimus smartphone series – but only one is coming to the UK.

• Marketed for first-time smartphone users, the LG Optimus One and Optimus Chic use Froyo, the latest Android 2.2 platform, to enable faster browsing and smoother multitasking.

• This week’s unveiling of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab stoked the already formidable fire lit around tablet devices by Apple’s iPad. And with several other contenders coming to market in the coming months, tablets should be a common sight in the coming year, particularly in the workplace, thanks to their unique combination of power, simplicity, and portability. But will Microsoft, long prized for its business-centric offerings, manage to get in on the action?

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• A few days back I reported on the first operating system where you may see the Wayland Display Server used rather than an X.Org Server after talking with Kristian Høgsberg while in Toulouse. At the X.Org Developer Summit’ he talked to everyone about EGL in Mesa, which also plays an important role with Wayland.

• While the open-source Radeon DRM/KMS (along with the closed-source Catalyst) drivers have had support for audio over HDMI / DisplayPort, patches are finally moving along by Intel’s Zhenyu Wang for bringing up audio on Intel chipsets over these newest display interfaces.

Applications

• Today I found another Linux CAD software that will be out soon, I’m talking about DraftSight. While not available yet in Linux version it’s a free alternative to other programs in 2d drawing. According to the manufacturer “Mac OS and Linux support will be available later this year”.

• A very important feature related to Draftsight is the name of developer – Dassault Systemes – Don’t you know them? And if I mention the name SolidWorks? And Catia? Well, we are talking about a major cad dealer. Can this mean that we have competition on CAD software on Linux?

• Minitube 1.2 beta was just released, bringing a much requested feature: Gnome multimedia keys support as well as YouTube video downloads.

Distributions

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A case is being made for a ‘Sent from Ubuntu’ signature to be appended to all mail sent from Ubuntu’s desktop e-mail application ‘Evolution’.

• While Ubuntu 10.10 installer revamp has caught everyone’s attention, Edubuntu on the other hand, is also having a complete installer overhaul. And it looks pretty neat too.

• Let’s elaborate. A “bug” was filed asking to add a “Sent using Ubuntu” signature by default to Evolution. How did this happen and who decided it was a bug? Judging by the way it was so quickly responded to, it seems like a decision made in Canonical behind closed doors and filed on Launchpad as a mere formality, with no input from users. The “bug” was then “fixed” by making Evolution copy the behavior of proprietary email interfaces like Microsoft Hotmail or Windows Live Foo or whatever its latest rebranding is called.

• The default Ambiance theme in Ubuntu 10.10 – and its lighter sibling Radiance – have received lots of due love and attention since Lucid and thusly many third-party browser “themes” have also been pepped up in anticipation.

Devices/Embedded

• ITWire sat down with Tom Tom Australia marketing manager Nick Saisanas to go through the current range of navigation devices and touch on services for the future of the Sat Nav market.

Phones

Android

• Sharp has announced two phones for Chinese market; these smartphones will run on Tapas OS, which is based on Android. Tapas was announced a week back only by x-Google China president Kai-Fu Lee.

• First of these two Tapas based phones, Sharp SH828U comes with a 3.5” WVGA screen, a 5MP Camera with AF and flash, Bluetooth, WiFi, microSD slot, and powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor.

• Alcatel has introduced its first Android phone – OT-980. Featuring a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and 2.8 inch touchscreen display, Alcatel OT-980 will ship with Android 2.1. Among other specifications, there is Wi-Fi, HSPA, E-Compass, Multi IM client an MP3 player and a 2MP camera.

• Android, Symbian to Vie for Dominance as Microsoft Phone Series Flounders

Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• WEB BROWSER DEVELOPER Mozilla has released a benchmarketing tool that it says provides a more realistic representation of browser performance.

Databases

• While we have yet to see any official release announcement, if you browse the PostgreSQL FTP server you can now find the final packages for PostgreSQL 9.0.0. This major update to PostgreSQL brings easy-to-use replication, mass permission-changing, anonymous code blocks, enhanced stored procedure support, exclusion constraints, deferrable unique constraints, and a variety of other enhancements.

Oracle

• Oracle has delivered an updated version of its Secure Global Desktop that offers more browser flexibility, enhanced availability and seamless integration with VDI platforms.

• OpenOffice.org just finished their annual conference in Budapest, Hungary. One of the outcomes of the conference announced today is the need for developers to spend more time together to properly fix problems.

• In light of this, OpenOffice.org decided to have a HackFest specifically targeted at developers. The idea here is for the developers to spend more time face to face working on the code. The OpenOfice.org HackFest is scheduled for November 5-7, 2010 in Hamburg. The location can be seen on Google Maps and Open Street Maps.

• However, when I got my hands on this book, OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming, I was curious and hoped to find I was wrong, that this would open up new opportunities for clients and organizations that want to get away from Microsoft Office, clients who are already using OpenOffice, so I was really interested to see the level of capability that Calc had in its macro programming.

• Instead you can download an alternative. Rather than add Open Office formats to the Open window, there are options available for opening and saving with the ODF format added to the File menu.

• Fullerton India saved crores of rupees by moving the bulk of its users onto the open source office suite.

• [...]

• Fullerton India Credit Co. Ltd. wanted to convert the bulk of its users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. It would turn out to be quite a complex project involving macro migration, some hardware upgrades and educating users at numerous locations. At that point of time, the company had 850 branches (6,000 PCs, 15,000 users). Currently, after consolidating and downsizing, it has 400 locations (4,000 PCs, 9,000 users).

Hacking

• Ironically we started a little later as planned due to unforeseen traffic-jams for Yeri and Christophe. Nevertheless we did a great job and I want to start off by thanking all the participants and of course the hackerspace of Ghent.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free software and open standards advocates are encouraging web users to put pressure on governments not to ‘advertise’ proprietary Adobe software as a tool for reading documents created in PDF format.

• Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking users to conduct a month-long ‘hunt’ for examples of what it says is the promotion of proprietary PDF readers.

• On Saturday, September 18, Melbourne will mark Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software.

• “CERN is a leading partner of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) that provides the distributed computing infrastructure for scientists working on the LHC experiments. This infrastructure links more than 300 computer centers and provides access to 260,000 CPUs on which users run about 20 million jobs every month. These machines are operated under several GNU/Linux variants.

• We created a list of the things we still need for using the Hurd for in our day-to-day activities (work or hobby).

Project Releases

• Version 3.5.5, which was released on Tuesday, fixes the underlying buffer overrun in functions used to generate a credential known as a Windows Security ID. It can be exploited by sending a booby-trapped ID that overflows the stack variable and injects malicious code into memory.

Government

• Across Europe, several policy initiatives to implement rules that favour the adoption of Free Software and Open Standards in competitive tenders to public administration have been proposed or implemented. Many reasons have been posited to support such the favouring of such solutions, not least the evidence that proprietary software – through various mechanisms – is unjustly given preferential treatment in many tenders.2 Italy is no exception. The main national law that rules on software procurement of the Public Administration3 is agnostic, and does not go farther than to say that a Public Administration shall always choose between various options – one of which is procuring “open source” software – and that the choice should be made according to a technical and commercial comparison.4 In the national law one cannot find guidance as to how to evaluate the characteristics of the competing offers. This means that any public administration can decide by following the general principles of public procurement.

• The Piedmont law was intended to take advantage of the limited but decisive role regional laws have in skewing the situation one way or the other. However, the national government objected to this approach, and the Constitutional Court found that it is constitutionally permissible for a regional law to try to alter the rules of the game of public procurement in order to favour one type of software offer over another, provided that certain conditions are met.

Standards/Consortia

• Afghans headed to the polls today for parliamentary elections in a tense but hopeful atmosphere. If the Internet has a role to play this year in helping Afghanistan develop a peaceful civil society, it will probably turn on two key developments: cheap GPRS Internet delivered over mobile phones, and strong relationships with neighboring states to provide Internet transit.

• In-house lawyers at companies being investigated for competition law offences do not enjoy the same privacy rights for communications with their companies as lawyers from external firms, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has said.

• The ECJ has ruled that in-house lawyers are in danger of suffering a conflict of interest because they have a duty to their permanent employer as well as to the law. They cannot be allowed the same legal professional privilege (LPP) as external lawyers because they are not independent, the Court said.

Leftovers

• Apple, Adobe Systems, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar are reportedly looking to settle the allegations to avoid a courtroom face-off with the Justice Department. The companies have been trying to persuade the government that nonpoaching agreements are not anticompetitive because they help ensure that employees can work on projects with other firms without fear of being stolen away.

• Several of the U.S.’s largest technology companies are in advanced talks with the Justice Department to avoid a court battle over whether they colluded to hold down wages by agreeing not to poach each other’s employees.

• The companies, which include Google Inc., Apple Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc. and Walt Disney Co. unit Pixar Animation, are in the final stages of negotiations with the government, according to people familiar with the matter.

• 2015 is far too early, says the Consumer Expert Group in its report for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport today entitled Digital Radio Switchover: what is in it for consumers? to start the switchover process. The Group advises that any switchover should only occur when analog radio listening has fallen to 30 per cent of total listening – the current trigger is 50 per cent of “digital” – and says there is far more to do than the radio industry or current policy appreciates.

• WE REPORTED back in March that former IBM senior executive Robert Moffat, who was once lined up as a candidate for chief executive, collected his pink slip and did not pass go when he pleaded guilty to insider trading. He was the 11th person to do so in the Galleon hedge fund probe – the biggest insider trading scandal the US has seen for some time.

• Authorities say profits from illegal trades topped $50 million, though Moffat’s tips resulted in no profits and he received no money, lawyers on both sides agreed.

• A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of the mathematical constant pi – and a few digits either side of it.

• Nicholas Sze, of tech firm Yahoo, said that when pi is expressed in binary, the two quadrillionth digit is 0.

• A federal inmate who once dubbed himself the “lawsuit Zeus” is so litigious that prosecutors are trying to put an end to the frivolous filings.

• Jonathan Lee Riches has filed more than 3,800 lawsuits, targeting defendants ranging from the planet Pluto to former president George W. Bush, the Associated Press reports. The Bush suit claimed the president and his brother had snuck into prison to clone his brain. A motion in another case, chronicled by Above the Law, claimed Riches became addicted to video games, causing him to lose touch with reality and his mind to become a living video game.

• At a town hall-style meeting in L.A., Stephen G. Breyer says that the few times the court has acted under the sway of politics, the results have been disastrous.

• Edison2, a company based in Lynchburg, Va., won the $5 million top prize with its Edison2 Very Light Car. The competition was broken up into two classes: Mainstream, which was for four-seat vehicles, and Alternative, which had two divisions: two-seats side-by-side and two seats in a tandem, fighter-jet configuration.

Hardware

• The new cards are no bigger than the one in your wallet, and is actually slightly more flexible. It can display information at the press of a button, and can become several different cards by rewriting its own magnetic strip.

• Intel’s latest business-model takes a page out of Hollywood’s playbook: they’re selling processors that have had some of their capabilities crippled (some of the cache and the hyperthreading support are switched off). For $50, they’ll sell you a code that will unlock these capabilities. Conceptually, this is similar to the DRM notion that I can sell you a movie that you can watch on one screen for $5 today, and if you want to unlock your receiver’s wireless output so you can watch it upstairs, it’ll be another $5.

• BRITISH CHIP DESIGN OUTFIT ARM is not flustered by Intel’s recent acquisitions and has been planning its assault on the laptop market for some time.

• That’s the message coming from the UK firm, hot on the heels of Chinese chip outfit Nufront demonstrating its dual core 2GHz system-on-chip (SoC) based on ARM’s Cortex A9 architecture. Speculation has been rife that Intel’s round of big money acquisitions means that Chipzilla is gunning for the plucky British company in the mobile space, but Nufront’s announcement has repositioned ARM as being on the offensive.

• IN HIS KEYNOTE SPEECH at IDF 2010, Intel CEO Paul Otellini all but ruled out any more big acquisitions by the chipmaker within the next few years.

• STORAGE AND DISPLAY VENDOR Lacie is extending its RAID drive and external hard drive portfolios with a USB 3.0 external RAID hard drive.

Health/Nutrition

• The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

• Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

• The FDA is poised to approve sale of the first GMO animal for human consumption, a fast-growing Frankenfish that hasn’t been fully assessed for food safety or environmental hazards, and that has little benefit outside of corporate profits.

• As the Food and Drug Administration considers whether to approve genetically modified salmon, one thing seems certain: Shoppers staring at fillets in the seafood department will find it tough to pick out the conventional fish from the one created with genes from another species.

• Despite a growing public demand for more information about how food is produced, that won’t happen with the salmon because of idiosyncracies embedded in federal regulations.

• The American Society for Microbiology and the American Cleaning Institute wanted to see how often people wash their hands in public restrooms. (It’s flu and cold season again!) And, they found the “dirt” on people’s hand-washing habits.

Security/Aggression

• Paul Chambers, the Twitter joker victim, has been sacked from a second job a week before his appeal against a widely criticised conviction for sending a “threatening” message to to blow Doncaster airport “sky high”.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Czech data protection authority has confirmed that Google does not have the proper licence to continue collecting images for its Street View service.

• The issue is not just about Wi-Fi data, as reported yesterday, but also images taken by its fleet of Street View cars which have already covered much of Prague, Český Krumlov and some major roads.

• A US APPEALS COURT has reversed itself on the idea of computer privacy that it had previously upheld.

• Last year the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a landmark data privacy ruling that curtailed the US government’s computer search and seizure powers. The ruling was made in the case of 104 US baseball players who had their hard drives ransacked by feds looking for evidence of drug use.

• A letter apparently from the Mozambique communications authority asked mobile networks to block text messages during food riots in the southern African country earlier this month.

• Hundreds of people were arrested over the protests and 13 killed, after the government put up the price of bread by a third. Petrol and electricity also went up sharply. The riots were encouraged by round-robin text messages.

• The war between the video games industry and critics who think that playing violent games are harmful to children moves to the US Supreme Court in November.

• A mobile-marketing company claimed Friday it would go out of business unless a federal judge orders T-Mobile to stop blocking its text-messaging service, the first case testing whether wireless providers can block text messages they don’t like.

• Earlier today, EZ Texting, a mobile marketing company, filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York City against T-Mobile for unilaterally blocking its customers from exchanging text messages with EZ Texting’s customers, which the company said could put it out of business. The parts of the suit are here and here. The declaration of Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting, is here.

• You don’t have to assert something as a fundamental human right to believe that it provides a social good of deep, deep of value. So, I remain an Internet exceptionalist and fanatic. I am all in favor of providing Internet access to the world, preferably for free. (Of course, I’d first want to make sure everyone can read and write, and has electricity, has a full belly, and has access to medical care, so that they can use the Net in the first place. Also, so they can live.) Access to an open Internet is an incredible social good. We who have such access should cherish it, use it, spread it, share it, and fight to keep it open. Nevertheless, calling Net access a human right blurs the line between social goods and demandable human rights. That does not bring the Net to the world any faster, and diminishes the effect of claims of genuine human rights.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, has pitted two several homing pigeons – Rory and Tref – carrying a microSD card with 200MB of HD video data, against a fairly typical rural broadband connection to see which is faster.

Intellectual Monopolies

• If voted in the European Parliament, the Gallo report will promote a dogmatic, repressive vision of Copyright for the future of EU policymaking, calling for instance for more repression of not-for-profit online filesharing. A recently tabled proposal for a resolution by the ALDE group contains the same inaccuracies and biased approach; it is almost as bad.

Copyrights

• While most filmmakers shy away from anything remotely related to BitTorrent, Swedish director Stina Bergman has partnered with The Pirate Bay for the release of her latest movie. Today the film, titled “Die Beauty”, debuts in Swedish theaters as well as on The Pirate Bay.

• A failed three-year police investigation of a filesharing website, run in cooperation with the music industry, cost taxpayers at least £29,000, and probably much more.

• Figures released by Cleveland Police detail some costs of Operation Ark Royal, a raid on invitation-only BitTorrent site OiNK.cd.

• The Nevada agency that regulates attorneys is looking into a grievance filed against the chief executive officer of Righthaven LLC, the Las Vegas copyright enforcement company that has sued at least 124 individuals and companies in North America since March over unauthorized online postings of Las Vegas Review-Journal stories.

• The nature of the grievance hasn’t been disclosed except that someone filed it with the State Bar of Nevada against Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson, a Las Vegas attorney, and that it is related to Righthaven.

• The State Bar calls complaints filed against attorneys by citizens or clients “grievances” so they’re not confused with “complaints” the State Bar may file against lawyers.

• The grievance under investigation could relate to any number of allegations defense attorneys have made against Righthaven and its procedures — which are unusual for the newspaper industry — of detecting online infringements of Review-Journal material, obtaining copyrights to the infringed material and then suing over the retroactive infringements.

• Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the best known evolutionary biologists today. Affiliated with the University of Oxford and Berkeley, he is famous for his fierce and outspoken critique on religious institutions through his publications and documentaries. In common with many scientists, he wants his work to be read and seen by the public, even if that means ignoring copyright by going to The Pirate Bay.

• Over the last 36 hours or so, the ‘Anonymous’ masses and many unaffiliated sympathizers joined forces to attack the MPAA’s website. Continuing with ‘Operation Payback’, today an attack will be launched on the RIAA. The ultimate in decentralized protests will go ahead and there’s not a lawyer or police force in the world who can do anything about it. Is this the protest of the future?

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