● 10.09.10

● Links 9/10/2010: More Android Tablets, Drupal in Tablet World, Joomla! 1.5.21 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you happen to think, as I do, that Google Chrome is emerging as the very best browser available, it’s worth noting a point that we’ve made many times on OStatic: Chrome’s evolution will have everything to do with the ongoing development of Google’s upcoming Chrome OS. Chrome OS, Google’s first operating system aimed squarely at computing desktops, is an ambitious project for Google, and, from the outset, it’s been clear that because the Chrome browser interface–and much of its plumbing–form the UI and guts of Chrome OS, the fate of the operating system and its sibling browser are inextricably tied.

Server

• Within the next few weeks, Rackspace is expected to announce key milestones for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing standard. But how will VARs and managed services providers potentially benefit from OpenStack? The VAR Guy went straight to the source, interviewing Jim Curry, chief stacker for Rackspace’s OpenStack effort. Here’s the conversation, recorded at the Rackspace Partner Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas, earlier today.

• Data Robotics announced a new member of its Linux-based Drobo network-attached-storage (NAS) storage family that adds a Drobo Sync application for offsite backup. Compared to the earlier Drobo FS, the DroboPro FS boosts capacity to eight bays (16TB), adds a second gigabit Ethernet port, and increases performance by 15 to 20 percent, the company claims.

• The DroboPro FS is a larger, turbocharged version of the Drobo FS announced in April. As a result of its greater speed, capacity, and replication capabilities, the DroboPro FS is aimed at the small business market instead of the Drobo FS’ broader SOHO (small-office, home-office) focus.

Ballnux

• The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the poster child of the Android Tablet movement. This being the case we’ve put its specifications and features head to head against the current king of the hill – the Apple iPad. As you can see it raises the bar in several key areas including processing power, pixel density, system memory and storage among others…

• T-Mobile announced an upgraded version of its HTC-manufactured MyTouch that is said to support the carrier’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. The MyTouch is equipped with Qualcomm’s new 1GHz, 4G-ready Snapdragon MSM8255 processor, and offers a 3.8-inch, WVGA screen as well as a five-megapixel camera with HD video recording, says T-Mobile.

• Sprint annouced Android phones from Samsung, Sanyo, and LG, all offering a new “Sprint ID” service for downloading UI skins. Sprint is readying a $150 Samsung Transform 3.7-inch QWERTY slider with front- and back-facing cameras, plus the previously announced 3.5-inch Sanyo Zio ($100) and 3.2-inch LG Optimus S ($50) — the latter also coming from T-Mobile as the Optimus T.

Applications

• The command line is a great place to get weather information. Here, I discuss one cli-app for current conditions and forecasts, in the larger context of why you would ever want to use the command line anyway.

• A tag editor (or tagger) is an application which allows users to edit metadata of multimedia files. Metadata is the data about the audio data. It lets information about the audio file such as the title, artist, conductor, album, track length, lyrics, embedded images, and other information be stored in the audio file itself.

• Advanced Find / Replace is a plugin for Gedit for easily search and replace in multiple documents. It currently works with all opened documents and all the files in a directory you select.

• The utility also allows you to download full maps to your hard disk. While it is fine with many services to download bulk maps, for some it may be against terms and conditions and the application will give a warning if it is so. However, you can always load the maps while you are online and view them later when you have no connectivity as they will be available for you without any need to download them.

• Synology began shipping a diskless network-attached storage (NAS) server designed for use with USB storage devices. The USB Station 2 incorporates an 800MHz processor, supports up to 4TB of external storage via dual USB 2.0 ports, includes gigabit Ethernet port, and offers file sharing and multimedia streaming via Synology’s Linux-based, DLNA/UPnP-ready DiskStation Manager 3.0 software.

Proprietary

• When Nvidia kicked off the GPU conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the first things they announced was that MATLAB now supports GPUs. This is a key milestone, as it essentially means that anyone who knows math can now speed up their calculations with parallel processing on GPUs.

• I sat down with Loren Dean, Director of Engineering at Mathworks to talk about MATLAB and what GPU support means for the user base of this popular software.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• Its time for a new q4wine release tagged by the 0.120 version.

• Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today.

Games

• Panasonic unveiled a teaser website showing off a new portable gaming console targeting online gaming and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). The “Jungle” has a clamshell form factor with a QWERTY keyboard, and will offer Wi-Fi, a high resolution screen, and an embedded Linux operating system, according to reports.

• First off, the Jungle is rumored to run on Linux.

• The specifications of the clamshell device have yet to be revealed, but it is said to have a high definition screen and WiFi connectivity, as well as a rumored HDMI out port and Linux operating system.

• If you run a Linux OS like Ubuntu on your computer and you’re looking for some quality gaming downloads, head on over to PenguSpy.

Desktop Environments

• So you’ve managed to download and install Ubuntu, and now the customization features are calling. Don’t be alarmed, Ubuntu has always been nearly fully customizable due to having open source coding. However, there are plenty of options for the average user to utilize when giving the PC its own personal feel.

• The typical user will most likely only customize wallpapers, fonts, and the icons on the desktop. With wallpapers being the easiest of Ubuntu customization options, finding the websites to obtain them from is the tough part. There are thousands of websites on the Internet dedicated to downloading wallpapers for Ubuntu, a version of Linux.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The KPresenter Template Contest was over on September 15. We are really happy with the number and the quality of the entries, and the fact that they came from all over the world. KPresenter 2.3 will be the first version of KPresenter 2 to ship with some cool templates to base your presentations on. Thanks to these templates it’s easier than ever to wow your audience, your customers and your colleagues.

• Michael: The KDE community is very large and vibrant, would it help Bardinux to have an affiliation with KDE, such as a logo? We now have a series of labels you could use…

• Jesús: Yes, I think it could help Bardinux. KDE is a very important project which has a large community, so affiliation would be very interesting. I also think it would be very useful for students of the Free Software Bureau to have more contact with the KDE community. In any case, I did not know about those labels but will include some in the version of Bardinux that will be released soon.

Distributions

New Releases

• We have released CRUX 2.7! Please check out the ChangeLog, the Release Notes and the Handbook, and download CRUX 2.7 right here.

• ArchBang Linux 2010.10 is out in the wild! Grab it while its hot from the download section. Reported issues have been addressed. It comes with vesa video driver. To install your video driver, remove vesa by running as root “pacman -R xf86-video-vesa” & then run “pacman -S yourvideodriverpackage“. If you have a recent nvidia card (greater than GF FX), run “pacman -S nvidia” and run “nvidia-xconfig” and you’re done. For other video cards, simply run “Xorg -configure” after you have installed your video driver and “cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. Last step, edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg and remove xorg=vesa & nomodeset! Don’t forget that you can always build Arch Linux w/ OpenBox from scratch if you want by following my guide. Enjoy & report any bugs you could find on this thread!

• After five months of development released the new version of the distributive Calculate Linux Desktop 10.9. There are three ISO images for download with desktops KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) and XFCE (CLDX).

• the Xange team are proud to anounce the release of Open Xange 2010.10:

• * Open Xange Live DVD > Minimal release for production and enterprise environments. * OpenOffice 3.2 * Firefox 3.6 * Java and Adobe * KDE 4.4.3-1

Red Hat Family

• Innosoft Gulf, the leading Certified Red Hat Training Partner and Approved Oracle Education Center in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), is pleased to announce the availability of the prestigious Red Hat training courses and certifications in its training center in the Dubai Knowledge Village.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Linux distribution is set to debut on Sunday (fittingly: 10/10/10), and with it will come a renewed vision for the idea of the personal cloud.

• In contrast to the public cloud, where applications are served, the personal cloud is all about user data, content and synchronization. With Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Linux distribution will also take aim at improving the way users view their desktops and acquire new software.

• Canonical announced today, October 7th, the upcoming availability of the new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system for download on Sunday, October 10th.

• The Ubuntu 10.10 release introduces various offline and online applications for the Desktop Edition, and a brand-new user interface for the Netbook Edition, called Unity. The Server Edition of Ubuntu 10.10, as well as the Enterprise Cloud EC2, also introduces new features.

• Canonical’s work on the “Maverick Meerkat” Ubuntu 10.10 development effort has been mostly about polishing the desktop, but the commercial Linux distributor has not forgotten about the server business that increasingly pays the bills.

• And for those bleeding-edge shops who want the latest, greatest Ubuntu features, it could turn out that the Meerkat is a better fit for servers and their workloads than the Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Long Term Support variant that came out in April — especially if they are building private clouds using the built-in Eucalyptus framework that’s embedded with Ubuntu Server, deploying on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, or both.

• Canonical has pre-announced the release of the desktop, netbook and server versions of Linux distribution Ubuntu 10.10 for Sunday 10th of October (10/10/10). Of particular note are the enhancements to the server edition of 10.10 which focus on cloud deployment.

• “With Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition we continue to make Ubuntu the default open-source choice for cloud computing,” said Neil Levine, VP of Corporate Services at Canonical. “We are adding features and functions that extend our lead in the public cloud and bridge the gap to hybrid and local computing environments. The infrastructure layer is the enabler of cloud computing and Ubuntu 10.10 is leading the way to put open source at the heart of those efforts.”

• Already one of the most popular operating systems on Amazon EC2, Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition gets kernel upgrades, more configuration options at boot time, and the ability to run the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) off-line on a KVM-virtualised machine. The latter feature means users can test and develop on local servers before pushing to the public cloud – true hybrid cloud computing.

• Unity is a new interface for Ubuntu that is making its debut in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition. It is designed for highly mobile computing, making the most of precious screen space on mobile devices. The Unity interface also supports touch and gestures for the increasing number of devices that will support it, with larger icons and a more touch-intuitive interface.

• Canonical announced the availability of the only release candidate and the last developmental release before the Meerkat goes gold. Ubuntu 10.10 is due for release on October 10. Design has been the watchword around Canonical this cycle, resulting in lots of cosmetic changes. Will they be celebrated or spurned?

• The chief improvement of the Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition is the new “Unity” user interface, which is optimized for smaller netbook screens and mobile computing.

• Canonical, the company that provides engineering services to the open source Ubuntu operating system community is whetting our mid-week appetites this morning by letting us know about the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition, which will be free to download this coming Sunday.

Flavours and Variants

• The latest release is Peppermint-Ice-10012010, it is the first respin of Peppermint “Ice” release. This new release “offers a fully updated system as of October 1st, 2010 and comes with a number of bug fixes, some new features, and some other miscellaneous goodies. The default Linux kernel has been updated to version 2.6.35. In an effort to continually try to offer the best possible hardware support, we felt this was a good move for the Ice release. A number of lower-level updates, such as Grep 2.7.0, Samba 3.5.5, File 5.04, FreeType 2.4.2 and others have been implemented in order to offer a more up-to-date system while remaining on the Ubuntu LTS code base.” Read the complete release announcement for further information.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River announced a collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent to develop a common Linux development platform for the latter’s wireless network base stations, optimized for the Freescale QorIQ P4080 multicore processor. The platform is based on Wind River Linux and the recent Linux 2.6.34, plus the latest version of the PREEMPT RT real-time Linux technology, says the company.

• Logitech announced an Android- and Atom-powered STB (set-top box) that employs Google TV software. The Revue includes HDMI I/O and 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, may be controlled via smartphone apps or a choice of keyboards, and, with an optional camera, provides 720p videoconferencing, the company says.

• World’s first Linux-based NVR for PC-less network surveillance

• Thales announced the Touch Passenger Media Unit (TouchPMU), an Android-based in-flight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC) handheld with an ARM Cortex processor and a 3.8-inch touchscreen. Meanwhile, rival Panasonic is planning its own Android-based seat-back IFEC system, says reports.

• Swiss university EPFL has demonstrated a swarm of Linux-based semi-autonomous “Flying Robots” designed for rescue communications. Each winged drone in the “SMAVNET” project is equipped with a Toradex Colibri PXA270 module, plus Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and GPS wireless communications, used to log location and trajectory and communicate with both ground communications and other craft.

• The e-CAM50 OMAP Gstix is said to include Linux camera drivers, with full source code. The drivers include support for the V4L2 (Video for Linux 2) buffer management interface, as well as close integration with TI’s IVA 2.2 (Image, Video and Audio Subsystem) accelerator subsystem on the OMAP35x SoCs.

• Wind River announced a collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent to develop a common Linux development platform for the latter’s wireless network base stations, optimized for the Freescale QorIQ P4080 multicore processor. The platform is based on Wind River Linux and the recent Linux 2.6.34, plus the latest version of the PREEMPT RT real-time Linux technology, says the company.

Phones

• Regard Palm. The sine qua non of handset makers saw that their PalmOS couldn’t be fixed, so they pressed the restart button and created WebOS, a Linux derivative.

• Android? It’s based on a Linux kernel. Nokia’s MeeGo? Ditto.

• The list goes on. We have the spiritual children of Unix living inside the Cloud, powering the millions of Linux servers running at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Android

• Motorola announced two Android phones for Verizon Wireless: the business-oriented, QWERTY-enabled Droid Pro, featuring Android 2.2 running on a 1GHz processor, plus a more modest three-inch “Citrus” phone. Meanwhile, Motorola announced a three-inch QWERTY slider with Android 2.1 called the Spice, and says that plans are going forward to split the company in 1Q 2011.

• I accept that. And to ensure that I can fill out my time sheet, and track all those changes in MS Word documents, I run Windows in a virtual machine. (As an aside, I also use Open Office, have done so for years, but OO is not 100% compatible with MS Word. It’s also not always too swift with track changes, and I cannot count the hours I have wasted trying to make an OO Presentation look like anything other than the dog’s dinner when viewed in MS Power Point.)

• Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, more than one third of all Android devices in circulation are now running version 2.2 of the OS – an increase of nearly 30% over early August of this year.

• Google’s Android might be the most successful thing the company has ever done that fails to completely live up to one of its original principles.

• Lots of companies have mission statements, core values, or publicly stated ideals that are supposed to put a pretty bow around the fact that they’re mostly in it for the money. Google, of course, made quite the splash in 2004 with its famous declaration that you can make money without being evil.

• Google’s fast-growing Android operating system picked up significant bragging rights this week. According to the latest research from Nielsen, Android was the most popular operating system among U.S. consumers who bought smartphones in the past six months.

• Apple’s iOS and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS came in tied for second in a statistical dead heat at 25 percent and 26 percent, respectively, about the same as the previous month.

• According to their data, roughly one in three (32 percent) smart phones sold over the last six months were powered by Android.

• Android ad requests increased 39 percent month-over-month in August and 996 percent during 2010, says Millennial Media.

• Motorola today published details about the Droid 2 Global handset, intended for Verizon Wireless. According to the specs posted on Motorola’s web site, the Droid 2 has a 1.2GHz processor and can access both Verizon’s 3G network and WCDMA/HSDPA/HSUPA networks of carriers in Europe.

• Wind River announced the release of a version of its Wind River Platform for Android that supports Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) and Adobe Flash Player 10.1. The company also announced a design win with train manufacturer Bombardier for a computer system that will run on London Underground trains.

• Virgin Mobile USA has started selling the Samsung Intercept Android slider at Target stores nationwide for $250 without a contract, available with a prepaid plan. The Samsung Intercept is equipped with a 3.2-inch touchscreen display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and an optical joystick, says the company.

Sub-notebooks

• We haven’t seen any reason to love anything that’s attempted to combine the comfort of Windows 7 with the sheer unpreparedness of Android in a dual-boot netbook form factor, Acer’s Aspire One D255 included.

Tablets

• The Australian firm Tegatech announced a tablet PC that can boot into either Android 1.6 or Windows 7. Offered with available 3G cellular or WiMAX, the “Tega v2″ includes a 1.6GHz Atom N455 processor with 1GB or 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 32GB SSD (solid state disk), and a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, the company says.

• Sharp announced two color e-reader tablets set to ship in December, along with an electronic bookstore that will offer 30,000 books and periodicals with automated scheduled delivery services. The “Galapagos” is available in 10.8-inch and 5.5-inch versions, offers 802/11b/g Wi-Fi connections, and according to one report, runs Android.

• MP4nation has opened preorders for a seven-inch, Android 1.5 “Rocktab” tablet from Nationite that costs approximately $130, featuring a 600MHz Rockchip RK2808 and GB of memory. Meanwhile, the retailer is also preparing to ship another batch of the 800MHz “Nationite MIDnite” seven-inch tablet, selling for $209 with Android 2.2 and an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU.

• Irish consumer electronics manufacture Disgo has begun selling a seven-inch, 1GHz Android 2.1 tablet, called the Disgo Tablet 6000, for 180 U.K. Pounds ($285). The release follows the announcement from British fashion retailer Next that it has begun selling a 10-inch, 1GHz ARM11-based “Next 10″ Tablet” running Android 2.1 for the same price — but an early review dubs it “dreadful.”

Free Software/Open Source

• In a post on the Sonatype Blog, Maven’s chief developer Jason van Zyl has made version 3.0 of the popular Java build tool sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) available to download. The developers have completely reworked the central build infrastructure. While migrating Maven development projects from version 1.x to version 2.x was a very laborious process, the new release aims at being decidedly more compatible than its predecessor. Where necessary, the contributing developers made use of compatibility layers.

• The Kofi Annan ICT Centre in collaboration with the ECOWAS Commission has launched an open source ICT centre for West African countries.

• The Centre is to help shift attention from the mere consumption of technology, to sharing ideas and expertise on the internet.

Events

• One of the big headlines for me was a changing development environment, as Matthew Aslett, senior analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group (right) revealed while offering a peak into a report due next month on “The evolution of OSS-related business strategies.”

• French open source companies want to embrace the American way very much.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla announced a beta release of the Firefox 4 for Mobile (“Fennec”) web browser, initially supporting Android and Maemo Linux (Nokia N900). The Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile aims to increase performance, adding a new “Layers” technology claimed to streamline scrolling, zooming and animations, but an early review says it still needs to get faster.

• Mozilla announced a beta release of the Firefox 4 for Mobile (“Fennec”) web browser, initially supporting Android and Maemo Linux (Nokia N900). The Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile aims to increase performance, adding a new “Layers” technology claimed to streamline scrolling, zooming and animations, but an early review says it still needs to get faster.

SaaS

• Applicom: please, release Apollo under the GPL

• My love for Apollo is cursed: Apollo is not free software. The arguments are the same as with any Software As A Service:

• * If Applicom stops developing Apollo, I will no longer be able to use it * If Applicom’s servers stop, I will be locked out of my data * Nobody can look at the code, and improve it

• This is the same problem I have with Google Documents, and any proprietary Software as a Service. Yet, I’m addicted to Gmail and Google documents as well!

• The Hadoop hoopla is generating increasing numbers of announcements from more and more vendors. From startups to large established players, new products and partnerships are emerging which confirm the emergence of a vibrant Big Data ecosystem evolving around Apache Hadoop.

Databases

• Amazon is making it easier, and cheaper, to roll out copies of MySQL for very large websites across its cloud.

• On Tuesday, the company announced an update to its Amazon Relational Database Service that will let users create and delete multiple Read Replicas of MySQL instances in minutes, via a point-and-click interface.

LibreOffice

• Open source community splits off new version of office suite to ensure future

• Most users have heard of OpenOffice.org, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Now there is another name to add to the list: LibreOffice.

• LibreOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) that has been “forked” from the original code. The new LibreOffice version will now develop at its own pace and in its own direction under the guidance of the newly formed Document Foundation.

• OpenOffice.org’s main development community has split off and founded LibreOffice, freeing the alternative office suite from Oracle supervision. If you’d like to make the switch on your own Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Debian system, it’s not too hard.

CMS

• The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.21 [senu takaa ama wepulai]. This is a security release, and we recommend users upgrade immediately.

• A few years ago, computer tablets similar to Apple’s iPad were props in science fiction films. Only a couple of years from now, tablets might be among the most popular consumer electronics ever.

• It took less than three months to sell the first 3 million iPads. This has made the iPad the consumer electronics device with the fastest adoption rate of all time. Compare that with the 1 million iPhones sold in the first three months of its release, and the 350,000 DVD players sold in the first year of their mass production.

Films

• When I think of (a) Blender, I think of a device for making slushy adult beverages, not an Open Source tool for rendering images, despite coverage in Linux Journal by Ben Crowder, Robin Rowe, Dan Sawyer and Dave Phillips to name a few. In fact, I am surprised I do not know a lot more about Blender. But if you, like me, feel like you have been living under a rock, let me introduce you to Sintel, the third Open Movie by producer Ton Roosendaal.

• Michelle offered one final goal for open source filmmaking: To drive creation of a new type of storytelling. One where audiences can participate and interact, creating new hybrid forms of art. One potentially fruitful genre for this, as pointed out by the moderator, Elenore, is documentaries. They are especially opportune for being open because they generally involve a point of view. With an open source documentary, you can see all of the raw footage that went into it. You can use it to tell your own story, maybe even one that doesn’t agree with the original.

Healthcare

• The latest US Senate Committee on Veterans Afffairs, SR-418, includes a recommendation for Open Source beginning after minute 41 of the hearing here.

Semi-Open Source

• Alfresco has issued version 3.4 of its open source enterprise content management system (CMS). The latest release is aimed at making it easier for users to collaborate and and share their content as quickly and easily as possible. Discussing the release, Alfresco Software CTO John Newton said that, “The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web”.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• FreeDiams prescriber and drug-drug interaction checker is the result of FreeMedForms prescriber plugins built into a standalone application. FreeDiams is a free and open source application, GPLv3.

Government

• It is great to see the European Parliament getting into digital spirit with a MEP 2.0 workshop this week. The trend is for more and more public officials to go 2.0, so it is good see this in the EU institutions. Even better that Jerry Buzek is supporting it – thanks Damien!

• For example, the Digital Agenda is all about new ways of working. Partnerships such as European Innovation partnerships (EIPs) help to get innovations into the hands of ordinary people and businesses as quickly as possible. They do this by concentrating our resources: bringing together innovators from both the public and private sectors, entrepreneurs, procurers and other interested parties. The partnerships are aimed at our grand challenges such as aspects of climate change, energy and food security, or supporting an ageing population.

• The Government has made an important move towards opening its data for public use with the launch of the Open Government Licence, its answer to Creative Commons.

• Currently running in a beta phase, the Open Government Licence – part of the UK Government Licensing Framework – aims to make public sector data, which would ordinarily be covered under Crown Copyright and Crown Database Right, available for all to remix and reuse.

• The idea behind the Open Government Licence is to give the government a legal licence which it can publish its data and software under while retaining the copyright and database rights under Crown Copyright rules. Described as being “interoperable with the latest versions of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, and the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence,” the OGL offers those who want to use and derive UK public sector information a free licence to do so.

• FSFE president Karsten Gerloff recently wrote a blog post about the situation in the UK. He writes “Britain is the sick man of Europe in terms of Free Software adoption.” The results below agree with this. I think there are more – too many – sick men in Europe who suffer from the same disease. That’s why Wales is able to get a draw against Bulgaria.

Programming

• For the third time in a row, Worldforge participated in Google Summer of Code, with three students completing the program this year. Worldforge is the original open-source Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) project, so it’s great at getting students who are interested in games into open source.

• This post showcases some of the work done by one of our students, Tiberiu Paunescu, to implement a series of improvements to the Ember UI. These improvements were all end-user focused and meant to provide a better and more streamlined user experience.

• Thinking about starting a new open source project? Great! Thinking about hosting it yourself? Hold on there, sparky. Whether it’s an individual project, or something your company is behind, I’ve got at least four good reasons you should start the project on an established hosting site instead.

• Free and open source software is all about not re-inventing the wheel. Yet one of the first things many companies and projects want to do is re-invent the wheel when it comes to project hosting. Overcoming that is a good step towards success, for many reasons. Here’s the top four.

• Building HTML 5 and CSS 3 capabilities into modern Web applications is about to get easier for developers, thanks to the release of ActiveState’s Komodo 6 IDE .

• Komodo 6 also includes support for the latest iterations of development languages, including Python 3, Perl 5.12 and Tcl 8.6. Improvements to remote server connections, database connectivity and project flow also make their debut in Komodo 6.

Standards/Consortia

• Companies that participate in hundreds of standard setting organizations (SSOs) often bemoan the continuing launch of more and more such organizations. Why, they are wont to ask, are so many new ones being formed all the time? And indeed, the aggregate participation costs for such companies in terms of membership dues and personnel are very high.

• The power of this platform is that it is so comprehensive. The challenge presented by HTML5, which I mentioned a month ago, is the need to test, refine and mature certain aspects of the specification in order to support the early adopters, the innovators and the engineers who are embracing this technology today.

Leftovers

Security

• The promise of cloud computing is very compelling. Just listen to the pitch for hybrid clouds: “If your organization needs more computing resources, why purchase extra hardware? Just set up a connection to a public cloud, use the extra machines to your heart’s content, and stop using them when your needs are satisfied.”

Defence/Police/Aggression

• As previously discussed on this blog, the new paid-to-snoop service which will allow members of he public to monitor CCTV cameras from their own home and alert business owners to shoplifting and anti-social behaviour has now been launched. Upon alerting business owners to a crime taking place, a text message will be sent to the business owner alerting the of the alleged crime.

• The million-plus citizens of Leon, Mexico are set to become the first example of a city secured through the power of biometric identification. Iris and face scanning technologies from Global Rainmakers, Inc. will allow people to use their eyes to prove their identify, withdraw money from an ATM, get help at a hospital, and even ride the bus. GRI’s eye scanning systems aren’t more secure than others on the market, but they are faster. Large archway detectors using infrared imaging can pick out 50 people per minute, even as they hustle by at speeds up to 1.5 meters per second (3.3 mph). The first phase of the Leon iris and face scanning project has already begun. It is estimated to cost around $5 million and focuses on law enforcement agencies’ security check points.

• A POOLE father has told of his shock at discovering that the Child Support Agency could see how much money he had available on his credit card.

• Stephen Bailey, 49, pays child support for his son direct from his Sunseeker salary.

• But, after a recent reassessment, he was told by the agency that he owed arrears of almost £300 and needed to pay straight away – or see his monthly payments increase.

• The technology is so advanced that it can distinguish between identical twins.

• The scanner works by measuring distinguishing features such as the distance between eyes and the length of the nose.

• About 200 sixth formers are having their faces scanned when they ‘clock in and out’ at Sir Christopher Hatton School, in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, along with pupils in schools in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.

• Security chiefs have cautioned army, navy and RAF personnel to disable Facebook Places, over fears it could be used by terrorists to identify and track targets.

• The new service could act as a “one stop shop targeting pack”, particularly in Northern Ireland, they warn.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The White House blocked government scientists from warning the American public of the potential environmental disaster caused by BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico, a report released by the national commission investigating the oil spill said yesterday.

Finance

• Last week the bank, the country’s biggest by assets, announced it was halting foreclosures in the 23 states where foreclosures are processed in court, saying it needed to review foreclosure documents for potential errors. Now, the bank has extended that moratorium to all 50 states as it has decided to stop sales of foreclosed properties, blocking a major step in the foreclosure process.

• Rumors are rampant in Washington, D.C. that Tim Geithner’s first act as the new head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the high-level body created to bring stability to the financial system, will be to blow a hole in the Dodd-Frank law. Evidently, Geithner is interested in exempting the $24 trillion – that is trillion with a “t” – foreign exchange (or forex) market from the clearing and transparency requirements of the act.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The documentary film “(astro)Turf Wars: How Corporate America is Faking a Grassroots Revolution,” explains the bizarre situation we face as America drowns in fake, corporate-funded “grassroots” movements. The 2009 “Tea Party Movement”, for example, came out of nowhere, and through a string of well-funded activities, became a huge roadblock to reforming health care, financial services and more. Leaders portray the tea party “movement” as made up of hard-working, mom-and-pop patriots who love their country, but well-heeled players representing some of the biggest and most lucrative businesses in the country are really funding and organizing it.

• While AFP have been getting a lot of press lately for their ties to billionaire oil man David Koch, (Astro) Turf Wars take this to a whole new level. Of particular note are the revelations that in a previous incarnation both AFP and FreedomWorks were paid by tobacco companies to kill the Clinton healthcare reforms in 1994, mobilizing their grassroots army to fight a ‘government takeover’ and ‘socialized medicine’.

• The largest attack campaign against Democrats this fall is being waged by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association organized as a 501(c)(6) that can raise and spend unlimited funds without ever disclosing any of its donors. The Chamber has promised to spend an unprecedented $75 million to defeat candidates like Jack Conway, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jerry Brown, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), and Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). As of Sept. 15th, the Chamber had aired more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates alone, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project. The Chamber’s spending has dwarfed every other issue group and most political party candidate committee spending. A ThinkProgress investigation has found that the Chamber funds its political attack campaign out of its general account, which solicits foreign funding. And while the Chamber will likely assert it has internal controls, foreign money is fungible, permitting the Chamber to run its unprecedented attack campaign. According to legal experts consulted by ThinkProgress, the Chamber is likely skirting longstanding campaign finance law that bans the involvement of foreign corporations in American elections.

• By September 18, the Chamber had already aired over 8,000 ads on behalf of Republican candidates.

• Yesterday, Think Progress dropped a campaign finance bombshell when it reported that the US Chamber of Commerce, which is spending tens of millions of dollars this year to run ads supporting GOP candidates in federal elections, is collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from foreign owned businesses, including companies owned by foreign governments.

• Reliable clean elections proponents, like Minnesota senator Al Franken, spoke out immediately for the FEC to investigate the Chamber’s finances. But the voices in support of campaign finance disclosure haven’t been coming only from the left.

• The Act would prevent foreign influence in elections, enhance financial disclosures for advertising, and make CEOs and other leaders take responsibility for financing political ads.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Back in the 1990s, in what’s remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.

• The Republicans think expenditures related to “security” deserve the same exalted status, presumably because a government that is bumbling, wasteful, and ineffective in every other endeavor could not possibly display those characteristics when protecting Americans from terrorists. Yet defense is, among other things, a fiscal issue, consuming a fifth of the budget. The Republicans’ grandiose goal of “bringing certainty to an uncertain world” is inconsistent with their goal of “a smaller, less costly, and more accountable government.”

• Joseph Werner, mayor of Mokena, Illinois, who compared bloggers attacking local officials to terrorists who fly planes into buildings, killing innocent people, and he believes blogs have given rise to the greatest First Amendment crisis in this country’s history.

• We’ve been hearing a lot about politicians trying to restrict access rather than actually dealing with the root causes of problems a lot lately. From the horrible COICA censorship bill, to various state attorneys general pressuring websites to block forums, rather than having those AGs actually do their job and go after those responsible, it seems that politicians keep looking to put up a wall, rather than deal with real issues.

• “Ed Balls, just like Ed Miliband, voted for all Labour’s attempts to steal our hard won civil liberties, not least ID cards and 90-day detention without charge.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• I’m 100% committed to 100% broadband coverage – now we need to get all the available funds used (there’s no point in not using the funds!) and get all implementation costs and barriers down. See my interview with the Committee of the Regions here.

• Congratulations to BT and Sky for opposing Norwich Pharmacal Orders following the ACS:Leaks.

• It’s good news that they have learned from the massive data protection breach from ACS:Law and opposed further orders by Gallant Macmillan, as we and others advised.

• Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the senior Republican on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would not support a Net neutrality proposal put forth earlier this week by Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)

Intellectual Monopolies

• In their film about the history of Facebook, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin found a way to make computer programming a little sexier: play up the rivalries, the parties, the relentless pursuit of fame and fortune, and add Justin Timberlake to the cast. But “The Social Network” should also be celebrated for casting an intellectual property dispute as its central conflict — and in doing so, chipping away at the legitimacy of modern intellectual property protections.

• Overall, the book is definitely a worthwhile read, though, at times it gets a little too caught up in the idea of “copying” vs. “innovating.” As the details of the book make clear, true innovating is really a combination of copying the best ideas of others, adding new things (tweeks) to them, improving on them, learning from the mistakes of others, and continually experimenting. It’s all really a part of the same spectrum. The problem is that we have such a negative association with the concept of “copying,” even though every company does it, and the end results are often really important and beneficial to society.

Copyrights

• Last week an impressive new music downloading application hit the mainstream. Mulve became hugely popular and demand was so great that the site’s servers couldn’t handle the pressure and fell over. Today the site is down again, not through excessive demand, but thanks to the lawyers at the RIAA.

• Newton firm EveryScape Inc. is going after Adobe Systems Inc. in court, asserting the San Jose, Calif.-based software company copied a plug-in that EveryScape founder Byong Mok Oh had developed for use with Adobe’s popular Photoshop image editing software and began passing the technology off as its own.

• Now, Bronstein appears to be admitting that he sent the takedown notice, because the video includes a few photos of him (ever so briefly). That seems like a pretty clear abuse of the DMCA takedown process, as it would be difficult to argue that the use of those photos was not fair use. Of course, at the same time, Bronstein also admits that his voicemail “was off the Douche-o-meter” and sent Gizmodo a photo of him holding a trophy for the “Douchiest Voicemail of the Year.”

• Sure, going after file-swappers has the potential to be hugely lucrative, but there are problems. Problem number one: someone needs to write all of the warning letters and response letter templates and all sorts of other legal miscellania. Sound simple? It’s not, and even anti-piracy lawyers aren’t above (allegedly) nicking the letters drawn up by other antipiracy lawyers.

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