● 10.21.10

● Links 21/10/2010: Linux 2.6.36 is Out, Red Hat’s CEO Says Software Vendor Model is Broken

Posted in News Roundup at 3:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Well let me tell you something, desktop Linux is alive and well; and it’s getting better and better.

Server

• The LSE has moved to Linux for the same reason the vast majority of supercomputers run Linux — it’s faster and better.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this very special episode we interview LO community member, hacker, tinkerer and GIMP-master Jezra Lickter about the projects he does, facial hair and all kinds of random shit. It’s an epic interview!

Kernel Space

• Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 (codenamed “Iveland”) has been under heavy development for more than a month and there is still at least three more months left of work before this major release will be christened. Today though it is time to publicly share the first details (aside from those that learned about it in the Augustiner tent at Oktoberfest) for one of the new components to be making up a critical piece of the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 platform: OpenBenchmarking.org.

• The Linux 2.6.36 kernel is now out there on the Internet. After an unexpected delay and some other slowdowns in the 2.6.36 development cycle, Linus tagged the 2.6.36 kernel this afternoon.

• The Linux 2.6.36 kernel features Fanotiy (a new file notification interface), kernel debuging with KMS support, improved Intel power management for Core i3/i5 CPUs, AppArmor integration, and many other features. A more exhaustive list can be found at KernelNewbies.org.

• Linus has released the 2.6.36 kernel with only a small number of changes since the 2.6.36-rc8 prepatch. Headline features in this release include the AppArmor security module, the LIRC infrared controller driver subsystem, and the new Tile architecture. The fanotify notification mechanism for anti-malware applications was disabled at the last minute due to ABI concerns. See the KernelNewbies 2.6.36 page for lots of information.

• I’ve done the research and finally I found a negative film scanner which works with gnu/Linux (ubuntu). Its the Maplins Film and Slide Digital Scanner. It works exactly how I would expect it to. You scan the slides into the memory of the machine or even on to a SD card then you connect the whole device to a pc via usb port to transfer the images out of the device.

• [...]

• The device is great…

Graphics Stack

• Even with MeeGo, Intel’s mobile Linux OS formed out of marrying Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo, the Poulsbo support still sucks with Intel not even being allowed to ship their own driver and they even admitting there are too many Poulsbo drivers with none of them being that good. The situation with Intel’s newer Moorestown GMA 600 graphics is the same. While there’s already enough incomplete Poulsbo Linux drivers out there, another one is available today.

• A new pixman release 0.19.6 is now available. This is a release candidate for a stable 0.20.0 release.

Applications

• To many of us applications are like cars: you get it, turn them on and they run. The running, fine-tuning and servicing of the app/car is left to a professional – in this case developers.

• In today’s Linux distributions, there are usually two to three levels of package management. In this blog post, I will explain the three levels of package management.

• You may be familiar with the concept of Getting Things Done, a method of organizing tasks and information to increase personal productivity. While there are many tools available for implementing this technique, one of the better ones I’ve seen is GTD-Free. One of the great things about GTD-Free is that you don’t need to be an expert in the GTD methodology to use it. Simple and efficient, it gets out of your way and lets you focus on the task at hand instead of the tool.

• Many people associate pdf to adobe reader, but is this the best reader of this type of documents that we have on Linux?.

• But in the while le’ts say that Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange. The file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Revision 1723 of Steel Storm Episode I, a 3D top down arcade shooter, has been released. New features include four camera modes, gamepad support, and a difficulty selector.

Desktop Environments

• So what does KPresenter have to do with all this? Well, it’s just that in my experience, KPresenter does a whole lot better in terms of usability and ability to create high-quality presentations than either OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft Office Powerpoint. That’s because the whole KOffice suite is geared towards desktop publishing as opposed to traditional document creation.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Short of fully creating a new profile, there is no easy way to create a completely different desktop experience using most desktop environments. If you use KDE, you can easily create one setup for work, and one setup for personal use.

• This is how I setup two desktop environments on my Ubuntu 10.10 computer (with KDE 4.5.1), using Activities.

• For general use, it is sufficient to configure KDE using the options provided in System Settings and in individual application settings. Nevertheless, to unlock the full power of KDE, you should learn some of the system administration tools that it provides.

Distributions

• Are you in a habit of disabling SELinux, because it seems to break things? That seems to be the first reaction, as the first impression of SELinux is that it’s just a troublemaker that stops tasks and causes access denied errors. However, recently I had the pleasure of digging in to SELinux to see just what it is all about. After figuring out how it works, I am making sure it’s enabled on systems in the future. Why? Because it’s an extra layer of security, and when you look at it, SELinux is actually a very smart way to prohibit attacks on a Linux system, mainly servers. If a system is compromised, SELinux greatly limits the damage that can be done.

• As I was checking about 10 Linux Distros that are now gone, I noticed a pattern (at least on the ones I checked…there are many more that have been discontinued): Most of them had price tags attached. With the exception of Feather Linux (United Kingdom), Arabbix (United Arab Emirates), and Linux Loco (Argentina), the other discontinued Linux distros I happened to check had prices that went from $14 (Spanish Aslinux) to $100 (Canadian Xandros).

• To tap into BitTorrent’s magic, first download a BitTorrent client program to your computer. The one I recommend is called Transmission, available as a free download for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers. You’ll need a broadband connection to proceed.

Reviews

• Parted Magic is one of the best standalone partition management Linux solutions out there. Sukrit explains why…

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring is the most advanced Linux operating system to date, a genuine concentration of technologies and innovations. Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring combines simplicity with conviviality in an intuitive, high performing environment. It is the ideal distribution for all users, from the beginner to the most advanced.

Red Hat Family

• The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn’t address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.

• “The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,” said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. “Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.”

• Red Hat has launched a new certification for virtualization called the Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA).

Fedora

• The release of Fedora 14 is just around the corner, and one of the areas of active development for this release is mobile devices, such as netbooks. Fedora community members have integrated several different mobile development platforms for use with Fedora, including Sugar on a Stick and software from the MeeGo project. Fedora members also work to bring Fedora to new hardware platforms.

• “Fedora Mobility is a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in Fedora on small devices,” said Peter Robinson, leader of the Fedora Mobility team. “Our initial aim is to ensure that the hardware used in devices such as Netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) work out of the box with Fedora.”

Debian Family

• Today, the Debian Project has overwhelmingly decided in a General Resolution to formally acknowlege the contribution made by many people who help Debian in ways other than maintaining packages – by opening up the process of becoming an officially recognised Debian Developer.

• Manhattan OS was a great Ubuntu remaster you might remember reading about on WebUpd8. I say “was” because it doesn’t exist anymore – you can’t download it and there won’t be any new versions, not under the “Manhattan OS” name. That’s because Kevin wanted to go with Debian instead of Ubuntu and as a result, he is currently working on a new Linux distribution called Jupiter OS.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It is in this spirit that I have been thinking about Qt recently. We want to make it fast, easy and painless to develop applications for Ubuntu, and Qt is an option worth exploring for application developers. In thinking about this, I’ve realized that there is quite a bit of commonality between the strengths of Qt and some of the new directions in Ubuntu:

• * Qt has a long history of use on ARM as well as x86, by virtue of being popular on embedded devices. Consumer products have been built using Qt on ARM for over 10 years. We’ve been making Ubuntu products available for ARM for nearly two years now, and 10.10 supports more ARM boards than ever, including reference boards from Freescale, Marvell and TI. Qt is adding ARMv7 optimizations to benefit the latest ARM chips. We do this in order to offer OEMs a choice of hardware, without sacrificing software choice. Qt preserves this same choice for application developers. * Qt is a cross-platform application framework, with official ports for Windows, MacOS and more, and experimental community ports to Android, the iPhone and WebOS. Strong cross-platform support was one of the original principles of Qt, and it shows in the maturity of the official ports. With Ubuntu Light being installed on computers with Windows, and Ubuntu One landing on Android and the iPhone, we need interoperability with other platforms. There is also a large population of developers who already know how to target Windows, who can reach Ubuntu users as well by choosing Qt. * Qt has a fairly mature touch input system, which now has support for multi-touch and gestures (including QML), though it’s only complete on Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6. Meanwhile, Canonical has been working with the community to develop a low-level multi-touch framework for Linux and X11, for the benefit of Qt and other toolkits. These efforts will eventually meet in the middle.

• I was glad to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way. I wrote below a brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS (since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd.

• Overall, I’m extremely pleased with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. It fixes some of the old ill, but does not introduce any new ones. This is good. Now, the installation procedure is the big star of the autumn release. It is smarter and smoother than ever before, plus it lets the user have updates and popular stuff. For anyone who’s ever installed Ubuntu in the past, the changes will be refreshing and encouraging. For new users, it’s instant usability out of the box. Compare this to a typical Windows setup, please.

• Next week, Ubuntu developers will be discussing the possibility of adding a desktop focused version of the new Unity interface to the normal build of Ubuntu. This edition would have these changes among other possible improvements:

• -Would be movable to any edge of the screen per user preference.

• -Normal style floating windows, with window controls in the windows.

• -Home screen turned into a drop down menu with search and program access.

• Finally, this release is sloooow compared to 10.04. I’ve been reading other reviews of UNE 10.10, and they all pretty much agree that this one is not completely baked yet. Unless you have some compelling reason to change, you should stay with UNE 10.04 until this one cooks a bit more.

• Other than these relatively negligible annoyances, I can’t say there’s anything I’d change about Ubuntu 10.10. I won’t go so far as to call it “perfect,” because experience has shown that to be a word which usually leads to regret later on. But I would describe it as pretty great, and definitely worth trying out. After all, with the installation process so quick and easy, what excuse is there not to?

• I feel pretty comfortable using Ubuntu, considering it’s my OS of choice on my main laptop. I realize most people aren’t like that, but the netbook market has sold people on the idea of devices that are just a little bit different from your usual portable computer, so maybe more folks will be willing to give it a shot.

• It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing with that random dependency error, but once that was taken care of I didn’t have any other hiccups to speak of. Overall I think I enjoy the interface of UNR more than Starter, if for no other reason than it’s something different.

• I intend to continue playing with both Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the included Windows 7 Starter for a while before I decide which one I prefer. The relative freedom and spiffy interface of UNR is certainly poised to win me over at this point. I also like the idea of having a full-featured (and free-of-charge) office suite at my disposal rather than just WordPad to do my writing. Only time will tell. I’ll post back if anything particularly monumental happens over the next month or so.

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu is the community developed, KDE-based version of Ubuntu. The latest edition, Kubuntu 10.10, was released on 10.10.2010, the same day that Ubuntu 10.10 was released. This article offers a detailed review of this KDE-based distribution, and also marks its first listing on this website.

• [...]

• Final Thoughts and Suggestions: Writing this review gave me the opportunity to use Kubuntu for the very first time. And I like it. Though KPackageKit’s interface is not as slick as the Software Center in Ubuntu, I found it a lot easier to use. The only suggestion I have for the Kubuntu team is about rekonq, the default browser. It is a decent browser, but it is not fully production ready. Until rekonq is fully ready for prime time, I think it is best to install Firefox as the default and have rekonq as the alternate.

• Lubuntu 10.10 will certainly be appreciated by most current Lubuntu users. It’s worth considering as an upgrade.

• However, its minimalistic appeal is rivaled by Xubuntu 10.10 and Xubuntu has the advantage of offering the Ubuntu Software Center as part of its desktop. Which one would I recommend? I’d have to lean slightly toward Xubuntu right now; it seems every bit as fast as Lubuntu and it offers better software management.

• On the other hand, Lubuntu does ship with Chromium as its browser. I prefer Chromium to Firefox; it’s performed faster and more reliably for me. So bear that in mind if Chromium matters to you.

• Don’t be afraid to give both distros a spin though; both of them are Live CD distros so you can simply boot off the CD and try them out without having to install them. I’m definitely curious to hear from those who have tried both distros; please tell me which one you prefer and why in the comments below.

• Few days ago LinuxMint 10 Julia RC1 was released, this release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your linux-mintdesktop even more comfortable to use.

• Bringing together the best the open source world has to offer to students, Linux distribution UberStudent is a great starting point for the college-attending geek wanting to give Linux a try. It may not be as straight-forward as Ubuntu, but it does aim to bring together a number of needs students have: links to cheap textbooks, simple citation and various media editing tools.

Devices/Embedded

• Nygard: Aava Mobile was founded in 2009 by a team of engineering wizards with a strong background in mobile phone development who wanted to build an open source mobile device platform for the OEM/ODM market. Aava Mobile’s open devices harness the creativity of developer communities and provide the flexibility to OEMs/ODMs and mobile operators to incorporate their own user interface, content and services to differentiate their devices from competitors.

• Tada ! Everythnig is now open to find a way to mix Openmoko V4 project with the base of the A.I.’s MID.

Phones

Android

• We’ve heard countless reports that it’s out there. We know it’s still in development and we know some Googlers have it loaded onto their Nexus Ones. I’m talking about the Android Gingerbread update, of course, and we can finally bring you the first details regarding the next iteration courtesy of our trusted source close to Google. The biggest change – outside of built-in video chat support (more on that later) – that many have been wondering about has been a possible graphical overhaul. The acquisition of ex-Palm user interface expert Matias Duarte – the guy that designed the still-pretty webOS – implied that Google would be looking to pretty Android up against criticism that it was noticably “uglier” than the competition (they may have an argument up against iOS, but I don’t think Symbian, Windows Mobile (6.5) and Blackberry OS are any prettier. No offense to those respective design teams.)

• In Silicon Valley, there are few developers more respected than Joe Hewitt — he helped create Firefox, he built the indispensible development tool FireBug, and he was also responsible for both Facebook’s ‘Touch’ mobile website and the first few versions of its incredibly popular native iPhone application (which he’s rumored to have built singlehandedly). And Hewitt, who is still a prominent Facebook employee, isn’t shy about voicing his opinions when it comes to technology.

• This evening Hewitt has tweeted an hour-long stream of criticism directed at Google’s definition of “Open” when it comes to Android — a topic that was brought up by Steve Jobs during his tirade against Google during Apple’s earnings call yesterday. Android chief Andy Rubin responded to Jobs with his first tweet, which contained his definition of open: a terminal command that can be used to download the source code of the current version of Android. But Hewitt obviously isn’t satisfied.

• Hewitt kicked off his series of tweets with a question: “How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?”

• Digitimes is reporting that Google has notified its partners that the next version of Android is nearing completion, and that tablet PC engineer samples are set to show up in December.

• Great news for Canadians people! Bell Mobility, one of the top wireless carrier announced the release of the HTC Desire Z for November 3. Known on T-Mobile USA as the HTC G2, the device will be the first smartphone in Canada to operate on Bell’s HSPA+network and support incredible speeds.

• Much has been made of Steve Jobs’ presence on the earnings call yesterday. In particular, there’s a little nerd slapfight going on between Apple and Google around the “openness” of their platforms. As Steve said yesterday, “open doesn’t always win.” Andy Rubin, the father of Android at Google, later reportedly tweeted the code needed to compile Android, thus jabbing at Apple by illustrating that anyone could freely download and compile the Android OS. Yeah, and how many “average” people do you know that’ll do that? Exactly none.

• Think back to 2009 and the state of the smartphone industry. The iPhone had completely redefined the entire market, while Google was just beginning to see traction with Android and looking at a long struggle to catch up with Apple.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Apache Software Foundation on Wednesday is officially announcing its open source Maven 3.0 software build system for Java projects, which supports multicore processors.

• The company will make the system available to all people. For more information, visit its project page on the Funambol Forge website. Funambol is working with the developer community to enhance CAPRI and invites interested parties to participate in the project.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers. We designed and built a prototype of a system for open Web apps: Apps built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that work both on computers and mobile phones, have many of the characteristics that users find compelling about native apps and provide developers with open and flexible distribution options.

• Having announced its plans for a “open web app ecosystem” in late May, Mozilla has now released a prototype. This may be an attempt by Mozilla to pre-empt Google’s announcement of the Chrome Web Store.

• In the May post on the Mozilla blog, Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Products, writes “Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop web sites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission.”

• The resources collected range from free documentation and tutorials that you may not be aware of, to guides to working with open source tools for multimedia and graphics. Our collections of resources for the Firefox browser have been among our most popular, and in this post, you’ll find the latest updated collection for Firefox.

Oracle

• Ninthchamber asked the Office & Business Software forum why OpenOffice files don’t always open in Microsoft Office.

• The free OpenOffice suite is relatively compatible with Microsoft Office, but not perfectly. It’s best to understand what will work with what.

• For simplicity’s sake, I’m sticking to word processing files here. But the basic rules apply to other office formats, as well.

CMS

• We love the freedom afforded by being an independent company and plan to stay that way for the foreseeable future. In that scenario, being publicly held is one of the obvious liquidity options for shareholders, but in an environment where even companies with massive revenues like Zynga and Facebook aren’t public, I think for Automattic it’s many years off and not something that influences our decisions day-to-day.

• 4. How do you balance your commitment to open source with your capitalistic ambitions?

• I don’t balance them — they’re both out in full force. The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing. The more I make, the more I donate to non-profits spreading Open Source to the world.

Business

• This is an updated version of a post that was originally published in July 2009. It has been updated in response to ongoing confusion about open core licensing.

Project Releases

• Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, today announced the latest update for Open-Xchange Server providing users with significant usability enhancement and mobility support for HTC, Android 2.1 and 2.2.

• Open-Xchange provides users with a more intuitive layout of the AJAX-based web interface. A new folder tree design and additional features make the interface of the Open-Xchange web client easier to use and more appealing. Users can switch between e-mail, contacts, calendar, tasks, document management and settings with a single click.

• Finally, we have a development version of Qt 4.7 that can be installed to Symbian^3 devices like N8 and C7. It’s meant explicitly for development purposes only and cannot be used deploy Qt 4.7 based applications to Symbian^3 devices. This is the real Qt version and it will actually replace Qt libraries on your device (don’t worry, we will provide also a package so that you can revert to Qt 4.6.3 which actually ships on N8 and friends).

• Maps 0.7.1 and Semantic Maps 0.7.1 are now available for download. The main new feature in this release is the long awaited images as layers.

• We have just had word that the GA release of Lotus Symphony 3 will be available tomorrow, that’s 21st October 2010, from the Symphony website.

Government

• A group of European lawyers interested in open source and open standards will discuss if countries can pass laws that favour open source software, at their annual meeting next month. The group will also look at how to write calls for tenders in order to not discriminate against this type of software.

• The European Open Source & Free Software Law Event (EOLE) recently posted the draft programme for the conference.

• NDP MP Charlie Angus has tabled a motion before the House of Commons focusing on the need for the government to support open source software, particularly through public tendering processes.

• The thing is, such a thing does exist, and it’s sent by councils to central Government (the Department for Communities and Local Government to be precise) for them to use in their own figures. It’s a fairly hellishly complex spreadsheet called the Revenue Outturn form that must be filled in by the council (to get an idea have a look at the template here).

• This article is the first of a two-part report on the Digital Agenda Stakeholders Day, an event held by the European Commission in Brussels on 25 October 2010.

• Part one of The EU’s digital agenda: What is at stake? looks at some of the overarching issues that most areas of information and communication technology (ICT) have in common.

• Part two (published Wednesday 27 October, 2010) will put the EU’s Digital Agenda into its political context, and will include a review of the actual Stakeholders Day event.

• If they have something like 90000 PCs, they could be getting stuff for free. We don’t know the details of the deal but they could get stuff for free using GNU/Linux. I wonder if they considered that.

• On the other side, the Federal government is putting its toe deeper in the Open Source waters, recently making agreements with SourceForge and other web-based developer services. The GSA has announced its intention to launch “forge.gov”, inspired by forge.mil. The VA is exploring how to open source their VistA electronic health record system. The list goes on.

Licensing

• License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the license involved in that case is an End User License Agreement (EULA), not a source license delivering extensive liberties. When we compare like-for-like, we discover open source software has no such issues. End-users do not need to have a license management server, do not need to hold audits, do not need to fear BSA raids. Open source is so much easier!

Openness/Sharing

• In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should tell you straight away that I don’t own a television. I sold mine seven years ago, after the year 2003 saw the debut of Nashville Star, The O.C., Fame, and some train-wreck reality show starring Jessica Simpson and her then-husband Nick Lachey.

• These days, my knowledge of television programming comes from disparate half-hours spent on the treadmill at the gym. I catch bits and pieces of shows like Law & Order, Hannah Montana, The Dr. Oz Show, One Tree Hill, The Doctors, and The Dr. Phil Show. (Who hired all the doctors, and am I the only one who wonders how many drinks the talent scout had when he signed Miley Cyrus?)

• A few years ago, I experimented with what I called The Open Source Dating Project.

Open Access/Content

• Implementing open access is a tough job. Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial. Pioneers, role models and flagship institutions all have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success. Professionals charged with implementing policy typically need several years to accomplish significant progress. Many institutions adopting open access policies probably need to do more, much more, if the commitment to open access is to be meaningful.

• The goal is fairly simple. We now have 3 million records from the British Library catalogue. We are grateful to them for not only making them available but also making them CC0. Only CC0 or PDDL is really useful for Open Bibliography. CC-NC creates enormous downstream problems. Avoid it like the plague.

• Today, Creative Commons announces the release of its Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that allows them to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0 public domain dedication, which enables authors to relinquish their rights prior to the expiration of copyright.

• Creative Commons has announced the release of the Public Domain Mark. Artists and others are using multiple images from the web for just about every conceivable purpose including making artwork. Now, the new mark can be attached to images that are free of copyright and are a part of the public domain.

• When a fan on Twitter who enjoyed it asked where he could purchase the print version, Pak responded by saying “Digital only at the moment. We’re printing a trade later in the year and distributing for FREE at fests/conventions.”

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• This is an open invitation to comment. We strongly encourage feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of OASIS work.

Leftovers

• This post is for all those people out there who don’t know ANYTHING about the publishing industry.

• My students were most troubled by the evidence that the “good” enemies of “bad” freedoms were not just traditional icons like presidents and business leaders, but that many of the most revered abolitionists, progressives, and leaders of the feminist, labor, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the cultures of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the flamboyant gays who brought homosexuality out of the closet.

• Two criminals, Dave Basi (right) and Bob Virk, “wasted millions in public money by clinging for years to their claims of innocence” says the Vancouver Sun.

• But yesterday, they abruptly changed their tunes, finally admitting they’d in effect sold confidential government information centering on the BC Rail bidding process in 2003.

• Retro Thing has been a member of the eBay Partner Network for years. It’s a program that helps websites earn money by linking to eBay auctions, and we’ve used the income to pay some of the costs of running the site.

• We got an email from eBay last week telling us that our account was under review. They demanded a “detailed explanation of how you are driving traffic to eBay, or you risk the termination of your account and 100% reversal of commissions.” They even wanted server logs.

• Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal, in its continuing series of excellent articles about online privacy, released a controversial story about Facebook apps transmitting identification information to outside advertisers — in clear violation of Facebook policies. In response, a number of other media outfits have collectively shrugged their shoulders, maintaining that sending this information happens all the time and no one should be particularly concerned. Did the Journal overreact? Or are others missing the point?

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• We have always been, rightly, sceptical about the various propaganda claims about the annual figures for the financial value of alleged “identity theft / fraud” in the UK.

• These were abused by the previous Labour government in their farcical attempts to “justify” their repressive, mandatory, centralised biometric database National Identity Register scheme (which, as planned, would have been useless against online web or phone based frauds).

• The coalition government has approved a multibillion-pound plan by the intelligence agencies to store details of every online conversation.

• The reemerging Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) means internet providers will be forced to install interception equipment in their networks to capture details of who contacts whom, when, where and how via services such as Facebook, Skype, webmail, and online games.

• Will the courts allow citizens to be stripped of the right to comment anonymously? If you make an anonymous comment expressing your disagreement with a situation like this, can you be sued? Is an opinion slander? Or since it’s published online libel?

• Anonymity can be a powerful tool for good. Whistleblowers can leak information that their consciences dictate ought to be public which often serves the public good.

• EFF recently received new documents as a result of our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the Department of Homeland Security’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the first of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications.

• 7. What are Ben’s views on prison charities or other organisations supposed to represent those in custody? Which ones does he think have their interests at heart and which are just a cash cow for the employees? In other words, who is worth donating to from a prisoners perspective? (Anon)

• A: Oh, come on, that question is just an invitation to upset a lot of organisations!! That I have reservations about the aims and operations of many prison reform groups is something I have written about for many years. Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

• Almost universally, though, they have no impact at all on the lives of prisoners. As originators of researcher or as policy campaigners they may have some influence on a political-policy level, but their connections with prisoners and our interests are pretty tangential.

• The New York Civil Liberties Union and Libertarian activist Antonio Musumeci just won a court case that affirms the right of photographers to take pictures and record video out front of federal courthouses. The US federal government settled the case by apologizing to Musumeci for his arrest, acknowledging that it is legal to record at courthouses, and promising to issue guidelines to federal officers explaining this fact to them.

• Based on the compelling evidence that Dominic has put together, the result of all the liberty-infringing anti-terrorism legislation that has been pushed through in the UK is that we are now, as he put it, “less free and no safer”. This benefits no-one: indeed, it runs the danger of producing the opposite outcome of that intended by alienating the very elements in society that we need to ensure feel an integral and welcome part of our community.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Keep your eyes peeled: There’s a bold new raptor in the sky, eager to pounce on weaselly warming skeptics

Finance

• David J. Stern is a Florida lawyer who operates a foreclosure mill, a firm that foreclosed on more than 70,000 homes last year. According to a deposition from Tammie Mae Kapusta, a former employee, Stern’s firm cut many corners, foreclosing on homes without serving notice, ignoring mortgage payments that would have prevented foreclosure, and “yelling at” employees who talked to homeowners on the phone, because that was “giving them too much time.”

• Mr. Donovan, speaking at a White House news conference, also sought to shift the focus of public concerns about the foreclosure process. He said the administration was more interested in making sure that mortgage companies helped homeowners avoid foreclosure by modifying or replacing unaffordable loans.

• As we all know, there is a major philosophical divide in US politics.

• A Republican plan to rein in the rising cost of Social Security would dramatically reduce retirement benefits for middle- and upper-income Americans, especially those now younger than 25, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the program’s chief actuary.

• The chief judge of New York’s courts on Wednesday imposed a new rule requiring lawyers handling foreclosures to verify that all paperwork is accurate.

• The U.S. economy grew unevenly in early fall, with more than half the regions of the country expanding modestly while others struggled to grow.

• A survey by the Federal Reserve released Wednesday found that seven of the Fed’s 12 regions reported moderate improvements in business activity. Three regions – Philadelphia, Richmond and Cleveland – described economic activity as mixed or steady. Only two regions – Atlanta and Dallas – suggested economic growth was slow.

• Investors around the world are likely to regard new banking rules proposed by an international group of central bankers as a “minimum” standard and will probably force banks to set aside even more capital than required as a buffer against losses, according to one of the regulations’ main authors.

• The news that the largest bond fund in the world, the largest money manager in the world and the New York Federal Reserve are demanding that Bank of America repurchase $47 billion in mortgage bonds is scary stuff. As Daniel Indiviglio says, “these investors aren’t exactly Moe, Larry, and Curly. This is serious.”

• Workers opposed to a higher retirement age blocked roads to airports around France on Wednesday, leaving passengers in Paris dragging suitcases on foot along an emergency breakdown lane.

• Outside the capital, hooded youths smashed store windows amid clouds of tear gas.

• Banking giant Wells Fargo said Wednesday that its business shows no signs of the looming crisis some analysts fear the industry faces from shoddy lending and foreclosure practices.

• “We are confident that our practices, procedures and documentation for both foreclosures and mortgage securitizations are sound and accurate,” chairman and chief executive John Stumpf said in a news release as the bank announced a third-quarter profit of $3.3 billion.

• And yet to hear many people tell it, Radosta – whose home in metro Atlanta is scheduled for foreclosure by Bank of America – is making out like a bandit because there’s a possibility he might get a loan modification.

• The fraud I wrote about then and have continued to write about in this blog will take the banking system and those we bailed out to their knees albeit by the back door. Yes, they committed fraud when originating the loans, they committed fraud when they securitized those loans and committed fraud when they sold those securities to the public. In other words they have been operating what I have consistently called an “organized crime” which should have been – and I hoep will be prosecuted under RICO – The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce four winners of its 2010 Pioneer Awards: transparency activist Steven Aftergood; public domain scholar James Boyle; legal blogger Pamela Jones and the website Groklaw; and e-voting researcher Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, who was recently released on bail after being imprisoned for his security work in India.

• Snap a photo of a sunset with your iPhone and you can upload it to Twitter with a few clicks. But your smartphone might be transmitting more than a pretty photograph. It could be collecting and storing data about your real-time location – and then broadcasting that information when you upload photos onto the Internet.

• The European Commission has adopted a strategy which is aimed at ensuring that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is respected at every stage of the EU legislative process. At the initiative of Commissioner Reding, the intention is to create a template to make it easier for the Commission to measure its own respect for the Charter and, by extension, to give the public a clearer yardstick by which to measure the actions of the Commission.

• The case of Healthcare Locums is sadly not alone with many firms sharing the company’s apparently slap-dash attitude to ensuring the safety of data relating to their customers and employees. While the company has, on this occasion, escaped a large fine for their infrigement of the Data Protection Act this case should serve as an example to all firms of the absolute need for solid data protection policies.

• Skim through the photos on Flickr or Photobucket, and you’ll find pictures of cats pawing at living-room sofas, children playing in backyards and mothers gardening at home.

• Dig a little deeper, and you can unearth the exact locations of many of those homes, embedded in data within the pictures.

• The UK Attorney General has said that operators of websites should be responsible for comments made by visitors to their sites that prejudice trials. Dominic Grieve said that he wants “further discussions” on site owners’ liability.

• Speaking to the Criminal Bar Association, Grieve, a Conservative MP, said that protecting the fairness of trials was growing increasingly difficult as news outlets proliferated.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Protecting the Internet against content discrimination by broadband carriers is crucial to protecting First Amendment rights in the age of modern technology, the American Civil Liberties Union said today in a new report on network neutrality. In the report, “Net Neutrality 101,” the ACLU urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create strong policies that prevent Internet gatekeepers from exploiting their role for private gain. The report characterizes the need for “net neutrality” as a leading free speech issue of our time.

• Mobile is a rapidly growing and potentially major element of the future Internet, and its environment cannot be sensibly considered in isolation from fixed networks [2]. A note on terminology: Europe uses the term Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) while the United States uses ‘wireless’ Internet Service Providers (ISPs) [3]. ‘Wireless’ is somewhat more open in the United States. In Europe, mobile has always made special pleading for forms of self-regulation, as we will see. The article introduces mobile broadband, then considers net neutrality in the fixed environment including the new laws passed in November 2009 in the European Parliament, before considering the mobile net neutrality debate, the degree of price control regulation exerted on European mobiles and the MNOs’ vigorous rear-guard anti-regulation defence. Finally, I look at the effects of this regulatory asymmetry and whether MNO calls for mobile to be treated differently from other ISPs can be justified. I conclude by examining what the effect of price and content control on mobile is likely to be for incentives for fixed ISPs and produce a result that I describe as the ‘fixed’ strategy.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Europe has promised at the “highest levels” to fix laws that caused generic medicine seizures in the Netherlands, the Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry said today. The minister is in Geneva for meetings on the ongoing Doha Round trade liberalisation talks at the World Trade Organization.

• “The actions that were taken were not only TRIPS plus but TRIPS illegal,” Minister Anand Sharma told journalists at the WTO, referring to the 1994 WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, as well as to delays in generic drug shipments in 2008 (IPW, WHO, 5 June 2009)

• Over the next few weeks, I’ll be placing the spotlight on the many contributions in From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda. My substantive contribution focuses on the legal requirements to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties. With the treaties dating back to the 1990s the issue may seem dated, yet it still resonates today. Within a domestic context, the government has identified ratification of the WIPO Internet treaties as one of Bill C-32’s chief goals. Internationally, the 1990s WIPO debate was re-enacted this year during the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations, with the U.S. again failing to convince its negotiating partners to adopt its implementation approach for anti-circumvention.

• My article examines the issue from four perspectives: the plain language of the statutory requirements, the legislative history behind the inclusion of anti-circumvention provisions within the treaty, state practice in implementing those requirements, and scholarly analysis of the treaty obligations.

Copyrights

• Pirate Parties International reportedly discussing plans for a high-altitude balloon that would host an airborne file-sharing site, placing it well above the reach of copyright laws and enforcement groups.

• File-sharers have always had a flair for the dramatic, and the latest effort by Pirate Parties International (PPI) lives up to this longtime characterization. For yesterday a group of PPI’s members began discussing plans for a high-altitude balloon that would host an airborne file-sharing site, placing it well above the reach of pesky copyright laws and enforcement groups.

• Anyone introduced to the word “Copyleft” in that film won’t understand what Copyleft actually means in terms of licenses.

• Entanet says it thinks disconnecting people from the Internet is not a “proportionate punishment” for illegal file-sharing, and points out that an IP address is not an accurate way of identifying whose responsible.

• Last week Ireland’s High Court sided with Irish ISP UPC in its battle with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), Justice Peter Charleton ruling that Irish law doesn’t require ISPs to identify and disconnect illegal file-sharers from the Internet as the IRMA had demanded.

• One sign of this: The question of copyright seems to weigh heavily on just about everyone’s mind. (Keep in mind, of course, the self-selection of those with whom I have talked.) Copyright is only perceived as an obstacle if you are intent on maximizing access to the works of human intellect and creativity. If you are afraid of what open access means, then copyright looks like a bulwark. But, if you are confident that we together — with the invaluable aid of librarians, among others — can overall steer ourselves right, then the current copyright regime looks like a fear-based reaction.

• The Las Vegas Review-Journal online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign sustained a setback Tuesday when a judge granted a real estate agent’s motion for dismissal, ruling his posting of part of a Review-Journal story on his website amounted to fair use under copyright law.

• But in another case involving a Review-Journal story on Wednesday, copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC received a boost when a second judge denied a motion to dismiss and authorized the parties to engage in evidence-gathering through discovery.

• Copyright and fair use expert Peter Friedman has grappled with this in the past as well, saying that there are some cases where fair use is easy to determine… a statement he later had to backtrack on when the example he used in that original article — a case where he insisted the fair use call was an easy one went the other way.

• Michael Scott recently pointed us to the latest draft of a paper by law professor Ned Snow on how fair use should be viewed in the legal system. He’s written similar papers before, but he focuses in on two key points. The first is that until the mid-80s to early-90s, it “fair use” was considered mostly a “matter of fact” rather than a “matter of law.” As such, it was often for juries to decide, rather than judges. However, in the last few decades that’s flipped almost entirely, and it’s exceedingly rare to find a court that views fair use as a matter of fact, rather than a matter of law. That is, the judge will decide, not the jury.

• John Bennett post links to an interesting article on copyright as a way of infringing upon free speech. While I agree on the substantive conclusion (the power attributed to copyright holders does infringe on free speech nowadays) I am not sure that the issue can be addressed in a satisfactory way by simply advocating a Common Law (CL) approach instead of a Statutory one (SL). At the end, this seems the eternal debate between CL and SL and both evidence and logic leave the issue quite open. Until a judge does not exceed the established boundaries the CL approach tends to leave more to to fair use and less to its opposite. But once a judge rules otherwise … well, we are up the old creek that John Belushi made so famous (did he have a copyright on the joke?)

• About a year and a half ago I released my film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. That license allows truly free distribution, including commercial use, as long as the free license remains in place. But my experience is that most people see the words “Creative Commons” and simply assume the license is Non-Commercial – because the majority of Creative Commons licenses they’ve seen elsewhere have been Non-Commercial.

• This article explores the journal publishing industry in order to shed light on the overall economic consequences of copyright in markets. Since the rationale for copyright is among others to promise some market power to the holder of the successful copyrighted item, it also provides incentives to preserve and extend market power. A regular trait of copyright industries is high concentration and the creation of large catalogues of copyrights in the hands of incumbents. This outcome can be observed as the aggregation of rights and is one of the pivotal strategies for obtaining or extending market power, consistently with findings in other cases. Journal publishing is no different in this respect from other copyright industries, and in the last decade has experienced a similar trajectory, leading to a highly concentrated industry in which a handful of large firms increasingly control a substantial part of the market. It also provides a clear example of the effect of copyright dynamics on market structure, suggesting that a different attitude should be taken in lawmaking and law enforcement.

ACTA

• Copyfighting rapper Dan Bull (he of Dear Lily Allen fame) has just released a new track, “Death of ACTA,” about the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a privately negotiated super-copyright treaty.

• Dan says that the “terrifying implications” of ACTA inspired him to write the song. ACTA has been negotiated behind closed doors, with no involvement of our elected representatives.

• The ACTA negotiations were launched in June 2008, based on a concept introduced by Japan in the preparation of the 2006 G8 Summit and later endorsed by the US. There were 11 rounds of negotiations.

• Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are a key asset of the EU, ensuring its leading role in the “knowledge economy”. The EU can only remain competitive, if it can rely on innovation, creativity, quality, and brand exclusivity. These are some of our main comparative advantages on the world market, and they are all protected by intellectual property rights. Only, the means of adequately enforcing those rights in our main export markets to date are limited.

• Copyright is a term that in the United States describes the laws that regulate the use and distribution of “original works of authorship.” The types of activities and expressions protected by copyright have expanded over the years, particularly due to technology, but also due to the lobbying by various interested parties. The current systems of registration of copyrighted works in the United includes the following catagories:

• 1. literary works 2. musical works, including any accompanying words 3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music 4. pantomimes and choreographic works 5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works 6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works 7. sound recordings 8. architectural works

• On October 19, 2010, Senators Bernard Sanders (I-VT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have written to David Kappos, the Director of the USPTO, asking for an assessment of conflicts between the October 2010 ACTA text, and U.S. law.

• On October 19, 2010, Senators Bernard Sanders (I-VT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have written to David Kappos, the Director of the USPTO, asking for an assessment of conflicts between the October 2010 ACTA text, and U.S. law.

• The MEPs from the Green Group in the European Parliament ask crucial technical questions about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement as “priority questions”. These questions address the tip of an iceberg concerning technical issues with the ACTA, there is much more that can be raised. Any Member of the European Parliament is entitled to ask written and oral questions to the institutions which have to be answered. MEPs are more restricted towards filing priority questions which have to be answered on short notice by the institutions.

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