● 10.22.10

● Links 22/10/2010: Linux 2.6.37 Preview, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 10:15 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that the LPIC-1 certification program for Linux professionals has been accepted as a nationally recognized IT accreditation for college students at secondary schools and technical colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. LPI’s affiliate, LPI-UK worked in co-operation with e-skills UK to ensure this initiative. In addition, the two organizations are working in partnership with the Scottish Qualifications Authority to recognize LPIC-1 as a nationally accepted award and SCQF Credit within Scotland.

• Every Linux user has been new at some point, and unless you’ve got a history of UNIX administration, the transition was likely a bit daunting. Many people began learning Linux before sites like Google and StackExchange made it easy to find answers, and ended up having to figure everything out in their own. While inconvenient, this approach can force you to challenge yourself and learn things about the system that you might otherwise never find out.

• I just wanted to make a point that no, Mac is not the most advanced OS in the world. On the contrary it appears to me like one of the least capable OSes from among Windows, BSD and Linux.

• If you are a Systems Administrator, the refrain the network is down is routine. Depending on the sophistication of your users, it might be a more specific lament, such as the Internet is broken or email is unavailable. If you have really sophisticated users, you might actually get a real error message to work with. And if you work in a large organization, the level of sophistication could be all over the map.

Desktop

• Public administrations in the Axarquia region in Spain autonomous region of Andalusia are making steady progress in their migration to a complete open source desktop, according to Ramón Ramón Sánchez, lead consultant assisting the local government.

Audiocasts/Shows

Ballnux

• Verizon Wireless will launch the Samsung Galaxy Tab on Nov. 11 at a steep $600, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Samsung unveiled a seven-inch “SMT-i9100″ Android tablet aimed at Japan, MSI is postponing a Windows-based tablet in favor of an Android model due in 1Q 2011, and Lenovo is postponing its “LePad” tablet until next summer, waiting for Android’s “Honeycomb” release, say reports.

• Miguel writes that his Samsung monitor stopped working, but it has a 3-year warranty. He contacted Samsung to see if they could help him. They could not, but not for any mundane reason. Samsung insists that his monitor is from Canada, and they can’t provide warranty service to Miguel because he doesn’t live in Canada. Where did he buy his monitor? Um, a Sam’s Club store in Missouri.

Kernel Space

• After years of being outside of the mainline, the AppArmor security system is now finally part of the main Linux kernel.

• Linux founder Linus Torvalds formally released the 2.6.36 kernel this week nearly three months after the release of the 2.6.35 kernel.

• While the Linux 2.6.36 kernel was released yesterday, we already have our eyes towards the Linux 2.6.37 kernel to see what new features this next kernel will bring, any performance changes that may come as a result (we continue to benchmark the kernel everyday), and this will likely be the kernel version used by Ubuntu 11.04 and other early 2011 Linux distributions. While we have already reported on some of the features that should be merged into the Linux 2.6.37 kernel, there’s at least three major features we have been looking forward to that will be sadly missing from this kernel.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that OpenLogic has become its newest member.

Graphics Stack

• This evening AMD has officially launched their Radeon HD 6800 series, which currently includes the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards. These are just two of several next-generation graphics cards to be launched over the coming weeks and months for consumers while next year the FirePro derivatives for professional/workstation customers should come around too based upon this architecture. How though does the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series play with Linux?

• While Intel has not even rolled out their Sandy Bridge processors yet, their OSTC developers have been working on support for this next-generation micro-architecture with integrated graphics core under Linux for many months. It was back in February when we originally reported on Sandy Bridge GPU support coming to Linux.

• While Cairo is frequently mentioned on Phoronix, mentioned less but used by Cairo (as well as the X.Org Server) for pixel manipulation is the Pixman library. Soeren Sandmann announced a new release candidate of Pixman 0.19.6 this afternoon and it has a few interesting changes worth noting.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• CrossOver Games 9.2 brings support for the Civilization 5 game under Linux and Mac OS X, with this turn-based strategy lacking a native game client for either platform. When it comes to CrossOver 9.2 itself, it’s been upgraded against the Wine 1.2.1 release, as said in the change-log.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• While they are not busy doing (crazy) research, most scientists do a lot of technical writing: papers, presentations, posters, reports. Such writing is usually accompanied by large number of references; managing them by hand can be tedious and long. That is why scientists use bibliography managers. In the FOSS world, a popular choice is BibTeX, a complement to the LaTeX typesetting system. Along with BibTeX, front-ends are used to simplify addition, modification and removal of bibliography.

• In this last (for now) post about the KDE Netbook Desktop, I want to focus on what it is like to actually use it on a typical netbook. I will be using my Samsung N150 Plus, running PCLinuxOS 2010.7. This is a very typical netbook, with an Atom N450 CPU, 1 GB memory, 10″ display, 1024×600 resolution. It is only important to note here that, unlike the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, this is not the only netbook configuration that KDE Netbook will run on. It does not require enhanced graphic support of any kind, and it does a pretty good job of detecting on its own what kind of video capability your netbook has, and adjusting its desktop effects accordingly.

• Want some more fun? Did you know that Special Window Settings are infinitely recursive? You can set Special Window Settings on the Special Window Settings “Special Window Settings” window! It’s do-your-head-in stuff and not particularly useful, but it brings me back to my original question: is KWin getting just too complicated for the average user?

• I’ve been impressed with the advancements the KDE development team has made with version 4.5. Not only is the desktop environment light-years ahead of where I expected it to be (after the abysmal 4.0 release), it’s has turned out to be a desktop that any Linux user would be happy to use. It’s as stable and as responsive as GNOME and as flexible as just about any desktop.

• But beyond the desktop itself, KDE has a number of excellent tools. If you’ve never tried, you don’t know what you’re missing. So I thought I’d highlight some of these tools and maybe pique your interest. These tools vary in topic and task and should appeal to a wide range of user types.

GNOME Desktop

• Divergence IV – “A New Hope” is a very cool looking new theme (updated today) which gives a slick look to your desktop. I’m not an Emerald fan, but the truth is you can do something as beautiful as the Divergence IV – “A New Hope” Emerald themes with Metacity.

• Desktop gadget shows pictures in your desktop from many sources online image hosting or locally from directories located in your hard drive.

Distributions

• I was running Unity Linux 2010.2 with KDE 4.5 for around the last month. I really like what has been done there but it seemed a bit heavy for my Gateway M250…the CPU fan was always on which told me it was always in high use.

• I checked out Gnome 2.30 on Unity and found it to be delightful on my resources; however, Gnome doesn’t make me feel warm and tingly when I use it. I find myself frustrated with its lack of configuration options…specifically, right click menu. So I rolled my own using the base install of Unity. That worked quite nicely but lacked much of the polish I became accustomed to when using KDE. What I wanted and needed was a happy medium. I found that happy place with TinyMe Linux.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat took another step closer to the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with its recent delivery of the release candidate of the operating system.

Fedora

• Even though I’m actively testing Ubuntu 10.10 (installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive) and find it extremely compatible with my current hardware (Lenovo G555), I expect I’ll be sticking with Fedora 13 for at least the next few months.

• Things I’ll be looking for include return of a working open-source ati/radeon driver (not exactly holding my breath, am I), newer kmod-catalyst packages from RPMFusion (who knows when/if this will happen) and seeing how everything involved in this Fedora 13 build works the next time there’s a kernel update (and there hasn’t been one for awhile).

Debian Family

• When I started working on the new source package format, I set out to get rid of all the known limitations and to integrate a patch system in dpkg-source. I wanted to clear up the situation so that learning packaging only requires to learn one patch system and would not require modifying debian/rules to use it. I picked quilt because it was popular, came with a large set of features, and was not suffering from NIH syndrome. This lead to the “3.0 (quilt)” source format.

• I also created “3.0 (native)” as a distinct format. “1.0″ was able to generate two types of source packages (native and non-native) but I did not want to continue with this mistake of mixing both in a single format.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In many ways, though, this release is pretty cool. The visual effects are pretty cool, but not so over-the-top that they distract. Click the desktop icon; see all your desktops.

• There are a lot of cool things to this interface; more than I can mention. I love using it, even though I dislike certain things about it. It’s certainly a better interface than Jolicloud’s monstrous HTML5 experiment. I’m not sure whether I’m going to switch back to Ubuntu’s desktop mode anytime soon, but I’ll be sure to let you all know of any quality changes.

• The Ubuntu team is trying out a lot of new things here, and a lot of it works really well. Some of it is pretty slow, which may frustrate those of us with lower-grade netbooks, but overall the design shows a lot of promise. I’m going to use this as long as I can, and am very excited to see how the interface progresses. If you’re interested, head over to Ubuntu.com and download the Netbook version. You might like it.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• MeeGo utilizes the Qt (pronounced “Cute”) application development environment. Nokia has announced that it has streamlined its development environment across multiple device platforms. From now on all development for Symbian and Meego should be based on Qt.

• The most important aspect of this announcement is geared around developers. When you develop an application within the Qt development framework it can easily be deployed to Nokia devices running Symbian and/or Meego. This should lead to many more applications being available for both platforms, richer user interfaces and more visually engaging applications.

Android

• According to a source close to CNET, Barnes and Noble will be making an announcement on Tuesday October 26 to unveil a new Android-based full-color touch-screen e-reader.

Free Software/Open Source

• Frostwire is a powerful P2P file sharing program which is the supposedly the best free alternative for Limewire for Windows, Mac and Linux OS.

• We continue to see evidence that open source software is helping vendors expand and grow globally. The latest announcement from French BPM vendor BonitaSoft, which is establishing U.S. offices in Boston and San Francisco, is a prime example. We covered BonitaSoft’s expansion and approach in July, which leverages more than 300,000 downloads of the software and presence in more than 20 countries.

• Another example of an open source vendor expansion and growth in North America is OTRS, a help desk and ITIL service management software and support vendor from Germany that is also growing its presence in the U.S. and rest of North America.

VMB_ware

• Since Zimbra Desktop supports IMAP, I went ahead and configured it to connect to my Gmail account and put it through its paces. The verdict? It has some improving to do.

• Oracle may own the Java trademark, but VMware is touting its own Spring framework as the best programming model for enterprise Java developers.

• “In the innovation of the Java programming model, I think Spring really plays a leading role there,” said Rod Johnson, who is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s SpringSource product division, as well as the creator of the first version of Spring.

• As reported recently in the news and elsewhere, there are two issues currently facing the Foundation that merit a response from the ASF.

• At the last JCP Executive Committee meeting in Bonn, Germany, Oracle announced that it will not offer a TCK license for Java SE (for the Apache Harmony project) without the so-called “Field of Use” (FOU) restriction. We believe that this is a final decision from Oracle and that there are no further opportunities for productive discussion on this topic.

• To that end, the Apache Harmony project is evaluating its project goals and future, as Oracle’s decision blocks Harmony from achieving the original community goal of a TCK-tested, spec-compliant, Apache-licensed implementation of Java SE. The ASF fully supports the Apache Harmony community as it moves forward, past this regretful decision on the part of Oracle. With respect to the many other projects in the ASF that implement JSRs, we remain committed to those projects as they are, and any new projects that wish to implement JSRs that have appropriate TCK licensing terms.

Web Browsers

• The “Chromeless” project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• For those not in the know, SVG is a family of 2D XML-based image formats that can be created as either static or dynamic images, similar to what you can do with GIFs.

• Why is the Google’s Demo Slam trophy a golden Opera logo?

Mozilla

• Last week we moved ahead of Apple’s Nitro engine and today we move ahead of Google’s V8 engine. That gives Mozilla’s Spidermonkey JavaScript engine (including the Tracemonkey and JägerMonkey JITs) the fastest Sunspider scores on the planet!

Databases

• To properly evaluate the strengths of PostgreSQL and MySQL, the two leading open-source databases, one must look at the history and pedigree of each, and their feature functionality and performance. By comparing and contrasting PostgreSQL and MySQL here, Knowledge Center contributor Jim Mlodgenski guides you to a more informed decision about which open-source database is right for your enterprise deployment.

Oracle

• Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m90 is available for download.

• Pavel Janik, a developer with Openoffice.org said during the meeting that, “I (maybe I’m naive) expect that people with “conflict of interest” will automatically step down.”

CMS

• Drupal is a battle-hardened soldier that has faced its enemies, looked them in the eyes, and defeated them with relatively minimal effort. Drupal ranks amongst the elite of the elite, like Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress tower like titans over all other content management systems: does ANYONE still use Mambo? I love Joomla and WordPress, but my favorites CMS, by far, is Drupal. As most of you know, I use it on both of my websites. I am excited by the fact that the upcoming version, Drupal 7, is coming ever closer to becoming a reality. In this article, I will give a brief history of Drupal, and I will relay what I know about the upcoming release.

Business

• Belgian open source application vendor OpenERP has set up its first overseas business office in San Jose, Calif. Traditionally, the company has worked with reseller partners in the United States and 54 other countries worldwide.

BSD

Project Releases

• Open source telephony vendor Digium released the newest version of its popular free VoIP software Asterisk today, and it’s packed with more than 200 enhancements, security updates, and new features — including calendar integration and support for Google Voice and Google Talk. Asterisk’s fully- featured PBX includes call waiting, hold and transfer, caller ID, and other useful tools so it’s a great option for small businesses that need to watch costs.

Openness/Sharing

• For the last month we have been developing an Open, distributed, automated Knowledgebase for computational chemistry. Millions of valuable data files are created each year – almost none are published. Yet they are amongst the best, the most reproducible science in any discipline. The give believable results about the real world.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• To create a new era of accountability for government spending and to spur innovation and economic growth, a Liberal government will launch the single largest effort of government openness and transparency in Canadian history through the Liberal Open Government Initiative.

• As for the oddities in banning him from using computers with viruses, trojans or keystroke monitors, which he could potentially violate without even knowing it, the court changed the terms to say that he can’t knowingly use a computer with any of those things on it. Unfortunately, they still include “encryption” on the list. I find it troubling that the court is okay with demonizing encryption (and, to a lesser extent, “hacking” tools) when there are plenty of legitimate reasons to do so. Does that mean he can’t even encrypt his email?

• Let me introduce you to His Holiness Sant Baba Jeet Singh Ji Maharaj.

• His Holiness is the “Third Holy Saint”.

• This is apparently very important.

• He is not the second Holy Saint; not the fourth; and fifth is right out.

• And what does His Holiness do?

• He is suing a journalist for libel.

• At the beginning of the year, Ceglowski’s website might have had 3,000 visitors a day and 20 reports of bedbug sightings. Now, the site gets up to 40,000 visitors and 100 new reports a day. (That’s down from a peak of 50,000 visitors a day in August.)

• Intended or not, bedbugregistry.com has become a source of news. For some, it’s an example of the potential of crowdsourcing, where thousands of anecdotal reports come together to identify clusters of bedbugs in cities around the country. That relies on the assumption, though, that the information reported is accurate. And that gives some people pause.

• Last week, we wrote about The NY Times threatening Kachingle, over a silly publicity stunt that Kachingle pulled. As we explained, Kachingle, which is a voluntary micropayment-type solution (somewhat similar to Flattr), for blog and journalism content, had put up a site where it encouraged the NY Times not to set up the paywall it’s planning. To “convince” the NY Times not to bother, it wanted people to contribute to the various NY Times’ bloggers via Kachingle, and Kachingle would use the amount raised to try to let the NY Times know there were alternatives. Of course, no one really believed that the NY Times would stop its paywall because of this. It’s just a silly publicity stunt.

• UK officials have prohibited the Kentucky Kernel from distributing newspapers at Commonwealth Stadium before football games, a move First Amendment lawyers call unconstitutional.

• On Sept. 18, UK Athletics officials stopped eight Kernel advertising staff members who came to the stadium’s parking lot before the game against Akron to distribute issues of the free student publication, Kernel Student Advertising Manager Sarah Geegan said.

• What happens when a Post staffer uses the official Twitter account to lash out at a critic? A memo.

• Starting October 16, all Verizon Communications landline, FiOS, and DSL customers will have to pay a $3.50 fee if they pay their bills by credit or debit card. (Currently there are no plans to apply to same to wireless customers). The only way to get around it is to sign up for auto-billing. Verizon says the new fee is because they have a new vendor for processing credit and debit transactions, and they’re passing on the lack of savings to you.

• Alan sez, “It looks like the Canadian government is making life harder for scientists who want to talk to the media about their work. Presumably the science is inconvenient for those in power. In response, the scientists’ union has put up a web site to inform the public directly.”

• Canada’s Tory government is notoriously hostile to science (especially climate science, which poses an existential threat to their power base in the planet-killing tar-sands). But a state-imposed gag-order on scientists, putting their ability to communicate to the press in the hands of petty bureaucrats, is beyond the pale even for them. Why is it that so many “small government neocons” love big government solutions to their embarrassing little problems?

• As an undergraduate at Sacramento State, Ryan Stevens founded NoteUtopia in order to provide a mechanism for students to buy, sell, and share their university course notes. Stevens graduated last spring and NoteUtopia officially launched in August. But less than six weeks into the startup’s history, NoteUtopia has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California State University system, charging that the company violates a provision of the state education code.

Science

• India’s Department of Atomic Energy has been given clearance to build a multi-million dollar underground facility to study particles called neutrinos.

• The environment and forests ministry gave the go-ahead for the observatory to be built in the Bodi West hills on the coast of southern Tamil Nadu state.

• There is water on the moon … along with a long list of other compounds, including, mercury, gold and silver. That’s according to a more detailed analysis of the chilled lunar soil near the moon’s South Pole, released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday.

• “We thought the moon was bone dry,” said planetary geologist Peter Schultz of Brown University, lead author of one of the studies. “All the books on the moon say that the moon is dry, and now we have to rewrite that chapter.”

• A nasty trade dispute appears to have prompted Chinese customs officials to block shipments of rare earth minerals to the U.S.

• The move underscores a deepening U.S. vulnerability because of its dependence upon China for tech-crucial rare earth minerals (also known as rare earth elements). Small but significant amounts of the minerals go into creating everything from PCs and cellphones to wind turbines and hybrid cars, as well as U.S. military technologies such as missile guidance systems.

Security

• Linux has security problems like any other operating system. Most of them aren’t that big a deal though. Many of the more serious ones require local user access to cause any real trouble, and except for Linux desktop users that’s not a real concern. The latest Linux security problem with Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) though is a real problem.

• The US website for anti-virus provider Kaspersky was caught pushing malware to its users for three and a half hours on Sunday after it was compromised by criminal hackers.

• Of course, right before I had read that article, I had been reading an article where the reporter spoke to an energy grid expert, who called such claims “a bunch of hooey.” The guy, Seth Blumsack, along with a couple of colleagues, had been hearing all these stories about how “at risk” the electric grid was, so they went looking for the evidence. After looking at the claims and predictions, they realized that those claiming the electrical grid was at risk didn’t actually appear to understand the physics of how electric grids actually work.

• Countries are already using cyber warfare techniques to attack each other and need to be vigilant round the clock to protect computer systems, the head of Britain’s communications spy agency says.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• We’ve discussed, a few times, the issues with border patrol/customs officials in the US searching laptops at the border. The reason it doesn’t make much sense is that the purpose of border patrol is to make sure nothing bad gets into a country, but the content on your laptop can easily get into the country via the internet, rather than at the border. And even bigger concern, of course, is that people store everything on their laptops. If you’re packing your suitcase for a trip somewhere, you pack only the things you want to take. Everything you bring is effectively “opt-in.” However, on your laptop, you already have everything. If anything, you might (though I doubt many people do) delete some stuff to avoid having it searched. In other words, unlike your suitcase, the data on your laptop is more of an “opt-out” situation.

• Rather than simply encouraging a considerate approach to the environment, school children are being actively encouraged to sign up as “eco detectives” in order to identify and personally harrass individuals who have failed to clean up their dog’s mess, dropped litter or such like.

• In an online forum for pilots of the private jet charter service ExpressJet, Houston-based pilot Michael Roberts relates the disturbing tale of what happened when he recently refused to consent to an “Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) system” (aka “backscatter scan,” aka “naked scan” aka “the porn machine”) at the TSA checkpoint. He also refused a manual pat-down from TSA agents, after already going through a metal detector, if I’m reading this correctly.

Finance

• One day as Wall Street was crashing, President George W. Bush had the temerity to plaintively ask his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson: “How did this happen?” Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs before taking the Treasury job, remarks in his memoir: “It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked—after all, we were the ones responsible.”

• Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

• Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

• Russian spy Anna Chapman is making headlines this week for posing provocatively in a photo spread in the Russian edition of Maxim magazine, but she equally deserves notoriety for landing a job as an IT security official in a Russian bank despite glaring gaps in her technical knowledge.

• Plaintiff fell behind on her car payments. The lender turned the debt over to a collection agency that used technology and some remarkably poor judgment in an attempt to get paid.

• The first bad decision was to use a caller-ID spoofer to make it look like the collection call was coming from plaintiff’s mother in law. The next not-smart use of technology was to access plaintiff’s MySpace page, learn that plaintiff had a daughter, and to use that fact to intimidate plaintiff. There was evidence in the record to suggest that the collection agency’s “investigator” said to plaintiff, after mentioning plaintiff’s “beautiful daughter,” something to the effect of “wouldn’t it be terrible if something happened to your kids while the sheriff’s department was taking you away?”

• Two Norwegian day traders who hoodwinked a trading system in the US for their own financial gain, have been handed suspended prison sentences.

• The Norwegian traders, Svend Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby, were handed suspended prison sentences and fines for market manipulation after outsmarting the trading system of Timber Hill, which is a unit of US-based Interactive Brokers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• You can probably guess quite easily, but if not: These emails were all from PR people I didn’t know and contained material that was supposedly embargoed.

• Except that I had never agreed to any such embargo.

• If your inbox is anything like mine, it is full of embargoed releases. (So full, in fact, that I have to spend time most days cleaning it out so I don’t exceed my corporate email quota.) Most of them are from journals, societies, institutions, and companies with which I have had some relationship or agreement.

• Then there are emails like the ones above.

• Sorry, folks, but that’s not an embargo that deserves to stick. It happens that we wouldn’t cover any of the stories being pitched in those three emails, but what if we had wanted to? I would have felt no obligation to follow them.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Facebook and its developers could bring in as much as $1 billion this year; only a bozo would think that Mark Zuckerberg will give that up to protect the privacy of his users

• There are at least five U.S. government efforts to regulate data and online privacy, according to a new U.S. government internet policy official, who said that some kind of privacy regulation appears likely.

• The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act would create a blacklist of domain names that the government thinks are involved in copyright infringement. Internet service providers and others would be required to block any domains on the list.

• Google violated the privacy of thousands of Canadians when it inadvertently collected personal information about them with its Street View mapping cars, the country’s privacy commissioner has ruled.

• In the wake of the finding, influential privacy groups expressed concern that no legal action had yet been taken against the search giant.

• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) today declared illegal any digital canon which is being imposed indiscriminately on all equipment and materials used for reproduction and not only that which presumably can only be used for private copying , as applied in Spain. Spain imposes a “canón digital”, a small tax on all digital media (CD’s, tapes, DVD’s and associated equipment) which is given to the General Society of Authors for copyright payment in case the media is used to copy work.

• A Supreme Court judge in New York City has given Google 15 days to provide the court with whatever identity information it has on commenter(s) that left a defamatory comments on YouTube videos of Columbia Business School grad and former actress and model Carla Franklin, including the word “whore”.

• The plight of Iranian “blogfather” Hossein Derakhshan, known by his online handle Hoder, is a chilling reminder that there are still places where the exercise of one’s freedom of expression could be a capital offense. According to officials in Iran, Canada is one of those places.

• Derakhshan, an Iranian-born Canadian citizen, has been in prison in Iran for the past 22 months, after being arrested shortly after returning to his country of birth under suspicious circumstances in 2008. Late last month, it was reported that Derakhshan had been sentenced to 19 years in prison. One activist who wished to remain anonymous told me that this is the longest prison sentence given in Iran for a speech-crime since the post-election crackdown that began in June 2009. But the sentence is still a victory of sorts: There were credible rumors that prosecutors had been pushing for the death penalty.

• The company is far more interested in making you into better bait for advertisers and visitors who click on ads. A side benefit is “a smarter, personalized Web” that is not the Web at all, but rather an indoor commercial habitat with some nice conveniences.

• An unmistakable strain of compassion runs through Cindy Cohn’s voice when she talks about the plight of Internet users she says are wrongly accused of copyright violations or tech companies she believes are being abused by large entertainment conglomerates.

• The lawsuit alleges that Zynga, maker of six of the top 10 Facebook games, collected and shared the IDs of 218 million users, in violation of federal law and terms of service. It seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction preventing the alleged practice from continuing. The suit was filed in US District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Nancy Graf of St. Paul, Minnesota. It seeks class action status so other Facebook users may also be represented.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Google has reached an agreement to build its first ultra-high-speed broadband network near Stanford University, the search giant announced on Thursday.

• Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Britain are having a bad year. First, the Digital Economy Act passed into law requiring ISPs to monitor and pay for part of the illegal downloading prosecuting process. Then, Net Neutrality is gaining steam and if an expected decision is made by the EU shortly it will require ISPs to fundamentally change the way they do business. And now, as of yesterday, ISPs will be forced to retain all of our digital data on behalf of the Coalition Government.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As part of the latest effort by the US to get China to respect US patent, copyright and trademark laws, it’s apparently sent Attorney General Eric Holder to Asia to make speeches that are blatantly ridiculous. You can read the text of the speech that Holder recently gave in Hong Kong, and try not to gag at the claims he makes that are either blatantly misleading or simply outright falsehoods. The Attorney General is supposed to enforce the law — not lie to protect the interests of a few companies.

• After kicking it off with (yet another) conflation of serious counterfeiting issues (that actually put people’s lives in danger) with file sharing of music, movies and software, he simply parrots the totally debunked BSA’s stats on unauthorized software…

• Case in point, Elan Arbitsman points us to the news that Twitter simply handed over the username @NFLLockout to the NFL Players Association. Some other folks had registered the name and used it to discuss a possible NFL lockout. After they had done so, the NFLPA had registered the domain name NFLLockout.com, and then sought to get the Twitter handle from the guys. They offered to give them some stuff (apparently a life-sized poster or something). When the guys turned this down, the NFLPA went to Twitter, and Twitter just handed them the username. Even worse, Twitter implied that one of the reasons they did so was because the guys tried to “sell” the username — though they say they didn’t try to sell it, they just listened to offers from the NFLPA.

• State ownership of natural resources. Is that capitalist? That’s what we have in America. On state lands—and I used to be an oil and gas lawyer before I went to the dark side—unlike anywhere else in the world that I’m aware of, minerals underneath land are privately owned, as it should be. In every other country, and even outside the states in America, like offshore where the BP accident happened, the MMS, the Minerals Management Service, the federal government basically claims ownership of the minerals under the ground. Then they grant leases and they take a cut. So actually the landlord of the BP disaster was the federal government, but you don’t see them taking the blame for it.

• Everyone thought the question of what rights exist in football fixture lists was settled back in 2004 when the European Court of Justice concluded that the then-new database right did not protect football fixture lists. But a judge has just ruled that they are protected. What now?

• As many in the gambling industry will know, this decision did not stop Football Dataco Limited (and others) from sending out demands for payment for use of football fixture lists.

• Video game company Blizzard often appears to be a study in contrasts. At times, it seems to recognize the changing nature of the technology landscape, embracing scarcities, giving people reasons to buy and even coming out against DRM. But, at the same time, it tried to retroactively ban anonymity in its forums, and has been notoriously litigious, even going after organizations who promote its games.

• A whole bunch of you* sent over the article from humor site Cracked, all about scarcity and abundance in economics. Wait, what? A humor site? Yeah, a humor site. Of course, they don’t officially claim it’s an article about scarcity and abundance in economics (though, they come close). Instead, in true linkbait-fashion it’s called “5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.” Nicely done. Then, it focuses on the idea that the future can be described as FARTS: Forced ARTificial Scarcity.

Copyrights

• The basic details are that comic book artist Steve Lieber discovered that folks at 4chan had scanned in and uploaded every page of his graphic novel Underground. Now, the typical reaction is to freak out, scream “piracy,” whine about “losses” and demand that “something must be done.” But, in a world where obscurity is really a much bigger issue than “piracy,” another option is to actually engage with those fans who liked his work so much that they put in the effort to share it with the world.

• It is almost four years ago that The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, so they could host their site without having to bother about copyright law – an ambitious plan that turned out to be unaffordable. This week, Pirate Parties worldwide started brainstorming about a similarly ambitious plan. Instead of founding their own nation, they want to shoot a torrent site into orbit.

• We’ve been following, with great interest, the antics of Righthaven, the company funded by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which has been suing all sorts of random websites for copyright infringement after posting articles (or even snippets of articles) on their sites, often with a link back. A variety of different defenses have been raised by those sued, with almost all of them claiming fair use — which seemed like a credible claim to us (though, of course, others have disagreed).

• Now, in a pretty big setback for Righthaven’s entire strategy, the first ruling on this question has been made, and… the judge dismissed the case, claiming that it was fair use. As Eric Goldman notes in the article linked here, it’s a bit surprising that the judge ruled fair use so early in the process: “Because the case so clearly lacked merit, the judge prudently is trying to end the case early rather than letting it drag on for months and years, wasting lots of time and money in the process.”

• Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit filed by Disney and Warner Bros. against Triton Media, an ad firm that apparently helped place ads on sites that linked to infringing content (hosted elsewhere). We noted that the lawsuit seemed like a huge reach for a variety of reasons. Nothing in the complaint seemed to indicate that what Triton had done had violated copyright law. Instead, it focused on the various sites for which it provided ads. And, even those sites seemed like a stretch on claims of copyright infringement. The sites didn’t host any infringing content. They just allowed people to post links to content (authorized or not) that was hosted elsewhere. To go after the ad provider for a few of those sites, claiming some fourth or fifth party form of contributory infringement seemed pretty crazy.

• Private copying levies on blank CDs, MP3 players and other digital media are allowed under EU copyright law but only when charged on goods sold to individuals and not those sold to companies, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has said.

• Some European countries allow the unauthorised copying of material that a person legitimately owns, as long as that is for private use. The European Copyright Directive says that this is permitted as long as there is ‘fair compensation’ to the copyright holders.

• I have some ideas that I might have to act upon. One of them is to open a taqueria in Glasgow. There’s no decent Mexican food in Glasgow. And I’ve had this idea for a while, to open a Belle & Sebastian taqueria. You’re laughing, but I’m about to get serious about this. Because this could be the thing that allows me to carry on doing music — to serve a decent taco.

• Motion Picture Association of American President Bob Pisano refers to rising online copyright infringement as an “epidemic,” and that only by disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet can countries “slow the spread of the disease.”

• I always find it fascinating when the MPAA stands before a crowd of bright, intelligent, and critically thinking individuals and proceeds to try and convince them that a wildly successful industry is under immediate threat, and that without decisive and robust action it may be gone forever.

• We’ve been covering the Golan case for a while now. It’s an important case in determining the contours of copyright and the public domain. Many details of the case involve a lot of legal specifics, but the general point was to question whether or not taking works out of the public domain, and putting them under copyright violated the First Amendment. Now, there’s a lot more to it than that, and it would take way too much time to get into all the details. But, basically, due to a trade agreement, certain works that had been considered in the public domain in the US, were put back under copyright. Whether or not that, alone, is that big of a deal wasn’t the key point. Realistically, the point of the case was to get a court to finally admit that there were ways in which Congress could change copyright law that violated the First Amendment.

• While the COICA bill introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy and Orin Hatch was initially designed to be rushed through Congress, after people pointed out that it pretty clearly violated due process and prohibitions against prior restraint, the Senators realized they needed to hold off for a bit. Everyone has expected that it will be back on the agenda after the midterm elections, and now a bunch of companies and organizations, including the RIAA and the Chamber of Commerce have asked Leahy to move forward with the bill, immediately following the elections.

• More than a decade after Joe DiMaggio’s death, his friend and attorney Morris Engelberg is still playing hardball with anyone seeking to exploit the Yankee Clipper’s love for Marilyn Monroe.

• Gene Simmons, frontman of the band KISS, is hardly impressed with the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on GeneSimmons.com – and indirectly – SimmonsRecords.com. In fact, according to a news post made to his site yesterday, Gene is threatening legal action against the perpetrators, along with posting their names and pictures online.

• SteveMars sez, “Every photo image library got this by email today. ‘We are sending you an email regarding images of Stonehenge in your fotoLibra website. Please be aware that any images of Stonehenge can not be used for any commercial interest, all commercial interest to sell images must be directed to English Heritage.’ Here is one image library’s response:”…

• Why, why, why is it still necessary for every single DVD that I buy to have the F.B.I. warning at the beginning? Why can’t they just put the warning on the DVD box? Oh wait— they already do. So why, EVERY TIME I want to watch a movie or TV show that I legitimately purchased, do I have to spend 30 seconds being told yet again that, if I choose to copy the DVD, the F.B.I. is going to come after me?

• It’s an odd way of saying, “Thanks for buying this DVD.”

• Well, well. Back in 2008, we noted that Warner Music had hired Jim Griffin to put together a sort of skunkworks project to create what sounded like a mandatory ISP tax to allow file sharing, which was eventually dubbed Choruss. We say “sounded like,” because (as you will see), any time we tried to describe the project, we started getting angry emails from Griffin about how we were wrong. Later that year, someone sent us a presentation that Jim was pushing on universities, asking them to sign up for a “voluntary blanket license” that would let students share files. Initially, upon seeing the presentation, my problem was the fact that (from the details presented) this did not sound particularly “voluntary” for the students — and it felt like yet another situation where the real stakeholders were being left out of the discussion.

• That line: “Authors do not create value in a vacuum,” is a good one, and deserves to be repeated. So much of the debates we have on copyright and related issues seems to center on this belief that they do. In that patent realm, it’s the whole “flash of genius” concept, but it certainly applies in copyright as well.

• The Associated Press is overseeing the creation of an organization to help newspapers and broadcasters make more money as more people get their news from mobile phones and other wireless devices.

• [...]

• In creating the clearinghouse, the AP is drawing upon research that began in 2007 to establish an enforcement and payment system loosely modeled after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP collects and distributes royalties for more than 390,000 songwriters and others involved in the creation of music.

ACTA

• The legal base for the Commission’s DG Trade negotiations of ACTA is Article 207 of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

• Consequently, the Commission can assure the Honourable Member that the EU’s position is that ACTA should not create new requirements for telecommunication operators, such as the obligation to remove Internet access from customers without judicial process or the obligation to monitor the information they transmit.

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