● 10.27.10

● Links 27/10/2010: Unity Debate Carries on, Fedora 14 Goes Gold, Qt Goes Modular, Community Goes Away From Oracle

Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• So this is just a reminder – I’m trying to make sure that everybody is aware of the fact that in my 2.6.36 announcement, I was talking about trying to do a short merge window. Why? So that I could release -rc1 by the time the kernel summit started, despite the release of 2.6.36 being delayed.

• In February of this year the Clang C/C++ compiler for LLVM hit the milestone of self-hosting itself after Clang’s C support was declared production ready (with the recently released LLVM 2.8, the C++ support is now deemed feature-complete) just last October. In April another achievement was reached for LLVM/Clang and that was building much of FreeBSD’s base operating system. Today another milestone has been hit and that’s building the Linux kernel for Debian to the point that it’s functional and can run the X.Org Server both on bare metal and this can also be done within a QEMU virtualized environment.

• When looking at the Core i7 970 at its stock speeds with turbo boost capabilities, the CPU performed very well and practically winning every benchmark. Granted, the CPUs we used for this comparison were limited to what we had access to, and that meant no six-core AMD tests or any of Intel’s Extreme Edition processors. The only tests where the Core i7 970 “Gulftown” did not come out the winner was with the software that did not have enough work to keep all twelve CPU threads busy and so the Core i7 870 commanded the lead due to its higher turbo frequency. The Core i7 870 quad-core with Hyper Threading can be boosted up to 3.60GHz when needed, but with the Core i7 970 in most cases you can overclock this CPU to at least 3.6GHz if not 4.0GHz. Of course, that is unless the motherboard (or cooling) limits you in doing so as we were faced with in this set of tests.

Graphics Stack

• So xorg-server-1.9.1 went out fairly smoothly and will probably be the version tied to the Katamari release.

• The Wayland Display Server continues moving forward and is nearing the point of usability by enthusiasts and those interested in easily trying out this display server that leverages the latest and greatest Linux graphics technologies.

• The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here’s a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

Applications

• Rosegarden is a tool for making and understanding music, a general-purpose MIDI and audio sequencer, score editor, and music composition and editing environment that is released under the GPL, and runs exclusively under GNU / Linux.

• Compiz 0.9.2 has been released with a lot of bugs fixed but also new features such as:

• * a new MultiAnim which allows for mutliple copies of windows in animations * minimized live window previews (experimental) – a feature many have been waiting for to use in DockBarX (among others) * natural scale mode which pushes windows apart based on their distance from each other already when overlapping * re-written group plugin * simplified shadow storage in the decorations * support for KDE 4.5′s blur hint * Allow resizing from the center of the window

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Overall, with the less GPU demanding games, Windows 7 tends to take the lead over Ubuntu 10.10 when running at higher resolutions, but Ubuntu 10.10 did secure some significant leads at lower resolutions. In the toughest multi-platform environments presented by Unigine, the performance was the same across operating systems.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins.

GNOME Desktop

• This move could anger at least some open source enthusiasts, but it probably shouldn’t. Ubuntu is clearly trying to further differentiate itself in a Linux world filled with UIs and user experiences that are extremely similar. It is a risky bet, but Shuttleworth says that developers need not worry because fragmentation can be avoided by using FreeDesktop.org to ensure that desktop integration mechanisms are standardized and interoperable. Whether that will be enough to alleviate all possible issues or silence the critics of this decision remains to be seen.

• I was vocal enough in the past so I guess there is no need to reiterate again how much I dislike GNOME Shell… I see now Canonical is practically forking GNOME and replacing the Shell with Unity for the next Ubuntu release. In both the case of the Shell and Unity I can’t understand why people behind those projects persists in trying to make a Desktop OS act and feel like a mobile phone OS, like being targeted exclusive at clueless users.

• It is the super secret service that does all the work behind Gwibber. It is not without improvements this cycle, most notably Geolocation support, the ability to display maps about where your friends are, inside it and the the ability to store you and your friends’ profile data offline.

• There is going to be some questions about this decision in relation to GNOME. I want to make something crystal clear: Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME, but we continue to support the latest GNOME Shell development work in the Ubuntu archives.

• Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.

• As Debian is to Ubuntu so GNOME is to Unity. What do I mean by that? Well, once upon a time there was an operating system called Debian. It was, and is, a powerful version of Linux. Outside of the Linux community though almost no one had ever heard of it. Then Ubuntu came along, built its own easy-to-use distribution on top of Debian, and now it’s arguably the most popular Linux in the world.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Asturias Blarney Lovelock Pushcart Sturgis

• I was doing an installation of Debian Squeeze to a USB drive, and unfortunately the Debian installer was eager to drop its own GRUB on the Master Boot Record — not on the drive to which I was installing Debian but to the first hard drive on the system, which contains Fedora 13 and Windows 7.

• So I had a dead GRUB on the Master Boot Record of my drive.

• So we just got done signing off on the gold images for Fedora 14. I’m amazingly proud of the whole little release management group – development (especially Anaconda team, who were awesome), release engineering, and QA teams: we had an unbelievably smooth ride through the Final validation testing stage. Unprecedented in the annals of Fedora history, we span one publicly-announced Test Compose (TC) build (there were five unannounced ones, but they were just to test small fixes which we needed an image compose to verify) and exactly one Release Candidate (RC) build, which was the build signed off as Gold today. We have never needed just one candidate build to get a release right before.

• Fedora 14 has gone gold. According to Adam Williamson, Red Hat Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, the Fedora 14 Final Release Go/No-Go Meeting resulted in the unanimous decision that RC1 should be declared Gold. Attendees were pleased that the quality tests had gone so smoothly and this is the first time a first release candidate would ship as final. An email with the good news will go out to mailing lists on Thursday.

Debian Family

• Squeeze includes not only Shotwell but the GIMP and Inkscape. It also includes OpenOffice and what’s known as GNOME Office, the latter including Abiword and Gnumeric.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’m writing this blog post in a chair in the ‘Grand Caribe Convention Center’, at the end of the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in preparation of the 11.04 Natty Narwhal release. It’s been a very interesting first day to say the least.

• Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has reached EOL (End Of Life). It is no longer supported by Ubuntu with security updates and patches. You have known this day was coming for 1.5 years, as all non-LTS Ubuntu releases are supported for only 18 months.

• I have no plans to delete the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty AMIs for EC2 published under the Alestic name in the foreseeable future, but I request, recommend, and urge you to please stop using them and upgrade to an officially supported, active, kernel-consistent release of Ubuntu on EC2 like 10.04 LTS Lucid or 10.10 Maverick.

• This is it! Porting the Unity view to Compiz, comibing the Desktop and UNE editions, and defaulting to UNE for users who can run it. This is is a huge opportunity for the Ubuntu community to make something that can deliver free desktops to millions and millions of people who don’t have software freedome today. And also, having a lot of fun with our friends doing something really big along the way.

• The Ubuntu Font Family, which was only available for Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 (in the official repositories) has just been uploaded to the official Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 9.10 Karmic Koala and 8.04 Hardy Heron repositories.

Mint

• The Digital Prism Screencast covers both Drupal and Linux Mint.

• MintUpload is one of the Mint Tools, it’s a simple drag & drop FTP / SFTP / SCP client. It allows multiple services, folders or sites to be set up for different purposes. It’s a notification area widget and desktop widget.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• Well, this was inevitable. After Samsung and Sony Ericsson abandoning Symbian for their line of smartphones, and after Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams leaving the company for “personal reasons”, there’s now a report that the Symbian Foundation is winding down its operations, in preparation for closing up shop entirely.

• The news comes from a “source close to Symbian”, and basically states that Lee Williams’ successor as executive director, chief financial officer Tim Holbrow, has been appointed to wind down the Symbian Foundation’s operations. This seems in line with Holbrow’s background in finance, whereas Williams worked within Nokia on S60.

• Recently a project called “Qt Modularization” was initiated. This is a project that aims to modularize Qt at every level. As you may know already, Qt is currently modularized on the DLL level; each module has its own DLL. However, the project as a whole is still monolithic; all the code is being hosted in a single repository, and you cannot build a leaf module without building the modules on which it depends at the same time. This project aims to change that, so that the modules are hosted in different repositories, with a separate maintainer for each, and the modules may have different release schedules.

• Qt Quick provides a declarative framework for building highly dynamic, custom user interfaces from a rich set of QML elements. Qt Quick helps programmers and designers collaborate to build the fluid user interfaces that are becoming common in portable consumer devices, such as mobile phones, media players, set-top boxes and netbooks. Qt Quick consists of the QtDeclarative C++ module, QML, and the integration of both of these into the Qt Creator IDE. Using the QtDeclarative C++ module, you can load and interact with QML files from your Qt application.

• ‘It also aligns the Qt application and UI framework with the planned version for the MeeGo 1.1 platfrom (Qt 4.7). Qt Mobility 1.0.2 APIs for mobile development are also included’. Essentially, even without MeeGo1.1 handsets, you can built now apps for it using the N900 running PR1.3, and Qt4.7.

Free Software/Open Source

• Since setting up Zimbra, the email migration has gone quite well. The Outlook-connector works as expected and the more adventurous users are enjoying the fully-featured Zimbra web interface (which is much better than Outlook and Gmail, it could only be better if it made you lunch).

• [...]

• For agenda and contact synchronization I finally settled on Funambol, which has native mobile clients for Blackberry, iPhones, Nokia and WM and provides a J2ME client for other mobile platforms. Another plus over BES is that Funambol is both open source and very easy to deploy (it does require a server- and a client-side install though).

• The children had been designing images to go on bags that could be sold for charity to aid flood victims in Pakistan. They came to work with Jelena to actualise their ideas. They were introduced to a piece of open-source software called Inkscape (download here) and were shown how to produce high quality designs and manged to achieve some incredible results in a total of only four hours.

• Of course, Grace Hopper is a conference for women in all sorts of computing, which includes lots of proprietary software and the ratio of women in proprietary software is significantly higher than it is in free software. At 20%+ vs 2% (respectively) one would expect the strategies and tactics to be a little different. Yet, despite the differences in the two communities, I don’t think advancement is out of reach for us.

• AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

• Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

Databases

• LWN.net has a nice article on their front page on Drizzle’s and MariaDB’s recent beta and RC releases. it is behind a paywall for a few more days, but using the link below you can already read it.

Oracle

• Whether the proposal was backed by Oracle or not, some long-term contributors are resigning already. On Friday, October 22, Charles H. Schulz announced his resignation in a blog post. He said it saddened him to have to resign, but was also a relief due to the tension at OpenOffice.org lately. He said the proposal and subsequent behaviors and discussions were unprofessional and showed a complete lack of understanding of Free and Open Source Software. He and others have stated that both projects will now lose out due to a competitive atmosphere instead of the desired cooperation. Schultz said the LibreOffice will now become an official fork since Oracle et al. “refuse to play ball” with The Document Foundation. Schultz will continue to contribute to The Document Foundation.

• Hi Louis, all,

• This mail to inform you that I’m resigning from being Louis deputy at the CC. Please remove my role from the site. I unsubscribe from the list just after this mail.

• Kind regards Sophie [Gautier]

• Hi Louis, all,

• With respect for my friends in the community I hereby resign from myposition as deputy for Charles in the community council.

• I’m sorry that this is a necessary step.

• Good luck in the future. I hope we can meet one day – still as friends and free software enthusiasts.

• Cheers, Leif Lodahl

• The Java Community Process truly was a great hope for peace. A neutral place where everyone from developers to vendors could work together to produce specifications, reference implementations and tests to drive the success of Java.

• For one thing, as much as people may have complained about Sun’s guarded control of the Java Community Process (JCP), concern is growing that Oracle’s commitment to Java may benefit it more than it benefits the wider Java community. Oracle, perhaps recognizing that it had a PR battle to win, has repeatedly emphasized Java’s central importance to it, leading the Java community to mostly give Oracle the benefit of the doubt.

Business

• For example, when I teach a class about OpenNMS, I often ask the students if they are subscribed to the main OpenNMS discussion list. Usually, less than one in ten raise their hands. In fact, more than half of our commercial customers contact us for the first time without ever having installed the software. And that’s because our customers don’t come to us looking for open source software. They come to us because they want to find the best solution to their problems—and, in many cases, that solution includes open source software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today their partnership in the FTA’s Associate Partner Network. The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of free software and free standards.

Openness/Sharing

• I believe history – especially recent history — teaches us something very different. While information technology markets certainly go through cycles, they tend to oscillate between open and closed more fluidly than Wu suggests – and that dynamic is accelerating today. Moreover, during periods which Wu regards as more “closed,” things aren’t always as closed as he suggests. Or, more importantly, the “closed” models typically spawn more innovation than Wu and others bother acknowledging. It’s during what some regard as a market’s darkest hour when some of the most exciting forms of disruptive technologies and innovation are developing. Finally, to the extent some markets are completely locked-down for a time, it’s more often than not due to public policies that facilitate that lockdown or the “closing” of systems.

Standards/Consortia

• This website has W3C-compliant, CSS3 and HTML5 -based website templates with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Leftovers

• “Unions set to fight plans for £6bn cuts” was the front page news of the Financial Times yesterday, May 24th, in the aftermath of the well-trailed and assiduously leaked initial skirmish in what we are told is to be a long and multi-billion War of Austerity pitilessly fought out in the next couple of years.

• Boingboingdave sez, “Outside the Conway-Rand Paul debate in KY, Paul supporters held down a woman from MoveOn while another stomped on her neck and head. The woman was attempting to present Paul with a mock Employee of the Month award from Republicorp representing the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech.”

• Asserting that Jammu and Kashmir’s accession with Union of India is full and final, the BJP State President Shamsher Singh Manhas today said that no body can dare to challenge it and any one who does should be put behind the bars.

• The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia, the website’s founder, Julian Assange, told a leading Moscow newspaper Tuesday.

• Fifteen past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have issued a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao, asking that the newest winner, Liu Xiaobo, be released from his 11-year prison sentence, and that his wife, Liu Xia, be freed from de-facto house arrest.

• Chinese police seized a woman from her house in the middle of the night after she tweeted her intention to demonstrate with a banner congratulating jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel peace prize, a friend said today.

• If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the WePay team, and they’re trolling PayPal’s conference in an effort to tell everyone in attendance that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course.

• The 159 dummy accounts all have obviously-fake names (such as the ‘dd1′ pictured) and curiously seem to only have contributed to submissions from Digg’s publishing partners. The suspicious activity began after an algorithm revision that took place on October 15.

• On Monday, following a report in AllThingsD that publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards was bailing for a start-up, Pixazza, CEO Matt Williams e-mailed staffers to announce that “the burn rate is too high” at the company and that it would be laying off 25 of its 67 staffers, a total of 37 percent. At its peak–at the time of Adelson’s departure–the number of employees was slightly over 100.

Science

• A newly discovered class of materials known as “topological insulators” could help physicists to obtain new ways of defining the three basic physical constants – the speed of light (c); the charge of the proton (e); and Planck’s constant (h). That’s the claim of a team of physicists in the US, which has proposed a new experiment to measure the fine-structure constant (α), which is a function of h, c and e, by scattering light from such a material. Topological insulators are unusual in that electrical current flows well on their surface, but not through their bulk.

Health/Nutrition

• Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.

• Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year’s harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.

Security

• SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If you login to a social media site, it is likely that you will be getting a session cookie to keep you logged in (usually turned on by the “Remember Me” button). This cookie will identify you as already having logged into the system, and therefore its possession will allow you to connect to the social media site without having to identify yourself again. So, now imagine you are in a coffee shop with open wifi and you have your laptop with you, and you are also logged in with a session cookie to Facebook or Twitter. Guess what? Any person in the possession of Firesheep will be able to intercept that session cookie, and therefore will be able to connect to your Facebook account. Not only that, Firesheep will capture all of the unencrypted cookies flying around in the open wifi environment.

• There’s been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby cafe, and then easily view, delete, and add comments using their name on these sites.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Leading the attack on whistleblower web site WikiLeaks, Fox News editorialist and former Bush-era US State Department official Christian Whiton said on Monday that the US should classify the proprietors of WikiLeaks as “enemy combatants,” opening up the possibility of “non-judicial actions” against them.

• “So far, the Obama administration appears to have been asleep at the wheel in responding to this,” he wrote for FoxNews.com on Monday. “The same is true of the Democratic-controlled Congress, which has no fewer than ten committees of jurisdiction that could be doing something about this—but which are not.”

• The U.S. Defense Department is quietly taking on an expanding role in defending U.S. critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.

• In a break with previous policy, the military now is prepared to provide cyber expertise to other government agencies and to certain private companies to counter attacks on their computer networks, the Pentagon’s cyber policy chief, Robert Butler, said Oct. 20.

Finance

• As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The coalition government has torn up figures that pegged the cost of plans by the intelligence services to store records of every online communication at £2bn.

• A Home Office spokesman told The Register that the previous government’s estimate of the cost of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) has been abandoned.

• This week, EFF is taking part in the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, where we urged the Privacy Authorities to call for the repeal of the European Union’s 2006 Data Retention Directive, which requires Internet service providers operating in Europe to retain telecom and Internet traffic data about all of their customers’ communications for a period of at least six months and up to two years, for possible use by law enforcement.v

• A federal judge ruled late Monday that government requests for detailed information about Amazon.com customers violate Internet users’ rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy. The ruling came in a lawsuit originally brought by Amazon to stop the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) from collecting personally identifiable information about customers that could be linked to their specific purchases on Amazon. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation and ACLU of Washington intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of several Amazon.com customers whose information was at stake.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• I’m coming back from JISC and again sitting on the floor among the Bromptons. Alice and Bob are in their regular seats. They must get out earlier than me or rush along platform Zero faster than the average punter. (The 1645 is not a good train to arrive just-in-time for unless you like bicycles). Anyway I catch part of their conversation.

• A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that global P2P traffic is expanding, with BitTorrent as the key player. In North America, more than half of all upstream traffic (53.3%) on an average day can be attributed to P2P. The report further signals some really interesting regional differences in P2P use, such as the dominance of Ares in Latin America.

Intellectual Monopolies

• “The color PURPLE is a trademark of 3M.”

• Earlier this year we covered how Facebook was suing a site called Teachbook.com, claiming that any social network that ended in “book” was infringing on its trademarks.

• A civil society group this week warned government officials gathered here against patents on “climate-ready” crops and what they characterised as an attempt to obtain an exclusive monopoly over plant gene sequences. The group asked states at the United Nations biodiversity conference to recognise that such patents are a threat to biodiversity and to the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources.

• Yesterday, the ETC Group held a side event and presented a paper [pdf] alleging that the six largest global agrochemical and seed corporations are filing wide-scope patents with the aim of obtaining a monopoly on plant gene sequences that “could lead to control of most of the world’s plant biomass” for food, feed, fibre, fuel or plastics.

• Biomass is defined by the group as “material derived from living or recently-living biological organisms.” Biomass includes all plants and trees, microbes, but also by-products like organic waste from livestock, food processing and garbage, they said. “Climate-ready” crops are engineered to address climate change challenges.

• In a landmark 2010 declaratory judgment decision, a Southern District of New York court invalidated claims from seven Myriad patents associated with the BRCA1/2 breast and ovarian cancer genes. The patents include both composition claims covering isolated DNA molecules and method claims covering the processes of detecting and screening for BRCA mutations. The lower court held that these claims all fail the patentable subject matter eligibility test of 35 U.S.C. §101. A typical invalidated claim includes Claim 1 of Patent No. 5,747,282 which reads “1. An isolated DNA coding for a BRCA1 polypeptide, said polypeptide having the amino acid sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:2.” (The amino acid sequence No. 2 was provided as a part of the patent filing).

• Indigenous Peoples previously protested the position of Canada opposing the language in the 21 October preambular text “noting the significance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 21 October 2010). The CBD secretariat is housed in Quebec, Canada.

• “The protocol must meet standards consistent with the internationally accepted rights of Indigenous Peoples,” said Harry. “If it does not, the ABS protocol will facilitate the misappropriation of genetic resources from indigenous lands and territories, and alienate the traditional knowledge implicated in benefit sharing schemes,” she said, adding that this would lead to a further impoverishment of the “world’s most vulnerable peoples.”

• Today, a group of Canadian indigenous peoples published a press release about Canada’s alleged undermining of the biodiversity negotiations. They said that in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, John Duncan, Canadian minister of Indian affairs and northern development, “claimed the ABS issue was a diversion. “What is being discussed in Japan is about intellectual property, so to think that has anything really significant to do with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is inappropriate,” he was reported saying.

Copyrights

• Nobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France’s new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country’s “three strikes” law.

• IP Dragon is concerned that the owners of internet cafés and the operators of planes, trains, ships and buses are not charged for showing foreign films. This is not only discriminatory to foreign film makers, and in violation of international treaties, but it will hurt the fledgling Chinese film industry. There is not really fair competition if you have to pay or Chinese films and foreign pirated films you can use for free. The National Copyright Administration of China has already announced that this will not change in the near future. Maybe Hollywood, Bollywood and the European filmindustry can change their opinion.

• Many people, including myself, have said it’s inevitable: digital music is going to be given away legally for free, while musicians and songwriters try to make livings in other ways. But just how inevitable is it?

• With this salon, CC Denmark would like to invite the public in to discuss the benefits of using open licensing models in business. Presenting each of their work, renowned speakers from three international projects will elaborate on using CC licenses and sharing ideologies in their respective fields.

• Well, here’s a fun one. Apparently, there’s a local news site known as The North Country Gazette (don’t click that just yet…) covering parts of upstate New York via a blog format. Rather than putting in place an actual technical paywall, the site has apparently decided to go with a paywall-by-threat model.

• ERIKA: Like I said earlier, it’s made me re-think how you interact with the trolling, toxic readers that everyone inevitably picks up when their work starts to attract an audience.

• The Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has ceased all its operations after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA. Limewire was ordered to disable all functionalities in the current application to prevent users from sharing copyrighted material. The verdict is expected to have an unprecedented impact on the P2P file-sharing landscape.

ACTA

• När det gäller det redan så hårt kritiserade ACTA-avtalet , så är kristdemokraterna (EPP) och de konservativa (ECR) i Europaparlamentet mycket angelägna om att det även skall omfatta så kallade geografiska indikatorer (GI). In the case of the already much-criticized ACTA treaty , so is the Christian Democrats (EPP) and the Conservatives (ECR) in the European Parliament is very keen that it should also include so-called geographic indicators (GI).

• Det innebär i korthet att de vill att geografiska produktmärken (Champagne, Parmaskinka mm) skall få samma skydd som vanliga varumärken mot förfalskning. That basically means that they want to geographic marks (Champagne, Parma ham, etc.) shall receive the same protection as regular brands against counterfeiting.

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