● 11.04.10

● Links 4/11/2010: Fedora 15 to be Called Lovelock, Many Fedora 14 Reviews Now Available, OpenOffice.org Analyses

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• What does a Recompute DIY kit, a Brain Machine, and an Ice Tube Clock all have in common? The question is, Alex, What Are Things You Can Win From Linux Journal This Month. That’s right, we’re celebrating 200 issues in a big way this November and have rounded up some pretty cool prizes to give away each and every day.

• But then, I don’t think many of us do. It is 2011, Linux users come in all shapes and sizes today. If anyone asks me I will tell them:

• I am a Linux Geek – and I am proud of it!

• Have you ever come to this same realization about yourself? If so, what caused it?

• For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I’m constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I’m convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I’m also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely.

Desktop

• My wife and I bought two computers at the same time. Hers was a laptop and mine was a desktop computer. Both came with Windows XP pre-installed. She uses Windows every day and I never use Windows, but instead have run a version of Kubuntu or Ubuntu since the day that I bought it, almost five years ago. Those are the facts.

• In all of that time I have but one problem with my desktop computer; I had to replace the power supply and bumped up the RAM to run VMs. I have had no software issues. I have re-installed Ubuntu every six months or gone the upgrade route once or twice. I have run alpha versions to final releases of many distributions including the above mentioned.

• My wife has had problems with several viruses, trojans and the like. She has used anti-virus software from all of the major distributors, Symantic, AVG, Panda, Avast, Kaspersky, and Trend. In addition, she runs anti-malware and anti-hijacking software that detects changes to the registry. She does not indulge in any risky practices. She uses lots of email and clicks on links that people send her. In short, she is a typical user with average skills.

• Her computer slows down to a crawl much to her frustration every month or two and it needs to be defragmented, the system tray needs to be cleaned out, her desktop needs tidying, her menu need to be cleaned up, her temporary files need to be wiped, and her registry tidied up. I am not making that up. She cannot do these things herself, so I do it.

• In comparison, my computer which runs Linux needs none of that. I run no anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-torjan, anti hijacking software in the background. My system tray has no applications running in memory that did not come with the OS. My desktop is clean of shortcuts. My menu does not need to be re-ordered. My computer runs as fast as it did when I got it almost five years ago.

• QML fundamentally changes the way we create interfaces and it’s very neat. From the api perspective it’s not much different from JavaFX and one could argue which one is neater/better but QML allows us to almost completely get rid of the old 2D rendering model and that’s why I love it! A side-effect of moving to QML is likely the most significant change we’ve done to accelerated 2D in a long time. The new Qt scene graph is a very important project that can make a huge difference to the performance, look and feel of 2D interfaces. Give it a try. If you don’t have OpenGL working, no worries it will work fine with Mesa3D on top of llvmpipe.

• It’s fast and responsive for realistic netbook usage and the six-cell battery boasts a good seven or so hours of life, but the shoddy materials, weak keyboard layout and appalling aesthetics are enough to send us looking elsewhere. In short then: solid performance, brick-like appeal.

• Verdict: 5/5 The Acer Aspire One D260 is the best netbook we’ve reviewed in some time. Its chassis is TARDIS-like in design, managing to house a competitive array of netbook hardware in a thin, light and supremely attractive package. Definitely the benchmark against which the next round of netbook releases will be scored.

Server

• By tonight, the LSE admitted the problem may have been caused deliberately. A spokeswoman said: “Preliminary investigations indicate that this human error may have occurred in suspicious circumstances. The LSE takes this matter very seriously and a full internal investigation has now begun. The relevant authorities have been informed.”

• The problems at Turquoise, known in the City as a “dark pool” which allows participants to trade anonymously with each another, had major repercussions for the LSE which had been planning to transfer its entire share trading business, known as the main market, to a new system today.

• The LSE had been under pressure from its customers to delay the introduction of the new computer system to allow further network upgrades even before the latest problems but has now been forced to abandon any updates until next year.

• The London Stock Exchange has put the brakes on its cash markets migration to a Linux-based system after human error in “suspicious circumstances” floored the network on its Turquoise alternative trading venue.

• Turquoise, a dark pool or anonymous trading platform, uses the same system, and this morning took trading offline for two hours after a “network issue”.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Been experimenting with a dynamic microphone (the Shure SM-58) and so here is the first in a series of audio blog entries.

Kernel Space

• Benchmarking 26 kernels was no easy feat with running nearly two dozen tests each time and each test being run multiple times (usually three to five times as a minimum). Fortunately, with the Phoronix Test Suite combined with an Intel Core i7 “Gulftown” made this process much faster, easier, and more reliable than what would otherwise have been possible. A huge thank you goes out to Intel for supplying Phoronix with the Intel Core i7 970, which is their 32nm Gulftown processor with six physical cores plus Hyper Threading to provide a total of 12 threads. The Core i7 970 has 12MB of L3 cache and is clocked at 3.20GHz while having a maximum turbo frequency of 3.46GHz. This is one very fast desktop processor as shown in our Intel Core i7 970 Linux review and more recently within our LLVMpipe Scaling On Gulftown article where the performance of this Intel LGA-1366 CPU was looked at when running Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe when enabling 1/2/3/4/5/6/12-threads. While the i7-970 is very fast, it’s also very expensive at approximately $900 USD (NewEgg.com and Amazon.com), but it allowed this major Linux kernel comparison to happen in just under a week of constant testing, which is significantly less time than it would have required if using one of the less powerful Intel or AMD CPUs.

Applications

• Dealing with the mind-numbing array of formats present in digital media can be intimidating for a user of any platform, and users considering Linux may be hesitant to switch if they think certain types of files simply cannot be made to play on an open source OS. There’s really nothing to fear, though — here are three applications that can transform common and obscure media types into ones easily digested by Linux.

• If you’ve ever checked out the list of applications available for the Linux operating system, you know there are tons of them out there. The only problem is determining which ones are worth trying. This is especially true of the office applications. You could dig through those apps for hours just to come up with a handful of gems. So I thought I would do the grunt work for you and highlight 10 of the more obscure applications that actually have valid use in your workplace. These tools range in scope and purpose, but each one of them offers an obvious business value.

Proprietary

• Hi, we are working hard on making our new extensions feature better, more functional and more stable. This build is the result of more than a week of our work on extensions, and also contains a small Unite surprise, fixes for the new Windows installer, and a nice set of *nix bug fixes.

• From now on, Unite Application will no longer be delivered with the browser installer. Instead, they will be downloaded when launched for the first time. This noticeably reduces the installer size.

• There’s a new feature which involves an autoupdate feature for Opera Extensions and Unite Applications as well. It is not fully functional yet, as we are still working over server farm configuration.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• NAEV is a 2D space trading and combat game, in a similar vein to Escape Velocity. NAEV is played from a top-down perspective, featuring fast-paced combat, many ships, a large variety of equipment and a large galaxy to explore. The game is highly open-ended, letting you proceed at your own pace.

• Thanks to a reader for pointing out Coldest, an open-source multiplayer mech combat game. The project is also looking for contributors, so check it out if you’re interested!

• The two man indie game company Lassie Games released the 2d classic adventure game “What Makes You Tick : A Stitch in Time” which is a sequel to their previous freeware game “What Makes You Tick ?” (which is not available for GNU/Linux yet).

• Sun Blast is very polished graphically, and the gameplay immerses you in the experience, even providing Wii remote force feedback at the appropriate impacts and explosions. While the lack of a save feature keeps it from being a casual “little bit at a time” game, the unlockable challenges add value and longevity.

• The Wii remote feature is definitely one of Sun Blast’s strongest assets, and the $9.95 price is the best feature of all. The one-time purchase gives you access to all OS versions of the game, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and PC-BSD. A demo version is also available and you can play it first before you make a purchase. Sun Blast gets four galactic star explosions out of five.

• The sheer amount of software you can find in your average Linux package manager is astounding. For example, Ubuntu offers 502 free game downloads, all a single click away in the software center. Other Linux distributions, including Fedora and Suse, offer just as many choices.

• With that many games it’s hard to know what’s worth playing and what’s not. It wasn’t easy, but I spent a couple of days trying various games out. Keep reading to hear about five simple Linux games I personally enjoyed but think many Linux users may not be aware of, and feel free to suggest more in the comments below!

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Today, KDE has made available 4.5.3, the November updates to the Plasma workspaces, the applications built on top of KDE’s platform, and the platform itself. This release, as all x.y.z updates, contains bugfixes, performance improvements and localization updates only. As such, it’s a safe upgrade and recommended for everyone running 4.5.2 or earlier. The update contains a number of fixes in Okular, Dolphin and a series of KDE games. Also, the new shared data cache continues to mature.

GNOME Desktop

• Unity is still very fresh – if you do an online search for it you find very little about it. In fact, Day Four is the only proper result Google returns for giving Unity a custom Skin.

• Will I switch back to regular Gnome now that this series is done? No. I will stick to Unity whenever using Ubuntu – I kinda enjoy the newness of it. It is quite a fun interface to use.

• A new default GTK and Metacity* theme for Gnome 3 landed in the Gnome Shell git a few days back. Called Adwaita it looks very similar to the design mock-ups displayed at GUADEC earlier this year.

Distributions

Reviews

• Slackware is a great Linux Distribution, and often called the one you need to work with if you want to learn Linux, people usually say:

• — Disclaimer:

• I am new to Slackware, please let me know if I’m wrong in anything of the above said. Once again, I am new to Slackware but I’m already in love with it.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora 14 is the latest update to the Red Hat-sponsored, Linux distribution. It is one of a handful of Linux distributions that use LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, as the default disk partitioning scheme. The installer creates three logical volumes by default, besides the non-LVM /boot partition. The three logical volumes, for /home, /, and swap, are the minimum recommended for a desktop installation. The problem with the default installation is that all available disk space is allocated to the logical volumes, living none for future use when it might be needed to grow a partition, or create a new logical volume. This installation guide takes you through the process of editing each logical volume to free up disk space, space that is not needed for the system to run. At the end (of this tutorial), I will show an example of how to resize (grow) a logical volumes, a basic LVM management task.

• Fedora 14 linux distribution code named ‘Laughlin’ is out. This new release comes with many new features and improvements for developers, system administrators and open source enthusiasts. if you are already a fedora user and you want to upgrade to this new release, please check our previous post. Find in this post screenshots for Fedora14, also installation steps for newbies(screenshots).

• If you like Fedora, or if you prefer to get your Linux distribution from a large organization with a lot of resources behind it, the Fedora 14 release is very good news. It is solid, stable, it works well on everything I have tried it on, and it includes pretty much the latest versions of everything. My only reservation about it is that it does not include some of the things that I always want installed (Java, Flash and OpenOffice.org for example). None of these are hard to install, but my recent experience with PCLinuxOS has made me prefer that. So perhaps it really comes down to a choice based on the size and character of the organization behind the distribution. As far as I am concerned, either way you win.

• In my meetings with Red Hat executives, I found the company had no intention of making Fedora a competitor to Windows or Mac at home user end. Enterprise or business customers were the company’s target.

• Honestly I think the Fusion beta 14 I reviewed ealier was a bit more stable in some ways, as I noticed the Desktop screen would “crackle” and flash when opening apps or menus. I would say it’s probably the old mx4000 nVidia card in this old testbed PC, a AMD AthlonXP 2400+ with 768mb RAM, but the Fusion beta 14 did not have these issues. Overall Fedora 14 is a sharp, beautiful, and well supported full-featured linux distribution with a reputation for providing an easy to use system that’s always up-to-date.

• While it may lack some of the flashier “everyday user” features Ubuntu has been focusing on, Fedora is still a very user-friendly distro, especially for those just looking to get work done without the bells and whistles of Ubuntu.

• In the end both are great desktop releases, the main difference is that Fedora has more to offer once you scrape below the glossy surface.

• I’ve been thinking about this for the last week or two, and I’ve decided to run for the Fedora Board elections. I felt a bit reluctant to do this since I’m a Red Hat employee and I’d like to see more non-RHers on the Board and other committees, but in the end I decided it was the best way to move forward with my idea.

• Used the live session for Fedora 14 Laughlin Desktop edition ” Gnome “, looks really good, Fedora Art team work did a great job on new backgrounds, and many great enhancements will talk about it in another post, for now we will take a quick look to Fedora 14 with screenshots and quick screencast.

• So anyhow, we watched TS3 and greatly enjoyed it for the second time (having seen it in 3D in the theater with our kids this past summer). But then I got an extra bonus when I popped in Disc 2 of the set, the disc that includes a bunch of supplements. During the supplements, the filmmakers and crew at Pixar show off a lot of the work that goes into making one of these groundbreaking films. And thanks to the exceptional resolution of the Blu-ray format, you can pick out a lot of detail in the material they show.

• Including the fact that the animators were running Fedora on a number of their systems!

• It’s official: “Lovelock” is the Fedora 15 codename.

• After the community proposed a variety of codenames, the choices were narrowed down to Asturias, Lovelock, Pushcart, Sturgis, and Blarney. My pick was on Blarney or Pushcart, but in fact winning by 28 votes was the Lovelock name.

Debian Family

• FOSSASIA 2010, one of the top Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events for developers, enterprises, governments, and users in Vietnam, will take place in Ho Chi Minh City on November 12-14, 2010.

• The event will feature the first mini-DebConf in Vietnam. After Beijing, China (2005), Taipei, Taiwan (2009), Khon Kaen, Thailand (March 2010), and Pune, India (August, 2010) this will be the fifth mini-DebConf in Asia.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We’ve known for a couple weeks that one more woman becoming an Ubuntu Member would cause the Ubuntu Member statistics to to go from 4.98% and nudge us over that 5% mark – and it happened today!

• I am delighted to see that over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women. That is 5% of active contributors who have performed significant and sustained contributions are women. For the full scoop, read Lyz’s post.

• I just want to offer my congratulations to the awesome Ubuntu Women team for all their hard work. It was also great to see the team’s continued hard work and participation at the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

• Canonical’s decision opens the door for Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint and others to gain more users, at Ubuntu’s expense. I suspect that many faithful Ubuntu users will be casting around for alternatives the minute they see what Unity looks like on their computer screens.

• We are blessed with choices in Linux, and switching away from generic Ubuntu to one of its derivatives or a completely non-Ubuntu distro is probably going to happen once long-time Ubuntu users experience Unity.

• If you are unhappy about Canonical’s foolish decision to make Unity its default interface, I recommend that you consider Linux Mint Debian Edition instead. LMDE gives you all of the advantages of Debian (and the excellent Linux Mint tools & utilities) without any of Canonical’s poor choices and silly design decisions.

• I just wished Ubuntu would give a bit more back to a community it takes so much from.

• One of my goals of UDS was to do a little survey on the floor to get a feel for why participants were contributing to Ubuntu and how they see the reason for doing all this work. I set out a simple 5 questions and asked attendees one after another and recorded them on my phone. The Data Source was then compiled into the following statistics with some answers folded into each other since spellings and meanings of difference words meant the same thing.

Flavours and Variants

• The remastered “Ubuntu after a week of customizations” Pinguy OS 10.10 beta 2 has just been released. For those of you who are not familiar with Pinguy: it’s an Ubuntu remaster with a lot of useful default applications “built to have eye candy (Gloobus Preview, GNOME Do, Docky, Elementary*) and for every part of it to be user-friendly”.

Devices/Embedded

• Jungo Ltd. announced a Linux-ready middleware stack for automotive infotainment applications. The Automotive Connectivity Middleware offers a complete media and networking infrastructure, including wireless connectivity, phone management, and integration with mapping and telematics functionality, says the company.

Tablets

• Unlike Android and iOS, the WeTab software environment uses a conventional window manager that allows the user to resize windows, drag them around the screen, and view multiple overlapping windows at the same time. Due to this capability and the performance characteristics of the device’s Atom processor, the WeTab software experience feels more like a netbook than a tablet. It has a lot of rough edges and doesn’t come with much out of the box, but it’s very open and quite conducive to running ported desktop Linux applications, which could make it appealing to enthusiasts who are looking for a more flexible device than the iPad or Android-based tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• How important our “leaders” to open-source projects? We tend to think of open-source projects being lead by top developers. Sometimes that’s true. Without Linus Torvalds, the top developer, would we have Linux, the major operating system or, as is the case the BSD Unix family, a handful of relatively minor operating systems? I don’t think so.

Oracle

• Oracle has hiked up the price of MySQL, killing low-priced support options and more than doubling what it charges for the commercial versions of the database.

• There is no inherent reason to think that open source software is free. And there is no reason that software source shouldn’t be available, should a company decide to make it so. But getting stuck in between the two camps can be sticky, and that’s exactly what has happened at Oracle. The company asked almost three dozen developers to leave OpenOffice.org, the open source office application product line that came along with all of Sun Microsystem’s other belongings. Set aside who’s right and who’s wrong here for a moment, and the situation brings two important management lessons into clear relief.

• The developers, disappointed with how Oracle managed the OpenOffice project, split off the open source code into a new version, free of the database company, called LibreOffice. This made Oracle management none too happy, particularly as one of the big supporters of LibreOffice is Google (GOOG), which Oracle is currently suing for patent and copyright infringement over its Java implementation on Android. (It must be the season for legal arm twisting as Google, whose own Apps are a LibreOffice competitor, has sued the Interior Department over alleged favoritism toward Microsoft (MSFT) in a search for a new email system.)

• TDF Fast Start, not without complications.

• The TDF Steering Committee (SC) invited Oracle to join, asking them to give away the OpenOffice.org mark. Inviting a corporation to join a will-be foundation without a document describing a draft legal and governance structure sounds a bit naïve, though.

• Why the SC gave such a short notice is unclear. OpenOffice.org community members have been treated like second citizens, while TDF first-hour supporters have been giving all the time to provide feedback and quotes.

• As a long time member of the OpenOffice.org community and as a founding member of one the oldiest OpenOffice.org associations ( PLIO), I found odd myself being noticed only two days in advance. Knowing about the decision to go without Oracle, some of us would have asked time for a second thought, maybe coming up with better alternatives.

• The thought has occurred to me, though, that this may be about much more than Oracle not sharing its community. In fact, given the past history of how Oracle treats open source projects in general, I believe any strengthening of the LibreOffice community, whether through new developers or from developers migrating from OpenOffice.org, will ultimately benefit OpenOffice.org far more than a weaker LibreOffice.

• An outcome, by the way, I believe Oracle planned all along.

• Here’s my thought process: Oracle is trying to keep OpenOffice.org going, but only in a certain direction. No one if quite sure what that direction is right now, but I think it’s fair to assume there is a definite plan.

• LibreOffice, for whatever reason, does not fit in that plan. Or Oracle is worried that LibreOffice is in sync now, but won’t be later.

• This is about to get more complicated as a slew of OpenOffice developers have abandoned ship to create the Document Foundation where they are using the OpenOffice open-source code to produce a fork development effort called LibreOffice. You can download the current version of LibreOffice and give it a try.

CMS

• Compared to Drupal 6, Drupal 7 is easier to use and scales better on large sites, such as those getting 30 to 40 million page views per month.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• One month, one campaign, one goal: getting rid of non-free software advertisements on public websites. In four weeks, FSFE received reports concerning 2162 European institutions who advertise non-free PDF readers. Apart from the 305 activists who participated to the search, 1500 individuals, 46 businesses and 38 organisations signed our Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Public Websites. Now that the hunt is over, it’s time to chase up those websites which encourage visitors to jeopardise their freedom. It’s time to stamp out the ads!

Project Releases

• MyPaint is an easy to use paint program. It supports several popular image formats, comes with a load of brushes, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. After 5 years of development, version 0.9.0 was released on November 2 with some nice new features.

Government

• Discussing the optimal mix between open-source software (OSS) and closed-source software, Andreas Freytag, Stephen M. Maurer and Sebastian von Engelhardt argue that “pro-OSS [government] interventions make very little sense if there are too many OSS firms already”.

• [...]

• Almost every company, not just software editors, relies on software. But companies are not at all homogeneous as is implied here. Using the same OSS software will not cut it in an environment of diversified business models. Companies will have to write (or have someone write) modifications to the software, or even brand new software, to fit the business process.

• Then, if they release as open-source, will every competitor immediately benefit for free? It seems like a long shot. It is one thing to have access to the code, another thing to adapt it to the specificities of your business, teach it to your employees, etc.

• If however you choose to adopt the newly released OSS, you will probably need to have some “integration” work done to combine the software with your specific needs and practices. Being forced to release this additional code as open-source as well, you contribute to the innovative iterations. It doesn’t mean, however, that you will immediately ruin your competitive edge.

Licensing

• The checklist is available from the Linux Foundation site, with a list of more than 100 guidelines to follow. The items are comprehensive but not overly detailed. The PDF weighs in at just 22 pages, and the idea is that it’s a starting point for organizations to help develop their own internal processes. For companies that are new to the open source community, or simply feel they’d like to have expert assistance in developing policies, the Linux Foundation is also offering several training options to help organizations come up to speed.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Consensus is that train times are best disseminated as widely and openly as possible. The more chance us folks have of finding a train the likelier we are to ride on it. Keeping the details of train times a secret or charging people for non-profitmaking uses is perverse and a retrograde step from when they were supplied freely to the public through an API.

Open Access/Content

• What should we think about politically selective calls for OA? For now, put aside those that are yoked to general calls for OA and framed as politically realistic first steps. What about those that are not yoked to general calls for OA, and whose narrowness suggests political opportunism more than political realism? Here are five quick examples from the US to show what I have in mind.

Standards/Consortia

• I’ve spend a lot of time on the past years trying to make a wallpaper with the ODF logo for my smartphone, but as I don’t have the necessary graphical skills, I never got anything that could be useful…

• Few weeks ago, I was searching the Internet to find some cool ODF logos, and finally found one very well done on a site andy.fitzsimon.com.au. I contacted Andy and asked his permission to use the logo. He authorize me and even send me an SVG file with other ideas…

• Based on this file I created the wallpaper below, in two versions: BlackBerry (which also fits on desktops and other smartphones with keyboards) and Android (which by the size of the screen had the main logo reduced).

Leftovers

• Back in June, News Corp put two more of its newspapers, other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times. We kind of expected it to be a disaster, but now we actually have some results. The company announced that it signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.

• But what did the Times lose? According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

• It is time that package-management applications free shared libraries from artificial shackles, and create a more dynamic and versatile distribution.

• The first time I came across UNIX shared libraries was with UNIX SVR3.2. The ability to work with multiple versions of libraries concurrently seemed impressive; as I recollect, the shared libraries we were using on mainframes did not offer such capabilities. After about a year of using Linux, I found that I required that capability: we were using the Slackware distribution, and needed to install an additional package. We could get a binary version; however, it needed a lower version of a shared library. It was fairly simple to install the alternate version of the library as well, and get on with the work.

Science

• Our study describes a level of molecular diversity previously unknown in honey bees that might be important for generating phenotypic flexibility not only during development but also in the adult post-mitotic brain.

Security

• While the answer to this question is likely dependent on many variables and will almost certainly be debated for months or years to come, it should not matter to anyone reading this. It goes without saying that harassing or attacking people is a terrible thing to do. To suggest Firesheep was created for this purpose is completely false; Firesheep was created to raise awareness about an existing and frequently ignored problem. As I’ve said before, I reject the notion that something like Firesheep turns otherwise innocent people evil.

• Reports have been trickling in that Microsoft’s anti-virus software is now detecting Firesheep as a threat, despite the fact that Firesheep poses absolutely no threat to the integrity of the system it’s installed on, and as mentioned earlier, has many legitimate uses.

Finance

• The Sinn Féin Spokesperson on Workers Rights, Martin Ferris TD has claimed that the Government’s austerity programme is not only designed to pay for failed bondholders and speculators but is being advised by them. He referred to the fact that the Chairperson of Goldman Sachs Peter Sutherland whose Asset Management section holds Anglo Bonds has been advising the Government on the cuts.

• Deputy Ferris said: “Apart from the economic and financial issues that we have discussed here for the past few days there is the whole moral and ethical aspect of the situation.

• As Republicans prepare to assert new authority in Congress, America’s overseas trading partners worry that Washington’s political upheaval may pose fresh challenges to the global economy.

• After a last-minute back-to-school buying spree, Americans appeared to have taken a shopping pause in October, resulting in a mixed retail sales picture.

• That lull could continue until the day after Thanksgiving, the unofficial start of the Christmas season, as shoppers wait for big bargains, many analysts say.

• The Federal Reserve is making a high-stakes bet in the hope of getting the economy steaming along again. Nobody is sure the Fed’s best efforts will work, and they may actually backfire.

• The Fed announced a plan to buy $600 billion in government debt, aimed at driving already low long-term interest rates even lower. The central bank would buy the debt in chunks of $75 billion a month through June of next year.

• Group of 20 leaders know they must achieve “concrete agreements” including goals for reducing current account and trade gaps at next week’s summit or risk having their leadership of the world economy called into question, South Korea’s president said Wednesday.

• Finance ministers and central bank governors from the group of leading rich and developing nations met last month in South Korea ahead of the summit scheduled for Nov. 11-12. They vowed to avoid using their currencies as trade weapons and promised to come up with a way to measure the reduction of destabilizing trade gaps.

• The Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program for reducing mortgages of homeowners who owe more than their houses are worth has fallen far short of its objectives. Officials seem surprised by that outcome and blame the result on administrative problems. But, all along, the program’s bad economics doomed it to failure.

• The White House today is under pressure, with insiders asking: After the strong showing of the Republicans in the midterm elections, should the president move to the right or to the left?

• This is entirely the wrong way to think about the problem – the administration needs to get beyond its mental framework of early 2009, which led it sadly astray with regard to the financial sector. The President needs to find people and themes capable of cutting across the political spectrum; specifically he needs to promote strongly the ideas of Elizabeth Warren – what we need in financial services, above all else, is much more transparency.

• Obama has since led a relatively charmed political life, savoring a series of thrilling victories. His election nights have largely lacked the sting of defeat his opponents know well, and the words “record landslide” and “historic and decisive” have accompanied his successes.

• The Federal Reserve is poised to adopt a new plan to jolt the economy. It’s a high-stakes gamble that could shape Chairman Ben Bernanke’s legacy.

• The Fed is all but certain to detail its plan for buying more government bonds when it wraps up its two-day meeting Wednesday. Those purchases should further lower interest rates on mortgages and other loans. Cheaper loans could lead people and companies to borrow and spend. That might help invigorate the economy, and lead companies to step up hiring.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Another trick, the fourth, the strategy of delay. “Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as” painful and necessary, “gaining public acceptance, in time, for future application.” It ‘s easier to accept a sacrifice but a sacrifice immediate future, Chomsky argues, because the effort is not used immediately, and because the public, mass, always has a tendency to naively hope that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The federal government’s proposal to make consumers liable for legal damages of up to $5,000 if they break digital locks to copy movies, video games and electronic books for their own personal use appears dead on arrival — with all three opposition parties on Tuesday speaking out against this key provision of the Conservative’s copyright bill.

• The controversial legislation to modernize Canada’s copyright law is expected to clear a key parliamentary hurdle as early as this week when MPs vote to send it to a House of Commons committee for closer scrutiny. Critics for the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrats all stood up in the House of Commons Tuesday to support updating the law, but said they will be proposing amendments to the digital encryption provisions before a final vote.

• Sintel Open Movie was released last month and it was an instant hit among developers and movie lovers alike. Now it’s time for some real learning. If those awesome blender tutorials were not enough for you, may be you should watch this making of Sintel Open Movie documentary video as a first step.

• New Zealand’s Parliament Commerce Committee has reported back on the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Bill and it will now move to parliament for its second reading. The controversial 3 strikes provision is still included, but will now only be implemented if a letter writing scheme to educate citizens fails, and people continue to share illicit files during the next two years.

• Michael J. Davis, Chief Judge for the District of Minnesota, opened the remarkable third trial of peer-to-peer file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset today with a quip. “It is Groundhog Day,” he said, looking out over the lawyers gathered before him.

• This is an extremely interesting ruling for various reasons. Firstly, it helps to eliminate the typical FUD that tries to undermine Creative Commons as licences that are not valid because they lack case law. Secondly, it will also serve to answer another common piece of FUD, which tries to imply that CC licences are American-centric documents that are not valid and/or enforceable in Civil Law jurisdictions. Finally, it is interesting to see how a court may consider the fact that a licence is non-commercial when calculating damages, a solution which I tend to agree with.

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