● 12.07.10

● Links 7/12/2010: Mandriva Win in Brazil, Huawei Joins Linux Foundation, and CyanogenMod 6.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Out on the web, M$ has an army of astroturfers proclaiming that GNU/Linux has less than 1% share of desktops and that “best practice” is to scrap working computers every few years and that a whole organization must run that other OS just because some particular application runs only on that other OS. These lies, repeated often enough, are believed by uncritical thinkers despite the obvious flaws in reasoning. Critical thinkers can find plenty of evidence that GNU/Linux runs on 5-10% of PCs, more in some places like Brazil where most barriers to adoption are gone. That share has been achieved with very little advertising except sharing by individuals. As new architectures like ARM and tablets come on the market and XP is killed, GNU/Linux will have a decent share of PCs and M$ will have failed utterly in its dream of a licence for each PC for its OS.

• From the 24 tests shown via the Phoronix Test Suite, Ubuntu 10.10 ruled when it came to the OpenGL performance, it was mixed between the two operating systems when looking at the OpenCL computational performance, and with the CPU-bound tests it was often mixed as to whether Mac OS X or Ubuntu was superior, but it seemed Ubuntu did do better when it came to more of the multi-threaded benchmarks.

• The Brazilian government education authority has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use nationwide. Mandriva is working with the hardware manufacturer partner Positivo, to deliver this open source solution which will help teachers to improve students’ education. Also, this will be one of the world biggest organized deployment of Linux, with potential to get to 1.5 Million units, and confirms Linux as a key, cost-effective alternative PC operating system. The hardware, operating system and software is targeted to have a per student cost around USD $200.

• The Intel-powered classmate PC is a small and rugged, fully functional mobile PC, specially designed by Intel for primary students in emerging markets. Brazil will be one of the first countries to deploy Intel-powered classmate PCs in their schools to such a large scale. The Brazilian government’s decision to choose as Intel Learning Series solutions running Mandriva Linux on a classmate PCs reaffirms Linux as the preferred operating system for the global education market with Mandriva as the Linux education market leader.

• OK, so it’s a bit of a clichéd question, but with the awesome developments that have taken place in the Linux world over the last year, it’s worth asking again. Will 2011 – finally – be the year that Linux makes serious inroads into the desktop space? Are all the pieces in place to mount a major assault on Microsoft and Apple? Or are we barking up the wrong tree, and we should be looking to the mobile space with Android and Chrome OS for Linux’s future?

Google

• Google said at the start that “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” Google hasn’t always been on message with this.

• Google also took its time getting even a Chrome beta out the door. Now that Chrome OS is about to be unveiled, we know that it is going to be Google’s “desktop” operating system, while Android is for smart phones and tablets.

• Thin clients are in demand for virtual desktops of all kinds, even “cloud” computing. Tomorrow, Google is expected to reveal an operating system on a device with the system intended to function mostly on the cloud.

• Tomorrow, December 7, Google is expected to launch its new netbook-and-tablet cloud-based operating system, Chrome OS. It’s also entirely possible that Google will simply show off the much-hyped Chrome Web Store. The event was only announced December 3, and it’s extremely unlikely that Google would rush the launch of something huge and consumer-facing.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Huawei, a leader in providing next-generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, has become its newest member.

• Being recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies, Huawei is using Linux to develop network equipment and devices and sees its Linux Foundation membership as an opportunity to collaborate with a worldwide network of developers, users and vendors to advance that work.

• Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There’s this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.

Applications

• TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it).

Proprietary

• Skype is hiring a whole lot of engineers. Many of them will work on the company’s mobile applications, as we reported earlier this week, and many will work on cloud-based implementations of Skype that would include working with third parties such as LinkedIn. This hiring binge is part of Skype’s big expansion in Silicon Valley, something I wrote about in July 2010.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• At the beginning of October there was the announcement of the Unigine OilRush game, a strategy game developed atop the Unigine Engine and developed by Unigine Corp itself as one of the first real games available to multi-platform gamers of this advanced, very interesting game engine. The screenshots continue to look impressive and it was supposed to be released in Q4’2010, but now Unigine Corp is sharing that the game’s release date has been pushed back to March of 2011.

• A three month delay in Unigine’s first game release is a bit disappointing, but it comes due to taking longer to negotiate with their publisher and ensuring the game itself will be great for all gamers upon its release. The precise release date in March has not been given officially, but it should come shortly after GDC 2011 (the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco) that is running from 28 February through 4 March.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Now that I have spent some time with RHEL 6 I have to say that, over-all, it’s a good release. It’s solid, polished and comes backed by a great support infrastructure. Home users may be put off by the smaller repository, older packages or, for that matter, the price tag. Businesses though, Red Hat’s target customers, should be very happy with this release.

Debian Family

• Interview with Asheesh Laroia, a member of the Debian Mentor Community.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• What I found particularly touching about this story was a poem that Manuèla wrote about her experience of joining the Ubuntu community:

• Today I want to talk about bug fixing. Tomorrow Jorge will be starting a weekly Bitesize Bug Campaign in which he will highlight a set of bitesize Unity bugs, that is bugs that only require small and simple fixes (and are ideal for new Unity developers), and work with the community to get those bugs fixed. This campaign is similar to the papercuts effort in that these bugs are rough edges that need sanding off. Jorge will highlight a new set of bugs each week, and he will also highlight those rock stars who contribute these improvements to Unity.

Flavours and Variants

• The default Bodhi Linux theme looks very geekish, using black and green which at first I thought it would be annoying but I quickly got used to it and further more I ended up loving it by the time I’ve finished writing this post. Don’t worry though, it can be easily changed if you don’t like it from the Enlightenment menu.

• Even though it is minimalistic, Bodhi Linux tries to cover every little aspect to make your desktop experience enjoyable. And for everything else, the new online software center (which should be available soon – read on for more info) will allow you to install any extra packages you may need to further tweak or enhance Bodhi with minimum effort.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Version 6.1 of the CyanogenMod Android distribution has been released.

• Today’s a Google day. The company, after announcing before the weekend that they had a couple of announcements ready to go for Monday, has officially pulled the curtain off their latest version of the Android mobile Operating System, Android 2.3. Its’ better known as Gingerbread, and for those in the development community who have been waiting to get your hands on it, the time is now.

• For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.

• Google has revealed Android 2.3, codenamed Gingerbread, a new version of its popular mobile platform. It introduces a handful of modest user interface enhancements—such as a more refined touchscreen keyboard—and brings some noteworthy performance improvements that are largely intended to boost Android gaming.

• Alongside the release of Android 2.3, Google has also announced plans to launch the Nexus S, a new smartphone that was developed in collaboration with Samsung. Much like Google’s Nexus One, the new phone in the Nexus series will be available unlocked with a pure Google experience. The unlocked version will be sold at Best Buy for $529 without subsidy, and T-Mobile will be selling it on contract for $199.

• VMware is teaming with LG to sell Android smartphones that are virtualized, allowing a single phone to run two operating systems, one for business use and one for personal use.

• In a bit of awesome news, the android.view.KeyEvent class (that’s geek speak for keyboard controls in the code) in Android 2.3 has been updated to include support for what looks like Playstation phone controls.

Tablets

• A 3D version of Google Maps will accompany a Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Google’s Android, according to Google’s Andy Rubin.

• Rubin showed off the unreleased prototype tablet at the opening session of D: Dive Into Mobile in San Francisco today, the same day that the company announced plans to ship Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will arrive at some point next year, Rubin said, showing off the Google Maps application and eliciting more than one “oooh” from the crowd of mobile professionals.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Document Foundation welcomes the new BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software, a software development project recently announced by BrOffice, Itaipu Binacional and the Itaipu Technological Park Foundation. The main software lab, based in Foz do Iguacu, will contribute to the development of LibreOffice (BrOffice in Brazil), and other free software projects. The activity is forecast to start in the first quarter of 2011.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that Google’s Wave communication platform has been accepted into the Apache Incubator – a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the ASF was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki last month by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration. In a post on the Apache mailing list, Google’s Dan Peterson says that the the vote to accept Wave into the incubator was “overwhelmingly positive”.

• The investigation into BP’s disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill has hit the buffers after a drilling technology firm refused to hand over access to fundamental software used on the rig.

• National Oilwell Varco rejected US government demands to provide access to its proprietary HiTech application, which was relied upon by BP engineers to determine the presence of dangerous hydrocarbons in the well during the drilling. It said that handing over the code would mislead the investigation.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• I commented on Friday about the weakness that responses to Wikileaks have exposed in cloud computing, whatever your view of Wikileaks itself. While there are strong incentives to host critical infrastructure in the cloud or using web services, we saw last week both Amazon Web Services and PayPal – flagship brands in cloud computing and web commercial services respectively – suddenly toss customers off their services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse. I’m sure they breached none of their own (voluminous) agreements. We saw other, less well-known companies (Tableau, EveryDNS) follow suit too, and even a Swiss bank finding a handy loophole. We also saw the US Department of Homeland Security start to seize domain names – this time at least by sending a court order to Verisign, albeit sealed, but without useful explanation or workable recourse. I sense we will see more of this happening.

Education

• I want to see e-readers and epub succeed in schools but I fear restrictive practices will threaten their adoption. The future may lay with EPUB and the Open Education Resources project (OER)

• [...]

• Many others have noticed the problem of providing ‘school-knowledge’ for all. To many, including me, it should be free and free of restrictions in distribution. The Open Source model so well known to us in the software world is making inroads in the proprietary education system.

• The Open Education Resources project embraces the likes of Wikipedia, WikiEducator and Open Text Books. The once hopeful project known as the National Digital Resource Bank seems unfortunately to have foundered (too expensive?) and is currently off line.

• Sugata Mitra is the founder of Hole in the Wall experiment, which inspired the writing of Slumdog Millionaire. On the same day he keynoted at Big Ideas Fest, a story about his Self-Organized Learning Environments hit Slashdot.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This year, the FSF will also be undertaking a series of new public advocacy campaigns to advance awareness for free software. This, our first series of general GNU/Linux adoption campaigns, is possible only because we now have fully free distributions utilizing a kernel, Linux-Libre, that has removed all the nonfree code normally present in Linux. And it is only possible because our new hardware endorsement program will make it increasingly possible to find hardware that respects our freedom.

Openness/Sharing

• Who’s behind it?

• The Eurostat Hackday is currently being organised by:

• * DERI * LATC * LOD2 * The Open Knowledge Foundation * Planet Data

• As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely like you) in Ottawa and Sao Paulo and we agreed to see if we could prompt an international opendata hackathon. At the time we thought there would be our three cities and maybe three of four more. At no point did we think that there would be 1000s of people in over 73 cities on 5 continents who would dedicate the time and energy to helping foster both a local and international community of open data hackers, advocates and citizens. Nor did we know that the wonderful people like those with Random Hacks of Kindness would embrace us and help make this event such a success.

Leftovers

• TSMC has many clients for its 28nm process, including Xilinx, Altera, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm, and has attained tape-out for 71 IC products. The 28nm production capacity will be fully utilized by the end of 2011, TSMC noted.

• As if you don’t know this already, Grooveshark is an online music broadcasting application.

• Much of the world’s food supply is transported via an inefficient, polluting, and dangerous system of highways and trucks. The overwhelming share of the fuel used to move food powers cumbersome vehicles, only eight percent is really needed to transport the cargoes themselves to supermarkets, according to one estimate.

• So what’s the alternative? Move the whole system underground and set up a “transport industry Internet,” says the United Kingdom based Foodtubes Project, a consortium of academics, project planners, and engineers. Siphon veggies, corn flakes, and cans of baked beans about in high-speed capsules (one by two meters) traveling through dedicated pipelines lodged below our cities. And why not? That’s the way we transport water, oil, gas, and sewage, isn’t it?

• Nvidia is looking to pack more CPU cores into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as a way to improve performance while preserving battery life.

• Most of the mobile devices today contain single-core processors, which are not enough to handle new mobile applications such as 3D gaming and video, the company said in a whitepaper published this week.

Science

• On one level the answer is simple: it comes from our mastery of our subject matter – it comes from our knowledge and training. In that sense, anybody with a Ph.D. who walks into a classroom should have authority. But we know that’s not the case. There are many professors who have to work very hard to establish themselves as authority figures. Some reasons for this have to do with personalities, level of confidence, and other personal attributes. But that doesn’t explain why, for certain groups of professors, their authority is not a “given” and it is not assumed. To believe that it is ignores the connection between individuals and their experience with (or lack of) privilege as members of particular groups. So, yes, we walk into the classroom as individuals who have mastery over our field, but a growing number of us also walk into the classroom as members of under-privileged and/or under-represented groups.

• The good news: scientists have discovered a completely new type of bacterium that could help with the disposal of old ships and oil rigs. The bad news: it’s eating the Titanic.

• With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.

• While today’s fiber optics-based networks can shuttle data around the world at the speed of light — momentarily slowed only by routing and switching — the vast geographic distances data has to travel can be a factor of delay, especially when the information itself is generated so quickly by computers and is useful only within a very short time period. At least one industry, finance, is starting to chafe at this limit.

• The mega-filament collapsed in a gorgeous cascade of hot plasma between noon and 2 p.m. EST. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a beautiful movie of the eruption (above). The explosion does not appear to be aimed at Earth, so we shouldn’t expect any magnetic storms or satellite troubles.

• The loop of hot plasma has been snaking around the sun’s southeast limb since Dec. 4, and appears to be growing by the hour. When SDO saw it on Dec. 4, the filament was more than 250,000 miles long, about 30 times the diameter of the Earth. In the image below, taken at about 12:30 p.m. EST on Dec. 6, the loop of charged plasma stretches more than 435,000 miles, the full radius of the sun.

Health/Nutrition

• Dwindling biodiversity could cause more humans to contract infectious diseases such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, according to scientists who have reviewed the results of 24 separate studies.

• Biodiversity hotspots must be protected to prevent the transmission of dangerous diseases from increasing, they warn.

• They don’t send out press releases, don’t have public information officers and their contacts are not widely publicized by the huge international humanitarian operation helping cholera-hit Haiti.

Security

• The key on the CPE worked fine for my Linux netbook and an iPhone, but not a Windows 7 laptop. So he said he would change it, and suggested, nay insisted upon… 0123456789. We protested. No, he said, people wouldn’t guess it (I’m not making this up, by the way). We refused.

• [...]

• Cue much palaver testing various keys on various devices, but eventually we found something that would work on everything: a WEP key with few letters mixed in. Great. Now, on the issue of the 0-9, this engineer told us many Windows Vista/7 PCs have Wi-Fi password issues, and the ISP’s standard Huawei home gateway is partly to blame, and he therefore usually sets customers’ security to 0123456789.

• Hence the depression. In the context of the Digital Economy Act, if this is the norm, we can look forward to an awful lot of court cases.

• The full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs that are fast becoming the norm at US airports – just in time for Thanksgiving! – do at least provide the answer to what should be done with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever captured: Rotate him in perpetuity through this security hell, “groin checks” and all.

• He’ll crumple fast and wonder that 19 young guys in four planes could so warp the nervous system of the world’s most powerful nation that it has empowered zealous bureaucrats to trample on the liberties for which Americans give thanks this week.

• [...]

• Anyone who has watched TSA agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok? I don’t doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

• By co-opting doctors to supervise waterboarding, George Bush subverted their sacred oath to give himself legal cover

• The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) strongly condemns the criminal proceedings launched against K.K. Shahina, a reporter with the weekly news magazine Tehelka in India, after a story of hers appeared to cast doubt at the prosecution of a prominent Islamic cleric and political figure on terrorism charges.

• Shahina’s story appeared in an issue of Tehelka dated December 4, released a week prior to the cover date. It is available online and is based on interviews with key witnesses cited in the case made by police in Karnataka state in southern India against Abdul Nasar Mahdani, an Islamic cleric who heads the Peoples’ Democratic Party, active mainly in the neighbouring state of Kerala.

• Today I read that the TSA will now tell children that groping them is a game. Terrorists, through a series of acts in one day 9 years ago, are now causing our children to be sexually molested when we travel. Having a stranger touch your genitals is not a game unless you are both consenting adults.

• We need to grow up, crawl out from underneath the bed, trust each other and fight back. We need to carry our fingernail clippers and our knives on the airplane again. We need to give up the charade that we can be stripped of everything that can be a weapon. We need to fight back with intelligence, not fear. Invest all the money that is going into scanners and use it to fight terrorists not travelers.

• Remove TSA from the airport process. Let airlines decide how to run security for their flights and let travelers vote with their money for the type of security they want.

• A few weeks back, we wrote about the FBI celebrating that they stopped a terrorist plot that appeared to have been mostly planned by the FBI itself — basically encouraging one guy, who had no actual terrorist connections, to think he was a part of a terrorist plot where none actually existed… and then arresting the guy. As we noted at the time, we knew of at least two other very similar stories, where US law enforcement appeared to set up people in such a manner.

• Anticipating the US attempts to block it though, WikiLeaks has taken the precaution of posting a big, 1.4-gigabyte file encrypted with a 256-digit key said to be unbreakable.

• Titled “insurance.aes256″, the file was big enough to contain all the US cables said to be in WikiLeaks’s possession.

Cablegate

• Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett broke at Counterpunch in September. Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.

• Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.

• US and UK diplomats warn of terrorists getting hold of fissile material and of Pakistan-India nuclear exchange

• Guns and ammo from Turkey. Missile components from Germany. Guidance systems from China. Iran is on a global, clandestine mission to acquire weapons and weapons technologies of all sorts, diplomatic cables released Sunday by WikiLeaks reveal. And the Tehran regime is using a series of front companies in its attempt to assemble the arsenal.

• Last weekend, I posted that I suspected the KIPR tag on U.S. diplomatic cables being released by Wikileaks represented cables involving intellectual property issues. Sure enough, the first batch of KIPR cables have been released in Spain, confirming U.S. pressure on that country to reform its copyright laws. The release – which come from El Pais – has generated considerable commentary with BoingBoing proclaiming that it reveals that the U.S. wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law. That headline led others to speculate what the remaining KIPR cables might reveal, particularly the 65 Canadian ones (there are also 84 WIPO tagged cables and nearly 2,500 KIPR tagged cables overall). There has been one release on copyright law in France, with officials discussing U.S. industry support for its three-strikes approach.

• WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks’ own site is taken down.

• But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a more hostile tone. On Saturday PayPal restricted access to WikiLeaks’ account to prevent fund raisers from donating money to help the site. In return, the PayPal blog page that announced the decision to shut off WikiLeaks’ account was taken offline for around eight hours last night by a distributed denial- of-service (DDoS) attack.

• Experts at Panda Labs pointed to a statement from the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, which said that the PayPal blog would be the target of its first DDoS counterattack on behalf of WikiLeaks. Panda also cited comments from a Twitter account named AnonyWatcher, which released several statements related to the attack.

• It’s the latest financial hit against Wikileaks, which earlier saw its PayPal account suspended. Wikileaks own statement in the matter said that the account, with some $41,000, was seized after the bank found that Assange, “as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer’s address in Geneva for the bank’s correspondence.”

• Public Safety Minister Vic Toews appeared unconcerned or unaware Monday of the WikiLeaks release of a list of sites and resources in Canada identified by the United States as critical to that country in the event of attack, natural disaster or other emergency.

• “I don’t follow gossip very much so I don’t really know the impact of WikiLeaks, but I can assure you that the security agencies in Canada are following it very closely and to the extent that I need to be involved and address those issues, they will brief me on the issues,” Toews said in response to questions from an audience after delivering a speech in Ottawa Monday.

• Tom Flanagan thought assassinating Julian Assange was reasonable.

• We are succeeding in adding the Wikileaks censorship issue in the public agenda. Perhaps the time has come to propose a boycott against those companies who are suspending the services which support Wikileaks activity?. Please, think about that.

• It’s thanks mainly to Julian Assange and Wikileaks that people around the world finally have a little insight into the brutality and venality of US foreign policy. Assanges’ quest to let people all over the world know the truth and his refusal to stand mute in the face of duplicity and injustice deserve our praise. Moral courage of that calibre is rarely seen nowadays, and people need to know what is really happening and why. If he didn’t publish these documents you can bet we would never have known the truths they contain.

• As I write this, much of the international media is consumed with WikiLeaks’ gradual publication of a quarter-million US diplomatic reports. Why? Well first off, everyone likes to be let in on a secret, and if that secret involves acronyms like CIA, RAW, MI6, or ISI, the sexiness quotient skyrockets. That’s more or less just human nature. But the reports also provide grist for media publications—especially European ones—always eager to spread some dirt about the Americans. London’s Guardian, Madrid’s El Pais and Paris’s Le Monde were fairly salivating as the documents’ release date approached, and wrote with near-orgasmic prose once publication began. Their behaviour, too, was more or less predictable.

• Meanwhile, business group CBI has called manufacturing the “unsung hero” of the UK economy.

• Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.

• Now WikiLeaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document — and we can be certain that it will — Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.

• Since several major Internet companies cut off services to WikiLeaks in recent days, activists have created hundreds of mirror sites, Web sites that host exact copies of another site’s content, making censorship difficult.

• One cable reads, “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”

• One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.

• Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a bill Thursday aimed at stopping WikiLeaks by making it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants.

• Ensign accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his “cronies” of hindering America’s war efforts and creating a “hit list” for U.S. enemies by outing intelligence sources.

• MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned.

• The WikiLeaks affair has twofold value. On the one hand, it turns out to be a bogus scandal, a scandal that only appears to be a scandal against the backdrop of the hypocrisy governing relations between the state, the citizenry and the press. On the other hand, it heralds a sea change in international communication – and prefigures a regressive future of “crabwise” progress.

• The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange’s defense fund and personal assets (31K EUR) after reviewing him as a “high profile” individual.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Tuesday in London on a Swedish warrant, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

• Wikileaks has been dumped by Amazon and mirrored across the globe as it attempts to spread its whistleblowing message to the masses. But would any web-hosting company in Australia consent to play host to Wikileaks? The answer, so far, appears to be “probably not”.

• Several large Australian web-hosting companies said today they would be unlikely to host the Wikileaks repository if asked to by a customer, for a number of reasons.

• Bulletproof Networks has earned a reputation for stability and reliability with its customers. The Australian company hosts several large Australian sites which attract record amounts of traffic — and sometimes controversy.

• In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.

• Julian Assange’s lawyer has warned that supporters of the WikiLeaks founder will unleash a “thermonuclear device” of government files containing the names of spies, sources and informants if he’s killed or brought to trial.

• Assange, the 39-year-old Australian who has most recently embarrassed the U.S. by leaking hundreds of previously secret diplomatic dispatches over the past week, has dubbed the unfiltered cache of documents his “insurance” policy. The 1.5-gigabyte file, which has been distributed to tens of thousands of fellow hackers and open-government campaigners around the world, is encrypted with a 256-digit key, reports The Sunday Times. Experts interviewed by the paper said that even powerful military computers can’t crack the encryption without the key.

• I’m tired of people saying that Assange/wikileaks ‘leaked’ the info. People from inside these agencies/companies do the leaking. Assange/wikileaks just reports it. All they want to do is kill the messenger.

• In State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, the Moscow Embassy describes how Intel bypassed Russia’s tough crypto import regulations

• With Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS.net dissolving their relationships to WikiLeaks, leaving it without a stable home and a way to make money, Twitter currently serves as the only solid ground the Internet whistleblower has to stand on. This has left many wondering whether or not Twitter will eventually take down the @wikileaks account if put under enough pressure, from lawmakers or otherwise.

• PSSST. Want to share a secret? Here is the place to send it. But be quick. This postbox to contact WikiLeaks in Australia is about to shut down.

• Australia Post insists its sudden decision to close the University of Melbourne Post Office has nothing to do with the fact that Box 4080 is the Australian postal address for submissions to the whistleblower website.

• The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.

• IIn the US, however, the government has a “heavy burden” for engaging in prior restraint of even secret documents, an established principle since New York Times Co. vs. The United States*, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. If we want a different answer for Wikileaks, we need a different legal framework first.

• Though I don’t like Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposed SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination*), I do like the fact that it is a law, and not an extra-legal avenue (of which Senator Lieberman is also guilty.*) I also like the fact that the SHIELD Law makes it clear what’s at stake: the law proposes new restraints on publishers, and would apply to the New York Times and The Guardian as it well as to Wikileaks. (As Matthew Ingram points out, “Like it or not, Wikileaks is a media entity.”*) SHIELD amounts to an attempt to reverse parts of New York Times Co. vs. The United States.

• I wonder whether it has occurred to the US Government that copyright is the reason it is so hard to shut off the cablegate cables. Not directly, indirectly through technology evolution in response to regulatory change. Ever since the mid 90s the copyright industry has had the practical effect of energetically evolving new and better means of disseminating information.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The UN climate talks in Cancún were in danger of collapse last night after many Latin American countries said that they would leave if a crucial negotiating document, due to be released tomorrow, did not continue to commit rich countries to emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.

• The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (Alba) group of nine Latin American countries – who claim they are backed by African, Arab countries and other developing nations – said they were not prepared to see an end to the treaty that legally requires all of its signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Without a proper waste collection and management system, such nocturnal enterprises are not unusual in Uganda. These days, however, the two men turn rubbish into fuel. The friends have honed a technique to produce what Kyagulanyi calls “non-fossil fuel”, made from refuse such as plastic bottles, polythene bags and organic waste.

• The Obama administration reversed its decision to expand offshore drilling today, saying it had learned a lesson from the BP oil disaster.

• Nigeria’s anti-corruption police said today that they will charge former US vice-president Dick Cheney over a $180m bribery case involving energy firm Halliburton.The announcement follows a probe into the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in the conflict-ridden Niger Delta.

• Could the whale wars be over? Things are looking very good in that direction! The whalers may be close to capitulation.

• It is December 1st, at least on the Japanese and Australian side of the International Date Line, but the Japanese whaling fleet remains in port.

• For years I have said that Sea Shepherd goes down to the Southern Ocean stronger than the year before, and the Japanese ships go down weaker. They may be weaker than we thought. They may be ready to call it quits. The illegal Japanese whaling fleet may be on the brink of surrendering, at least for this year.

• Aw man, and we were doing so good with those plastic bags….dang it. But yes, according to Global Entrepreneur magazine, China creates 30.6% of the world’s waste or an unbelievable 150 million tons every year.

• A global survey that looks at international efforts to address climate change has yet again ranked Canada near the bottom — just as the country’s top environment officials leave for a United Nations conference on the issue.

• The sixth annual list compiled by 190 climate experts around the world placed Canada 54th out of 57 countries, ahead of only Australia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.

• Italy is moving ahead with a plans to ban the production and distribution of non-biodegradable plastic shopping bags starting January 1, its environment minister told ANSA this week.

• “There is no going back”, said Stefania Prestigiacomo, stressing that “producers had enough time to prepare themselves for this change”. The government’s plans to ban plastic bags, first drawn up in 2007, originally foresaw an end to their use starting from January 2010 before a one-year extension was granted. A campaign is being planned to inform citizens about the ban and about environmentally friendly alternatives, said Prestigiacomo. The environment minister is certain that the ban will have a positive effect.

Finance

• This is the Japan you might remember from 80s television: all those documentaries about the far east’s new economic powerhouse and consumerist paradise, and Clive James snarking his way through clips from perplexing gameshows. As the dog wigs show, that side of the country still exists. And yet, in the intervening 20 years something big happened to Japan, something that places it in the heart of the debate over what Britain’s economy might look like over the years ahead. Decades before the British were bandying the term about, Japan suffered a major banking crisis – and it still hasn’t recovered.

• Rarely has the true face of the modern Republican party in America been exposed so obviously.

• Just a day after President Barack Obama met with Republican leaders and came out talking of a new era of co-operation, Republican senators united around Mitch McConnell to sign a letter declaring they would pass no legislation without movement on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

• That legislation they are willing to scupper includes extending unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans, still suffering the terrible hangover of the Great Recession. The tax cuts the Republicans are really fired up over will benefit only the top 2% of Americans.

• To put it even more simply: Republican leaders are happy to go virtually on strike in order to win a tax cut worth billions of dollars for America’s most wealthy people (which includes themselves and many of their top campaign donors). At the same time, they are willing to deny help to America’s most vulnerable; standing by as once middle-class people lose their homes as their benefits disappear.

• Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”

• When AIG was bailed out out in Sept. 2008 and immediately passed on huge sums to overseas counterparties, including Société Générale (France) and Deutsche Bank (Germany), there was a public uproar. The Fed data out today confirms what many suspected. This back-door bailout of foreign banks was just the tip of the iceberg. The Fed data covers 13 programs amounting to some $3.3 trillion in loans. We could only look at a few, but in every program examined, foreign banks were huge beneficiaries of a taxpayer-funded lifeline.

• Such is the message from the massive document drop the Federal Reserve made last week. The Dodd-Frank law forced the Fed to disclose the recipients of $3.3 trillion from emergency lending programs put in place during the crisis days of 2008, so the taxpayers who paid for those rescue efforts now know whom they were helping.

• Not that we should expect to receive any thank-you notes from these institutions for rescuing them from themselves.

• The Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms during the financial crisis, according to newly revealed data released Wednesday.

• The loans were made through a special loan program set up by the Fed in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse in March 2008 to keep the nation’s bond markets trading normally.

• There is one problem, however. Basel may have asked the right question, but it did not come up with the right answers, mainly because it allows banks to remain dangerously leveraged, setting equity requirements way too low. This fact is not understood because the debate on capital regulation has been mired with a cloud of confusion, and filled with un-substantiated assertions by bankers and others. As a result, the issues appear much more mysterious and complicated than they actually are.

• After a massive and incredibly costly financial crisis, we seem to have financial system that is a more consolidated, more powerful, more profitable and, yes, as fragile and dangerous as we had before the crisis. How did this happen and what can we do?

• President Barack Obama on Saturday praised a newly sealed trade deal with South Korea as a landmark agreement that promises to boost the domestic auto industry and support tens of thousands of American jobs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• But that hasn’t stopped the Right from propagating the myth that the failures of “socialism” forced them to embrace capitalism.

• Last week, when the American League of Lobbyists announced a new PR offensive to help change the public perception of the profession, including this video, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. Their Lobbying-as-American-as-Mom-and-Apple-Pie PR effort deserved a classic Internet video mashup – one, that in Sunlight-style involves “data jamming” – telling the real story of how lobbyists work to control the Washington agenda…

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• WikiLeaks has become the symbol of disturbing information that can’t be stopped. Recent declarations and actions against the organization clearly expose the will of governments to control the Internet. From now on, it seems that both sides are fighting a battle that could be one of the most important that we must wage for the future of our democracies. On one side, those who would like to put the Internet under control, through administrative or privatized censorship, in order to remain in power. On the other, citizens of the word at large ready build networked societies in which the sharing of knowledge, freedom of expression and the increased transparency allowed for by the Internet must be protected and strengthened at all costs.

• It is essential to debate about how the leak of the diplomatic cables is organized, drop by drop, by WikiLeaks, and about the security of the individuals mentioned in the documents, in particular to be able to detect the false rhetorics being spread about them: The cables weren’t “stolen” by WikiLeaks. It received them like newsrooms usually receive anonymous brown paper envelopes full of documents. It also sought to minimize the harm to innocents’ lives through the erasure of their names prior to publication.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• New Zealand is one of several countries currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a regional trade deal that the U.S. would like to see include a major chapter on intellectual property (Canada has been excluded from the talks). A new leak [PDF] of the New Zealand government’s position on the IP chapter is revealing on several levels, most notably for its criticism of the WIPO Internet treaties and the attempts to limit existing flexibilities on digital locks. According to the leaked document:

• Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In the April 2010 issue of SCRIPTed, there is a very interesting article by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe entitled “The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing“.

• Counterfeit Culture is one of my favourite chapters. It includes an unforgettable scene about Bernie who is managing the China business for Johnson Carter and wants a breakdown of the ingredients King Chemical uses when it is manufacturing their soaps and shampoos and Sister, who is the co-owner of King Chemical: “Sister said that she was not compelled to provide a breakdown. The details were their trade secrets, she insisted. This infuriated Bernie. “The product line came from my sample set. What trade secret? It’s my fucking product!”

• Mr Midler dryly determined: “the factory was claiming intellectual property rights over its copying methods.”

Copyrights

• As you may have read, the US government “seized” a bunch of domain names that were hosting sites allegedly involved in piracy and counterfeit goods over the Thanksgiving weekend.

• Over 80 domains, all of them in the .com namespace, had their DNS settings reconfigured to point them to a scary-looking notice from the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division.

• One reason is compatibility. My primary goals include being used in soundtracks and mashups, so I needed licensing that allowed my work to be incorporated into as many other works as possible. Public domain is the only universal. The only license for creative works that is used widely enough to be considered a standard is a Creative Commons non-commercial license (like this one), but they are deliberately incompatible with many works.

• In addition to changing their default licensing policy from CC BY-NC to CC BY, the University of Michigan has enabled even greater sharing and reuse by releasing more than half a million bibliographic records into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. Following on the heels of the British Library, who just released three million bibliographic records into the public domain, the University of Michigan Library has offered their Open Access bibliographic records for download, which, as of November 17, 2010, contains 684,597 records.

• I’m delighted to introduce Andrew Rens, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes, who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you should too. Rens, the founding legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa – a volunteer position he held from 2003 to 2009 – possesses particularly adept superpowers when it comes to facing tough issues around intellectual property and education in Africa. Here is his story.

• As part of an investigation running for more than a year, police in Iceland have been trying to track down individuals who run file-sharing sites and those who added large amounts of content to them. This week, teenagers as young as 15 had quite a surprise when police raided several locations across the country.

• The US “IP Czar,” Victoria Espinel, said at a conference this week that Homeland Security’s seizure of a bunch of domain names was apparently just the beginning of a larger plan to go after such folks. Espinel has been making the rounds over the past few months, working to get various companies to voluntarily start censoring websites in this manner, even without the COICA bill being in place. This isn’t really a surprise. Espinel has stated in the past that her job is to focus on the enforcement side of copyright law, so it’s no surprise she’s supportive of such seizures.

• BT today told the press that Ministry of Sound have abandoned their attempts to get the details of thousands of alleged filesharers under a “Norwich Pharmacal Order” (NPO).

• Kroes is calling for two very important reforms. The first is pan-EU copyright licenses. This would allow simpler trade in legitimate copyright works. iTunes, for example, has never provided services to many EU states, because getting licenses is too complicated.

• The second reform is about allowing the use of the vast swathes of music, books, films and photos where the copyright owners have long since disappeared, generally because they have died, and it is unclear where their relatives might be. These are called “orphan works”. While the best solution would be shorter copyright terms, there are other possible solutions.

• You may recall, a couple of years back, the Associated Press got a ton of negative attention for threatening bloggers who “quote too much” of AP articles. Soon after that, we were among those who noticed that the AP had a deal with a company called iCopyright, which seemed to suggest that “fair use” quotes were limited to four words or less. After that, rates started at $12.50 to quote five words. The AP later came out and said that this was entirely different, but to this date has never adequately explained when its deal with iCopyright applies and when it does not. This got some attention earlier this year, when the cheeky folks at Woot mocked the AP over this after the AP quoted Woot’s CEO from his blog. Separately, some others noticed that the iCopyright system on the AP’s site was so screwed up that you could just put in any text you wanted and “license” it — even if it wasn’t the AP’s to license.

ACTA

• You can request legal access to ACTA related documents from the Council. Either documents are available through the register or for the confidential ones just fill out a form with your address and mention the requested document numbers. The Council will either enable public access to the documents and sent you a pdf or deny your request and state reasons for that or they sent you a crippled, a redacted version. If your request is refused you can file a confirmatory application and when that is denied again, you can go to court or complain at the EU ombudsman. In the case of ACTA the confidentiality at the Council was so rigid. Many first applications were rejected which is quite unusual.

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