● 01.22.11

● Links 22/1/2011: More Android Tablets, Tor 0.2.1.29 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• When checking out the latest Linux 2.6.38 kernel, libdrm, xf86-video-nouveau, and Mesa 7.11-devel all as of 17 January 2011, more graphics cards that I previously tested with Nouveau were back to functioning with the open-source kernel driver. In particular, the GeForce 9500GT, GeForce 9800GT, GeForce 9800GTX, and GeForce GT 220 were used for another mini test comparison of this days-old Nouveau code against the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

• This entry on the X.Org Wiki isn’t brand new, but for those that have yet to see it, there is a development guide to how graphics cards work on this Wiki page. There was just a trivial update to the guide today and I had then realized it hasn’t been mentioned before on Phoronix.

Applications

• OpenShot developers have been hard at work since November cooking up improvements & upgrades for this already awesome video editor.

• Starting early this week the guys over at OpenShot have been announcing new features to be included in the next release. This list is quite impressive already with still more to come.

• RadioTray is a minimalistic radio player stat runs in the notification area (system tray).

• It happens every now and then you have a set of photos and you want to do with them a background image with a collage of them, or perhaps a mosaic, it’s possible in Linux?

• Sure there are Gimp and Picasa that among the many features that give even offer these options, but there are other programs, perhaps smaller and simpler to just make this work?

Instructionals/Technical

• There are plenty of tools to back up your personal files, and all sorts of backup strategies (such as performing a full backup once a week and incremental daily backups in between), but it seems that no two people have precisely the same approach, and there are many tutorials in books and on the Web on the subject of backing up in Linux. Anyway, here I explain my personal way of making backups, which fits my modest requirements and may be of interest to someone. If this post does nothing other than spur someone to backup their data, whatever the method, then I’ll be happy.

Wine

• Wine 1.3.11 wasn’t too interesting as the inaugural Wine development release of 2011, but Wine 1.3.12 has been released today and it carries a bit more weight, such as an initial stab at integrating DOSBox.

• The noteworthy changes to be found in today’s bi-weekly development snapshot, Wine 1.3.12, include support for multiple icon sizes in the Wine menu builder, improvements to the Wine help browser, initial stab at DOSBox integration, various MSI installer fixes, fixes to the Wine debugger, and various other bug-fixes throughout the Wine stack.

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

LXDE

• I persevered with the basic Debian/LXDE installation for just over a day.

Distributions

Reviews

• This is my first attempt at reviewing a Linux distribution. I’m excited, and I hope you’ll find it useful. I would definitely appreciate any feedback! I’m a user, not a developer, so I’ll be approaching this from a not-too-technical angle, focusing on asthetics and usability. Here goes.

• I first became aware of Saline Linux when Anthony Nordquist posted a comment on one of my previous blog posts, Why I Use Linux. Toward the end of his comment he mentioned that he was working on a distribution of his own, and I said I would give it a try. I was excited to learn via Twitter that as of 1/16/2011, version 1.0 of Saline Linux is now available.

• [...]

• Saline Linux is built on Debian and features Xfce for its desktop environment.

• Saline OS 1.0 has been released. Saline is a new Linux distribution based on Debian Squeeze with the main purpose of bringing some of the things users’ might want that doesn’t fit in with Debian Open Source philosophy. It uses Xfce for the desktop, making it light weight enough for some older machines and netbooks while still bringing modern amenities.

New Releases

• After the last maintainance release in november 2010, the developers are proud to release a new version 2.9. About 400 different changes were taken in this build and there were about one hundred testers that have installed at least one of the beta versions.

• The new version of the distribution Calculate Linux 11.0 has been released. All editions of distribution are available for download: Calculate Linux Desktop with desktop KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) and XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS), Calculate Directory Server (CDS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).

• 10 January 2011. pelicanhpc-v2.3 is out. From this release forward, Debian Squeeze will be the base for PelicanHPC, until future notice. Also, PelicanHPC is henceforth available only in a 64 bit version. There are no major changes since version 2.2, apart from the newer versions of most packages. In particular, the kernel is now at 2.6.32, and Xfce is looking sharp at version 4.6.2. In the move from Lenny to Squeeze as the base, the ganglia monitoring system has stopped working, because the configuration files have not yet been updated. I would be happy to receive gmond.conf and gmetad.conf files that cause the installed version of ganglia to work properly on PelicanHPC. ksysguard still works well as a cluster monitor, though.

Red Hat Family

• Crenshaw, much like Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, positions the open source company as the most complete cloud alternative to Microsoft’s closed-source solutions. Crenshaw points to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Middleware as key components for public and private cloud opportunities.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s implementation of the XFCE Desktop works fine, and looks good. The problem is that it could look fantastic with a bit more work. I don’t know why Canonical made the original decision to concentrate on Gnome. In my opinion XFCE is far nicer.

• The Places Tile View is not yet fully functional: clicking the top items it opens Nautilus. Further more, the design looks unpolished with no effects and a rough design but this will surely change.

• Just in, and an update to the Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha has brought with it the first iteration of what will soon blossom into Unity’s long-awaited Dash revamp.

• Still, Canonical has faced its share of challenges over the past year. COO Matt Asay left the company in December 2010; Google Android and Apple iPad have largely stolen Ubuntu’s thunder on so-called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs); and Google Chrome OS could emerge as an Ubuntu rival on netbook-type devices.

• Ubuntu Developer Diaries with Michael Vogt and Matthew Paul Thomas introducing new features under developing to Software Center For Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

• Rating and Reviews are a great way to easily know users feedbacks, reviews, and rating about any application available on the software center before installing it, and you can publish your own reviews and ratings, also sharing your reviews and rating directly from Ubuntu Software Center to your twitter account and other social network using Gwibber client.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is my recommended operating system (as well as my recommended GNU/Linux distribution).

• Linux Mint will provide an end user with a legitimately free, robust, stable, secure, full featured, easy to use, and up-to-date modern operating system.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• In my previous post, I whipped up the ability to hang-up calls when placing my N900 face down, well I got a few comments and requests about turning the loud speaker on when placed face up. So, with a little time to kill on a Wednesday evening, I cracked a cold Moosehead and added that in.

• I recently came across an article reporting the rebirth of the Qt port for Firefox 4. When the journalist wrote about rebirth they were referring to work that some bloggers at Tech Freaks 4 You reported two years ago, but it rattled loose an old memory I had from when I first joined Trolltech (way back when digital watches were thought to be a pretty neat idea).

Android

• Sure your car can go from 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, but can it play Angry Birds? French wireless specialist Parrot has developed a break-through in automotive accessories: the Android- powered car radio. Known as Asteroid, the system uses 3G, Bluetooth, and GPS to provide you with internet radio, hands-free calling, maps…and apps. With its Android OS Asteroid will be able to run a variety of smart phone applications, as well as some developed specifically for in-car use.

• What a rollercoaster you’ve put me through today Motorola, can I call you Moto? I’ve been a fan of your products since the MicroTac I had way back in the day and I said this then, and I still say it today, you seriously build some outstanding hardware. I’ve also had several variants of the Razr, which was a great phone (pretty obvious from the bajillions you sold back then, huh?) and innovative at the time. Then you hit some rough times. Your glory days had seemed to wind toward that corporate sunset, and you needed a way back into the hearts and minds of the people. A small green robot came by and offered his tiny robot hand to pull you out of the depths. The Droid was born. Now you did an amazing job with the original Droid, which is still one of the best devices I’ve owned running CyanogenMod 7 Nightlies, touting some nice specs for the time and offering the openness that really sets Android apart from its competitor in its walled garden. The Droid is still the number 1 Android device, at least as of Dec 2010, which says a lot toward its greatness.

• After the infamous announcement by one of Motorola’s YouTube channel moderators that those wanting custom ROMs should “buy elsewhere”, it seems that Motorola’s PR department has taken control back: “We apologize for the feedback we provided regarding our bootloader policy. The response does not reflect the views of Motorola. We are working closely with our partners to offer a bootloader solution that will enable developers to use our devices as a development platform while still protecting our users’ interests. More detailed information will follow as we get closer to availability.”

• HTC was the first smartphone maker to use Google’s Android operating system.

• T-Mobile USA introduced its Samsung Galaxy S 4G, an Android 2.2-based smartphone the carrier says will offer peak download speeds of 21Mbps. While few other details were provided, the device will likely feature a 4.3-inch AMOLED (active matrix organic LED) screen and dual cameras, as do others in the Galaxy S line.

Tablets

• GizChina have posted news of another new (albeit dual-booting) Ubuntu tablet.

• The tablet boasts a dual-core 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, 1GB Ram, a 16Gb SSD hard-drive and a 9.7″ screen, all tucked up inside an iPad-esque shell complete with iPad home button and iPod-style charger.

• Even though it isn’t needed with the tablet version of the software, the Toshiba Android Honeycomb tablet will have the four standard Android buttons on the bezel. We haven’t been able to dive into the latest version of the little, green robot to know if these standard buttons are even needed anymore.

• HTC is planning three Android tablets under the “Flyer” moniker, starting with a tablet due in the second quarter, says a report. In other Android-related news, Acer has denied claims that it would either phase out netbooks or use “Sandy Bridge” processors in tablets — but now confirms two Android tablets are coming — and Google co-founder Larry Page is taking over as CEO.

• Massive pre-orders show that demand is high for the Motorola Xoom Android 3.0 tablet, as well as the RIM PlayBook tablet, says an industry report. Meanwhile, Asus has denied rumors that its Eee Pad tablets will be delayed and won’t run Android 3.0, says another report, and LG’s G-Slate gains a sign-up page on T-Mobile.

Free Software/Open Source

• From the experience I’ve had so far with OX administration, I’d give it a B, maybe a B-. It could be far easier to administer for a small business, but I suspect that much of the company’s focus is on their hosting provider business. I’d recommend strongly considering a hosted version of Open-Xchange if you have a smallish organization with limited tech support resources. If you have more time than money, though, the Server and Community Editions are there.

• We wondered recently about the impact of a cloud partnership between Red Hat and Eucalyptus Systems, which also works closely with Canonical for its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. In a recent discussion, Marten Mickos told me Eucalyptus Systems fully expects and supports Canonical’s moves toward another cloud framework, OpenStack. While Canonical’s strategy probably has as much to do with customer demand, particularly for cloud flexibility, as it does with responding to rivals’ moves and deals, I believe that both the Red Hat partnership with Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical’s support for multiple, open source cloud computing frameworks signal a more open cloud computing market that is evolving.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Miramar Alpha 2, available here for download, is for testers, extension developers, and friends who are curious to follow the development of our next release of Thunderbird.

SaaS

• The fact that Amazon.com selected the open source Apache Tomcat as the Java application server powering Amazon.com’s entry into the Java platform-as-a-service market came as little surprise to Java vendors and industry watchers. Amazon.com’s pricing strategy, on the other hand, will surely surprise some vendors and IT decision makers. Additionally, Amazon.com’s apparent lack of contributions to the Apache Tomcat project should be considered as you make your Java cloud-platform selection decisions.

• And, perhaps most notably, Eucalyptus Systems’s technologies and buzz drew open source management talent like former MySQL head Marten Mickos and Red Hat sales veteran Said Ziouani to sign onto the core executive team.

Databases

• EnterpriseDB, the largest independent PostgreSQL open source database company, today announced the availability of three components, adding important security and replication technology for community PostgreSQL Server users — SQL/Protect, PL/Secure and xDB Replication Server. These add-on modules make PostgreSQL more secure and supply data integration capabilities between multiple PostgreSQL servers as well as between PostgreSQL and Oracle. Prior to today’s announcement, these three components were only made available to EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus customers.

• In this brief period, SkySQL, with employees in 13 countries, grew its global operations, expanded its sales force in the Americas and APAC regions, and increased its overall workforce. The company is now serving roughly 40 customers globally across various industries. Growth was particularly strong in Europe, where the company added customers such as internet-based financial information services provider, BörseGo; luxury goods manufacturer, Richemont; film/tv studio and distributor Canal+; and internet hosting provider, FHR, to its list of customers. This list includes a growing number of former Oracle MySQL customers that have made the switch to SkySQL.

Business

• An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the database was also one of the great success stories in the Open Source world, and ended being acquired by Sun (now Oracle) for approx. $1 billion. Making money in Open Source businesses is a lot harder than it may appear on the outside. Lesley tells the story of how she and Zack Urlocker, running marketing partnered to solve the sales and marketing challenges that the company faced when trying to monetize MySQL.

• Pentaho Corporation, the open source business intelligence (BI) and data integration leader, today announced the most successful year in company history represented by 120 percent bookings growth, over 400 new customers and rapid expansion of the global partner network during 2010. This momentum has helped solidify Pentaho as the leading OSBI provider helping to address some of the most demanding needs for its thriving worldwide customer base.

• n the past year, one in five Fortune 100 companies started up a Eucalyptus cloud deployment, as part of the more than more than 25,000 Eucalyptus deployments across government organizations, academic institutions and private enterprises worldwide. The past year was also marked by rapid expansion of the Eucalyptus partner ecosystem, with leading global companies including Dell, HP, Intel, and Red Hat collaborating with Eucalyptus for private cloud computing solutions.

• WANdisco, the makers of Enterprise Subversion with the most active core developers from the project on staff, today announced that it had completed the acquisition of SVNForum.org – the world’s largest Subversion user community with over 20,000 active members. At the same time the company has given the site a new lease of life with a distinctive new look and new features that make it easier to use.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) does not claim to be a perfect organization, but our model is definitely geared towards project sustainability, and makes most or all such events impossible by design.

• Let’s discuss a few concepts that promote and enable this project sustainability.

• Newcomers to the ASF sometimes complain about our “red tape”. People have to sign our CLA [1] before being granted commit access. Projects have to follow strict rules for voting and releasing software. Adding a committer also requires a specific process, which lasts at least 72 hours. None of this is really complicated once you’ve done it a few times, but it sometimes seems like extra overhead for people coming from smaller projects where everything just happens.

• This is just a repost of the disappeared blog post. (The small print allows me to copy it verbatim.) There is no commentary from myself, except that what Mark wrote is the same I also heard Oracle say a year ago. That Oracle is being consistent on this point is very welcome and deserves to be kept available online.

• Hudson is the most popular open source continuous integration server with 25,000 sites deployed.

• OpenLogic, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source software support and governance solutions encompassing hundreds of open source packages, today announced a partnership with Talend, a global open source software leader.

• “Talend is a recognized market leader in open source software with more than ten million downloads,” said Vincent Pineau, general manager of Americas for Talend. “Our solutions are the most widely used and deployed open source data management and application integration solutions in the world. We are excited to see our community get more support options for these products, thanks to this partnership with OpenLogic.”

• “The launch of ConVirt 2.0 Open Sourcein February really hit a chord with anyone looking for a better way to manage Linux virtualization,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “The new features, combined with our datacenter experience from versions 1.x drove an incredible amount of downloads and valuable contributions to the product, which provided a great launch pad for our Enterprise version later in the year.”

• OpenERP has launched a significant upgrade designed to appeal to small and mid-sized businesses both for its functionality and its pricing. OpenERP is “a good example of a company using open source to target a piece of the market that has been overlooked by some of the larger, more established vendors,” said 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman.

Funding

• The Scala research group at EPFL is excited to announce that they have won a 5 year European Research Grant of over 2.3 million Euros to tackle the “Popular Parallel Programming” challenge. This means that the Scala team will nearly double in size to pursue a truly promising way for industry to harness the parallel processing power of the ever increasing number of cores available on each chip.

Project Releases

• Tor 0.2.1.29 continues our recent code security audit work. The main fix resolves a remote heap overflow vulnerability that can allow remote code execution. Other fixes address a variety of assert and crash bugs, most of which we think are hard to exploit remotely.

• If you’ve ever had to audit/capture network traffic, you’ve likely used the open source wireshark (formerly Ethereal) application.

• Wireshark is getting updated this week to version 1.4.3, providing some really interesting fixes. I personally use wireshark to audit network traffic and security, but apparently Wireshark itself had a trio of security flaws in it.

Openness/Sharing

• According to Dave Glassanos, founder of Disrupt.fm, the price of a song is about the equivalent of a Facebook update. That’s up for debate, but I will say that Glassanos’s Facebook-oriented startup is pretty cool.

• Can you help lead the chapter to success in 2011 by standing for election as a board member? If so, you’re warmly invited to join us on Saturday 5th February from 5pm where you can find out more about what is involved in being a board member and have an opportunity to ask any questions and meet other interested people.

• Green Energy Corp, a software technology company that enables traditional and emerging power providers to move to the Smart Grid, today announced that it has launched the Total Grid open source community.

Open Access/Content

• Nick Shockey is the Director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC) and the Director of Student Advocacy at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The R2RC is an international alliance of 31 graduate and undergraduate student organizations, representing nearly 7 million students, that promotes an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the research they need for their education because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of scholarly journals. We spoke to Nick about similarities in the open access and open educational resources movements, the worldwide student movement in support of access to scholarly research, and the benefits of adopting Creative Commons tools for open access literature.

Programming

• ActivePython Community Edition is a freely downloadable Python distribution pre-compiled with popular Python packages designed for the open source community and prototyping in enterprise environments, it enables easy deployment to production by moving from ActivePython Community Edition to Business or Enterprise Edition.

Standards/Consortia

• The most unified criticism has centered around the FAQ’s original statement that the logo means “a broad set of open web technologies”, which some believe “muddies the waters” of the open web platform.

Leftovers

• The internet is now deeply embedded in group and organizational life in America. A new national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has found that 75% of all American adults are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization and internet users are more likely than others to be active: 80% of internet users participate in groups, compared with 56% of non-internet users. Moreover, social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants.

• The move has clearly been planned for some time; in a blog post, Schmidt admitted the move had been planned “over the [Christmas] holidays”. Of course the trio – Schmidt, Page and his co-founder Sergey Brin – had figured out that if Schmidt had simply announced it on 2 January, all hell would have broken loose: the stock would have tanked, and everyone would have picked the financial results announced on Thursday night apart like vultures on a carcass.

• According to the National Association of College Stores in a 2007 survey, the average cost of a new college textbook was $53. The founders of Flat World Knowledge, which launches with its first run of college textbooks this fall, consider that too high–so high, in fact, that they’ll be offering textbooks for free, at least in versions that can be read online.

• If the student wants to buy a printed copy of the textbook, it will be printed on demand by the company and provided in color for one price or black and white for a lesser price. For the student who prefers to listen to the book on an MP3 player, audio versions will be available too. Each format will have its own cost structure, but on average, it’ll tally up to about $30.

• This BBC video-clip describes the latest ingenious project from Sugata Mitra, an Indian-born professor at Newcastle University.

• We may all be getting ready to “Marry Durham” come March, but Google hasn’t even shown a willingness to return our phone calls after that initial flirtation they made with municipalities nationwide for their fiber-optic program. (Or, for that matter, anyone’s calls — there’s no sign that the Big G has picked any community for a residential gigabit network.)

• Instead, we’ve been stuck in a relationship with Time Warner Cable that’s been pretty monogamous, though some Durhamites have tried to stray with mixed success.

• Google may be trying to take over the world, but as long as you’re on-side it is still a brilliant place to work.

• In a ruling that Eric Goldman correctly refers to as “divorced from reality,” a California Appeals court has ruled that two advertising firms can be held liable for actions done by their affiliates (and sub-affiliates). In this case, these sub-affiliates sent out spam, advertising things on behalf of the defendants in the case. There were a few legal questions raised by the case, including yet another attempt to see if CAN SPAM really pre-empts state anti-spam laws, which are interesting, but which we won’t discuss right now. Instead, I wanted to focus on that one key issue of putting the blame on a company for what a third party does.

• Botswana’s government has green-lighted a massive $3bn mine in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve – in the middle of the Kalahari Bushmen’s appeal against the Botswana authorities’ refusal to allow them access to water there.

• Gem Diamonds announced today that its application to open a huge diamond mine near the Bushman community of Gope in the reserve has been approved. The company claims to have secured the consent of the Bushmen on whose lands the mine will be located.

• More than 100 breastfeeding mothers staged a protest outside a store in Montreal Wednesday.

• The “nurse-in” was in front of the Orchestra baby clothing store in the Complexe Les Ailes shopping centre on Ste-Catherine Street. Two weeks ago, Montrealer Shannon Smith was asked to leave the shop because she was breastfeeding.

Science

• Being an artist, taking science courses is usually just a bit curious. Usually it only has slight ramifications. Like for graphing in 3D, the texts and teachers just used the below left axes. But I made my own, I thought more artistic axes, shown by the below right axes.

• Google is making a €1 million gift to the International Mathematical Olympiad organization, which has been organizing the annual World Championship Mathematics Competition for High School Students.

• This book is written in the hope that presenting the engineering discipline underlying successful parallel-programming projects will free a new generation of parallel hackers from the need to slowly and painstakingly reinvent old wheels, instead focusing their energy and creativity on new frontiers. Although the book is intended primarily for self-study, it is likely to be more generally useful.

Health/Nutrition

• ResourceShelf has a number of links and excerpts relating to the sordid story of the Enfield, Connecticut public library being forced to cancel its showing of Michael Moore’s Sicko after a few people complained to the town council, who took issue with the characterization of the film as “non-fiction.”

Security

• During 2000 and 2001, Ph.D. student Niels Provos would occasionally drive from the University of Michigan across the border into Canada and spend the weekend working on an open-source cryptography project that would end up becoming one of the most widely used network security technologies ever: OpenSSH. He couldn’t work on it in his Ann Arbor office, or he would have run afoul of restrictive U.S. export regulations designed to keep strong crypto out of the hands of foreigners.

• Several years later, Provos moved his research papers and software related to steganography, which is the science of hiding secret messages, from servers at the U.S. university to a server in the Netherlands to avoid violating Michigan law. He was concerned (and so was the Electronic Frontier Foundation) that the law–which made it illegal to develop software that conceals “the existence or place of origin of any telecommunications service”–was so vague as to allow it to apply to his research. After the legislation was later watered down, he moved his stuff back to the states.

• Terry Sweeny is right. Hacker attacks won’t hurt your company brand. And claims that they do hurt security’s brand.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• For the last 25 years CCTV has proliferated into public spaces across the UK, but is it going too far to use cameras to give parking tickets and enforce bus lane rules?

• When most people think of CCTV being used in law enforcement they think of a string of high-profile crimes that have been solved or publicised with the help of footage.

• A G20 incident caught on video that shows a York Regional Police officer telling a protester he is no longer in Canada and has no civil rights is under investigation.

• The video shows several activists standing outside of the G20 security perimeter at King St. W. and University Ave. on June 27 while their bags are searched by a group of police officers. The mood is pleasant until a young man in a black T-shirt and cap refuses to hand over his backpack.

• It has been two decades since a U.S.-led coalition expelled Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait — and global leaders are still grappling with the challenges of the new world heralded by the Persian Gulf War.

• “In the case of Desert Storm, I honestly believe history will say we got this one right,” former president George H.W. Bush said Thursday at Texas A&M University’s basketball arena as he opened a 20th-anniversary symposium on the war.

• Members of Bush’s war cabinet, including Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, discussed the legacy of the first major military conflict after the Cold War — as well as some of the lessons that have not been easy to apply in the years since.

• During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction even though none were ever found after the invasion of Iraq.

• The senator, retiring his seat in 2012, also said that despite the enormous cost to the U.S. in blood, prestige and treasure he does not regret his vote for war and would do it all over again.

Cablegate

• Private First Class Bradley E. Manning was arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. He has been held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico since sometime in May 2010.

• I will drive down to Quantico this weekend with Bradley Manning’s friend David House when David delivers petition signatures to the Commander of the Quantico brig. The petition urges an end to the inhumane treatment of Manning during his pre-trial confinement.

• Life for PFC Manning, however, is not much better now that he has been returned to POI watch. Like suicide risk, he is held in solitary confinement. For 23 hours per day, he will sit in his cell. The guards will check on him every five minutes by asking him if he is okay. PFC Manning will be required to respond in some affirmative manner. At night, if the guards cannot see him clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure that he is okay. He will receive each of his meals in his cell. He will not be allowed to have a pillow or sheets. He will not be allowed to have any personal items in his cell. He will only be allowed to have one book or one magazine at any given time to read. The book or magazine will be taken away from him at the end of the day before he goes to sleep. He will be prevented from exercising in his cell. If he attempts to do push-ups, sit-ups, or any other form of exercise he will be forced to stop. He will receive one hour of exercise outside of his cell daily. The guards will take him to an empty room and allow him to walk. He will usually just walk in figure eights around the room until his hour is complete. When he goes to sleep, he will be required to strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothing to the guards.

• For years we’ve heard reports of classified data inadvertently being available on P2P networks, and watched Congress hold hearing after hearing proclaiming the chances of a “cyber Pearl Harbor.”

• [...]

• WikiLeaks says the claims are “completely false in every regard,” but Tiversa has compiled a rather damning list of coincidences.

• On Bloomberg.com today, Michael Riley reports that some of the documents hosted at Wikileaks may not be “leaks” at all, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, according to a computer security firm called Tiversa, “computers in Sweden” have been searching the files shared on p2p networks like Limewire for sensitive and confidential information, and the firm supposedly has proof that some of the documents found in this way have ended up on the Wikileaks site. These charges are denied as “completely false in every regard” by Wikileaks lawyer Mark Stephens.

• I have no idea whether these accusations are true, but I am interested to learn from the story that if they are true they might provide “an alternate path for prosecuting WikiLeaks,” most importantly because the reporter attributes this claim to me. Although I wasn’t misquoted in the article, I think what I said to the reporter is a few shades away from what he reported, so I wanted to clarify what I think about this.

• [...]

• But I restate my conclusion: I think a prosecution under the CFAA against someone for searching a p2p network should fail. The text and caselaw of the CFAA don’t support such a prosecution. Maybe it’s “not a slam dunk either way,” as I am quoted saying in the story, but for the lawyers defending against such a theory, it’s at worst an easy layup.

• Lawyers for ex-inmates of the Guantanamo prison camp used documents released by WikiLeaks to argue for their acquittal in a French terrorism trial Thursday.

• The lawyers for five Frenchmen, originally acquitted of the charges in a 2009 trial, argued that it was inappropriate for French investigators to have discussed the ex-inmates’ cases with American authorities after a new trial was ordered. Lawyer Dominique Many said it “shocked” him that investigators would discuss ongoing cases with the U.S. government.

• Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt insisted Thursday that his government will play no role in deciding whether WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, should be extradited to the U.S.

• Assange is in London, where he’s battling extradition to Sweden over sex-crime allegations.

• The production company behind the TV series Bones has announced a biopic on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It will be a thriller—a “suspenseful drama with a global impact”. But who’s going to play Julian Assange?

• While browsing through incoming malware samples, we noticed this one.

• Public relations professionals in Germany say that trying to sit out the storm is no longer a strategy for success in a post-cablegate world.

• The US Ambassador to Botswana strongly condemned the government’s forced eviction of the Kalahari Bushmen, according to secret US embassy cables released today.

• Ambassador Joseph Huggins told his bosses in Washington in 2005 that the Bushmen had been ‘dumped in economically absolutely unviable situations without forethought, and without follow-up support. The lack of imagination displayed… is breathtaking.’

• He concluded by saying, ‘The special tragedy of New Xade’s dependent population [i.e. the Bushmen in the relocation camp] is that it could have been avoided.’

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A high-profile thinktank founded by the former chancellor Lord Lawson, which has been highly critical of climate scientists and action on global warming, appears to have attracted fewer than 100 members in its first year.

• Accounts filed with the Charities Commission and Companies House in the last week show for the first time the extent to which the secretive Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded in November 2009, is funded by anonymous donors, compared with income from membership fees. Its total income for the period up to 31 July 2010 was £503,302, of which only £8,168 came from membership contributions. The foundation charges a minimum annual membership fee of £100 .

• Northern China’s largest body of freshwater is shrinking, but can it be saved? Huo Weiya travelled to Inner Mongolia to find out.

• In a document making its rounds among Republican lawmakers, Upton claims that the EPA has put a “chokehold” on businesses by regulating their emissions and pollution. The Hill obtained a copy of the document titled “Key Issues before the Committee on Energy and Commerce 112th Congress [PDF], which contains the following:

• “We believe it critical that the Obama administration ‘stop’ imposing its new global warming regulatory regime, which will undermine economic growth and U.S. competitiveness for no significant benefit…The EPA is regulating too much too fast without fully analyzing the feasibility and economic and job impacts of the new rules.”

• Upton and his colleagues are working to dismantle the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, which was granted to them by a Supreme Court ruling that stated that carbon was, in fact, a greenhouse gas. The energy industry was strongly opposed to this ruling, as it would hinder their ability to pollute without consequence, and reducing their emissions would take a small percentage off of their bottom line. And since Upton’s number one campaign donor is the energy industry, he’s not going to waste any time to grant their wishes.

• But then take a look at this video. Have you ever asked yourself where all those computers, printers and other things you disposed off ended up? Do you really need that computer with a bazillion gigs of memory and all that power?

• You might be safe from the pollution that the hardware and software companies induce through their very powerful marketing strategies, but for people like yours truly, we bear the full brunt of it.

• Next time you go out shopping for gadgets, ask yourself two questions: do you really need it, and what is the real price aside what’s displayed on the price tag.

• As a follow up to last week’s post, China Lights, Global Floods, Australian Coal, I’ve helpfully received various emails, reports, and some photographs from friends and contacts in New Zealand and Australia. Below is a classic Before and After portrait of the Baralaba Mine, flooded by the Dawson River.

Finance

• A few weeks ago, we mentioned a rather unusual technological endeavor to create an online currency. We received a few queries about this subject, so decided to provide a more thorough description of what digital currency is, how this system works, why it’s appealing and how it might fall short of user expectations.

• To understand digital currency, one must first note that money in the digital age has moved from a largely anonymous system to one increasingly laden with tracking, control and regulatory overhead. Our cold hard cash is now shepherded through a series of regulated financial institutions like banks, credit unions and lenders. Bitcoin, created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, is a peer-to-peer digital currency system that endeavors to re-establish both privacy and autonomy by avoiding the banking and government middlemen. The goal is to allow individuals and merchants to generate and exchange modern money directly. Once the Bitcoin software has been downloaded, a user can store Bitcoins and exchange them directly with other users or merchants — without the currency being verified by a third party such as a bank or government. It uses a unique system to prevent multiple-spending of each coin, which makes it an interesting development in the movement toward digital cash systems.

• FED observers are quite aware of Vice-Chairman Yellen’s recent theoretical presentation, in which she asserted that quantitative easing would create 3 million jobs in America. Yellen marked this objective to the year 2012, which is now just a year away.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Opposition MPs claim Prime Minister Stephen Harper has violated the spirit if not the letter of a Commons rule banning the use of House resources for election-related purposes by using his Prime Minister’s office on Parliament Hill as the setting for a television ad the Conservative party itself has linked to a possible snap election.

• So, remember how the Conservative Party’s latest ad campaign — and, specifically, the spot filmed in the prime minister’s office — got me wondering whether it was against the rules that govern the use of parliamentary property for partisan purposes? Turns out that I may not have been entirely correct when I concluded that it likely was not — or, at the very least, wasn’t explicitly forbidden — since it was shot in his Hill office, and not his ministerial quarters across the street in Langevin.

Privacy

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation today posted analysis of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which show how various popular social media companies handle requests for user data from authorities. The issue became a focal point earlier this month when the US Department of Justice obtained a court order for records from Twitter on users affiliated with WikiLeaks.

• Employees of government contractors, including scientists and engineers who work on government space programs, must submit to intrusive background checks if they want to keep their jobs, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Verizon dropped a bomb on the FCC’s net neutrality plans today, asking a federal appeals court to “vacate, enjoin, and set aside” the signature accomplishment of FCC Chair Julius Genachowski.

• Free and open access to the internet in Canada is under threat, according to New Democrat Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus. Angus, the MP for Timmins-James Bay, said the CRTC’s decision to allow usage-based Internet billing won’t just affect the so-called “bandwidth hogs” but also unfairly hit Canadian consumers in the pocket book.

• The CRTC’s decision to allow internet service providers to charge their customers for downloading excessive amounts of data threatens “free and open access to the internet in Canada,” the NDP said Thursday.

• Somehow I’m not surprised to see a Cable ISP like Shaw trying to fool their customers into thinking this forces them to raise the prices.

• The biggest problem with UBB is still that most Canadians consumers don’t understand it. And won’t even know about it until we get the bills.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Ars Technica has an article highlighting Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s “conservative tech policy goals,” which has a heavy focus on ramping up intellectual property laws and enforcement. Of course, I don’t see how that’s any different than the “liberal tech policy” these days. Of course, this reinforces the general point that intellectual property issues are not partisan, as both major parties seem to be beholden to the interests of those who abuse IP laws.

• [...]

• It’s really quite unfortunate that so many of our elected officials, no matter what their political party, seem to have fallen for the same fallacy, that seeks to turn the internet into the next version of television, rather than focusing on what the internet actually does well.

Copyrights

• An odd campaign by IRIS Distribution, a record label representative, is targetting children with the slogan “I share everything but my music.” The image of adorable woodland creatures depicting an “i’m totally ignoring you” rabbit wearing headphones and a confused looking raccoon attempting to share a ball with his rude buddy attempts to get at the problem of digital file sharing.

• The European Commission is consulting on blocking orders against websites, and on privacy rules which relate to graduated response / 3-strikes measures. Interested Internet users have just over 2 months left to respond.

• A man and woman who operated a 50TB capacity file-sharing hub have been found guilty of copyright infringement offenses. Despite arguing that their 2,600 member system was set up merely for discussion, the pair now face paying damages to the IFPI of more than $1 million and suspended jail sentences totalling 7 months.

• Once again the music industry has published a report featuring the desperate times record labels are facing, all because of file-sharing horrors. Each year the industry’s press releases and annual reports are ever more depressive, with their lobbyists citing horribly inaccurate research and utilizing twisted arguments to beg governments for help. Brace yourself.

• Five years ago, when I founded the Swedish and first Pirate Party, we set three pillars for our policy: shared culture, free knowledge, and fundamental privacy. These were themes that were heard as ideals in the respected activist circles. I had a gut feeling that they were connected somehow, but it would take another couple months for me to connect the dots between the right to fundamental liberty of privacy and the right to share culture.

• The connection was so obvious once you had made it, it’s still one of our best points:

• Today’s level of copyright can’t coexist with the right to communicate in private.

• It’s official: online piracy has only one real solution, and that solution will be taxpayer-funded.

• The yearly ‘reports’ from Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s IFPI used to be fun.

• Full of little lies, medium sized lies and Big Lies, statistics from outer space, smooth PR babble, and all the rest of it, they were ridiculous and fun to pull apart.

• They’re still ridiculous, but as it becomes more and more obvious they’re on their last legs and their efforts to stay alive in the 21st digital century become increasingly outrageous, the fun has worn off.

• [...]

• That’s the message buried in this year’s report, which features a section which should be deeply alarming to any parent, any teacher, any government department anywhere that’s concerned with the way in which our children are taught, and by whom.

• “Consumer education plays an important role in the music industry’s digital strategy”, admit Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US). Their “IFPI and its national affiliates are involved in dozens of public education programmes worldwide”, they say in the ‘report’, punching up “Four international consumer education programmes”.

• For “education” read “indoctrination”. And there’s zero genuine content: only corporate disinformation.

• Like all other music industry interest groups the IFPI suffers from the delusion that digital music is like physical music, and that two would be equal if “wasn’t for them meddlin’ kids” – aka illegal file-sharers. It says that in 2010 CD sales continued their sharp decline while digital music sales rose by a mere 6%, but what it doesn’t say is that people no longer want to own clunky, outdated CDs.

• A small battalion of music copyright trade associations have written to the global agency in charge of domains to express their displeasure with the group’s latest Draft Application Guidebook for generic Top-Level Domains (gLTDs). Those are the domain suffixes that we’ve all come to know and possibly love, such as .com, .org, and .info.

Digital Economy (UK)

• Rights holders will pay 75%, with the remaining 25% borne by ISPs. This reflects the position announced last spring following an earlier consultation – so no surprises in the draft SI, then.

• With no sign of a draft of the main body of the Initial Obligations Code – the legislation which details how the copyright infringement warning scheme will run, appeals will be heard etc – some commentators are surprised that the government should choose now to put this lesser costs order before parliament.

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