● 02.02.11

● Links 2/2/2011: Kineo Android Tablet, Puppet for the Enterprise

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The donated computers are powered by a Linux based operating system and the latest open source educational software. Technology is essentially in this day and age for a child to be able to exceed at school – I can say with 100% certainty that I would not be the person I am today without the access to computers I had from an early age. I was lucky enough to be raised in a family that could afford such technologies – not every child is so lucky.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

• But getting back to Linux, one of the best and maybe worst things about Gnu/Linux-based operating systems (distros) is the insane amount of choice that one has about the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and which desktop environment/window manager you can use to interact with your system. There are hundreds of Linux distros available that cost nothing to download and use to run your computer with. And there are many choices of GUI managers you can use. The most popular distros come with GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, LXDE, and Fluxbox. The last four here mentioned are becoming more popular because they are more light-weight (use less system resources, less RAM, so they work great on older computers/netbooks than GNOME or KDE). But there’s also another one that’s been around for a while called Enlightenment. For the past few years it seems like there hasn’t been much development going on with the Enlightenment Project, but recently I’ve seen a few new distros and some well-established ones that use the Enlightenment desktop. The version now in use, E-17, is pretty neat because it is very light on system resources, yet has a beautiful look (eye-candy) and is quick and responsive on a variety of hardware.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

• Anyone pulling the Launchpad branch of Wingpanel – the space saving desktop panel – today may be in for a surprise…

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Yesterday I followed the online event Virtual Experience, presented by Red Hat.

• The event was presented in 4 main areas :Red Hat Enterprise 6, Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Jboss, for an idea of the sessions available take a look here.

Debian Family

• In the beginning there was the command-line

• App stores have their roots in the package management systems employed by operating systems such as Debian. Debian is a distribution of Linux founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock.

• While Debian may not have been the first operating system to make use of a package management system connected to software repositories, it went on the become one of the most widely adopted.

Devices/Embedded

• Japanese telecom supplier Nakayo Telecommunications is preparing a videoconferencing-enabled IP phone that includes a removable seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet. The unnamed device features an 800 x 600 touchscreen, a camera, Wi-Fi, a microSD slot, and a USB port, according to the company.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• MeeGo-based tablets and netbooks will start shipping in the second quarter, shortly after the release of MeeGo 1.2, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced three new MeeGo training courses, along with three Android related courses — the first LF courses offered for either mobile Linux operating system.

Android

• Brainchild unveiled their new Android tablet at the Florida Educational Technology Conference today. The Kineo is targeted at primary and middle school students, and it’s based on a 7″ screen (800×480), with an 800MHz CPU, 2GB Flash, HDMI out, and Wifi.

Free Software/Open Source

• A press release from the Blender Foundation reports that two web sites have appeared selling re-branded versions of Blender. Allegedly in violation of the GPL, these sites, 3DMagix and IllusionMage, intentionally hide the origins of the software, change or remove credits and licensing and apparently even suggest the software on offer is a cracked version of Autodesk 3ds Max.

SaaS

• Later this week, sources tell me that Convirture, maker of open source-based virtualization management software, will announce a very close partnership with Eucalyptus Systems, creators of the eponymous private cloud platform. The agreement will have the two companies working together to integrate ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise with both Eucalyptus’ open-source cloud platform and Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. In addition, the two companies will cooperate on sales, marketing and support activities.

• Roughly one-third of SugarCRM customers use the company’s on-demand offering; one-third of customers are hosting with a partner; and one-third are running SugarCRM on premise, Augustin estimates. “I’m not sure I see that mix changing much,” he estimates. “The SMBs want SaaS; larger enterprises still want it on-premise and integrated with other applications.”

Oracle/LibreOffice

• The new LibreOffice open-source office suite “proves that forking isn’t always the kiss of death,” says this eWEEK review. New features in the Linux-ready release — including wider document format support, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) import into Draw and Writer, enhanced presentation support, and an improved “save as” feature — should give OpenOffice some robust competition.

• In the open source movement, the forking of a project is often a contentious matter, and can lead to the demise or mothballing of the applications that spawn from the original software. In many ways, it’s a “nuclear option,” as developers choose their allegiances and take their skills with them.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Puppet Labs is now officially a software company. The data center management technology company introduced Puppet for the Enterprise this week. The software is a major advancement for the company. It reflects on the cloud management space that is growing fast in concert with the move to virtualization, the need for data center efficiencies and automatic provisioning.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Contents o Another US federal OA mandate o Word contest #2 o Corrections and updates o Five years ago in SOAN o Roundup o Coming this month o Credits

Leftovers

• Mr. Buzek has 4,413 followers on Twitter, and has used the social-networking tool to publicize the Parliament’s stance amid the vast Brussels bureaucracy. This grabbed attention this week in particular, as the political turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt came to a head, and the EU imposed sanctions on Belarus.

Science

• The scientists asked volunteers to stay away from all emails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter updates for 24 hours. They found that the participants began to develop symptoms typically seen in smokers attempting to give up.

Health/Nutrition

• Leonor, a Mexican citizen, took part in a 2006 clinical trial of a drug to treat kidney disease, designed by a transnational pharmaceutical company.

• “A friend of mine who is a nurse told me about the trial and I decided to take part,” Leonor, a 30-year-old saleswoman who has kidney problems, told IPS. “I was given regular doses of the medicine for several weeks, and they said it worked.”

• Her story is just one among many as clinical trials are increasingly taking place in countries like Mexico and Brazil, for reasons that range from cheaper costs to less rigorous oversight.

• It will be harder for the chemical industry to use people as test subjects in pesticide research sent to the Environmental Protection Agency, based on an expanded “human testing rule” unveiled late Wednesday.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said he will not seek to extend his presidency when his current term expires in 2013.

• Mr Saleh, who has been in power for three decades, also pledged that he would not pass on power to his son.

• A Toronto police officer now faces a second assault charge in connection with last summer’s G20 protests.

• The Toronto Police Service said Wednesday that the latest charge followed a complaint received by the office of the Independent Police Review Director.

• The President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, opened today’s plenary session with a statement on the situation in the Southern neighbourhood of the EU, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt.

• In Egypt, where protestors continued to demonstrate Tuesday for the eighth day in a row, the use of torture by law enforcement officials over the past two decades has contributed to the growing unrest, rights groups say.

• In a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the international advocacy group claims the practice is endemic and often practiced with impunity.

• While the political earthquake rumbling through the Middle East began in Tunisia, when the people took to the streets in Egypt, unrest became a trend rather than an isolated event. In addition, Egypt’s unique role among states in the region — historically and due to the size of its population — amplified the importance of the demonstrations that have filled the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and the rest of the country for this past week.

• Even before President Mubarak’s decision to end his 30-year rule, Egypt’s crisis had earned the undivided attention of leaders across the Middle East. King Abdullah of Jordan’s sacking of his cabinet and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s announcement that he too was not going to seek to extend his three-decade-long tenure in office indicated that both men recognized the fuse that was lit in North Africa was connected to stacks of dynamite on which they were sitting.

• n Egyptian Facebook activist and leader of the group known as the April 6 Youth has been arrested in Cairo, friends told Wired.com Wednesday in e-mails.

• Ahmed Maher, 30, gained prominence in 2008 as one of the co-founders of the April 6 Youth, a solidarity group launched to support protests. Organizing mostly online, especially on Facebook, it is a carefully decentralized network of activists, who have used the tools of social media to broadcast grievances with the Mubarak regime, mobilize support, evade the government’s ubiquitous security forces, and, now, help to bring the Mubarak regime to its knees.

• The U.S. government Tuesday began testing new airport screening technology that does not generate an image of a person’s body, in an effort to address concerns raised by privacy and civil liberties organizations, National Journal reported.

• The use of whole-body scanning machines at airports has been controversial largely because the machines create an image of a person’s body without clothes. The Transportation Security Administration has said the machines give airport screeners the best chance of finding hidden objects on travelers.

• America’s bloated defense budget is ripe for cutting.

Cablegate

• A Norwegian lawmaker has nominated WikiLeaks for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, stating that the secret-spilling website is one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech in the 21st century.

• Lawmaker Snorre Valen said that by disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks is a “natural contender” for the peace prize.

• The US and Canadian ambassadors, who hosted a summit of foreign mining executives in Peru in August 2005, requested specific examples of “anti-mining” teachers and bishops “who engage in inappropriate activities” to take to government and church leaders, the cable claimed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Koch Industries, the private company of the billionaire Koch brothers, is one of the primary sources of carbon pollution in the United States. However, the actual emissions profile of the diversified giant, with its oil and gas, chemicals, cattle, forestry, and synthetics holdings, is unknown, because of the lack of mandatory carbon reporting in the United States.

• If you could take a time machine back to 1971 and tell people about today’s computing environment you would not be believed.

• Back then computer networking was brand new. The first Intel microprocessor was months from release. The first e-mail had yet to be sent.

• Yet the vocabulary of what was to come already existed. Bob Metcalfe was writing about what he would call Ethernet. Both TI and Intel were in business. Hobbyists were dreaming of turning components into computers they could call their own.

• Rick Threlfall of the Bureau of Meteorology in Brisbane said local residents can expect several more hours of destructive winds

• Fierce winds and driving rains brought by the most powerful storm ever to hit Queensland are lashing northern coastal areas of the Australian state.

• Trade talks between Europe and Canada could leave the door open to companies suing states for losses incurred by efforts to fight climate change, campaigners claimed today.

• The warning, backed by an MEP and a law expert, came as 10 protesters unsuccessfully attempted to talk to the Canadian energy minister, Ron Liepert, this morning during a visit to London for a meeting with Lord Howell, the UK minister for the Commonwealth.

• Some of the most detailed pictures ever taken of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe have been released by the Brazilian government. They show a thriving, healthy community with machetes, baskets full of manioc and papaya from their gardens.

• India’s biggest direct foreign investment project – a huge and controversial steel plant – got the go ahead from the Indian environment ministry today despite years of fierce opposition from local campaigners who claim that the lives of tens of thousands of villagers will be destroyed along with swathes of forest and coastline.

• It took the previous Conservative government 13 years to propose a sell-off as unpopular as this one. The privatisation of the railways was opposed by 85% of British voters(1), and helped to derail John Major’s administration in 1997. Cameron’s plan to flog the public forest estate, presented to the nation after eight months in office, is opposed by 84% of the public(2). So much for his brilliant political instincts. And yet, stupid and destructive as this sell-off promises to be, it’s just a stone’s throw from something really interesting.

• The one good thing about this rotten government is that it recognises – in theory, though apparently not in practice – that there are more than two options for the ownership of common resources. Previous governments – both Conservative and Labour – have presented our choices in crude terms: an asset of benefit to the public can either be owned by the state or sold to businesses and private citizens. Both parties have asserted absolute ownership of resources in which we all have an interest. In order to privatise something, you must first claim that the government and the government alone owns it and has the right to decide who gets it and how it will be used. In this respect the Conservatives have championed state power just as fervently as Labour has.

• GOOGLE has been accused of stifling free speech after it banned an ad attacking a paper manufacturer over its environmental record.

• The Wilderness Society paid to have its ad on Google promoting a boycott against a paper manufacturer that uses wood sourced from Australian old growth forests.

• Barrasso’s bill, “Defending America’s Affordable Energy and Jobs Act,” would block federal regulations under the Clean Air Act, but also the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. In case you’re keeping track, that’s just about all of the most important environmental laws currently on the books.

• So much for everyone linking arms and walking together toward a clean energy future. A week after President Obama called for setting a goal of drawing 80 percent of electricity from “clean” energy sources by 2035, the US Chamber of Commerce sent a message back in his direction: fat chance.

• The Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy held a press conference on Tuesday to roll out its energy plans for the year. Endorsement of a clean energy standard—even one that includes nuclear power, natural gas, and “clean coal” in the mix, as Obama’s does—was not part of it. The Chamber has been a major opponent of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but the group signaled Tuesday that it is also going to fight Obama’s much scaled-back version of an energy plan as well.

• The 2005 Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act famously exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. But it made one small exception: diesel fuel. The Policy Act states that the term “underground injection,” as it relates to the Safe Drinking Water Act, “excludes the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities [italics added].” But a congressional investigation has found that oil and gas service companies used tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel in fracking operations between 2005 and 2009, thus violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Hydraulic fracturing is a method of drilling that injects large volumes of water, chemicals, and sand underground at high pressure to break open rock formations and release stores of natural gas. In some cases, however, water based fluids are less effective and diesel fuel or other hydrocarbons may be used.

Finance

• Tax Freedom Day is the day when Britons begin working for themselves rather than the taxman and falls on May 30 in 2011, compared to May 27 this year, the Adam Smith Institute revealed.

• The main reason for the three extra days is the rise in Value Added Tax, which increases from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent on January 4.

• Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, described Britons as being “desperately overtaxed”.

• The five largest loan servicers, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, may be the first to settle with all 50 state attorneys general probing foreclosure fraud, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said.

• The morning routine in Palivelupa village, 100 miles north-east of Hyderabad in central India, has been established for years. Once the buffalo are taken to the fields, the tea made and the children sent to school, the women meet under the big neem tree and wait for the debt collectors.

• Until recently, Rama Peadda Boiana, a 29-year-old farmer’s wife, labourer and mother of three, was in charge. “She was hardworking and clever,” Boiana’s sister-in-law, Taj Mani, told the Guardian. “That is why she ran the group.”

• So, in many respects, details that the Fed was forced to divulge on Wednesday about the $3.3 trillion in emergency loans that until now were totally kept from public scrutiny, marked the beginning, not the end, of lifting the veil of secrecy at the Fed.

• After years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America. As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions and how we can make our financial institutions more responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans and small businesses.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In this country, each person has one vote, no matter whether you are rich or poor. And it is illegal to buy or sell a person’s vote. So why do we allow electoral influence to be bought and sold? Why has politics in America become a commodity in an economic marketplace, where the richest corporations, business associations, unions, and individuals can buy enormous leverage on the outcome of our elections?

• Yesterday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia traveled to the Capitol to teach a class about the Constitution to members of Congress, led by controversial Tea Party caucus chairwoman Michele Bachmann. Justice Scalia’s participation in Bachmann’s Constitution school has prompted a heated debate about the proper relationship between Supreme Court justices and political leaders. But the real debate that should be raging is not about judicial ethics, but about the dubious vision of the Constitution that Scalia and leaders of the Tea Party will be discussing.

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflected your sentiments when she commented on the Egyptian uprising with the words “We want to see free and fair elections.”

• But in the District of Columbia, where you and Secretary Clinton reside, there are no “free and fair elections” for electing representatives with full voting rights to Congress. There is only the continual disenfranchisement –unique to all other national capital cities in purported democracies—for the hundreds of thousands of voting age citizens in the District of Columbia.

• You stated that the United States “will continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people.” Presumably that includes the right to have members of Parliament, with full voting rights, elected by the Egyptian voters.

• Although you declared in the 2008 election that you supported voting rights for the District –at the least one voting member of the House of Representatives if not two voting Senators—but you used little if any of your political capital or the bully pulpit and muscle to get even the most modest measure through Congress.

Censorship

• In essence, that really is what the government did. There was no need for any fancy networking tuning. The Egyptian officials just called up the Egyptian ISPs and told them to switch their core-routers and Domain Name Service (DNS) servers on at about 11 AM local time, 5 AM U.S. Eastern time and within half-an-hour, most of the Egyptian Internet and its associated Web sites was back up again. As Dr. Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, a network security company, told me. “All major Web sites and providers now appear reachable again.”

• But in late November, Clough chose to instantly buckle under pressure from a right-wing media storm and remove a work of art from the exhibit. Clough’s decision was made, it seems, with very little input from the Portrait Gallery’s staff or the Smithsonian’s board, and without any formal avenue for public discussion. Instead, he listened to the reactionary politics of a far-right news source, extremist religious right leader Bill Donohue, and two newly elevated congressional leaders who had not even seen the exhibit but were eager to pander to their base by opening a new front in the culture wars.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• The Stop the Meter Internet petition now has over 200,000 signatories and is growing fast, which may help explain why UBB has emerged as a political hot potato. The NDP was the first to raise it as a political issue, followed yesterday by a response from Industry Minister Tony Clement (who promised to study the decision carefully “to ensure that competition, innovation, and consumers were all fairly considered”) and the Liberals, who called on the government to reverse the CRTC decision.

• Yesterday was a remarkable day for those following the usage based billing and bandwidth cap issue. In the span of 24 hours, an unlikely political consensus emerged that left little doubt that – at a minimum – the CRTC’s UBB decision will be reconsidered. Prime Minister Harper expressed his concern with the decision, Industry Minister Tony Clement hinted at overturning the decision, and both the Liberals and NDP expressed strong support for overturning the decision. Groups like the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, which represent dozens of independent ISPs, wrote to Clement to call for cabinet to reconsider all the CRTC’s UBB decisions and even the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses wrote to express its concern about the impact on Canadian small businesses. An Industry Committee hearing on UBB will apparently begin on Thursday.

• AT&T is facing a lawsuit over one Californian’s data bill that could blossom into a costly class-action case, the plaintiff’s attorneys said.

• In court documents in a suit filed on behalf of AT&T customer Patrick Hendricks attorneys wrote, “A significant portion of the data revenues were inflated by AT&T’s rigged billing system for data transactions,” Beta News reported Tuesday.

DRM

• Hackers say they unlocked the latest firmware for the PlayStation 3 game console, less than 24 hours after Sony released it in a desperate attempt to stuff the jailbreaking genie back in the bottle.

• Sony announced the release of Version 3.56 on Wednesday. That same day, game console hacker Youness Alaoui, aka KaKaRoToKS, tweeted that he had released the tools to unpack the files, allowing him to uncover the new version’s signing keys.

• The lawyer representing a hacker who published the first major PlayStation 3 jailbreak on the internet said Sunday he would challenge a federal judge’s order requiring his client surrender his computer gear to console-maker Sony.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• We’ve talked a few times about how the UK is going through yet another copyright rethink with a key focus (among others) on whether or not the country needs more expansive fair use rules within copyright. While we’ve seen similar discussions happen (and be ignored) in the UK, the good news is that the panel investigating this issue seems to include some really knowledgeable folks on the subject. Of course, it appears that some of the established interests aren’t so thrilled about all of this.

• It appears that Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, and their incredibly sloppy domain seizure operations, have moved on to the next phase — as was promised by both ICE boss, John Morton, and IP Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel. The timing on this one is particularly bizarre — and politically stupid.

• That’s because the the domain seizure is for the Spanish streaming site Rojadirecta. Yes, ICE seized the domain name of a foreign company. And it gets worse. Rojadirecta is not just some fly-by-night operation run out of someone’s basement or something. It’s run by a legitimate company in Spain, and the site’s legality has been tested in the Spanish courts… and the site was declared legal. The court noted that since Rojadirecta does not host any material itself, it does not infringe.

• One of the lawyers who has been at the forefront of filing many of those massive P2P infringement cases for porn producers, with the intent of getting people to pay up “pre-settlement” fees to avoid an actual trial (and being accused publicly of downloading porn), Evan Stone, keeps running into problems. Stone, who apparently only became a lawyer a few months ago, seems to have pushed his luck in yet another case, not expecting lawyers on the other side who might recognize what was going on. However, Public Citizen and the EFF, acting as lawyers for those being sued, discovered that Stone had sent subpoenas to ISPs seeking the identity of file sharers even though the judge in the case had not yet determined if such subpoenas would be allowed.

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