● 02.26.11

● Links 26/2/2011: More GNU/Linux in Schools, Including Punjab’s

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Intended primarily for schools and businesses that need to deploy lots of systems for very little money, Userful’s software can turn one Linux system into 11 separate workstations—for as little as $59 each.

• NComputing, the world’s fastest growing desktop virtualization company and provider of affordable desktop computing solutions, today announced that the Government of Punjab has selected NComputing’s virtual computers to deliver Computer Labs to 480 schools.

• Nitpicking over social networking features aside, I definitely like what the Boxee software has done with the 1.0.x releases available on the Box. The Boxee Box itself is quiet and unobtrusive, it can handle just about any media you throw at it, and unlike the competition, there are no barriers to accessing your own content, adding or reverse-engineering USB peripherals, and writing your own plugin apps. That’d make it a product worth looking at even it wasn’t glowing green and “phasing” its way through other solid objects.

• Imagine if you will, some pro-human-anti-robotic-apocalyptic Linux user that wanted to show the world that flesh and blood carbon-based humanoids will always be superior to silicon-based computers. He might have achieved this feat by slipping a rogue question onto the Jeopardy question board. Based on basic Linux commands, perhaps?

• Vancouver-based Angela Byron aka “webchick”, is an open source advocate and guru of the content management system Drupal. She’s made a huge impact on the Drupal community and her efforts haven’t not gone unnoticed.

• Byron is on the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association and leads community initiatives like Google Summer of Code, a program where Byron got her start as a student in 2005.

• BonitaSoft, the leading provider of open source BPM solutions, today announced the additions of OpenSymmetry, Savoir-faire Linux and Open Source Business Consulting to their partner program. These new partnerships expand BonitaSoft’s North American presence to complement its growing business operations there.

Server

• Millennium Exchange, the platform newly running on the main venue of the LSE, is written in C++ language and runs on Novell SUSE Linux-based datacentres. It offers data through the FIX and ITCH protocols.

• Virtualization isn’t just for geeks or those who run enormously powerful servers. It offers something for everybody, and if you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the virtualization ocean, then you’re at serious risk of being left behind.

• NAB marks the official US launch of Autocue’s first four standalone, Linux-based video servers.

Kernel Space

• That used to be one of the alleged benefits to using Linux on PCs; that older hardware was supported and because Linux (no matter which distribution, as they all mimicked it) was less clogged with non-essential code, it would run faster on older, less advanced hardware.

Applications

• Many people these days have the free VLC media player on their computers, because it’s so versatile and good at what it does. But most of us probably only use it to play DVDs and home movies. I doubt many people realise the power of VLC when it comes to streaming media. This is because it used to be difficult and hacky. Nowadays it’s as easy as changing channels on your TV.

• VLC, without a doubt, is the best media player around. Not only is it able to play almost any file format, it is also able to stream audio/video from the Web and transcode on the fly. VLC-share is a web implementation of VLC streaming and transcoding that allows you to stream (and transcode) your videos to your WII Media Center (WIIMC) or Android phone. Just think of airplay for Android and you get VLC-Shares.

• Combine nine different Linux antivirus programs into a single GUI. Whether you’re a security-conscious Linux user, or just occasionally need to clean up a Windows system from a safe distance, Penguin Pills aspires to combine all the major Linux scanners into one simple GUI. Update definitions and run a scan for all nine programs quickly and easily.

• Data compression is the process of storing data in a format that uses less space than the original representation would use. Compressing data can be very useful particularly in the field of communications as it enables devices to transmit or store data in fewer bits. Besides reducing transmission bandwidth, compression increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive or other storage device.

• Mixxx is a free and open source DJ software for Windows, Mac and Linux. Mixxx 1.9.0 was released a few days ago and this latest release adds several major new features including Shoutcast support, direct deck outputs for external mixers, and ReplayGain normalization.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Do you use the terminal in Linux? If you use Linux long enough you will. And chances are, if you are using the terminal in Linux, you are using either the GNOME terminal or KDE’s konsole. Each has their pros and cons and each has a lot of tricks tucked up inside their sleeves.

• I have covered the gnome-terminal in a few ways (see my articles “Make gnome-terminal profiles work for you” and “Get to know Linux: gnome-terminal“.) These articles either is an introduction or deals with a specific aspect of the tool. This time around, I want to highlight a few different tips and tricks that can help to make gnome-terminal even more useful and user-friendly.

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The Fedora project has postponed the release of the first and only alpha version of Fedora 15, originally scheduled for 1 March, by a week. This was due, at least in part, to a bug in X Server that occurred in connection with keyboard layouts for such languages as German or French and prevented users from successfully logging into GDM. Subsequent milestones in the release schedule for Fedora 15 remain unaffected at present, and the final release is still scheduled for 10 May.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, the Linux vendor behind Ubuntu, is facing growing criticisms about turning its back on the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Critics claim that Canonical is bowing to commercial interests. But is it truly a problem for customers or the Linux community at large?

• At the request of our readers we have decided to revive our old desktop customization tutorial for the Ubuntu OS (and other major Linux distributions powered by the GNOME desktop environment).

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 10 KDE is the latest release of Linux Mint. It is one of several editions of Linux Mint, a desktop-oriented distribution that is based on Ubuntu Desktop Edition. This release comes more than three months after the main Linux Mint 10 edition was released. The main edition, by the way, uses the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME).

• Ubuntu has been my preferred desktop for the last 5 years. It was not a fan-boyish choice, it was a practical decision. Ubuntu is easier to use. But, the latest release of Linux Mint may force me to make a switch. The reason is simple, Linux Mint adds yet another layer of simplicity and ease of use to Ubuntu thus making up for what is missing in Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Claims for the world’s smallest computer and world’s smallest SBC pop up every year or two in the embedded Linux world, it seems. The claims are usually true, for awhile, until the next, even smaller device comes along.

• My, my, my … Linux-based network attached storage has grown up. This month, two vendors released 64-bit NAS units geared toward the enterprise, capable of enormous storage density and equipped with enterprise-class price tags.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• The Necessitas team has announced a Qt SDK for the Android mobile platform. The first release includes Ministro, a system-wide Qt libraries installer, Qt framework, precompiled for Android (only in a Linux 32-bit version), Qt Creator for Android – to create, manage, compile, deploy and debug your software.

• This SKD will enable developers to port their KDE applications to Android platform. Android users may soon (not so soon) be able to use cool KDE apps like Amarok, Kmail, Korganizer, etc on their Android phones and tablets.

Android

• Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo says it will start selling an Android 2.2 phone that’s claimed to be the world’s thinnest, at just a third of an inch. The NEC Medias N-04C phone will be joined on the network by Sony-Ericsson’s Android 2.3-based Xperia Arc SO-01C phone and LG’s Optimus Pad L-06C tablet, the latter running Android 3.0 on an Nvidia Tegra 2.

• Runtime Revolution (RunRev) has ported its LiveCode for iOS software development environment to Android devices, with a pre-release version available this week. The product’s build is intended to provide developers with a base for creating cross-platform mobile apps using the same code base, while taking advantage of the many OS-specific features on each device.

• Depending on where you live in the world you can get caught speeding in a number of different ways. The two most common are in a speed trap which uses a camera, or by a police officer monitoring a highway with a speed gun.

• Sahas Katta got pulled over by the police for speeding. He was apparently doing 40 in a 25mph zone. At the time he was too shocked to even question the speed, so he just accepted the ticket and carried on driving. But Sahas had a way of proving he wasn’t speeding that he hadn’t realized.

• On his dashboard sat a Motorola Droid smartphone, and running on the device was My Tracks. For those that don’t know, My Tracks allows a GPS enabled phone to record detailed statistics about time, speed, distance, and elevation travelled. Sahas checked the data his phone and app had been capturing while he drove and found he was only doing 26 when the officer logged his speed.

Tablets

• Verizon Wireless launched the Motorola Xoom Feb. 24 for $600 with a two-year contract, and the dual-core Android 3.0 tablet has earned solid reviews — although with concerns over the high price and lack of apps. Android tablets certainly have a long way to go, however, since Apple’s iPad represented 93 percent of the 4.5 million tablet PCs sold in 3Q 2010, says ABI Research.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That’s $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

• 1. How to install Ubuntu/Mandriva (I’d like to add Mepis, Pardus and Mint, haha) 2. How to work with open word processors, spreadsheets, electronic presentations 3. How to save documents in compatibility mode (This one is funny. People still fail to see that incompatibility issues spring from Microsoft, not from open documents) 4. How to dual boot Linux/Windows.

• This hands-on workshop is again addressed to professors. They chose us, it turns out, because both Megatotoro and I are not technical users, which proves that ANYONE can use Linux.

• The flights have been confirmed for some time and they’re now being boarded. Speakers are packing and heading to Los Angeles, ready to rehearse their presentations before they go on sometime between Friday and Sunday. Exhibitors prepare to set up their booths. Registrations for the expo continue to roll in. Are you ready for some Linux The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo is set to start tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 25, at the Hllton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

• Heading to Southern California Linux Expo, SCaLE 9x? If so, join us this Friday, along with Cloud.com, Opscode, and Openstack, for a free Cloud building event in Los Angeles.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google released a stable version of Chrome 9 earlier this month but now the company has also pushed out a beta version of Chrome 10. As usual, there are many speed enhancements as well as changes in synchronisation and some of the dialog boxes.

• What do you prefer, keeping your Chrome browser open to get notifications about incoming mails, calender and chat or close the browser yet let these services run in the background? There can be many such service which will become more useful if they run in the background and notify a user if there is any update.

• There are many useful hosted apps, extensions available from Google’s Chrome Webstore which will become more useful if they get the capability of running in the background.

Sun/Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Sun Microsystems’ mishandling of Solaris on the Intel platform left an opening for Linux to become established, when the company’s Solaris OS could have won out instead, Sun co-founder and former CEO Scott McNealy said when interviewed Thursday evening by former Sun president Ed Zander at a Silicon Valley business and technology forum.

CMS

• Joomla has been one of my favourite CMS’s for a while but I left it behind when WordPress answered the last questions I had with version 3. Secretly however, I have been waiting for J1.6 to come out in the hope that it also answered some of the questions I had about the last versions.

• Frankly speaking I always thought that Joomla had a better Content Management interface than WordPress, it was just easier to find stuff with bigger sites in Joomla. The massive draw back was the imposed Information Architecture due to Joomla’s content hierarchy.

• So … FlatPress is mostly PHP, Blosxom and Ode are Perl, PyBlosxom is Python, NanoBlogger is a collection of Bash scripts.

• No databases. All “flat” files. You can see the code. It’s definitely non-commercial.

Funding

Government

• Systems integrators took on a disapproving audience of open source advocates this week after the government told its biggest suppliers to explain why its open source policy has been thwarted for so long.

• Five executives braved public censure to tell a meeting of the BCS Open Source Group that the fault was an industry ecosystem built over 20 years on principles inimical to the open source model. The hostile ecosystem sustained itself – they merely operated within it, they said.

• Bill McCluggage met with suppliers this week to make clear that the Cabinet Office, which leads on ICT policy, wishes to increase the deployment of open source across government.

• He emphasised that the government wishes to see the industry offer more solutions based on open source, and listed a number of approaches that it expects it to follow. These include: evaluating open source solutions in all future proposals; including open standards and interoperability as key components in IT systems; and moving towards the use of open source as normal practice.

• This is one of the stronger policies that we’ve seen from European governments. It certainly is a leap ahead for the UK, which until now has lagged behind many other European countries in terms of Free Software adoption in the public sector. We’d like to see similarly well-considered steps from more European governments.

• The policy note is refreshingly clear on what constitutes an Open Standard. The requirement that patents which are included in Open Standards should be made available royalty-free is a welcome improvement over the fudged compromise in the new European Interoperability Framework. It’s good to see the UK government take leadership on this important issue, in its own interest and that of its citizens.

• As the lamentable OOXML charade has shown, it’s important that standards are developed in a process that’s independent of any particular vendor, and open to all competitors and third parties. We commend the UK government for making this an explicit requirement. The definition of Open Standards could have been even further improved by demanding a reference implementation in Free Software.

• Open standards should be sought in all government IT procurement specifications, the Cabinet Office has said in a policy note.

• When purchasing software, ICT infrastructure, security and other ICT goods and services, where possible government departments should deploy open standards, according to the note published with little fanfare on the department’s web site last week.

• Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses, said the Cabinet Office.

• The programme office of ‘Netherlands in Open Connection’ (NoiV), the Dutch government resource centre on open standards and open source, announced the nomination of three authorities for the ‘Open call for tenders of the year’.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• In the settlement between the two websites, a new question arises: Just what constitutes publicly available data? Is it raw statistics or refined numbers presented by a third party? Governments regularly farm out their data to companies that prepare and package records, but what stands out in this case is that Public Engines effectively laid claimed to the information provided to it by law enforcement. This could be problematic to news organizations, developers, and citizens looking to get their hands on data. While still open and available to the public, the information (and the timing of its release) could potentially be dictated by a private company.

Standards/Consortia

• It is quite common that one wants to send ODF files to people that lack the software to display ODF. One workaround is to convert the ODF to PDF. Most office suites that support ODF can export to PDF. To compare how different office suites do this conversion one can use the website OfficeShots. This website offers the ability to perform this conversion in many office suites at once and to compare the results.

Leftovers

• Details the events of that lead to the arrests of to Latino leaders who tried to enter the Senate building in Arizona. They were blacklisted from entering the building by senate leader, Russell Pearce. That’s right. Blacklisted. Without trail or notice.

• The video is called “The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies” and was created by FeministFrequency. It describes a test for all movies with three simple qualifications:

• 1. Is there more than one woman in the movie who has a name? 2. Do the women talk to each other? 3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

• His and the other bureaucrats and politicians who supported the plan tried to assert that, like the Interstate Highway system has always been justified, long-distance data networks for use by the public are just too expensive for “private” efforts to successfully build. The backbone would have to be so big that only the Federal Government could successfully build it.

• Since I was working graveyard, then evening shift (graveyard and I don’t get along), I don’t recall the exact date that the change occurred, but here’s what it was: The National Science Foundation released control of the routing tables and eliminated the rules against commercial use. In fact and effect, they threw open the “Internet” to anyone and everyone that agreed to use the Internet protocols as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

• At a Churchill Club dinner, former Sun CEOs Scott McNealy and Ed Zander discuss why the company didn’t buy Apple in 1996, the real beginnings of cloud computing and why Linux should never have come into existence.

Hardware

• At a dinner this week with members of the press, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang laid out his view of NVIDIA’s past, present, and future in light of recent developments in the processor market. Jen-Hsun’s remarks are worth looking at in some detail, as much for what they say about Intel as what they say about NVIDIA. We’ll recap Jen-Hsun’s take on the processor and GPU markets, followed by a look at the implications of the trends he references for the future of Intel, the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), ARM, and the CPU market as a whole. Ultimately, we could even see Intel get back into the ARM market, a market where it had considerable success with its XScale line before betting the farm on x86.

• If the Chinese government is scaring the world with its hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, what do you think the reaction will be when Chinese supercomputers shun American-made x64 processors and GPU co-processors and start using their own energy-efficient, MIPS-derived, x86-emulating Godson line of 64-bit processors?

Health/Nutrition

• There are two things lawmakers can be certain of. One, “the study” they will get from AHIP, which was behind the successful effort to keep the federal government from creating a public option, will be anything but objective. And two, it will be the centerpiece of a multi-pronged strategic effort to scare people into believing, erroneously, that SustiNet will cost jobs, lead to higher taxes and bring to an abrupt halt the “market-based solutions” AHIP maintains insurers have brought to Connecticut.

Security

• An Iranian group claimed responsibility for the hack that temporarily defaced the main pages of Voice of America and several of its affiliated Websites.

• In the past year, U.S. government officials have spoken repeatedly about the need to give law enforcement broader powers to conduct surveillance online.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• If anyone deserves a longer sentence, it is a sex offender who victimizes minors. But no one would ever have anticipated that a sex offender would receive extra prison time for using a basic cell phone in the furtherance of his crime. Last week the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the enhanced sentence of the defendant Neil Kramer who pleaded guilty to transporting a female minor in interstate commerce with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, Title 18, U.S.C. § 2423(a). Kramer’s prison sentence was increased by an extra 2 1/3 years because he had used his cell phone to make calls and text messages to the victim for a six-month period leading up to the offense. U.S. v. Kramer, 2011 WL 383710 (8th Cir. Feb. 8, 2011). In total Kramer was sentenced to over 13 years in prison.

Cablegate

• George W. Bush said Friday he will not visit Denver this weekend as planned because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was invited to attend one of the same events as the former president.

• Bush planned to be at a Young Presidents’ Organization “Global Leadership Summit” Saturday but backed out when he learned Assange was invited, Bush spokesman David Sherzer said.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Something bizarre just happened at the Wall St. Journal. At 6pm I was reading a home page story on WSJ.com called “Oscar’s Attention Irks Gas Industry” by Ben Casselman which contained perhaps the most honest and revealing quote from the gas industry that I have read to date about their obsession with attacking my film GASLAND. The quote reads “We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” said Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp. Just thirty minutes later the quote mysteriously disappears, edited out and in its place is a far more typical spin controlled statement from Tom Price of Chesapeake energy saying, “We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately.” Sounds like a robot at a PR agency, more than a person.

Finance

• Wisconsin state employees fighting for their jobs should ask Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein for their money back.

• What’s the connection? During the dog days of the financial crisis in 2008, the investment bank advised clients to bet that Wisconsin and 10 other U.S. states would go broke by purchasing credit default swaps against their debt. For Goldman and other Wall Street firms that used this ploy, the beauty part was that they had also previously earned millions in fees by helping most of those states sell municipal bonds.

• Public employees have been cramming the Wisconsin state Capitol to protest the governor’s plan to cut their take-home pay and gut their collective bargaining rights. You can’t blame them for objecting when the state reneges on a deal. But they should have been protesting years ago, when politicians and union leaders struck a bargain that was too good to be true.

• It is very telling that we have enough money to extend the Bush tax cuts, to throw boatloads of cash at the big banks so that they can give lavish bonuses, and to continue fighting never-ending wars on multiple fronts giving no-bid contracts to favored contractors, but we can’t scrape together a little spare change to fund the regulators and prosecutors.

Wisconsin/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Scott Walker took a prank phone call Tuesday, and Wisconsin learned a lot about its new governor.

• A recording of the call released Wednesday spelled out Walker’s strategies for dealing with protesting union workers and trying to lure Democrats boycotting the state Senate back to Wisconsin.

• Speaking with whom he believed to be billionaire conservative activist David Koch, Walker said he considered – but rejected – planting troublemakers amid protesters who have rocked the Capitol for a week.

• But now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, conservative, anti-labor politicians like Governor Walker are trying out a new and potentially more potent anti-union argument: We can no longer afford collective bargaining. The wages, health benefits, and pensions of government workers, these opponents say, are driving states into deep and dangerous deficits.

• In his attack on workers’ right to bargain collectively, Scott Walker is diametrically opposing the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan — the same conservative figure Walker idolized in his prank phone call with a blogger posing as “David Koch.”

• Before news broke of the prank call from a David Koch impersonator to Governor Walker’s office, CMD had submitted the below open records request to the Wisconsin Department of Administration for all phone calls to-and-from the governor’s office since January 1. CMD confirmed receipt of the request via telephone on February 18 and expects a reply promptly. We have also submitted open records requests directly to the governor’s office for copies of all email and visitor log records.

• On the first day protesters occupied the Wisconsin Capitol building a young man held a sign, “Where is Jimmy Hoffa when you need him?” Well, International Brotherhood of the Teamsters President James Hoffa rolled into town today with a group of Wisconsin Teamster members to lend support to the Capitol protesters. Three members I spoke to were UPS drivers, private sector workers lending support to public sector nurses and teachers. I asked Hoffa about the news this morning that Governor Scott Walker had been caught on tape with a blogger who he thought was David Koch, of Koch Industries, specifically about Walker’s comments that he would “crank up” pressure on the workers with layoff notices. “We’ll announce Thursday, they’ll go out early next week and we’ll probably get five to six thousand state workers will get at-risk notices for layoffs. We might ratchet that up a little bit too,” says Walker on the call.

• In Madison, Wisconsin, record numbers of protesters have entered the 11th day of their fight to preserve union rights and collective bargaining for public employees, inspiring similar protests in the states of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. The protests have also helped expose the close ties between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who helped bankroll the Tea Party movement. On Wednesday, blogger Ian Murphy revealed he had impersonated David Koch in a recorded phone conversation with an unsuspecting Walker. We play highlights of the recording and discuss the Koch brothers’ influence in Wisconsin with Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy.

• Cars, SUVs and buses whoosh down Madison’s King Street Thursday afternoon, honking, windows rolled down, thumbs up in solidarity as neon-vested police officers direct traffic.

• “Stay strong!” shouted a man out the driver’s-side window of a State Employee Vanpool van. A Madison Metro bus driver drives by, honking and cheering.

• News reports indicate that legislators in Indiana have crossed state lines to protest votes on legislation that would savage the right of working people to collectively bargain. McClatchy Newspapers summarizes the rustbelt rebellion: “In Wisconsin, where the state Senate has been paralyzed because Democrats fled to block Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from government workers, the governor warned he would send 1,500 layoff notices unless his proposal passes. In Indiana, Democrats in the state Assembly vanished, depriving that body of the quorum needed to pass a right-to-work law and limit government unions’ powers. And in Ohio, an estimated 5,500 protesters stood elbow to elbow in and outside the Capitol chanting “Kill the bill!” as a legislative committee took up a proposal that would similarly neuter government unions.”

• Here’s a complete transcript of the Buffalo Beast prank conversation with Gov. Scott Walker Tuesday, from recordings by the Beast. Ian Murphy of the Beast poses in the call as David Koch, a billionaire contributor of Walker’s.

• In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich—and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response, and vital human services.

• There’s a three-prong approach in Governor Walker’s plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist situations.

• While most news coverage has focused on how Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill attacks the state’s 200,000 public sector workers (and by extension, the entire middle class), the law is increasingly recognized as an attack on the poor. It curtails (and perhaps eliminates) access to the Medicaid programs relied upon by 1.2 million Wisconsinites, limits access to public transportation, and hinders rural community access to broadband internet. The bill keeps the poor sick, stranded, and stupid.

• Outside of services offered during crises and protests, the street medic ethic is one of “community medicine” where medical providers reach out to the community, build trust, and participate in education. In Madison, he said, street medics offer free clinics in the summer months, and free meals on Sundays as part of the “savory Sundays” program. The latter is aimed at the poor and homeless, and includes medical care and education; foot care, Brian says, is particularly important. These community events aimed at the most vulnerable populations also build relationships and allow the medics to better connect the disadvantaged with available resources.

Civil Rights

• The Obama administration is appealing the first — and likely only — lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless-surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

• A San Francisco federal judge in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their attorneys $2.5 million for the costs of litigating the case for more than four years.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Four Senate Democrats this week staked out their opposition to efforts in the House to overturn the net neutrality rules recently enacted by the Federal Communications Commission.

DRM

• We actually wrote about Sony’s response to AIBO hacks a decade ago, and it’s absolutely true. Copyright is supposed to be about incentives to create. But it’s generally been twisted into a tool for control against “stuff we don’t like.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Chilean and New Zealand proposals for the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership have leaked (Canada has been excluded from the talks so far). The leaks demonstrate how much different many other countries view the inclusion of IP in trade agreements when compared to the U.S. and Europe.

• Ironically (and without comment from the district court), the particular identifiable traits of the characters identified here (apart from the portraying actors) were all derived directly from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel that is now out of copyright.

Copyrights

• Michael Robertson, an online music entrepreneur who has been something of a lawsuit-magnet for record labels, has launched his newest venture, DAR.fm, and has high hopes that it will stay litigation-free. DAR.fm is a “digital audio recorder” that allows users to record their favorite internet radio shows and store them in a cloud-based service. In an interview with paidContent, Robertson explained that the legal path for such a service should be perfectly clear now, since an appeals court already ruled in 2008 that it’s not a copyright violation to offer users remote, cloud-based DVR services.

• The trial has been viewed by Australia’s ISP industry as a major landmark case to help determine how ISPs will react in future to users using their networks to download copyrighted material. iiNet had not been forwarding email communication from AFACT to users who AFACT had alleged had breached copyright, whereas some other ISPs have been complying with the request.

• Last week, I reported on a major Canadian lawsuit filed by 26 record labels against isoHunt. The legal action, filed in May 2010 without any press releases or public disclosure by CRIA, seeks millions in damages and an order shutting down the controversial website. At the same time as the labels filed the statement of claim, the four major labels responded to isoHunt’s effort to obtain a declaration that it operating lawfully in Canada. Their Statement of Defence (posted here – excuse the poor scan) also makes the case that isoHunt currently violates Canadian copyright law.

• The McTeague comments – along with his positions at the C-32 committee – raise important questions about how the Liberal Opposition Critic for Consumer and Consular Affairs has emerged as the most anti-consumer MP on the committee from any party (a point noted in a follow-up letter to the editor). Even more troubling is evidence to suggest that McTeague’s comments are being actively fed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, with McTeague using his platform on the committee to effectively become an unofficial spokesperson.

• Presumably, very few copyright lawyers will be surprised to learn that the Federal Court of Appeal has just decisively (three days after the hearing) dismissed the application for judicial review brought by the collective Re:Sound (formerly NRCC) in its attempt to impose tariffs when a published sound recording is part of the soundtrack that accompanies a motion picture that is performed in public (i.e. movie theatres) or a television program that is communicated to the public by telecommunication (i.e. on TV).

• The movie business has — yet again — run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up eight percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren’t affecting box office receipts.

• The firm is responding to a court ruling from 2007 that found it in breach of copyright laws by reproducing some of the exciting and groundbreaking news that comes out of Belgium.

• Google is arguing that there is nothing wrong with what it does, which is to take something that someone else has written and use it on its own webpages, and in a bullish statement Google rejected everything that the Belgian courts had said about it.

• We’re always told by copyright system defenders that there’s an “idea/expression dichotomy” in copyright law that prevents copyright from really getting in the way of free speech. This is supposed to mean that it’s perfectly fine to copy the idea, so long as you don’t copy the fixed expression of that idea. In practice, this gets a lot trickier, with courts seeming to find all sorts of copied “ideas” infringing, even if they don’t copy specific expression. So where is the line?

• This one is a bit confusing, but an artist named Matthew Smith apparently wrote a song back in 2002, but late last year he tried to re-market the song by trying to associate it with the Twilight Saga movies. He did so by doing some sort of deal with the company that sells pre-movie ads to promote the song in various theaters… and by getting an image designed as the “cover” image for the song that was inspired by the Twilight Saga — using a moon and a similar font to the movie’s advertisement. Summit — who has shown itself to be ridiculously overprotective of its trademarks and copyrights issued a takedown to YouTube, where the song was hosted. This part isn’t clear, because I’m not sure where the song image was included on the YouTube page. I guess in the video, but the article linked above doesn’t say.

• At the beginning of January, we wrote about a troubling court ruling in Florida, where a judge ordered XCentric, the operators of Ripoff Report, to remove some content from their website, despite the company’s policy against such removals and the clear and well-established safe harbors for Ripoff Report from Section 230. There were some serious problems with this ruling beyond just the Section 230 questions, including the prior restraint issue, whereby content was ordered taken offline despite the lack of a full evidentiary hearing on the merits.

• In a Feb. 15 op-ed for the New York Times, three representatives of the Authors Guild — Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro — raise the question “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?”

• In my opinion they have it just about backward. They’d have been better off asking whether the Bard would have survived copyright.

• In the course of this piece, the authors manage to recycle just about every pro-copyright cliche and strawman known to humankind.

• Their central focus is on the novel potential for making money through paid performances in Shakespeare’s day (“for the first time ever it was possible to earn a living writing for the public”), and the role of that development in the literary explosion of the English Renaissance.

Clip of the DayAndroid/iPhone/iPad Development with Corona-sound effectsCredit: TinyOgg Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.