● 03.20.11

● Links 20/3/2011: ext4, ZFS for Linux, and Gentoo 11.0

Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It seems to be human nature to fear the unknown. Sure there are a lot of brave souls who love to go out in to the unkown and learn new things. To those we are greatfull. Without those types of people we would not have the technological toys that are so much fun to play with.

• The average human is different. We seem to get stuck in a rut. We wake up, go through our morning rituals, hopefully go to work, then come home, play a bit and off to bed. Only to repeat this same cycle for as long as our health allows. We are fine with that, in fact we are downright comfortable with it. We are happy and secure in the little comfort zone we have carved out for ourselves in this big bad old world.

Desktop

• There are two things that can be associated to new Linux users and that is tragic and magic. And as to what part an individual would experience depends on a lot of factors. The first factor would be the ease of use, certainly Linux would be a user friendly application but since you are not used to it, the first experience on Linux would really be difficult. If the new user will tend to see things so complex to understand, he will surely forget about the idea and carry on with using his old operating system.

• They were impressed enough to offer us an extremely generous deal on a 2200 square foot building for our use.

• [...]

• This is a huge step in the evolution of The HeliOS Project. We will be able to impact entire neighborhoods and area’s, not households in one’s and two’s. We will finally have some autonomy and freedom in our operation, and as always, it will be the Free Software and Linux Communities that makes it happen.

• The graphical user interface (GUI) is certainly one of the most sought-after features of any operating system. A typical Ubuntu setup can have one of the three major Linux GUIs, including XFCE, KDE, and the most popular, Gnome.

• In my experience Windows tends to have a habit of going wrong when you least expect, and at crucial moments. If you dread that sinking feeling as your system screws the pooch on startup, maybe it’s time to make a Linux live CD.

• There are plenty of reasons the average Windows user may want to create a Linux live CD or USB stick before it’s too late. A USB-based distribution will be speedier (you’ll need Unetbootin) or you can simply burn a CD/DVD with something like ImgBurn.

Kernel Space

• To add some details that they did not mention in either summary, we also have a lot of new code in the NFS client in 2.6.38 that will be the building blocks for parallel NFS (a way to make clustered NFS servers much higher performance).

• The ZFS for Linux FUSE (File-systems in User Space) driver has been updated to version 0.7.0, nine months after it’s last release (0.6.9). New features in the version include updates to pool version 23 of the Sun code and the incorporation of all of Sun’s bug fixes, robust rollback handling, improved init scripts, bash completion and a more reliable zpool export and destroy.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that PingWin Software is its newest member.

• PingWin Software is a leading systems integrator in Russia and is focused on Linux and open source software integration. PingWin Software is the first Russian company to join The Linux Foundation.

Graphics Stack

• While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel has been out for less than one week, if you use NVIDIA graphics, particularly with a low-end GPU, start counting down the days to the release of the Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Particularly on lower-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver now meets or exceeds the speed of NVIDIA’s official proprietary driver in a number of OpenGL test cases.

• The test system was an AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core CPU with an ECS A70-GXM-A motherboard, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, and 250GB Seagate SATA HDD.

• There’s also a brand new GSoC proposal this morning. An Indian student developer has proposed XCB keyboard support in this e-mail.

Applications

• Linux: Apt-Get is a great command line tool for downloading apps in Linux, but if you’re looking for even faster downloads, Apt-Fast can nearly double your download speeds in Ubuntu.

• What is this? it’s a neat little app that automates away the tedium of my personal journal system. Running KDE trunk, and having a strange knack for hitting freaky PIM bugs, I end up with my most important things stored in plain text. It’s grown into quite a system, one file per day with ascii todolists and stuff – add to that the need to do timetracking on one project, and, well, a bit of automation does wonders.

• You can share your music, videos, and photos on your network via regular folder shares, but using a media server gives you additional functionality and lets you stream to more devices. A Linux media server has a home in the enterprise because it’s a superior tool for storing, archiving, and sharing company multimedia presentations.

• To address this need, I’ve rounded up fifteen powerful Linux applications that reflect the best that Linux has to offer the desktop user, both in and out of the enterprise environment.

• OpenShot is a video editor for Linux that aspires to be simple, powerful, and “the very best open source video editor.” OpenShot 1.3, which was released on February 13, brings it a little closer to that goal. This release brings a theme for the UI, support for adding multiple clips, new 3D animations, and a wizard for uploading video directly to YouTube or Vimeo. It may be the best open source video editor, but only if one is willing to overlook some stability issues.

• This article focuses on Audacity 1.3.12 Beta on Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and uses a Logitech 350 USB Headset with built-in microphone. I selected two audio files for this project: A 30 second music clip and an 11 second voice-over clip. Mixed together with a little advanced Audacity magic creates a studio-quality introduction that costs nothing and only takes about 30 minutes to perform.

• Hotot is a lightweight, python-based, desktop twitter client I tried on my Linux Mint 10 GNOME desktop. I found Hotot to include many features you’d expect in a desktop client and a few you may not. Warning: Hotot is still in heavy development (alpha) but performed quite well for me.

• Photivo is a free and open source photo processor. It handles your RAW files as well as your bitmap files in a non-destructive 16 bit processing pipe with gimp workflow integration and batch mode.

• Empathy 3.0 will finally include ‘user blocking/unblocking ‘ – a feature long demanded by users of the multi-protocol chat application.

Instructionals/Technical

• I tested the Mustang’s connection to a system running 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04. When I connected the Mustang’s USB port to my computer I immediately had a verifiable hook-up between the amplifier and the machine. Running cat /proc/asound/cards revealed that the Mustang was recognized as a full-speed USB audio device known as “FMIC Mustang Amplifier” (Figure 3).

Games

• March’s Quake Live Content Update has been released, which includes 2 New Premium maps, new social networking features and the usual bug fixes and balancing changes.

• Gameduino is a DIY game platform built on a shield for the Arduino. It’s open source hardware (BSD and, for the code, GPL). Okay, that’s fairly cool. But what makes this project special is that this inexpensive board (a $50 donation buys you one) has hardware that’s capable enough to be interesting, as seen in the video.

• I don’t like gravity shooters. In fact I don’t like them so much I don’t play them. They require more precision and skill than I want to give and are unforgiving.

• It is ridiculous that I like one gravity shooter though. A ridiculous one. M.A.R.S.

Desktop Environments

• In conclusion, Webconverger is limited, but useful precisely because of its limits. For an initial investment in time and money than can be counted in minutes and cents, those who deploy Webconverger will reap the benefit of never having to even think about the software on their machines, while knowing that their users’ security and privacy are ensured.

• It appears that SkiesOfAzel, the Orta theme developer was contacted by a LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) developer to create a similar theme for LMDE and the initial result can already be tested (not just on LMDE – you can use it on any Linux distribution obviously). If you thought Orta is amazing,

• I decided to give Awesome a try. Awesome is a tiling window manager like xmonad. I’ve been using it for about a month, and I like it a lot.

• It integrates with GNOME much better than dwm. Most users of dwm don’t use GNOME, but I do. Its default settings are a lot nicer than xmonad’s. When I use xmonad, I spend all my time futzing with my .xmonad.hs, but I haven’t had to tweak Awesome at all the whole time I’ve used it. For instance, Awesome comes with a ton of layouts built in.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• For the 7th year in a row KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code. We are delighted to be able to work with great students throughout the summer again. To find out more about the program visit the GSoC website and pay special attention to the FAQ and timeline.

• It began about ten years ago, when I rewrote the KDE address book library. I implemented a nice API, vCard parsing, and a representation of something I called an Addressee back then, a contact, the data belonging to a person or any other entity, closely modelled after the fields of vCard, which is a fine standard for storing and exchanging address book data.

• So, without further ado: Project Neon is back with much more stuff in stock. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old one developed by everyone’s favourite (or NOT) apachelogger which offered daily builds of Amarok. Well, that one kind of died but new Project Neon Team managed to revive it with new features. Thanks to ingenious Launchpad Source Builds feature we set up nightly builds of the KDE Software Compilation trunk and we are currently working on getting Amarok there too.

• I want to thank who ever it was that made the decision to NOT force KDE to develop a composited desktop with a fall-back to a totally different looking un-compositied desktop in the event the computer has a driver failure/poor videocard. (Edit: I know kde has compositing, but those are effects and the overall design of kde looks basically the same whether you have the compositing on or off).

• I say this in light of the development work on Unity and Gnome3. Which falls back to gnome2 when 3d acceleration is not available. Why?

• Unlike with the panel, in GNOME 3, I can no longer choose to have the clock where I want it, remove some of the unnecessary icons, or even add weather applets and information to the screen. At the same time, I am supposed to believe everything is now an “Activity” with a single menu button being used to drive everything I do, rather than various shortcuts and icons around the screen. I can’t even have desktop icons or launch a terminal via the right click menu (which now doesn’t exist in the default setup). I’m also not at all fond of the effects, or the new window manager. In fact, where GNOME 2.x did almost everything I wanted, it seems that GNOME 3 does the opposite. Where it used to be about productivity, it’s now about appearance and effects, at the cost of more experienced users.

GNOME Desktop

• gnome-tweak-tool is a GUI to customize advanced settings beautify desktop environment in coming Gnome 3.

• While you are waiting for the Gnome 3 impatiently for the April 2011 release, you could attempt peaking at new shell. Those who have had a go at it come away excited at the substantial changes. The desktop design is spanking new and definitely appealing. New intuitive messaging, without have to switch, that allows you to reply are some of the distinctive and immediately identifiable changes. GNOME3 is essentially the next generation shell and several legacies of the GNOME 2 have disappeared because there is no room for them in the new shell design.

• It’s almost time. Soon a new paradigm of GNOME is going to drop onto the desktops of suspecting (and unsuspecting) users. When this does there is going to be reaction. As with any major change to the computer industry, users are going to have both negative and positive reactions. Some will go so far as to switch distributions to avoid this change. Some users, on the other hand, will seek solace elsewhere. What exactly does that mean to the landscape of Linux? Let’s don our speculation caps and take a look.

• There have been two recent instances where Canonical has acted in a way that has displeased GNOME – one was when it decided to use its own interface, Unity, for the next version of Ubuntu, instead of the forthcoming GNOME 3 shell.

• Faenza icon theme is arguably *the* most beautiful icon theme for GNOME and also has support for the widest range of applications in Ubuntu GNOME. Faenza 0.9 was released a day ago and it brings in a number of major upgrades including a new “darkest” theme and many other openly visible as well as subtle changes.

• It’s fine for you to state Canonical did not follow the process, but to not link to a doc or provide a post showing the process as approved by either GNOME or the team within GNOME responsible for this particular area, it’s quite frankly irresponsible.

• One of the most fundamentally life-altering books that I have ever read was Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book is inspiring, eye-opening, and has allowed me to work more efficiently than I ever had before reading it. The GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology has quite literally changed the way that I work and approach tasks.

• I’ve played with a number of GTD-inspired applications on the Mac with varying degrees of success. Currently my app of choice on the Mac is OmniFocus, which is a great application. Unfortunately, it does not run on Linux and I do like to keep work and home-related tasks separate, so while I use a Mac for the home stuff, I use Linux for work. That meant I needed a good GTD app for Linux.

Distributions

• Linux seems to offer a distribution for every occasion. Among these obscurer flavours are a few that you may not have encountered, but could be just what you need, says Jack Wallen.

• I’ve been making a personal Fedora remix for a while now… since Fedora 10. While that might sound hard, thanks to Fedora’s livecd-tools package and their livecd-creator script, it is really quite easy. I even made a screencast about it. I recently started making a remix of Scientific Linux 6.0 and wanted to share.

• As you may recall, I prefer Fedora on my personal desktops but on servers I prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux or a RHEL clone. There are actually a few clones to pick from and I’ve been using CentOS for a number of years. One thing I like about CentOS is that one of its goals is to stay as true to RHEL as possible by attempting to be 100% binary compatible with it, bugs and all. Unfortunately the CentOS developers have gotten somewhat backlogged with the onslaught of RHEL releases over the last few months (6.0, 5.6, and 4.9) and have taken a lot of criticism for release delays as well as falling behind on security updates in the process.

• Yesterday a reader dropped me a link to Gnuffy, which is an offshoot of Arch Linux started about three years ago. Looking over what has been accomplished with it thus far, I was very impressed with their ideas on expanding Arch (many already implemented), and given a few new ideas of my own.

• At this point Gnuffy appears to consist of a package manager called Spaceman and some user repositories. Gnuffy can use any of Arch Linux’s repos in addition to its own, and can use the standard PKGBUILDs in addition to its own improved version of PKGBUILD, which includes some Gentoo-style USE flags and other enhancements. Packages on Gnuffy’s repos are GPG signed with the key of the packager, and Spaceman checks signatures. Nice work! It was a bit like suddenly being transported into the future of Arch.

• It also includes editorial work on the explanatory material throughout the book, improving both the clarity and accuracy of the text.

• I’ve run Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly.

• I have half an entry (not yet published) on the Lenny to Squeeze upgrade for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop — a 1999 throwback with Pentium II MMX at 233 MHz, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. I’ve written dozens of articles about this laptop, and I’ve run everything from OpenBSD and TinyCore to Slackware and Debian Lenny and now Squeeze on it.

• In this article, I’ll highlight some of the top Linux distributions for advanced users as well as some great ones for those who are intermediate and newer users. In each case, I’ll include distributions for those wanting to learn more about using Linux effectively.

Reviews

• Tiny Core is a light and modular Linux distribution. Its main purpose is to allow the easy construction of simple but powerful appliance-like desktops. Michael Reed tests the latest release…

• Pardus is easily one of the lesser known bigger surprise Linux distributions. Developed in Turkey, it does not strike you as a top choice for your desktop, does it? But it is a top-notch distribution with a handful of clever tricks that make it a great candidate for daily use. I was mightily impressed with the 2009 version, which is why I’m testing this year’s release.

• I can’t deny Bodhi brings something new to the table; the desktop it provides is certainly different. Judging from the number of downloads the project has experienced thus far it must be appealing to quite a lot of people. However, I didn’t find anything to recommend the distro. It is, in my opinion, mostly glitter and little substance.

New Releases

• The release candidate images for the 4.5 release of Trisquel, “Slaine” are ready for testing. Note that this images will become the final release if no bugs are found. Minor bugs would be fixed via updates.

Red Hat Family

• Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is sponsoring open source workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology this summer that have the potential of improving technology for deaf and hard of hearing children.

• Three RIT students who are alumni of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience workshops have developed an open source prototype video chat package to produce smooth sign language video for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptops.

Fedora

• There are concern among users that Gnome 3 or Unity is a wrong decision; that it needs a learning curve and not many users are ready or willing to do so. I disagree. The fact is people like status-quo; they don’t like changes. But that’s not how world works. Not changing for sake of user’s reluctance also keeps technologies from evolving.

• I downloaded and installed Fedora 15 alpha (Gnome 3) after reading this review. I was looking forward to this opportunity as I knew that sooner or later it will be ‘between the Devil and the deep blue sea’. I will have to choose from between Unity and Gnome Shell 3. Or, I will resist the change and migrate to a distro which will continue to invest on Gnome 2? I believe I will go with Unity or Gnome 3. It’s not fair to not embrace newer technologies. The incident that I am going to share with you strengthened my trust in Gnome 3.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

• About five years ago, the Debian Common Core Alliance (DCCA) got started as an effort to help encourage collaboration among Debian derivatives. The DCCA failed.

• Debian 6 was in many ways an important and path-breaking release of Debian, but is it really relevant today? Debian as a desktop system isn’t really something you’d like to use—it’s too old. Debian for servers? Well, it does the job extremely well, but Ubuntu Server, while providing LTS releases every 2 years (which coincides with Debian’s new release cycle), has better support from applications, built-in support for EC2 clouds, and commercial support from Canonical (with stuff like Landscape, which even Red Hat cannot boast of).

• Moreover, day by day, Debian is getting more purist in its approach. For a server OS, it beats me why SELinux or AppArmor wasn’t included, and the fact remains that even if I use it as a desktop, it still needs a bit of tinkering around with configuration files in /etc to fully realise the potential of the system. Although yes, porting in Software Center from Ubuntu was a very nice touch, and it does make managing repositories and installing software a lot easier.

• There’s only one thing I can say about Debian 6: it may have released just yesterday, but it was outdated 6 months ago. So unless you have a reason for using Debian, both on the server front and desktop front, I’d recommend Ubuntu. On the other hand, if you do have that reason for using Debian, go ahead and upgrade, because you will be blown away by the amount of polish that has gone into this release. Debian 6 is indeed a worthy upgrade to Debian 5, but not really from other distros.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Linux 11.04 now uses the “Unity” user interface, which features a prominent “Task Bar” on the left hand side that acts as both a task manager in addition to a common application launcher. Shown on the desktop is LibreOffice Writer, the word processing program that comes with the new LibreOffice productivity suite which replaces OpenOffice 3 in previous versions of Ubuntu.

• So, what is going on at Canonical when it comes to the multi-touch devices? It appears a lot is going on behind the scene. Future versions of Ubuntu will have better support for mult-touch devices and if vendors like it they might start putting Ubuntu on tablets.

• Chase Douglas of Canonical has written in his blog post, “One of my key goals for Ubuntu 11.04 has been to introduce full multitouch support through X.org. In technical terms, this means adding touch support to the XInput protocol. You may see others refer to multitouch in X.org as simply XInput 2.1. We hatched our plan back at UDS-N to push hard on developing the XInput 2.1 protocol and implementing it as best as possible in 11.04. The idea was that Ubuntu would be a test bed for the protocol before it is adopted by X.org upstream.”

• Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux, is going to make it easier for people to consume its operating system.

• Gerry Carr, director of platform marketing at Canonical, says in a blog post that beginning with the “Natty Narwhal” release in April, the company is going back to the way it did things ahead of its server launch, with a single release for any kind of PC. That new release will be called simply Ubuntu 11.04, and the server edition will be called Ubuntu Server 11.04.

• It’s no secret that Canonical’s been pushing Ubuntu’s cloud-centric features hard in recent months. We’ve written frequently here about new tools, like cloud-init, that give Ubuntu a leg up vis-à-vis other distributions in the cloud niche, as well as development trends that place the cloud at the center of the longterm vision for Ubuntu Server Edition.

• Well, we dodged a bullet. Instead of Octopoid Octopus, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, has chosen Oneiric Ocelot for Ubuntu’s November 2011 version name.

• Unless you’re a film maven, your first question is probably: “What’s Oneiric!?” I know it as a film criticism term for dream sequences in a movie. Or as Shuttleworth explained, “Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.” I’ll buy that. But, let’s get down to brass tacks: What does this mean? What can we expect from this version?

• Such a lack of scrollbars gave the design team at Canonical an idea. Could they remove the permanent scrollbars at the edge of windows in Ubuntu to free up more space for content while still allowing them to work with a cursor? The answer was a definite yes, and the re-design is now being experimented with.

• The two videos included here give you a good idea of how the experimental scrollbars, called overlay scrollbars, work. They are effectively the same as before functionality wise, but invisible until your cursor enters the area of the screen you would normally expect to find them. At that point a scrollbar appears as an overlay and you can click and drag to scroll around.

• I recently had a chance to take a look at the Alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 11.04, the latest version of Canonical’s Linux desktop OS that is due in April. 11.04 is considered to be a major release for Ubuntu because it represents a significant departure from the default GNOME UI to the new Unity UI.

• It has been really long since we featured any new collection of wallpapers for Ubuntu or Linux. Article featuring Ubuntu/Linux wallpaper packs was the last in this particular category and even that was several months ago. So here is it once again, a nice and simple collection of 15 Ubuntu branded wallpapers from across the web. Enjoy!

• The Netbook Remix was a personal favorite of mine, as it made it easy for me to point my netbook friends at it, as an easy replacement for whatever OS was installed by default on their device.

• If you’d like Super key as keyboard shortcut to launch Gnome Main menu in Ubuntu, follow this simple tutorial.

Flavours and Variants

• Ultimate Edition 2.9 has been released! according to the announcement, this release was built off Ultimate Edition 2.8 which is built off Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’. All updates fully updated / upgraded, old kernels purged, new initrd and vmlinuz rebuilt. Ultimate Edition 2.9, as with all odd release numbers, was built with KDE users in mind. Ultimate Edition 2.9 has KDE, GNOME, Openbox and Xfce environments, user selectable at login. A crisp new theme (121 to choose from) and tons of new software. LXDE was broken at time of build on the 32-bit side, so it did not make the cut.

• In the Linux-verse, a re-spin is basically a new distribution that has been “spun off” from another distribution. We’ve already seen the likes of this with just about every major distribution. Ubuntu is one of the distributions that has enjoyed a number of good re-spins. Based on what is going down with the current releases of Ubuntu, this favorite distribution of new users will be in need of a few newer re-spins.

• With that in mind, I thought it would be a fun exercise to come up with a few re-spins of my own that would combine various bits and pieces (and a few philosophies) from other operating systems or developers. Some of these distributions would be quite possible, whereas some may not. I’ll leave it up to you which of them should actually happen.

Devices/Embedded

• Car maker Saab recently announced that it will use Android, a version for mobile devices of the “Free as in Freedom” Linux operating system, for its in-car entertainment and information system, the IQon.

• Korenix is readying the JetBox 9435-w, a Linux-based industrial embedded Layer 3 VPN routing computer with an Intel Xscale IXP435 667MHz RISC processor, eight 10/100 Ethernet ports, and extended temperature support. The company also has begun touting its JetBox 9400- and 9500-series as suitable platforms for network video recording (NVR) applications.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• Nokia is shedding the commercial licensing and professional services business for its Qt cross-platform app development framework, selling it off to Digia.

Android

• Now Google has something that could be a very good alternative to Linux in the form of Chrome OS. We put Google’s own Cr-48 through its paces and we came away impressed with computing from the cloud.

Free Software/Open Source

• Email marketing firm Constant Contact said it selected Puppet Labs’ Puppet configuration management and automation framework to help scale its environment from a couple hundred servers to several thousand in under two years time.

• If all goes as planned, that trend will continue unabated, as the company grows and adds new applications like a Cassandra distributed database cluster.

• With open source technology now in the mainstream, IT shops now have plenty of options for systems management. But IT administrators — even those with open source skills — agree that these tools have some significant drawbacks.

• Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

Events

• This year, TXLF will be held at the spacious and opulent Downtown Hilton hotel. I’ve been in aircraft hangers that were not as big as the speaking halls and let’s face it…it’s the Hilton. I believe current numbers are already surpassing last year’s attendance.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google’s Chrome platform is coming on strong in the browser market. It’s becoming clear that more and more people are realizing it might just be better than Internet Explorer.

Mozilla

• After last week’s benchmarking project, I combed through the comments and ran the numbers myself using the latest Firefox 4.0 beta, Chrome 10, and Opera 11. The results? It looks like Firefox 4.0 has the speed crown on Linux, for now.

• Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 is coming next week. How do the two shape up?

• Showing impeccable timing the developers of both Firefox and Internet Explorer have decided to release new versions of their browsers within days of one another. Microsoft’s IE9 browser was released on Tuesday (15 March 2011), just a couple of days after Firefox released its final release candidate and days before its final release on March 22.

• Mozilla has released the Release Candidate of latest Firefox 4 i.e. Firefox 4 RC and is available to download and try. I installed this RC 3 days ago and since then spent hours on this new version and here is my review and experience.

SaaS

• Rackspace will help enterprises build private clouds using the OpenStack cloud operating system, the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dell is seeking enterprises and service providers for proof-of-concept OpenStack trials with its Dell PowerEdge C family of servers.

• Discussions surrounding S3TC Texture Compression support for mainline Mesa (right now it’s an external library) is becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Newer games and OpenGL applications depend upon S3TC support and open-source developers are unable to provide “out of the box” support due to patent concerns.

• There was a hopeful discussion about S3TC and floating point support for Mesa a little more than a week ago, but that discussion died before anything materialized in Mesa Git. The push there was for mainlining the S3TC and OpenGL floating point support but to not build it by default if not using the hidden –enable-patented option.

Databases

• What happens when you bring together two open source database technologies? In the case of vendors Membase and CouchOne, you end up with a new company called Couchbase and a new product called the Couchbase Server.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• As you all should know by now, LibreOffice is already the new default office suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. You can even install latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid easily via LibreOffice PPA by following the instructions here. Now, here is a very good looking and very creative LibreOffice splash screen that demands your attention.

• The risk was deemed so serious that many developers decided to form the Document Foundation in September 2010 to manage and develop a fork called LibreOffice. There have already been a number of significant features added to the OpenOffice.org codebase in recent months. However, it is likely that there will be a significant delay before the corporate world readily embraces LibreOffice, in part because of concerns about the Document Foundation itself. Nevertheless, their fork is a comprehensive desktop productivity suite with a number of significant features not found in OpenOffice.org.

• Although Java founder James Gosling left Oracle last year after a short, dissatisfying experience with the company following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, he nonetheless sees Oracle as having no choice but to do a good job in its stewardship of Java.

• In discussions Wednesday morning at the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas, Gosling stressed that a large faction of Oracle’s business is based on Java. For example, Oracle Fusion Middleware, including the WebLogic application server, is based on enterprise Java. “It’s in their own self interest to not be aggressively stupid,” said Gosling, who was a prominent Sun engineer and has been called the father of Java.

Business

• It seems like there’s no such thing as a non-controversial Linux distribution anymore.

• Look at the news and the blogosphere, and lately it seems like every major distro company’s in some kind of hot water with various elements of the community.

Semi-Open Source

• Later — shortly after I pointed out Mark Shuttleworth’s fascination with and leanings towards this practice — I realized that it was better to use the preexisting, tried-and-true term for the practice: “proprietary relicensing”. I’ve been pretty consistent in avoiding the term “Open Core” since then. I called on Shuttleworth to adopt the FSF’s recommendations to show Canonical, Ltd. isn’t seeking proprietary relicensing and left the whole thing at that. (Shuttleworth, of course, has refused to even respond, BTW.)

Funding

• Packt today announced that its donations to open source projects have surpassed the $300,000 mark. Following its first donation to the phpMyAdmin project in April 2004, the company has gone on to provide sustained support for over 70 different open source projects.

• The Knight Foundation has given a $975,000 grant to The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen, both non-profit news organisations, to develop a free and open source publishing platform for other online news organisations. Online local news is a growing sector in the United States and the Foundation wants to enable local news organisations to engage with readers more and manage content easily while being able to raise revenue. The Knight Foundation is dedicated to funding local news and journalism in the digital age.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I was both surprised and pleased with the community response to the announcement for GNU Free Call. Rather unfortunately our hosting for the wiki, Ibiblio, was down, as they were doing a large move on Tuesday. Even more amusing, Haakon’s email provider also decided to do some relocation this week.

• Sylvain Beucler, who was instrumental in modernizing and maintaining Savannah for the last seven years, has decided to step down and look for new challenges. Many, many, thanks to Sylvain and best wishes.

Project Releases

• Following a number of internal disputes among FFmpeg developers in recent weeks, a group of these developers have stepped away from the project and have forked off of the FFmpeg code-base to create a new project called the “libav” project.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The federal bureaucracy is failing to abide by President Barack Obama’s inaugural decree that agencies “usher in a new era of open government,” according to a Monday survey by the National Security Archive.

Programming

• The GNU developers responsible for GCC have eliminated all of the P1 regressions (their most serious class of regressions in this open-source compiler) in the GNU Compiler Collection 4.6.0 code-base, so they have went ahead and tagged the first release candidate.

• Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new status report on the progress of GCC 4.6. The P1 regression count is now at zero, after the last four bugs were corrected in the past week. There have also been seven P2 regressions fixed, but three new regressions of P3 status discovered.

Standards/Consortia

• This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile. The new organization is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and the winner is . . . well, we’ll come back to that a little later. Suffice it to say for now that the fifteen year battle to control the digital future of the automobile could be at an end, and that its resolution may tell us something about the future of the digital desktop as well.

Leftovers

• Over the weekend into OpenBenchmarking.org I pushed the OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index (OPCI) feature. Read that blog post for all of the features, but it comes down to now indexing the most commonly tested hardware and classifying the performance of all test results into low, mid, and high-end segments. So you can easily see a list of overall — for all tests hosted by OpenBenchmarking.org — a list of the rated processors, graphics cards, motherboards, and disks that are self-hosting. The OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index was then resolved down to the test profile level to be able to answer questions like what is the best graphics card for this game?

• Oracle has been accused of stifling the publication of an HP/Oracle DBMS benchmark that indicates its own SPARC SuperCluster world-record benchmark system cost almost 60 per cent more per transaction than a similar test on an HP Proliant system.

• The record TPC-C benchmark result is held by a $30.53m, 108 processor, SPARC Supercluster, which achieved 30,249,688 transactions per minute (TPM) at a cost of $1.01/TPM.

• Though blogger John (Johnny Northside) Hoff told the truth when he linked ex-community leader Jerry Moore to a high-profile mortgage fraud, the scathing blog post that got Moore fired justifies $60,000 in damages, a Hennepin County jury decided Friday.

Hardware

• UltraViolet (UV) is the name of new technology standards expected to debut this summer that Hollywood hopes will help reignite the public’s interest in collecting movies and cauterize the bleeding in their home-video divisions. UV was created by a consortium that includes all the big film studios–with the exception of Disney–and numerous movie-sector allies, such as Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Comcast and Netflix. UV managers said in January that the technology will ensure consumers will be able to play their movies and TV shows on a wide range of devices and services.

Security

• “Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration,” Portnoy said.

• Some friends who are in the computer business took exception to my position on anti-virus (AV) software, saying “for Linux, we don’t clog up our computers with anti-virus software.” And that remark deserves some elaboration.

• Windows is such a booby-trap for malware of all kinds, that Windows AV software works in the “always-active” mode. Emails are scanned the moment they arrive. If you insert a storage device or download a file, that gets scanned. This requires a big chunk of the AV software to be permanently loaded in memory, and continuously running, so yes, it does “clog up” your computer to some extent, making it run slower. But you need this continuous vigilance to keep your Windows PC safe.

• A politician running to lead the B.C. New Democrats says he is refusing to comply with a requirement of leadership hopefuls to hand over the passwords to their social media accounts.

• Nicholas Simons, an NDP MLA who’s hoping to run in the leadership race, says he’s left that information off his nomination package.

• Google will soon require the use of SSL encryption with three of its developer-facing APIs.

• Beginning September 15, Google will require all developers to use SSL connections for all requests through its Google Documents List, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Sites APIs. In other words, these APIs will only accept requests via HTTPS. If you make a request to an old HTTP address, such as http://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full, it will no longer work. You must use https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• United States soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking US state secrets to WikiLeaks and detained under restrictive conditions at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia since July 2010, was ordered Wednesday to sleep stripped of all clothing. According to his attorney, this condition was imposed because Manning made a “sarcastic quip” about the harsh conditions of his confinement.

• When President Obama was campaigning and elected, one of the things he frequently talked about was how he was influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, and how President Lincoln brought together may dissenting voices into his cabinet. There were, clearly, political reasons for doing so, but part of the benefit was that it allowed voices of dissent to be heard. However, in practice, it’s appearing that President Obama has no real interest in allowing the same thing to occur in his administration, and that’s really unfortunate.

• Federal agents today arrested an ex-soldier with ties to the white supremacist movement and charged him with planting the backpack bomb along the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day march in downtown Spokane.

• A former FBI informant who helped foil a bomb plot at the 2008 Republican National Convention has sued the New York Times for libel and defamation.

• A Times story from February 22 claimed that Brandon Darby had “encouraged” others to bomb the RNC, when in fact he had been essential to law enforcement efforts that disrupted the plot.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• While media around the world continue to present the Fukushima nuclear crisis as an Armageddon moment for Japan and the world, Japanese media is going out and taking measurements of radiation levels all around the Kanto region. Because I have not been able to find this type of information easily in English I have translated a radiation map of Japan into English and created a clear overview for you here.

• The response from an Energy Department official nicely illustrated the paternalistic, know-it-all attitude Paul was criticizing. “I’m pro-choice on bulbs,” insisted Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency. “My view is, what you want is lighting.” And the government, in its infinite wisdom, will tell you what kind of lighting is best for you.

Finance

• Tens of thousands of people were in Madison, Wisconsin, again this weekend, continuing to protest Governor Scott Walkers attempt to do away with collective bargaining for some state employees. We’re at Day 18 now, if you’re keeping track.

• With the labor movement suffering an epic defeat in Wisconsin and perhaps other states, union leaders plan to use the setback to fire up working people nationwide and mount a major counterattack against Republicans at the ballot box in 2012.Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

• Republicans and Democrats squabble over crumbs as the layer cake of debt keeps rising.

• Oil prices surged to near $107 per barrel yesterday and regular gasoline is going for $3.51 per gallon. Last March oil sold for around $80 per barrel and gas cost about $2.79 per gallon. The uprisings throughout the Middle East are in part responsible for the recent uptick in prices. For example, the fighting in Libya has reduced global oil production by about one million barrels per day. On the other hand, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are boosting their output by a similar amount to make up for the shortfall. Democrats in Congress are calling upon President Barack Obama to damp down prices by selling off oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

• Republican Michigan governor Rick Snyder, along with the state’s Republican house and senate, have passed a controversial bill that allows the governor to dissolve the elected governments of Michigan’s towns and cities, replacing them with unaccountable “emergency financial managers” who can eliminate services, merge or eliminate school boards, and lay off or renegotiate unionized public employees without recourse. Republican senator Jack Brandenburg — who supported the measure — calls it “financial martial law.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Premiere On Call, a division of the Clear Channel subsidiary that distributes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is a service that hires actors to call into radio shows and read a script that purports to be a true story presented by the public.

• Sending DMCA takedown notices in bulk has become increasingly fashionable during recent years but thanks to the database at Chilling Effects, we are able to see who is sending what to whom. As concerns mount over the amount of checking carried out before items are taken down, it appears that Fox has managed to get Google to delist DMCA complaints on Chilling Effects, which were originally sent by Fox themselves and submitted to Chilling Effects by Google.

• The Chilling Effects web archive was founded in 2001 as a response to the usually secretive practice of sending so-called ‘takedown notices’ to have content removed from the web. This, according to the activists involved, was having a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech.

• In the video, NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller and a colleague met with two members of a fictional Muslim group dangling a $5 million donation. Prodded by the “donors,” Schiller said liberals “might be more educated” than conservatives, described Republicans as “anti-intellectual” and said the GOP had been “hijacked” by the “racist” Tea Party.

Censorship

• Last year, we wrote about a horrendous lawsuit brought by an Israeli author/law professor, Karin Calvo-Goller, who had written a book on The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. Another law professor, Thomas Weigand, in Germany, reviewed the book for Global Law Books, and didn’t think the book lived up to its potential. I’ve read plenty of book reviews, and while this one is negative, it’s hardly a scathing book review. Weigand just didn’t think the book was all that good. It happens. Move on.

• But Calvo-Goller did not move on. She claimed that the review was libelous, and contacted the editor of the journal — an American named Joseph Weiler — who responded quite reasonably to Calvo-Goller, pointing out that the review wasn’t that bad and that he did not believe the review was libelous (and explained in detail why not), and then offered Calvo-Goller the right to write a response that he would publish as well. He also pointed out that her reputation would likely take a much larger hit from trying to suppress a negative book review, than from the review itself.

• Paul Alan Levy points us to the news of how a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon, Usha Rajagopal, has sued some people who wrote negative reviews of her work for defamation. However, he notes, despite the fact that she’s in California and the reviews she’s upset about appeared on Google — a California-based company, she filed her suit in Virginia. Levy suggests that this was done to avoid California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which would have allowed for immediate dismissal and the possibility of attorney’s fees being awarded for the filing.

• Lady Gaga is now demanding that photographers surrender the copyright of photos taken at her concerts – and photographers are incensed.

• Washington, D.C. website TBD.com made this practice public on Friday when they published the release form given to their photographer Jay Westcott. In addition to standard release restrictions regarding the use of images shot at her concerts, the document states that any photos taken at the show become the property of Lady Gaga. This an especially bold demand as the government has established that copyright exists the moment when a work is created, which in this case is the moment when a photographer clicks their shutter button.

• An NBA referee has sued The Associated Press and one of its sports writers over a Twitter message suggesting he intentionally made a bad call to make up for a previous bad call that went against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

• In a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Minneapolis, veteran NBA referee William Spooner claimed AP sports writer Jon Krawczynski defamed him in the Twitter message, sent while he was covering the Jan. 24 Rockets-Timberwolves game.

• Judges held that article 4 of the bill, which allows the executive branch to censor the Net under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the constitutional court has failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hopes lie now in European institutions, which are the only ones with the power to prohibit or at least supervise administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.

• We’ve covered Beverly “Bev” Stayart a few times — and even been legally threatened by Stayart and her lawyer (also named Stayart). As you may recall, Stayart sued Yahoo/Overture after doing a search on her name, and seeing a suggestion that included “levitra” and “cialis.” Stayart took offense to such terms being associated with her name. She tried a few different questionable legal theories including “privacy rights” and that because the search engine made the suggestions, the search engines have liability for impermissably selling her name. It had also kicked off with a trademark claim over her name, despite the lack of any trademark in her name. The threat against us was because she didn’t like some of our comments, which necessitated us having our lawyer explain Section 230 to her as well, after which we never heard from Stayart again. However, after losing in her lawsuit against Yahoo, she sued Google over the same “levitra” connection. Oh, and she appealed and lost her original loss against Yahoo.

Privacy

• I heard a report on NPR about an auto insurance company giving drivers the options of putting GPS tracking devices on their vehicles to lower insurance rates by as much as 30%. The idea is that, for example, the device could confirm to the insurance company that the car wasn’t being used in high risk situations, such as commute traffic. Safe driving situations would be rewarded with lower rates.

• The U.S. government is getting closer to getting data from Twitter about various associates of WikiLeaks.

• The people whose Twitter records were being requested had moved to throw out the government’s request for data, but a judge denied that motion Friday, ruling that the associates don’t have standing to challenge it.

• The judge also denied a request to unseal the government’s application for the Twitter order.

• Sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal said that the US assistant secretary of commerce, Lawrence Strickling, is going to bring up the Obama administration’s legislative initiative at the Senate Commerce Committee.

• The US administration is expected to push for a privacy bill of rights as it wants to give the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more powers. Back in December, The INQUIRER reported that the FTC called for a “Do Not Track” mechanism to be installed in consumers’ web browsers.

• A federal magistrate judge refused to vacate a previously issued order granting the government’s request to reveal information regarding various Twitter accounts for people allegedly associated with Wikileaks.

Civil Rights

• A 21-year-old Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area is demanding $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

• Aaron Tobey claims in a civil rights lawsuit (.pdf) that in December he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.

• “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated,” his chest and gut read.

• A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely to block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

• Still, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears challenges to Department of Homeland Security policies, did not indicate during an hour-long oral argument here whether it agreed with allegations that the machines are an unconstitutional privacy invasion, ineffective, and unhealthy. Instead, the three-judge panel, which did not indicate when it would rule, appeared stuck in the procedural muck, and spent little time on those bread-and-butter issues.

• The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

• A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely it would block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

• The father of suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning says the military has crossed a line in its treatment of his son and called the conditions under which he was being imprisoned “shocking.”

• Brian Manning broke his silence to a PBS Frontline correspondent this week after the U.S. Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where his 23-year-old son is being held, stripped the soldier of his clothing and forced him to stand at attention in the nude and sleep naked. Manning’s defense attorney has called the brig’s move “inexcusable” and “degrading treatment.”

• The American Civil Liberties Union calls the treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning unconstitutional and “gratuitously harsh.” The remarks came in a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

• “The Supreme Court has long held that the government violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment whenever it ‘unnecessarily and wantonly inflicts pain,’ the ACLU’s letter read. “No legitimate purpose is served by keeping Private Manning stripped naked; in prolonged isolated confinement and utter idleness; subjected to sleep deprivation through repeated physical inspections throughout the night; deprived of any meaningful opportunity to exercise, even in his cell; and stripped of his reading glasses so that he cannot read. Absent any evident justification, such treatment is clearly forbidden by our Constitution.”

• Members of the European Parliament have condemned the first six months of data sharing with US terror spooks as an abject failure of data protection.

• The SWIFT agreement gives US authorities access to Europeans’ banking information, but MEPs were told that in the first six months of operation data requests were so abstract it was impossible to tell if they complied with data protection rules or not.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s recently adopted net neutrality rules.

• The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC’s rules. Those rules would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

• The Obama administration today called for improvements in the mechanisms used to oversee Internet domain names, saying changes are needed to make the process more “accountable” and “transparent.”

• Larry Strickling, a Commerce Department assistant secretary, said that the California nonprofit group created in 1998 to oversee these functions–the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN–”needs” to do more to explain the reasoning for its decisions and to heed the advice of national governments.

DRM/SCOny

• Tuesday’s order by US Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero said the information subject to Sony’s subpoena “shall be provided on an Attorneys’ Eyes Only basis” and is limited to information relating to whether Hotz has enough ties to Northern California to be sued in federal court in that district. Hotz, who goes by the hacking moniker GeoHot, is a resident of New Jersey, and has argued that the court lacks the authority to try him.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Joe Karaganis, from the Social Science Research Council was kind enough to reach out to me last week and send me an advance copy of the (somewhat epic) report that SSRC just released this week, exploring “Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.” It’s a rather massive 440 pages of research into a variety of issues having to do with infringement, specifically focused on emerging markets. While it was nice of Karaganis to send it to me, I was a bit disappointed to find out that they’re not releasing the report for free (for most). Instead, it’s released under a “Consumer’s Dilemma” license, where they want people in developed countries to pay $8 for the report, but will offer it for free to those in less developed countries (though, it looks like Canadians can get it for free).

• The ‘Star Wars’ creator argues prop designer Andrew Ainsworth doesn’t have the rights to sell the replica suits.

• If Russia wants to prove the country is a good trade partner, then the country must be more aggressive in fighting online piracy. That’s the message a group of U.S. congressmen wants Vice President Joe Biden to send during his visit to Moscow this week.

• Of course, around that time, we highlighted the fact that Murdoch, himself, owned a whole bunch of aggregators, many of which acted much worse than the sites — such as Google — that Murdoch was complaining about.

• However, over the weekend there was a nice example of how one of Murdoch’s publications clearly copied a story from another publication and did not give any credit for it whatsoever. We noted earlier how Broadband Reports broke the story of AT&T deciding to put in place metered billing. Broadband Reports got a tip with a leaked email showing the new rules, and got confirmation from AT&T. Nearly every other report on the story credited Broadband Reports with breaking the story. However, when the WSJ (via Dow Jones Newswire) wrote the story, by reporter Roger Cheng, there is no mention whatsoever of Broadband Reports breaking the story.

• But, really, the bigger question is what does this have to do with enforcement? I’m fine with Espinel going beyond just focusing on enforcement, if she’s going to look for ways to actually help IP live up to its Constitutional mandate of promoting the progress. But this recommendation seems completely out of place in a document focused entirely on enforcement with this one non-enforcement issue tossed in at the end.

• The thing is, every time the government ratchets up IP laws in ways that don’t match with the way most people view the world, the less respected those laws become. Rather than actually increasing enforcement, these moves decrease respect for those laws.

• Thanks to G Thompson for pointing us to where the BSA has stashed a copy of that mysterious “piracy” research report we were just talking about, which was apparently written by someone named Emilio Ferrer. It’s embedded below, and it’s even more ridiculous than we had initially expected. First, the entire thing is based on the massively and completely debunked TERA report from last year, that used such outrageous assumptions as to not even pass the most basic sniff test. The researchers here appear to have made no attempt to determine the accuracy of the TERA report, nor to respond to any of the debunked points.

Trademarks

• Judith Lindenau points us to the news that a guy named Daniel Rothamel, who is apparently a well-known, well-respected blogger in the real estate world, is facing a questionable trademark infringement lawsuit because he blogs under the name the Real Estate Zebra. The company suing him, the Lones Group, claims to publish a blog and newsletter under the names The Zebra Blog and The Zebra Report. So, they’re claiming infringement, because there can apparently be only one zebra in the real estate world. It’s worth pointing out here that the Lones Group apparently is not actually in the real estate business itself, but provides marketing services to real estate agents.

• The planet’s most flamboyantly dressed pop star is threatening legal action against British manufacturers of the world’s most bizarrely flavoured ice-cream.

• Lady Gaga has told a store in Covent Garden, central London, to stop selling its latest brand, Baby Gaga – ice-cream made from human breast milk, blended with vanilla pods and lemon.

• The US singer, whose last entanglement with foodstuffs involved wearing a dress stitched together from raw meat to an awards ceremony, appears unaware that the product she complained about disappeared off the company’s shelves last week.

• The day after it went on sale inspectors from Westminster council’s food standards department confiscated the remaining scoops of Baby Gaga to check whether it met hygiene requirements.

• On March 1, 2011, Zynga filed for a trademark on the word: ville. The trademark was filed with the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the official trade marks and designs office of the European Union.

• Zynga’s trademark representative is Rouse, a specialist in international IP business whose client list ranges from Honeywell and BP to Christian Dior and Starbucks Coffee.

• For the better part of a decade, there have been a ton of lawsuits about keyword advertising, and whether or not it’s a trademark violation to buy an advertisement on a competitor’s trademark. All along, we’ve argued that this is not, at all, a trademark violation. The main purpose of trademark law, of course, is to prevent consumer confusion — and advertising a competing product when people are looking for one brand is not a trademark violation. Just think of supermarkets where they have those little coupon dispensing machines that pop out competitor’s coupons all the time. Keyword advertising is basically the same thing. Tragically, despite a large number of these cases, the courts have really skirted the issue. Some of the cases have blamed Google, but thankfully there have been a growing number of cases that have ruled Google clearly has no liability here as a third party. But the company buying the ads? Well, we’ve been waiting for a clear ruling… and we’re getting closer.

• Bath & Body Works is suing Twilight distributor Summit Entertainment, hoping to get a declaratory judgment that its “Twilight Woods” line of lotions, shower gels and other products doesn’t infringe the trademark on the hit vampire film franchise.

• There’s an unexpected Utah connection in the online battle for the website Pac12.com.

• Maybe you’ve wondered why the Redskins Insider Live videocast became the Football Insider Live videocast. Or why the Redskins Insider blog became The Insider blog. Or why the Redskins Insider twitter feed became the Insider twitter feed.

Copyrights

• Liberal MP Dan McTeague has responded to my recent post on his linkages with CRIA in a 2,200 word “rebuttal.” The McTeague post confirms that his earlier letter to the editor came directly from content supplied by CRIA and adopts the contradictory position that when CRIA launches a lawsuit, it is only an unproven claim that should not have an impact on copyright reform, but when isoHunt files a lawsuit it demonstrates that there is a “legislative holiday” in Canada that demands immediate action.

• The McTeague post provided the opportunity to take a closer look at his website, which reveals what may be widespread copyright infringement. Since the introduction of Bill C-32, McTeague has posted dozens of full-text articles from mainstream media organizations on his website, at times without attribution. In addition to the articles, McTeague has also reposted many photographs associated with the articles. While it is possible that McTeague has fully licensed the reproduction and posting of each article and photograph, this seems unlikely since the licences offered by many organizations do not even permit this form of reproduction. No other Liberal MP appears to have established a similar practice.

• We saw today on the Creative Generalist blog a post about a film entitled Rip! A Remix Manifesto. The film, according to the Open Source Cinema Web site, is “an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”

• Eldred and Kahle, both ended up in losses, but they did get the court to establish some boundaries for when and how the US could retroactively change copyright law. As a very quick review, Eldred argued that the ongoing extension of copyright violated the “limited” part of the copyright clause in the Constitution.

• The blog garnered a small audience on Tumblr and a following in the newsroom of The Times. When it came to the attention of the company’s Senior Counsel, he asked that I remove all copyrighted New York Times content. This request effectively ended Ten Ones.

• Speaking at a Silicon Valley legal conference this morning, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said that the recent website shutdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement COICA are way out of line, and an abuse of due process. In particular, she pointed out a recent episode during which, while pursuing a handful of websites allegedly connected to child pornography, ICE agents accidentally shut down more than 80,000 unrelated websites and tarnished them with child porn-related accusations.

• We’ve covered how Rep. Zoe Lofgren is one of the only Representatives in Congress (along with Senator Wyden on the other side of the Capitol building), who appears to actually be concerned that Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group is seizing web domains on questionable authority, without due process, and likely in violation of basic First Amendment rights against prior restraint. Of course, even with just one Congressional Rep. speaking out about this, apparently the RIAA wishes to stomp out any dissent. Yesterday, they sent Rep. Lofgren an unsolicited letter in response to her comments. You can see the full letter embedded below, but let’s go through a few of the “highlights.”

• At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name’s registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography.

• But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might “take as long as 3 days.”

• One outraged user took to his blog to tell ICE to “get out of my Internet. You’d get no argument from me that there are truly distasteful and illegal things on the Internet. That’s true of any society. But there are also proper ways to deal with these problems. Pulling a total domain, sweeping up innocent people along the way, feeling that you don’t have to comply with due process of law and indicating that you don’t give a damn is wrong. It’s not as wrong as child pornography or counterfeiting, but it’s still wrong… That’s to say nothing of any damage done to my name or reputation.”

• We’ve raised a number of reasons as to why the federal government’s domain name seizures (via Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement group) are almost certainly not Constitutional. And while we’ve run these arguments by a number of well respected Constitutional lawyers who are extremely interested in these issues (and may be getting involved in various ways), some in our comments have insisted that our points could be ignored because we are not lawyers. And while I’ve asked some of the lawyers I regularly speak to if they would write blog posts commenting on these issues, many are quite busy trying to actually do something about these issues, and that seems a bit more important.

• CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood’s “PATRIOT Act” Yesterday’s White House wish list of new intellectual property laws focused on things like counterfeit medicines, but it also included proposals to extend wiretaps into copyright cases and to ensure that illegal streaming video is a felony. A DC trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft today objected loudly to the plan, saying that legitimate concerns about counterfeiting have been “hijacked to create draconian proposals to alleviate the content industry of the burden of protecting its own interest using its own extensive resources.”

• IN AN effort to keep audiences flocking to the cinemas to see the latest movies, studios and theatres are gambling on the 3D movie experience.

• We were a bit surprised last summer when the major music publishers piled on to the bandwagon and sued Limewire. After all, the major record labels (who own most of the major publishers anyway) were already involved in a lawsuit with Limewire and had won a pretty complete victory over the file sharing system.

• As a lawyer, you know it’s going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”

• Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a “Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!” sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele’s representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

• Last week we covered the somewhat surprising arrest of Brian McCarthy, the operator of Channelsurfing.net, on charges of criminal copyright infringement. As we noted at the time, this seemed like a pretty questionable charge. I could potentially see a civil charge against him using the court-created concept of “inducing” infringement (a concept that Congress rejected…), but there is no inducement standard in criminal infringement. It’s possible that the feds could go with an aiding and abetting charge, but that requires a much higher standard, and it’s not clear that the feds have enough to make such a claim really stick. At the time, we didn’t have the complaint, but the folks at DemandProgress have obtained a copy of the complaint, which we’ve also embedded below.

• According to Espinel, the current law makes it unclear whether streaming copyrighted works is subject to felony penalties, meaning prison time, because the penalty is “predicated on the defendant either illegally reproducing or distributing the copyrighted work”. The question lies in the legal definition of “distribution”, as streaming isn’t the transfer of complete files.

• The latest in confused secondary liability rulings comes from France, where Google has lost a lawsuit and been fined for copyright infringement, because of links and an uploaded video of a movie from producers Mondovino.

• For a while Righthaven and its corporate owners/partners at the Las Vegas Review Journal positioned Righthaven as being about big newspapers standing up to the grubby internet folks posting copies of newspaper articles on blogs and forums. In fact, it kept trying to get other big media operations to sign up — with the only other paper to sign on so far being the Denver Post. Since then, Righthaven has gone a bit ballistic in suing all sorts of websites for posting a particular photo from the Denver Post (of a TSA patdown) that had gone viral. Rather than recognizing the positive benefits of the image going viral, Righthaven and the Denver Post has just seen it as a way to do a short-term money grab by suing everyone they can — of course, without any notice or takedown requests.

• I am having trouble convincing myself why digital books will not cost 99 cents within 5 years. All books, on average. Just as the price of music does not in general change on the length or quality.

• Hollywood film executives want you to know that they are not at war with Netflix or the Internet.

• Of course, WIPO certainly hasn’t gone too far away from its traditional position, but it has been showing more and more signs of moving away from copyright maximalism. TechnoLlama points us to a recent keynote speech given by Dr. Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, on the issue of “future directions in copyright law.”

• The notion that all Internet users should somehow pay the old copyright monopoly structures a monthly fee, to compensate them for file sharing, has popped up again. It does from time to time. It’s a terrible idea, and for several good reasons. It fails to meet basic quality standards for lawmaking. But the most elusive and strongest reason is that it’s a last-ditch attempt to maintain the old power structures where a small pseudonobility were the only ones allowed to create culture.

• The latest sad example of this overvaluing of one’s own work and talking down about someone else’s work comes from the NY Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller (also a driving force behind the NYT’s plan for a paywall). In a weird and somewhat rambling discussion, which eventually gets around to the future of news, Keller decides to attack the Huffington Post as a bunch of sniveling copyists, compared to his high minded version of journalism…

• Sean Parker helped create Napster, which kicked off the long and steep decline of the big music labels. Soon he might own part of one.

• The digital entrepreneur is considering putting his money into a consortium bidding on Warner Music Group, which put itself on the block earlier this year. Sources tell me that Parker isn’t part of the formal bid, but is aligned with a group led by investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum.

• A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can’t be stopped through “three strikes” Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That’s because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is “better described as a global pricing problem.” And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.

• The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.

• The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.

• The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making “illegal streaming” of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.

• In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix “deficiencies that could hinder enforcement” of intellectual property laws.

• A few weeks ago, at the Digital Music Forum East event, right before I went on stage to interview Gary Shapiro from CEA, there was a presentation from a new music startup I’d never heard of, called Beyond Oblivion. The presentation (which is embedded below) was interesting, if incredibly vague. It looks like they’re trying to create a music locker of sorts, but to avoid the various legal woes of other such music lockers by throwing a ton of cash at the labels. It’s basically “don’t sue us” money. Literally, the company has promised to pay $500 million to labels.

• The most effective way to target foreign Websites that illegally stream copyrighted material may be to cut off their funding, Maria Pallante, acting register of copyrights, told a House subcommittee Monday.

• “The parasites who operate so-called rogue websites build businesses on piracy, counterfeiting and other unlawful activity, in part based on the expectation of weak enforcement,” Pallante told the House Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet Subcommittee.

• Jon Bon Jovi has taken aim at Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, accusing him of “killing” the music industry with iTunes.

• The rocker is saddened that the “magical” experience of buying records in a store is disappearing, brick-and-mortars stores being eroded in part due to iTunes’ success.

• No surprise, really, but former Senator Chris “I won’t become a lobbyist” Dodd has begun his new tenure as a lobbyist for the MPAA on an inauspicious note — by falsely claiming that infringement is no different than “looting.”

• The Associated Press has sued several retailers including Urban Outfitters for the unauthorised use of the Hope image created by artist Shepard Fairey.

• Artist Fairey used an AP photo without permission to create the image, and was sued by the news agency for violating copyright. That case was settled.

• It really is amusing at times to go back and look at the historical moral panics by the recording industry over the “threats” of piracy. It’s the same story every year, from the player piano (killing live music!) to the tape recorder (home taping is killing music!) to the MP3 player (illegal!). Sometimes such stories get lost to history, but Boing Boing has an amusing image from a 1976 record album sleeve, where the cover is devoted to telling people to fight the scourge of 8-track piracy.

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