● 06.19.11

● Links 19/6/2011: GNOME 3.1.2 and Apache Traffic Server 3.0.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:56 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• The UN says three strikes laws violate Human Rights, Fedora wants a Code of Conduct, IBM and Oracle screw LibreOffice, Skype is reverse-engineered, Microsoft screws with their developers and Apple invents cloud computing.

Kernel Space

• Nailing down the Linux kernel power regressions (see Linux Has Major Power Regression and Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted) has made a big step forward this weekend. Not only to fix up these major kernel power regressions that are hitting many mobile Linux users, but to look further into the state of Linux power management is now possible and to closely analyze other areas of the Linux stack to find other areas for improvement.

Applications

• So linux to the rescue. I do all my video editing in kdenlive, so the attempt at using iMovie was a bit of an experiment. With linux, I just connect my camera, and add the .MTS files to the project. From there, they can be dragged on to the time line and away you go. No fuss, no convoluted import process which does a conversion of the file to an intermediate codec causing a loss of quality.

• The default setting in the GIMP has a mouse pointer highlighter active. It makes working in GIMP difficult- to the point that it’s been mistaken for a bug.

• Physics is a natural science concerned with the study of matter and energy applying laws that govern natural phenomena. It encompasses the study of the universe from the largest galaxies to subatomic particles, covering mechanics, radiation, heat, electricity, sound, magnetism and the structure of atoms.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Gaming is becoming a more and more expensive pastime, with many new titles costing around $50 or even more. For console owners, this pretty much delivers a simple choice – either hack your device to allow homebrew titles and lose the benefit of network play, or else pray for an increase to the limit on your credit card.

• For PC and Mac owners, however, there are the benefits of cheap re-releases further down the line, possibly bundled up with similar titles. While this isn’t ideal for everyone, it is certainly a popular alternative to splashing a half days wage on the latest gaming titles, but there is an alternative…

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Many GNOME packages have been updated for this 3.1.2 milestone. Some of the notable updates for this GNOME 3.2 development snapshot include a new Clutter release where COGL has been moved out-of-tree, Empathy has a new log viewer and supports CSS variants in Adium themes, a new experimental call channel handler for Empathy, improved SVG decoding with Eye of GNOME, GDM improvements, GNOME Shell enhancements, and much more. There’s also GTK+3 tool-kit improvements.

• Even since before Gnome Shell‘s official release, people have been hard at work creating some interesting themes for the new desktop environment. Changing themes in Gnome Shell isn’t hard thanks to some nice configuration tools you can install. With plenty of people sporting the new desktop environment in Linux thanks to releases such as Fedora 15, which has Gnome Shell by default, applying themes is quickly becoming a more desired action.

Distributions

• A Live CD is a convenient and easy approach for users to try out an operating system and run pre-configured software, or do virtually everything that you can with an installed system. It’s a bootable CD-ROM disk that loads an operating system without the need to permanently install it on a storage device like a hard drive.

• The origin of the Live CD was not a CD at all, but a bootable floppy disk. Usually, hardware manufacturers and anti-virus developers produced bootable floppy disks for various operating systems, to perform certain administrative tasks that were not possible with the OS already running. For example, anti-virus software needed users to boot their system in a known safe condition, so that any virus infections on the machine would not interfere with virus-testing activity. Hardware manufacturers distributed bootable floppy disks to allow the system user to test the hardware products without OS intervention, and to be sure that the firmware was working correctly.

• We selected Ubuntu as our base system, for its manageability, and also because most of our users are new to GNU/Linux. To re-build the distribution we used Remastersys, a useful software that packs your existing system into a ‘live’ disk image. Let’s look at how we did this.

• To create a custom GNU/Linux distro, you need to install and customise the base distro first; so we installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu onto a system that was going to be our ‘build’ machine. Next, we applied all our customisation to the system, installed the software we needed, and applied customisations to the desktop.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux by former contributors and members of Mandriva, As expected, there was a flurry of activities between the announcement of the fork of the distribution (on September 18, 2010) and the first official (stable) release (June 1, 2011). Teams had to be put together, servers and hosting and the required development environments set up, etc.

• In the end, what we have is a community-driven and community-sponsored distribution in contrast to its parent distribution, which is controlled by a commercial entity. This article is a review of this new distribution and also marks its listing in the Desktop/Server Category on this website.

• [...]

• Out of the gate, Mageia packs all the features one would expect from an excellent distribution, and that is due, of course, to its being a fork of Mandriva.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) has a potential upside of 24.6% based on a current price of $41.20 and analysts’ consensus price target of $51.35. The stock should find initial resistance at its 200-day moving average (MA) of $43.25and further resistance at its 50-day MA of $44.73.

Fedora

• Some folks just aren’t happy with GNOME 3. Some aren’t happy with the whole concept while others think it just really needs more simmering. Regardless of where you might fall in that spectrum, there may be hope yet. Juan “Nushio” Rodriguez, Fedora Ambassador and packager, has been working on bringing the deprecated desktop back to life for Fedora 15.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 11.10 has received many new updates in last few days. Here is a quick summary of recent changes.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Hmmm… the official Maemo/MeeGo Twitter account just tweeted, “Rumours of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” Their previous tweet was from last December! Something is definitely up. This looks like another hint of a MeeGo announcement at the upcoming June 21st Nokia Connection event in Singapore.

Android

• The news that Android users who have jailbroken their phones will be denied access to the new commercial YouTube pay-per-view service is as neat an example of copyright extremism as you could hope for.

• Android, of course, is Google’s wildly popular alternative to Apple’s iOS (the operating system found on iPhones and iPads). Android is free and open – it costs nothing to copy, it can be legally modified and those modifications can be legally distributed. Android products come in varying degrees of lockdown; flagship devices such as the Samsung Nexus S are easy to set up to run competing, unofficial flavours of Android (such as CyanogenMod, which adds lots of useful features and controls to your phone that are missing from the stock Android version). Other phones use various kinds of hardware and software locks that try to get in the way of installing your own OS, and while Google doesn’t prohibit this behaviour from its vendors, it also doesn’t encourage it – until now.

• Google is activating some 400,000 new Android devices every single day now(source) and Android is already the fastest growing and most popular smartphone OS in many parts of the world. In tune with its rising popularity, Android’s applications base is also showing stupendous growth. We have already featured a bunch of must have open source Android applications and now here is a collection of Android apps dedicated to travelers among you.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• By now, most everyone in your circle of friends has played with a Kindle and an iPad. Fewer have picked up a Nook. But I’d urge you to give this dark horse a shot.

• I’ve been testing the newest black and white version of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, and, well, you can color me impressed.

• The freshly-updated Nook is smaller and lighter than Amazon’s Kindle, and on those qualities alone it stands a excellent chance of capturing some more market share in the e-ink device game. But the new Nook also embraces social media sharing (and does it well enough), eliminates all buttons save a “Home” key (where’d they get that idea?) and ambidextrous page-turners, and introduces a responsive e-ink touchscreen that controls an intuitive interface.

Free Software/Open Source

• To drive that hardware Qi will provide a 6LoWPAN driver for the Nanonote or Linux box, but has also managed to connect it to a Linux Zigbee stack. Zigbee is free for non-commercial use, but that makes it incompatible with the GPL so the hardware isn’t named as being Zigbee compatible.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• From the programming viewpoint, Chromium is a solution consisting of 473 projects. The general size of the source C/C++ code is about 460 Mbytes and the number of lines is difficult to count.

• [...]

• Chromium had become the most quality and large project I have studied during testing of PVS-Studio. While handling the Chromium project it was not actually clear to us what was checking what: we have found and fixed several errors in PVS-Studio related to C++ file analysis and support of a specific project’s structure.

Mozilla

• Firefox 4 was another milestone for the Mozilla team. Of course, with the growing popularity of Chrome, Firefox’s admiration seems to have taken a downward trend. However, the record-holding browser isn’t going to back down. In its next version, that is Firefox 5, the veteran browser promises to bring along features that will put Firefox at par with Google Chrome.

• Here are 9 such features that will make you reconsider if you’re planning to switch to Chrome. Or, if you’re a Chrome user already, who knows, you might as well go turn back to the fox.

• The introduction of HTML5 and super-fast JavaScript engines to the latest web browsers has brought with it a wealth of new functionality. The focus seems to have been put on the ability to play video in a browser without Flash, or making games. But a project born out of a Music Hackday in Berlin is just as exciting.

SaaS

• To get the latest from git, set up a LAMP server (sqlite works just as well as mysql). There are 2 options for getting the latest git: In the root of your web directory run: git clone git://anongit.kde.org/owncloud.git. If you use this method and want to help out we have instructions on our wiki on how to modify that slightly for a development setup (keeping your own files out of git and under your user while letting git update the system files). The other option for getting owncloud itself is to download the latest, automatically created snapshot from git: Snapshots are here. These snapshots are created on the fly so whenever you download it you’ll get the most up-to-date version possible at that moment.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation today announced the first members of its Advisory Board: Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation. The new appointees will serve for an initial term of one year.

• The body represents The Document Foundation’s sponsors, with each sponsor having the right to one representative. They will provide the future Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals, and will consult regularly on the further development of the Foundation and its associated projects.

• In the Calligra Suite, we have a good separation between the so called Office Engine and the user interface. This engine has the responsibility to load, store, and save the contents of the document. It also renders the document on a canvas that can then be shown in an application for viewing or editing. The separation between the load/store/save parts and the rendering parts are not very strong, but it can nevertheless be seen.

Project Releases

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0. Apache Traffic Server is a Cloud Computing “edge” service, able to handle requests in and out of the Cloud, both by serving static content (images, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files), and routing requests for dynamic content to a Web server (such as the Apache HTTP Server).

Public Services/Government

• The purpose of this dossier is to analyse the most important criteria taken into account by the public administrations of thirty countries when adopting or choosing open source software, within the limitations inherent in this type of study.

Leftovers

• The tech world seems to move in spurts and spasms, and right now we’re in the middle of the “cloud” wave.

• Personally, I find the term “in the cloud” pretentious and annoying. Don’t they just mean “online?” Yes, I realize that computer professionals are referring to something much more specific — “data and application software stored on remote servers,” for example — but the world’s marketers and P.R. people seem to think that “the cloud” just means “online.” (“Now you can buy your toiletries in the cloud!!”)

• The first juror to be prosecuted for contempt of court for using the internet has been sentenced to eight months in jail.

• Joanne Fraill, 40, admitted at London’s high court using Facebook to exchange messages with Jamie Sewart, 34, a defendant already acquitted in a multimillion-pound drug trial in Manchester last year.

• Fraill, from Blackley, Manchester, also admitted conducting an internet search into Sewart’s boyfriend, Gary Knox, a co-defendant, while the jury was still deliberating.

• Oral arguments in US appellate courts tend to be staid affairs, with judges asking probing questions and attorneys politely sparring over the finer points of legal doctrine. So Joseph Kish, attorney for alleged serial spamming firm e360, must have known he was in trouble when Judge Richard A. Posner interrupted him seconds into his opening statement to berate both Kish and his client.

• “I have never seen such an incompetent presentation of a damages case,” Posner said. “It’s not only incompetent, it’s grotesque. You’ve got damages jumping around from $11 million to $130 million to $122 million to $33 million. In fact, the damages are probably zero.”

Security

• - The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

Cablegate

• Oliver Stone, the legendary and controversial American film director and screenwriter, recently shared his thoughts on Wikileaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning while speaking to students and faculty at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

• In a series of rarely viewed YouTube videos brought to our attention by Blogger Maria Technosux, viewers will hear Stone (JFK, Natural Born Killers, Platoon) comment on an array of topics including global politics, war and freedom of speech. However in this post Wikileaks-Movie.com brings your attention to Oliver Stone’s comments on Wikileaks, Julian Assange & Bradley Manning. And while we have transcribed only these comments in this post, we encourage you to view each of these videos in their entirety.

Finance

• I’ve been traveling a lot in recent weeks and had the pleasure of meeting policymakers in a number of countries. Perhaps the most interesting of those meetings occurred in a small workshop attended by a couple of policymakers who had worked with Timothy Geithner to bail-out Wall Street. Let me just say that these were intelligent guys with their hearts in the right places. While they probably did not think they were doing “God’s work” (as the Vampire Blood Sucking Squid put it), they certainly did think they were operating in the public interest.

• Goldman Sachs appears to be trying to clear its name.

• The compelling Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on the financial crisis is wrong, the bank says. Goldman Sachs didn’t have a Big Short against the housing market.

• But the size of Goldman’s short is irrelevant.

• No one disputes that, by 2007, the firm had pivoted to reduce its exposure from mortgages and mortgage securities and had begun shorting the market on some scale. There’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t we want banks to reduce their risk when they see trouble ahead, as Goldman did in the mortgage markets?

• Nor should shorting itself be seen as a bad thing. Putting money behind a bet that a stock (or bond or commodity or derivative) is overpriced is necessary for the efficient functioning of capital markets. Short-sellers can keep prices from getting out of whack and help deflate bubbles.

• One year after the passage of Dodd-Frank’s provisions on swap regulation absolutely nothing has been implemented.

• High food prices are likely to rise even further over the next decade, putting the poor at an increasing risk of malnutrition and hunger, a world food report warned Friday.

• The joint report of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said the risk of price volatility that has hurt farmers across the globe remains high. The OECD leader came out to back France’s demand for increased transparency and more regulation and public information in the farm commodities markets as a key measure to stabilize prices.

• The Biden group is readying itself for the final sprint towards a debt deal. “Now we’re getting down to the real hard stuff,” Biden told reporters. “I’ll trade you my bicycle for your golf clubs.” The hope is to get to $4 trillion in deficit reduction eventually, and at least $2 trillion in the deal to raise the debt ceiling. But perhaps the strongest sign that they’re likely to succeed isn’t coming from inside the room, but from outside of it.

Censorship

• Houston lawyer Jason M. Medley, as next friend to his daughter, has filed a libel suit on her behalf against three middle-school students who allegedly posted a video on the social networking site Facebook.

• Medley says the intention in filing the June 14 suit was not for publicity or to “get on a pedestal and make some kind of an example” of cyber-bullying. “It is my goal to protect my daughter, not to make greater publicity over an event that was harmful to her,” Medley says.

• The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

• The U.S. government has created what it is calling an “Internet in a suitcase” to cheat the switches on the filtering regimes of repressive countries. A kit of hardware, the suitcase creates a “shadow Internet” within a country that allows users to communicate with each other and the outside world despite electronic censorship.

• The suitcase was funded by a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of State, according to the New York Times.

DRM

• If you thought that I was being ridiculous in saying that big corporations might want to do something as ridiculous as restrict your ability to use a camera, I give you Exhibit A, which has made the news this week:

• It’s nice to see that even creators are speaking against this concept. Every now and then, the big media companies like to trot out one of the well-known artists to say that piracy is a huge problem and DRM is vitally important.

• I realize its anathema to some, but one of the things I miss most about the transition from print to digital books is the ability to write on the pages. Oh sure, I can justify my notes and marginalia as being full of intelligent insights. But I think it all stems back from a love of coloring books and from adding my own creative and colorful commentary to printed pages. There’s also a lot of pleasure in that sort of mark-up: coloring in pictures, doodling in the margins, scribbling on pages.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A Utah investment company late Friday dropped its copyright-infringement lawsuit against 5,865 BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the movie Nude Nuns with Big Guns between January and March of this year.

• Incentive Capital, which is embroiled in litigation with another company called Camelot Distribution over who actually owns the B-rated flick, notified the Los Angeles federal judge presiding over the copyright action that it was dropping the case. (.pdf) An identical Nude Nuns lawsuit brought by Camelot Distribution, a California company, was voluntarily dismissed three weeks ago.

• In this (non-embeddable, natch) video interview from the World Copyright Summit on June 8, Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, the UN agency that creates and oversees global copyright policy, laments the current state of WIPO, saying that the copyright agenda there:

• Translation: our job isn’t to figure out how to balance out freedom of speech and access with exclusive rights for authors and investors; more copyright is always good. And the subtext is, “All those public interest groups that have got us looking at rights for blind and disabled people, exemptions for poor countries, rights for educators and archivists, and Creative Commons-style ‘some rights reserved’ issues are distracting us from the real business of WIPO: maximizing copyright’s benefit for a handful of corporate giants.”

• Earlier this month we covered a UN report that argued that “three strikes” laws that deprive alleged copyright infringers of Internet access violate human rights. The report was delivered by an independent UN investigator, and so didn’t represent the view of any UN member governments.

• Michael Geist notes that on Friday, Sweden made remarks at the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed many of the report’s findings, including the criticism of “three strikes” rules. The statement was signed by 40 other nations, including the United States and Canada. The United Kingdom and France, two nations that have enacted “three strikes” regimes, did not sign the statement.

• “All users should have greatest possible access to Internet-based content, applications and services,” the statement said, adding that “cutting off users from access to the Internet is generally not a proportionate sanction.” It also called network neutrality and Internet openness “important objectives.”

• The saga of controversial copyright-enforcement company Righthaven may be slowly drawing to a close. A judge has dismissed its lawsuit against the Democratic Underground website, saying that the contract Righthaven struck with Stephens Media, owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, doesn’t give it the right to sue anyone. Righthaven has been “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful” in how it described its business dealings with Stephens Media, the judge wrote. It’s a loss that endangers many of the more than 200 copyright lawsuits the Righthaven has filed in the past year.

• In his order, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt accepted in full the argument put forward by Democratic Underground’s lawyers that it’s simply not allowed under copyright law for Stephens Media to transfer only the right to sue, while keeping the many other rights that come with a copyright grant. Righthaven and its owner, Steve Gibson, tried to make the argument that Stephens Media really only had a license to use the material, and that Righthaven did indeed own the entire copyright. But that argument has now fallen apart with this order.

• A Las Vegas federal judge threatened to sanction copyright troll Righthaven, calling its litigation efforts Tuesday “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful.”

• The blistering decision also places into doubt the litigation factory’s year-old business model, which is also under a Colorado federal judge’s microscope.

• U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt of Nevada ordered Righthaven to explain why Hunt should not sanction it for trying to “manufacture standing.” Standing is a legal concept that has enabled Righthaven to bring 200-plus lawsuits on behalf of the copyrights owned by news agency Stephens Media of Las Vegas.

• There are three quick steps to angering a federal judge: first, launch the country’s largest file-sharing lawsuit against 23,322 anonymous defendants, even though most of them don’t live where you filed the suit. Second, request “expedited discovery” in the case, allowing you to quickly secure the subpoenas necessary to go to Internet access providers and turn those 23,322 IP addresses into real names. Third, don’t even bother to serve the subpoenas you just told the court were so essential to your case.

• Federal Judge Robert Wilkins of Washington, DC this week blasted the conduct of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver, the attorneys behind the lawsuit, calling it “inexcusable.” Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver helped kickstart the current frenzy of P2P lawsuits last year after filing cases under the name “US Copyright Group.” The 23,322-person case, their largest to date, involves the film The Expendables.

Reader’s Picks

Health/Nutrition

• A paper printout of an Electronic Health Record is often huge and unwieldy. If it is printed out or faxed it creates something so huge that it is pretty impossible to be useful in a paper record. This is the reason why need electronic interoperability solutions like the Direct Project.

Security

• Remember the Agent.BTZ worm that caused significant problems at military installations back in 2008? Now, three years after what the Pentagon called the most significant breach of US military networks ever, new versions of the malware blamed for the attack are still roiling US networks.”

Defence/Police/Aggression

• In a city whose schools and students are stereotyped as violent and failing, the success of the Urban Academy gives lie to the rationales behind the Lockdown High model of high-tech security equipment and harsh zero tolerance disciplinary policies in creating safe and secure schools. In fact, a mounting body of research contradicts the fundamental principles behind punitive, zero tolerance strategies as the most effective approach to school safety and discipline, while also revealing their harmful effects on children.

• Mexican officials were dismayed when Georgia passed the law, which it said could impact millions of Mexican workers, tourists and students in the U.S., and millions more whose jobs depend on international trade.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• … the Louisiana District Court … ruled in February that Feinberg was acting on behalf of BP and had to cease claiming to be neutral. … [one very sick clean up worker's] denied claim included medical bills from multiple doctor visits, and the results of a test showing his blood contains alarming levels of toxins that are found in BP’s crude oil.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping—but only Comcast and Cox also use upstream shaping

Privacy

Civil Rights

• The state’s governor, Nikki Haley, is slated to testify tomorrow at Issa’s hearing. “There’s no secret that I don’t like the unions,” she has said. Haley has vowed to keep up the political pressure in order to stop the lawsuit.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The branch of the U.S. government that typically deals with border control—Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE)—began seizing U.S. web domains of sites deemed to be involved in online piracy about a year ago. While the appropriateness of that process has been questioned in Congress and elsewhere, but ICE directors have frequently noted that the sites’ owners are free to challenge the seizure in court—but none have. Now, that’s no longer the case. A Spanish sports-streaming site called Rojadirecta filed papers in a New York District Court on Monday demanding that the government give back the domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org.

• Major legal issues on her desk relate to, among other things, the fair use doctrine, authors’ rights, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act recommendations.

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