● 07.13.11

● Links 13/7/2011: KDE 4.7 RC2, Pardus Linux 2011.1 Out With KDE SC 4.6.5

Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Journalist, FOSS advocate, feminist – Carla Schroder is all these and more. But more than anything it is her straight talking that marks her out – when she takes a stand on issues she is driven by conviction.

• Why do you think so many offer support for a platform that is supposed to be so under used?

• I’m sure the idea of using Linux to help teach Windows users how to recover their files has invoked a few chuckles amongst the Linux community as well as grimaces from Microsoft, though it’s nothing radically new: I use Slax and Parted Magic all the time to recover data from Windows PCs. BootMed is not dead-simple–you must at least understand the concepts involved and be fairly proficient at navigating a file system–but it’s a boon for less experienced users that want to learn the basic processes of recovery and of course, recover things.

Desktop

• This is because Linux is immune to Windows viruses and spyware. Linux doesn’t require all that extra antivirus software. These Windows anti-virus programs run constantly in the background and eat up valuable processing resources.

• Plus, with Linux, you can choose from a number of desktop environments to run. These can be feature rich (Like KDE and Gnome) or streamlined and light weight (Like LXDE or XFCE).

• I can plug an unknown USB stick into my computer, because all my Linux computer will do is open a File Manager window to show me what’s on the USB stick. There is no “autorun” function — one of the stupider ideas to come from the Microsoft brain-trust. If I want to run a program from a USB stick, I have to specifically request it.

Kernel Space

• Along with better support for new chipsets and graphics cores from AMD and Intel, not to mention drivers for Microsoft’s Kinect and DVB-T2, Linux 3.0 once again offers a number of workarounds for a wide range of hardware problems.

• In the opening minutes of Tuesday morning, Linus Torvalds released another pre-release version of Linux 3.0. In his release mail, Linus says that “Things have been pretty quiet, but there’s enough new stuff here that I wanted to do another -rc”. The developer had previously said that the sixth release candidate might perhaps have been the last.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• some might remember my hackweek project Zippl. I blogged about it more than a year ago. Zippl is a lightweigt presentation tool, a bit like prezi, a hipp tool for that purpose, where all ‘slides’ sit on one large canvas and during the presentation a kind of camera moves over the canvas.

• Gwibber – it may be Ubuntu’s default social client but do you use it? Chances are you don’t.

• Working with bulk text means you need a reusable copy-and-paste buffer to store multiple snippets of verbiage and characters. ClipIt is a fork of the now deceased Parcelite clipboard manager. So its look and feel are very similar to its predecessor. But ClipIt offers more features and preferences to select.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Few days back we wrote about a new flight combat/simulation game Molten Sky, which will be coming soon to Linux. The article presented first teaser video of the gameplay. Game developers have now released a second video showing us the remaining part of the campaign where we control a helicopter.

• Game Editor is the open source game design software that gives you the power to create the games of your dreams, and, unlike other game creation tools, gives you the chance to get and change the source code of the game creator and design and develop 2D games for personal computers as well as mobile devices.

• Ubisoft, the massive video game publishing and development studio, has been busy playing with Linux. In particular, exploring opportunities presented by Xen virtualization with regards to VGA pass-through as a means of decent gaming performance in a virtualized environment. A discussion began in the Phoronix Forums yesterday about Ubisoft’s Xen VGA pass-through demo.

• [...]

• NVIDIA GPUs on the system to do gaming, while Linux is still running underneath.

Desktop Environments

• When I first installed Fedora 15 to try GNOME3 was fascinated by it’s look and differences from the older versions, I still like it but after a couple weeks using it started to work very slow and crashed many times, now finally decided to move to Xfce but not removing GNOME 3 because maybe one day I will come back but not until I upgrade my computer. Applications start very fast, don’t crash, it’s simpler and reminds me the ClearLooks of Gnome 2.6 from F13 and F14.

• Fluxbox is a fast, lightweight, very customizable window manager for X. Fluxbox is a great choice for Linux users who favor speed and efficiency, and setting up their working environment just the way they like. Today we’ll look at some super-saver speed tricks such as grouping applications with tabs, tear-off menus, sticky buttons, the infamous slit, and more.

• The perfect desktop would be the one you design yourself. Failing that, which of the main Linux desktops is right for you?

• A few months ago, this question came to a choice between GNOME and KDE. Now, with the introduction of GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity, the question has become more complex.

• Should you accept the latest innovation, or go with a desktop that proves itself? A simple desktop, or a complex one with all sorts of customization? One that doesn’t change, regardless of whether you are using a mobile device or a workstation, or one that changes to fit the limitations or advantages of each computing device?

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The KDE.org developers have issued a second release candidate (RC2) of version 4.7 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). The development team is now focused on finding and addressing any last-minute “show stopper” (major) bugs, as well as completing translations and documentation. Users are asked to test the release and report any bugs that they find. The final release of KDE SC 4.7.0 is scheduled for 27 July 2011.

• The KDE team has announced on July 11th the second Release Candidate version for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.7 environment.

• The KDE developers proudly announced that last evening, July 11th, the KDE Software Compilation 4.7 RC2 (Release Candidate), a version that is focusing on fixing last-minute bugs and finishing the required documentation and translations.

GNOME Desktop

• A while ago I read about this project, a small collection of scripts with the aim at creating a more GNOME 2 like user experience with the name of GNOME Shell frippery, so I had to try it out on my experimental install and took a few more screenshots to illustrate the effect. I’m also suspecting that many users are still unaware of it.

Distributions

New Releases

• Superb Mini Server version 1.6.1 released (Linux kernel 2.6.39.3)

• This minor release upgrade brings the latest stable linux kernel version 2.6.39.3. SMS-1.6.1 features the latest stable releases of various packages, such as, perl-5.14.1, mysql-5.1.58, postfix-2.8.4, cups-1.4.7, httpd-2.2.19, samba-3.5.9 and gcc-4.5.3.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• I wrote few lines on AltLinux.com international community forum – in English back in 2007 showing a desire for little needed publicity for ALT Linux because whenever I talk about this distribution anywhere I am told they have never heard about it . Michael Shigorin replied in these words

• French Linux provider, Mandriva, has announced that it has joined the industry consortium CompatibleOne – a research project working on the development of a free cloud infrastructure using open standards and interoperable open source technologies. Its members include companies such as Bull and Inria.

Gentoo Family

• Pardus is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution with roots in the National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), Turkey. The latest table version, Pardus 2011.1, was released just yesterday.

• Like Pardus 2011, Pardus 2011.1 is made available via DVD installation images, and also via Live DVD testing-only images. While a review is still in the works, here a few screenshots to whet your appetite.

• We are happy to announce the immediate availability of E17, XFCE, LXDE, built on top of Sabayon “SpinBase” ISO images. Here we go again, this is the last set of Sabayon 6 releases, we have Sabayon 6 LXDE, a very lightweight Desktop Environment for elderly systems, that fits on a single 700Mb CD. Then there is Sabayon 6 XFCE, which has been turned into a valid GNOME alternative, breaking the 700Mb size barrier, provided with multimedia applications, office productivity apps, NVIDIA, AMD GPU drivers and much more. Last and probably least, there is the somewhat i-like-broken-stuff-and-not-being-able-to-change-wallpaper Sabayon 6 E17, well, it’s Enlightenment 17, subversion snapshot, for the braves.

• Gökcen Eraslan proudly announced yesterday, July 12th, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the popular Pardus 2011.1 Linux-based Turkish operating system.

• Dubbed Dama Dama, the final and stable version of Pardus 2011.1 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.37.6 and it’s available as Live and Installation images for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Red Hat Family

• With Linux in the Enterprise, RHEL is king. Sure there are people who love and use Debian, or Suse. I would imagine that if you looked hard enough you could likely find somebody who’s using Slackware or Gentoo in a business somewhere. But I think it can safely be said that RHEL is currently the dominant enterprise Linux distribution. Then, of course, there are the clones. If you so choose, you can forgo Shadowman’s Support team and either compile the freely available Redhat Source RPMs, or choose to use a community-supported RHEL clone. Currently, the two most popular of those clone distributions are CEntOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) and Scientific Linux (SL).

Fedora

• Thanks to Miroslav Grepl, he has put together a working Kiosk OS for Fedora 15.

Debian Family

• In Belgium, we can fill out our tax form online on the Tax-on-web site using a smartcard reader and our electronic identity card. Unfortunately, things are rather complicated to set up, partly because the eID authentication is based on SSL renegotiation, a feature which is disabled by default in recent Firefox versions because it can be insecure. It is a bit disappointing that we have to rely on potentially vulnerable technologies to authenticate with our eID, but there is not much choice if you do not want to fill out the paper forms (or are too late, so that the electronic way is the only option).

Derivatives

• Knoppix is Live CD (DVD) system based on Debian. Debian gives Knoppix very stable and large platform. What has changed in Knoppix since my last review? I’d say not much. Most of these changed are due to new version of Debian. Squeeze changed Lenny, and now Knoppix uses Squeeze as stable repository. Other that that? LibreOffice became official office manager. Then… Argh, to be honest, I can’t name any other difference. Can change of default wallpaper be the one? I doubt. From my perspective, Knoppix now simply follows the trend to update packages up to the latest version of those. Nothing significant happens in this part of Linux world. Somebody can call it stagnation. Somebody can call it stability.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The art of software engineering management is so different from software engineering that it should be an entirely separate career track, with equal kudos and remuneration available on either path.

• This is because developing, and managing developers, are at opposite ends of the interrupt scale. Great engineering depends on deep, uninterrupted focus. But great management is all about handling interrupts efficiently so that engineers don’t have to. Companies need to recognise that difference, and create career paths on both sides of that scale, rather than expecting folk to leap from the one end to the other. It’s crazy to think that someone who loves deep focused thought should have to become a multithreaded interrupt driven manager to advance their career.

• Very occasionally someone is both a fantastic developer and a fantastic manager, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. In recognition of that, we should design our teams to work well without depending on a miracle each and every time we put one together.

• There is still a huge myth among Linux users that KDE 4 is unstable and hard-to-use. Well, that may be the belief of people who haven’t used KDE before, but for the ones who have already used it, there’s nothing like it. KDE4 is a stable desktop environment made purely for the masses with the average user in mind. What’s more, it comes with all the fancy effects that will make a Windows or Mac user jealous. In fact, ZDNet Australia even did a survey demonstrating a KDE 4 PC and telling the users that it is the next version of Windows. Guess what, almost everyone loved it. The survey simply proves the point that KDE4 is a modern interface that is ready for the masses.

• Bringing KDE to the Ubuntu fanatics comes Kubuntu, the KDE version of the world’s most popular Linux distribution. Kubuntu comes with a great set of applications like Amarok, Kopete and Gwenview. For the “newly switched” users, there are familiar applications like Libreoffice and Firefox. Kubuntu Natty includes the latest stable version of KDE 4 without much customization.

Flavours and Variants

• Today, I was reading DistroWatch when I saw an interesting tidbit about how Linux Mint’s KDE Edition is moving to a Debian base, though the developers originally intended this KDE release to be based on Ubuntu as before. I think the reason why I felt as surprised as I did was because as opposed to the other editions (Xfce, Fluxbox) which were announced as moving to a Debian base without any previous statements regarding them, the developers did say the KDE edition of Linux Mint would be based on Ubuntu, and judging from the forum posts, this decision seems to have been rather abrupt, as opposed to being more carefully planned.

Devices/Embedded

• This week I received a couple of PandaBoards, courtesy of our friends at Canonical by way of our friends around Kubuntu. The goal is to get Plasma Active running well on the platform.

• Google announced that iRiver’s Story HD e-reader will be available July 17 at Target, and will be the first device to offer Google eBooks support via Wi-Fi. In related e-reader news, the Philadelphia Media Network will offer deeply discounted Android tablets to Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News subscribers, and e-reader/tablet vendor Augen appears to have gone under.

Phones

Android

• Android took the top position among U.S. smartphone market share with 35 percent, followed by Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry, each with 24 percent, says a Pew Research study. Android is particularly strong among younger adults and African Americans, says the study.

• Some 35 percent of owners who call their phones a “smartphone” use an Android phone, estimates Pew Research. This is compared with 24 percent share each for users claiming to use Apple’s iPhones or Research in Motion’s BlackBerry handsets.

• NionCom is preparing an Android 2.3 mini-tablet reference design that includes an embedded pico projector, capable of displaying content on a wall or screen sized up to 100 inches diagonal. The “MemoryKick Vision” offers a 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, 4GB flash memory, a 500GB hard disk drive (HDD), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, plus HDMI in and out ports, according to a story in Picopros.

• A mini joystick module from austriamicrosystems has been selected by Google for the new Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK).

• The kit is an open-source electronics prototyping platform and is aimed at developers, engineers, hobbyists and artists interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

• If there’s one thing that is totally clear, is that Android is ravaging the smartphone market, and all those that are feeling the heat are trying to use the most innovative and transparent approach to stop it: sue Google and its partners out in the oblivion. Software patents, design patents, copyrights, plain trolling- anything goes if it can help in stop the Droid juggernaut. At the same time, Google is under attack for its delay in publishing the Honeycomb source code, attacked for the half-backed results that can be witnessed in some tablet products, all of this in an environment where Android phone makers are obtaining extraordinary revenues, in large part thanks to those contested products (Samsung comes to mind).

• Of course, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and it’s easy to “predict” that the extraordinary success of Android would have generated such a defensive attack. It is however at least predictable, given the extreme litigation of software companies, that patents would have been used as a blunt instrument to fend off competitors. Could things have been different? I believe so, and I also believe that Google made some errors in its decision, especially in trying to create a control point (the “Google experience”) instead of favoring a more long-term vision.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• 1280 x 800 display, and full-size HDMI, USB 2.0, and SD connections

• HP may be taking the extraordinary step of actually licensing webOS to run on other manufacturers’ devices, despite earlier statements to the contrary. That stance seems to have gone by the wayside, as HP has come to the conclusion that in the mobile marketplace, it’s no Apple, and hanging on to an HP-only device channel may not be a great idea.

Free Software/Open Source

• Recently I noted that people seem to think there is only one business philosophy for Free Software, and that is to charge for “time and materials”. In reality this is a fairly bad business philosophy, and will quickly drive the programming community to very low wages.

• I have known many business philosophies with Free Software, and I will discuss a few of them here. But first I would like to discuss the concept of “time and materials” usually associated with “Total Cost of Ownership” and the concept of “Return on Investment” or the value of the solution, which is where I feel that FOSS really shines.

• In the world of proprietary software you may be trying to fit a square “box” of software into the round “hole” of the business problem. You may put as many “square boxes” of software (which you can neither change the size nor shape of the solution) as you want, but there will always be a “business problem” that will show through, unaddressed, and forcing you to change the way your customer does business to fit the way the software works.

• Whether you’re looking for financial software to manage your personal finances, your small business or for a large enterprise, the open source community offers a lot of options. The business-focused products are particularly robust, with a huge list of solutions, many of which offer commercial support and/or hosting.

• We last updated our list of open source replacements for popular financial software about a year ago. This year, we’ve revisited the list, updating links and details and adding quite a few projects that we haven’t featured before.

• How do enterprises face up to the generational shift to new and more empowered users? How can businesses react and exploit more applications and data resources and do so in a managed and governed fashion? We’re finding that modern, lightweight, and open source platforms that leverage modular architectures are a new and proven resource for the rapid and agile integration requirements.

• Should Samba switch gears and accept corporate contributions for the first time?

• We’re not talking about funding. We’re talking about code.

• That’s the question Samba chief Jeremy Allison is asking his large open source community, which to date has only accepted code with personal copyrights.

• The Internet Archive, a nonprofit repository of digital media assets, has implemented a video solution from Kaltura, a provider of the world’s first Open Source (News – Alert) Online Video Platform.

• Recently I was reminded yet again of why I purposely avoid Microsoft products altogether. I wrote a while ago about migrating a relative from Windows 2000 to Fedora Linux 14. The migration went well, and they are still today happily using Fedora 14.

• Free-as-in-freedom software is very often free-as-in-beer, too. This is normally a good thing. But one open source project developer is calling out a troubling problem with free software: counterfeit applications.

• The problem, according to VideoLAN developer Ludovic Fauvet, is this: VideoLAN’s highly regarded VLC Media Player, which is licensed under the GPL, is being redistributed by various organizations’ websites, some of which claim that VLC is actually their application to distribute. These websites attract users with paid Google AdWords ads that come up in various media-player related searches.

• Right off the bat, this would be a clear violation of VideoLAN’s intellectual property, but it gets worse. Many of the sites that redistribute VLC have wrapped the binary in installers that also install malware in the form of adware and spyware on unsuspecting user’s computers, too.

• “What bothers us the most is that many of them are bundling VLC with various crapware to monetize it in ways that mislead our users by thinking they’re downloading an original version. This is not acceptable. The result is a poor product that doesn’t work as intended, that can’t be uninstalled and that clearly abuses its users and their privacy,” Fauvet wrote in his blog.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I will let other people debate Oracle’s motivations, Apache vs. The Document Foundation (TDF), etc. but here are a few interesting facts: OpenOffice is one of the most successful and vast open source projects in the world (1.2 million downloads a week and 135 million known distributions). OpenOffice.org gets 10x the number of unique visitors as the Apache.org homepage itself, according to Compete. By measures of downloads and web traffic, OpenOffice is as relevant as ever.

• According to an online magazine aimed at users of the Linux Operating System, since 2008 the Austrian justice ministry has migrated several thousands of desktop PCs to OpenOffice, in a “complete success story” worth highlighting.

• Thanks to the invaluable work of our lawyer, we now finally have a close-to-final draft of the legally binding statutes. The creation of these took a lot of time, because many of the ideas and processes we have outlined in our Community Bylaws are innovative, and implementing them in a legal framework is indeed a challenge. However, all of these ideas are important and show the values and roots of our community, so taking time for legally establishing them is very well spent.

CMS

• Despite the rise in social networking sites — Facebook, Twitter and the new Google+ — blogs continue to flourish. For example, WordPress.com over the weekend announced that more than 50 million blogs are powered by WordPress.com’s open source software. About half of those blogs are hosted by WordPress.com, while the others are hosted on rented servers or the bloggers’ own servers.

• WordPress.com hosts sites for free, though there are features you can buy, including paying $30 a year to remove ads and fees to increase storage.

• WordPress.com announced that there are now more than 50 million blogs powered by WordPress’s open source software. About half of those blogs are hosted at WordPress.com while the others reside on blog owners own servers or server space rented from hosting providers.

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Q2’2011 update for the long-in-development GNU Hurd operating system says that Java is coming to Hurd this summer as part of Google Summer of Code, but in the process of porting Java, the student is also filling in some parts of Hurd’s componentry in order to handle the Java run-time.

• Additionally, the first Debian GNU/Hurd spins with a graphical installer is now available. It’s publicly available here. Debian GNU/Hurd can run within a KVM/QEMU virtualized environment, but it’s hardware support is still shoddy (the network adapter support is limited to what was found in the Linux 2.0 kernel, for instance).

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Gonçalo Caseiro, Member of the Board of the Agency for the Public Services Reform (Agência para a Modernização Administrativa – AMA, in Portuguese), gave a presentation that addressed the issues of interoperability, open standards and open source in the PA, the AMA’s perspective on these issues, and provided examples of actions taken in recent years within the PA.

• When violence erupted after the 2007 Kenyan elections, a team of activists produced Ushahidi – a digital open-source platform to monitor crises in near real-time. Taking its name from the kiswahili word for testimony, or witness, Ushahidi has since been deployed to monitor unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, track violence in Gaza, and gather global reports about the spread of Swine Flu. Around the same time, a partnership between Vodafone and Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile operator, produced M-PESA, the mobile banking system that has revolutionised the way many Kenyans manage their money.

• The Australian Government’s latest commitment to open source software has been undermined by patchy compliance by the agencies it informs.

• While the Government’s revised guide urged agencies to consider cost, customisation, end-user training, reliability, lock-in and license obligations when choosing between proprietary and open source software options, already there are examples of non-compliance with the policy.

• Despite the guide instructing agencies “to insert a statement into any Request for Tender that they will consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software”, no such statement was published in Austrade’s recent request for tender (RFT) for an Online Recruitment System (C11/0403).

Licensing

• German router maker AVM says GPL campaigners are backing software which would break the Fritz!Box

• German router maker AVM has defended itself against claims that it is breaking the terms of the GPL licence on its Fritz!Box broadband routers, but GPL creator Richard Stallman has said the firm is in breach of the licence.

Openness/Sharing

• Truism #1 – Newsrooms to face tougher economic challenges and more challenging workflow issues than ever before.

• Truism #2 – Stories now need to be written for a more live, dynamic, potentially changeable publishing medium. So writing from the ground up for paper-based publication is not necessarily good sense.

• Truism #3 – Open source document management and content management tools now exist to bring tangible cost savings to bear.

• Milgrom-Elcott says it’s an approach that worked for cystic fibrosis (CF) research and treatment practices. During the mid 1990s, CF patients at different clinics had wildly different life expectancies and lung capacities. As doctors began to share the best practices for treating patients, the life expectancy gap narrowed, and CF survival rates improved. 100kin10 hopes to mimic this transparency and openness.

Data

• From being the poor relation to deployment in pretty much every institution, public and private, open source software (OSS) in the shape of Linux and others has taken over a huge proportion of the world’s servers.

• It was quite a mountain to climb. At first, sceptics — a group that included me — struggled to see how the business model could work. Could the software developers sustain themselves by giving away the software? Could they keep up with commercial developers? Would enterprise users get the kinds of support they were used to? And would the software be robust and as feature-rich?

Open Access/Content

• But add Open Access/Open Source to the equation, and the long-term savings usually outweigh the costs (here’s an app that lets educational buyers calculate exactly what they stand to save). Clunky hardcover textbooks, constantly in need of repair or replacement, with built-in obsolescence, are a major expense for schools. As soon as decent, curriculum-connected free versions are online, they can be used anywhere. Once forward-thinking Canadian classes take the plunge, it’s unlikely they’ll ever go back.

Programming

• The Python developers have released Python 3.2.1, a bugfix release for February’s Python 3.2 with no new functionality. It fixes more than 120 bugs and regressions in the most recent release of the widely used dynamic scripting language, including a fix for a urllib and urllib2 medium severity security issue (CVE-2011-1521) which had been corrected in older versions of Python in recent months.

• The creator of the Ruby programming language, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, has joined Heroku, the cloud application platform provider, where he will work as the chief architect for Ruby. The news release states that Matsumoto will, in close collaboration with the Ruby open source community, continue his work on the Ruby scripting language he designed in the mid-90s. The creator of Ruby will keep his post at Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten’s Institute of Technology, and he will also continue to work as a researcher for the Network Applied Communications Laboratory.

Standards/Consortia

• RDF has been slowly making it’s way into Office applications. The ODF standard includes support for shipping RDF/XML file(s) inside the zip file that is an odt file. This RDF can also be linked to particular part(s) of the document text so that you and your computer both know where the RDF is most relevant. For example, if “Fred” in the document has his phone number, location, and cake preference in RDF, that can all be linked just to the four characters “Fred” so that it all makes sense. Strange as it might be, not everybody likes Baumkuchen, and it is fairly likely not to be relevant to a stock quote in another part of the document.

Leftovers

• ‘Eventually, there comes a time to give us more money’

Health/Nutrition

• Good luck with that. You might seriously consider moving to Denmark or Canada. Those countries have not only achieved universal health care coverage for their citizens — coverage that’s not tied to employment — but they have also moved ahead of the U.S. in the Small Business Administration’s ranking of entrepreneurial performance worldwide.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In April 2011, some of the biggest corporations in the U.S. met behind closed doors in Cincinnati about their wish lists for changing state laws. This exchange was part of a series of corporate meetings nurtured and fueled by the Koch Industries family fortune and other corporate funding.

• At an extravagant hotel gilded just before the Great Depression, corporate executives from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, State Farm Insurance, and other corporations were joined by their “task force” co-chairs — all Republican state legislators — to approve “model” legislation. They jointly head task forces of what is called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC).

• The Regulatory Compliance Congruity with Liability Act is part of a set of “tort reform” bills from ALEC that limit corporate responsibility at the expense of average Americans. ALEC, the corporate-funded national organization that lets Big Business hand state legislators “model bills” to introduce in their state, has been pushing “tort reform” since about 1986 with the support of Big Tobacco, the insurance industry, and other major corporations.

Censorship

• Having just pushed a draft executive order to establish total administrative censorship of the Internet, the French government is now attempting to extend Net filtering, this time through a bill on consumer protection. Tonight and tomorrow, the bill will go through the French Parliament’s Committee on Economic Affairs. The latter must absolutely reject this new attempt to control the Net. French citizens can help defend the Internet by calling the members of the Committee.

• Today, the Broadband Stakeholder Group had the second meeting discussing what to do to protect the Open Internet: a process started after Ed vaizey’s meeting including Sir Tim Berners-Leee.

• Today was what should have been the easy part: talking about transparency of ISPs over network discrimination, or “traffic management”. You can see that all major ISPs have now published a standardized policy such as this from Sky or this (sigh) jpg from Virgin

• Governments across the globe are going open source, other than those who are either close to Microsoft or who have been bought by them. Emerging economies such as India and Brazil know the value of open source It boosts local economy instead of filling the pockets of multi-national companies who have little or no interest in the development of the region.

• The government of India, despite desperate measures from companies like Microsoft has always been pro-free software or open source. The government has prepared a draft for the “Policy on Device Drivers for Procurement of Hardware for e-Governance”.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

Copyrights

• Paris, July 11th, 2011 – The European Commission just published the synthesis of the responses to the consultation on the revision of the anti-sharing “IPRED” directive. Among these are a large number of responses from European citizens worried about the transformation of Internet technical intermediaries into a private copyright police. La Quadrature du Net congratulates all citizens for their watchfulness and their responses. The Commission can no longer ignore the citizens’ opposition to its project to reform the IPRED directive.

• The world’s largest lobbying organization, the US Chamber of Commerce (which thrives off the fact that many people mistake it for a US government body), along with the biggest lobbyists representing the recording and movie industry, have ramped up their efforts to get PROTECT IP approved as quickly as possible. The groups held a conference on Capitol Hill and then began visiting Senators to talk about how much they needed this protectionism, because they’re unable to adapt to a dynamic internet where they’re no longer the gatekeepers. Who’s doing this? Well, along with the Chamber of Commerce, we have NBC Universal, Sony Music and Pictures, Walt Disney Company, the MPAA, the RIAA, News Corp. (watch your voicemails, senators), the National Association of Theater Owners, Warner Music and the American Federation of Musicians.

Reader’s Picks

• “Acquisitions of great magnitude such as ours result in some job redundancies and we have taken actions to address this. We are grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this and we wish them the best in their future endeavors.”

Security

• [he] told Britain’s Computing magazine that unlike RSA or Sony, Microsoft was extremely unlikely to be hacked by an advanced threat. “Sony was brought down because it didn’t patch its servers, it ran out of date software, and it coded badly. These are rookie mistakes,” said Howie. He likewise labeled RSA being exploited by a social engineering attack as a “rookie mistake.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In one case, radiation reached 3400 Becquerels, which is about seven times the limit set by the government.

Anti-Trust

Censorship

• since there’s no information on what content triggers Apple’s anti-spam conditions, and since the offending emails aren’t returned to sender with an error message attached, Apple’s MobileMe email filtering has all the superficial appearance of censorship.

Privacy

• The Facebook archive [being shared by researchers] is more like plutonium than gold—its contents yanked offline, its future release uncertain, its creators scolded by some scholars for downloading the profiles without students’ knowledge and for failing to protect their privacy. Those students have been identified as Harvard College’s Class of 2009.

• “It is becoming increasingly clear this scandal was not perpetrated by a few rogue reporters, but was systematically orchestrated at the highest levels of News Corp.,” … Les Hinton, one of Mr. Murdoch’s closest advisors and now the chief executive officer of Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, testified – it now appears untruthfully – before a parliamentary committee that the hacking was limited to a single reporter. Fox News and the New York Post are also owned by News Corp.

Civil Rights

Internet/Net Neutrality

• [CRTC hearing on wholesale usage based billing] it was clear that claims that usage based billing practices are a response to network congestion is a myth … The numerous violations of net neutrality … and the near-universal use of UBB are both a function of the lack of competition within the Canadian market

Intellectual Monopolies

• [IV] sued a second set of companies, claiming its giant cache of intellectual property includes patents that give it the right to collect royalty payments on DRAM, the most common type of computer memory. … The defendants include some of the world’s biggest computer makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Asus, and Acer; as well as two huge retailers, Wal-Mart and Best Buy….

• The National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) will be holding its 2011 Annual Meeting on July 16-19, 2011 in Las Vegas, NV. An optional short-course entitled: “The Nuts & Bolts of Patent Prosecution Practice,”

• [Federal antitrust investigate Google whether Google] is facing an unfair coalition of companies that could block its popular Android mobile phone software … according to some experts, the $4.5 billion auction of Nortel Network’s remaining patents demonstrates the growing dysfunction of the country’s patent system, where even the most amorphous ideas can be rubber-stamped by the government and protected for years.

Trademarks

• “The general response to the lawsuits was that it was the pot calling the teakettle black,” said Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst with M2Research. “Zynga itself has been accused of ripping off other games.”

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

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