● 09.30.11

● Links 30/9/2011: FOSS Catchup, Many More Linux Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Few vendors and few topics on the Linux Planet inspire as much vitriol as Microsoft. This past week, Microsoft managed to inspire new outrage, as details about its secure boot approach for Windows 8 were alleged to be a potential risk for Linux. It was also a week that saw a delay for Linux 3.1 as the kernel.org servers remained offline.

Server

• Amazon has declared its Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) production ready. With the update, Amazon is introducing a security center to track security and privacy issues, providing 50 new packages for the distribution and adding access to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

• The Linux AMI provides a Linux image for use on Amazon EC2, so that users have a way to get started with EC2 without having to create their own image or use one of the paid images from Red Hat or SUSE.

• A total of 50 new packages are available including the command line tools for AWS, Dash, Dracut, Facter, Pssh, and Varnish. 227 other packages have been updated and 9 have been removed. For a full list of changes, refer to the Amazon Linux AMI Release Notes.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We talk about Eucalyptus, the project that enables on premise private clouds without retooling existing IT structure or introducing new hardware.

• I’ve not been particularly good at keeping up with this blog here, although I have generally kept up with the oggcast that I co-host with Karen Sandler, Free as in Freedom, which is released every two weeks.

• This Blog needed a header image – and it still needs a lot of header images to rotate through. So I created one out of an image of a Berlin Subway station. Nothing much new in here – rotating, cropping to the needed aspect ratio, a bit of curves for better contrast and colours, scaling and sharpening. Finally I added a text layer with the image credits.

Kernel Space

• But many of you who closely watch this space may be asking: what about Meego? While Meego will remain a project at The Linux Foundation, we see industry leaders lining up behind Tizen. Imad Sousou, Meego’s technical steering group co-leader, had this to say about the future of Meego.

• The annual Storage Developers Conference is kind of like a five-ring circus. There are way too many tracks to follow, all going on at once and all interesting to varying degrees to varying people. It was a big show again this year, but this year it didn’t matter what else was going on. The center of attention was Microsoft’s center-ring act: SMB2.2.

• I have been going to the SNIA SDC every year since before it was the SDC. I started going in 1997, when it was still “The CIFS Conference”. Even before that, I went to lots of different computer conferences and shows. Remember DECUS and DEXPO? Amiga DevCon? LISA-NT? I do.

Applications

• I knew this day was coming… the day when a Linux application could begin to suffer from that horrible disease so many other applications suffer from on other platforms. Bloat. What is bloat? Bloat is the addition of unnecessary features that cause an application to grow to a size that renders it slow and laggy. Those features may be useful to some. But for many, they are just an anchor dragging the application deeper and deeper into murky waters.

• Do you love using the Gimp, but feel lost amongst all the tools and options? Find just the things you need for the job at hand, instantly, with a simple search. With Adaptable Gimp, you’ll even find step-by-step instructions for accomplishing precisely the thing you want to do. This software, powered by user contributions, makes it easy for just about anyone to use The Gimp. It all revolves around “TaskSets”, a concept so amazingly useful you’ll wonder why it wasn’t in The Gimp all along.

• Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from airtime.sourcefabric.org

• Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you’re into 3D animation, then perhaps the one and only program you will ever want and need is Blender. Well, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure is a mighty program that does a lot. In fact, it does so much that you will feel quite intimidating even browsing the menus. Luckily, there are a plenty of books that can help you around.

Games

• We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely. There is no time-limit on your downloads.

• Humble Bundle is back with another pay-what-you-want plus charity deal on sweet indie games — the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle! Thanks to everyone’s past support, Humble Bundles have now raised over $2,000,000 for charity (the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play charity).

• Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.

Desktop Environments

• For those looking for an interesting read today, Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin and known for his insightful blog posts, has written about fighting the schism in free software; in particular, the KDE vs. GNOME battle.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• When you are looking for a universal document viewer that will suit all of your needs you might as well go for one with all of the features. Thats where Okular dominates the stage on KDE desktops, being one of the best document viewers available. Some of the excellent features include advanced presentation support, overview mode, and annotation capabilities. Also with Okular it is easy to open files and switch between them. Okular will store your recent documents for easy viewing as well. This is how you can install Okular document viewer on your system from the Linux command line.

• For a fun and friendly instant messaging client try Kopete for the KDE desktop. You can use Kopete to communicate with your friends and family, even using multiple different network interfaces. Kopete also offers some key features that are lacking in other instant messengers. Advanced users can also expand the functionality of Kopete using plug-ins without much hassle. So if your current instant messenger will not suffice maybe you should try Kopete today. To install Kopete on your system open your terminal and type these commands.

• Qt, the cross-platform and application UI framework, formerly run by Trolltech until they were taken over by Nokia, has taken a step forward to more independence: the hosting of the project will soon move to qt-project.org, a domain owned by a non-profit foundation “whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project”. Lars Knoll, director of Research and Development at Nokia, announced the change on the Qt Labs Blog noting that this move was solely about the infrastructure and the new foundation would not have anything to do with steering the project.

GNOME Desktop

• If the mere mention of Gnome shell brings terrible images in our mind. Relax and take a look at our tutorials on installing and using Gnome shell in Ubuntu. After you do that take a look at a few gorgeous gnome shell themes that is bound to leave you asking for more.

• GNOME 3.2 was officially released yesterday with all those cool features which I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

• The first major revision of GNOME 3 offers tighter integration of online services into the desktop environment. The development team has also introduced many minor enhancements and resolved a number of irritating idiosyncrasies.

• Now that GNOME 3.2 has been released, the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment will see the light of day in about six months from now, and it will bring many new features and improvements.

Distributions

• Pardus is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Unlike most distributions, it is not based on another; an original, in the same sense that Debian is an original Linux distribution.

New Releases

• Steven Shiau proudly announced the final and stable release of its popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Update Pack 3 was released as the “latest” update pack today. If you’re not using Linux Mint Debian, please ignore this post.

• Mandriva announces the immediate availability of a new release of the Mandriva Directory Server (MDS), an easy to use, powerful and secure solution for managing identities, directory services and network services within the enterprise.

• I wish I had the time to provide a more comprehensive review of Mandriva 2011, perhaps I will come back later on with a few more articles featuring Mandriva but until then I seriously recommend trying Mandriva 2011.

Red Hat Family

• YUM is a package manager and updater service for Red Hat Linux, and if you’re part of the Red Hat Network, you’re likely already using the offering to keep your applications fresh. YUM makes sure your various server components are as up to date as they can be, bringing you the latest and greatest in Red Hat without much fuss.

• Red Hat “won’t be the first company to make a billion dollars a year off of open source — Google and IBM spring to mind — but as a ‘pure play linux distro vendor,’ this is great news,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “There’s certainly a halo effect for all linux-based endeavors.” Red Hat has been criticized “for focusing on the business and server market and ignoring the desktop, but the move has paid off in continued growth.”

• For this HowTo I used a VirtualBox with CentOS 5.7 x86_64. I attached a separate 20GB Data drive mounted to /data. This will hold the lessfs DB and data. The lessfs mountpoint I put at /lessfs.

• The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), today announced that it is experiencing rapid growth in participation from companies focused on cloud computing and emerging markets around the globe.

Fedora

• We are making some great progress on Anaconda’s UI revamp mockups after last week’s Anaconda team meetings. Here’s the storage flow diagram, now annotated with the screen #’s from the mockups:

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux! I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time, because trying this distribution really feels inviting. Trisquel GNU/Linux is as you can see by the naming convention one of the few distributions fully endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, and in return they’re doing a lot to promote the FSF and their principles on their website. If you’re yawning already, hold steady and read on, because Trisquel looks sharp and has something to offer.

• Trisquel is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures, and is drawing from both Debian and Ubuntu, a fact which became immediately apparent when booting. To celebrate Software Freedom Day 5.0 was released on 17th September which has become an annual tradition for the project. The main and so far only edition was using GNOME, but since 4.5.1 in May this year there’s also a Trisquel Mini edition using LXDE, and we have been promised that a KDE using image for 5.0 is on the way. For more advanced needs like disk encryption, RAID/LVM or server setups a netinstall image is also available. Since I have a 64-bit capable machine I downloaded the CD sized image trisquel_5.0_amd64.iso (696 MB).

Canonical/Ubuntu

• When Ubuntu 11.04 was released, Phoronix provided Bootchart results for five different systems showing the boot performance from Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS through Ubuntu 11.04. Since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the boot time has unfortunately increased.

• It worries me because Ubuntu was our fresh brand, to try and get out there and if we bugger it up we’ll have to make a whole new brand

• In this interview with Strategic Architect for Ubuntu One, Stuart Langridge, I kick off the first of a series of articles about Ubuntu One.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Timesys announced embedded Linux development support for two Logic PD embedded modules incorporating Texas Instruments’ 1GHz DM3730 processor. The LinuxLink offering supports Logic PD’s Torpedo System on Module (SOM) — which at under one square inch is billed the industry’s smallest embedded module — as well as the larger, more feature-rich DM3730 SOM-LV module.

Phones

• Nokia is developing a new Linux-based “Meltemi” operating systems to replace Symbian on its feature phones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, more details have emerged on the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo-derived Tizen project, which also gained a bit of industry support beyond co-sponsors Intel and Samsung.

Android

• ZTE is preparing two Android tablets, including a seven-inch “T98″ model built on Nvidia’s five-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, code-named “Kal-El.” Meanwhile, Asus announced a rugged, Tegra 2-based seven-inch Asus Tough-ETBW11AA model with Android 3.2 and 1280 x 800 resolution on Japanese carrier KDDI, and the Motorola Xoom finally got its LTE 4G upgrade on Verizon.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Think that new $199 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is cheap? Indian officials plan to launch a tablet for students on October 5th that will be available for just $35. We’ve been hearing stories about the cheap Indian tablet since last summer — and it’s not the country’s first foray into cheap computers. Officials promised a $10 laptop way back in 2009, but it turned out to be just an inexpensive computer without a keyboard or monitor.

• The long awaited $35 (Rs 1735) dream tablet promised by the Indian government will finally see the light of the day as the launch date has been fixed for October 5. The low cost computing device touted to be the cheapest in the world, has been a project drawn on lines similar to the OLPC, with the students being the target beneficiaries.

• There’s no denying the open source world lags far behind the proprietary universe when it comes to tablets and touch-enabled devices. But as ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose explained recently, that may soon change, as she and her employees are working hard to release a Linux-friendly tablet. Here are the details.

• It’s true that open source developers have been making progress when it comes to touch. Interfaces including Unity and GNOME 3, with their finger-friendly buttons and emphasis on dropping and gesturing, lend themselves to touch in ways that earlier desktop environments do not. And projects like Canonical’s uTouch promise better overall support for touch on Linux.

• Today in New York, Amazon introduced Silk, an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire. You might be asking, “A browser? Do we really need another one?” As you’ll see in the video below, Silk isn’t just another browser. We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers.

• Amazon was widely expected to announce a Kindle-branded tablet today, and it did — also revealing three additional Kindles, two breaking the magical $100 price barrier. The $200 Kindle Fire has a seven-inch color IPS (in-plane switching display), “cloud-accelerated” Silk browser, dual-core processor, and 8GB of flash storage, while the $150 Kindle Touch 3G, $99 Kindle Touch, and $79 Kindle all include six-inch E Ink screens and either 2GB or 4GB of flash.

• Presto chango! You can have a full-fledged Android tablet today by applying your DIY skills to a few simple ingredients: a Nook Color, a memory card, a PC to carry out a few tasks — and some nerve. Among your rewards, besides self-satisfaction: the Amazon Kindle app. This is a great solution for anyone who already has a Nook or anyone who just can’t wait another month or so for Amazon’s Fire.

• Today’s big tech news is the release of a new generation of Amazon Kindles. Of particular interest is the Kindle Fire, a $199, 7-inch color touchscreen tablet based on Android. It seems destined to become the most credible competitor to the iPad.

• One point I haven’t seen anyone make about this is the importance of open source software to the evolution of the tablet computing market. Google decided to make Android an open-source operating system, which meant that third parties could take the code, tweak it for their own needs, and sell competing Android-based products. That’s what Barnes and Noble did last year with the Nook Color, and it’s what Amazon did to create the Kindle Fire.

• Toshiba announced a seven-inch Android 3.2 tablet featuring an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor and a 1280 x 800-pixel resolution typically found on 10.1-inch models. The Thrive 7″ Tablet offers 16GB or 32GB of storage, microSD and HDMI connections, five- and two-megapixel cameras, and a full complement of wireless features — except for cellular support.

Free Software/Open Source

• Andy: I’m 24 years old, I grew up in the Midwest United States and am currently working as an embedded software engineer in the Los Angeles area. I’ve been interested in Free Software for the past 6 or 7 years since first installing GNU/Linux during high school. I’ve mostly contributed small patches to various open source projects after finding bugs or when I wanted additional features. Of my own projects, they tend to be small, obscure, and arguable crazy, with AWeather being the main exception as the most “Normal” application.

• Tim Yeaton is the President and CEO of Black Duck Software. He has more 30 years experience working in the software community. Contact him at tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com.

• Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

• The free software world moves rapidly, but every individual project also moves at its own pace and rhythm. Consequently, it is easy to get behind on the news. Here is a look at the state of the art in the open source desktop publishing (DTP) arena for fall 2011.

• Lucid Imagination released a new version of LucidWorks this week that provides an easier way for data centers to install and use the open source search products Apache Lucene and Solr.

• Every month, regular as clockwork, the free software community receives a gift. It takes the unusual form of the Netcraft Web Server Survey, which provides a measure – by no means the only one – of the market share of the main web server software used on the public internet.

• For the last 15 years, Apache has been the most popular system there; and for the last 15 years, Microsoft’s IIS has failed to dethrone it, despite at least two concerted attempts to do so (visible as temporary rises and then falls in the latter’s market share). This month, though, the survey has an extra little present: Microsoft’s market share has not only (again) failed to rise, it has actually sunk back to the level it attained in June 1997. That is, in 14 years, IIS has gone precisely nowhere.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Whirr has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

• Hi there! Let me start this post, the first of many, by introducing myself and my team. I’m Ashley Jones, manager of and senior engineer in the Web Development group here at Splunk. My team is responsible for every nook and cranny of the code for a number of sites you know and love. This includes, but is not limited to, splunk.com, docs.splunk.com and blogs.splunk.com. We have wonderful groups inside Splunk that we’re privileged to provide the code which makes their design work well and their content easy to consume.

Events

• The Apache Software Foundation announces ApacheCon Keynotes by noted Open Source authority David A. Wheeler, Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschweiler, and IBM Emerging Internet Technology group CTO David Boloker.

• It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Web Browsers

• With the Oneiric Ocelot release of Ubuntu just around the corner, we decided to take a fresh look at some alternative browsers for Linux. While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it has a history of being slow and getting bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has started the Firefox development merry-go-round again, updating its Beta, Aurora and Nightly builds to versions 8, 9 and 10, respectively.

• Mozilla is patching it’s Firefox Web browser for at least 10 vulnerabilities, seven of which are rated as being “critical.” Firefox 7 was released on Tuesday offering users the promised of improved perfomance and better memory usage.

• On the security front, the Firefox 7 release provides a critical fix for what Mozilla describes as, “Miscellaneous memory safety hazards.”

• Only it’s not Windows 7, but Firefox 7.

• I downloaded it as a .tar.bz2 file and used alien to convert it into an RPM. You do that by typing SU in Konsole, then your root password. You have to use this this command:

Big Data/SaaS

• SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OpenStack™, the open source cloud operating system, will today release “Diablo,” the fourth version of its community-driven software, with nearly 70 new features and enhancements making it possible for a broader community of users to deploy OpenStack clouds in production on a global scale. OpenStack Diablo allows users to automate and control pools of compute, storage and networking resources across a global footprint and multiple datacenters with increased scale, performance and networking capabilities. There have been nearly 50,000 downloads from the central code repository, and production cloud environments are coming online across the globe.

• Every technology goes through this evolution. It’s created, it’s put in a box and finally it becomes just software.

Databases

• Matt Raykowski pointed out a couple of notes about the recent announcement by Oracle that it would begin supplying closed source extensions to MySQL, which it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems (such as this one from Simon Phipps and this one from Monty Widenius)

• This new foundation, combined with the injection of experienced QA personnel from the ranks of Sun and Oracle, made the project ready to offer reserved features to customers, while continuing the development of a lot more features for the community edition. From a community standpoint, I welcome the commercial extensions.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• It was just a year ago today that LibreOffice was officially announced and the first beta of the OpenOffice.org fork was released. The Document Foundation marked the occasion by sending out a announcement with lots of juicy statistics. For example, LibreOffice represents the results of the collaborative power of 330 contributors.

• Firefox developers searching for a way to protect users against a new attack that decrypts sensitive web traffic are seriously considering an update that stops the open-source browser from working with Oracle’s Java software framework.

CMS

• A number of concerns have been voiced from the community about the substantial growth Acquia has achieved since its inception, the number of key contributors who are now employed by Acquia, and the subsequent influence that this allows Acquia to have on the project.

• While some of these concerns have validity, I also think there is also a fair share of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread. So, let’s clear up a few points.

• As followers of this blog, you might have read that Acquia acquired two Drupal companies; security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation; it is beneficial for the Drupal community, our partners and our customers. I personally championed and led those acquisitions so I want to take a moment to explain why…

Healthcare

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• A project in which I’m involved, in the middle of a time of change, recently received an enquiry from a member of its user community. The enquirer was pleased with the software, concerned about the changes and wanted to provide support to the project to ensure it continued and as an expression of gratitude. “Where should I make a donation to support the software?”

• Seek advice first. In some really great comments that Linus Torvalds supplied on the Input/Output blog, he said this: “The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help…”That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.” There it is: You can’t take the Tom Sawyer approach right out of the fence and ask everyone to whitewash your fence.

• Know what open source means. The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• On this day in 1983, Richard Stallman wrote the groundbreaking announcement that he intended to write a comparable version of Unix. After experiencing frustration in getting critical changes made in the source code of proprietary software, he set out to champion the idea of returning to the spirit of sharing that existed in the early days of computer programming. He cites as one reason for the project:

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the re-launch of its Free Software Directory at directory.fsf.org. The Directory lists over 6,500 programs that are free for any computer user to download, run, and share. It was first launched nearly a decade ago, but the new version brings a host of new features designed to make it a more useful and current resource for users, developers, advocates, and researchers.

Project Releases

• This is the first release of NeonView, a minimalist, lightweight image viewer written in C and using the GTK toolkit.

• This first release, codenamed ‘Betta splendens’, includes just a handful of features for now, however it is the base on which development of more advanced features will take place. Still, the goal of NeonView is to remain clean and lightweight, while also trying to implement only the needed functions that a simple image viewer should have.

Programming

Leftovers

• Windows 8 currently boasts the same hardware requirements as Windows 7. Don’t believe it. Microsoft has never been accurate with its hardware specifications yet.

• Another issue is that most casual PC users aren’t going to be too enthused about having to do anything extraordinary just to get their computers ready to install Linux. Even with an off switch in computer BIOS, Secure Boot could still be a significant stumbling block for some.

• And even if disabling Secure Boot in the BIOS is simple to do, the fact is that Linux newbies who aren’t aware that Secure Boot even exists will only find themselves frustrated when their distribution won’t install as expected.

• A number of Australian Linux users have filed a formal complaint with the national competition regulator over what many perceive to be restrictive practices introduced in upcoming Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system which may stop many mass-market computers from being able to boot alternatives such as Linux.

• Microsoft recently revealed it would support a PC booting protocol named the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in Windows 8. The move was broadly seen as positive, as it will increase the security of PCs as well as doing away with the legacy limited BIOS platform which underlies operating systems like Windows and Linux on computers today.

Finance

• Mark Ames referred me to the documentary “Lifting the Veil.” I’m only about 40 minutes into it and am confident it will appeal to NC readers, provided you can keep gagging in the sections that contain truly offensive archival footage (in particular, numerous clips of Obama campaign promises).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Rogers astroturf lobby campaign against a spectrum set-aside, which sneakily uses people interested in a notification on when LTE may be available in their market, foreshadows a major battle over the rules on the 2012 spectrum auction. Much like the 2007 battle over the AWS auction, the incumbents will argue that the market is already sufficiently competitive and that any set-aside will unfairly advantage new entrants. The 2007 battle included submissions from Rogers and Bell that insisted that Canada was already “extremely competitive” and that consumer prices for wireless services very low. For example, Rogers argued:

• Rogers, Canada’s biggest cellphone carrier, made waves on Friday by taking its lobbying efforts for the next auction of wireless airwaves to the public. The company launched a website that urges Canadians to write to their MPs in support of a wide-open auction, rather than one that will set aside licenses for new cellphone companies.

• Responding to what it says is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating government regulators and public perception, Mobilicity today said Canadians should not be fooled by a new Big 3 carrier stunt to get people to protest more wireless spectrum set-asides for Mobilicity and other new carriers.

• “The future of affordable wireless rates is at risk, not the future of long-term evolution (LTE) networks,” said Chief Operating Officer Stewart Lyons. “Mobilicity has helped bring down the cost of wireless in Canada significantly and we need to augment our limited amount of spectrum to ensure affordable pricing continues.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• When the Federal Communications Commission last week issued its final network neutrality rules and said they would go into effect at the end of November, lawsuits against the policy could finally begin. Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist group Free Press—one of the strongest supporters of network neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• What is curious is that this company that is taking people’s IP’s must be using some sort of commercial app to target the specific city of the person. For example when I try to geo-locate the 70.53.229.233 IP using standard available web apps or demo’s of commercial apps, it shows it to be in Terrebone, or Ottawa or Toronto. The filing shows it as Asbestos, Quebec. How did they get that? And with which app? Or did Bell give them that location?

• The Copyright Board today released a decision denying AUCC’s request to amend the interim Access Copyright post-secondary tariff to force Access Copyright to issue transactional licenses.

• The legislation, first introduced ahead of the federal election in May, is designed to cope with things like movie piracy, which the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association put at more than C$1.8 billion ($1.7 billion) in 2009-10, or the equivalent of 12,600 full-time jobs.

• The Conservative government is taking another stab at revamping Canada’s copyright law after minority parliaments scuttled past attempts.

• Industry Minister Christian Paradis will reintroduce the government’s copyright reform bill Thursday, setting out what consumers and educators can — and can’t — do with copyrighted songs, movies, video games and e-books in the age of MP3 players.

• Later today, the government will table Bill C-11, the latest iteration of the Canadian copyright reform bill that mirrors the previous Bill C-32. It was widely reported this fall that the government would reintroduce the previous bill unchanged, re-start committee hearings where they left off in March (with prior witnesses not asked to return), and move to quickly get the bill passed by the end of the calendar year. That seems to be what is happening with today’s tabling and a new legislative committee to follow.

ACTA

• It has been reported in the global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect.

• ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.

• On Saturday, October 1, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan will hold the signing ceremony for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at Iikura Guest House, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

• On Saturday, October 1, 2011, parties that have completed relevant domestic processes will sign ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

• FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) statement:

• The world faces major challenges: access to medicine, diffusion of green technology needed to fight climate change, and a balanced Internet governance. While flexibility is essential to solve these major issues, ACTA codifies heightened measures.

• To stimulate startup companies, the EU legal situation should minimize market entrance risks for innovators. In digital markets, innovators are often confronted with patent minefields. Even a mere allegation of infringement may easily lead to market exclusion. ACTA’s damages beyond the actual prejudice have a disproportional negative effect on startup companies, which do not have deep pockets.

• Japan has announced that negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will congregate at the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday and those countries that have “completed the relevant domestic processes” will sign the agreement.

• ACTA is a voluntary international treaty that seeks to provide standardised international enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. The agreement was negotiated in secret by the Governments of a collection of countries over the past three years.

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