● 01.19.12

● Links 19/1/2012: OpenNebula 3.2, Rhythmbox 2.95

Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I read a lot while travelling. So, to lighten my load, my wife gave me a Sony Reader for Christmas. I knew that it ranks tolerably well on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Guide to E-book Privacy, and it was reputed to work with Linux. And it does, but it takes some figuring out.

• The Sony Reader connects to the PC through a standard USB cable. The first time I tried to connect reader, it wasn’t automatically detected. I don’t know why; perhaps I did things in the wrong sequence. I had to manually mount the devices. Yes, devices. The Reader appeared in my device list as three devices. Two are the reader, I think the third is for the add-in memory card (which I don’t have inserted).

• In the nascent surge of mobile convergence, we now have a choice of four major desktops for Linux: GNOME 3, Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4 and Linux Mint’s Cinnamon. There are huge, complex and mind-numbingly technical advances in all of this technology. But all I want is for my window still to work the way I want.

• According to new report by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” in a lousy IT economy Linux is still growing by leaps and bounds.

• How fast it is growing? The report states, “Eighty-four percent of respondents report that their organizations have expanded Linux usage in the last 12 months, with 82% planning on continuing that expansion into the year ahead. The 5-year outlook indicates an even longer-term commitment to the platform among 79.8% of Linux users surveyed, who say the use of Linux in their company or organization will increase relative to other operating systems during this time period.”

• These names represent just a handful of the thousands of large companies using Linux today. As early adopters of Linux (some having used the OS well over a decade) with some of the most technically advanced challenges to overcome in their business environments, companies such as these can give us important insight as to how Linux is being used and where it’s growing.

• That is why we started surveying large companies using Linux in 2010 and why today’s new report, “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” sheds light on what we can expect from enterprises, both large and small, that are using Linux. We hope this research can help inform the industry, our members and us as we prioritize our work for a New Year.

Desktop

• I use a Linux desktop. According to Google Analytics, 12% of the visitors to my various technology Web sites use Linux. Nevertheless, I know that on the traditional desktop, the vast majority of ordinary users are running Windows, and don’t even get me started on “The Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s not going to happen. But, and this is interesting, it appears that there is a slight upward trend in desktop Linux use.

• For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon.

• A new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that growth in Linux usage is being driven by factors such as big data, cloud computing and virtualization, among others.

Server

• According to research from app monitoring firm New Relic, open source Java application servers own a serious chunk of overall application server usage. In fact, InfoWorld notes that New Relic’s data illustrates that the open source solutions are hindering commercial software alternatives. New Relic surveyed a series of enterprises regarding their Java application servers, with respondents ranging from big businesses to online merchants. Here are the numbers the survey turned up.

• Linux has vaulted to 1.4 percent worldwide desktop market share from 0.97 percent in July, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, a new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that 84 percent of organizations currently using the open source operating system have expanded their deployments over the last year. Meanwhile,

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has been called upon to pull the NVM Express driver into the Linux 3.3 mainline kernel.

• The NVM Express driver has been around for the better part of the year now since the specification was announced, but it looks now like it’s finally ready to enter the mainline Linux 3.3 kernel.

• The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

• A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

• World’s largest enterprises will add more Linux to support cloud computing, “Big Data” – all at the expense of Windows and Unix

• SAN FRANCISCO, January 19, 2012 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the immediate release of its latest report “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” which shares new data representing Linux’s dominant role in supporting cloud computing, “Big Data” and new, “greenfield” deployments.

Graphics Stack

• I’ve been alerted this afternoon that there’s an outstanding security vulnerability within the current X.Org Server that’s receiving little attention. This active vulnerability could allow anyone with physical access to your system to easily bypass the desktop’s screen lock regardless of your desktop environment.

• Tiago Vignatti, one of the active developers at Intel who’s dedicated to the Wayland team, has shared some active TODO list items that for those wishing to contribute can easily jump on.

• Vignatti wrote a post on his personal blog entitled starting on Wayland development. Tiago shares that while the Wayland protocol is not yet complete, there’s a number of items on their growing TODO list that could be accomplished by new contributors even without much graphics or X.Org/Wayland experience.

• What happens when you pull out some vintage computer hardware and run the latest Linux software as well as go back and run some of the oldest software available? Well, in the case of systems with antiquated R300-era ATI Radeon graphics, you are left with a downward slope in performance. Not only is the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver not always performing as well as an ancient Catalyst driver, but also the power consumption of the latest Linux code remains on an incline.

Applications

• nano, the old stand-by, low-resource console editor, is probably most often used for quickly editing computer configuration files. It seems also sometimes to be used by programmers for writing programs or editing code. Some of us non-programmers can think of other uses it might serve, such as writing documents or creating outlines. This article will discuss some of the uses I’ve tried to make of it and some ideas I have for further deploying it.

• Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.

• The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.

• Bitwig has now released Bitwig Studio, a multi-platform professional music-creation system and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for production, performance and DJing and unlike Ableton Live, it will have a Linux version.

• This weekend, I’m going to be spending some time at the Southeast Linux Expo (SCALE) and presenting at the Linux Beginner Training. I’m doing the Desktops and Applications presentation, which includes demos of Linux desktop apps. As I was prepping for the talk, I needed to decide which apps to focus on for a audience new(ish) to Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Indie platformer Dustforce developed by Hitbox Team was recently released on Steam. The game was much awaited by Indie game fans since it was first previewed because of its unique visuals and gameplay style.

• Welcome to another Let’s Play. I tell you: this was really huge. I haven’t too much time to update this blog, so for this Let’s Play i worked more than a week (for about 1 hour a day). Anyway, Oblivion is the fourth episode of “The Elder Scrolls” saga. It has been just released the fifth episode called “Skyrim”, and it seems it works well too (see LinuxGameCast blog by Venn Stone for more infos). Maybe this is one of the best RPG ever created, with wonderful landscapes, astonishing textures, a really deep main plot, a huge map and a lot of secondary missions. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to “Let’s Play: The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion”!!!

• Updated Linux versions of Postal and Postal 2 has been released on Desura. Postal 2 (first person shooter) by Running With Scissors has been banned in many countries in past because of extreme graphic violence but enjoys quite a dedicated fan following.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Just a brief heads up. As you know, from now on the recomended way to write plasmoids will be using QML only, and using the new components api for common widgets such as buttons, sliders etc.

• What’s cool about this API is that is as compatible as possible with Symbian and Harmattan(N9/N950), so porting to and from those platforms just became a tad easier (That’s especially important in the perspective of Plasma Active).

• The idea of activities have only recently been introduced with the release of KDE 4. The KDE desktop is set up so all virtual desktops use the same activity and look the same, but this can be changed. Widgets will appear on all workspaces, along with icons, panels and other items. You can use activities to create a completely different work environment on each workspace. Each activity can even have its own name and function, this is great if you prefer to separate your work and play. You can use activities to add a different desktop wallpaper for each workspace, or to separate your widgets based on function.

• In 2011 when talking about Digia putting out new Qt Commercial releases with over one hundred changes compared to what’s found in the open-source/community Qt repository, many Phoronix readers were upset by this large delta. Digia is still putting out new Qt Commercial releases that carry large differences to the upstream open-source releases, but they’ve offered up the patches for mainline integration.

GNOME Desktop

• Owen Taylor announced last night, January 18th, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the GNOME Shell 3.2.2 user interface for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

• GNOME Shell 3.2.2 is a maintenance release and it comes with over 15 changes, as well as lots of updated translations.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has built a $1bn company, more or less, predicated on the idea that open source Linux is cheaper than Windows or Unix and that open source Java application servers are cheaper than commercial alternatives like WebLogic and WebSphere.

• For two years now, Red Hat has been trying to convince the world that it has a chance to take on x86 server virtualization juggernaut VMware, to little avail. But with the advent of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, and a future upgrade planned later this year, Red Hat has a much better chance of denting VMware.

• Open source software-maker Red Hat took to its blog Wednesday to speak out against controversial legislation meant to prevent online piracy.

• Red Hat and other critics of the Stop Online Piracy and the Protect IP acts, known as SOPA and PIPA, claim that the legislation would censor the Internet and throttleinnovative American businesses.

• “Now, Atomia customers can easily upgrade their operating system to CloudLinux OS greatly enhancing the security and efficiency of their shared hosting businesses,” said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. “Better control over computing resources leads to a better overall customer experience and results in lower churn.”

• Announced on Wednesday, RHEV3 adds a self-service portal for provisioning virtual machines, access via RESTful API, the ability to store data locally on client machines and, via integration with the company’s private cloud management product CloudForms, a limited ability to manage hypervisors from other vendors.

• As before, the RHEV hypervisor, which is only a few hundred megabytes in size, virtualises using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and integrates many RHEL core components – however, the new RHEV uses components from the current RHEL version 6.2 rather than RHEL series 5. Consequently, the new RHEV-V offers many improvements that have been available in RHEL 6 for some time – for example, guest systems can now access up to 64 virtual CPU cores and up to 2 TB of working memory. Technologies such as vhost-net, Transparent Huge Pages (THP), x2apic and KSM (Kernel Shared Memory) are designed to improve performance and increase efficiency.

Fedora

• Here it is the first release of Thinkfan, a simple and lightweight fan control program, for Fedora. As a thinkpad user so it’s obvious what my interest is, but developer assures now can manage other computers fan too.

Debian Family

• “For all the grief people have given Debian over time for how ‘outdated’ the packages in Debian stable have been, Debian is certainly my choice for any type of Linux-based server,” said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. “I flirted with Ubuntu Server for a while, but Ubuntu suffers from an excess of dependencies.”

Derivatives

• The new year has only just begun – and already, a new m23 version with many new features and (of course) some corrections is available! Among the highlights, you will find the “m23 remote administration service”, the reactivation of openSUSE and Debian Lenny, the migration to new mirrors, support for arbitrary file systems and extended package manager settings (e.g. LibreOffice from Debian backports) in the package sources lists and a Java applet for accessing the “m23 VirtualBox OSE Console” directly from the m23 interface.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Even if you don’t run Linux, chances are good you’ve heard of Ubuntu. You’re probably also familiar with its official cousins: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and the like. But there’s another subset of the Ubuntu ecosystem that gets less play — namely, the medley of unofficial spinoffs built by third parties. Although little discussed, the trends surrounding these distributions that hide in Ubuntu’s shadow reveal a lot about the open source channel more broadly.

• According to DistroWatch, there are 118 Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. These include both the official variants like Kubuntu and a wide range of lesser known spins created by community members. It’s this latter group, comprised mostly of operating systems that are not so well-known, that I’m interested in here.

• The School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor deployed their first network of diskless thin clients in August of 1987. Since then, the CS school has progressed through three operating systems, four thin client devices, and seven Sun server configurations. In the summer of 2011, UWindsor switched from Solaris and Sun Ray clients to Ubuntu and LTSP Thin Clients.

Flavours and Variants

• If Bodhi Linux was a little too minimal, then perhaps Bodhi’s beefy brother Bloathi Linux will fill the bill. Jeff Hoogland posted today of a new community spin of Bodhi that comes with ” a slew of pre-installed software.”

• Bloathi retains the Enlightenment desktop environment and comes with lots of themes and several hardware profiles. These are setup upon reaching the desktop through a pop-up configuration. The hard drive installer icon normally found on the desktop doesn’t show up in a lot of themes, so check in the file manager under Desktop.

• Bodhi Linux is mainly built around two things – the Enlightenment desktop and a minimalistic approach to software. Even with these goals stated we still have users (and review writers) that complain about the lack of pre-installed software Bodhi comes with by default.

Devices/Embedded

• Ubuntu on your TV and Android running your refrigerator. Glyn Moody looks at some of the developments announced at the recent Consumer Electronic Show and explains how Linux is the natural choice for intelligent appliances.

Phones

Android

• I write this article exactly 24 hours after receiving my Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’s something I’ve been wanting for a long time. I had to wait for the dispute between Apple and Samsung to settle (Samsung actually lost on millions of dollars worth of sales thanks to software patents, but that’s another story). After all that, I came to the realisation that we are in front of a forking path. On one side there is the death of GNU/Linux as we know it. On the other side, there is a new exciting world where free software is still relevant. I am not writing this just to be “sensational”: here is why.

• Both the Samsung Epic 4G and the Samsung Epic 4G Touch have new kernel source up at Samsung’s open source portal. The Original Epic 4G has the kernel and other open-source bits for update version EL30 ready to download, and the Epic 4G Touch has the same for version EL29.

• Oracle is claiming Google makes $3.65 billion a year in mobile advertising from Android, basing its estimate on Google’s own boast of 700,000 daily activations for Android devices. Oracle made the new claim to encourage a favorable settlement in its lawsuit against Google, which is finally scheduled to go to trial in March.

• A reader of DL was fortunate enough to spend some time in a focus group within the last couple of days and came away with a spec list for a Casio phone that may actually interest some of you. There were other devices on display including a set of clam shells, but we will get to those in a minute. Remember, that our reader is going off of pure memory here, as focus groups almost never allow you to bring in a phone (for obvious reasons). He also mentioned that most of the phones were headed to Verizon.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Linux and open source technology should be a good news story for everyone. However, the way these topics are presented in the media often leaves enthusiasts unhappy. There is a widespread belief that open source alternatives are neglected in favour of commercial products; that coverage often distorts the facts and exaggerates conflict rather than offering insight; and that the right-wing bias of much Australian media dooms the open source community to being dismissed as a kook minority led by some cult figure from Scandinavia whose name no-one can pronounce. The reality is more complex, as reality usually is.

Free Software/Open Source

• Years ago, the short-lived Maximum Linux magazine ran a graphic showing Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds wearing the gang colors of open source. Naturally, Stallman protested in the next issue that he was an advocate of free software, not open source, but the point is that, back then, it was easy to point out the leaders of free and open source software (FOSS) in a way that would be impossible today. And I can’t help thinking that’s a healthy sign.

• I was reminded of how much things have changed when I read about Bruce Perens’ keynote at linux.conf.au this week. If the Maximum Linux graphic had added a fourth or fifth figure, that figure would probably have Perens. But now? Although I was peripherally aware of him giving the occasional talk, his influence had faded. I doubt that many newcomers to the community would be even aware of his involvement in the early days of FOSS).

• THE digital industry has gone through a big change in the last couple of years. Funding used to stretch high and wide which meant there was a lot of money available for software projects.

• Two years down the line and the game has changed completely – companies now have to be more sensible about how they use their resources to avoid passing their costs on to clients.

• One of the largest non-productive costs to a web development agency is the cost of their bespoke content management system (CMS).

• Open source software vendors 10gen and Talend have both turned their attention to the channel this week, announcing their intentions to start recruiting resellers in the UK as part of a strategy to up their growth rates and find new ways to generate cashflow from communities of non-paying users.

• 10gen is behind a database package called MongoDB, which has found a ready audience among internet firms that need to take a mroe flexible approach to their data management. It counts social start-ups including Foursquare and Craigslist among its customers and claims to have around 100,000 downloads a month as a free product

• The widespread internet blackout yesterday in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame.

Events

• Open software isn’t just a programming- and software-licensing methodology; it’s also a political philosophy and a revolutionary movement — something made clear by Linux projects like FreedomBox.

• Perens created the Open Source Definition and was founder or co-founder of projects including the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Standard Base, to name just two.

• In his keynote address to the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday he delivered a blunt warning.

Web Browsers

• Epiphany 3.3.4 has been released today with many user interface changes which bring it closer to the mockups we’ve seen about a month ago.

• The new version features a much cleaner, unified user interface that’s optimized to offer the user as much vertical space as possible. The old-style menu and statusbar have been removed, being replaced with a menu integrated into the top GNOME Shell bar (that will be used by the whole GNOME application stack: Music, Documents, etc.), a new “super menu” and a Nautilus-like floating statusbar.

Mozilla

• Mozilla is drafting a proposal for a new Web standard called MediaStream Processing that introduces JavaScript APIs for manipulating audio and video streams in real time. The specification is still at an early stage of development, but Mozilla has already started working on an implementation for testing purposes.

• Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan, the author of the MediaStream Processing API proposal draft, released experimental Firefox builds that include MediaStream Processing support. He has also published a set of demos (note: you need to run the experimental build to see the demos) that illustrate some of the functionality defined by the specification.

SaaS

• The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the release of a new stable version of its widely deployed open-source management platform for enterprise data center virtualization. OpenNebula3.2 is the first stable distribution produced by OpenNebula’s new release cycle aimed at faster delivery of new features and innovations to the community, based on their requirements and feedback, while also increasing technical quality.

• The developers of OpenNebula, the “open source cloud computing toolkit”, have announced version 3.2 of the software which adds support for Xen and KVM and out-of-the-box support for VMware including live migration, image and network management and automatic contextualisation (setting of parameters based on the host and other rules).

• Piston Enterprise OS, or (pentOS) is a hardware agnostic OpenStack Linux distribution that utilizes the company’s Null-Tier architecture, combining storage, compute and networking on individual nodes to deliver high scalability at lower cost. This allows customers to “scale a high availability private cloud one server at a time,” the company announced Wednesday.

Databases

Education

• When you’re working online and you access a text heavy web-page that scrolls for 5 pages, what is your initial reaction? To most of us, a text-heavy page filled with a long list of resources and activities is not inviting or enticing. The same is true for students and online courses. But with a little sleight of hand, plus use of the right resource formats and labels, you can design an aesthetically pleasing online course and avoid the long scrolling webpage syndrome.

Business

Funding

• Nexenta has announced that it has received $21 million in Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, along with Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures. The enterprise storage specialist says that the current round of funding will be used to sustain its growth and global expansion, and to scale its support; the California-based company previously received funding from Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

BSD

• This operating system is a community supported distribution, initially forked from FreeBSD 4.8. The current release of DragonFlyBSD is 2.10.1 and it was announced in April 2011. There are 3 downloading options available for this stable release of DragonFlyBSD: CD, USB and GUI. I downloaded the last one, which offers to have a GUI on top of the operating system itself. The distribution comes as a 1.2 Gb bz2 archive which packs an .img file of 3.7 Gb. Basically, this saves you some time during the downloading. But, then you need to unpack the file on your local drive before using it. Generally speaking, this is not an issue since most modern archivers, both Windows- and Linux-based, support bz2 format.

Project Releases

• Rhythmbox 2.95 has been released, this release is considered as final transition of Rhythmbox to GTK +3, the new release also is compatible with Gnome3.

Public Services/Government

• The recent launch of code.nasa.gov is providing better access to NASA sourced and funded projects, but William Eshagh of the NASA open government team says some forthcoming open-source licensing changes will make it more participatory.

• Though open source developers approve free distribution of software, they are serious about their use in commercial products and solutions. “They may not restrict their source code or its usage, but they nonetheless would like licensing terms to be respected,” said Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver.

• With nearly 70 terabyte of code being indexed –against which most of the available open source software can be checked– Palamida’s solution mitigates risk of copyright infringement.

Openness/Sharing

• Floodlight, an Apache-licensed open-source OpenFlow Controller, was released recently by networking startup Big Switch Networks , as part of its commitment to the open source community around Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

• Headquartered in Palo Alto, Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 to bring virtualization and cloud innovation to enterprise networks using OpenFlow-based SDN. The OpenFlow standard was developed at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and allows users to manage network equipment using software that can run on servers that communicate with switches, rather than directly on the switch or router.

Open Access/Content

• Why would an editor let go of publishing power and give the master calendar over to a group of trusted people? That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But we did it. And it works. And this is another example of the power of open source.

• At the beginning of July, we opened the opensource.com publishing calendar to all the moderators. It started with a prototype that quickly evolved and grew in popularity. Sharing what was scheduled for publishing and articles in the works was the first step in being more transparent between the different community moderators.

Open Hardware

• A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open-source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard; Johns Hopkins; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

Programming

• While git has been around for some time, it is only recently that I used it for collaboration with a co-worker. For those who are not aware, git is a distributed version control system with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities. It is a great tool for developers to collaborate without losing their sanity.

• I was emailed by the BBC last week and asked to comment for the PM programme about suggestions that the British Government may add basic programming skills to the national curriculum, and whether this would have a political impact on society in terms of how we interact with technology. Here’s my answer.

• ActiveState Software Inc. said its newest version of ActiveState Stackato, the infrastructure-agnostic, multilingual private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, has expanded the support its private PaaS support to OpenStack, Linux KVM, and Citrix XenServer, and improves the user experience (UX) of its Management Console.

Leftovers

• So far it seems no OEM is considering an exclusive relationship with M$. The monopoly is not there. Further, OEMs who do put out a few models of ARMed PCs with “8″ may be wasting their money. Same with retailers. At best, it seems quite possible retailers may stock shelves with “8″ only to find consumers don’t want it just as they didn’t want “Phoney 7″. M$’s scheme may backfire in that they will be shipping “8″ on machines that will not sell. That is not a sustainable business model.

• One picture is worth millions of words. Here’s a site that has plotted sales/shipments of various platforms of personal computing over the decades. The PC has obviously peaked while new technology climbs like a scalded cat. It’s also clear that the new technology is just getting started… and Android/Linux is overtaking whatever Apple puts out.

Censorship

• In an unusual move, the campaign team for Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul has filed a trademark and defamation lawsuit against for-now anonymous individuals who uploaded unauthorized attack videos.

• The videos in question bear the name “NHLiberty4Paul” and malign former candidate Jon Huntsman’s religion and ties to China. The Paul campaign has disavowed the videos.

• “This is a classic case of dirty politics resulting from the unlawful use in commerce of an underhanded and deceptive advertisement designed to tarnish plaintiff’s reputation,” reads the complaint (posted below) which was filed yesterday in San Francisco federal court.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Supreme Court upheld a law Wednesday that extended U.S. copyright protection to books, musical compositions and other works by foreign artists that had been available without paying royalties.

• The justices said in a 6-2 decision Wednesday that Congress acted within its power to give protection to works that had been in the public domain. The law’s challengers complained that community orchestras, academics and others who rely on works that are available for free have effectively been priced out of performing “Peter and the Wolf” and other pieces that had been mainstays of their repertoires.

• Khan Academy has provided a very helpful video, “SOPA and PIPA : What SOPA and PIPA are at face value and what they could end up enabling”, explaining how SOPA and PIPA would work. It gives the lie to those supporters of the bills who claim it is targeting *only* foreign and illegal sites. Khan Academy, the famous non-profit educational site, shows how this “shoot-first, ask-questions-later” legislation could affect YouTube, Facebook or CNN, any site with user-generated content.

• I hope journalists and members of Congress in particular will view the video, because he goes through the wording of the proposed bills, bit by bit. It’s the best I’ve seen, by far. And for the rest of us, if we see journalists making mistakes in covering this story, why not let them know about this resource in a friendly way?

• The Supreme Court has found Congress can extend copyright protection to works that had previously been in the public domain link here. The decision was 6-2 with one recusal. The story is covered here and here, but focus should be on the two dissenters who held that Congress had exceeded its authority when judged by the constitutional provision that copyright was justified when it served “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

• Digital filesharing doesn’t need the internet. This is the case at least in Western Africa and other parts of the developing world, where computers aren’t yet consumer goods for most and, even if they were, web access isn’t exactly New York City. Lovers of music still get it done, however, sharing files between knockoff cell phones via bluetooth connections and accumulating song collections in memory cards and bitrates that would probably make most in our lossless world laugh. It’s created a music culture that’s uniquely underground, an awesome anything-goes world of No Limit-style rap marrying Megaman-synth workouts, strange new techno-folks, and various other things so far untaggable.

• The MPAA and the RIAA have never been good about doing any kind of communication with “the public.” They’re just not set up for that kind of thing. They communicate with elected officials and with the press. And that’s about the extent of it. Of course, in this situation, where the public is actually paying attention to them… all they’re doing is showing off their true colors: condescending, entitled, spoiled brats who are seriously pissed off they’re not getting their way. Boo-freaking-hoo.

• As the fracas over the proposed federal anti-privacy legislation known as SOPA heats up this week, the open-source encyclopedia website, Wikipedia, says it will shut down for 24 hours, beginning midnight Tuesday to protest what the website warns is a threat to free speech.

• Instead of its usual homepage, users who navigate to the English-language Wikipedia Wednesday will find directions for reaching local members of Congress to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement Monday, he hopes this “will melt phone systems in Washington.”

• Living in what can only be described as pure denial, the MPAA announced today that the SOPA/PIPA protests “failed to enlist big sites.” Honestly, there’s really not much more to say about that. Google. Wikipedia. Facebook. Amazon. Craigslist. All participating. Let’s just stare in wonder at the MPAA’s hubris and ability to deny reality.

• We are putting up a black interstitial about SOPA/PIPA for the next 24hrs or so. If you click away from it, you’ll get a cookie stored so you won’t see it again in the same browser, but what follows is my reasons for doing it.

• You may have heard that today’s been quite a day online and in Congress, concerning SOPA and PIPA. Senator Ron Wyden — the first politician in Congress to take a direct stand against these bills at the very beginning, and who was brushed off by the opposition — has now offered up what can be reasonably described as a thank you letter to the internet for speaking out on this important issue, and making it clear to many in Congress that this is not an issue that everyone takes lightly.

• Yesterday I posted screenshots of 127 websites that “blacked out” to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation before the US Congress. Another site I came across reported that 7,000 sites had gone black. There was no citation, but I believe it if you include every blog that WordPress enabled to automatically go black and if you count all of those sites I posted screenshots of as “blacking out.

• Greenpeace certainly isn’t alone in deploying mockery online to needle companies about the things they’d rather keep quiet: it’s particularly effective for smaller groups that can’t afford expensive, conventional campaigns. But such satire frequently depends upon using authentic elements from the marketing materials of the organizations they tackle. The extremely broad framing of SOPA/PIPA means that the large, well-lawyered enterprises of the world will have powerful new weapons for suppressing this kind of protest by claiming that their intellectual property is being harmed as a result.

• Lots of folks in Congress have been speaking out about SOPA and PIPA today — and what’s fascinating is how many of them are actually using key internet innovations to do so. Most of the comments we’ve seen were first made on Twitter and Facebook. But the best response (and by best, we mean funniest) response we’ve seen today comes from Rep. Bruce Braley from Iowa. Y

• A lot of people have been posting on twitter or sending me email thanking me for bravery in opposing SOPA. That’s a very very kind sentiment, and I really do appreciate it!

• Thomas Lin writes at length about the scientific process, peer review of results, and publication of scientific papers link here.

• The concern remains that the results of research financed by the public’s taxes are not available free. The science establishment turns out of be conservative, however, and is sticking to the tradition of time consuming peer review and publication in the established journals. The results are still appropriated by the journals and published at great expense but considerable profit and public access is correspondingly limited.

• Thousands of websites across America have gone dark today in protest of supposed anti-piracy bills in Congress.

• I first noticed when I went to MichaelMoore.com to see how he was covering the Wisconsin protests, but his site was black with an eerie image of a mouse-controlled light that revealed the message “This site has gone dark today in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate… We need to kill these bills to protect our right to free speech, privacy and prosperity.”

• Tim Berners-Lee says US government plan to censor the internet violates human rights.

• The father of the web has added his voice to the global chorus of outrage at US Government plans to censor the internet, saying its plans are undemocratic and violate human rights.

• Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

• Earlier today, January 18th, we’ve announced that the openSUSE and Fedora projects decided to protest against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) through their websites.

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