● 12.06.12

● Links 7/12/2012: More Games and RHT News

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “There must be 50 reasons to prefer GNU/Linux over ’8′ — all of them sufficient for one or more groups of users,” asserted blogger Robert Pogson. “Where GNU/Linux appears on retail shelves, a significant number of consumers do choose it — we saw that all over the world when ASUS brought out its netbook with Linpus GNU/Linux, and we see it in Brazil today, where GNU/Linux outsells M$’s OS at Wal-Mart.”

• I’m not saying Linux is the best thing to use for everyone. I am saying, however, that it may be better for you than what you’re using now. Linux is different from Windows or Mac OS X in some fundamental ways. For thousands of people, these differences are a reason to choose Linux over its alternatives. Are they for you? Read on to find out!

Desktop

• Rumors began circulating earlier this year that Dell might be developing a laptop specifically designed for developers. Then Barton George, Dell’s Web Vertical Director, began blogging about Sputnik, a “scrappy skunkworks project” that would combine the XPS 13-inch laptop with the Ubuntu 12.04 Linux distribution.

• In recent posts, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Now that these systems have been in the wild for a few weeks, reliable reviews are appearing, and, users are liking them.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Imagination Technologies has published a set of 44 patches that add in over 28,000 lines of new code to the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Everpad is a tool that allows Linux users to use the popular Evernote service with a native client. The developers have recently released version 2.3 of the client, which supports Evernote’s most important functions such as the creation and editing of notes in multiple notepads, attachments, and organisation with tags. The latest release also supports dragging and dropping of files to attach them to notes. Images are automatically embedded inline with this method.

• Whether you’re moving to a paperless lifestyle, need to scan a document to back it up or email it, want to scan an old photo, or whatever reason you have for making the physical electronic, a scanner comes in handy. In fact, a scanner is essential.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Games in the Steam store have begun listing Linux system requirements, hinting that the client is making good progress towards a wider release.

• Pier Solar HD has more than hit its Kickstarter funding goal, bringing in $231,370 at the end of the campaign this morning. People were sufficiently piqued by the idea of an HD remake of a present-day Genesis RPG to not only get developer WaterMelon Co. to its $139,000 goal, but to exceed every stretch goal set by the developer.

• Teleglitch is a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. The game takes place in procedurally generated military research & training complex that has a different map every time you play. Our mission is to give players like you a chance to walk in the dark corridors, gripping their gun and few last rounds of ammunition. To play with finger on the trigger, high on adrenaline. We want to give you the, paranoid, sweaty, and bloody hard kind of fun.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I have been kept very busy during the last six months with Homerun, spending little time on Gwenview. Luckily Gwenview received several contributions from other developers during this cycle, so Gwenview 2.10 (from KDE SC 4.10) features some significant improvements.

• The KDE Project has announced a few minutes ago, December 5, the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last maintenance release of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.

Distributions

• Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

• As promised in this week’s Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here’s our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.

• Our annual distro competition is as close to a tradition as we get here at LXF Towers. We do it because we love distributions – we love their variety and the way that so much changes over the course of a year. If you want to see what conclusions we came to last year, for example, check out our previous feature, The best Linux distro of 2011.

• But if we restricted our comparisons to the same old dominant stalwarts, our yearly parade of victors would look more like political oscillation than a reflection of Linux distribution development. Which is why this year we wanted to do something different…

• There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

• That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Today I performed the easiest Mageia install ever. It was on an Acer netbook (an Inspire One D257-1408 that came pre-installed with the curse of Windows 7 Starter).

• The machine packs an Intel atom N570, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB HD. When I first saw it, my worry was the strange keyboard configuration: there are functions scattered all over the keyboard. Besides, I still had the usual concerns: Graphics server and effects, Wi-fi, sound, and the SD card reader.

Red Hat Family

• ManageIQ, the leading provider of IT Cloud Management ™ solutions, today announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. ManageIQ support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 provides customers with unified monitoring, management and automation capabilities that are quick-to-deploy and easy-to-use, reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise virtualization and cloud computing.

• Less than a year after a major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has upgraded the software to offer more advanced storage capabilities.

• Released Wednesday, RHEV 3.1 allows administrators to make snapshots and clones of running virtual machines. And, in a technical preview mode, RHEV 3.1 supports storage migration for virtual machines (VMs), in which the backup disk image of a running VM can be moved from one SAN (storage area network) to another without stopping the running VM, said Chuck Dubuque, Red Hat product marketing senior manager for Red Hat virtualization infrastructure.

Fedora

• It was decided at today’s FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release.

• For months the Fedora developers have been planning to mount /tmp with tmpfs for putting the temporary directory in RAM/SWAP volatile memory as it will lead to less disk reads/writes, potentially save power / better the performance, not preserve temporary data across reboots, and other benefits.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After reading this book I can say that I have a better understanding on how this Ubuntu operating works. The nice thing about this book compared to other books on Ubuntu that cover how to use Ubuntu, is this books covers not only these topics, but goes over why and how Ubuntu came into being and thoroughly teaches the readers how the Ubuntu community runs and operates.

• Over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Cyber Week madness, I managed to pick up a new laptop that, as it turns out, is decently Linux-friendly, so I thought I’d share my findings with you! As it turns out, I have a tendency to ramble on, so enjoy this 14+ minute video! Click “Read More” to see it.

• A quick update for our Ubuntu readers using Foobnix: the player has a new PPA, so remove the old one and add ppa:foobnix-team/foobnix-player instead.

• Project Sputnik, Dell‘s innovative initiative for building a high-end, open source laptop, launched a week ago with the release of an XPS 13 “Developer Edition” laptop powered by Ubuntu Linux. But Dell’s far from done on this front, according to Barton George, the brain behind the project. In an interview, he explained where Project Sputnik — and Dell’s open source channel strategy more broadly–might be headed next. Read on for what he had to say.

• The Sputnik laptop released last week was the product of an effort that began about six months ago, when George floated the concept of creating a laptop tailored for programmers to the Dell Innovation Program. Sputnik was the inaugural project for the Innovation Program, which Dell established earlier this year to help inspire innovative product ideas from company employees.

• The Ubuntu development cycle moves up a notch as the first alpha release of what is to become Ubuntu 13.04, Raring Ringtail, and images for Edubuntu 13.04 and Kubuntu 13.04, are released to the public. A decision has been made by the developers to reduce the number of milestone builds and switch to daily and fortnightly quality tests. Raring Ringtail will be continuously updated and new daily images will be released over the coming months to test it. There will not be a milestone release of Ubuntu 13.04 until 28 March 2013, and that will be a “FinalBetaRelease”. Rather than there being an Alpha 1 image, users should download the most recent daily image and use that.

Flavours and Variants

• Every release KDE users are treated like red-headed stepchildren over there at Linux Mint. We wait and wait… Fortunately, Clem announced the Release Candidate today, which means version 14 with KDE should be along any time now. It comes with most of goodies outlined earlier and we’ll miss the showstopppers that prompted a quick update.

• Clement Lefebvre today announced Linux Mint 14 RC with KDE 4.9.2. Like the others, this release is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and includes Linux 3.5, Xorg X Server 1.13.0, and GCC 4.7.2. KDE 4.9.2 in Mint includes improvements such as enhanced Dolphin metadata, New “Change Directory To” upon drop in a Konsole, and Kwin got lots of quality and performance improvements. Kontact received many bugfixes and performance improvements too and Workspaces now have MPRIS2 support.

• Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

Devices/Embedded

• There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc.

• Texas Instruments released a real-time operating system developed entirely in-house for its microcontrollers. TI will offer the code for on a royalty-free, open source basis, aiming to ease the path to market for its customers.

Phones

Android

• merging markets are where it’s happening these days in IT, especially in the mobile segment. According to Gartner [1], smartphone sales to emerging markets grew at a 63 percent rate in Q3 compared to 46 percent globally. Not surprisingly, the new wave of mobile Linux platforms [2] like Jolla’s MeeGo-based Sailfish OS, Mozilla’s Firefox OS, and The Linux Foundation-hosted Tizen, are initially targeting these same, “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP) consumers.

• By the time they reach market, however, they may find that another Linux-based OS has beaten them to the punch. Android is leading the way in low-cost smartphones, and increasingly, tablets, aimed at the new, budget-conscious middle classes in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other developing nations.

• Samsung has really gone far ahead in the Android Smartphone Segment and left manufacturers such as HTC struggling. Even though HTC produced some stunning phones in 2012, its financial condition has been on a continuous decline over the past year. After barely managing to remain profitable HTC is planning to change it fortune in the first half of 2013.

• Great news for all the Android Fanatics in India, Android App Expo is going to be held in Bangalore on January 5 2013. Android is having a very good run in India where, affordability of Android smartphones has led to huge adoption of this open source OS, over throwing steeply priced iPhones and almost dead Symbian powered Nokias.

• Samsung announces the opening of its first Samsung Mobile Store in Paris, a unique place for Samsung experience with expertise. Dedicated to mobility, Samsung Mobile Store has conceived and designed as a showcase of the latest technological innovations. Hands-on experience, advice and customized solutions: this new space is open to all, individuals and professionals.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• For anyone who has ever used his or her Android tablet and wished that it could double as a desktop-style device, PengPod has a product just for you. Ars Technica reports that the new PengPod tablet, which runs both Android and Linux, has met its crowd-sourced fundraising goals and will so on sale in January for $120 a 7-inch model and $185 for a 10-inch model. According to Ars, the tablet will be able to “dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the touch-friendly KDE Plasma Active interface.” Overall, the tablet received funding of nearly $73,000, or around 49% more than the $49,000 that the company had been seeking.

• The Archos GamePad is now available in Europe for €149.99, with a North American release scheduled for early Q1 2013. As the name suggests it combines physical gaming button controls and a patented mapping tool that allows you to link the virtual controls of any game to physical controls.

Free Software/Open Source

• Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.

• Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory. But during the decades of providing support to the nation, BRL quickly became involved in the move toward modern computing. Indeed, nearly 70 years ago, BRL unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — ENIAC, the world’s first operational, digital computer. The development of this computer was driven by the Army’s need to speed calculation of firing tables. And ever since the development of the ENIAC, ARL has provided the U.S. military with unprecedented scientific computational capabilities.

• Transcends upgrades Rifidi open-source RFID software, introduces new appliances, reader; Napa Valley’s AuburnJames Winery to test RFID-enabled pallets; ADR’s Automated Workforce Monitor service initiated at Texas construction sites; Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ parking lot uses TagMaster RFID tags; Toshiba certifies Omni-ID UltraThin IQ 400 and IQ 600 RFID labels; Intellitix intros RFID MiniPortal.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

Databases

• SkySQL’s CEO Patrick Sallner, Percona’s co-founder Peter Zaitsev and MySQL AB co-founders Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson have come together to announce the creation of the MariaDB Foundation. “The time is right for an independent organisation to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10″, said Axmark. According to the announcement made at the Percona Live conference in London, the organisation has secured a pledge of one million euros from the foundations two initial sponsors and is seeking other sponsors.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.6 open source office suite is now available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.

• The LibreOffice developers from The Document Foundation have released LibreOffice 3.6.4, an incremental update to the open source office suite that fixes over 60 bugs. The fixed bugs include problems with the office suite’s RTF support, display problems with Hebrew font symbols, and several crashing problems. Bugs in the LibreOffice UI were also addressed, such as check boxes that would not retain their state, resetting configuration dialogs, and sorting of tables in the Calc spreadsheet application that did not work correctly.

Semi-Open Source

• John Newton has had an influential career in the content management market, having co-founded and led the development of Documentum, subsequently acquired by EMC. Today Newton is chairman and CTO at open source content management firm, Alfresco. I grabbed him on the phone for a Q&A.

• …now with partial access to its source code.

Funding

• The Picket Project, an open source effort to create a new crowdsourcing software, launched on Indiegogo this week with the goal of funding their initial software release. This is the final push in the launch of their platform. The software was developed to tackle large, complex political problems in a new, innovative way. The Picket Project Platform allows engaged citizens to build their own solutions by connecting and building on related, similar ideas.

Project Releases

• Longtime users of Ubuntu Linux may already be familiar with open source Ekiga, which used to be the default Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client in that popular Linux distribution, but late last month the telephony software got a major update.

Public Services/Government

• Talend, a global open source software leader, announced today it has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency around the government’s ability to purchase open source software. The CBP has determined that software products are compliant with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA) when that software is manufactured in a designated country through numerous, complex and significant activities including key product research, writing the specification and architecture, and the actual software build – even if the majority of its source code was created in a non-designated country.

Openness/Sharing

• Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the “open” movement. “Open” as in open access, open source, open data, open science.

• We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.

Open Hardware

Programming

• You might get confused with the name of a musical band group but here we will talk about a serious technology. The framework is inspired by Ruby on Rails that makes use of Groovy language which is a dynamic and agile scripting language. The syntax is somewhat very similar to that of Java. In fact, you can use groovyc just like javac to produce bytecode files. Also, Groovy integrates with Bean scripting framework, which allows you to embed any scripting engine into your Java code. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the “coding by convention” paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.

Standards/Consortia

• An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM’s Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner.

• Edwin Vane of Intel Canada has called for comments on his proposal to develop a Clang-based tool using the LibTooling library for automatically transforming C++ code-bases to take advantage of modern C++11 features without needing any manual code rewriting.

Leftovers

Science

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) of Islamabad Police has arrested ten men for their alleged involvement in pilfering petroleum products, selling these in open market without permission and also recovered diesel and petrol worth Rs270,000 from them, the police spokesman said on Thursday.

• So, what else is new with the CIA? Susan Rice was loaded in the boat just like one of my favorite people was.

• Colin Powell was supplied with false information about weapons of mass destruction when he was ambassador to the U.N., and the result was a war that should have never been fought. Add to that the Vietnam War, which started on false information supplied by the CIA about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and I didn’t hear any complaints from the Plutocrats.

• The Central Intelligence Agency for a few years has operated a group focused on examining how climate change could affect U.S. National Security. But, recently, the desk has been shutdown, which some environmentalists say is because of opposition from Republicans in Congress.

• Former priest of Vishwa Hindu Parishad Jugal Kishore Shastri created headlines last year when he claimed before a court in Lucknow that American intelligence agency CIA had funded the entire operations of the Ram Lalla movement for the VHP.

• The congressional inquiries into who was responsible for the tragic loss of life in Benghazi continue and may not be resolved for some time. I would like to address the CIA’s role in the loss of life.

• It was reported it was a chaotic situation and the CIA responded in 24 minutes. During this time, the CIA tried unsuccessfully to obtain machine guns from pro-Libyan forces. When CIA reinforcements were dispatched from Tripoli, Libya’s capital, to the Benghazi airport, it took several hours to obtain permission and find vehicles.

• How many exercises did the CIA hold involving all parties to coordinate responses in any emergency? Did these exercises identify areas of risk and develop contingencies and back-up plans to eliminate confusion?

• The drone Iran says it captured appears to be a U.S.-made ScanEagle, Pentagon spokesman George Little said, in a change from the initial U.S. rejection of the Iranian claim.

• Do you view your life as an American more important than the lives of those in other countries? That is the view of many politicians in Washington today, including President Obama. Since Obama took office in 2008, more than 2,500 people in Pakistan and other Middle-Eastern countries have been killed by the use of drones, which are unmanned missile-firing planes. The President continued the usage of drones after President Bush left office to continue seeking out terrorist groups, but he also expanded the usage by a lot.

• If there’s one thing authority figures hate, it’s anything that goes counter to the narrative and/or puts their pet projects in an unfavorable light. A New York City artist is learning this the hard way after he and some friends took aim at the police department’s drone program, plastering the city with satirical ads touting the “safety” provided by the new eyes in the sky.

• Model of unmanned device appeared in picture to have crashed into ground near library

• …one of the inventors had regrets about selling ScanEagles to the military

• The term “unmanned aerial drone” might strike a bit of fear into your heart when you see the live tracking map of the USA that’s been made available this week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but not to worry – not all of them are flying overhead right this minute. Instead this is a map that’s the result of the EEF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that covers the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)’s full knowledge of unmanned flights across the United States and what you’re looking at is a tracking of project licenses rather than actually flying objects. That said, this map is exciting in its coverage for our greater understanding of unmanned drone flight projects as initiated by state and local law agencies, universities, and US Military operations.

• AR Drones can be much, much more than awesome toys. Just recently, we’ve see how the (relatively) inexpensive and versatile flying robots have been used as research tools, but the sky’s the limit as to what you can do with them, so to speak. DroneGames, which took place over the weekend in San Francisco, tasked programmers with hacking the UAVs in the most interesting and creative ways possible.

• The Pentagon’s top lawyer has resigned and says he will return to private practice.

Cablegate

• The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has confirmed that the US diplomatic cables about the alleged criminal past of Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, leaked through the whistle-blowing site, are fully authentic.

• When Julian Assange rapped on the door of the Ecuadorian embassy in June, he had probably packed no more than a weekend bag. Five months later and purportedly suffering a nasty lung infection, the world’s most wanted Australian is not only in need of a little vitamin D, but also lacking good company.

• A FORMER US Marine Corps commander has argued a vague regulation gave him discretion to maintain strict conditions on the army private charged in the WikiLeaks case, after a psychiatrist determined the soldier was no longer a suicide risk.

• James Averhart testified on Thursday, the eighth day of a pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning.

• The hearing is to determine whether the conditions of Manning’s 2010 imprisonment at a base in Virginia – including confinement alone in a cell at least 23 hours a day – amounted to illegal pretrial punishment, possibly warranting dismissal of the case.

Finance

• On October seventeenth (O17), a group of about 10 occupiers gathered outside 15 Central Park West, the address of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s multi-million dollar condo. Occupy Goldman Sachs was born. In the model of sleepful protests, they set up camp across from the building’s main gate. They brought sleeping bags, signs, food, cameras…and have not left the area since.

• In a move that surprises just about nobody, Governor Rick Snyder announced at press conference this morning that when anti-union Republicans send “Right to Work for Less” (RTWFL) legislation to his desk, he will sign it.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Despite two separate Wisconsin courts striking down the state’s voter ID law as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, the state legislature’s incoming Assembly Leader, Rep. Robin Vos, has pledged support for amending the state constitution to require ID at the polls — despite hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents not having ID and no significant evidence of voter fraud in the state. Vos is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair for Wisconsin; Wisconsin’s voter ID law, like many of those introduced in recent years, echoes the ALEC “model” voter ID Act.

Censorship

Civil Rights

• ric Pickles may not have the most glamorous job in Westminster, but he has delivered an early Christmas present for civil liberties campaigners.

• The last Labour Government changed the law to give local authorities powers, originally intended for the Environment Agency to tackle serious fly-tipping, to go through people’s bins. Now the Secretary of State for Local Government has announced that no longer will council inspectors have the right to enter your property and rifle through your bin.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Don’t be fooled by the opaque wording above. If that request was put into practice, service providers get to prioritize certain types of Internet traffic and “the sending party”—a network generating content, like Netflix, Youtube, and maybe even Google or Ars—has to pay for the privilege of reaching consumers. Although opinions differ on whether free, unregulated markets are the universal solution to all problems, it’s hard to argue against the success of this model in the case of the Internet. Even in places with limited broadband competition, the amount of bandwidth users get for their money has increased at rates far beyond those of any other industry.

• If you ask the folks who had a hand in the creation of the Internet, odds are you’ll get a very different read on a regulation idea likely to turn into a lightning rod for controversy at a highly anticipated meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union.

• We recently made the case against a proposal to institute a “sender-pays” rule for Internet interconnection. The idea was submitted by European telecom incumbents and it’s under discussion at this week’s International Telecommunications Union confab in Dubai. Telecom incumbents love this because it could force Google, Netflix, and other major Internet services to pony up more cash. They argue they need these revenues to fund network upgrades and keep the Internet working smoothly.

• We’ve noted that among the proposals being pushed this week at the ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) are a few that are solely designed to divert money from innovative internet companies to stodgy old telcos who haven’t adapted. The ITU has defended such proposals as being about sharing revenue more fairly, which tends to be a warning sign for most folks that failed organizations are about to take money from successful ones. Indeed, a number of proposals have suggested a form of “sending party pays” infrastructure for peering, claiming that such a system was successful (via the ITU) for telco buildout, and so they could do the same thing for the internet. Of course, this leaves aside the vast differences in how the networks work and where they came from — and how a “sending party pays” internet system would almost certainly lead to a balkanized and fragmented internet.

DRM

• David sez, “We all hate seeing the way computers are depicted in TV shows and movies. Magic boxes that can do the impossible and it only gets less realistic when the subject turns to hacking. There is though one upcoming movie that aims to tackle this subject with realism and while telling a damn interesting story.. it’s The Root Kit and it is on Kickstarter right now. With less than 3 days left to succeed.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Continuing our series of posts concerning the Republican Study Committee report on the problems of the copyright system and how to fix them (which it quickly retracted under industry pressure), today we’re going to explore the second “myth” that author Derek Khanna helped debunk: that “copyright is free market capitalism at work.” We’ve already covered the first myth, about the purpose of copyright, as well as responded to various responses to the report by copyright maximalists.

• That response feeds nicely into this post, because the whole argument that copyright is “free market capitalism” depends almost entirely on the key claim of maximalists: that copyright is property, full stop. However, as we noted in our response, copyright has both property-like attributes and many non-property-like attributes. And it’s when you look at the actual market that you have to recognize that those non-property-like attributes start to stand out. The only way you can argue that copyright is free market capitalism at work is to flat out ignore the ways in which copyright is unlike property.

• Groups representing European publishers, writers and collective management organisations are urging the European Commission to support their interests as it considers initiatives on copyright policy this week. The groups asked the Commission to back stronger copyright and resist calls for greater exceptions and limitations to copyright.

• We recently mentioned that Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University was publishing a book about the “free market case for copyright reform,” called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess. It’s now available at Amazon. They also have a free chapter available on the site. Brito was kind enough to send me an advance copy of the short book, and it’s a worthwhile read.

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