● 03.17.13

● Links 17/3/2013: Qt 5.1, GNOME 3.10 Talks

Posted in News Roundup at 11:56 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When I started six years ago in Linux, I didn’t know that not only would my operating system change, but also my life.

• I am a basic user of Ubuntu and in these several years I have met many people using Linux, ranging from new user to Distro Developer, to those with their wallpapers or those who created the countdown banners to those who file [package] a new application.

• SprezzOS, a Linux distribution that most people have likely not heard of, is aiming for real change with their open-source operating system. They previously claimed their ambitions were to become the “most robust, beautiful and performant Linux”, and it turns out they are indeed trying to at least live up to their performance goals.

• SprezzOS was exclusively covered on Phoronix earlier this year in the aforelinked article. Many downplayed this Linux distribution that sent information to the Phoronix news box. The developers later made claims of a 120 second Linux server installation.

Desktop

Kernel Space

• Embedded Linux is hard to define, but at least we know now that Linux pros say Android is not embedded Linux. (See part 1 in this series, Android vs. Embedded Linux and this week’s Q&A with Mentor Graphics’ John Cherry.) That doesn’t mean, however, that Android isn’t useful in some embedded projects. The question is: How does a developer know which operating system to choose?

Graphics Stack

• Chris Forbes has introduced support for Mesa and specifically Intel’s DRI driver to support ARB_texture_storage_multisample, a feature that’s been apart of core OpenGL since version 4.2.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• A kickstarter project aimed at creating a “truly open source” Linux-based video game handheld recently achieved nearly double its funding goal. Game Console Worldwide (GCW), the enterprise formed to build and market the GCW Zero game console, says its preparing to mass-produce the device.

• Justin Barwick, who created the GCW Zero, says he did so because he was “fed up” with video game handhelds that were “incapable of accurately emulating classic gaming experiences.” In order to tap into an avid community of software developers and beta testers, he used Linux and other open-source software components and applications as the basis for the device’s operation.

• The GCW-Zero can best be described as a portable console designed for playing retro games, say up until the advent of the original PlayStation.

• The device – which runs an open source Linux-based operating system known as OpenDingux – features a 3.5 inch display, Vivante GC860 graphics and a 1GHz MIPS processor.

• Mike Zaimont, the creator of the fighting engine powering Skullgirls, has revealed that a Linux port is currently in the works. Word came via Zaimont’s Salty Cupcakes tournament series, which he’s been hosting on a weekly basis in Los Angeles and streaming through Twitch.

• Prepare to experience the original man-on-the-run thriller in a completely new way. Be transported back to 1914 London, where Richard Hannay finds himself framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Now he must escape the Capital and stay alive long enough to solve the riddle of The 39 Steps. There are secrets to be discovered, locations to be explored and – above all – an incredible tale to be told in this ground-breaking interactive novel.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXLE, the Lubuntu Extra Life Extension, is a respin of LXDE-based Lubuntu, aimed at ageing computers. Based on the last LTS release (12.04) of the official Ubuntu derivative Lubuntu, it retains drivers and utilities for older graphics and audio hardware that have been dropped from newer releases. The developers say that with the normal Lubuntu releases, “support is sometimes lost too quickly with a 6 month core release cycle” and that LXLE is designed to bridge the gap between LTS releases.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• GIMP isn’t the only graphics application for Linux, though you might think so since it gets all the attention. Today we turn our attention to the wonderful Krita drawing, painting, and illustration program for Linux. We’ve talked about Krita before: Demystifying Krita with Comics, Modern Art: A Look at Krita 2.3, and Calligra Suite, the Promising Not-An-Office Suite. Today we’re going to learn about the important fundamental Krita tools, Tools, Brushes, and Colors. I’m not much of an artist, but I can show you how to use the excellent Krita features.

• Last year I wrote how OpenGL may take on a greater role within Qt. Thanks to work by KDAB and others, the forthcoming Qt 5.1 tool-kit will offer enhanced OpenGL support.

• With Qt 5.1 it will be easier to take advantage of specific OpenGL functionality, such as an OpenGL 4.3 Core Profile context, Qt functions for checking the existence of certain OpenGL extensions, and other helpful features.

• KDE’s KWin compositing window manager is making steady progress in supporting the Qt 5 tool-kit and KDE Frameworks 5.

• The lead developer of KWin has shared an update regarding the work he and others have been doing to bring KWin to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, for the eventual release of KDE 5.

• The first part of today’s headline is probably obvious to many of you. KDE will be moving on from Xorg to Wayland. And considering Gnome’s aggressive plans to move to it, this may happen sooner rather than later. KDE & Gnome having a mutual interest in Wayland is great, and we can’t wait to reap the benefits of it. But it seems that one technology — one that’s synonymous with KDE — will likely not be making the transition.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Gnome developer Matthias Clasen recently proposed to make Gnome work on Wayland, today he has proposed to set a new goal for Gnome community and ‘port GNOME to Wayland’.

• Clasen writes on the mailing list, “Wayland has reached the 1.0 milestone recently and it has already had some good success in the embedded space. Many of us have silently assumed that Wayland is the future display system on Linux, and that we will get to using it eventually. But to reach its full potential, it needs the push of a full desktop porting project. I think GNOME is the right project for this and now is the right time for us to embrace Wayland.”

• Matthias Clasen sent an email today, March 15, to the GNOME mailing list, in which he proposes the porting of the GNOME desktop environment to the Wayland display server.

• Many of us thought (read: believed) – including myself – that Wayland is the next-generation X.Org server for Linux operating systems, but in order for it to be that popular, it requires a big push from a ginormous project, such as GNOME.

Distributions

• Kali Linux is the latest incarnation of BackTrack Linux, an Ubuntu-based distribution for penetration testing. It is developed and maintained by Offensive Security, an outfit that provides security training and certification courses for IT professionals.

• It has been described by its developers as the “the most advanced and versatile penetration testing distribution ever created.” Whether you agree with that statement or not, this article gives you an idea of what types of applications and features are available on this first edition of Kali Linux.

New Releases

• Some of you will hate me for this I’ve just released yet another Slax version. This one should fix the plasma task bar finally. If not, then I’ll give up Anyway, if you do not like to download new Slax each two days, feel free to use 7.0.6 or 7.0.7 and just resize the taskbar manually to full screen width if you need.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Well the public has had its say and now it’s up to the committee. A recent OpenMandriva announcement said, “Vote for a Face! has ended, and public has pronounced its favorites. Now is time for OpenMandriva Association (OMA) to choose the Final Logo for the Association.”

• The University where I work has proudly put up a new network for remote access. Among its advantages, one can count that there are more access points, its has a more robust security, and that the user only needs to register once. One additional point for Linux users is that, as opossed to Windows, you do not need to download any software, install it and run it to be able to log in. It is a WPA2 Enterprise network that uses PAP for authentication.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall that the Ubuntu 13.04 development cycle is a little different from those of versions past, as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth outlined back in October.

• In this guest column, Daniel Mandell, a research associate at market analyst firm VDC Research, examines Canonical’s recent efforts to morph Ubuntu into a smartphone operating system. Given the wild success of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS, and the mixed success of Limo, Meego, OpenMoko, WebOS, and other earlier attempts, how likely is it that a Ubuntu smartphone OS can successfully gain a foothold in the smartphone market?

• The Ubuntu developers have just passed the beta 1 milestone in development of Raring Ringtail, Ubuntu 13.04. Although the milestone does not see a release of the Ubuntu distribution, it does see a release of a beta 1 version of most of the various remixes, as previously disclosed by the project’s leadership. The announcement notes that 13.04 Beta 1 images are available for Edubuntu (download), Kubuntu (download), Lubuntu (download), UbuntuKylin (download), Ubuntu Server Cloud (images), Ubuntu Studio (notes, download) and Xubuntu (download).

Flavours and Variants

• Canonical’s taken the next step in pushing Raring Ringtail out of its nest by releasing the very first beta version, but only for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu. Plain ol’ Ubuntu for desktops and servers will arrive with the final 13.04 beta release on March 28th, so that devs will be able to focus on the software and keep things under wraps for a little longer. These early versions aren’t for the faint of heart, but adventurous folks can download them at the source if they don’t mind some kinks. However, those who aren’t interested in tempting fate can wait for the polished release in April.

Devices/Embedded

• Toradex is pleased to announce the version V2.0 production release of the Colibri T20 Linux BSP.

• Raspberry Pi isnt just a toy for geeks to play around, it’s also a cool tool to serve the convivial folks. Recently, a project called “Bartendro” has met its fund-raising goal – $135000- on Kickstarter.

Phones

• Samsung Electronics created a lot of buzz surrounding the Galaxy S4, which was finally unveiled on Thursday. But amidst this buzz, did you forget that Samsung has also been working on Tizen OS that will compete against the most prominent open source mobile OS Android?

• Along with this shift is a total stall in adoption of Wintel. Households with a desktop PC are stuck at 60% as the old machines cling to life but are not replaced. Meanwhile the mobile gadgets have a huge share of households. There is some life in notebooks but they grew just 37% while tablets grew 500%. This year, the contest will be over. Between the tablets and the smartphones, few will have a need for a Wintel PC. ASP has come down 12% for desktops and notebooks in one year. There’s not much room to decline further without M$ taking a big hit. Obviously the high-priced Ultrabooks are not making a dent.

Ballnux

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Dimitri Albino is the proudly self-proclaimed smARtMAKER #1, and he’s brought his company’s Insert Coin finalist, the smARtPULSE oximeter, here to Expand. Using photodetection tech to produce readings of oxygen levels and pulse. While this is standard functionality, the company claims its advantage is in being able to cheaply deliver the product, and stream the data via Bluetooth to a computer or mobile device.

• EdX has made publicly available source code that it built specifically to support online interactive learning, writes Sharleen Nelson for Campus Technology. The non-profit online learning platform founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting EdX course content.

• XBlocks are a prototype, second-generation application programming interface for hierarchically combined EdX courseware components such as video players and learning sequences. The XBlock source code allows course developers to combine independent XBlocks to create engaging online courses such as wiki-based collaborative learning environments and online laboratories, or create integrated education tools such as a circuit simulator for an electronics course or a molecular manipulator for teaching biology.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has just announced Open Badges 1.0, which it is billing as “an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning.” The project has apparently been in development for two years with the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla claims that 600 leading organizations are now using Open Badges to issue badges that count toward education, careers and lifelong learning.

• “Today, we learn things in a wide variety of ways, but there are fewer opportunities to gain formal recognition,” said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman, in an announcement. “Open Badges lets you take all those skills and show them off in one place, regardless of where you’ve earned them.”

CMS

• And there was quite a bit to talk about. Mullenweg has some pretty informed opinions on the recent hot topic of remote working, as 130 of the 150 people who work for Automattic (WordPress.com‘s parent company) work remotely from outside of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. And with his growing activity investing both in startups and artistic projects along with the continued success of WordPress as a publishing platform, there’s no shortage of things to discuss.

Education

• Well. When I was teaching at my last school we had already converted to GNU/Linux when we made the first of two requests for batches of 20 CFS PCs. I asked them for GNU/Linux and they said they don’t do that. I had to re-image the machines, not a huge chore but wasted effort by CFS and myself. Can education afford to waste manpower on supporting that other OS? I don’t think so. Again, if CFS doesn’t offer GNU/Linux how do they know there is no demand? It’s just like retail shelves stocked with nothing but M$’s OS. How is the retailer to know they have choice? I took the trouble to contact CFS Manitoba to request GNU/Linux. How many computer teachers would do that?

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Today, there is still nothing like a level playing field for open source and closed source software. Even so, regulators need to think about how they will recognize it, and then maintain a delicate balance afterwards. Recent research using mathematical economics shows that a mixed market in which open source and closed source companies coexist delivers the most value to society.

• Unfortunately, analysis shows that equilibrium mixed markets consistently produce too many open source firms to maximize welfare. Many governments have turned their own major spending on software and accompanying services into a policy instrument — some more successfully than other — by establishing formal preferences (and even mandatory requirements) that systematically favour open source over closed source. Unlike the case of government provided open source code, however, this intervention could actually reduce welfare.

Funding

• On the cloud computing scene, there is some very interesting action going on with organizations open sourcing valuable software components designed to make cloud deployments much more efficient and secure. This week, I reported on DBSeer, a component from MIT researchers that can increase the efficiency of database-centric cloud applications and reduce the need for expensive hardware.

• It may come as a surprise to some, though, that Netflix is one of the big organizations open sourcing valuable cloud components. Netflix–which has a very robust cloud-based proprietary platform–has released Chaos Monkey and a number of other meaningful open source components in recent months. Now, the company has unveiled the Netflix OSS Cloud Prize, a contest that will reward the best cloud developers with $200,000 in prizes.

BSD

• Last month I reported on the AMD Linux DRM/KMS driver being ported to FreeBSD. With the developer receiving funding from the FreeBSD Foundation, progress on this open-source AMD kernel mode-setting driver is moving in a steadfast manner.

• There’s an Intel KMS/DRM driver to FreeBSD 9.1, but that’s it as far as ports go of the Linux DRM drivers. However, the AMD KMS driver along with support for TTM memory management within the FreeBSD kernel is taking shape quickly.

• The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Konstantin Belousov has been hired as its first full-time member of technical staff, a key milestone of the Foundation’s investment in staff for 2013.

• The DesktopBSD project is in the process of being revived. EchoD has brought the website and the forums back to live.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Organizations still have a long way to go to to fully integrate the social web to connect to their customers. Here are some great examples, curated by Hult International Business School and Center for Innovation, Excellence and Leadership (IXL Center). Their book Connectivate! is a collection of real world stories from 54 innovative companies whose breakthroughs are changing the world.

• Richard M Stallman has turned 60 today. He was born to Alice Lippman and Daniel Stallman on March 16, 1953 in New York City. Popularly known as RMS, Stallman wears many hats – most notably the creation of Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, the GNU GPL licence and Emacs. Stallman has dedicated his life to software freedom. He says if you don’t control your computing, someone else will.

• I have been fortunate enough to spend quite some time with Richard in India and then here in Belgium and each time learned more about him.

Openness/Sharing

• In order to accelerate the development of new drugs to combat and cure major infectious diseases, Professor A.K. Ganguly of the Department of Chemistry, Chemical Biology & Biomedical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology is contributing his expertise and passion to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Open Source Drug Discovery initiative. Dr. Ganguly is focusing on new treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, which are causing millions of deaths while several drugs used to cure these diseases no longer work because of the appearance of resistant strains.

• The true potential of collaborative initiatives around the world is yet to be known. However, a sneak preview will take place on March 20, when hundreds of communities, networks, and institutions from widely diverse backgrounds and hailing from over 20 countries get together and take part in a global Wikisprint.

Open Access/Content

Programming

Leftovers

• The Senate unanimously confirmed Washington lawyer Richard Taranto to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Monday, more than 17 months after he was first nominated for the position and more than a year after his confirmation hearing.

• The nomination of Taranto, a name partner at the D.C. firm Farr & Taranto, never faced much opposition but got caught up in election-year politics last year. The Senate voted 91-0 for the specialist in intellectual property and patent law, who has argued 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and taught patent issues at Harvard Law School.

• As far as Dave Winer, one of RSS’s creators, is concerned, Google turning off Google Reader isn’t a big deal. The potential for Google to control the news flow is what he finds worrisome.

Security

• The threat is always there — in your car, at the office, on the table next to where you sleep at night: a near-biblical plague of worms, phisher kings, identity thieves, even cyberterrorists.

• As computer networks have been transformed into a global battlefield, where America faces what former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently called a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” security experts who understand those vast neural systems have become prized recruits in an invisible war.

• No one has stood watch on the wall holding back the hidden hordes longer than Peter G. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man). He was there at the dawn of the computer age and helped usher in its more muscular modern era with his pioneering work in Multics, an innovative operating system in the 1960s. Now, at 80, Neumann is leading an effort to rescue the computer from potentially fatal flaws encoded in its DNA.

• Doctors in Brazil are using phony silicon fingers to fool biometric scanners. Sneaky? Sure. But you really gotta hand it to them.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• But when exactly did a lot of Republicans stand up and criticize Obama’s drone policy in his first term?

• A jogger who collapsed and died in leafy Weybridge turns out to have been blowing the whistle on one of Russia’s biggest tax frauds. Mark Townsend reports on a crisis that has pitted the Kremlin against the US Senate and British police

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• My experience with the Enlightenment desktop slash window manager hails back to 2007, when I started exploring distributions like openGEU and friends. Then, fast forward two years, I’ve had my first encounter with Bodhi Linux, which comes with E17 as its default desktop. Fast forward some more, and we enter the year 2013, with yet another review of Bodhi.

• Half a decade ago, I was rather impressed with what the desktop could do. It managed a fair share of bling-bling, smooth transitions, shadows, transparency, and other cool effects, without having to rely on an expensive graphics card. It was all done in 2D. From the purely aesthetic perspective, E17 was not the best looking, but it was not bad, nor that much different from the contemporary rivals. But then, when I tested the desktop again two years back and just now, I noticed that little has changed in the visual phase space. Which brings a question, is Enlightenment a suitable desktop environment for modern machines?

Finance

• Here are just some of the improprieties by big banks:

• * Funding the Nazis

• * Laundering money for terrorists

• * Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs (and see this and this) and other arms which are banned in most of the world

• * Launching a coup against the President of the United States

• * Handling money for rogue military operations

• * Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis)

• * Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• * Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

• * Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis

• In a move that could set off new fears of contagion across the euro zone, anxious depositors drained cash from automated teller machines in Cyprus on Saturday, hours after European officials in Brussels required that part of a new 10 billion euro bailout be paid for directly from the bank accounts of ordinary savers.

• A sports apparel retailer is fighting back against the arbitrary multi-million-dollar penalties that credit card companies impose on banks and merchants for data breaches by filing a first-of-its-kind $13 million lawsuit against Visa. The suit takes on the payment card industry’s powerful money-making system of punishing merchants and their banks for breaches, even without evidence that card data was stolen. It accuses Visa of levying legally unenforceable penalties that masquerade as fines and unsupported damages and also accuses Visa of breaching its own contracts with the banks, failing to follow its own rules and procedures for levying penalties and engaging in unfair business practices under California law, where Visa is based.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Another day in which Google makes a move that leaves me scratching my head about what it’s thinking. It has decided to remove Adblock Plus from the Google Play store arguing that it interferes “with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.” Obviously, some will argue that of course Google is doing this to protect its own ad revenue, but it still surprises me. Google’s entire premise was built on the idea of building advertising that was non-intrusive and non-annoying such that it created value for people. The whole reason that Adblock exists is to fight back against bad advertising. On top of that, Adblock is a very popular tool, in part because it helps stop annoying advertising. If anything Adblock represents a useful way of exposing information about when and why people find advertising annoying.

• At its best, the Web is a place for unlimited exchange of ideas. But Web-savvy news junkies have known for a long time that reader feedback can often turn nasty. Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news.

Censorship

• Please be advised that the undersigned represents Professor Lawrence Schiffman, previously Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, now Vice Provost of Yeshiva University. Dr. Schiffman’s name was the subject of illegal and criminal misconduct by Raphael Golb. Your website has been provided to me as one of the locations where the criminal postings occurred. Please confirm that within five (5) work days of the date of this email the following will occur: 1. Complete removal of the blog material; 2. Removal of index entries on search engines; 3. Cancellation of fraudulent email accounts; 4. Removal of any other mention or reference to Dr. Schiffman by Mr. Golb or anyone responding to him.

Privacy

• One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

• I’ve spent the last two weeks vacationing out of the country, with only intermittent access to headlines from the United States. Every time I checked in, I felt as though I’d missed another huge legal story: the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling onmateriality and securities class certification in Amgen v. Connecticut Retirement Plans; oral arguments in Argentina’sappeal in the renegade bondholder litigation; a New York state court’s long-awaited holding that insurance regulators were within their rights to approve MBIA’s $5 billion restructuring in 2009; Credit Suisse throwing in the towel on Ambac’s mortgage-backed securities claims; and the slashing of Apple’sbillion-dollar patent infringement damages against Samsung. But one of the great things about legal journalism is that first-day coverage isn’t usually the end of the story, especially when it comes to judicial opinions.

Civil Rights

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Activists at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX, built a free wireless network to help publicize the power of unlicensed “white spaces” technology. The project is part of a broader campaign to persuade the FCC not to auction off this spectrum for the exclusive use of wireless carriers.

• Almost everyone agrees that until recently, the spectrum allocated for broadcasting television channels was used inefficiently. In less populous areas, many channels sat idle. And channels were surrounded by “guard bands” to prevent adjacent channels from interfering with each other. A coalition that includes technology companies such as Google and Microsoft and think tanks such as the New America Foundation has been lobbying the FCC to open this unused spectrum up to third parties.

DRM

• The knight who invented the World Wide Web came to SXSW to point out a few ways in which we’re still doing it wrong.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Last November, Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells wrote a piece on the Canada – EU Trade Agreement in which he expressed doubt about the ability to conclude the deal (“Everybody connected to the negotiations assures me there will be a deal. Every public sign I see makes me think there won’t.”). I was skeptical about the prospect of years of negotiations falling apart and expected the political level meetings in November to wrap things up. They didn’t. Last month, International Trade Minister Ed Fast and his European counterpart Karel de Gucht tried again. Still no deal. While Fast wants everyone to believe that momentum is building toward an agreement, it clearly is not. Over the last year, Canada’s lead lawyer on the negotiations resigned, Canada’s lead agricultural negotiator was re-assigned, and the EU’s lead negotiator has added the EU – Vietnam agreement to his responsibilities with rumours that he will head the EU – Japan trade talks. Fast says he won’t negotiate the agreement in the media and then proceeds to do exactly that by staking out positions on agriculture and investment. The same business groups that have been lobbying for the deal issue a public letter on the agreement that does little other than promise “future support.”

Copyrights

• The ruling is intended to discourage lawsuits that have a “chilling effect on creativity.”

• On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on an issue that always causes trouble — when it is permissible to use a short clip of copyrighted material.

• Porn-trolling firm Prenda Law is getting dressed down in federal court today. Ars will have a more thorough update when our own reporter gets out of court, but some basics about what is happening are becoming clear based on early tweets.

• Brett Gibbs, the former Prenda lawyer who was first told to show up and explain himself, is there. So too is his attorney, who has been “awfully quiet” according to Adam Steinbaugh. (Steinbaugh tweeted several observations during a break in the proceedings.) Gibbs has been distancing himself from the firm’s actions recently; it’s John Steele and Paul Hansmeier who are seen as the brains behind the operation.

• A federal appeals court has rejected a major record label’s effort to undermine the legal safe harbor provided to user-generated content sites by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Under that 1998 legislation, sites like YouTube and Flickr are immune from copyright liability as long as they promptly respond to takedown requests by copyright holders. The safe harbor has become a foundation of the Internet economy, allowing entrepreneurs to build new user-generated content sites without worrying about being held responsible for their users’ infringing uploads.

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