● 07.15.15

● Links 15/7/2015: Linux in Prison, Canonical ‘IP’ Dispute

Posted in News Roundup at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Adobe is not having a good time right now. Its Flash product has more security holes than Swiss cheese, making it a recurring target for hackers and bad guys. The tech world owes Steve Jobs an apology for poo-pooing his choice to disallow Flash from iOS. Things have gotten so bad, that Mozilla is blocking it by default as a major security risk.

• If you’re looking for a new Linux distribution, don’t let the choices overwhelm you. This list of rising distributions will get you off to a great start.

• Dabbling for the first time in Linux starts with choosing a Linux distribution. A typical “Linux” system is built up of software from many different open-source projects, including the Linux kernel. Linux distributions—or “distros”—are the projects that package all this software into an easily installable, usable operating system.

• Each one of these laptops has one or two really great points counterbalanced by one or two unfortunate compromises. Usually, you’re either trading performance for general aesthetics and build quality or the other way around. Chromebooks with nice screens tend to have slower internals, and Chromebooks with better internals are usually generic plastic laptops with faded, cheap LCD panels. And of course, there’s always the Chromebook Pixel, perfect in pretty much every way except that $999 price tag.

• Chromebooks have been red-hot on Amazon’s bestseller list for a long time, with many people defecting to Chromebooks from Windows and OS X laptops. The Asus Chromebook Flip is a convertible device that sells for $250. Ars Technica has a full review of the Chromebook Flip.

Server

• The latest list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Top500 June 2015, shows the fastest of the fast growing ever more powerful. It also shows Linux is still number one with a bullet when it comes to supercomputing.

• “The real focus is the roughly $20 billion Linux server market, which is where we’re focused for growth, and we’re a small part of that today on Power,” Balog said. “So I view it as $20 billion of upside for me to go after and all of that is competitive against x86.”

Kernel Space

• Sasha Levin, the maintainer of the Linux 3.18 kernel series, announced recently the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.18.18, an LTS (Long Term Support) branch that receives security patches and bug fixes for a couple of years then regular kernel branches.

• I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the idea of operating system kernels to be some mysterious and esoteric programming skill. Its importance cannot be overstated of course, but I’ve always felt that kernel programming and regular programming were two very separate skills.

• I’ve recently had some patches merged into the Linux kernel, and thought it might be interesting to describe what I learnt from this brief dip into kernel development and how someone who is new to it might go about getting into this space.

Graphics Stack

• Nvidia is making some changes to the way it’s installing its drivers on the Linux systems and they are now using a new kernel module source layout. It’s not something that will directly impact users, but it’s interesting to see that Nvidia is starting to shake things a little bit.

Applications

• If you work with open source servers (such as the world’s most popular web server, Apache), you know a massive number of tools are available to you. They range from security to functionality to monitoring… to just about anything you can imagine. But if you were to compile a single list of tools to include on your open source server farm, what would that list look like?

• My own list tends to fluctuate on any given day. But almost always, certain tools stay on it. Here are the tools I rely on the most. (NOTE: This list does not include such things as basic Apache mod tools or the big four (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP— LAMP.)

• If you’ve ever taken a digital photograph into GIMP to remove red eye or an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, or crop out a finger that got into the edge of the frame, then you are practically a compositor. A “comp artist,” as they are called in the industry, specializes in taking disparate moving images and placing them in the same frame, usually to make it appear that the different elements were shot at the same time. On the big screen, you’ll see this in nearly every movie since 1933′s King Kong (or thereabouts), but the art has reached a science in the digital realm, where some movies are practically not so much as edited as they are superimposed.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Volgarr the Viking, a 2D platforming game built by Crazy Viking Studios, has been released for Linux users on the GOG.com digital distribution platform.

• Lucius II, a third-person action game developed and published on Steam for Linux by Shiver Games, will be released for Linux users, according to an entry in the Steam database.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Together with some friends we visited the LinuxTag in Stuttgart and afterwards founded a local Free Software user group. We helped each other to install Free Software on our computers, configuring them to be routers, mail/print or file servers. I enjoyed learning with others, exchanging ideas, trying to fix problems. I subscribed to many mailing lists, and was eager to participate in Free Software events.

• The KDevelop frontend for Krazy tools has been ported to KF5, so it now works with the KF5 version of KDevelop.

• On the user interaction side, the past years have accompanied our interaction designers with visual artists. This is clearly visible when comparing Plasma 4 to Plasma 5. We have help from a very active group of visual designers now for about one and a half year, but have also adopted stricter visual guidelines in our development process and forward-thinking UI and user interaction design. These improvements in our processes have not just popped up, they are the result of a cultural shift towards opening the KDE also to non-coding contributors, and creating an atmosphere where designers feel welcome and where they can work productively in tandem with developers on a common goal. Again, this shows in many big and small usability, workflow and consistency improvements all over our software.

• Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

• We’ve addressed this in many ways so far: we’ve optimized the code for performance so it’s more responsive and starts reasonably fast, we’ve made sure most done is accessible using the keyboard so we don’t feel clumsy and overwhelmed by all the options.

• [...]

• One of the developments that have struck me the most during last years is Kate. Instead of focusing on the editor, it went the KDevelop route: it has started to offer all of the information at once (especially odd, given that there’s quite some feature overlapping).

Distributions

New Releases

• We have been recently informed by Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator of the 4MLinux project, that the upcoming point release of the 4MLinux 13.0 distribution has entered development and that Beta builds are now available for download and testing.

• Alpine Linux development team announced on July 14 the availability for download of the second maintenance release of the server-oriented Alpine Linux 3.2 operating system.

• The Solus operating system is coming along, and developers are constantly making improvements to it. The most recent iteration got a few fixes and small changes, but the most important aspect is the fact that the boot time has been reduced considerably.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

Ballnux/SUSE

• On July 14, SUSE LLC had the great pleasure of announcing that they will provide a new partner program expansion which brings support for 64-bit ARM server processors to their award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 computer operating system.

• Now that 64-bit ARM processors are starting to generate some interest inside the data center, providers of Linux distributions like Suse are starting to get in line.

• Today Suse announced that version 12 of Suse Enterprise Linux will be supported on 64-bit ARM server processors from AMD, AppliedMicro, and Cavium powering servers by Dell, HP, Huawei, and SoftIron.

Red Hat Family

• In infrastructure, the company has the RHEL OpenStack Platform. For application development it has OpenShift, a platform as a service now on its third version. Red Hat rolled out extensive support for containers in RHEL and OpenShift too. Cormier says Red Hat is “well into that journey” of bringing open source products across the entire infrastructure stack.

• Being first to release a new technology can give a company an advantage in the marketplace, but when the product isn’t true to your brand, it can backfire. Red Hat, a world leader in open-source software, learned this lesson in 2008 when it acquired the tech firm Qumranet in an attempt to move into virtualization, a technology that allows computers to simultaneously run multiple operating systems.

• Many big names in the storage industry have been jumping on the Ceph train. And why shouldn’t they? It does it all. Well, almost. Originally developed by Inktank and later acquired by Red Hat, Ceph is a software-defined scale-out data storage solution. It supports Object, Block, and File storage. It also exposes a RESTful API that supports both OpenStack and Amazon S3. What is there to not like about it?

Fedora

• Many Fedora users take advantage of the fact that Fedora is internationalized, which means it can be used by people that communicate in different languages. Fedora provides support for displaying information on the screen for many different languages. There is also support for different input methods allowing users to input text for native languages where the number of characters is greater than keys on their keyboard.

• Container technology has lead to several other areas of development and one of them being an atomic operating system that sandboxes applications and delivers updates in a single image. Red Hat started their Project Atomic to provide applications in a containerized format and produced Atomic Host as the tiny OS on which they’d run. It didn’t take long before planners began speaking of doing similar for Fedora and now developers are in the early planning stages of bringing this idea to fruition.

Debian Family

• Marketing to FOSS is radically different from general ads to consumers or to other businesses. To start with, FOSS can be deeply suspicious about exploitation and free-riding from business outsiders. Just as importantly, FOSS contributors are often as intelligent as they like to think, and would prefer to make decisions based on information rather than emotional appeals. For these reason, FOSS marketing needs a delicate touch in order to reach its target audience.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is preparing to launch a new major update for Ubuntu phones and we now have a few more details about the new features, improvements, and fixes that are going to land very soon.

• A libwmf vulnerability has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury was happy to announce a few minutes ago the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place earlier today, July 14, 2015, on the Ubuntu’s official IRC channels.

• On July 14, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch development team, informing us that the OTA-5 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system was delayed for the next Monday, July 20, 2015.

• Meizu might be feeling similarly anxious, as this is its first major release in Europe, having previously focused on producing smartphones for the firm’s home nation of China.

• Ubuntu developers are making some really interesting progress with the upcoming Wily Werewolf release, and they have revealed some of the work that’s being done for the desktop. It’s not much to look at, but there are a couple of items that should be mentioned.

• Meizu has started shipping its MX4 Ubuntu Edition to a select few, and we now have a chance to test it. The review is not yet ready, as we’re waiting for a new major update, but we can give you a first impression, and we all know that first impressions are everything.

• A vulnerability that would allow users to crash Bind with specially crafted network traffic has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

• Canonical is rolling out an over-the-air update for smartphones running its Ubuntu software. Ubuntu OTA-5 adds one key new feature, a few smaller features and bug fixes, and lays the groundwork for a very important new feature that probably won’t work on most phones currently running Ubuntu software.

Devices/Embedded

• Hardkernel unveiled a $74, open-spec “Odroid-XU4″ SBC equipped with an octacore Exynos5422 SoC, 2GB RAM, eMMC flash, a GbE port, and dual expansion headers.

• The WeTek OpenELEC is a Linux media player dedicated to Kodi with OpenELEC pre-installed that gives you access to IPTV services with the extra of being compatible with modular DVB tuners.

Phones

Tizen

• Tizen has previously made its way onto the Raspberry PI 2 Development Board, but 3D acceleration was not working at that point. Well, the good news is that the Team over at the Samsung Open Source Group have got the 3D Acceleration working now.

Android

• If you want a desktop PC, you’re typically going to have to fork over several hundred dollars (Windows OEM licensing alone can make up a significant portion of that). But what if you could turn open-sourced Android into a serviceable desktop OS? That’s what Jide is trying to do, with its ultra-cheap Remix Mini PC.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• At the recent Red Hat Summit, Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst talks with Network World about new IT processes and why companies should focus on open source.

• Xerte Project’s Open Source Initiative membership furthers both organization’s commitment to growing open source community and collaboration within institutions of higher education.

• The US National Security Agency has offered up one of its cyber security tools for government departments and the private sector to use freely to help beef up their security and counter threats.

• Not sure which tools belong in your open source server toolkit? Here are 10 solid go-to tools to get you started.

Events

• Open source software supplier Obsidian Systems invites OS enthusiasts, developers, geeks and friends to the next ‘Free Beer Session’ on 27 August 2015. This session, the 17th in the series, will offer delegates fresh insight into the open source industry, challenges and opportunities.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I’ve dogfooded Firefox OS since its early beginnings and have some of the early hardware (hamachi, unagi, One Touch Fire, ZTE Open, Geeksphone Keon, Flame and ZTE Open C). It was good to hear some of the plans for Firefox OS 2.5 that were discussed at Whistler, but I wanted to take the time and model of this post and remix it for Firefox OS. Firefox OS you are great and free but you are not perfect and you can be the mobile OS that I need.

• As the zero days in Adobe Flash continue to pile up, Mozilla has taken the unusual step of disabling by default all versions of Flash in Firefox.

• The move is a temporary one as Adobe prepares to patch two vulnerabilities in Flash that were discovered as a result of the HackingTeam document dump last week. Both vulnerabilities are use-after-free bugs that can be used to gain remote code execution. One of the flaws is in Action Script 3 while the other is in the BitMapData component of Flash.

SaaS/Big Data

• Recently, all-in-one appliances have been much in the news. A few days ago, I covered Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, which deliver OpenStack and all the hardware resources you need for a deployment in one hardware/software entity. Then, Cloudera, which focuses on Apache Hadoop, and Teradata, a big data analytics and marketing tools company, announced the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop with Cloudera.

• Laura is the founder and lead consultant for SafeStack, a security training, development, and consultancy firm. What does that mean exactly? SafeStack helps organizations choose the right kind of security best practices for them. Then, Laura’s team shows them how to implement those new-found security protocols. This usually calls for a strong dose of workplace culture change, which might sound like a tall order, but Laura tells me in this interview “we want security to be any empowering tool for growth rather than a costly hindrance to innovation.”

• In the beginning of the open source OpenStack cloud effort, there were two projects – Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Swift is an integrated part of most OpenStack distributions but it is also the focus for a standalone company called SwiftStack, which was founded by Joe Arnold.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• After over four years of development, including missed deadlines on general availability, the open source Drupal 8 content management system (CMS) finally appears to be nearing the finish line.

• Drupal, one of the world’s most popular CMS technologies, is used by many high-profile organizations, notably Whitehouse.gov, the flagship website of the U.S. government. While Drupal founder Dries Buytaert in 2012 announced Drupal 8 would be generally available in December 2013, that date passed with no release.

• Why is being open source so important to us? At its most basic, being open source means users have access to and can manipulate PrestaShop code to make improvements or develop technical answers to address specific business needs. But more importantly, open source represents accessibility and flexibility. It’s an open-door policy versus the private club mentality of proprietary software. Our community is built around this open source ethos; it’s the source of our strength and it’s how we’re contributing to a more democratic e-commerce market.

• At Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center, our researchers and clinicians have pushed boundaries to generate new knowledge in patient care and cancer research for more than 130 years. This culture of innovation allows our scientists to continually develop new methods for treatment and work tirelessly to discover more effective strategies to prevent, control, and ultimately cure cancer.

Education

• SIGES is a free, open source, available in French, Haitian Creole, and English. It is customizable to suit the schools: primary and secondary; professional and technical; private and public; in urban and rural areas, the school networks, sponsorship organizations, educational projects, etc…

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• If you need further evidence that container technology is all the rage, just follow the money. Sysdig, focused on bringing infrastructure and application monitoring to the world of containers and microservices, has announced a $10.7 million Series A funding round led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). In conjunction with the funding, Sysdig announced the general availability of Sysdig Cloud, which it bills as “the first monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting platform specializing in container visibility, which is already used by more than 30 enterprise customers.

BSD

• The PC-BSD crew has released version 0.8.5 of their Lumina desktop.

• Lumina 0.8.5 has a speed boost for the user button, desktop icons have improved styling and appearance, a new desktop plug-in is present for monitoring system hardware sensors, and there’s a desktop plugin container for custom QML/QtQuick scripts. There are also updated translations, new PC-BSD/FreeBSD packages, etc.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has often rubbed other free software groups the wrong way when it came to open-source licenses. On July 15, Canonical, with support from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), have changed Ubuntu’s licensing terms. The FSF states that Canonical’s new intellectual property (IP) policies “unequivocally comply with the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and other free software licenses.”

• Canonical have a legal policy surrounding reuse of Intellectual Property they own in Ubuntu, and you can find it here. It’s recently been modified to handle concerns raised by various people including the Free Software Foundation[1], who have some further opinions on the matter here. The net outcome is that Canonical made it explicit that if the license a piece of software is under explicitly says you can do something, you can do that even if the Ubuntu IP policy would otherwise forbid it.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) have been bickering with Canonical since 2013 over concerns that certain clauses of the Ubuntu IP rights policy seemed to claim to override provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) – something the GPL explicitly forbids.

• Today, Canonical, Ltd. announced an updated “Intellectual Property” policy. Conservancy has analyzed this policy and confirms that the policy complies with the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), but Conservancy and the FSF believe that the policy still creates confusion and possible risk for users who wish to exercise their rights under GPL.

• Compilation copyright is an idea exclusive to the US (or North America anyway). It restricts collections of items which otherwise have unrelated copyright restrictions. A classic example is a book collection of poetry where the poems are all out of copyright but the selection and ordering of poems is new and has copyright owned by whoever did it.

Project Releases

• The world’s most used open-source software solution for accessing shared Windows folders over a network from GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, Samba, has recently been updated to version 4.2.3.

• On July 14, Lubomir Rintel announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of the stable NetworkManager 1.0 network connection management software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• OEP is part of the Norwegian Government’s work to promote transparency and democracy within the public sector. OEP aims to make the Norwegian public sector more open and accessible to citizens. OEP is based upon the Freedom of Information Act and related regulations.

Programming

• Zend, the PHP company, is updating its namesake PHP application server to version 8.5 providing new features and performance for users. The Zend Server 8.5 release builds on the Zend Server 8 milestone which debuted with the Z-Ray application insight technology.

• Perl 6 has been 15 years in the making, and is now due to be released at the end of this year. We speak to its creator to find out what’s going on.

Leftovers

Security

• I won’t pretend to be Steve Jobs—I don’t even own a mock turtleneck—but I have to repeat his words from April 2010: “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.” Flash is a constantly exploited, superannuated bit of technology that useful in the early days of multimedia in web browsers, and now deserves to die.

• When Jobs wrote “Thoughts on Flash” over five years ago, it was in response to the notion that Flash should be available on iOS. At the time, I asked repeatedly for Adobe to stage demonstrations in private using iOS development tools to show Flash running. They never took me up on it, or any other writer that I’m aware of, even though they had the ability. Flash for Android, when it appeared, was terrible. Within two years, it was dead.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The corporate media in both the UK and US are attempting to portray the Iranian desire to have the arms embargo lifted, as a new and extraneous demand that could torpedo the nuclear deal. This is an entirely false portrayal.

• There is a parallel danger in Iran. The Iraq War was totally unjustified and illegal, but Saddam Hussein might nonetheless have evaded it had he boxed a bit more cleverly and allowed some foolish inspectors to wander around his palaces prodding at the teaspoons. Yes the inspections regimes will be galling, even humiliating. But patience will have its rewards. There is real danger though that the hardliners on the Iranian side will be able to muster sufficient local points of power to hamper inspections, thus giving the US and Israeli hardliners an opportunity.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• An American-owned water export company has launched a massive lawsuit against Canada for preventing it from exporting fresh water from British Columbia.

• Sun Belt Water Inc. of California is suing Canada for $10.5 billion US, the Canadian foreign ministry said Friday.

• The suit has been filed under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sun Belt says it has been “mistreated” by the B.C. government.

• Senator Ted Cruz, raising cash for a 2016 presidential bid, was to meet privately Monday in Denver, Colorado with executives from major oil and gas corporations, all members of the pro-fracking lobby group Western Energy Alliance (WEA), according to details of the secret meeting shared with the Center for Media and Democracy.

• The Republican presidential candidate, a climate change denier, is also a leading proponent of opening up federal lands in the west–in fact virtually all lands everywhere–to energy development, and for scrapping regulations on oil and gas development.

Finance

• Greece’s rampant corruption is one of the reasons why the country’s economy is in such a mess. German companies have taken advantage of the system for years in order to secure lucrative deals.

• The International Monetary Fund has set off a political earthquake in Europe, warning that Greece may need a full moratorium on debt payments for 30 years and perhaps even long-term subsidies to claw its way out of depression.

• Prof. Wolff joins GRITtv’s Laura Flanders to talk about Sanders and Socialism. Is socialism still an American taboo?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A new FAIR study finds that NPR commentary is dominated by white men and almost never directly addresses political issues.

Privacy

• I’m currently working on developing a guide to securing iOS devices in a hostile environment (basically, “iPads for activists”). Although iOS is solid, iCloud backup is dangerously insecure, and must be avoided at all costs. Worse, it is enabled by default!

• It was an unusual group. An investigative journalist, a moral philosopher, an internet entrepreneur, a cyber-law academic, a government historian, a computer scientist, a technology exec, a long-time cop, an ex-minister and three former heads of intelligence agencies. I wondered not just how but if we could agree on anything, let alone an entire set of recommendations to reform UK communications surveillance.

• Yet we did. The Royal United Services Institute panel was set up by Nick Clegg, the then deputy prime minister, in response to revelations from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden about the scale of intrusion by US and British intelligence agencies into private lives. Our remit: to look at the legality, effectiveness and privacy implications of government surveillance; how it might be reformed; and how intelligence gathering could maintain its capabilities in the digital age.

• We’ve discussed the “cybersecurity” bill, CISA, that’s been making its way through Congress a few times, noting that it is nothing more than a surveillance expansion bill hidden in “cybersecurity” clothing. As recent revelations concerning NSA’s surveillance authorities have made quite clear, CISA would really serve to massively expand the ability of the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) to do “backdoor searches” on its “upstream” collection. In short, rather than protecting any sort of security threat, this bill would actually serve to give the NSA more details on the kind of “cyber signatures” it wants to sniff through pretty much all internet traffic (that it taps into at the backbone) to collect anything it deems suspicious. It then keeps the results of this, considering it “incidental” collections of information.

• Google has jumped on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon bandwagon with a set of open standards and software interfaces to give Apple’s iBeacon a run for its money.

• Apple rolled out iBeacon in 2013, and has been pushing it as a way for companies to do things like tracking potential customers’ movements as they wander around retail stores.

• Move over iBeacon—today Google is launching “Eddystone,” an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. Bluetooth beacons are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend. They’re little transmitters (usually battery powered) that send out information about a specific point of interest, and that info is then passively picked up by a smartphone or tablet in range of the transmitter. A beacon-equipped bus stop could send out transit times, stores could send promotions to the customers currently in the store, or a museum could send people information about the exhibit they’re standing in front of.

• Open Rights Group has responded to the Report of the Independent Surveillance Review by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

• Their Panel included three former senior security staff, and RUSI are themselves very close to the UK’s defence and security apparatus. Thus the tone of the report was always likely to address the concerns of GCHQ and the Foreign Office before those of civil society. Martha Lane Fox, Ian Walden and Heather Brooke will have had a tough job to help produce a relatively balanced report that does at least go some way to address wider concerns.

• Netzpolitik, the German website defending fundamental freedoms, has been charged for “treason” on 10 July by demand of the president of the German intelligence services. The case will be lead by the federal prosecutor in charge of espionage and terrorism.

Civil Rights

• Having spoken alongside Mhairi at a few meetings, and much admired her, it is rather strange to find her in danger of becoming an object of cult veneration. Just as with Nicola Sturgeon, it seems the shock of seeing the coherent and intelligent articulation of views outside the narrow consensus manufactured by the corporate media and political class, really does strike home to people. They almost never get to hear such views put; Mhairi is being given a hearing because of her youth in her position, but the marginalisation and ridicule will soon kick back in. Above all, Mhairi should remind us of how the Labour Party has completely sold out those they used to represent, and abandoned the task of proposing an intellectually compelling alternative to trickledown.

Intellectual Monopolies

• What exactly is of trade secret concern here? The answer is: the aggregate email addresses of the subscribers. Anyone who wants to show the broad scope of what is protectable as a trade secret will likely mention a customer list. What could be further from patentable subject matter, yet still be of value to its owner as a trade secret, than a customer list? Email addresses of subscribers can be likened in this respect to the classic customer list. Thus misappropriation of the email addresses might be a concern.

Copyrights

• Mega.co.nz has lodged legal threats against a New Zealand based search engine. MegaSearch.co.nz allows users to search Mega.co.nz for content but has attracted the attention of the file-hosting company after using its logos and trademarks without permission. Mega.co.nz is demanding a full shutdown.

• Romanian authorities and the FBI have reportedly coordinated to shut down three sites involved in the unauthorized distribution of movies and TV shows. Several men were detained and various domains were seized amid allegations of criminal copyright infringement, tax evasion and money laundering.

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