Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 20, 2011
by sjvn01
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Libya turns off the Internet and the Massacres begin

First, Libya blocked news sites and Facebook. Then, beginning Friday night, according to Arbor Networks, a network security and Internet monitoring company, announced that Libya had cut itself off from the Internet. Hours later the Libyan dictator’s solders started slaughtering protesters. As of Sunday afternoon, U.S. Eastern time the death toll was above 200 in the city of Benghazi alone.

Welcome to 2011. While dictators in the most repressive regimes, such as North Korea and Cuba, have long kept Internet contact to the world to a bare minimum, less restrictive dictatorships, such as Egypt and Libya left the doors to the Internet cracked open to the public. Now, though, realizing that they could no longer hide their abuses from a world a Twitter tweet away, the new model autocracies, such as Libya and Bahrain have realized that they need to cut their Internet links before bringing out the guns.

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February 18, 2011
by sjvn01
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Banshee vs. Ubuntu Linux on Revenue sharing

When Banshee, the popular Mono-based open-source media player was first included by default in the next version of Ubuntu Linux , Banshee’s developers thought this was great news. But, then Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company decided that they wanted 75% of any revenue from Banshee’s built-in connection to the Amazon music store-revenue that Banshee was already donating all of to the GNOME Foundation.

Now, this isn’t a lot of money–As of February 1, 2011 Banshee had raised $3,077 for GNOME–but it was the principle of the thing. So when Canonical, “concerned with how our [Banshee] Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store.” and proposed two options: “Canonical disables the Amazon store by default (you could enable it in a few easy steps) but leaves the affiliate code alone (100% still to GNOME), or Canonical leaves the Amazon store enabled, but changes the affiliate code and takes a 75% cut.”

The Banshee developers “unanimously to decline Canonical’s revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent” As my buddy Joe Brockmeier explained in his column on the Banshee/Ubuntu conflict, “Canonical were worried that their music service wasn’t competitive enough with Amazon MP3.” They had reason. Brockmeier continued, after all, “It isn’t. Amazon has aggressive pricing and (from what I’ve seen) a better selection. Amazon is also aggressive with promotions and offering free music, which makes it a fairly attractive service to people looking for new music as well as trying to fill out their music collection with music they already are aware of.”

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February 17, 2011
by sjvn01
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Bahrain’s death toll grows and its Internet slows

Bahrain’s dictatorship looked at what has happened in Tunis and Egypt and decided that bullets would serve its cause better than relenting to its people’s call for ballots and reform. This morning, mercenaries of Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf country, overran a camp of sleeping protesters killing at least four of them. At the same time, it appears that Bahrain has started strangling the country’s Internet connection to keep news from coming in or out of the country.

Sources at Arbor Networks, a network security company, told me that “Bahrain has significantly increased its filtering of Internet traffic in response to growing political unrest.” While the Bahrain Internet has remained up, unlike Egypt’s Internet, it’s averaging a pronounced 10-20% reduction in traffic volumes.

The data for Arbor’s analysis was collected by its ATLAS (Active Threat Level Analysis System) network. This system collects Internet traffic data from about 120 worldwide ISPs.

Others have noticed this decrease as well. As New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof, who is reporting from Bahrain, tweeted, “Why slow the Internet? The #Bahrain govt view seems to be that if it isn’t uploaded on YouTube, it hasn’t happened.” Al Jazeera is also reporting that there are Internet slow-downs in-country and that some Web sites are being blocked.

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February 17, 2011
by sjvn01
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Open Source Obama

Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS).

Drupal, for those of you who don’t know it, is an excellent CMS. According to a 2010 survey by Water & Stone, a digital marketing agency, “WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal dominate the marketshare (PDF Link) and brand strength ratings in the open source CMS market. The Big Three lead in almost every metric and we have seen little this year to indicate that their leadership is being challenged in the near term. ”

It’s easy to see why. While WordPress is great for blogging, and indeed it can be used for massive publishing platforms such as ZDNet, but you have to built onto WordPress to make it a full-scale CMS. While, starting with WordPress 3.x, the popular blogging program is becoming more and more like a complete CMS Drupal, along with Joomla!, work well for people who want a ready-go-platform for sophisticated CMSs.

That’s one of the reasons why Obama’s White House went with Drupal. Since then, the White House hasn’t just used it. They’ve contributed to it.

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February 16, 2011
by sjvn01
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Freedom Box: Freeing the Internet one Server at a time

Free software isn’t about free services or beer, it’s about intellectual freedom. As recent episodes such as censorship in China, the Egyptian government turning off the Internet, and Facebook’s constant spying, have shown, freedom and privacy on the Internet are under constant assault. Now Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and renowned free software legal expert, has proposed a way to combine free software with the original peer-to-peer (P2P) design of the Internet to liberate users from the control of governments and big brother-like companies: Freedom Box.

In a recent Freedom in the Clouds speech in NYC, Moglen explained what he sees as the Internet’s current problems and his proposed solution. First, here’s the trouble with the Internet today as Moglen sees it:

[6:13] “It begins of course with the Internet. Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent free standing entity who’s volition is equivalent to the human beings who control it … But it never really worked out that way.”

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February 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux

September 8th 2008 was one of the worst days ever for the London Stock Exchange (LSE), and high-end Windows server-based applications. That was the day that the LSE came to a crashing stop. What happened? While the LSE has never come clean on the whole story, my sources told me that the LSE’s Windows-based .NET TradElec stock exchange had crashed. What we do know is that the CEO who had brought Windows and TradElec in was fired, TradElec was dumped, and a Novell SUSE Linux-based platform was brought in to replace it.

Today, February 14th, the LSE’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange took over and everything just worked. It did take longer to switch to Linux than expected, because of what the LSW first called “sabotage” but later put down to “human error” in late 2010. On its first day, out LSE ran like a charm.

It’s not the only stock exchange that’s found that Linux worked better. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa is moving to Millennium Exchange. The LSE’s parent company is in the process of acquiring the Toronto stock exchange so it will soon be using Linux as well.

Novell’s not the only Linux company doing well by the stock exchanges. The Qatar Exchange, a major Persian Gulf Exchange, recently migrated from AIX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). These exchanges were only following in the footsteps many other stock and commodity exchanges that had moved to Linux.

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