Linux Solutions

When small time hacker David C. Kernell broke in to, then McCain running mate, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account, I don’t think he was thinking about the consequences. He now sits in court facing some pretty scary charges – just don’t call him a hacker…

Kernell’s defence attorneys have filed a heap of documents that say Kernell should not be tried as a hacker per say, “Because of the negative connotations evoked by these terms, there is a significant danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, and misleading the jury.”

His lawyers believe that the terms “hacker” and “hacking” have no place in the court case, under the law Kernell is accused of breaking. They say that, “Hackers are commonly portrayed as dangerous criminals who are involved in malicious conduct such as credit card fraud, stealing, intentional disruption of legitimate activities and causing economic damages.”

Kernell caused a media storm when he hacked into Palin’s account when he used readily available information to hack into the Alaskan Governors account. His lawyers say that hackers use “sophisticated means or specialised computer skills”, and that that does not apply to this particular case.

The majority of computer security specialists don’t see that calling Kernell a hacker is justified. With one security expert saying that hacking into the governor’s account was, “something that a teen can figure out, rather than an advanced professional.”

The defence attorneys have posted three defense motions since Kernell was indicted back in October for breaking in to a protected computer without authorization. Kernells father is a Democratic state lawmaker, and looks to be pulling his resources to mount a defense that is more than most computer-crime cases.

One of the motions argues that prosecutors charged Kernell with a felony, hen in fact he should have been charged with a misdemeanour. Under the current law, breaking into someone else’s computer should be classified as a misdemeanour, except for when it is used to enhance a crime.

Jennifer Granick, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks the indictment as “very strangely pled and circular”.

“It’s not surprising given the nature of the charges and given the quality of the indictment that the defendant would see a real opportunity here to make some points in favour of the defendant,” she said

A further motion filed by the defence is seeking to push the trial date from December 16th to next year. To this point the judge has not made a decision on any of the motions, but its fair to say this one will drag on for a while.

The One Laptop per Child Scheme (OLPC) has confirmed that it will start selling its XO laptop through Amazon.com starting Monday.

The XO laptop is to be sold by the company in the same way as the G1G1 program. The customer spend $400 for two laptops, one of which gets sent to a child in a developing country,

Amazon will only sell Linux-based XO laptops, said Jim Getty, the vice president of software engineering at OLPC. A Windows version will not be for sale.

Time to frown slightly if you don’t live in the US, as the XO laptop will only be for sale through Amazon’s US store. However, OLPC are currently investigating the possibility of selling the laptop in other countries.

The laptop was designed for children in developing countries to use to enhance their education, and has received praise for its innovative hardware features, and environmentally friendly design. The laptop comes with 256MB of Ram, a 1GB internal flash storage drive, a 7.5” LDC screen and has wireless networking capabilities.

Depending on how the laptop is used, the XO may include a specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery, which the OLPC claim is more power-efficient than batteries used in commercial laptops.

The laptop can be used in settings that don’t have electricity by using solar power, and can even be run by using a foot pedal or pull string to generate enough energy.

OLPC is a non-profit company hat competes with Intel’s Classmate PC in the global education market. The OLPC scheme face set-back earlier this year due to restructuring of the business and spiralling manufacturing costs, causing them to lose ground in the battle with Intel.

The XO laptop is undergoing an incremental update that should make it faster and allow it to store more data. The update is code-named XO-1 Gen 1.5, and is likely to include a faster processor, more flash storage, and new wireless chip, and improved screen protection from rubber covers. The new version should appear in the first quarter of 2009, say OLPC.

OLPC also announced the 2010 arrival of the XO-2, its next generation laptop, which will feature a software-based touch sensitive keyboard and two touch screen displays.

Microsoft has irrefutably denied any wrong doing after rumours emerged that they had paid-off a Nigerian contractor for $400,000 in an effort to trip up the smooth run of Linux’s move into the government sector.

The media has pounced on the company alleging that Microsoft had offered the sum to a government contractor under a joint marketing agreement last year. The deal reportedly involved the contractor being paid to persuade the government to adopt Microsoft Windows instead of a Linux OS for thousands of school laptops.

A joint marketing agreement was drafted to document a best practice for using technology in education, however it never happened, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. It became clear that one customer would prefer a Linux OS.

“As such, the joint marketing agreement became irrelevant; no such marketing agreement was ever agreed to, and no money was ever spent,” he said.

Aside fro the fact that Linux is freely distributed, its functionality and adaptability have made it the main alternative for anyone who would rather steer clear of the corporate giant Microsoft. Even though the governments of Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa have adopted Linux, and placed departments in schools, Hansen claims Microsoft still has a strong relationship with these governments.

“From our standpoint, those governments, and indeed every customer, should always decide which software solutions meet their needs most appropriately. We strongly believe that governments must carefully consider all costs of acquiring and using a PC, along with the benefits of widespread application availability, maintenance, and training,” he said.

Hansen staunchly defended the Windows platform, saying that although you think your saving money, in actual fact you’ll end up spending more for Linux.

“Further, when the full range of user benefits are taken into account, such as the wide range of applications available, familiarity, and ease-of-use, Windows is often a much better overall value,” he said.

Da, Daa, Dum, Dee, Do, Da, Daa, Dum, Dee, Do, Da, Daa, Dum, Dum, Da, Duum…

In a galaxy not so far away, Red Hat has inextricably linked the worlds of Star Wars and open source, as the president of George Lucas’ Lucasfilm Ltd., Micheline Chau, has joined Red Hat’s board of directors.

Ok, so it may not entirely be big news, but it is perhaps a sign that open source is gaining further acceptance in the movie, online and digital gaming industries.

Over a decade ago, the vast majority of special effects were produced on a network of Unix workstations. These days Windows and Linux-based systems are part of a never-ending struggle for supremacy in effects, and game development.

Its impressive that Red Hat landed such a big fish, Chau looks after a lot of the Star Wars franchise including, Lucasfilm’s motion-picture and television productions, Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, LucasArts Entertainment, Lucas Online, Lucasfilm Animation and Lucas Licensing.

What Chau’s role will be is not confirmed, but it looks like he’s been brought in to help Red Hat get involved in the digital entertainment world.

Much closer to home, OpenOffice.org celebrated 10 million downloads of their OpenOffice 3.0 package.

The newest version of the popular software was released just a month ago, on October 13th, and after just two days had reached an impressive 3 million downloads. The software still sees around 275,000 downloads per day.

John McCreesh, OpenOffice’s marketing project lead, said, “What makes the statistics impressive is that they only record downloads via the OpenOffice.org website, and exclude for example large numbers of Linux users who generally download software from their own distributor.”

McCreesh couldn’t begin to estimate the amount of OpenOffice users, but that “the Community believes it is well on track to reach its declared target of a 40% market share worldwide by 2010.”

Search engine Yahoo uses software called ‘Hadoop’ to provide its web search and advertising. This software can search through vast amounts of data so fast it’d make your head spin.

Hadoop is part of Yahoo’s huge computing grid and is changing the way that Yahoo and other large computer companies extract vast data streams. The code is also used by universities so that it can train up the next generation of computer boffins.

Larry Heck, vice president of search and advertising sciences at Yahoo said that with the software, “It makes it possible to actually take advantage of all the computers that we have hooked together.”

Hadoop improves the relevance of the adverts Yahoo shows on the net by analysing the company’s - 10 terabytes a day - flow of data. For example, if a user was to click from Yahoo Mail to Yahoo Search, then to Yahoo Finance and back again, then Hadoop figures out which ads are most relevant to display n the page.

It’s a pretty stunning piece of software. At a Yahoo sales presentation, they gave this example: If a woman repeatedly reads reviews for sports utilities vehicles, then clicks on vehicle classifieds, then orders a book about helping her child get used to playschool, then the software would surmise that she could be looking to buy a family-sized car.

As part of the companies push for more openness, Yahoo is using the technology not just for boosting its own sales, but on websites owned by the 796 members of a newspaper consortium, who are working at selling more advertising, at a better price.

“In some ways, perhaps it is even more targeted than search advertising,” said Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers, a consortium member.

Where Yahoo is concerned, this innovative approach to web advertising is pretty impressive. When Yahoo first launched Hadoop in 2006 it was selling its search advertising for half the price of Google.

Hadoop’s first task was to build Yahoo’s web index – the largest scale task inside Yahoo. Since then a team of engineers fine-tuned the software and began experimenting on the gigantic sets of data.

“All of a sudden, instead of waiting overnight people could get the results of their experiments in a minute,” said Doug Cutting, a work-at-home dad who created the first version of Hadoop in his spare bedroom as part of an open source search project.

The 44-year-old programmer, who helped to build Apple’s and Excite’s search engines, started what would become the Hadoop project in 2000 because he wanted people to use his code.

Well aware that closed-sourced projects are on their last legs, he used the open source community to contribute suggestions and help iron out the creases. “It was a pretty ambitious goal, destined for failure in the short term but still worth pursuing in the long term,” Cutting said.

With the support of the Apache Foundation, Cutting created a library of code he named “Lucene” and built a web crawler called “Nutch”

In the meantime, Cutting worked as a consultant for companies like the Internet Archive and Yahoo. He made a great amount of progress but after indexing a few hundred million web pages, he realised he was a long way off from indexing the rapidly expanding billions of web pages on the internet.

A solution to the problem of indexing all those pages was to come from the unlikeliest of all places: Google. In 2004, Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat from Google published a paper on MapReduce – the top secret software that Google uses to processes raw data using thousands of computers. Cutting had found his solution: “It pretty much directly addressed the scaling issue we were having.”

Using the information from the paper, Cuting wrote the code for Hadoop, which he named after his son’s toy elephant. Yahoo saw the code, and offered Cutting a position in the company.

A team of engineers played around with the software so it would run reliably on tens of thousands of computers, and researchers used the new software as a data mining tool.

As often happens, word spread fast about the new program, and b the start of this year, Amazon, Facebook and Intel were all using Hadoop for everything from log analysis to modelling earthquakes.

“Hadoop gave me, an ordinary developer, the ability to do something extraordinary,” said Jinesh Varia, from Amazon.

Google also got involves, launching an initiative with IBM to provide major universities with clusters of several hundred computers so students could develop their techniques for parallel programming. As MapReduce was a trade secret, Google and IBM said the students would be taught on Hadoop.

“We are leveraging not only the contribution that we are giving to the software, but the contributions from the larger community as well, and everybody wins from it,” said Heck of Yahoo.

The Open Source community’s worst enemy, Microsoft, have launched a new programme called Microsoft BizSpark.

BizSparc gives small businesses and start up’s a heap of free software and services to encourage them to stick with Microsoft for the future, which for a start-up has to be an attractive offer, especially with the state of the economy to consider.

The interesting thing about this programme is that Microsoft are not just provide SMEs (Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises) with freebie software and a firm pat on the back, but they are giving away other valuable services, such as expert mentoring and marketing assistance. What this means is that if your company plans to stick with Microsoft, you will be taken care of.

It’s worth noting the features that Microsoft are giving/loaning businesses:

• Microsoft Windows Server® (all versions up to and including Enterprise)
• Microsoft SQL Server® (all versions)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server
• Microsoft System Center
• Microsoft BizTalk® Server
• Microsoft Dynamics® CRM (coming soon)
• Access to Microsoft Azure Services Platform
• Free MSDN subscription

The scheme is free to join, but cost $100 to leave.

Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing. They’ve had to sit by while small companies with little or no start-up capital have opted for free open source software alternatives. Microsoft obviously realise the weight behind their name, and are using this to their advantage. Ask yourself this, how often do you see the words “Microsoft” and “free” in the same sentence?

It seems like a solid strategy, but the open source community still stand by the fact that Microsoft will never be open source – and that for many is the only reason to avoid Microsoft products. Microsoft may well be offering free services and products initially but you will have to pay a hell of a lot of money when the free start-up deal comes to a close, and you need to buy the software for real.

I think if you were always planning to use Microsoft tools to build your business, then this scheme could be your answer. However, if you do get sucked in by Microsoft’s vast hype, please take care to ensure you know exactly what you have to do/buy to get out. As a huge business themselves, Microsoft just want your money, and the promise that you’ll use them forever, and ever, and ever…

Today’s computer users are starting to realise that if you want to save money on software, and not pay those pesky license fees, that open source is the future. Freely available on the internet, open source is answer to those who want feature rich applications, but don’t want to/can’t afford to pay the excessive price tag.

Many people believe that government organisations could save an astronomical amount of money if they changed from their (generally) Microsoft powered systems/applications to open source technology, which is more than adequate.

West Virginia state government currently spends millions of dollars per year in license fees to software developers including Microsoft. However, state chief security officer, Kyle Shafer claims that switching to open source would not be beneficial to the government.

“We haven’t done a lot with open source,” he said.

But is he right? There are many cynics around, that denounce open source as either inaccessible, incompatible, or just too much hassle, but anyone reading this should know that that is not the case. Let’s look at OpenOffice, for example. OpenOffice is a free home office software package that is pretty much an exact replica of Microsoft Office; however, the real difference is in the price tag. OpenOffice: Free, Microsoft Office: around £200. The openOffice format can even open most Microsoft documents.

Open source even applies to browsers. Firefox is the second most popular browser on the internet, to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Its constant updates are made by the open source community, and Mozilla actively try to get everyone involved in the development. Companies like Google are in on the open source act as well, offering various programs you can download an tweak/improve/totally cock-up.

There have been attempts in various state of America to mandate that state agencies use open source software. California and Oregon have both dipped their toes in the open source pool, but so far no one has jumped in.

Perhaps the reason for this slow acceptance of open source applications is because of the ‘you get what you pay for’ attitude. Wisconsin made a point of examining the benefits of open source software, but came to the conclusion that the costs of training new staff, coupled with the software’s unreliable nature made it more beneficial to stick with Microsoft products.

The software has other issues like security, and a lack of a technical support team to fix any software problems – you just have to wait for the community to develop a patch, Schafer whined.

This is generally the point that open source falls down. It’s hard to convince anyone to take a risk when you know that you don’t have a technical team on 24hr standby, and you need to rely on a relatively faceless community. The problem for most is that a failure to understand how open source software really works will hold open source down.

The first ever game to be sold with the source code included, Finity Flight: Fight Back, from Curved Infinity Games is to be released shortly.

The Finity Flight: Fight Back (FF:FB) game is released via the MirthKit platform, and is an expansion pack for Finity Flight, and is what the developers claim to be the “first direct hybridization of commercialism and open source philosophy”. What this means is that the game will be sold for a little under $12 and comes complete with the full source code.

The developers say that our “increasing volatile” world of theft countermeasure, FB:FB is a unique development in gaming. Mirthkit firmly believe that this game represents the future of gaming, where it will be viewed as a service, as opposed to being viewed as “information property”.

Mirthkit believe that FF:FB is proof of this new view, claiming that “because gaming is a media, the people will always want more and more”.

Because the game is open, the company feel that it has the benefit of increasing the amount of developer information that is publicly available, which in turn improves the techniques of the game developer community as a whole.

The game itself sounds ok – if a little tired, concept-wise. “Finity Flight: Fight Back takes place shortly after the events of the original Finity Flight. All alone, you’ve repelled the invaders of earth, but instead of simply waiting for them to come back in greater numbers, you are taking the fight to their home turf.”

The expansion pack takes place in space, and adds 15 new levels, four new end-level-bosses, four new types of bad guy to kill, and a load of new unlockable features. Not bad for $11.99.

Mirthkit is a multi-platform online game arcade which provides a complete game-making and publishing package that is free to anyone who wants it. This package allows developers to find new games, as well as modify and sell on anything you come up with.

For those who don’t know, Curved Infinity Games are a Virginia based company who are trying to improve the sustainability of independent game development. Go to their website for more info.

CherryPal has announced that they will be shipping out its, $249, 2 Watt, cloud desktop pc next week, but according to an email from the company’s CEO, Max Seybold, the new company is having some pretty major funding issues – they just haven’t got any money.

An email from Seybold just before Halloween revealed that they have been screwed over “a firm and binding funding agreement with a UK based African-born family. Unfortunately they never followed through and left us high and dry.”

Seybold went on to explain that they sought out investment angels (high powered business men and women with a ton of spare cash) to help balance the company’s books. However, with seven investors interested, and “oral commitments” in place, the stock markets plunging all over the world caused the investors to hold on to their money.

“In a nutshell, we need to raise funds ASAP,” Seybold wrote.

CherryPal’s first PC caught the eye of many as it boasted cloud computing, as well as being more green – the concept involved a small computer with no moving parts, running a low-power hip with 246MB memory and an 8GB hard drive.

Rather than storing files, music and other applications on your hard drive, the CherryPal used Amazon’s S3 service to store your data online for free – a feature funded by advertisements.

The CherryPal’s original release dat was around July, but it had to be pushed back a couple of weeks due to a fault with the systems graphics card. However, two months later CherryPal changed the release date to November 4th.

CherryPal has plans to launch an open source initiative with Freescale in about two weeks time, called “Maraschino”.

Maraschino, Seybold wrote, is to consist of ten sub-projects, starting with embedded Linux, browser optimisation, and local and hosted applications. He believes the scheme is a “combination of Facebook and sourceforge.net”. Seybold said that Freescale will supply free developer boards of the 5121e PowerPC processor for the project.

But with the global economy in meltdown, governments changing, and a general feel that recession is upon us, its understandable that CherryPal as suffering.

Intel has joined with the Taiwanese government as part of its project to put a Linux stack on the Atom Processor. The Microsoft partner said today that it is getting together with Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) to establish a “Moblin Enabling Center” to encourage developer support and interest.

The company is also spending 386 million New Taiwan dollars (£7.14m) into the WiMax technology carrier VMax, which plans to push Taiwan’s first nation-wide 4G WiMax network.

Moblin is a Linux stack that is designed to be fast and light for low-cost, low-power netbooks and nettops.

The Moblin lab is to train an consult device and software vendors, which Intel hopes will encourage the development of more Moblin-based devices arriving sooner to the market. The company’s main contribution will be to fill the Center with trained engineers.

“With a shared vision to accelerate mobility industry momentum, our collaboration with Intel positions Taiwan to further capitalize on opportunities created by the next phase of the Internet,” said Yiin Chi-Min, Minister of the Taiwan MOEA.

Intel had previously funded 29 WiMax companies worldwide, VMax is the 30th.

“With Intel Capital’s support, VMax intends to become the first-mover in bringing the benefits of high-speed wireless broadband to Taiwan,” said C.K. Liu, Vmax chairman.

“Vmax intends to be the first to deploy a 2.5GHz WiMax network in Asia Pacific,” he added.

Intel say the WiMax service will be available in Tawain in the first half of 2009.