Chris, McGreal, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, took to the road last month to report on how Americans living along Route 66–made famous in John Steinbeck’s fictional Grapes of Wrath journey–are faring during the recession.

You might think McGreal quickly encountered “real Americans” protesting President Obama’s “socialist” healthcare agenda by hurling insults at town hall meetings. Cable news channels are full of these images, which together portray the United States as a giant angry grassroots rally against reform-minded policies.

Odd, then, that McGreal reports this:

The outbursts against President Obama’s healthcare plans filling television screens, with opponents calling him a Nazi and accusing him of planning death committees to do in old people, are to a large degree manufactured by the same people who use similar tactics to oppose abortion.

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Pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount, on 24th August Stockholm’s district court ordered aggressive action to remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet.

The court ordered the site’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, to disconnect the site from the Internet or face penalties of 500,000 kronor ($70,600). The ISP complied immediately – it had no choice if they were to comply with the law.

The Pirate Bay was quickly back up with a new bandwidth supplier but now several Swedish political parties are being openly critical of the law used to threaten Black Internet with fines as punishment for failing to stop the actions of others. The politicians are now calling for a change in the law.

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Open Source

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means “false” or “fake”. So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there’s more fauxpen stuff than ever. In his post Tristan issues a fresh warning about some of what he calls “a venus flytrap of technology”. His definitions:

• Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

• Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t. (continue reading…)

µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

via torrentfreak.com

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has turned up the heat on the wireless industry expanding its probe of mobile phone practices following widespread complaints about a lack of competition, openness and innovation.

The “Notice of Inquiry,” announced during a Thursday agency meeting, expands on open FCC proceedings, including a look into exclusive contracts that lock phones to provider networks, and the anti-competitive blocking of applications and services.

With the new inquests the agency is broadening its investigation into innovation and consumer choice in the wireless marketplace. Issues that will come under consideration in this proceeding will likely include exorbitant text-messaging and termination fees, device and application blocking, and others.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are the two largest carriers in the marketplace controlling more than 60 percent of mobile phone accounts in the U.S. (continue reading…)

NY Times

The New York Times gets Net Neutrality right again, and again, and again. In their fourth editorial in support of Net Neutrality the newspaper’s editors write:

“A good bill that would guarantee so-called net neutrality has been introduced in the House. Congress should pass it, and the Obama administration should use its considerable power to make net neutrality the law. “

Why? According to the Times, we can’t let Internet service providers prioritize certain content over others.

Allowing these companies to become the Internet’s gatekeepers would undermine the democratic nature of the Web, which has made it such a great engine for free speech and economic growth.

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A 15-year old Belgian by the name of Salvatore is the latest victim in a series of mysterious iPhone explosions that have captured the attention of France’s and the European Commissions’ consumer affair watchdogs. Details are scarce for the moment, but according to local news reports the teenager was holding his iPhone in his hand, about to make a call, when the device suddenly ‘imploded’. The incident didn’t cause any serious injuries but reportedly gave Salvatore a headache for a couple of days. He has been promised a free replacement unit by Apple but hasn’t yet received a new phone.

There have earlier been numerous reports of exploding iPhone devices in the United States, United Kingdom and France, with most recently about ten cases having emerged in France where the official competition, consumer affairs and fraud watchdog DGCCRF has now launched an investigation to find out whether the popular Apple smartphone could pose a threat to consumers. Apple, which has sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods to date, said it had been informed of the French cases, but would not comment until it had closely examined the damaged phones.

Update: Apple has now said iPhones turned in by customers in France and elsewhere in Europe with shattered screens showed external pressure that would have caused the cracking. More on Bloomberg and Techmeme.

In one instance, a French teenager claimed he was hit in the eye with a glass shard when the screen of his iPhone cracked up. He said he would seek a full refund and file suit for damages. In another case, Apple came under fire for allegedly asking a young British girl’s family to sign a confidentiality agreement (aka a gagging order) before it would agree to refund her.

Earlier this month, Apple reportedly informed the European Commission that it regards all reported iPhone explosion cases as isolated incidents and have no evidence of a general problem. The European Commission, which has stated that the U.S. technology giant has been very cooperative, has asked all 27 EU nations to keep it informed of any problems under the community’s rapid alert system for dangerous consumer products, known as RAPEX.

(Image via QuickPWN)

via techcrunch.com

Check out this Chart

Hot on the heels of the news of UNIX’s 40th anniversary comes a Linux Foundation report entitled Who Writes Linux. This report investigates who is contributing to the Linux kernel, and how much: “Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different companies have contributed to the kernel. The Linux kernel, thus, has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies which are fierce competitors in other areas.” Wow!

It bears noting that an analysis like this is only available because Linux is open source software. You can look through the changelogs and project history to see who has done what, who’s been attributed with doing what, etc etc.

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Unix

Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod.

Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.

Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE pulled the plug on an ambitious project to create an operating system called Multics.

The idea was to make better use of the resources of mainframe computers and have them serve many people at the same time.

“With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably,” said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix’s early years.

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Etherpad

Better-known offerings like Google Docs and Zoho Writer are now spurring intense innovation among competing start-ups in the realm of Web-driven word processing environments for Linux and other OS.

Online word processor EtherPad, for example, is the creation of a group of ex-Google employees who came together to form a start-up named Appjet. Unlike Google Docs, EtherPad lets you work online with friends and colleages in “absolute realtime.”

ScribTeX, an online writing and editing environment designed mainly for scientific documents, also draws its direct inspiration from the generically oriented Google Docs.

In last week’s discussion of Google Docs, Zoho, and Adobe’s Buzzword, we touched on a few of the advantages online word processors hold over word processing software such as OpenOffice.org and Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice.

For one thing, because online word processors are browser-based, they can generally run easily on just about any PC, ranging from small netbooks to larger systems already consumed by other applications.

Moreover, by and large, documents written in online word processors can be stored in the cloud, and then accessed from just about any Linux, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows machine.

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