For the second week of May 2012: Walters Museum uploads 19,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons, 2600 looking for help on 2013 calendar, 7.5 billion dollars worth of hardware last year has shipped world-wide with Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth says countries with hard limits on what can be patented will do better, and the Password Protection Act of 2012 has been filed.
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©2012 Poobah Records, available under the terms of an Attribution license.
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May 11th 2012 / The Tom Coston Show with Red Rosie
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For the second week of May 2012: Walters Museum uploads 19,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons, 2600 looking for help on 2013 calendar, 7.5 billion dollars worth of hardware last year has shipped world-wide with Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth says countries with hard limits on what can be patented will do better, and the Password Protection Act of 2012 has been filed.
- The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. On March 26, uploading was completed. Much of the work was by Dylan k from Walters Art Museum, Jarekt with after-upload metadata internationalization and categorization, Aude with metadata preparation, Jeremyb with technical assistance, SarahStierch with online and offline support and categorization. The collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join the Wikimedia Commons collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files. You can view more works at art.thewalters.org
- Help “2600, The Hacker Quarterly” compile the 2013 hacker calendar. The theme is surveillance. Their release reads, “(…)If you know of a particularly good example of surveillance technology at work, or perhaps a funny or ironic image that we could capture, please let us know by emailing calendar<<at>>2600.com. We’re not looking for photographers at the moment but we are looking for ideas (…).
- Cory Doctorow writes on BoingBoing, “Here’s an eye-popping stat from Canonical’s VP of sales and business development Chris Kenyon, speaking at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit: the free operating system Ubuntu (a flavor of GNU/Linux) will soon ship on 5% of all new PCs.” Phoronix reports that Chris Kenyon from Canonical also stated that, “Last year Ubuntu shipped on 7.5 billion dollars worth of hardware.”
- On May 2nd on the BBC Leo Kelion published an article with Mark Shuttleworth, a lead for Ubuntu, that brought some attention to the subject of software patents. Shuttleworth said towards closing, “It’s basically impossible to ship any kind of working software without potentially trampling on some patent somewhere in the world, and it’s completely impossible to do anything to prevent that. The patents system is being used to slow down a lot of healthy competition and that’s a real problem. I think that the countries that have essentially figured that out and put hard limits on what you can patent will in fact do better.”
- On May 9th, Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut and Representative Martin Heinrich from New Mexico filed the Password Protection Act of 2012 in the Senate and House to prevent employers from strong-arming employers and job applicants into sharing information from their personal computing. The bill protects employers from coercing employees into providing access to information held on any computer that isn’t owned or controlled by their employer. Let your representative and senators know that you support this bill and other bills that help protect personal privacy. Capital switchboard numbers are (202) 224-3121, (888) 818-6641 and (888) 355-3588.