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MetaFilter reports on the neatest hack I’ve heard about for a while. A BBC systems architect wrote a Last.fm plugin that submitted all the songs played on BBC’s 6radio channel to a Last.fm account called Sekrit.  Not only can you see what kind of "musical taste" BBC’s player robots have, but you can also check out what kind of friends the channel has. Judging from these statistics, I just might try this channel myself and see if I like it :)
 

When the ForeverGeek blogger MacGyver noticed that two stories on the Digg front page were dugg by the same 16 people in the exact same order, he got curious. After all, Digg is supposed to be a social and user-driven technology news website, with no editorial control. Digg is one of the poster boys of the Web2.0 buzz, right up there along with Flickr, del.icio.us and the various AJAX application services. So, what does a blogger like MacGyver do if he suspects the system is rigged? Naturally, he blogs about it.

Uh-oh, wrong move. All of a sudden, strange things started happening on Digg, as described on McGyver’s blog entry from the next day. This of course is just his side of the story, but others have taken into investigating the matter as well. Roblomoso posted about the matter on Google Blogoscoped and was banned from Digg. Naturally, ForeverGeek in its entirety was banned as well.

I’d say this is editorial control, and not very "user-driven". If users don’t like ForeverGeek’s stories, they wouldn’t digg them and all would be well, no? That’s how the social web is supposed to work, and that’s definitely how Digg claims to work. Digg founder Kevin Rose sort-of responed to the mess, but didn’t really succeed in explained anything, as illustrated by McGyver’s reply. What does matter is that ForeverGeek stories are suddenly starting to appear on Digg again.

People and communities do fight in real life all the time of course, so why wouldn’t they do the same on the internet (let alone the chaos that makes up the "Web2.0"?) Nothing new in that. I guess my point is that it’s just as sad in both cases.

Noticed that the fastest growing blog on wordpress.com is “Linux for human beings?” by Danny. The blog is a report of Danny’s real-life experiment of replacing Windows with Linux. He honestly tells us the good and the bad stuff a new user faces trying to use Ubuntu without geek help around. Hang in there Danny, lots of people have gotten their Ubuntu boxen working beautifully in the end!

Update: I completely missed this: the second fastest growing blog is “Ubuntu newbie” by Cornell :)

In the middle of a technical debate about virtual memory in different kernels, Linus Torvalds showed again his charm and tact by claiming that "Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots." After Slashdot reported this, Linus wrote a nice, friendly response on his own medium (the lkml), not on Slashdot of course, pointing out that the Slashdot people "usually are smelly and eat their boogers, and have an IQ slightly lower than my daughters pet hamster". He is in a position to say this because not only is he "the smartest person around" but also "incredibly good-looking".

This flamebait is a worthy continuation of a long tradition of Linus’ communication, starting back in 1992 with his own master when it comes to operating system programming, and a more recent evaluation of the competence of the makers of the world’s premiere business Unix desktop.

All this is well in line with the fact that he is so smart he knows free software licensing matters better than the FSF which enabled him to write Linux in the first place, and its lawyers when it comes to the upcoming version of the GPL, the license which he licensed Linux under.

Kaspersky Lab’s announcement of a Windows/Linux cross-platform virus was the scoop of last week (source code available of course).

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn’t actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse’s analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I’m not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus’s explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users’ need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let’s see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky’s software for any platform.

I’ve been running the development version of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on all my machines since GNOME 2.14 was released on March 15th, without too much trouble. When I ran my daily upgrade yesterday, I noticed the artwork started to mention Dapper Beta. Today, Dapper officially enters Beta status, so the release should be more or less in its final form. Now you can read the Beta Announcement and drool over the great new features. If you can, try out the Beta and report any remainging bugs!

Dapper is different from previous Ubuntu releases. It is the culmination of lessons learned from the first three releases and will be the first one to receive three years of support for desktop installations and five years for servers, which makes it comparable to the expensive “enterprise” distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. The difference is of course that Ubuntu will never have a separate “enterprise” release but all Ubuntu users get the best possible distribution for free. This is great for corporate users and others who value extremely stable platforms but it has another consequense as well, for those who enjoy living on the edge: the freedom to experiment on the release coming up after Dapper, the Edgy Eft!

Following a rock solid release such as Dapper, the Ubuntu community can again freely concentrate on exploring new, exciting technologies for the next releases. Ubuntu leader Mark Shuttleworth, A.K.A sabdfl, opened yesterday the planning period for the next release, giving the community free hands to experiment, imposing almost “zero from-the-top requirements” for the release. We can afford this because of the long support for Dapper. Those who want to keep running a solid release can still enjoy Dapper while the more adventurous users can venture to the unknown with Edgy Eft. I’m sure that will be very exciting. I’m already anxious to try out Xen, wobbly windows on Xgl/AIGXL, and whatever the Ubuntu hackers come up with. Let’s first get Dapper out though, and make sure it’s the most awesome system to date!

As of today, I will no longer be logged in on the following proprietary chat networks:

• MSN
• Yahoo!
• AIM

I will be happy to chat with you on the free Jabber and IRC networks. Please see my updated contact information on the About page.

If you don’t have a Jabber account, you can easily get one for free on the jabber.org home page. If you use Gmail, you already have a Jabber account. If your current chat client does not support Jabber, upgrade to the open source multiprotocol Gaim messenger if you use Linux or Windows, or Psi if you use a Mac. Of course, I’ll continue to idle on the Freenode IRC network as well.

I stongly recommend that everybody upgrade to open chat protocols and leave the corporate networks fight their own battles.

Some time ago, I wrote a lament about the sorry state of video support in Linux, or more correctly, the crappy Linux support on the part of graphics chip manufacturers. Today, an interesting CNET article touches the issue. Do proprietary drivers belong in a free kernel? I’ll just summarize the views of the main manufacturers here.

ATI defends proprietary drivers on IP reasons: their drivers include licensed proprietary third-party IP that they are required to protect. They also cite teir own IP interests and wish to "maintain the proprietary, trade-secret nature of that as long as possible." Way to go.

Nvidia doesn’t think hackers can write complicated software: "It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help," Also, their customers don’t seem to be complaining enough. They do have open source "where it makes sense". Nice.

Intel seems to be the most interesting company here. They hope to compete against ATI and Nvidia specifically with open source drivers. If their chips become good enough in the near future, I have something to recommend to newbies again!

The article also has lots of interesting comments from the Linux kernel hackers and development of a stable interface for proprietary drivers, as well as the strategies of the commercial Linux biggies Red Hat and Novell. So go ahead and read it in full.

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