The Russian Federation is moving to a Linux based platform choice for most government office uses –

The government is hoping to launch the first version of a “national operating system” for its computers as early as next year, a senior Communications and Press Ministry official said Thursday.

The operating system, for use on the computer systems of government agencies and state-run companies, will be 90 percent based on the open-source Linux operating system, Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh said.

He said use of the operating system would be optional for all agencies.

The operating system is part of the Information Society program, which the government is planning to implement from September. The program will receive 10 billion rubles ($330 million) in funding per year and includes other technology-related projects such as the creation of an “electronic government.”

The national operating system “may be one of the first targeted programs from the new raft that the government is going to approve,” Massukh said.

143m Russians using Linux? Maybe.

Linky.

… Of lawyering — Know your facts before you make your case. Which pretty much sinks the Australian Internet censorship law. –

South Australia’s thin-skinned candy-ass politicians passed a law prohibiting any anonymous political commentary on blogs (but not “real” news-sources) prior to elections on penalty of a fine of AU$1250. Defending the measure, South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson claimed that a poster on AdelaideNow, Aaron Fornarino, was a fictional construct created by his political opponents to smear him. Turns out that Mr Fornarino lives just down the street from Atkinson’s office. Humiliated, Atkinson rescinded the censorship law: “From the feedback we’ve received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively… It may be humiliating for me, but that’s politics in a democracy and I’ll take my lumps.”

The major foopah? Atkinson, the regional AG made the claim that the person posting on an Internet site lambasting him was not a real person but fictitious, made up by the opposition party. Problem? Yeah, the person exists and there are pictures to prove it. Much to Atkinson’s credit, he will move for repeal of the law after the major embarrassment.

Linky.

… In Hungary? Yeah I know, Ole Tux is just an OS. That is what I thought too. Still do by the way. But in Hungary a political party — Jobbik — has sprung up.:

We are going to implement open standards in the public sector and will promote the spread of open source solutions among the general public and among businesses. Under these directives, government and public sector documents can be stored only, in open document formats, on systems running open standards applications.

We are going to develop open standard interfaces, in order to encourage municipalities, the tax department, the banking sector and public offices to use open source solutions.

We are going to supply government funded and developed applications for municipalities, nation wide, to eliminate parallel and wasteful developments.

When both proprietary and open source software will be available with the equal functionality to accomplish a particular task, we will make the use of open source solutions, mandatory.

We are going to implement open standards in the school system and will introduce open source computing as a subject in schools, under the discipline of computer sciences.

That ladies and gentlemen is the Jobbik party platform. Sound wild? Well I will just direct you to Sweden where the Pirate Party has a foothold in Parliment after raising petitions and funds on the Pirate Bay file sharing suit. They now have over a dozen affiliated Pirate parties in the world. So it would not be far fetched at all.

Linky.

Nor is it traffic that can be ignored. US readership is growing 7x faster than domestic readership on most UK sites. —

We’ve often written about how UK newspaper sites get a healthy number of visitors from the US, mainly via Drudge Report referrals (see Neil Thurman’s academic study). Now web measurer Hitwise says traffic to Brit news sites from across the pond is growing nearly seven times as fast as that domestically. (To view a breakdown chart, click here.)

Analyst Robin Goad says Drudge is still the biggest aggregation referrer to UK news sites (bringing 10.6 percent of visits in August), followed by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News (5.3 percent). But Google search is still the big traffic giver (13.5 percent); email’s a big referrer, too.

I don’t even have to guess either. UK papers have remained competitive unlike their US cousins. The rationale is content and editorial position. The UK landscape is such a paper takes a stand. They are either Conservative or Labor. None of this panty waist stuff of toned liberal tripe with a resident neo-conservative thrown in for ‘balance’. Papers in the UK revel in their differences. When they get a chance they even tweak the oppositions nose in it for good measure. It keeps the readers coming back for more.

Which goes to show that being brazen but fair pays (cue Glenn Beck) and that PC attempts at balance are a nonstarter. There is an old saying. What’s the quickest way for a lawyer to increase his income in a one horse town? Invite another lawyer to open an office across the street! By all appearances it goes for papers too.

Linky.

The blog Boy Genius Report has some input on what appears to be a Dell branded phone headed for the Chinese market initially. Still all rumor at this point. –

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 12
• Size: 68.6cc
• 103g grams weight
• Dimensions: 58 x 122 x 11.7mm
• Display: 3.5″ nHD 640×360 LCD, 18-bit, 262K colors
• OTA capable
• Microsoft Exchange support
• Google, AIM, Yahoo and MSN IM support
• 3 megapixel auto-focus, flash, 8x digital zoom camera with 30fps video shooting mode, built in photo editor
• USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• A-GPS
• On-screen QWERTY keyboard, hardwriting recognition, multi touch UI
• MicroSD slot

Yes its Android based. This was tech that was very hot two years ago but is now reaching table stakes to be in the market. Seems to be another candy bar style iPhone knock off. I’ll grant that the form factor and features are favorable, but there will be a dozen entrants with the same handheld for Christmas season.

Linky.

BT is bringing call centre jobs back to Blighty from India.

The move was revealed in an answer to a shareholder at BT’s annual general meeting yesterday.

Ian Livingstone, chief executive at the telco, was asked, to huge applause, when he would close the firm’s Indian call centres.

In response he said he would move about 2,000 jobs back to Blighty. The telco employs about 5,500 customer service staff in India and could eventually shift as many as 2,750, back to the UK.

Looks like as the global economy teeters the outsourcing price shift is occurring too. Outsourcing to India was very favorable when MBA’s could be had for $4/hr. Well those days are over. Couple that with changing tax rules, concerns about IP security and cultural differences, if you can’t work out a 33% disparity then it is probably not worth the move.

So what is to happen long term? Call center and mid management functions will probably come back to the host countries. Specialized skills will probably remain where they are. Engineers familiar with FPGA has almost become an Indian specialty not many in the US know how to program them.

The wheel turns again.

Linky.

Britain that glimmering island that in many ways is the birthplace of both man’s political aspirations and freedom from want is also in many cases the test case for mobile digital. Britain is somewhere around 3-5 years ahead of the US. Not in technology, but in how to deploy, market it and have politicians screw it all up. –

But wait a minute - why would this be? Are telecoms companies salting away billions of pounds of profits in a great offshore lair, somewhere? Or are they merely reflecting the market’s demand for data? Plain vanilla 2G is enough to make a phone call, and that’s everywhere.

If the telcos are hiding anything, it’s the level of their debt. They’re broke, and running on empty (hence the nonstop rounds of refinancing), which explains their renewed focus on mature markets where they can squeeze higher revenues by diminishing competition. The UK is reckoned to be a full 10 per cent less profitable than other European countries, because retailers such as Carphone Warehouse are in the chain, and because of all this pesky competition. It’s true that the 3G auctions didn’t help, either, sucking £20bn into Brown’s piggy bank, and onto quangos like, well… Ofcom.

Which is in a sense reflected in the current apathy of the FCC, irrespective of pending ‘investigations’. But there is more —

What we now know, thanks to the 3G map, is just how expensive building out a broadband infrastructure will really be. What it shows us is that the definition of “rural” is much broader than we supposed. An analysis conducted for the Broadband Stakeholder Group last year put the cost of rolling out fibre to every home at almost £30 billion.

During the media orgy of coverage around Carter’s Digital Britain report two weeks ago, I only heard one journalist ask the obvious question: why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want. That was Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight, apparently waking up from a deep slumber.

But it was a lone voice, and I didn’t hear anyone - not a single one - go any deeper and follow this to its logical consequence. Which is that maybe people aren’t stupid, as the political and media classes suppose, and many find what’s on offer from the internet somewhat wanting. Maybe it’s not offering compelling services.

The US is ramping for a similar head long rush to round one of a universal service offering with $4Bn in taxes to be doled out. Its a known fact that even if available some 30% will just refused to sign up as broadband is NOT critical to their everyday life. What’s worse is that I have yet to hear any voice other than ourselves pose the question — “why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want?” Why indeed?

What Britain is experiencing is like a canary in a coal mine for the US. We face similar questions and much larger expanse of ‘white space’ in the 3G map than they. For the US it is more problematic. We have 10x their real estate and a carrier base loathe to leave the urban centers as they know that is where the profits are.

Chirp!

Read the whole article here.

That is its inaction makes it complicit in activities like shilling by not going after sellers who practice such tactics. The case in point –

How can you be sure the price of your latest eBay buy wasn’t shamelessly inflated by some faceless shill bidder? Well, there’s always the ad hoc investigative skills of Australian retiree Philip Cohen.

Cohen recently posted a nearly 8,000-word shill-bidding case study to the online forums at AuctionBytes, as part of a, shall we say, dogged effort to show that eBay does relatively little to stop the underhanded practice. His case study tracks an Aussie eBayer who made 190 bids on 41 items over a 30-day period, and all 41 items were listed by the same seller.

The implication is that the seller and bidder are the same person - or that they’re working in tandem to boost prices on the seller’s auctions. Cohen estimates that on one auction, the bidder in question artificially raised the price of the item by $156.

“This underbidder…stopped his ‘nibble’ bidding at the point when he equaled the maximum proxy bid value of the ultimate buyer,” Cohen writes. “At that point the underbidder would also have understood that only one more incremental bid was required for him to win the item; but he did not make that one more bid. What then is the chance that this underbidder is not a most naïve and blatant shill bidder? Absolutely none!”

Now this is out of Australia. Shilling, whether physical or virtual is against the law. So in a sense eBay if they are not aggressive in their pursuit of such practices becomes an accessory after the fact. There is however and inducement for eBay not to act. To the extent that a buyer is secured eBay’s commission on such a sale increases. That is reward enough on eBay’s part. What eBay’s intended mind frame in the matter would require a full scale investigation. To do that would require the power of the State and sufficient probable cause. Another words its not likely to happen.

Linky.

It has been announced that Pirate Bay, the audio/video/mp3/ogg/flac source site for things not paid for has itself been sold. Why a sucker? Well I will get to that after the jump –

The Pirate Bay has agreed to be sold for $7.7 million, a deal with a Swedish software maker that would ultimately turn the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a legitimate player.

The move by Global Gaming Factory X AB comes nearly three months after the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement, and face a year each in prison pending appeals in addition to a $3.6 million fine.

While the site is to discontinue pointing the way to free movies, music, games and software, Global Gaming Factory thinks it can turn The Pirate Bay into a money-making venture.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Eh, Hans, you are the sucker.

This is not an issue about Pirate Bay going legit. I hope they do, I also hope they are successful at it. For if they are, they will be positioned to offer deep discounts on media, if the sources get a clue. If I could get a copy of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ legit for $2.99 vs $19.95 off the storefront I would do so.

But that is not Pirate Bay’s draw. Bay’s draw was something for nothing. That and the ‘Tee Hee….’ mindset of ripping off The Man. I dare not call it counter-culture. Not quite that but almost. When the chic is off the rose then so goes the audience. That happened to Napster to a certain extent. The other fact is it is too easy to set up another site like it in Pakistan and have free competition vs paid service. Its the mindset in play here.

Possibly Pirate Bay will need to be renamed to Rum’s Cay and Media Emporium when the dust settles.

Linky.

Consumers are calling for a boycott of telecom equipment makers Nokia and Siemens after the Wall Street Journal reported that the companies’ joint networking firm sold sophisticated internet surveillance equipment to Iran — a story that the company says is false.

Despite the denial, boycotters have written Nokia saying they’ve destroyed their Nokia phones, and are telling friends and family to avoid Nokia products until the company “can make the right ethical choices.”

According to the Journal, a system installed in Iran by Nokia Siemens Networks — a Finland-based joint venture between Nokia and Seimens — provides Iranian authorities with the ability to conduct deep-packet inspection of online communications to monitor the contents and track the source of e-mail, VoIP calls, and posts to social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. The newspaper also said authorities had the ability to alter content as it intercepted the traffic from a state-owned internet choke point.

Will have to delve into this more. But it brings up a interesting phenomenon. Individuals as using the power of the purse, by not buying or not using products from a company based on their relationships with other entities. It may very well be the Achilles heel of the multinational corporation. With the world becoming more and more interconnected, the ability of persons to act locally for global impact. There are not many Corporations that can afford 1-2 quarters of lost revenue.

Linky.