– By Grant Gross –

They’ve organized street protests around the world. They’ve convinced the software company that was supposedly wronged to back off. They’ve made their case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The groups advocating the release of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have seemingly done everything they can, yet he remains in a U.S. jail. So what’s next?

Although the next big move is uncertain, one thing’s for sure: The loose-knit group of civil libertarians, Open-Sourcers, programmers and opponents of Digital Millennium Copyright Act who have worked together on the Free Sklyarov campaign are not giving up.

Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says protests from the U.S. public, in addition to growing pressure on the U.S. government from Russia, can still be effective. Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI in July after speaking at Def Con in Las Vegas. He’s accused of violating the DMCA, only a law in the United States, for creating a program that allows users to back up Adobe’s eBook format, or open eBooks in unsupported operating systems such as Linux.

“We are calling for stepped-up public pressure on the [U.S. Department of Justice] to dismiss the case — now that Adobe, the purported ‘injured’ party, is calling for his
release and to drop all charges against him,” says Gross. “The will of the public
is to release this computer programmer for writing software that can compete
with Adobe’s eBook viewing software.”

Both Paul Holman, founder of the now-inactive BoycottAdobe site, and C. Scott Ananian, organizer of the Boston protests and spokesman for FreeSklyarov.org promise to continue the protests.

“There are more protests this week scheduled for (among other places) Salt Lake
City and London,” Ananian says. “Many groups are setting their next protest date two weeks from now, to give them a little more planning time; we will continue to
be involved.”

Ananian’s Boston crew is planning another protest for Aug. 6, and the group is working on a petition campaign, with the results to be delivered to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, who voted for the DMCA in 1998. “This campaign will probably culminate in a march on Kennedy’s office shortly after the current congressional term ends, returning
Kennedy to Boston,” Ananian says.

Since the EFF convinced Adobe to back away from the prosecution of Sklyarov, Holman has been working on protests against the U.S. Department of Justice, instead of Adobe. “More protests are being planned to draw attention to the fact that Dmitry
Sklyarov still is not free, and that the federal prosecutors are
responsible for this,” he says. “There will continue to be protests of the DMCA
until it is repealed or modified to respect our First Amendment rights.”

The focus for most of the protesters is two-fold — the more immediate goal of getting Sklyarov released from jail and the repeal or wholesale change of the DMCA. Holman, a programmer/computer security expert from San Francisco, would be happy with the first goal, for now. “I want to get Dmitry out of jail so I can retire from activism,” he says. “Sadly, this is only the first of many battles in our war against the DMCA, but
the rest of the army of supporters can take it from here, I need a break!”

Michael “proclus” Love, who’s GNU-Darwin distribution project site has run “Free Dmitry” links and information, says he’s not sure what else can be done on the site.

“I have to admit that I’m somewhat at a loss, as far as Dmitry is
concerned,” Love says. ” I have been trying to decide if there is anything more that
the Distribution can do for him. We will keep the Free Dmitry banners
up until he goes home, and I want to continue our news coverage. The
incarceration of Dmitry is an outrage, and people who visit our news
links should be able to clearly see why we are outraged.”

Canada’s Financial Post reports that Corel Corp.’s two quarters of profit, plus the acquisition of a competitor and the launch of new graphic design software have investors slowly getting interested in Corel again.

Arnaud LAPREVOTE writes about SigLab, a graphical signal calculator: The Free&ALter Soft company is ditributing its softwares under the GPL licence, among others SigLab, that can be freely downloaded from the CVS Sourceforge server.
Introduction
SigLab is a calculator specially designed for working on signals. You may load, save or generate signals, do various operations on and between the signals (addition, …, log, abs, sin, …, filtering, convolution, fft, correlation).
SigLab was designed for being able to handle results of simulations or measurements. It means it can handle signals with millions of points in just keeping in memory a small piece of each signals. However, to keep good performance, it caches in memory portions of the signals.
SigLab was specifically thought for Ptolemy users. You will then find stars ready to use. SigLab will start at the end of the simulation and show all signals that you asked.

Requirements
You need a working copy of SciLab 2.5 beta for having SigLab working. You also need tcl/tk 8.xx (just tested on 8.0). SigLab was tested under Solaris, Windows and Linux.

Licence
SigLab is now under GPL. Siglab is originally a sponsorware. It was developped thanks to the support of the C2R (Research Center on RadioDiffusion and RadioCommunications) of TéléDiffusion de France (a subsidiary of France Telecom) and thanks to Philips Semicondictors Rennes. You can thank these companies for having accepted to share the tools they use with everybody. We are still looking for sponsors to improve SigLab (improvement of integration with SciLab, filter design interface, management of multidimensionnal signals, …).

The downloading site: http://siglab.sourceforge.net/
The site of the Free&ALter Soft company:
http://www.freealter.com

Advogato.org has an appeal by the maintainer of the KDE Usability Project for people to get involved with usability reports.

eWeek reports that the second coming of the Code Red worm was a bigger flop than “Caddyshack II.” CBS News tells a different story.

DaemonNews.org has an article about general security issues for FreeBSD. “The funny thing about security is that we actually have quite a lot of it in the UNIX paradigm. We have users, groups, chroot,
secure levels, and jails. The only problem is that we don’t use any of it by default. Most services are run as root – pop3, ftp,
ssh, ident, sendmail, talkd, named, ntpd, and even the ones that aren’t, such as apache, barely touch the first layer of
security offered in FreeBSD: each runs as its own user and group but doesn’t bother with anything else. Even when
programs such as named have security-minded options, they tend to not use them by default.”

“So you’ve heard a lot about the power of Linux and want to try it out for yourself. Where do you start? Whether you’re a
long-time Linux user or a total newbie who needs to obtain Linux software for that first install, it is easy to become
overwhelmed by the vast amount of Linux information available. Finding the best approach to getting help on a particular
problem is no simple task. Here’s an attempt to outline the most efficient means of getting help with Linux.” More at FreeOS.com.

BBC: “A decoy computer network set up to record every
attempt to crack it open and subvert it has revealed just
how active and determined malicious hackers have
become.

Statistics gathered by the
network show that computers
connected to the web are
scanned for weaknesses up
to 14 times per day and that,
on average, an attempt will
be made to break into a
net-connected computer
every three days.”

Wired: “New legislation, hailed by the music and movie industries, would create a standard for hearing and viewing digital content. It’s about time, right? Well, critics worry that too many rights would be trampled in the process.”

The Register: “Three versions of the long-awaited Puma upgrade to Mac OS X – version 10.1 –
appear to be in circulation, according to BetaNews, and some fairly authoritative
reports confirm that the speed improvements demonstrated by Steve Jobs at
Macworld Expo New York are very real.”