These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the 'battles' between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations.

People around the world are cheering up and joy-dancing about the release of KDE4. The Indian EFYtimes for instance said something like:

The project repeatedly hit snags. Unforeseen production costs nearly doubled the projected price of $100 per machine, hindering poor nations from purchasing it. A Nigerian-owned, Massachusetts-based firm, Lagos Analysis, is suing the foundation for copyright infringement of its laptop keyboard design.

Connect to your Linux computer remotely without needing to take the less secure VNC route yet, still having a GUI to work with. This quick and painless tutorial will show how to forward your GNOME session from your Linux box to another computer, via SSH and X11 Forwarding.

I watched a 20 minute documentary this afternoon on BBC News 24 about the One Laptop per Child program in Africa.

Do you have some mundane task that you have to do regularly through a Web browser? Are you a developer who wants to automatically test the interface of your latest Web application? Maybe you want to log into all of the sites you visit on a daily basis with one click. If you fall into any of these categories, you should check out the iMacros Firefox extension.

DeviceVM's SplashTop, a product we had named as one of the greatest Linux innovations in 2007, is sharing a booth this week at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) with ASUS. At their booth we were allowed to check out a SplashTop demo running on an ASUS notebook!