Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced on a posting on the ubuntu-devel-announce list Friday. As usual, efforts surrounding the Linux distribution are divided between two target deployments, desktop and server. The desktop goals are primarily around “first impressions,” with Shuttleworth indicating that “boot will be beautiful.” He also promises that the appearance of Ubuntu will change significantly:

The desktop will have a designer’s fingerprints all over it - we’re now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

I am sure others here at CNET will give the desktop portions of the announcement the serious treatment it deserves, but the server functionality that Shuttleworth announced is much more interesting to the cloud-computing community.

It sounds like the majority of the work on the server side in Karmic Koala will be around cloud computing. Here is the entire text of that portion of the announcement:

A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds. Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools. We’re currently in beta with official Ubuntu base AMI’s for use on Amazon EC2. During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image. Ubuntu-vmbuilder makes it easy to create a custom AMI today, but a portfolio of standard image profiles will allow easier collaboration between people doing similar things on EC2. Wouldn’t it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favorite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It’s no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs. A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there’s work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there’s nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

If that sounds rather open and nebulous, then we’ve hit the sweet spot for cloud computing futurology. Let me invite you to join the server team at UDS in Barcelona, when they’ll be defining the exact set of features to ship in October.

In case you missed that, let me break it down:

• Ubuntu server will target promoting cloud computing through entirely open-source software.

• For those wishing to manage clouds, Ubuntu will apparently contain tools that leverage the Amazon APIs. (I would hope the GoGrid APIs are also under consideration, considering its apparent consideration by a variety of Amazon’s competitors.)

• Canonical will create standard Amazon Machine Images from Karmic Koala, essentially creating “ready-to-run” appliances that will serve as “standard builds” to the Amazon community.

• Don’t want to commit to Amazon? Would you rather build a cloud on your own infrastructure to get a feel for things while the public clouds “cure”? Starting with Karmic’s predecessor, Jaunty Jaguar Jackalope (soon to go to code freeze), UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project, Eucalyptus, will be included in every install package.

Read more @ Cnet

As the first week of the trial came to an end, hundreds of supporters gathered Friday evening for a Spectrial Kopimi Party at a night club in central Stockholm. The party was thrown by the Swedish Pirate Bureau and saw live performances by several artists, a DJ set from Brokep and video art made from the movies featured in the trial.

It has been a long and exhausting week for all participants of the spectrial. To end it in style, Pirate Bureau threw a party last night, which turned out to be a huge success. Tickets were sold out just an hour after they started selling, and as the party got underway the optimistic kopimistic atmosphere among the participants couldn’t be mistaken.

“Right now, society is developing at a fantastic pace. That is immensely wonderful and everyone involved is having fun. Let us try and make it a good development,” said Johan Allgoth of the Pirate Bureau.

The cheerful spirit was not only due to the events in the first week of the trial (where the prosecution repeatedly failed to present any evidence) but also down to a supply of free champagne for all pirates in attendance.

“The Pirate Bureau operated for many years without economic resources and that was a very good way for us to work. Lately, we’ve had some money coming into the organization and we needed to put it to good use. Buying champagne for great people is definitely a good way to channel our resources, paying the poor artist another way,” Johan Allgoth told us.
Free Champagne for all the pirates

The Pirate Bureau has had a busy week in Stockholm, doing their part in the performance of the Spectrial theater. Their headquarters have been located in the S23K bus, parked outside the court. From the bus they created audio visual art, published op-eds and streamed impromptu parties with everyone welcome to participate.

Read more @ TorrentFreak

Two Californian men have been charged with uploading leaked copies of Oscar-nominated Hollywood movies to the Internet.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, yesterday a federal grand jury indicted Derek Hawthorne of Moorpark and Owen Moody of San Marcos on federal copyright violation charges.

Hawthorne is charged with uploading ‘Australia’ to a torrent site known as Movie Hogs and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ to Demonoid.com. Moody is charged with uploading the hit movie “Slumdog Millionaire” to The Pirate Bay.

The pair have been contacted by the FBI who ordered them to surrender to authorities next week. The charges are ‘Uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution’ which is a term under the tough Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, previously used to jail Star Wars uploaders at the now-defunct EliteTorrents site.

They face a possible punishment of three years in jail and fines of $250,000.

Authorities also arrested a third man last week. Jack Yates of Porter Ranch, an employee at a Los Angeles duplication company, is accused of illegally copying the movie ‘The Love Guru’. Yates was asked to copy the movie by Paramount so that Jay Leno could show a clip on his show but allegedly he also made a copy for himself which he passed to friends, one of which uploaded the movie to the Internet.
It’s alleged that Yates lied to the FBI so he faces stiffer punishment than the previously mentioned pair. The offense of copying the movie carries a sentence of up to a year in jail but for lying to the authorities he could get five years. He is scheduled to be arraigned March 16 2009.

Source: TorrentFreak

How would you like a mobile phone that can be svelte and spare one day, and larger and full-featured the next? That’s the concept behind Modu, one of the more innovative handsets introduced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Regrettably, its creators have no immediate plans for a United States launch, but it is slated to debut through carriers in Israel and the Philippines this spring.

Created by the company of the same name, the Modu phone resembles a small MP3 player, with a screen the size of a postage stamp and very basic controls. It’s so small that it’s in Guinness World Records as the world’s lightest cell phone.

But the folks at Modu (the company) hope that you won’t buy just the phone itself. When the device ships this spring, it will be accompanied on the market by four “jackets”–skin-like shells that you can drop the phone into to change its whole look and feel, including the screen. From left to right below, the looks consist of the Modu Classic (a slider phone with a large screen), the Modu Night (which adds a camera to the device), the Modu base unit, the Modu Express (which gives the phone a colorful, whimsical look), and the Modu Street-Art (a candy-bar handset with a large screen).

Read more @ PC World

Modu: A Cell Phone that Morphs