04.16.09
Stallman Explains Why Software Patents are Wrong
FROM yesterday's protest:
More to come. █
Revolt Against Software Patents in Europe
Here are some photos from yesterday’s demonstration at the European Patent Office. Press coverage will come soon. █
“Staff at the European Patent Office went on strike accusing the organization of corruption: specifically, stretching the standards for patents in order to make more money.
“One of the ways that the EPO has done this is by issuing software patents in defiance of the treaty that set it up.”
“[The EPO] can’t distinguish between hardware and software so the patents get issued anyway.”
–Marshall Phelps, Microsoft
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More Details About the ACTA Trickle In
Summary: Preliminary analyses of the impact of the ACTA (still a secret draft)
NOW that ACTA drafts are out there for people to read and assess, we know for a fact that patents too are included. Digital Majority took a look and highlighted the required proof.
Wikileaks has published some drafts of the secret ACTA treaty, which aims to give better guns to Patent Trolls. The draft mentions that it covers all the rights covered by TRIPS, so it will cover also patents.
Glyn Moody, who watched the ACTA very closely, has just published: “Goodbye WIPO, Hello ACTA?”
What is really remarkable about this is that Greve can even be asking WIPO to consider free software and open standards: a few years ago, such a thing would have amounted to blasphemy.
Sadly, there is another sign that WIPO is becoming more accommodating to the ideas behind free software: the fact that there seems to be a move to come up with an alternative forum for promoting intellectual monopolies where it will not be so easy to participate.
Cory Doctorow, whose interests are slightly different, focuses on the fact that “ACTA copyright treaty dodges the UN, poor countries and activists.” He cites Michael Geist, whose expertise seems to include open access, DMCA, copyrights, and other such territories.
Michael Geist sez, “The World Intellectual Property Organization may be best known for the Internet treaties that led to the DMCA, but in recent years groups like EFF, KEI, and Public Knowledge has helped to open things up and move toward a Development Agenda that better balances international intellectual property policy. That progress may be threatened by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which officials now acknowledge is designed to exclude WIPO, developing countries, and NGOs.”
Unsurprisingly, TorrentFreak focuses on the impact on file sharing.
Leaked ACTA Draft: More Power to the RIAA
A recent draft of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) surfaced on Wikileaks this weekend. Among other things, the draft aims to strengthen the power and rights of the entertainment industry and other copyright holders, by letting them choose how they want to be compensated for copyright infringements.
Obama and Biden have already put at least 5 RIAA lawyers in charge. Moreover, Obama refuses to granted people access to the ACTA (never mind if it inevitably leaks anyway). █
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04.15.09
Quotes of the Day: LinuxToday Readers Explain Why They Avoid SUSE
Ballnux
The benefits of software freedom apply to businesses too. Businesses like mine.
Which is why SLED, SLES, and OpenSuSE don’t have a place in my company. Why not OpenSuSE? Because it indirectly benefits Novell by growing the SuSE “ecosystem” and potentially attracting ISV interest.
Many of us business IT Managers do not mind paying money for free software, but we are interested in the long term well being of the free software ecosystem. We want to see it prosper and thrive. Moves such as those by Novell, driven by short sighted, short term profits, at the possible expense of a poisoned free software well, do not merit our support.
Vista 7 Death Watch
Down for the count before arrival?
- Vast majority won’t go for Windows 7
- 84 percent say no thanks to Windows 7
- IT pros prefer old XP over new Windows 7, survey says
Cautious business IT administrators are more willing to stay with the devil they know, Windows XP, than risk the devil they don’t, even if the latter is the highly touted Windows 7, a research company said Monday.
According to Dimensional Research Inc., which surveyed more than 1,100 IT professionals in March, 72% of those polled said that they are more concerned about the cost and overhead of migrating to Windows 7 than they are about continuing to supporting the eight-year-old Windows XP. Only 28% felt the opposite, that they’re more worried about holding XP’s hand than migrating to Windows 7.
So what are Windows 7’s damning problems?
–Windows usage is on the decline, and while Windows XP was an acceptable OS from the standards of 2001, both the Mac OS X and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu have matured. Microsoft also launched many other business ventures that it had hoped to subsidize entirely as loss leaders using Windows and Office sales to run the other guys out of business, but with sales of those faulting combined with massive XBOX 360 hardware failures, giving up on the Zune 2 years in with 4% of the market, and failing to put a chink in Google’s services, Microsoft is getting desperate.
–They’re not listening to real users, they’re listening to a focus group if that, and the focus group gave us the McLean Deluxe, which was a total disaster for McDonalds. But unlike McDonalds, Microsoft has the advantage of no competitors. If we want to put Windows in the McLean Deluxe analogy, Windows thrives because all restaurants are McDonalds, all grocery stores are closed, and the only thing on the menu is the mystery meat. At least til lately.
–Abusing their OEM partners for years hasn’t won them any friends, and mainline PC vendors such as HP and Dell are marketing Linux systems now with no Microsoft Tax. This isn’t helped by the fact that the only thing Microsoft has that is nimble enough to run on the Netbooks that they totally failed to see coming is 8 years old (XP) and that they are giving Windows away in a massive dumping operation to keep Linux off these things, because Linux is far more capable.
–There’s no way to actually file detailed bugs and communicate with Windows developers or to have any ETA on a patch if one is coming. If you need help it costs $49.99 per incident to get someone that probably knows less than you do on the phone. You can’t just go to an IRC room and talk to the person that wrote it.
–Windows 7 is in short, Vista all over again. It may be masquerading as a huge upgrade but the changes have been trivial, superficial, and usually skin deep at best, and “eat my data” and “fail to even load my program” at worst. Even my dad saw it running on my test system while he was over the other day and thought it was Vista. I had to point to the Windows 7 build number on the desktop because there’s almost no way to tell them apart otherwise.
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Microsoft’s Older Crimes Against Web Browsers Return, Microsoft’s New Attacks on JavaScript Revisited
“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
–Bill Gates [PDF]
Summary: ECIS joins the Web browser case against Microsoft, whose people are already busy subverting JavaScript
Restoring Web Browser Competition
AT the bottom of this post is an excerpt from the Comes petition, which sheds light on what Microsoft did to Netscape. It appears very clearly in black on white and one day we shall deal with each exhibit in turn.
Today’s big story — at least in certain circles — is ECIS taking on Microsoft. Since The Register is filled with Microsoft puppets these days (e.g. Kelly Fiveash and Gavin Clarke), they insult the ECIS’s reputation and characterise it only as an IBM front. There is this quote however:
“This is an important case to ensure that browsers can compete on the [sic] merits and that consumers have a true choice in the software they use to access the World Wide Web,” said ECIS spokesman Thomas Vinje.
Thomas Vinje is involved in a variety of other cases that we wrote about before. Here is the formal statement from ECIS [PDF].
Support Grows for EU Browser Case against Microsoft
Brussels – 15 April 2009 – The European Commission recognised ECIS as an interested third party in support of the Commission’s preliminary findings (Statement of Objections) that Microsoft is violating EU anti-trust law by tying its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser to its dominant Windows operating system present on over 90% of all personal computers.
To an extent, this case is about the past, but it’s also to do with Microsoft’s future bundling, which is already anti-competitive.
Microsoft Still Breaking JavaScript
Microsoft has already proceeded to new fights that we wrote about before. It’s about JavaScript — a Web ‘middleware’ enabler — which is a great threat to Microsoft and a powerful feature to competitors like Google. Heise wrote about the latest draft.
The publication of the final draft JavaScript standard, ECMA-262, ECMAScript fifth edition, marks the final stage of revision for the ECMAScript standard, which was last updated in 1999. The redevelopment of the standard has been an acrimonious affair.
The Register has a lot more details about what Microsoft is doing.
The debate over ES4 turned at times acrimonious, with Microsoft IE architect Chris Wilson saying that it introduced too many changes and Mozilla architect Brendan Eich accusing Wilson of spreading “falsehoods” about the proposed standard.
If the European Commission is unable to punish Microsoft for crimes it committed (read the details below), then Microsoft will be tempted to redo the same thing, knowing that it can carry on without punishment.
It’s all about the economics of crime (risk, reward, and punishment). █
Appendix: Netscape Portions from the Comes vs. Microsoft Petition
Over 23 New Microsoft Vulnerabilities and Microsoft Could Not Patch the One Actively Under Attack
Summary: Another massive patch Tuesday is due, but Microsoft customers are still left vulnerable
ACCORDING to a flood of reports, Microsoft claims to have just patched 23 vulnerabilities (the real number is a lot bigger and always a mystery). Quite a few of them are “critical”.
It’s a busy month for Windows administrators, as Microsoft has released eight security bulletins addressing more than 20 vulnerabilities. Five of the bulletins are rated ‘critical’.
But here is the important bit:
Missing from the list is relief for a zero-day vulnerability in PowerPoint, actively targeted by hackers since last month.
This most likely means that for at least another month, all Microsoft Office users will be left exposed to attacks which have already begun, with Microsoft confirming this. Later on, people wonder why Conficker is able to propagate quite so rapidly. Here is the latest report about Conficker.
People have been speculating, waiting and prognosticating, but until now the extremely cleverly programmed Conficker worm has limited itself to mainly defensive measures, such as opening various communications channels (Conficker.C can set up peer-to-peer networks with other infected systems) in order to transform itself with downloaded code, and to actively combating anti-virus software and security analysis tools. Even on 1 April, the known date on which Conficker.C would be looking for updates, virtually nothing happened. Now however, money is involved: computers infected with the Conficker worm are downloading the scareware program “SpywareProtect2009″.
Despite the latest lie from a Microsoft executive (circulating in the press this week), Windows Vista is just as insecure as its predecessors.
With so many of the world’s Windows PCs already enlisted to join a botnet, it is no wonder that — even according to Microsoft’s latest report — 97% of E-mail is SPAM. We have already shown why this is Microsoft's fault, at least in part. The catastrophic damage is not just one of productivity; according to this new report, there is also a severe environmental cost.
That’s what McAfee says in its “Carbon Footprint of Spam” report released Wednesday, which states climate-change researchers from the firm ICF and McAfee’s security staff calculated that the amount of energy needed to transmit, process and filter spam globally is equal to 33 billion kilowatt-hours each year. They say that can also be expressed as the equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes annually or the same green-house gas emissions from 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gas.
The Inquirer, as usual, sensationalised it a bit.
Spam is killing the planet
[...]
Apparently, dealing with spam burns 33 billion kilowatt hours (one KW is about what a single bar electric heater will use) every year, enough to power 2.4 million homes.
There may be simple solutions to this. █
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