Summary: More information than Apple wants the public to know about its attitude towards copying and its latest patent lawsuit against Linux/Android
Yesterday we wrote about Apple suing Linux phones using software patents [1, 2]. Apple should be ashamed of itself and its followers ought to rethink their relationship with a brand that has committed the crimes of Hubris. As TechDirt correctly puts it (regarding Apple’s lawsuit):
It’s usually a sign that a company is worried that it can’t keep up with the competition.
Oh, hello! A trip to the YouTube wayback machine shows that 1996′s Steve “Great Artists Steal” Jobs might have taken issue with Steve Jobs 2010, and his patent lawsuit firebombing of HTC. Irony!
The comment was made during a 1996 PBS documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds,” and looks a smidge hypocritical in light of today’s events. As does this one:
Let’s remember that Apple also invests in Microsoft's patent troll, Nathan Myhrvold, who argues that “intellectual property is the next software.”
But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple’s headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?
Apple is just upsetting it own fans, as we showed yesterday with an example. How about this new article?
Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch: Let’s Sue the Internet
So Apple is suing HTC, the premier manufacturer of Android-based phones, including Google’s Nexus One. And Rupert Murdoch is suing Google—or so he says.
[...]
It’s a Steve thing. Not just a temper tantrum. But an operatic one. It’s Steve Jobs’ signature: pride and paranoia. Behind it, too, is the motivation of all great competitors—they really don’t want to compete, they want the market for themselves. Now it’s Google, rather than Microsoft, copying him. It’s Google’s phone he’s out to get. He’s pissed off: Google controls the Internet and all he controls is his rotten phone.
One of the culprits here is also the patent system, which is worth reforming or abolishing. It does nothing good for society, say patent holders themselves (whose employers asked them to apply for patents). █
Summary: Thoughts and references about the notion that those who criticise troubles and ills are simply being “divisive”
A LOT of people have accused this Web site of being divisive. In fact, almost every Web site that ‘dares’ to criticise the unjust is bound to be smeared. The reasons for this were explained here before [1, 2], so we won’t be discussing them again.
A few days ago we found some interesting articles in PR Watch (CMD) that name MSNBC along with Fox News and others (whose divisive intent is obvious). They are rightly being accused of pushing an agenda rather than reporting news. “Cable TV Shows Rife with Hidden Flacks and Lobbyists,” writes the author, who explains:
Cable news networks like MSNBC, CNN, CNBC and Fox News routinely use commentators who have financial conflicts of interest that are undisclosed to viewers. Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, for example, appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, to discuss the economic crisis.
Here is another new one, titled “The Media-Lobbying Complex”:
President Obama spent most of December 4 touring Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting with local workers and discussing the economic crisis. A few hours later, the state’s former governor, Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. There were “modest things” the White House might try, like cutting taxes or opening up credit for small businesses, but the real answer was for the president to “take his green agenda and blow it out of the box.” The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”
As regular readers may know, we include many such links on a daily basis, but the reason for including them here is to show that the mainstream media can be no more than lobbying, no more than a farce. The effects of this range from environment to what people consider ‘normal’ ways of life. The media establishes norms and consensus.
There is another lesser-known aspect that the environment debate in particular is showing these days. Climate scientists are being bullied. And to use a parallel example, Mono critics have been bullied for years. Take Sam Varghese for example; he gets abuse from people whom he dares to criticise and companies that he dares to see as malicious. These people who bully the messenger, in turn, are suffocating and suppressing free speech through a form of retaliation. “Divisive Behavior” is the title of this post about the ordeals of Varghese. It’s a fascinating read.
Past Sins
Sam Varghese wrote an article about Matthew Garrett’s LCA talk “The Linux community: what is it and how to be a part of it” [1]. In page 2 Sam quotes Martin Krafft as asking about how Matthew’s behavior had changed between 2004 and the present, Sam cites some references for Matthew’s actions in 2005 to demonstrate. I think that this raises the issue of how far back it is reasonable to go in search of evidence of past behavior, something that I think is far more important than the specific details of what Matthew said on mailing lists many years ago and whether he now regrets such email.
If someone did something that you consider to be wrong yesterday and did the same thing five years ago you might consider it to be evidence of a pattern of behavior. If someone’s statements today don’t match their actions yesterday then you should consider it to be evidence of hypocrisy. But if someone did something five years ago which doesn’t match their current statements then in many situations it seems more reasonable to consider it as evidence that they have changed their mind.
Perhaps Varghese has received the type of abuse that Richard Stallman is always getting, so it’s a badge of honour really. Matt Lee from the FSF has had this little confrontation with The Guardian recently. He explains in his blog:
Upon my return to the UK, my colleagues at work informed me that I’d been in The Guardian, and sure enough, checking the newspaper’s website, I was there, as part of a collection of ’24 hours in pictures’ for August 10th, 2007.
This seemed like a reasonable mistake, but my attempts to contact The Guardian and also the photographer were not satisfactory. Unable to be able to get a free license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) of my own image, I made a copy of the image and promptly forgot all about it.
Watch how they characterise him. It all seems to suit the image that the FSF is very dangerous and those ‘hackers’ (intended in a negative sense) are against society. █
Summary: Microsoft’s government insider and executive is told off for his distasteful plan of fighting the plague of Windows botnets at taxpayers’ expense
USERS of GNU/Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X already suffer from Windows because they receive SPAM, get around outages (mostly caused by DDoS attacks), and they have their personal details stolen from compromised servers. Yesterday we wrote about Microsoft’s Charney having the nerve to suggest a universal Internet tax to clean up Microsoft’s mess (or at least trying, obviously in vain). Charney’s statement was extremely unpopular (more coverage in [1, 2]).
Mike Masnick explains why Microsoft’s analogies are totally improper:
Tank Szuba alerts us to the story about a Microsoft security exec suggesting that it might make sense to implement an internet usage tax to help fund a “computer healthcare system” to fix the notoriously insecure software that his company produces.
[...]
Has he looked at how well healthcare has been working lately? Of course, as with healthcare, the real issue should be preventative efforts, and those mainly start with Microsoft and how it architects its software. But I guess it’s easier to just ask everyone to pay a tax to hide that.
The idea of Microsoft-funded PSAs advertising Linux as a way to avoid Internet-spread malware sounds much more reasonable than taxing all users to shore up defenses against Windows-based botnets. And it would give Microsoft an added incentive to work harder to solve the problem. If and when Windows-based botnets are a thing of the past, then the company could stop paying for the PSAs. At least that makes more sense than a general taxation for end users.
Spanish authorities have arrested three men in an operation that has crushed a major botnet network of infected computers.
Given that one in two Windows PCs is said to be a zombie PC [1, 2], the above will have virtually no effect. The root problem is not botmasters but botmasters-friendly operating systems, in the sense that they are easy to hijack remotely. And now that Microsoft offers no patches for IE6, things are bound to get worse (not just for web developers, who have suffered enough). █
Summary: Education site that claims to be of the EU Commission is actually run by lobbyists who promote Microsoft’s interests in the classroom
SOME MONTHS ago we wrote about the European Commission opening its doors to Microsoft boosters [1, 2, 3]. André Rebentisch has found this outrageous thing a couple of days ago:
It is well understood that Microsoft is keen to get the governments into “eSkills” because it is the smart thing to do. Essentially your customers are trained with public funds on how to use your popular products. For the past decade the company has been a committed driver behind all eSkills programmes in the European Union. Nothing wrong with this, I guess it is a “Win-Win” and a matter of social responsibility to enhance the ICT skills of citizens, in particular disadvantaged ones and elderly people.
[...]
And when you look into the contact information of the website you find that the website is run by:
Magali MERINDOL
DIGITALEUROPE Communications Officer
T. +32 2 609 5315 M. +32 477 229 939
E. magali.merindol@digitaleurope.org
www.digitaleurope.org
In other words the Communication officer of an European ICT lobbying group DIGITALEUROPE is responsible for the contents of an EU Commission website. Or as they explain:
This ground breaking initiative of the European Commission’s DG Enterprise and Industry is coordinated by DIGITALEUROPE and European Schoolnet in conjunction with twenty national partners.
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