I thought it would be a good idea to try and engage you – the fine openSUSE community – in discussion about “Us” the Community. We seemed to have been spoiled by having a Community Manager, people kind of seemed to let him do the work or worse expected him to do so. Now that we don’t have that position any more we need to go back to basics and start rolling our sleeves up. We’ve started but we have much to do. As such this is the first in I’m not sure how many posts on the subject.
With or without Novell, the OpenSUSE community is likely to live on, maybe even without that patent deal which Novell and Microsoft signed.
On next weekend I will be present at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage running the openSUSE booth there, so if you don’t know what todo next weekend and you are in the Chemnitz area stop by and visit Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, of course stop by at the openSUSE booth
For us, the openSUSE Group in Nicaragua, this is a great opportunity to participate in leading one of the main groups and to send personnel to the remaining places, so we can provide a permanent and effective presence in the Country.
Reviews
In OpenSUSE Forums, someone has posted a sort of comparison between PCLinuxOS 2010 (still in beta) and the latest stable version of OpenSUSE. We could not find another review.
Setting up my HP wireless printer/scanner was also painless, that took me days of bashing my head against the keyboard fighting with the hplip drivers in 11.2, where it wouldn’t work if you selected the printer the software discovered, you had to enter the IP manually. Plus PCLOS set the scanner part up automatically, that has to be done seperately in 11.2.
The idea for kde-obs-generator emerged from CampKDE and FOSDEM. Since then, Novell employee Lubo Lunák has uploaded its first developer version on kde-apps.org. The program creates RPM and Debian packages for openSUSE Build Services (OBS) supported distros without having to know very much about package building. A few command line commands in kde-obs-generator will easily create packages, according to Lunák. He has tested it on Plasma, KDM and KSplash themes, simple wallpapers and, of course, KDE apps themselves. The tool should greatly simplify uploading content to the kde-apps.org site, for example.
The procedure to build the rpm can be found in the openSUSE wiki. One word of caution about the procedure, you need to be an experienced linux user and you need to have access to the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) to be able to build the rpm. This is due to library dependency problem, which prevents it to build without modification to the base system.
Enjoy this gift from our community member and don’t forget to report any problems you find with this new milestone in our bugzilla.
PS: I had a talk with our SUSE Studio guys and they are up to something similar using their infrastructure. They have to solve some issues first, though. Feature for this is already filed in openFATE.
Last time I blogged about open positions in the SUSE Studio team we were just preparing the first public alpha of SUSE Studio. We were excited about our application, but we didn’t know what users would say. Now we are running SUSE Studio Online with more than 50.000 registered users. We have released an onsite version as part of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, have won awards, and we get a lot of fantastic feedback. We have achieved a lot. To sustain this growth and success we are looking for some smart people to join our team. This could be you.
Then there’s just a bunch of OpenSUSE-specific/oriented HOWTOs, notably:
The next openSUSE german Wiki Team meeting will take place tomorrow Wednesday March 09 at 18:00 GMT. As always, the meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-wiki-de channel on Freenode.
In this Week:
* Pavol Rusnak: Announcing Connect!
* Andrew Wafaa: openSUSE & Google Summer of Code 2010
* Bento-Theme implementation approach
* Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Beginner’s Guide to Nmap
* Poll: Which linux Distro do you use frequently
The man behind these posts says that “Geeko wants you” and a Geeko tram gets spotted (but it’s not really Geeko). On the more positive side of things, there’s something for OpenSUSE to be genuinely proud of; It has achieved this minor goal of advocacy with an accidental television appearance:
Just received the message (via awafaa) that our preferred distro openSUSE is being featured in the trailer of the Film Genitori e Figli (Parent and children). Here an screenshot of the moment were openSUSE is visible at 01m:40s
GNU/Linux is used on sub-notebooks quite extensively, especially outside the United States. █
Summary: Overview of news about software patents and slightly beyond that
THE ISSUE of software patents is having an impact on GNU/Linux more than ever before. Apple, Microsoft, and a few other companies use software patents against the freedom of software. This post is a collection of items that hopefully inform and explain where we stand.
Acacia
There is only one patent troll that directly challenged GNU/Linux by filing a lawsuit against a GNU/Linux vendor, based on a software patent claim. Acacia sued Red Hat and Novell shortly after it had hired from Microsoft and Law.com has an update on the case.
Already this month, Rader has dismissed one patent case against Google and Yahoo on summary judgment and trimmed back damages theories in a lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell. These are somewhat unusual rulings for the Eastern District of Texas, which historically has not killed as many patent cases on summary judgment as other venues.
[...]
• In IP Innovation v. Red Hat, another case also involving plaintiff IP Innovation, this time against Red Hat and Novell, Rader made a statement on the hot button issue of damages in patent cases. The judge questioned the plaintiff expert’s use of the “entire market value” rule, which calculates damages based on a percentage of total sales even if only a small feature of a product like a computer is infringing.
“Mr. Gemini’s current expert report improperly inflates both the royalty base and the royalty rate by relying on irrelevant or unreliable evidence and by failing to account for the economic realities of this claimed component as part of a larger system,” Rader wrote (.pdf).
Red Hat and Novell are being represented by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher lawyers from San Francisco.
It is hard to tell if Microsoft was in touch with Acacia executives just before the lawsuit (there was a staff migration from Microsoft to Acacia), but as we showed many times before, the timing was interesting. The Acacia lawsuit was filed shortly after Ballmer had issued a patent threat to Red Hat.
For those who do not remember how Tuxera is connected to Microsoft, here is a Wiki page serving as reference. There is noteworthy news about Tuxera becoming an SD Association member. They hopefully won’t standardise only on Microsoft file systems that require money to be paid to Microsoft (for software patents).
Monsanto
One company that might be more malicious than Microsoft would have to be Monsanto. There are others too, but the nature of their malice is different (wars, poisoning, et cetera).
Monsanto officials are already inside the government (we have dozens of posts about Monsanto’s inter-personal relationships) and this new report from The New York Times indicates that the company’s patent franchise is still under scrutiny.
The price increases have not only irritated many farmers, they have caught the attention of the Obama administration. The Justice Department began an antitrust investigation of the seed industry last year, with an apparent focus on Monsanto, which controls much of the market for the expensive bioengineered traits that make crops resistant to insect pests and herbicides.
But the ones he chooses in contrast are pretty significant:
And the past:
Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft’s just a flea on Wall St’s elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?
Protective. Think Microsoft’s the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto’s Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto’s made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?
Hmm, Microsoft and Monsanto, what a combination – and interestingly, it’s the latter that is singled out as clearly the worse of the two (which is why I am writing increasingly about the company and its activities.)
Monsanto is directly connected to Bill Gates [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
Apple and Microsoft
Moody also writes about Apple and Microsoft; specifically, he is referring to the secrets Sun’s former CEO is telling about this pair (already covered in [1, 2, 3, 4]).
What Schwartz’s wonderful anecdotes remind us is that every piece of software borrows from its predecessors, just as every artist learns from the artists that created before him or her. And that’s to be expected, because software is a combination of art and science, and both gain much of their power by building on what went before, and then sharing that for others to build on in their turn, for the wider benefit of everyone.
The insane fad for trying to stop that sharing, and to turn those ideas into some mythical “intellectual property” is now reaching its inevitable conclusion, as patent thickets everywhere mean companies spend more and more time and money defending themselves against patent lawsuits, and less time getting on with their main business. There is only one solution: get rid of patents completely, and let the companies that innovate obtain their rewards from *using* that innovation to become leaders, not from trying to stop others from following belatedly in their footsteps.
In the context of free software patents are problematic. In the ideal world patents on software wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be a problem. However, they do exist. Moreover, part of the reason they exist is because of a variation of mutually assured destruction – many businesses believe they need to acquire patents in order to defend against other patents.* Jonathan Schwartz sets out some of the sad, tawdry circumstances in which this logic plays out here.
I think it is a non trivial problem to find wording which preserves just the defensive potential of patents (which, is actually their offensive potential limited to specific circumstances of exercise) while preserving freedom when licensing software. Some of the more detailed free software licences attempt this. It is, I think, a more difficult problem to craft such wording to apply to standards – because standards purport to be agreed by some collection of people, while freedom requires that everyone be permitted to pursue their own goals. Thus, any ‘promise’ or ‘covenant’** which is limited to an agreed specification must necessarily be inconsistent with freedom in a way qualitatively different to a patent clause in an open source licence. Moreover, any wording which applies to a particular version of a specification will be inconsistent with the evolution of that specification. In short, promises made in relation to specifications are likely to always be problematic (the best to hope for is a disclaimer – per W3C).
More information about Apple’s lawsuit (and some background) can be found in The Prior Art blog, which is a good resource.
So while its partner HTC may be the “perfect target” for a patent attack, this is clearly a proxy war with Google—a company that has made clear that it’s determined to push into the cell-phone market. That makes Apple’s gambit a truly risky one.
We recommend that our readers do not pay Apple any money from now on (and encourage others to do the same). There are alternatives to Apple in every area of computing and these alternatives are also much cheaper anyway. A former Novell/SUSE evangelist finds out where Macs just don’t work well (technically, as opposed to perception and visuals).
I have two MacBooks. One is from early 2007, the other from late 2009. Both have intermittent problems waking up from sleep often enough, and similarly enough, to indicate that the perfectionist culture rumored to drive Apple’s every move has its severe blind spots.
Vista 7 — like Vista where shots have just been fired — has its problems too. We wrote about this in the morning, quoting our reader Goblin who now adds: “Speak with a “average” user of Windows 7 after its been running for a few weeks. In my experience, there’s some unhappy people.” He also gives a couple of examples [1, 2] that say: “Since I upgraded my Acer Aspire 6930 from Vista to Windows 7 I have been having many issues…”
Another example says that “these are some of the problems faced by me on the operating system windows7″; is anybody surprised? We have warned about it since 2008 and large businesses refuse to consider this operating system, usually after extensive testing that they require and can afford to perform. █
Summary: How SCO orchestrated attacks on Groklaw and other takes on the trial against Novell
WE generally cover the SCO case only when there is a major development. One new post that we found particularly curious is titled “Blake Stowell Email to Maureen O’Gara: ‘I Need You to Send a Jab PJ’s Way’” (SCO also paid O'Gara, who carries on lying about the case).
Blake Stowell, then the PR guy for SCO, sent an email to Maureen O’Gara, saying “I need you to send a jab PJ’s way,” and then right afterwards she wrote that invasive so-called expose, in which she revealed, or at least intended to reveal, things like who I called on my phone. A la the HP scandal. She got fired for doing it the way she did, and the then-publisher apologized to me publicly, but she says in the deposition she’s not sorry a bit.
We learn this by reading excerpts from her deposition, previously under seal, attached to a letter [PDF] SCO’s attorney sent to the court. SCO doesn’t want the part of her deposition video played where she talks about me and Groklaw. It’s beyond eye-opening, however, despite her pretense, as I see it, that there is no connection between the two events.
They also don’t want the part about an email she sent to SCO, subject line, “I want war pay,” played. It’s allegedly humor. Just chatter. But you know, she is on the list of people SCO owes money to, now that I think of it, filed in connection with the bankruptcy. I wonder for what?
It isn’t acceptable, in my eyes, that SCO’s attorneys invariably smear Groklaw in every filing that mentions it. They don’t just say “Groklaw,” they say “the anti-SCO website, Groklaw.” One can say quite a lot in legal filings, and get away with it, but there is a line where it becomes libel, when it is gratuitous, and that language is gratuitous. There isn’t a media outlet that I can think of, other than Maureen O’Gara’s newsletters, that hasn’t criticized what SCO did. The Wall Street Journal was the first, actually, to suspect there was something rotten in Lindon, if you recall. Would it be acceptable to call it, in legal papers, the anti-SCO newspaper, the Wall St. Journal? I think not, and I suggest they are crossing a line.
Due to the interest in the case, Judge Kimbell told both parties to minimize redactions in the documents that they filed, and not to minimize the number of documents filed under seal. Because of this we learned that Caldera had hired people to investigate and prove the transfer of code, and that they reported that they COULD NOT FIND PROOF OF ANY TRANSFER. They filed their reports before the original lawsuit was launched. Darl, the CEO knew that he didn’t have any proof. None. But he went ahead with the lawsuit against IBM anyway.
Novell has asked the Court to rule further on their Motion in Limine No. 4 [PDF; text]. The Court had previously issued a ruling [PDF] granting that Motion, but Novell now asks for further ruling, stating that “[t]he Court addressed this issue solely in the context of SCO’s covenant of good faith claim. However, Novell’s motion covered all of SCO’s claims, including slander of title. The Court’s prior ruling did not expressly address other claims, so Novell requests the Court to rule on the issue that was left open by its prior order.”
Novell Inc. lied about owning the copyrights for the Unix computer operating system then collaborated with IBM to damage Unix owner The SCO Group, the latter’s attorney told a federal court jury Tuesday.
In the first day of testimony in a trial to settle a long-running legal dispute between SCO and Novell, SCO went on the attack by calling as its first witness the former CEO and chairman of Novell. Robert Frankenberg testified that despite Novell’s claims of ownership, his intent was to sell the copyrights in a 1995 deal that’s at the heart of the conflict.
The SCO Group claims that Novell “slandered” its title to the Unix system and caused it to lose as much as $215 million in revenue at a time when it was in a related dispute with IBM. SCO had accused IBM of improperly using Unix code for improvements that made the Linux operating system a commercial competitor.
SCO’s 2003 lawsuit potentially put IBM on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. But then Novell late that year claimed that it, and not SCO, owned the copyrights, meaning SCO did not have a basis for its IBM lawsuit nor for demands that businesses using Linux pay licensing fees.
A trial in federal court that could have a major impact on the Linux operating system opened in Salt Lake City on Monday with The SCO Group’s lawyer taking aim at Novell and IBM.
Would it surprise you to find out that it turns out that apparently one of the jurors might be related to one of SCO’s prior corporate officers? At any rate they have the same last name, and Salt Lake City is a big place, so perhaps not. Novell noticed the similarity in names, according to our reporter today, MSS2, only after jury selection was over.
MSS2 has just sent me his first report of day 2 of the jury trial in SCO v. Novell, with more to come. Today was opening arguments by both sides. And we have lots more goodies for you from two eyewitnesses, MSS2 and Tilendor. We begin with SCO’s opening argument by Stuart Singer. All I can say after reading it is maybe you needed to be there. Or SCO must be a slow learner or Mr. Singer never reads Groklaw, or … well, see what you think.
A jury has been seated to hear the lawsuit in which The SCO Group is claiming Novell interfered with its ownership of the Unix computer operating system and cost it more than $100 million in business.
Some readers of Boycott Novell have sufficient knowledge about the case and they comment about it in IRC. But for well researched commentary regarding SCO, we recommend that people read Groklaw, which could use more volunteers. █
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft
Summary: Disagreement between the press and the hostile acquirer as to whether or not Novell would stay in tact
NOVELL is at a stage of uncertainty and state of denial because it’s likely to be acquired soon [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The Novell-faithful people watch with concern as their Novell skills/certifications are at stake and Novell’s BrainShare, which is just days away, has "uncertainty" written all over it. Attendants are likely to bring up questions about the company’s short-term plans. Novell’s PR team promotes the event [1, 2], whereas analysts at Ovum claim that “The end is nigh for Novell”:
After years of acquisition rumors, last week Novell received a buy-out offer from hedge fund Elliott Associates (EA). Whether the offer succeeds or not, Novell is likely to end up in pieces.
[...]
Novell’s parts are more valuable than its sum
Novell’s board is likely to reject the current offer before Novell’s annual conference, BrainShare, starts on 21 March. It can keep rejecting EA’s offers, but it cannot stop EA from going directly to Novell’s shareholders. Should EA be successful, it is likely to pocket Novell’s cash then split the company and sell its constituent parts.
This news report from Bloomberg (also published in BusinessWeek and later corrected slightly) claims that Novell will be torn apart by Singer and his minions, who are only interested in money and not in Novell’s staff, products, and customers.
Elliott Associates LP, the fund manager that made an unsolicited $2 billion offer for Novell Inc., may consider selling the NetWare networking-software unit if its bid succeeds, a person familiar with the matter said.
Elliott, which owns about 8.5 percent of Novell stock, would also try to run the company more efficiently and bring about $400 million in cash that Novell holds off shore to the U.S., said the person, who asked not to be identified because Novell hasn’t agreed to the bid. Elliott may also try to find a buyer for Novell’s business that specializes in an open-source operating system, the person said.
“Our intent is to own Novell,” New York-based Elliott said in an e-mailed statement. “We have absolutely no plans to sell any business units.”
As the week was ending, rumors were swirling that the hedge fund suitor of Novell, Elliott Associates, which last week offered $1bn net of cash to take over the perennially struggling software maker, was going to start selling off its target’s assets if it clinches a deal.
[...]
In response to the Bloomberg story, Elliott put out a statement two hours after the market closed denying the rumors. “The story that Bloomberg ran today was inaccurate. Elliott has made no statement with respect to its intent regarding Novell. Elliott wants to own the company. Elliott has no plans to sell any business units and to report anything else would be erroneous.”
I personally do not want to see SUSE to die. I ‘dabbled my feet’ with linux was SuSe 6.0. I actually bought the boxed version of that software (since installing, downloading, configuring, etc were a major pain in those days). Among all linux I tried that time (which was probably early 1990s), SUSE was always the winner in detecting any hardwares I throw into. All other distros just simply failed, usually, in detecting the ‘soft modem.’ Remember that era? If not, soft modem is that annoying modem that can be used with Windows driver only. You would be lucky to run your beloved 1.44k band modem if someone did the hack for linux driver of it.
Taking a moment to look a few days back (before the Bloomberg report and the subsequent denial), Paul Rubens believes that sale of Novell’s assets is inevitable.
The enterprise Linux space has suddenly got very interesting following the news that a bunch of sharp-suited New Yorkers have made an offer to buy SUSE Linux’s parent company, Novell. Whether or not they succeed, there can be little doubt that it’s cheerio and night-night for Novell, a business that has been doomed since, let’s be brutally honest here, everyone stopped buying NetWare.
The offer, from hedge fund outfit Elliott Associates, was for $5.75 per share, valuing Novell at a shade under $2 billion. But bearing in mind that the company has vast cash piles in various currencies, worth about $950 million, and the offer values Novell’s businesses at around $1 billion greenbacks.
But there are fears that if Novell goes, that could be the first domino which damages the commercial outfits based on Linux.
The next target might be Red Hat. Some think that if Novell’s SUSE Linux business finds its way into Oracle’s or VMware’s or IBM’s paws, it will be hard for Red Hat to remain viable as a stand alone company.
This is only based on CNET, which they think is a reliable news site. When they say “there are fears” they only refer to Matt Asay, who used to work for Novell and thus compete strongly against Red Hat. This whole thing also feeds the shameless Microsoft booster Preston Gralla [1, 2]. His disinformation is self explanatory and public admiration of Microsoft very much expected. █
We are not at all surprised to hear this. On the contrary, many people are pleased with Mandriva, which is one of my favourites (others in the family use it). Another reader commenting on the same superb article from Richard Hillesley points out that:
Anyone else see the irony?
[...]
This paragraph brought a wry smile to my face:
“Miguel de Icaza, at that time a rising star of the free software movement and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the rival GNOME project, expressed the mixed feelings of many users and developers. “KDE was an inspirational project,” he told Linux Journal, “but at the time, the Qt toolkit on which KDE was built was a proprietary toolkit.”
The fact that he’s working with Microsoft now in producing the wretchedly slow Mono to provide compatibility with .NET and potentially laying Linux open to all sorts of future problems is deliciously ironic.
In terms of Mandriva, hopefully they will survive and flourish again, it still hangs in there fairly high up in Distrowatch. They probably do KDE better than any other distro and have done a splendid job with the now excellent KDE4 desktop.
There is some new Mono software from Novell employees this week [1, 2]. It’s fine for Novell, but it’s a patent fine for the rest.
Mandriva is indeed an excellent distribution. It puts to shame other operating systems, but it just doesn’t advertise as much. Since it is still KDE-centric for the most part, it hasn’t much of a Mono problem, either. █
“We designed the BusXpert and BusMod to be portable from the start and we’re proud to be the only analyzer/error injector in the market to deliver Linux support,” said Dale Smith, President/CTO of SerialTek. “Many Linux users will greatly appreciate not having to maintain separate Windows systems for their test tools.”
MSI Computer, recently donated a number of MSI Wind U100 Netbooks to the Virginia Tech Music Department to help create the first ever Linux-based laptop orchestra. The diverse group is made up of theater arts, political science, engineering, biology and math majors and called the L2Ork, in honor of the open source software used by the group.
Shuttle announced a Barebone XS35 nettop equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom D510, and Nvidia Ion 2 graphics. Meanwhile NewEgg is selling a Linux-equipped Eee Box B202 nettop for only $189, and the Eee PC-oriented Eeebuntu distro is moving from Ubuntu to Debian with EB 4.0.
Dell Japan is selling the Linux version of the new Inspiron Mini 10 netbook. Like the Windows version, the Linux model has a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. But it comes with an open source operating system.
The product description says this model comes with Ubuntu 9.10, Moblin 2.1. It’s not entirely clear what that means, but my best guess is that it’s a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses the latest version of the Moblin user interface and incorporates Moblin’s optimizations for speedy performance on a low power Intel Atom chipset.
While Elliott believes Linux is the ideal choice for cloud computing, he said any operating system will work because it’s really just a matter of making applications available.
The Linux Foundation has announced sessions for its Collaboration Summit, scheduled for Apr. 14-16 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This year’s event features a full-day workgroup on MeeGo, as well as discussions of Linux topics including toolchain, cloud computing, printing, filesystems, ISV porting, and open source compliance.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its Call for Participation (CFP) for LinuxCon Japan, which takes place September 27-29, 2010 in Tokyo.
Formerly known as the Japan Linux Symposium, LinuxCon Japan will continue the tradition of educating attendees with technical and informative presentations and will foster collaboration between developers from Japan and Asian countries and their International colleagues.
Following in the success of the Phoronix Test Suite, last month we launched Phoromatic as a remote test management system targeted for enterprise users of the Phoronix Test Suite that allows the automatic scheduling of tests, remote installation of new tests, and the management of multiple test systems all through an intuitive, easy-to-use web interface.
Currently the entire fragment pipeline is code-generated. Over the last two weeks I’ve been implementing the vertex pipeline, which I’m hoping to merge soon (hence the light smile). Code generating the entire vertex pipeline isn’t exactly trivial, but one can divide it into individual pieces and that makes it a bit easier. Start with the vertex shader, then go back and do the fetch and translate, then again move forward and do the emit, then go back and do the viewport transformations and clipping and so on, finally combine all the pieces together.
Text-to-Speech Software for Linux: If you’ve been using Mac OS X or Windows Vista before, you may be a bit disappointed to learn that there’s no speech synthesizer or text-to-speech (TTS) application that is installed by default on your Linux distribution. For those of you who don’t know what a speech synthesizer is, it’s simply a computer program that converts normal language text into speech. Text-to-speech software can be of great help particularly for people who are visually impaired and those who are mute.
Kristanix Games announces the release of Linux versions of its most popular games. The Linux Games project now includes such high quality casual games as Sudoku Epic, Solitaire Epic, Mahjong Epic, Jewel Twist, Fantastic Farm, Crossword Twist and many more. The clear interface, rich graphics and variety of genres (time management, puzzles, cards, match3, math games, etc.) guarantee hours of entertainment! Free trial editions of Linux Games are available at http://www.kristanix.com/linuxgames/
Palm’s highly regarded webOS is based on Linux, with many general applications created for it using web technology such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
When it comes to games however, developers usually require low level access to hardware. That’s why Palm has come up with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK).
Phoronix has used its Test Suite to compare the memory and power consumption of different desktop environments. However, the results should be handled with care.
The “Power & Memory Usage” test was done to evaluate whether XFCE and LXDE consume less power and memory compared with their “big” siblings KDE and Gnome. The tests were done on a stock Ubuntu installation. At first glance the results suggest that KDE consumes much more power than the others. However, these results are misleading.
We fired up the Phoronix Test Suite to run the LAME MP3 encoding, 7-Zip compression, LZMA compression, PostMark, Unpacking the Linux kernel, John The Ripper, GraphicsMagick, and the Bullet Physics Engine. As Fedora 13 still has a ways to go before its release and there are debugging options enabled within the alpha build as well as other development packages, its system performance now is not the same as it will be in May once it is officially released. With that said, we are publishing these graphs as-is for those interested in comparing Fedora 13 Alpha to the past releases or to Ubuntu 10.04.
I have recently fed up with the broken dependencies and potential boot problems after ever every update and decided to give Ubuntu a try – an action that was long awaiting on my to do list.
I’m very excited to announce that Ubuntu has applied as participating organisation in the Google Summer of Code 2010!
We submitted an organisational application, along with suggested ideas for potential projects for students. We also encourage students to come up with their own ideas.
What is the color of stability? A certain blue to be sure. Can it be aubergine? Well, this is what Ubuntu is trying to do with its upcoming Long Term Support (LTS) release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Make Ubuntu look different. Step away from its legacy orange.
My initial reaction, as I was fighting a not so successful Jaunty update that turned my Shutdown button into Logout button, was a kneejerk impulse. Browsing through a gallery of copy-pasted images from Ubuntu Brand page and replicated like Borg in a kazillion blogs, I did not like much what I was seeing, a Mac-like imitation.
March 3rd was a strange day. It was one day before User Interface freeze for the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid long term support release. By the end of the day we were supposed to have the entire look and feel of the desktop settled on so people could start writing documentation and books.
Scottie posted an entry earlier about the new Ubuntu branding. I’ve been meaning to make a very similar post, but I’ve had lots more important things to do the last two weeks.
For those who have missed it, Canonical announced the new branding and artwork on the day of the User Interface Freeze for the Lucid development cycle. The decisions around the new branding have been met with some controversy, and as Scottie pointed out, some awkwardness around it. I’ll try to sum up my views about it in this post.
1: Ubuntu users aren’t used to the change
I’m getting pretty sick and tired of the Ubuntu users out there that revert to saying that all changes that canonical has made to Ubuntu for 10.04 are bad “because Ubuntu users aren’t used to them”. I don’t really see how you can consider anything change unless something has … well … changed. Yes, these same people that are making those claims are the same people that are out there complaining about there being no changes.
Buffalo Technology has announced that it will be using the free DD-WRT Linux-based alternative open source firmware in several of its upcoming consumer and small business wireless routers, including the WZR-HP-G300NH, WHR-HP-G300N and WHR-HP-GN. Discussing the new partnership, Ralph Spagnola, vice president of sales at Buffalo Technology, said that he considers the move to be a “natural evolution,” adding that, “With DD-WRT, we now deliver professional grade solutions at entry-level prices”.
For this review, the spotlight is on Maemo, a Linux-based OS developed by Nokia that was initially made for its Internet tablet devices. Now, Maemo has been shoehorned into Nokia’s N900 smartphone.
Twitter client HootSuite, which recently raised $1.9 million in funding, has now made an acquisition, buying up Android app developer Swift App. HootSuite says that Swift App was behind the development of HootSuite’s own Android app, which was released last week. The company says the acquisition “means quicker development for the growing Android market.”
Martin gave his iPhone to his grandson in favor of a Motorola Droid. Good move Martin! What better of an endorsement to the Android Community than the inventor of the cell phone picking up an Android phone. I wonder if Martin’s phone is rooted? Could he be running the latest 2.1 custom ROM all theme’d out?
The availability of an Opera browser for Android handsets means more than additional choice for users. It means that the Android platform has achieved a new level of respect in the smartphone marketplace. “This is a clear sign that at least from a browsing standpoint, the platform matters,” said ABI Research analyst Neil Strother.
The JooJoo will ship with a Linux user interface, however other pictures from the FCC show it running with Windows 7 that could point to future OS choice. The non-removable battery should last for 5 hours. The JooJoo is due to launch on 25 March. Check out some more pictures below.
But — and this is the important bit — you don’t have to buy an Apple iPad to get all of the iPad’s goodies. ARM, a mobile microprocessor power, is predicting that we’ll see no less than 50 ARM processor-powered iPad clones by year’s end — and these ARM-powered entertainment tablets will all be running Linux.
There will be also other Linux-powered iPad clones. Some of them will be running Android. Others will be running MeeGo, which is Intel and Nokia’s combining of their embedded Linux efforts. These latter devices will have the new Intel Atom Pineview processor family at their heart.
All these Linux entertainment tablets are going to be cheaper than the iPad. You can expect to see the first of them by midsummer. Some of them will not force DRM on your content and, unlike the iPad, you’ll be able to watch Adobe Flash videos on them.
Open Source For America (OSFA), an organisation created to promote the use of open source in government, has denounced the IIPA’s “Special 301″ call saying it is irresponsible and misleading. The International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) had called for the US Trade Representative to place countries such as Indonesia, Brazil and India, on a “Special 301″ watch list, normally reserved for dictatorships or repressive regimes, because the governments advocate the use of open source. OSFA say that this request is “both irresponsible and misleading in its characterisation of OSS”.
The goal of this release is to smooth out the problems created by upgrading the Gecko engine that powers the program, and this is the first semi-stable release of Mozilla’s email client to use Gecko 1.9.2. The final version of Thunderbird 3.1 is expected to be available sometime in June, though the date hasn’t been set in stone yet, so there is still a possibility the release date to be changed.
Here’s what interests me: I’m hoping to watch closely to make sure no one pushes to make the patent clause weaker in the name of “freedom to do what you want” or some such nonsense. After reading Jonathan Schwartz’s account of a meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer where they tried to sell him a license to use and distribute OpenOffice, it’s vital, in my view, that patent clauses are, if anything, strengthened. Microsoft is real life. They don’t change. There is no footnote to that truth.
Offshoots, such as the OU, that promised to take Moodle to new heights, have then turned out to be separate species in themselves. This project put paid to the myth that Moodle is ‘free’, as they spent nearly £6 million 2 years ago (a cool million on Moodle development alone) and that was just the pilot! In fact, it turned out not to be such great, functional leap forward, more of a cul-de-sac in terms of the usefulness of the code. As a projects across the OU it’s been a great success.
In 2002 I was working for Oculan, a company that founded an open source network management application platform called OpenNMS. Oculan used this platform as the basis for a network management appliance, but my job was to create a services and support business around the platform itself.
In May, just after the release of OpenNMS version 1.0, Oculan got new investors, who decided to focus on the appliance and to stop working on OpenNMS.
I knew that without at least one person dedicated to OpenNMS it would die, and I wasn’t ready to give up on it. So I went to the CEO and asked to become the administrator of the project. We talked for a bit, and then he looked at his watch and said that if I was off his payroll by Friday, he’d give me a couple of servers, the OpenNMS domain names, and his blessing to continue on with OpenNMS.
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In conclusion, I should add that the first year I spent as the admin of OpenNMS cost me $5,000 of my savings. I’ve made money every year since then, and currently the commercial arm of the project has a dozen employees in three countries and seven-figure revenues. Oculan closed its doors in 2004.
Open source isn’t just a good design philosophy; it’s good business.
Today, we released RE2 as an open source project. It’s a mostly drop-in replacement for PCRE’s C++ bindings and is available under a BSD-style license. See the RE2 project page for details.
Having taken a job in biotech, I feel a bit cut off from any such community — industry is notoriously protective of IP and fond of secrecy besides. I feel a bit of a fraud, for instance, taking part in discussions of Open Science issues on FriendFeed (such as the conversation kicked off by Alan’s blog post), knowing that I can’t talk openly about my own work. It doesn’t keep me from shooting off my yap, of course, but it’s a nagging icky feeling — and I keep getting the meta-feeling that it doesn’t have to be this way. Just as secrecy in academia only makes sense within the existing reward structure, secrecy in industry could be at least partly offset by policy decisions that recognize the gains in efficiency that collaboration can bring. I’ve heard multiple times from multiple sources that industry may close itself off from the rest of the world, but within a company, the teamwork ethic is amazing. Clearly, the value of co-operation is recognized. Why shouldn’t that also work for (larger and larger) groups of companies? What you lose by not being the only company to know something from which profit can be made (call it X) is offset by the fact that you might never have learned X without the collaboration — and in the meantime, the world gets X that much faster.
It seems clear, though, that such top-down decisions are more likely to be made in academia, and perhaps the nonprofit sector, than in profit-driven industry — at least until there are enough concrete examples of success to tip the perceived balance of risk. If I’m — if we Open Foo types are — right, it’s actually riskier to compete than to cooperate in the long term. Better to own a share of X sooner than to delay any return on your investment in the hope of owning X outright later. This is especially true when the resources required to try to own X could be used to get you shares in multiple other projects at the same time.
The virtues of free are pretty inarguable, but advocating the open release of stuff inevitably begs the question: but how do you make a living from it? So it’s always great to come across a *thriving* business built on giving stuff away, like WikiPremed MCAT Prep Course, “an open access comprehensive course in the undergraduate level general sciences”.
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But irrespective of the how, the simple fact of WikiPremed’s success is good news: it means that Wetzel is likely to continue to offer his content for free, helping who knows how many impecunious students in the process; it also means that free content has another great case study showing how you can make money from giving stuff away.
The Open Educational Resource movement, based on the idea that educational content which is publicly licensed for modification and redistribution is a positive innovation in education, has just begun to break into the mainstream. Conceptually, the idea has been in the public sphere for years now with projects like the OpenCourseWare growing to over 200 schools and universities with over 13,000 courses online getting over 100 million visits from around the world.
Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy’s most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we’ve worked with a ministry of culture.
The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification. This is a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language allowing developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration.
The OpenGL 4.0 specification (along with the OpenGL 3.3 spec) is available for immediate download at OpenGL.org. The OpenGL 3.3 specification is designed to bring as much of the new OpenGL 4.0 functionality back into OpenGL 3.x as possible while still retaining compatibility with existing graphics processors. The press release announcing OpenGL 4.0 and 3.3 can be read via the Khronos Group.
Government is a big and unwieldy beast. Even when it is looking where it is going, it is all to easy for it to step on small creatures and hardly notice the crunch. All too often, it isn’t particularly looking where it is going and can tread on things without malice or intent – but if you are the small creature, the motives of the elephant are hardly your top concern.
We’ve mentioned that it’s been a bad year for tigers thus far, ironic since it is The Year of The Tiger, but it seems like every other week just piles on more sad tiger preservation news. At least 11 Siberian tigers were found starved to death in a zoo in Shenyang, northeastern China.
One of creationists’ favourite claims is that an organ as intricate as the eye could never have simply evolved. Fresh evidence to the contrary has now arrived, courtesy of a creature related to jellyfish.
The tiny freshwater hydra has no eyes but it will contract into a ball when exposed to sudden bright light. David Plachetzki and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have found that hydras “see” light using two proteins closely related to those in our own eyes.
Then the photo journalist Marc Vallée spoke about how he discovered the police were storing a private photo-database of everyone then can get pictures of at demonstrations, while intimidating us from taking pictures in public.
A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.
The data protection watchdog has strongly urged an incoming Tory government to quickly bring in jail sentences for data thieves, after the current government reneged on the idea.
The Olympics are coming to London, so our civil liberties are going out the window: because nothing epitomises the spirit of global competition and cooperation like corporate bullying and unfettered truncheon-waving.
I always hated the Olympics as a vulgar, corrupt and expensive display of corrosive, narrow-minded nationalism. Later, I came to realise that it is also a splendid example of all that is wrong with intellectual monopolies, as the IOC tries to claims “rights” over everyday word combinations.
More than one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumer goods used in developed nations is actually emitted in other nations where the products are made, according to a new study. In the U.S., about 2.5 tons of carbon produced per person annually — or about 11 percent of U.S. per capita emissions — are emitted elsewhere, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science say. In Europe, it’s about four tons of carbon per person. In fact, in smaller European nations like Switzerland, the emissions associated with products manufactured outside the borders exceed the actual emissions produced at home.
More bad news today for the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as another of its extravangant ecopocalypse predictions, sourced from green campaigners, has been confirmed as bunk by scientists.
The UN body came under attack earlier this year for suggesting that 40 per cent of the Amazonian rainforests – dubbed the “lungs of the planet” by some for their ability to turn CO2 into oxygen, and also seen as vital on biodiversity grounds – might disappear imminently. This disaster would be triggered, according to the IPCC’s assessment, by a relatively slight drop in rainfall of the sort to be expected in a warming world.
An Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Errors Contained in the Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007
We begin to see, I think, a very clear and chilling picture of what is happening to UK democracy as a direct result of its disastrous military alliances… Next week, as it happens, there is the launch of a rather different project which also deploys ‘futures thinking’. For this group of thinkers, it is also obvious that a radical claiming back of people power is on the cards. More of this project here on openDemocracy shortly. But in what Stephen Graham calls, ‘ the transformation of Western militaries into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces’, my point is that these campaigners for a better democracy just happen to be on the other side. Is this scary undeclared war already changing the way we live now?
Three Labour MPs and a Conservative peer facing charges over their expenses appeared in court today to argue that their cases should be dealt with by parliament rather than the criminal justice system.
Caution on Internet voting appears prudent, since experts have identified a long and costly list of necessary precautions, including random spot checks and post-vote verification programs to preserve anonymity. Given the security risks, opening the door to provincial or federal Internet voting seems premature. In the zeal to increase voter turnout, the reliance on Internet voting could inadvertently place the validity of the election process at risk.
I recently discussed this with Dr Peter Wilmshurst, the eminent cardiologist who is being sued for libel for commenting on the efficacy of a new heart device. Peter was put under immense stress when he received legal papers on Friday 21 December 2007 at 5.09pm, which was nine minutes after most solicitors closed for their Christmas holiday. It was not until the new year that Peter was able to get any legal advice, so it was an anxious Christmas.
Perhaps it was just as well that Peter was not aware of the full implications of what lay ahead of him, namely at least two years of anxiety, misery and the threat of bankruptcy. Almost all his spare time has been spent on the libel case. When finalising his defence, he took two weeks of annual leave to work on the documents. Moreover, dealing with ongoing legal issues has prevented him from carrying out his usual medical research, and a number of publications have been put on hold.
The UK’s libel laws, which place the burden of proof onto those who have published inflammatory statements, have had a chilling effect on journalism in that nation, and have led to a closet industry in “libel tourism.” As such, there have been repeated efforts to reform the laws, often led by professional organizations of writers and journalists. A 2008 case, however, brought a new community into the fight: science communicators, drawn in when the British Chiropractic Association sued a journalist for calling some of its medical claims “bogus.” Although the legal fight has continued, the journalist in question, Simon Singh, has now been forced to quit his job at The Guardian in order to defend himself.
The last weapon in the Internet users’ arsenal is humor, and it can be devastating. Ridicule always kills a policy’s credibility. In China, since February, a tough “antivulgarity” campaign for a Web without crude language or photos forced ISPs to ask public forgiveness for the “indecent content” they had provided and to sanitize thousands of sites and social networks.
Two Azerbaijani bloggers will remain in jail after using a donkey to represent their government in a satirical YouTube video. Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli lost an appeal Wednesday asking for them to be released from their respective 2 and and 2.5 year sentences. Their lawyer vowed to continue appealing all the way up to the Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.
The Department of Internal Affairs has admitted that the internet filter is now operational and is already being used by ISPs Maxnet and Watchdog. It appears that Maxnet have not told their customers that they are diverting some of their internet traffic to the government system to be filtered.
China’s top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or “pay the consequences,” giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking.
A Chinese government minister has issued a stern warning to Google in the event the company stops filtering search results at its Chinese Web site: Follow our laws, or else.
Members of the UK Liberal Democrat party are angry that one of their own put through an onerous web blocking amendment to the Digital Economy Bill. This dangerous amendment provides for web blocking by courts, in addition to 3-strikes provisions. It could usher in a bi-directional blocking of the UK Internet.
What Mr Livingston had to say will not make comfortable reading for Labour, the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. On the bill, he was concerned that people were going to have their right to fair hearing in court taken away – that his customers could end up having their internet accounts suspended for alleged illegal file-sharing without due process. He proposed an alternative – a system of fines much like those imposed on speeding motorists, with the accused then choosing either to pay up or have their day in court.
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BT has appeared content in recent months to let Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse grab the limelight when it comes to telling politicians what to think about technology policy. Now it seems Ian Livingston wants to make sure his voice is heard.
For the past few months the Digital Economy Bill (DEB) has been quietly making its way through the House of Lords. As is the way of these things, large numbers of amendments have been proposed, their lordships have had a series of mini-debates on each set of issues, and the Government have been busily amending the Bill in an attempt to fix all the things that they didn’t think through properly.
As well as ORG’s own campaign, Liberty and Consumer Focus have expressed concern about the Bill. Universities and libraries have expressed outrage that they are, somewhat perversely, covered by the Bill’s proposals much as householders are. Internet giants like Google, Facebook and BT have banded together to object to to the Bill, as have small businesses.
Last month I requested the South Korean government to disclose information on the three strikes rule that came into effect on July 23, 2009. Surprisingly there was no single case in which the rule has been actually applied or considered to be applied.
During a keynote speech as president of the Film Distributors’ Association, Lord Puttnam said young people needed to be educated at an early age that it was wrong to illegally download copyrighted material.
“The concept of intellectual property and its value needs to be embedded inextricably into the school curriculum,” he said.
The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday.
James Murdoch today called on governments to get tough on illegal downloading, which he said was no different from “going into a store and stealing Pringles or a handbag”.
Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, was joined in calling for tougher piracy measures at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit today by other media executives including Ari Emanuel, co-chief executive of William Morris Endeavor, the biggest Hollywood talent agency.
That is, the analogue side – ticket sales in the cinemas – is soaring, while the digital part – those “post-theatrical markets” – are on the way down. And that’s absolutely inevitable, of course, because the scarcity is all on the analogue side, while the digital artefacts – downloads, DVDs and Blu-ray – have close to zero marginal cost (not so true for DVDs and Blu-ray, but close enough), so you’d expect their prices and profits to diminish.
Back in 2007, the USA, EU, Switzerland and Japan started the negotiations to create an international agreement on intellectual property rights, the claimed goal was to reduce the trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works through a legislative framework. The agreement is now known as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA.
If you follow technology news services and blogs that are vaguely interested in digital rights issues, you must already have heard about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is a multilateral trade agreement between the EU, the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others, currently negotiated in secret that is set to tackle copyright infringement issues. As the name indicates, the aim of the agreement is to tackle counterfeiting. However, the most controversial aspect is that various sources have disclosed that the agreement is set to export some of the worst maximalist legislation out there, particularly in an attempt to curb illegal file-sharing. For the most detailed in-depth analysis of what has been happening so far, Michael Geist’s blog is the place to be. Nonetheless, I have been meaning to take stock and write a synopsis of what has happened so far for my own benefit. If you are confused about the various claims and counter-claims, I hope you find this useful.
Summary: Coverage about security issues is abundant, but the cause of many of these issues is simply not named
MANY companies in the West had their security measures superseded and breached due to an Internet Explorer hole that Microsoft had knowingly ignored for 5 months [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Microsoft is now warning that Internet Explorer is under another attack:
In an advisory, the company warned that a new vulnerability was being targeted in attacks against Internet Explorer 6 and 7. IE 8 is not believed to be affected. According to Microsoft, the vulnerability is due to an invalid pointer reference being used within IE and can be exploited by tricking users into visiting a malicious or compromised Web page.
This is a Windows problem because Internet Explorer is a part of Windows, which therefore inherits all the weaknesses of one piece of software that ought to have been isolated. The consequences of Windows’ insecurity can also be seen in the following news:
Upon further investigation, the phone was found to be infected with not one but three nasties, including the Conficker worm, a Mariposa bot client and a Lineage password divulger. The firm found that the Mariposa bot client was calling home to receive further instructions.
News Analysis: As much as Microsoft would like security problems to just go away, they won’t. The chances of Microsoft eliminating most of the software flaws that invite new attacks are slim to nil. But there are many things that Microsoft should do to improve the situation. We take a look at why security issues continue to haunt the software giant and what Microsoft can do about it.
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2. Windows is an easy target
Windows is a nightmare when it comes to security. The operating system is filled with holes that, over the years, have been patched with varying degrees of success. Windows 7 is the most secure operating system Microsoft has released to date, but it’s probably rife with flaws that Microsoft hasn’t heard of yet. And no doubt hackers are ceaselessly searching for them. Unless Microsoft does something drastic with the next iteration of Windows, its operating system woes will likely continue.
We do not agree with the article as a whole, but it does raise some important points. The security weaknesses of Windows produce botnets rather easily:
At least a quarter of the command and control servers linked to Zeus-related botnets have suddenly gone quiet, continuing a recent trend of takedowns hitting some of the world’s most nefarious cyber operations.
This is a Windows botnet (but it doesn’t even say “Windows botnet”). What’s sickening is that Microsoft is only mentioned in this article where it’s given credit. It says: “Late last month, Microsoft was able to disrupt the Waledac botnet by obtaining a court-issued order against scores of domains associated with the spam-spewing menace.”
Giving Microsoft credit for the Waledac takedown [1, 2, 3, 4] is like giving DuPont credit for some minimal cleanup after the Bhopal disaster. Microsoft employees are given credit for fighting a problem that they themselves created. It’s truly amazing, especially given that those Windows botnets are costing huge amounts of money that is hard to estimate (dependent upon definitions and methods).
We often criticize DMCA takedown abuse here at EFF, but last week’s Cryptome snafu highlights another facet of the problem: how a DMCA takedown for one item can result in the removal of lots of lawful material.
To recap, Cryptome posted Microsoft’s global criminal compliance manual. Microsoft sent a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome’s domain name registrar and web hosting provider, Network Solutions, alleging that the post infringed copyright. Under the DMCA, a web hosting provider is protected from copyright infringement liability if, among other things, it “expeditiously” disables access to material properly identified in a DMCA takedown notice. Network Solutions asked Cryptome to remove the Microsoft compliance manual. Cryptome refused explaining that the document was posted in order to help the public better understand Microsoft’s practices, and followed up with a DMCA counternotice. Network Solutions promptly shut down the entire Cryptome website. Thus, a complaint about a single document caused significant collateral damage to the perfectly legal material on Cryptome.
We have already covered this in another post. Microsoft can stop people who leak evidence of its warrantless spying, whereas those who empty bank accounts through compromised Windows PCs are not a priority. There are hundreds of millions of them. █
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