Summary: Bilski-watching in the words of those who care about software, not litigation
Tomorrow we’ll have a lot of new posts, but tomorrow may also bring the important decision [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] that can be extrapolated to annul software patents in the United States, or at leave pave the way. To quote from last week:
The Supreme Court is approaching the home stretch in its dash to end the current term, and it’s a period when the big pending decisions start to emerge. But not this morning.
“Waiting for Bilski” is the title of this report which requires subscription to access.
Unless and until the Supreme Court reverses the Federal Circuit decision in Bilski, applicants should take the interim instructions into account when drafting and prosecuting patent applications. For example, a process claim should pass muster under the interim instructions if it recites that non-trivial steps are performed by a computer or microprocessor, or if it specifically identifies electronic data by indicating what the data represents, the particular type or nature of the data, and/or how or from where the data is obtained and recites a change in the nature of the data such that it has a different function or is suitable for a different use. In addition, applicants may wish to include the term “non-transitory” in claims directed to a computer-readable medium, to avoid a possible rejection under Section 101.
To them, it’s about money, not science. “I thought you’d like to see how patent lawyers advise others on how to get a patent currently,” wrote Pamela Jones over at Groklaw, “or if the lower court’s ruling on Bilski is upheld unchanged.”
“According to SCOTUSblog, Schwab was the last undecided case, except for Bilski, argued during the last November session.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawLawyers want as many patents as possible (science does not matter) and the USPTO is addressing the wrong issues like speed of processing applications rather than limiting the scope of patents and narrowing their existing range. The other day we mentioned Amazon's latest outrageous patent on which Jones remarks by writing: “The USPTO and Amazon strike again. Amazon has gotten a patent, No. 7,739,139, on “Social networking system”. Dear US Supreme Court, Please do something before nothing new and innovative can be done by anyone except large companies, because if you don’t help, pretty soon every inch of the Internet will have somebody’s flag on it, and software will only be written by large, well-funded companies. And that blocks a person like Linus Torvalds from being able to create the next Linux, and it harms the one we have. Thank you if you are willing to help. In Re Bilski gives you a wonderful opportunity. [...] According to SCOTUSblog, Schwab was the last undecided case, except for Bilski, argued during the last November session. No Bilski today. Next possible day is Monday, June 21.”
That’s tomorrow. The decision must come this month. █
Are you the local computer boffin in your social circle? Tired of forever having to clean off that annoying fake super anti-virus 2010 trojan? Well, friends shouldn’t let friends run Windows. Be a friend to your friends.
Yes, everyone. Even the most hardcore Linux hater should run Linux. While this sounds absolutely contrary to simple logic, it aligns perfectly well with cunning logic, as I’m going to elaborate here. We’re not talking politics, ideology, zeal, Borg-like assimilation, or anything of that sort. We’re not talking cutting your costs in dire situation caused by some would-be financial crisis. We’re not talking freedom, free software or replacing existing business models with one that revolves around open-source.
We’re talking money.
Oh, you won’t get any money from running Linux, not in most cases, anyway. But you will save money. And not by spending less on Linux. You will spend less on Windows. Sounds tricky? It’s not. Follow me.
The whole package is put together very well. The menu is inuitive and easy to to understand, which (once you have logged in) will be easy to navigate and tailor to your needs. Turpial 1.3.3 appears a stable product and even during busy periods it has not yet offered up any problems.
Back in 1999, my employer, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center put a Red Hat Linux system running an Alpha processor on my desk. From there I was supposed to do write parallel code for a Red Hat Linux beowulf cluster. It was tricky without some basic desktop tools.
The Motorola Droid has never been an “iPhone killer,” but still one can regard it as a good alternative to the iPhone for Verizon customers.
But one should admit that the Droid was never a perfect handset. As Motorola is going to offer a Droid sequel this month, I think it would be right to go over the areas that are hoped to be found on board of the new handset.
The Droid Incredible ($200) is also in great demand. This high-end phone runs Android. It features 8GB of internal storage. You can add up to 16GB of additional storage with a microSD card.
The Incredible has a brilliant 800×480 OLED screen. This type of screen offers better, brighter colors than other screens. However, it can be a problem outdoors in bright sunlight. An optical joystick button is placed on the front of the phone to help you position the cursor precisely.
A whole seven months ago, back in November of 2009, I bought myself a Motorola Droid. At the time, the phone was considered to be absolutely state-of-the-art, with a high-resolution display, advanced Android 2.0 software, voice recognition, integrated GPS, 600Mhz OMAP processor, and a nifty slide-out keyboard design.
In those seven months Google’s Android OS has advanced at a pace equivalent to bacterial gestation in a petri dish.
Seemingly overnight, the platform has exploded, spawning many new phones from all the major carriers and TWO major OS upgrades, “Eclair” (2.1) which debuted on the Nexus One and now “Froyo” (2.2), which was announced at the recent Google I/O conference.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter as much as it would if Compiere’s original code base was proprietary. One of the tenents of open source is that no matter what the owner of the code does, the users of the code continue in their rights to use, extend, enhance, and distribute the code. The Adempiere fork of Compiere is evidence of this.
To my knowledge, this is the first instance of an open source ERP/CRM developer being acquired by a vendor of proprietary software. It will be interesting to see whether Compiere’s users are helped or hindered by this acquisition.
As a software engineer who works on open source scientific applications and frameworks, when I look at this, I scratch my head and wonder “why don’t they just do the equivalent of a code review”? And that’s really, where the germ of the idea behind this blog posting started. What if the scientific publishing process were more like an open source project? How would the need for peer-review be balanced with the need to publish? Who should bear the costs? Can a publishing model be created that minimizes bias and allows good ideas to emerge in the face of scientific groupthink?
What will your Web browser look like in 2015? Five years doesn’t always bring dramatic change to some technologies–today’s desktop PC, for instance, isn’t that different from its 2005 predecessor–but browsers are undergoing major changes that will alter our day-to-day computing lives.
In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it’s taking us
A Vancouver Island board of education has decided to reprint a middle-school’s yearbooks after a teacher took scissors to 150 copies last week and clipped out the photo of a Grade 10 student because of comments he made about the school principal.
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling for large-type warning labels on the foods that kids most commonly choke on — grapes, nuts, carrots, candy and public enemy No. 1: the frank. Then the lead author of the report, pediatric emergency room doctor Gary Smith, went one step further.
As someone who believes that our nation has a right to enforce its borders, I should have been gratified when the Immigrations official at the border saw the canoe on our car and informed us that anyone who crossed the nearby international waterway illegally would be arrested and fined as much as $5,000.
Trouble is, the river wasn’t the Rio Grande, but the St. Croix, which defines the border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. And the threat of arrest wasn’t aimed at illegal immigrants or terrorists but at canoeists like myself.
The St. Croix is a wild river that flows through unpopulated country. Primitive campsites are maintained on both shores, some accessible by logging roads, but most reached only by water or by bushwhacking for miles through thick forest and marsh. There are easier ways to sneak into the U.S. from Canada. According to Homeland Security regulations, however, canoeists who begin their trip in Canada cannot step foot on American soil, thus putting half the campsites off limits. It is not an idle threat; the U.S. Border Patrol makes regular helicopter flights down the river.
U. S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood may soon be nominated for heresy-of-the-year award for an impromptu speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit in March. In that speech he said federal transportation policy will no longer favor automobiles over bicyclists and walkers.
To blame or not blame BP is really not the point. BP must take its share of responsibility along with other US private companies involved. But the deeper lessons of the oil spill concern the future of our energy supplies, of regulation, and the shape of our society and economy.
And oil spills are far from the worst environmental disasters we’ve unleashed and are in the process of unleashing through the routine operation of our economy as currently designed. Climate change will over the next century almost certainly prove far more destructive to the natural systems and human communities of the Gulf than any oil spill ever could, and that’s a problem the Deepwater rig would have worsened if it had worked perfectly, as part of its successful operation.
Journalists covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been yelled at, kicked off public beaches and islands and threatened with arrest in the nearly three weeks since the government promised improved media access.
BP is trying to raise 50 billion dollars to cover the cost of the Gulf of Mexico spill and is preparing to sue its partners in the oil field, British newspapers said on Sunday.
Whilst the mesocosms were being set up, more than 30 scientists arrived here from all over Europe, including the Netherlands, UK, Norway, France and Germany. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be working hard, collecting scientific data that will be carefully examined and statistically analyzed during the following months, perhaps for even a year. Eventually, the results from the mesocosm experiments will be published in scientific journals. Only then can we begin to understand in more detail what the effects of ocean acidification from increased CO2 in the atmosphere might be in Arctic waters.
Carbon neutrality by 2030 is the new standard for climate policies, and again the UK is leading North America in the climate debate with a bold national-level proposal about how to get there. The Centre for Alternative Technology just launched zerocarbonbritain2030 (ZCB2030), a collaborative project showing one possible scenario for making the entire UK carbon-neutral by 2030.
New rules to cap US carbon emissions and promote clean energy could create as many as 540,000 US jobs a year, a green group claimed Tuesday, as the BP oil spill fueled debate over reform.
As financial regulatory reform takes its final shape in a conference committee led by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., members of the committee have voted to allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to fund itself, according to FOXBusiness.com. The SEChas asked to be self-funded for quite some time because it would allow the agency to step up its enforcement and investigative efforts.
The US government would be barred from buying any Chinese goods or services under legislation unveiled Friday by US senators angry at Beijing’s policy of buying only from domestic sources.
Early last week, we wrote a post that offered both some information and perspective about Bill C-32, which, if passed, is slated to revamp Canada’s copyright law.
As with any contentious issue, the post generated a good number of comments. Yet, as the days went on, it became apparent that some of the pro–Bill C-32 comments were unusually uniform and very…(how do we put this?) “on message.”
Now, we have learned, it seems possible that the comments were a result of an astroturfing campaign.
On his blog, law professor Michael Geist points to a site that bills itself as Balanced Copyright Reform. The gist, according to Geist:
The heart of the site (which requires full registration) is a daily action item page that encourages users to “make a difference, everyday.” [Each] list of ten items is a mix of suggested tweets, blog comments, and newspaper article feedback. Each item includes instructions for what should be done and quick links to the target site.
As of June 17, the last of the daily action items was “Comment on Torontoist article on Bill C-32.”
The popular Torontoist blog found that all the comments on its coverage of the new Canadian copyright law were a little…similar. Turns out that Torontoist has been targetted by the astroturf website that the US record-labels started, pretending to be just a group of Canadian citizens worried about copyright.
In “Picking Cotton: The choice between organic and genetically-engineered cotton for farmers in South India” a report released today, Greenpeace documents the experiences of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, one of the biggest cotton growing states in India. Unlike the seed companies, the farmers we met with have not been profiting from Bt cotton. Organic farmers have much lower costs of cultivation and therefore are more financially stable than Bt cotton farmers who often end the cotton season with crushing debt.
Benjamin Kam Lim reports for Reuters that the diary of Li Peng that describes Li’s version of what happened during the events that lead up to the June 3, 1989 massacre, that Hong Kong publisher New Centuty Press was going publish this June 22, will be halted, because the copyright holder allegedly is banning it.
There was also Novell’s Hackweek earlier this month. It involved mostly SUSE-oriented projects [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Here is one specific example:
This week was the fifth Hackweek at Novell where we can pick an interesting topic and work on it. I am always interested in cool applications and I wanted to investigate a bit on Qts GraphicsView anyway so I decided to go for a proof of concept implementation of a lightweight but cool presentation tool following these concepts.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me both within the openSUSE community and outside of it, whether I applied for the vacant openSUSE Community Manager role.
Yesterday we mentioned Novell’s involvement in MeeGo [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (SUSE MeeGo is perhaps a bit like Goblin) and despite a momentum issue, just over 3 weeks away they have some releases which revolve around 11.3 [1, 2]. Zonker already promotes OpenSUSE 11.3 in Linux.com without disclosure about the conflict of interests, except at the end. It turns out that he does communicate with PR people (in Techrights we ignore them or politely tell them to go away). Has OpenSUSE appointed a new Community Manager yet? There’s no announcement that’s truly visible. █
Summary: New analysis of patents relating to software, assorted items from the news, and interpretation of those items
A new volume of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has just been released[PDF]. Towards the end, this latest issue contains an article from Pieter Hintjens, who speaks about Microsoft’s OOXML corruption and “For monopolists like Microsoft,” quotes the president of the FFII, “the answer is to prevent the software from being free, this requires software patents.”
Companies like Tuxera help Microsoft achieve this goal even in Europe (Tuxera is based on Finland) and the 451 Group mentioned this company a few days ago:
While it has drawn some controversy for its IP deal with Microsoft, Tuxera says this allows it to benefit from the ability to offer support, integration and licensing for both NTFS and exFAT filesystems.
Tuxera receives money as long as it also allows Microsoft to make money from Android and from Linux. What’s not to like? Both Tuxera and Microsoft enjoy this, at the expense of software freedom. Microsoft uses Tuxera as a bridge with which to impose software patents on Linux (including branches/derivatives).
Here is a new press release which remarks on the difficulty of obtaining “business method software patents” (they are lumped together as though they are one).
The fundamental business methods and processes unique to N-Play(R) led the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to recently issue U.S. Patent #7,664,682. Business method software patents are considered a rarity and are the most difficult patents to obtain through the USPTO with less than 17% being approved.
Well, it’s obviously not hard enough because none at all should be accepted, especially after the Bilski case (assuming the decision stands when it’s released [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). If business method patents and software patents are seen as equatable, then both can probably be abolished post-Bilski. Neither refers to an actual product which is physical. Besides, as this new article puts it:
The US Patent Office has been flooded with software patents ever since.
Since anything (however stupid it might be) can be patented, I am gonna patent the following:
Title: SYSTEM and METHOD for TROLL CONTROL in open-source projects mailing lists, via Contribution-Points based eMail Limits
Speaking of trolls, Thomas Edisonhas some voice recordings of his salvaged. It’s more of an historical thing, not much of professional value. Edison was part of the problem we now know as the USPTO; his characterisation as an inventor is often challenged as it neglects to mention how he took people’s existing ideas, modified these mildly and then claimed/earned a monopoly on them. Edison is said to have been a businessman and a patent (monopoly) opportunist, just like Bill Gates in a sense. █
Migrating Linux is mostly about migrating services. To do this properly, there are two approaches. You can find out yourself what needs to be done, or you can use tools that analyze this for you. Apart from the services involved, migrating Linux is also about smoothly transitioning from one environment to another environment, without involving double work for your IT environment. If you have the appropriate system management tools in place, they can be very helpful. Finally, depending on the Linux distributions that you were using and that you are going to use, these might be a financial chapter as well. Check this with the new vendor of your choice. This vendor is going to earn your money and may be more than willing to help.
So what does it all mean? The transparency of free and open source software is increasingly recognized as an important benefit — even by experts studying software security, and even when they uncover occasional vulnerabilities.
The “security through obscurity” argument may still be frequently uttered by those on the pro-proprietary side, but — at least, based on this debate — it lacks substance. Indeed, given the financial stakes for those on the proprietary side, one could easily make the case that a certain amount of FUD is to be expected.
The growing ranks of FOSS proponents, then, should be heartened. When it comes to security, free and open source software has been held up, scrutinized, and declared superior.
The Captivate features Android 2.1 running on a 1GHz Samsung S5PC110 “Hummingbird” system-on-chip, a four-inch Super AMOLED display, 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and a five-megapixel camera, says AT&T.
You’re walking down a dark alley, late at night, when suddenly someone jumps out at you and forces you to hand over your passport, your credit cards, and the keys to your car. This is a good analogy of what using the internet is like.
Around every corner lurks danger, and with today’s always-on connections, you may have the internet equivalent of burglars without realising. For ultimate computer security, a firewall is similar to having a big, burly bodyguard walking down the street with you, keeping you safe. Whether it be your home or office network, a firewall distribution should be able to help you.
Hopefully you will download one of the distributions listed above, run it live and try out some of the applications I have listed here. Then we can continue investigating the FOSS multimedia world by looking closer at video and publishing multimedia works.
The UFO:AI development team is proud to announce the release of UFO: Alien Invasion Version 2.3. Two years in the making, this version features loads of new content, a dramatically improved rendering engine and extensive improvements to nearly every aspect of the game’s campaign and battle systems.
43 persons (including organizers, designer, bugsquashers, and others) from 17 different countries gathered in Randa from Thursday 20 May to Tuesday 25 May. Why Randa? It is a marvelous place in the mountains of Switzerland where Mario Fux knew a house that would be perfect for KDE developers. Several groups that work on different parts of KDE had a chance to meet and mix in one house. Present were KDE-Education, Amarok, various multimedia people (Phonon, KMix, vlc) and Gluon developers.
François Dupoux announced on June 18th the new SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Linux-based operating system. Being powered by the alternative Linux kernel 2.6.34, and the standard 2.6.32.15 Linux kernel, SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 includes now the popular GParted 0.6.0 application for partitioning tasks with support for drives with sectors larger than 512 bytes. Moreover, the FSArchiver and Memtest86+ apps were also updated. Without further introduction, let’s take a closer look at the changes brought by SystemRescueCd 1.5.4…
SmarTrend is bullish on shares of Red Hat and our subscribers were alerted to Buy on June 14, 2010 at $31.47. The stock has risen 1.4% since the alert was issued.
LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from June 28th – 30th, 2010.
Opengear announced three new UCLinux-based remote management device servers, focusing on industrial applications. In addition to the general-purpose, $475 ACM5004-2-I server, there’s a telecom-oriented ACM5004-2-I-SDC version with a 48V DC power supply, plus an extended-temperature ACM5004-2-T aimed at utility networks, the company says.
Lantronix is also known for its XPort Pro embedded networking module, which it touts as the “world’s smallest Linux networking server.” The XPort Pro (pictured at right) measures 1.33 x 0.64 x 0.53 inches, and offers 8MB of SDRAM, 16MB of flash, RJ45 Ethernet and serial ports, a web server, SSH and SSL security, and IPv6 support.
Let’s just put this out there: the image above was grabbed from a video that could be an early, leaked teaser for the N9, Nokia’s first handset to run the MeeGo OS. Could be.
The good news for developers is that out of the six versions of Android only three, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1 have widespread use. The figures also show that almost all Motorola Milestone and Droid users have now upgraded to Android 2.1.
Google’s Android team will focus on user interface issues in the upcoming “Gingerbread” release of Android in an attempt to dissuade handset vendors from adding their own UI layers, writes Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.
An astute reader stumbled upon an interesting bug with the HTC Incredible. The Incredible, with Sense UI, will periodically store screenshots of the contents of your web browser. The screen captures are a function of the HTC Sense UI bookmark widget
The super-phone war is about to start. The war was triggered back in 2007 when Apple announced its revolutionary iPhone. The market back then was scattered, primarily dragged by stagnated mobile operating systems. Times have changed with the arrival of Gnu/Linux ‘avatar’ in form of Android.
Verizon is elbowing its way into the Apple-dominated tech spotlight with the announcement that it’s going to make a big announcement next week, and it’s a very safe bet that it’s going to take the wraps off a new Droid smartphone. How will the newcomer compare to its popular brother? Bigger and faster, with a belt packed with fancier tools, no doubt.
The Nexus One may have taken a little while to reach South Korea, but it looks like KT is doing its best to make up for lost time — the carrier has just announced that it will not only be offering the Nexus One, but that it will come complete with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo).
Motorola is prepping two high-end Android phones for summer release on Verizon — the 4.3-inch Droid X and a keyboard-enabled Droid 2 — say reports. Meanwhile, LG will ship 20 Android phones this year, and Sony Ericsson is readying a mid-range Xperia X8 Android model, say other reports.
It appears that Sony Ericsson may deliver its Xperia X8 smartphone with Android version 1.6 in some parts of Europe and version 2.1 in others. The older version lacks some speed and performance enhancements, live wallpaper, built-in pinch-to-zoom capability and 3-D photo galleries. Still, many consumers are likely to find it adequate for their needs, according to Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.
Uruguay has already ordered 90,000 of the new XO-HS notebooks, having previously taken receipt of almost 400,000 XO laptops for primary school children. The Uruguayan government is clearly eager to distribute computers among the young generation, and has also ordered 10,000 of the Intel Classmate PC laptops. With 230,000 high school students in total in Uruguay, there is scope for further orders, with delivery of the new PCs scheduled to begin in September this year.
Want a touchscreen tablet computer, but don’t feel like purchasing any of the pre-configured options already on the market? No problem, you can pick up a $400 kit that will let you build your own tablet.
NEC is preparing an Android 2.1 tablet for the Japanese market based on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The LifeTouch offers a seven-inch, WVGA touchscreen, a SDHC slot, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, and a three-megapixel camera, says NEC.
On the second day of its 2010 Summercamp in Brussels, messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of a new integration framework. The new groupware integration framework is based on SWIG and allows open source and commercial solutions to integrate with Zarafa’s Collaboration Platform, connecting calendars, mail, contacts and tasks to virtually any developer language. The new Python language Messaging API (MAPI) binding provides full MAPI access from Python – documentation is provided.
From July 3rd through July 10th the KDE community will gather in Tampere, Finland for our yearly Akademy conference. We are pleased to announce that, once again, a number of sponsors will be helping to make this event possible.
As fans gear up for the upcoming release of Thunderbird 3.1, Mozilla has made available an updated version of the current line, Thunderbird 3.0.5. It’s a bug-fixing release with no new features, though users should see an improvement in message-indexing speed. More than 60 bugs have been fixed in Thunderbird 3.0.5.
The first Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Checksums for the images are at the bottom of this message.
On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce Parrot 2.5.0 “Cheops”. Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.
I met Matt Ridley once, when he was at The Economist, and I wrote a piece for him (I didn’t repeat the experience because their fees at the time were extraordinarily ungenerous). He was certainly a pleasant chap in person, but I have rather mixed feelings about his work.
His early book “Genome” is brilliant – a clever promenade through our chromosomes, using the DNA and its features as a framework on which to hang various fascinating facts and figures. His latest work, alas, seems to have gone completely off the rails, as this take-down by George Monbiot indicates.
Today I have participated to an international meeting in Madrid on the reuse of Public Sector Information. I came to gather as much information and food for thought as possible for my new research on Open Data for an Open Society and wasn’t deluded.
This is where the ethical and practical implications take place. I am not really too concerned about the Getty collection, I really thing that this is a good development. However, I am concerned about the potential negative impact on the take-up of CC licences in Flickr. By stating clearly that any CC licensed picture will be only eligible for the cheaper royalty-free licensing option, Getty has created a disincentive to licence under Creative Commons. While I give the Flickr community enough credit not to answer the siren’s call en masse, this could be a concern on the long run. We could have a two-tier Flickerverse of low-quality CC-licensed images, and high-quality content available only by paying fees to Getty.
CollabNet, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) specialist and provider of distributed software development solutions, has introduced Subversion Edge, a distribution of the Subversion SCM (Software Configuration Management) tool. In addition to Subversion, which was initially developed by CollabNet and has since been donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the distribution includes the Apache web server and the ViewVC repository viewer, a browser-based directory management system.
Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.
The U.S. Justice Department has joined a whistleblower suit against Oracle that accuses it of defrauding the U.S. government.
Filed back in May 2007 under the False Claims Act, the suit claims Oracle overcharged the federal government tens of millions of dollars by failing to offer it the same deep discounts the company offers commercial customers. That’s a real problem, because Oracle was obligated to do just that under the terms of the General Services Administration contract by which it was bound.
HP then went on for a few hundred words talking about how it would be happy to port ProLiant/Solaris customers to Windows or Linux – not just Red Hat and SUSE Linux, but Debian too – and reminding everyone that its Integrity HP-UX boxes exist. (Pity HP-UX doesn’t run on x64 iron, though.)
A woman with kidney disease has died after receiving an experimental stem cell treatment at a private clinic in Thailand, and a postmortem examination of her kidneys revealed that the treatment was almost certainly responsible for her death. Last week we reported that Costa Rica’s health ministry had closed a stem cell clinic that catered to foreigners, which sparked lively debates around the Internet about whether patients should be able to willingly take on risks associated with experimental treatments. This new case offers a sobering reminder of what can happen when patients travel abroad looking for a miracle cure.
Legacy Interactive has announced plans to create a web-based game designed to teach kids how to prepare for hazards and emergencies.
[...]
FEMA claimed to have research which showed that “despite imminent threats and increased media attention, Americans today are no better prepared for a natural disaster or terrorist attack than they were in 2003.”
On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he “boasted” in an Internet chat — with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo — of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records.” Lamo, who holds himself out as a “journalist” and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning’s detention.
US President Barack Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset”.
Defenders of the dirty energy status quo, particularly the lobbyists and politicians associated with the oil and coal industry, have repeatedly trotted out a group of evangelical leaders known as the Cornwall Alliance to counter the growing sentiment in the evangelical community that anthropogenic climate change is a threat to God’s creation. Cornwall declares that true Christians believe “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.” In this repost, Wonk Room exposes the Big Oil funding behind the Cornwall Alliance
BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England’s Isle of Wight.
China has indicated it will allow the yuan to rise against the dollar and other Western currencies.
The Chinese central bank announced it would make its exchange rate mechanism “more flexible”, but it gave no details about the timing or extent of changes.
The yuan has been effectively pegged to the dollar, drawing criticism that China was protecting its exporters.
On 27 May the Danish Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision which obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that may contain – or link to other sites which contain – material which infringes copyrights (the Pirate Bay in this instance).
The decision has rightly been criticized as a setback for internet freedom in Denmark. The decision attaches undue weight to the interests of copyright holders while ignoring obvious dangers of abuse, restrictions on internet freedom and access to information and the lack of any due process. The decision may lead to the blocking of websites that mainly includes content that does not infringe copyright and thus restrict the free flow of information. Moreover, by forcing ISP’s to police the Internet without due process the decision marks a dangerous precedent that is likely to include other ‘illegal’ or ‘offensive’ material in the future.
Are there really still problems being caused for scientists and science writers caused by the English law of libel?
On the face of it, that seems an odd question to be asked on this of all blogs.
But it is an entirely serious question, and it is not one which is intended to be unduly provocative.
Indeed, unless those of us who contend there is such a problem can answer this question in a calm, informed, reasoned, and ultimately persuasive manner, then our influence may be minimal in the upcoming debate on the legislative reform of libel.
The latest privacy controversy with Google is that while scanning for WiFi access-points in their Street View cars, they may have inadvertently captured data payloads containing private information (URLs, fragments of e-mails, and so on).
Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident. The technology for WiFi scanning means it’s easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it.
The BPI, the RIAA’s UK counterpart, has gone up against the Holiest of Holies, American online advertising conglomerate Google, says Chilling Effects.
Short for British Phonographic Industry, the BPI contributed to the British government’s Digital Ecomy bill, complete with its ACTA Three Strikes and you’re Off The Net element, with hardly a murmur from the UK lamescream media.
Summary: SCO’s bankruptcy hearing won’t take place until next month; SCO deals with pocket money, so Novell is unlikely to be properly compensated
According to Groklaw [1, 2] (whose editor takes a break), SCO is back to bankruptcy proceedings. Well, not quite back; not yet anyway.
SCO’s bankruptcy hearing scheduled for Monday in Delaware has been cancelled. The next one will be on July 12 at 1:30, or so they say, so if you were planning to attend on Monday, please rearrange your plans.
Here is one show that covered Novell’s victory over SCO.
