06.16.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Some people who favor widespread switches to Linux feel that it could put inexpensive laptops in the hands of kids, and help usher in more paperless schoolwork, which might be a money saver. One thing’s for sure: There is enough disagreement about Linux in schools that probably the best way to experiment with the idea is for teachers and administrators to try test cases with Linux on their own. As Cassidy reports, some teachers in cash-strapped school systems are already doing just that. Sometimes it’s surprising how much impact a technology decision made at the departmental level can really have.
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Server
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Cloud Linux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, announces that it is a finalist in the 2010 Cloud Computing World Series Awards. Cloud Linux is featured in the “Best Start-Up” category, which recognizes companies that were founded after January 2009 and provide a cloud-based product or service in the cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) market. CloudLinux is a new commercially supported operating system proven to increase server density, stability and performance, helping customers realize reduced operating costs and increased profitability.
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Ballnux
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Samsung announced two low-end Android handsets — the 3.2-inch Galaxy 3 (I5800) and the 2.8-inch Galaxy 5 (I5500) — as well as two Bada OS phones called the Wave 2 and Wave 2 Pro. Meanwhile, Samsung is prepping a keyboard version of its Galaxy S Android phone called the Galaxy S Pro, says AndroidCommunity.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Proprietary
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These releases mark a complete Navicat product offering to the Linux users. Linux users can now experience the comprehensive database administration for MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQLite with Navicat.
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Adobe might have finally released the full version of Flash Player 10.1 – which includes hardware acceleration during video playback – but it’s come at a cost: the removal of the 64-bit edition for Linux.
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Clearly, Opera 10.6 is the fastest browser on my Ubuntu Linux PC, trumping my current favorite, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and even Google Chrome.
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Instructionals
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New Releases
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sidux 2010-01, codenamed “Hypnos,” has now been released, the first update to the sidux distro this year. The highlights are KDE SC 4.4.4 and the latest Linux kernel 2.6.34. Of course, all other packages are on par with the ones available in the Debian sid repositories at the date of the release. The developers have also gotten some work done on the early boot components, GRUB 2 for the regular installs and ISOLINUX for the live environment.
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Red Hat Family
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Savvytek, the exclusive Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) Premier Partner and Certified Training Partner in the MENA region, has signed an agreement with KULACOM Jordan to provide Oracle and Red Hat licensing and technical implementation and support services for KULACOM Jordan’s Datacenter clients.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In Short
Ubuntu’s one-size-fits-all nature makes it a good initial introduction to Linux-based operating systems. Visually, it keeps improving, but it is not quite all the way there yet. While many can argue whether Linux is ready for the desktop, there’s little doubt that Canonical packages up Ubuntu better than the vast majority of distributions out there. The biggest compliment one can pay to Ubuntu is that it feels like a professional product in its installation, look and feel and above all updates. If nothing else, you should give Ubuntu a try to give you some perspective on how well your own OS suits you.
The Good
Maturity and popularity aid in usability, integration with cloud services, long-term support (LTS) release, painless update from previous version.
The Bad
Might be too Mickey Mouse for hardcore Linux users, strong branding and colour scheme.
The Ugly
Nothing.
Bartender’s Score
8/10
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In use, Ubuntu is a stable operating system with a mature front end. Version 10 is a pleasure to use, feeling more responsive than any form of Windows and easy to configure via the various control panel dialog boxes.
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Through Ubuntu Advantage and other new support options for enterprises, Canonical does seem to be taking a page from the Red Hat playback. Red Hat, of course, is legendary for its success in offering free support for open source software. Ubuntu Advantage consists of numerous types of support. In addition to the traditioal technical support that Canonical has offered. Ubuntu Advantage provides access to online and offline applications and legal assurances.
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Embedded Ally is a California-based provider of Linux, middleware and software for mobile and embedded devices.
“This has pushed us into the open source community,” said Rhines.
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Mentor Graphics is pushing into Linux, actually developing Linux-based software products for Freescale, following up on a similar agreement it announced last summer with Marvell. That comes in addition to the company’s existing Nucleus RTOS, which is already widely distributed.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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NOKIA has taken a big step forward with the N900 slider smartphone which ditches the stolid Symbian operating system (OS) for the more pleasing looks of Maemo 5, a Linux-based OS. Having tested the N900 for two weeks, I can cheerfully report that it is definitely a step in the right direction.
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While the document itself suggested that the OS for the phone could be the Linux based MeeGo, the video seems to confirm this.
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Although both the operating system (OS) is open source, the Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia will never use Android for their smartphones. Nokia prefer Meego and Symbian.
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Mοѕt οf thе open source software programs fοr social networking ѕο far аrе free. One thаt charges іѕ PHPizabi bυt despite thаt thеrе аrе still people willing tο υѕе іt. Sοmе οf іtѕ features include being аbƖе tο access іt through уουr desktop, communicating wіth friends іn thе chat room аnԁ maintaining a contact system.
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Students of Curtin University of Technology, Sarawak (Curtin Sarawak) have won two prizes in the Sarawak Open Source Competition organised by Sarawak Information Systems Sdn Bhd (SAINS).
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IBM wants to take Enterprise Generation Language open source. Last week at its Rational user conference in Florida, the vendor submitted a proposal to the Eclipse consortium that would place the bulk of EGL–a high-level language intended for Power Systems and mainframe shops that generates Java, JavaScript, and COBOL code–into the public realm.
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Vuvuzela
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Around the world, human ingenuity has been harnessed in pursuit of a single goal: removing the vuvuzela’s drone from World Cup football broadcasts through noise-canceling devices, EQ settings, and Linux.
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If you’re a soccer fan, now you can listen to the game without losing your hearing — or your mind. Kudos to Kaechele for a brilliant implementation of a terrific open source tools.
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Events
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As Michael Kleinhenz, member of the extended board of LinuxTag said, “in the long term open source has huge potential for saving costs. Thus it is all the more important to make funds available for research and investment, in order to get even more companies, public authorities and administrations to make use of open source. Open formats which everyone can use free of charge also increase transparency and improve security. More IT decision-makers should take this into account. LinuxTag contributes towards raising awareness of open source even more and thus propelling it even further.“
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Mozilla
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When you install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition in October, don’t look for Firefox on the desktop — it won’t be there. Chromium, Chrome’s open source cousin, is going to be taking its place. After years of desktop dominance on Linux, is Firefox losing its foothold or is this an anomaly?
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SaaS
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Talend, another open source company, offers a data-integration-as-a-service solution, called Talend on Demand, which launched in 2007. I’d love to be able to tell you the difference between offering a cloud-based solution and a SaaS-based solution, but I’m still trying to figure that one out. Obviously, Jitterbit’s solution runs on Amazon EC2, whereas Talend is a subscription service that requires you to download a management product, but beyond that, I’m not sure. I’ll have to get back with you on that one.
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Databases
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Open source company Ingres has released a vector version of its database, which it claims speeds up database operations enough to reduce the equipment required and greatly extend the use of realtime analytics.
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CMS
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Of the open source Content Management Services, three options stand out from a crowded field; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each one has it’s own benefits.
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Business
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Ann All spoke with David White, senior research analyst for Aberdeen Group and author of a report titled “Open Source Business Intelligence: The Cost, Utilization and Innovation Factors that Matter.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Mendeley offers a secure online database for scientists, academics and researchers to store their research papers in the ‘cloud’, making it easier to share those documents with peers. The system also helps researchers find and connect to like-minded academics in similar fields by looking at and extracting relevant meta-data from the millions of research papers stored in its database.
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Open Access/Content
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A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing.
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When I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief of this open-access journal, I began, for the first time, to think about scholarly communication beyond submitting my papers and getting them published.
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Advertising (as is traditionally recognised) is inevitably in decline. This is because it resulted from an extreme asymmetry that developed between vendors and customers when vendors became mass producers, and could no longer meet their customers on a one-to-one basis. It was further exacerbated when vendors took advantage of mass communications technology (printing, broadcasting) to communicate UNIDIRECTIONALLY to their customers (current and potential). Very little communication has been possible in the other direction for decades if not a century or more, i.e. customers needing to communicate their wants and prices to potential vendors, especially mass producers.
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Science
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A vast ocean chock-full of microbes may have once covered more than a third of Mars’s surface, scientists say.
The new evidence, from an analysis of dried-up Mars river deltas, adds to growing signs the red planet was once wet.
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Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.
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The Kepler spacecraft has found over 750 candidates for extrasolar planets, and that is just from data collected in the first 43 days of the spacecraft’s observations. “This is the biggest release of candidate planets that has ever happened,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s lead scientist. “The number of candidate planets is actually greater than all the planets that have been discovered in the last 15 years.”
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Security/Aggression
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Police have arrested 178 people in Europe and the United States suspected of cloning credit and debit cards in an international scam worth over 20 million euro ($24.52 million), according to a report from Reuters and authorities in Spain.
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Crown court clears Harvie Brown of violent disorder in case that challenged police version of events
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Environment
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President Obama’s attacks on “British Petroleum” and its chief executive, Tony Hayward, are deeply unedifying. Not because of the hypocrisy and misinformation involved, though there is plenty of that: BP has not been called British Petroleum for years and its controversial dividend is denominated in US dollars.
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Oil giant BP is to put $20bn (£13.5bn) in a compensation fund for victims of the Gulf oil spill and will not pay shareholders a dividend this year.
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Conventional oil production has a limited capacity. Most additional demand must be met by unconventional sources, which are abundant. But the capacity for production depends on the effective management of environmental, social and technical challenges that unconventional sources pose. The current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a clear indicator of how these boundaries are being pushed.
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Nick Clegg today warned that a row between Britain and the US over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was in danger of turning into a destructive bout of “megaphone diplomacy”.
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US government figures show twice as much oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico than earlier estimations suggested
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World governments voted last night to set up a major new international body to spearhead the battle against the destruction of the natural world.
With growing concern about the human impacts of destruction of habitats and species from around the world, from riots over food shortages and high prices, to worsening floods, and global climate change, more than 80 governments voted to take action in the final hours of a week-long conference in Busan, South Korea.
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Human Rights Watch has called on the Chinese government to release three Tibetan environmental activists who have played a major role in protecting the fragile eco-system on the roof of the world.
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A new blueprint for a global climate agreement would force the United States to massively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions but could also limit developing countries’ attempts to grow their economies, diplomats at the resumed global climate change talks said today.
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In the boom years of the 1990s, the workshop of Gordon Murray produced the 240mph McLaren F1, one of the fastest and most coveted road cars in the world. This month, the same design team will unveil the next vehicle to roll off the Murray production line, but using a lot less fuel as it does so.
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Three oil companies were last week accused of being complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan. A report published in Sweden by a group of charities and peace activists called for Swedish oil company Lundin, Petronas of Malaysia and OMV of Austria to be investigated by their national governments.
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Finance
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The problem is getting worse. Notional amounts of derivatives held by federally insured banks have risen to more than $200 trillion.
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A Senate proposal to force banks to shed their lucrative yet risk-laden derivatives units — which is vehemently opposed by Wall Street — is gaining steam, picking up the support of some regional Federal Reserve chiefs with more on the way.
Yet President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, continues to oppose the measure, Senate aides say, who add that Treasury is supporting Wall Street over Main Street by opposing the measure considered of “utmost importance” to financial stability.
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An effort to force some of the nation’s biggest banks to spin off their lucrative derivatives-dealing operations appears to be gaining traction, as members of a House-Senate conference begin finalizing details of far-reaching new financial regulations.
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This one’s pretty amazing. So as you know, Blanche Lincoln had this tough primary, which she ultimately won narrowly. Once the seriousness of the challenge became apparent to her, she sidled to the left and toughened up her derivatives language and set out to prove that she was in the pocket of no one except the good people of Arkansas.
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President Barack Obama took office more than 75 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated, but, to Obama, that chill March day in 1933 must seem like only yesterday, so often has his performance as president been contrasted with that of FDR’s in the halcyon days of the New Deal.
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This post also appears at the Presimetrics Blog. It contains some information that has appeared in a few different Angry Bear posts, but I think I’m starting to manage to put it into a more coherent narrative. And as I’m able to do that, I’m able to move slowly to the next part of the story.
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Today, the Princeton-trained nuclear physicist is investigating for the SEC what was behind the massive flash crash that sent the stock market into a tailspin last month. A specialist at culling conclusions from masses of chaotic information, Berman is in part trying to ascertain whether wrongdoing played a role.
Although lawyers fill most of the SEC’s ranks, the agency has been hiring experts with specialized quantitative skills and those who have worked on Wall Street who are hip to its tricks.
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There’s been no shortage of books that purport to dissect the financial crisis and all that ails Wall Street. Get ready for another entry: Chasing Goldman Sachs, by Suzanne McGee of Barron’s, the latest journalistic effort to get the real story behind the implosion that’s still rocking the economy.
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Goldman culture rewards hard-nosed aggressiveness and doesn’t put the client’s interests before those of the firm.
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Now it seems that we were lacking a crucial document: the firm’s internal Code of Ethics, which Goldman Sachs recently made public. Under the provisions of this remarkable Code, what Goldman Sachs did to its clients wasn’t unethical at all; deceptive, conflicted, and unfair, yes…but not unethical, in the sense that it didn’t violate the Ethics Code itself. “Impossible!” you say? Ah, you underestimate the firm’s cleverness.
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Despite all the bad headlines — the accusations of fraud, the talk of a big settlement, the risk, however remote, of criminal charges — there’s an inconvenient truth that’s been largely ignored: Most of Goldman’s big customers are not bolting.
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McGee, a contributing editor at Barron’s, isn’t out to bury Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or Blankfein, its chief executive officer. Her goal is, rather, to show how Wall Street bankers became preoccupied with their own short-term interests and drifted away from their raison d’etre — to funnel capital from investors to companies that need it.
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As if a nearly two-year siege of negative attention hasn’t been enough of a distraction for Goldman Sachs, now the controversial investment bank appears to be battling a potential bed bug problem.
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If reputational risk wasn’t a top issue for CEOs and boards of directors prior to 2010, the watershed events of the first half of this year should make them reconsider their priorities. Of course there’s the wrath of the American consumer wrought by BP, thanks to the deadly accident on board the Deepwater Horizon rig and the subsequent Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Before BP, however, two other companies sullied their sterling reputations and are still paying the price.
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Last week, President Barack Obama told us he is looking for someone’s “ass to kick.” He seems to be still looking for one, so perhaps he could use some suggestions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A website in support of Canada’s proposed US-style copyright law looks to be a work of corporate astroturf, and signs point to the Canadian Record Industry Association (mostly composed of US record labels; many Canadian labels have left to form an independent lobby that opposes much of CRIA’s agenda) as the entity behind it. The group, Balanced Copyright for Canada, has bought headline placement on Bourque, and recently took down its member list after TVOntario reporter Jesse Brown announced that it appeared to consist of record execs from CRIA’s member-companies.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Deep packet inspection (DPI) hardware continues to sell, with ABI Research now estimating that vendors will move $1.3 billion of the stuff in 2015, up from $207 million in 2008. According to Infonetics Research, DPI will be a $1.5 billion business—by 2013.
What will DPI devices be used for? According to ABI, “optimizing” mobile networks will be one of the chief uses—and by “optimizing” they mean limiting or prioritizing traffic from data-hungry mobile devices.
“Brute force won’t solve this problem,” said ABI’s Aditya Kaul. “If you double the number of smartphone users, you can’t just spend $10 billion to double the capacity of your infrastructure.”
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The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation raised the alarm after picking up a threat posted on social networking site Facebook.
A 19-year-old man was arrested and later released on bail.
More than 1,000 students, some of them taking their GCSEs, were in the Birley Street school at the time of the alert.
All entrances and exits were sealed while police investigated.
‘Leaving this world’
The school said it was the FBI who raised the alarm after internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words.
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But the downside is that everyone who reads the posting will know the user isn’t home. On top of that, some services, such as Foursquare, can be linked to Twitter feeds.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Copyrights
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The largest P2P conglomerate ever assembled is supporting today’s launch of the first episode of ‘Pioneer One.’ The show, made for and made possible by the P2P community, is actively promoted by uTorrent, Limewire and a variety of prominent torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and EZTV.
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The federal government’s national consultation on a digital economy strategy is now past the half-way mark, having generated a somewhat tepid response so far.
The consultation document itself may bear some of the blame for lack of buzz since the government asks many of the right questions, but lacks a clear vision of the principles that would define a Canadian digital strategy.
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ACTA
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The World Trade Organization has posted further information on last week’s Council meeting where India, China, and other developing countries raised concerns with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Introduction to the Semantic Web (2006)
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Posted in Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Patents, Servers, SLES/SLED at 12:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Peace of mind, or else…”
Summary: Novell still uses software patents protection as a business proposition to users of SUSE
Dustin Puryear, who has defended the Microsoft/Novell deal, no longer seems too impressed by the patents part of it. From Network World (IDG):
Microsoft Canada has a case study out on a Proof of Concept (POC) they did with Novell for a client.
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Here is a quote from the case study: “The organization has intellectual property (IP) peace of mind from the commitment Microsoft and Novell have made to bridge the gap between open source and proprietary software.”
Sigh.
It’s good to see that people are not exactly tolerating this whole software patents protection racket (“intellectual property (IP) peace of mind” is a euphemism). The interesting thing is that in Google News, Novell has gone into a lot of pages in IT World Canada (IDG) in the months of May and June (possibly no accident). Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but actually it’s a bit of a nuisance and maybe it’s intentional. Novell advertises with IDG.
Also from Network World we have this column titled “SCO: So die already!”
Another shoe has dropped for the SCO Group — this makes about a dozen — but when will this outfit go away?
First the SCO Group sues IBM for billions in a case related to alleged intellectual property infringement, and then it starts threatening Linux and Linux users. Then, after Novell says that the SCO Group does not have the rights to Unix that it needs to sue and threaten, it sues Novell. Since then it has been mostly downhill for the SCO Group.
SCO has definitely lost, but as we noted before [1, 2, 3], it is not waving a white flag yet.
In other Novell news, despite Microsoft’s massive contribution to pollution [1, 2], “carbon footprint” is named as reason behind dumping Novell for Microsoft at WWF-UK:
Conservation lobbyist WWF-UK has moved to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to reduce its IT costs and carbon footprint.
The not-for-profit environmental group had been using Novell Groupwise since 1995, but had concerns about Novell’s staying power and the availability of third party support.
Microsoft Exchange is not energy efficient. It uses Windows. They ought to have gone with Free software like Kolab, which is also far more secure than Exchange. This whole article smells like an advertisement, but we lack evidence to state/pose this as more than suspicion.
Closing off with some more Novell news, Adobe Flash is a hazard in SUSE, OpenSUSE Build Service makes some more waves [1, 2], and a business park where part of Novell is located gets revamped.
The business park is already home to IT firms Fujitsu and Novell, mortgage advisor GMAC-RFC and aviation product manufacturer Honeywell.
If Novell gets sold soon, it is likely to shrink. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Servers, Virtualisation at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s thick blanket of fog is looking to engulf the computing world after largely-failed attempts to sell ‘patent protection’ for GNU/Linux; these efforts may be short-lived as reports about Novell’s negotiations suggest no withdrawal from sale
NOVELL’S negotiations of a sale are very quiet and there have been no reports about them for a while. As DZone points out, this issue is important also because Novell owns UNIX [1, 2, 3], which can potentially be used against Linux (even on a basis of false allegations).
Although we now know that Novell’s Linux-related patents are safe from SCO, there’s no telling what could happen when Novell is acquired (companies have started bidding).
Earlier today we found this report about Novell’s buyout situation. The most relevant part says:
While the answer given [to Elliot] by Novell’s board was a clear refusal, it also stated that it would be prepared to consider alternative offers. According to an May 2010 report in the The Wall Street Journal, about 20 suitors – mostly private equity firms – had approached the company with offers. At the time of publication of this article, no offer had been accepted.
Private ownership may allow Novell to take the drastic action required to turn its business around, should the intelligent workload management and “cloud enabler” strategies prove insufficient. There is, for example, an opportunity for a company with deep pockets to become a commercial open source consolidator. It would be ironic if the opacity of private ownership were to allow Novell to pull this off.
Novell tries new directions, mostly Fog Computing-oriented. The article above mentions IWM and there is also PlateSpin, which continues to receive some coverage [1, 2] although probably too little to make a turnaround. █
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Posted in Apple, FSF, GNOME, GNU/Linux, GPL, Law at 11:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Credit: Harald Welte, photo by Quinn Norton
Summary: Harald Welte remarks on GPL violations at Apple; ACCESS leaves the GNOME Advisory Board
SINCE the end of May we have been posting about half a dozen items about Apple’s hostility towards the GPL, which it excluded/removed rather than comply with. One of the well-regarded figures that publicly supported the FSF’s action against Apple was Harald Welte, whose second post on the subject ought to explain why Apple took a disappointing route that demonstrates its general approach.
So yes, by removing the software that was distributed in violation of the GPL terms, Apple has done legally the right thing: Reduce the danger/risk of committing further (knowing) infringement.
The FSF (and probably the Free Software community in general) of course want something else: For Apple to alter their app store terms in a way that would enable software authors to have Apple distribute their GPL licensed software in it. While this might be possible very easily with small modifications to their legal terms and to the implementation of the app store, it is probably not quite easy to make a legal claim and try to force this upon Apple.
Anyone always has the choice to either distribute GPL licensed software compliant with its license terms – or not distribute it at all. If Apple prefers the latter, this is very unfortunate (and you might call it anti-social or even anti-competitive) but something that they can very well do.
In better news, an Apple proponent/former employee and Internet bully/troll lost impact in the GNOME Foundation after he had repeatedly smeared the FSF and also took Apple’s side (not that the two events are related). Here is a compilation of messages of interest.
Xavier Bestel had made a comment to a gnome member regarding their choice of OS and E-mail client. The person promptly fired back with an anti software freedom tirade and blurted out insider info from ACCESS as to why they pulled out on funding. This is the same person identified by RMS as “a troll like enemy of the free software movement”. Normally I avoid mentioning this individual but the information is far too important. It’s public information that anyone can access.
Let me be very frank with you, Xav: this sort of behavior was definitely a contributing factor to ACCESS’ leaving the Advisory Board this past January, and for our lack of sponsorship for GUADEC this year and last. It was a directly contributing factor to my rescinding my offer to provide media training for potential GNOME spokespeople at GUADEC this summer.
This is good news for GNOME and for software freedom in general. ACCESS was like a rogue lobbyist. Combined with the latest news about Mono, Free software is on the right track. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For a viable Linux virus to be written it would have to hack into the Linux system, escalate it’s privileges to root and then start infecting files.
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Linux gives you the freedom to deepen and assimilate as much information as possible, and when you understand things from the inside out that will change your way of seeing and working with her. To me there is no operating system provides this flexibility and control.
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Desktop
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Installing Software:
To install a piece of software on Windows you just follow a few easy steps. First you go to the store and buy the software, then you pop the CD into your disc drive, enter the CD key, wait for the software to install itself onto the hard drive, and you are good to go! Be sure to put the CD and key in a safe place in case you ever need to reinstall the software.
On Ubuntu to install a piece of software you open the software center. Type in the name of the software you are looking for (or browse by category), click install, and wait for the software to download and install.
Default Software:
Windows offers a fantastic default software install. Need to write a paper? No worries, Windows has the feature-rich Wordpad. Want to surf the net? Internet Explorer has always provided a safe webrowsing experience.
Ubuntu’s default software selection is somewhat disappointing. It has a full featured word processor, spreadsheet editor, and presentation creator. I know most people don’t use facebook or twitter, but just in case you do Ubuntu includes Gwibber, a software that fully integrates your social networking with your desktop. For webrowsing Ubuntu only has Firefox and if you want to instant message Ubuntu’s Empathy only supports facebook, AIM, yahoo, MSN, IRC…
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1. The Sky is Blue
And so is Heaven! BLUE! Why do you think the screen goes blue from time to time in your Windows system? That’s a reminder of what is to come and what is in store for you once Windows gets to be 8. A vertical infinity of BLUE SCREENS! Surely, you don’t want to miss it, do you?
2. Less Clutter Means SOMETHING
It means what? How would I know?? You have to meditate to get the answer! Windows XP gave you Explorer and Windows Movie Maker. Vista didn’t give you Movie Maker, but gave you a demon–stration of Office 2007! Windows 7 Starter didn’t give you anything! Meditate with me: Less is more, less is more, less is more…
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Audiocasts
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This week on a humongous episode of KDEMU I talk to Paul Adams, Mr. Green Eggs himself; we talk about KDE PIM, Kolab, Akademy and his love for braveheart.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Free and Open Source Video Editors for Linux: I’ve shared with you a list of free and open source video editing software before, and noticed that there are other excellent video editors for Linux that I failed to mention. So today, I would like to feature some more video editing software, which are all capable of handling video sequence editing and provide tools for trimming, colour manipulation, titling, visual effects, splicing, cutting and arranging clips across the timeline among others.
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Even when computers were first being introduced, engineers realized how useful they could be to teach children. There have been multiple games and even entire programming languages developed specifically for kids. Linux’s developer-friendly tendencies have made it an obvious choice as a platform to create software for children, and its security and stability leave little chance for them to break anything while learning. Today we’ve gathered together some of the best Linux software applications for kids, from simple games for toddlers to programming puzzles for the older kids.
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Another cool feature is that you can now choose from more than just flat and 3D bars. You now have the options: Flat, Edgy, 3D, Curved, and Floaty. In previous versions, I remember having to go into the configuration editor and manually set the bar to -1 in order to get a curve..Not anymore!!
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Proprietary
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I’m not sure how this happens, but I see more and more often FLOSS advocates that support Adobe, and in particular Flash, in almost any context out there, mostly because they are now appearing a lot like an underdog, with Microsoft and Apple picking on them.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Day 2 was a non event. I am beginning to generally dislike Gnome-Shell. It is not the optimum user interface. I am seriously beginning to have my doubts about Ubuntu switching to Gnome-Shell, let’s hope they have something up their sleeve to save Ubuntu from a clunky interface.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Celeste also gave a great talk about how KDE is EVERYWHERE! It focused on enlightening the Linux community about how we’re not only on the desktop, but are also spreading our technologies into mobile, netbook, and cloud based environments. She spent some time talking about how KDE is not just software but also a vibrant community including our developers and users. Finally she also covered some of the latest and greatest features of the 4.4 and 4.5 SC releases and introduced the new “Join the game” campaign.
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Now of course I shouldn’t dismiss the other people at the booth, I especially think Torsten Thelke (our KDE e.V. intern) did an amazing job, and so did Frederik in his sometimes-scary way. Yes, showing off Fluffy Bunny themed plasma desktops, then jumping some of your fellow booth mates for a hug could be off-putting.
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LinuxTag
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Chithanh participated in the distro contest for us and also was part of the team winning the hacking contest. I assume with his Gentoo shirt on in that moment. The hopefully complete list of current developers who I met on LinuxTag is: lu_zero, idl0r, polynomial-c, dertobi123, amne, rbu, hollow, chithanh, a3li, vorlon, hanno. Current Gentoo-GSoC student Andreas Nüsslein (rewriting webapp-config) also came by, Timo Antweiler said hello, too. Thanks for the chocolate to lu_zero, thanks to the helpful and friendly LinuxTag team (especially Jacqueline), thanks to everyone helping out, especially to Sebastian Dyroff for joining with setup on Tuesday evening. See you again next year!
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New Releases
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Parted Magic developer Patrick Verner has released version 4.11 of his open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.
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Red Hat Family
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But looking up today’s market cap shows Red Hat with a 5.9B market cap. Not too bad for a company that is doing 750 million in revenue.
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The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World team presented a preview into this year’s events during a one-hour Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in a Glimpse webinar offering. Four Red Hat presenters, including Red Hat’s global events strategy manager, JBoss product line director and two product marketing directors, detailed why customers, partners and community members attend the event, described the typical attendee and outlined highlights of the events from recurring session topics to the many networking opportunities.
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Frankly, it’s difficult to track everything that’s expected to occur at Red Hat Summit, because the open source company continues to diversify beyond its Linux heritage to promote JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Here’s how The VAR Guy expects the conference to unfold…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UNR, the netbook version, benefits most from the new theme and more efficient use of screen space, but we’re waiting for Canonical’s Unity and Gnome 3.0 for any real taste of revolution on the small screen.
What we’re left with is a division. If you’re not a current Linux user then Ubuntu offers the best Linux experience you can have. The desktop looks ultra-modern and the package manager is slick, expansive and easy to use.
But if you’re a Linux user looking for a spring break from your current distribution, this release doesn’t do enough to warrant the upgrade. While it looks nice, there’s no real innovation and nothing we can get too excited about.
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I’m again stuck with a full-blown Ubuntu desktop, full of goodies I don’t need and running much slower than I could make it run. But here’s the maddening part, it works. Right-click folder, share, adjusting smb.conf, done. Even worse, I can’t find any reference to my share in smb.conf ! If I knew where the right config is saved, I could simply copy/paste it to a leaner system, but now I can’t.
Curse you Ubuntu! Curse you for making my life so easy and so difficult at the same time!
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Android
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Not interested in waiting until the 23rd for Verizon’s big announcement? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered right now! The Motorola Droid X has probably been one of the worst kept smartphone secrets in recent memory, but after spending two hours with the phone we sort of see why. In short, it’s pretty awesome. Call it a superphone or a mega-smartphone, but the 4.4-inch handset is absolutely Verizon / Motorola’s answer to the HTC EVO 4G, and makes the Droid Incredible look like a bench warmer. What do we mean? We’ll let you see for yourself just after the break in a breakdown of exactly what this phone is all about — and in a video or three of it in action. Oh, and on your way down, make sure to feast your eyes on the gallery, too.
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All-volunteer, open source Appleseed project seeks to decentralize the social web, and turns to crowdsourcing website IndieGogo.com for funding.
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Treb Ryan is chief executive of OpSource, a company that specializes in enterprise cloud and managed hosting. In a recent interview with Forbes, Ryan explains his analysis of how the multi-tenant architecture used for most large software-as-a-service applications will become dominant and present a challenge to the relevance and importance of a large amount of open source software.
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Enter open-source WAN acceleration. Don’t expect to see open-source alternatives as mature as those in NMS, but projects like WANProxy and Squid can perform surprisingly well if you have some Linux talent on staff. WANProxy accelerates and compresses TCP and Squid does the brute-force work of caching; drop the software onto some spare servers and your staff can get a feel for the benefits of WAN optimization for short dollars.
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ForgeRock OpenAM, initially created by Sun Microsystems is an open source access management, entitlements and federation server platform.
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Mozilla
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Flock made its name as a Firefox remix that came loaded with custom add-ons for tightly integrating social networking with daily Web browsing. Just opened to the public, the Flock 3 beta keeps its social goals intact while replacing its Firefox base with Google-supported Chromium. The new Flock experience is vastly different than before, and is related to the old version in name only.
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Oracle
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He also attended the University of Chicago before finding his calling in software at the Ampex Corporation, where he created a database for the CIA called Oracle. It was up from there, and Oracle became a huge force in the enterprise software world. Ellison is known for his extravagant taste, and his home cost about $200 million.
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Healthcare
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At the Opensource.com Open Your World Forum on May 27, John D. Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and CIO of Harvard Medical School, described where open source and open standards fit into the ARRA expectations for healthcare IT. The short answer is, everywhere.
“We run a data center with a couple of petabytes of healthcare data for three million patients and the entire infrastructure is run on Red Hat technologies,” Halamka said. “We have multiple data centers, multiple clusters of Linux servers and we haven’t had downtime in a couple of years. No CIO in healthcare is afraid of open source. In fact, the movement to Linux clusters that are highly reliable for healthcare is the way the back end in most healthcare data centers seem to be going.
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Government
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In Inc.’s January 2005 article Open Source: It’s Not Just for Geeks Anymore!, Al Canton wrote: “No one is quite sure how to define fire, but everyone knows what it is. Open source software is the same. Like fire, we know what open source does, we know what open source looks like, and we know it when we see it, but no one agrees on a definition.”
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India is a heavy user of open source. Sectors leveraging open source include software development outsourcing, business process outsourcing, government services, technical education as well as industries such as banking, insurance, manufacturing, oil and gas, defense and space. According to Wikipedia, India produces 2.5 million graduates every year from which only a small percentage, about 700,000 people are employed by India’s BPO industry. The BPO industry which has flourished on cheap, skilled labor has started to leverage open source software based automation to gain further cost advantages.
Brazil
Brazil has also been a hotbed of open source activity in recent years. Government agencies, private industry, universities have been teaching and implementing open source solutions to create local centers of knowledge and gain expertise around open source in the country. Seeing India’s success in IT outsourcing, Brazil has also declared an interest in using open source to gain leadership in the market of software development outsourcing.
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Licensing
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Software compliance isn’t exactly the sexiest topic we tackle at the Linux Foundation, but it’s one of the most important. While we focus *our* efforts on open source software, the vast majority of software compliance efforts are focused on proprietary licenses. Just ask a CIO of an enterprise who has been audited by one of their software suppliers recently, or look at the well funded efforts of the Business Software Alliance, an organization dedicated to stamping out piracy and keeping companies in compliance with their members.
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Openness/Sharing
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From these we can infer what books, authors, or authors who influenced the author or were being influenced at the time. From this, we can see the growth of the social graph into the cultural graph. Essentially it is the same notion as the social graph but the cultural graph links items like books, poems and events together. In itself it means nothing but linked to the social graph, it allows the user to discover who is being written to whilst a book was being written. Is the author talking to other authors or only to his agent about it?
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Transport For London (TfL) is making its data freely available to web and mobile application developers, in a move that leaves Britain’s overground trains trailing.
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Open Data
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John Wilbanks is Director of Science Commons and a co-author of the Panton Principles. He has responded to my concerns about access to climate change data, with the observation that Open data is not the major problem or solution. I’ll comment at the bottom. I agree with what he says, but I will argue why there is a role for Open Knowledge in this issue.
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Without all the data in hand, it’s hard to answer the question that Kepler was built to answer: How common are planets like Earth? Though we now know hundreds of exoplanets, most of them are big, hot Jupiters around very bright stars that could not sustain any kind of life that we recognize. It’s easy to detect the bigger planets that orbit close to their stars because their gravity makes the star “wobble” more noticeably and their size dims its light more. So, the data we’ve collected on extrasolar planets over the last two decades is muddied by observation bias.
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WebM
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Good news about open video formats. In March both our sister organisation the FSF and our associated organisation FFII asked Google to free the video codec vp8 and use it on YouTube. This month Google announced they will do so. From now on users will be able use Free Software to play and encode the new WebM format. “WebM is based on the Matroska container format — replacing Ogg — and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.”
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Mozilla has turned out a Firefox 4 prototype that includes Google’s newly open sourced WebM video format, while Opera has rolled the format into a developer build of its own.
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The Mozilla Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0 features several user interface changes, such as an updated Add-ons manager and Aero Glass support on Vista and Windows 7 systems, and adds support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Platform changes include an updated about:memory page that shows the amount of memory being consumed, Mac support for Cocoa event model for NPAPI plug-ins used by Flash 10.1 and the latest Apple Java plug-in, and support for ChromeWorkers with jscytupes.
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Cynthia Dunbar does not have a high regard for her local schools. She has called them unconstitutional, tyrannical and tools of perversion. The conservative Texas lawyer has even likened sending children to her state’s schools to “throwing them in to the enemy’s flames”. Her hostility runs so deep that she educated her own offspring at home and at private Christian establishments.
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Environment
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Gregor MacDonald is an independent energy analyst & investment consultant. He publishes public analysis to his website, Gregor.us and hosts the internet investment show, StockTwits.tv, with Howard Lindzon. He offers private consultancy and regular email newsletters on global energy trends & investment guidelines.
I asked him some questions about his background, the state of global energy, the BP disaster, and California’s dependency on oil…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has started calling for something it says is an “Internet of things”.
The “things” is stuff that combines electronic chips and Internet addresses.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The campaign to free the digital world from Digital Restrictions Management just got a new sticker. The old one is on my laptop’s screen represents the famous iPod silhouettes with white wires acting as shackles. It was a simple and powerful design. The new one is a the famous 1984 Apple ad, but I’m not sure its message is as clear as before. It also seems to give a sense of ‘victory’ for Apple fans: they now rule the digital world –with shackles, ok, but still winning.
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If the people who brought us television had played by the same rules that today’s wireless carriers impose — we’d probably all be listening to the radio.
Which is a nice way of saying the wireless industry — AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile — needs some ground rules that make clear they are common carriers that get the right to rent the airwaves by abiding by fair rules.
Right now, they play by their own rules.
Imagine if the wireless carriers controlled your wired broadband connection or your television set. You’d have to buy your television from your cable company, with a two-year contract, and when that ended, you’d have to ask them to unlock it so you could take it to another provider.
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Copyrights
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Who exactly is James Gannon representing? He claims, as does Barry Sookman, that what he publishes in his blog is his own opinion. But is it really? Your life experiences, including work are part of what colors your opinions. We know that he’s a lawyer. We don’t know who his clients are – and those clients and their interests will have had an effect on his opinions. But he refuses to say who they are.
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Anti-piracy campaigns come and go every other month – most of them are either endlessly boring or end up becoming an object of ridicule. A new one just launched takes the form of a site which appears to offer free downloads from top artists, but with a twist. Clicking to download results in various pop stars meeting a grisly end by a bullet to the head or a careless hand grenade.
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Keeping its promise to Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, the music industry has targeted the country’s second largest ISP, Vodafone. According to a new report, Vodafone is in talks with the Irish Recorded Music Association about issuing warnings and eventually disconnecting its file-sharing customers. Since its introduction last month, around 800 Eircom customers have already received their first strike.
Tony Whitmore on RSS: News, blogs and podcasts (2006)
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Posted in Dell, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents, Red Hat, Ubuntu at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The importance of WebM, its progress in GNU/Linux-compatible Web browsers, and Google’s situation wrt MPEG-LA FUD
A few weeks ago Mozilla's CEO was quoted as saying that WebM is safe to use and it finally comes to Firefox 4 (trunk):
Opera is getting it too and optimisations are being reported by the developers at Google:
Since WebM launched in May, the team has been working hard to make the VP8 video codec faster. Our community members have contributed improvements, but there’s more work to be done in some interesting areas related to performance (more on those below).
The elephant in the room is still MPEG-LA, which is a patent aggressor that agitates Google. We wrote about the subject in posts such as:
The patent issue continues to come up in some articles about WebM:
In other words, if Google doesn’t address patent indemnification-or at least release information about its findings on the patents efficacy-a new licensing pool will be created to capitalize on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Yet Google seems more concerned with modifying its WebM FAQ than it is with helping the online video world understand the practical and financial benefits of an open-source competitor to H.264.
So the patent issue and Google’s existing plan matter a lot here. Fortunately, we have received some valuable information over the past few days. It helps us understand how Google views MPEG-LA. Florian Müller has had a scoop and he finally gave us the needed permission to shoot off the following:
“[S]omeone told me something that raises doubt about MPEG LA’s $5 million license fee cap but that same source has now substantially weakened its claims to the extent that the cap actually seems to be the case at least for most companies,” Müller told us.
Prior to this there was a stronger claim. “Concerning video codecs I heard something that raises doubt about the $5 million license fee cap, but I’ll try to obtain authorization from someone so I can attribute a quote to a person rather than just saying it’s a good source,” he expounded.
“The source originally claimed that contrary to the related claim made on MPEG LA’s website, the source has information that some licensees do indeed have to pay much more for such reasons as the $5 million per-company per-year royalty cap not including all categories of products.”
–Florian MüllerLater he wrote: “The source does not want to be named. The conversation took place at this event in Brussels on Wednesday. The house rules allow quoting from what was said at the event, but it’s not allowed to say WHO said something (without permission, of course). The source originally claimed that contrary to the related claim made on MPEG LA’s website, the source has information that some licensees do indeed have to pay much more for such reasons as the $5 million per-company per-year royalty cap not including all categories of products. With a view to the house rules of the event, I asked the source, which was present at the event and may have information I don’t, whether I could provide its name when quoting. The source asked not to be named. Meanwhile (yesterday) the source also added this clarification: “For most companies, they probably don’t see much more than one overall fee.” I will mention this on my blog next time I report on codecs [...] The thing is that philosophically I’m against those codec royalties, but economically, if big companies pay a maximum of $5 million per year, it’s not a fundamental problem to the industry and those who end up paying are largely in favor of software patents anyway, so I’m not much more sympathetic to them than to MPEG LA. I’m most sympathetic to those who want to get rid of software patents but are attacked nevertheless.”
Finally, Müller said: “I don’t know when to put it out because it was no longer the “gem” I thought it was once I received that additional clarification about most companies just seeing one item on the bill. You know, I would really have liked to call into question the truthfulness of the representations they make about the cap, but with the clarification the same source provided, it doesn’t really have a lot of teeth anymore.”
Google is often criticised for secrecy, so we found it neither surprising nor curious that “there are some confidentiality-related sensitivities there: at the start of the event in Brussels, the chairman announced the “house rules” which related to quoting…”
This matter is extremely important because codecs like Theora and VP8 help eliminate the patent problem often associated with codecs in GNU/Linux. To platforms like Windows and Mac OS X it matters a lot less, for sure (they already ship the codecs on the computer/CD). A couple of years ago Red Hat cited codecs as a key reason for abandoning plans to release a desktop product.
Some days ago we learned that software patents may affect the motivation of Free software developers — a subject that Glyn Moody has just elaborated on:
What this might mean is that although hackers’ views and motivations are relatively unaffected by the existence of software patents, they might in fact find themselves hugely affected if major software companies or patent trolls start trying to assert their software patent portfolios – something that many fear might happen. True, this is only speculation, but at the very least, it might provide an interesting topic for further research….
Here in Europe, codec patents can be more or less ignored, at least in theory*, but as multinational companies like Dell are selling computers here, it is hard to avoid the MPEG ‘codec tax’ which even a Ubuntu machine from Dell comes with [1, 2] (yes, also in Europe). This issue ought to be resolved in order to make GNU/Linux free (which it’s not, at least not from major, multinational OEMs). █
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* Nevertheless, as Müller points out, “you can find links to stories on the rigid enforcement of MP3/MP4 patents in Europe, particularly at the CeBIT trade show. So much for the exclusion of patents on software in Article 52 of the European Patent Convention…”
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 6:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[Note: the title and image are intended to be purely humourous, even if text leaves that out]
Summary: Microsoft’s coup against independent US politics is a subject that mustn’t be ignored if the danger of government-imposed lock-in is to be properly understood and countered
IN ORDER to maintain some dominance, Microsoft relies a great deal on politicians (whom it sometimes funds). Microsoft’s influence in the United States government continues to increase thanks to spineless politicians who would rather help companies than help their people. According to this report (pointing to another), “state and local incentives” are being arranged for Microsoft in Iowa (venue of the Comes vs Microsoft trial). Forget about foreclosures; it’s poor Microsoft that deserves financial favours right now, correct?
Microsoft is in discussion with Iowa officials about restarting a stalled data center project in the state, although envisions a considerably smaller budget, according to local media reports. The company is seeking to rework state and local incentives to support a $100 million project, reports the Des Moines Register.
The state of Florida became a victim of American EDGI [1, 2] a few week ago. Andy Perez is selling out his state based on this new press release and Microsoft claims to ‘donate’ access to some Internet resources that indoctrinate citizens. Quite a donation, eh?
Heartland Workforce is working with Workforce Florida Inc., the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation and the Microsoft Corporation as part of a public-private partnership to provide free technology training to individuals across the state. The Microsoft Corporation, through Microsoft Elevate America, will donate 35,000 vouchers to the state of Florida for no-cost, online technology training and certification. This initiative will be implemented through collaboration with the state’s 24 Regional Workforce Boards.
Forbes Magazine has a new article titled “Tech’s Attack Of The Freebies”; Microsoft is mentioned in it and the author is insightful enough to interpret “donations” not necessarily as a blessing.
Once again we witness Microsoft using children to promote the financial ’cause’ of Microsoft (good PR to be named alongside “Boys & Girls Club”):
The Digital Arts Festivals are a dynamic component of the national Club Tech program, a partnership between Boys & Girls Clubs of America, founding sponsor Microsoft and Comcast with the goal to provide youth with the skills needed to thrive in a technology-driven world.
Here is another press release which shows Florida giving Microsoft even more political power:
The Florida House of Representatives is making one final push over the next month for its state residents to be counted in the 2010 Census, through its MyFloridaCensus (http://www.myfloridacensus.gov) website and Web-based application. MyFloridaCensus is an innovative component in Florida’s overall effort to ensure a complete count of residents during the ongoing 2010 Census, supplementing door-to-door canvassing, which ends nationwide July 10.
This is part of a trend because Microsoft has been getting into politics with free-of-charge proprietary software since earlier this year [1, 2, 3] (starting around April). This now includes a platform for campaigning, based on several new sources [1, 2, 3] including the Microsoft booster Marius Oiaga. What are these candidate politicians thinking?
“This is part of a trend because Microsoft has been getting into politics with free-of-charge proprietary software since earlier this year.”Microsoft is now tightening its relationship with governments (covered in relation to an event that involved the The Economist too). More lock-in is promised and advertised by Mary Jo Foley. We previously covered Microsoft's plan of controlling government data. There is an ongoing race to control healthcare in the nation (lock-in proponents don’t seem to mind), but what makes it worse is that even Canadian healthcare is something which Microsoft tries to control. Here are the latest reports [1, 2]. Something ought to be done to stop this. The NHS is a lesson in Microsoft’s harms to healthcare.
Two years ago we warned that Microsoft wants to control healthcare data in case it goes bankrupt. If healthcare depends on Microsoft, then it will receive bankruptcy protection. Other companies have used similar tricks to reduce their risk, or rather to pass the risk to the public (socialism) while they make all the profits with outrageous bets that are secured by taxpayers.
“Microsoft Is Down 17.84% Since Reporting Quarterly Results 43 Days Ago” — that’s the title of this new report. We have also just learned about a possible shake-up coming to Microsoft now that Apple is worth more than Microsoft and there is no major new product over the horizon (Courier, for example, died prematurely [1, 2]).
Across the Atlantic we’ve held elections recently and a new government came to power, removing unnecessary bureaucracy like BECTA in the process. This will save a lot of public money that can instead be spent on developing/deploying Free software.
The closure of Becta will save £10m over the next year, the government said yesterday.
Former education minister and Labour MP Ed Balls tabled a parliamentary question in which he asked the Secretary of State for Education to estimate the cost and savings to the Exchequer expected from kyboshing the schools IT quango.
There is also news from New Zealand. Microsoft has had many problems there recently, so it may have become a matter of urgency and here is Microsoft’s apparent response:
Microsoft has officially designated this country “Tier One”, meaning Microsoft products will become available here at the same time as larger markets on the first launch “wave” such as the US, Japan, Germany, Singapore and Australia.
Microsoft has been trying to bring software patents to New Zealand. It probably won’t work. Microsoft may have a lot of political influence in the United States (and to a certain degree in Canada), but as the firm gets smaller, it also becomes more politically feeble. So, all in all, we are optimistic that change will come not from the United States but first from distant nations, which gradually move towards software freedom and in turn will help the US liberate itself from tyrants like Microsoft. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Linux backdoor? Not so fast, say people who are familiar with the issue
THIS subject has come up quite frequently in the IRC channel. We addressed this in a previous post, but in the interest of FUD-fighting, here’s more:
i. Gnu/Linux Infection Is Unreal
Windows world is still the same, nothing has changed from security point of view other than more bloated systems. The entire security industry thrive on Windows platform — if there is no Windows there is no security industry. Security firms hate Gnu/Linux, they love Windows, they want Windows – to survive.
There is no lesson to be learned from Windows peers, if you know the nature of this flaw, it is quite different from the flaws of poros Windows Machines.
So what happened here? Some cracker wrote a virus and send it to you through an email and you installed it by clicking on it? No, nothing as dramatic as it happens in Windows world. It was actually so boring you may not even want to read it.
ii. Trojaned App Demonstrates Need for Better Practices, Not More FUD
The Unreal team handled it pretty well, in my opinion. They embraced the suck and made a clear announcement free of blame or denial–an announcement that also pointed out how to confirm the trojaned version and how to replace the trojaned version with the clean version. This is not, I should emphasize, the worst exploit ever: “This backdoor allows a person to execute any command with the privileges of the user running the ircd. The backdoor can be executed regardless of any user restrictions (so even if you have passworded server or hub that doesn’t allow any users in).”
iii. Rootkits: Hiding in Windows shadows
While rootkit problems still exist in Unix and Linux, they’re far more common in Windows. That’s in part because the Unix operating family has many built in system monitoring and logging tools. In other words, while Unix and Linux can be attacked this way, it’s a lot harder to pull off without leaving tracks.
This hopefully provides ‘ammunition’ for those who come across the latest bit of FUD that Microsoft boosters use against GNU/Linux in their blogs. They hope to suppress migrations to GNU/Linux (like Google’s) which are motivated by security. █
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