07.28.10
Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s insecure-by-design products allow the camera to be remotely activated for spying
IF YOUR CHILD uses Windows, be aware of the risk. “Our products just aren’t engineered for security,” Microsoft’s Brian Valentine famously stated. From the German news:
Hacker arrested for spying on schoolgirls via their own webcams
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Two girls told him the little lights on their webcams were not going out when they had finished using them. On examining one of the computers Floß discovered a so-called Trojan computer program which was being used to control the equipment, and which had been spread via the chat service ICQ.
Acquiring anti-virus software is in its own right a risk, based on the news. [via]
The documents list the amounts charged to more than 2,000 people around the world (the screen shots show the distribution of victims globally and in the United States). Victims paid anywhere from $50 to $100 for the fake anti-virus software. The file lists the amounts charged, partially obscured credit card numbers, and the names, addresses and e-mails of all victims.
Windows is very good… for the bad guys. Don’t expect the press to blame Windows though; Waggener Edstrom is agitating/harassing journalists who do so. █
“All in all, Waggener Edstrom would have twenty months to lather up the press.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s Pam Edstrom
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Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at Microsoft’s very narrow world view when it comes to the Web
THE Mono-based Moonlight is a menace for many reasons. Even the FSF recognises this. A reader has sent us the following screenshot this morning. It helps show that in Microsoft’s eyes there is only one acceptable architecture and only two platforms worthy of being served on the World Wide Web (both are proprietary).
Last year it turned out that Moblin would get Silverlight, but there is no Moblin anymore. It’s merged with Maemo now and it’s called MeeGo. So what’s up with that? In any event, watch out for Mono traps which are still being promoted in Web sites like OMG! Ubuntu without discretion. Docky is Mono-based, just like Moonlight. █
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Posted in Australia, Patents at 4:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: South Pacific patent laws and how loopholes are made to allow software patents through “physical” appendages or “transformations”
OVER in Australia it oughtn’t be hard to patent software, but Australia is one of the very few countries which permit monopolising algorithms. Based on Patent Baristas, “Australian Patent Office Refines Test for Patentability of Business Methods” and this applies to software too:
Prior to the subject decision, the governing precedent was Grant v Commissioner of Patents [2006] FCAFC 120 (“Grant”). Grant stood for the proposition that a method must produce “a physical effect in the sense of a concrete effect or phenomenon or manifestation or transformation”. Grant went on to say that a change in the state or memory of a computer may be a “physical effect”.
Patentors of software can use the “embedded” trick in New Zealand following some changes which were not exactly ideal, but there are still claims of disparity between Australian and Kiwi patent laws.
Australia and New Zealand may be close geographically and culturally, but when it comes to patent protection, their paths have started to diverge. When talking to clients, whether in Australia or elsewhere, I usually mention the possibility that they could also pursue patent protection in New Zealand. In those discussions, it often becomes clear that the client assumes the patent provisions of the two countries are, by and large, synonymous. This is not so. While harmonisation of the IP laws of these South Pacific cousins continues to be the subject of much discussion on both sides of the Tasman, the reality of achieving this seems (sadly) increasingly unlikely in the context of recent developments.
Notice the use of the word “harmonisation”; in such cases, the more dominant force usually imposes its laws upon the subordinate one. This trick was being called the same thing — namely “harmonisation” — when American software patents lobbyists were trying to legalise software patents in Europe [1, 2].
One post-Bilski analysis that we missed last month came from TechInsights and it helped explain the tricks for patenting software. To quote the opening:
For over a decade the fundamental intellectual property rights of an innovation implemented in software have been held ransom as the appeals on the case, “Bilski et al. v. Kappos …” worked their way through the system to the Supreme Court. Prior to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, software and process patents were on very shaky ground due to the assertion by a lower court that a claimed process is only patent-eligible if it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.
The Supreme Court’s June 28th, 2010, decision on the Bilski case was an affirmation of the viability of patent protection for innovation implemented in software. However, uncertainty still exists as a clear test for patentable subject matter was not established. The Bilski patent was found to claim an abstract idea and as such was determined not to be patentable. Demonstrating the tangible nature of a patented innovation will likely be a key to successfully defending patent rights in the software space.
It sure seems like these tests for physical attributes and transformation are what eventually defines/determines many countries’ policy on patents. As such (pun intended), policy regarding software patents is not a binary condition and it’s important to recognise the familiar loopholes which are used to permit software patents. █
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Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 4:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Dan Farber
Summary: IBM is a proponent of software patents and it is very proud of its practice of patenting the equivalent of mathematics
EARLIER this year Novell bragged about its number of software patents. It claimed the #1 position based on one criterion and IBM — a proponent of software patents — does so too. IBM has an addiction (to patents) and it is not a healthy one. Steve Mills equates patents with invention when he says:
No company has more software patents than we do, so we are the most prolific company in the world in terms of software invention.
Wow. Everyone must be impressed because IBM has many monopolies on algorithms. What do these monopolies mean to software start-ups? According to Pamela Samuelson and a colleague, patents are hardly valuable to start-ups. Patents are a “big boys’ game” (not actual quote) for players like IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, and so forth. Here is what Feld, a venture capitalist, had to say about the study from Samuelson et al.
I was appalled when I started seeing soundbites emerge from at least one of the authors of the paper from weak conclusions buried in the midst of the data. My partner Jason took one of them on when he wrote his post 76% of Venture Capitalists Believe that Software Patents are Important (NOT!) In this post I think Jason does an excellent job of dissecting the data and explaining why this is not only an incorrect conclusion from the data, but a terribly misleading soundbite.
In other news, giant Rambus continues to terrify and to extort the entire industry with patent submarines.
Rambus, a designer of semiconductor chips, won a long-running patent battle with NVIDIA, but that dispute is not the only one the company is involved in – and the upcoming decisions could mean millions in additional revenue.
This week the barring the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that NVIDIA was violating Rambus’ patents for certain kinds of memory controllers. NVIDIA must now come to some agreement with Rambus to pay license fees. If it does not, then the company’s products cannot be imported into the United States.
Rambus is an excellent example of why the patent system is anything but excellent. IBM too could become more like Rambus one day, assuming it has no other sources of revenue (to an extent, IBM already milks the competition’s cows, unless it’s Free/libre). Microsoft has already turned into a patent bully because many of its products fail, so it chooses to rely on royalties (i.e. taxing the competition). █
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Posted in Asia, Google, Microsoft, Search at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: After the LawMedia AstroTurf (against Google) those same old talking points are returning
FOR THOSE WHO cannot remember or do not know, Microsoft hired a bunch of AstroTurfers to wash the Web (and other means of communication) with talking points about a Yahoo-Google deal being a threat. That’s just Microsoft’s modus operandi and it’s the reason this monopolist is loathed by so many. Watch what Microsoft is doing at this moment:
Yahoo!-Google deal in Japan is anti-competitive, says Microsoft. “This deal gives Google virtually 100 percent of all searches in Japan, both paid and unpaid.” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in a statement.
He also refers to the expected 2008 Yahoo! Google deal which was scraped owing to anti-competitive fears.
I wonder what Microsoft thinks of its own monopoly in the PC segment where the company has exclusive deals with all major PC vendors to pre-install Windows.
We haven’t kept track of Microsoft news since the beginning of the month, but hopefully we’ll return to this later and provide more details. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE, Novell, OpenSUSE at 3:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A prominent member of the KDE project is picked by Novell to serve as a promoter of OpenSUSE
A FEW HOURS AGO we wrote about OpenSUSE, noting that it ought to find new stewardship. In addition to covering some recent OpenSUSE news [1, 2], Muktware writes about Novell’s announcement that Jos Poortvliet is becoming the Community Manager of OpenSUSE:
The openSUSE Project has announced the appointment of Jos Poortvliet as openSUSE Community Manager starting August 1.
Poortvliet brings several years of community building experience to his new role and will be responsible for continuing to drive and grow the openSUSE project as well as serve as community liaison within Novell.
Zonker, who is the previous Community Manager, left Novell several months ago, so it took OpenSUSE a lot time to make this appointment. It took about half a year and Andreas Jaeger announced this in the mailing lists as follows:
We’re proud to announce today that Jos Poortvliet will join the openSUSE project and Novell as openSUSE Community Manager starting on August 1. With Jos we’ve found a leader with excellent community building experience combined with a very welcoming nature, many fresh, promising ideas and a strong drive to grow the openSUSE Project. Jos holds a degree in Organisational Psychology from the University of Utrecht and has gained valuable experience in several professional roles ranging from Project Manager at KPN to Service Level Manager at Royal Bank of Scotland. Last but not least, Jos is a leading member of the KDE Marketing Team and has helped Akademy and the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit attract a vibrant and collaborative audience.
Jos commented, “The opportunity to become part of the international openSUSE community is very exciting. There are a great number of interesting developments going on in the free software world, and openSUSE plays a major role in many of them. I look forward to working with the community on these, helping it grow, finding new directions and ways of developing, and delivering its innovative technologies to users and developers around the world.”
We enthusiastically welcome Jos and look forward to his working with the openSUSE community to shape the future of the openSUSE project. After his start he will be deeply involved in the openSUSE conference, other community events and activities, and of course he will have the pleasure of promoting openSUSE wherever possible.
Andreas
Poortvliet will be managing a strong KDE-oriented (but pro-DE choice) GNU/Linux distribution. It is mostly a representative role as people like Andreas, Coolo, and their colleagues coordinate development.
I generally like Poortvliet. He has been politely asking me in Identi.ca to go easy on Novell and SUSE (since approximately 2 months ago). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Box, a software development company specializing in open source technology, has earned ISO 9001:2008 certification.
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Applications
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My posts these days have gotten way too long. That essay about the Debian server, for example, put me to sleep when I looked at it again this morning. This time I shall try to be concise with a few more console gizmos.
I usually don’t need a screen-locking application, and if I did I believe screen itself would probably suffice, but if you want something dedicated to lock out terminals, vlock is a good option.
[...]
I mentioned some document converters the other day, then found two or three more: catdoc, wordview and word2x. catdoc is still in the Arch repos and worked fine for me, but the other two were less successful.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The VLC backend for Phonon is released!
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BlueDevil is a set of components, which integrates bluetooth within the KDE SC, for example adding a system preference module (KCM), or allowing to browse the files in a cell phone from you favorite file browser.
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Open Amarok and Clementine side by side, and the philosophical differences become apparent immediately.
The difference goes far beyond the fact that Clementine uses two panes — one for music sources and one for playlists — while Amarok adds a third pane for context information. The number of panes does indicate a difference in assumptions about what users have want, but it is the least of the differences.
Instead, the largest difference is that Amarok’s design philosophy is influenced by the current interface design theories, while Clementine’s are more oriented towards stone geeks, including every detail imaginable.
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GNOME Desktop
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Stormy: I first got involved with open source software around 1999 or 2000. I was managing the HPUX desktop and we decided that having GNOME, a free and open source desktop, on HPUX would be advantageous for users. It was a platform with a vibrant community and new features that customers wanted. The technical part turned out to be the easy part. The harder part was explaining what open source software was and how HP’s intellectual property would not be compromised, and how free and open source software was changing the software business. I ended up with a new job teaching people about open source software and creating the Open Source Program Office.
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Although a command line isn’t a necessity anymore in modern desktop Linux distributions, there are many situations where it’s still the most efficient way to perform and automate tasks. I often spawn terminal windows in clusters on my desktop while I’m working so that I can monitor and switch between a number of simultaneous operations. A large number of terminal windows can be frustrating to manage, however, and can look cluttered on a desktop.
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The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment.
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Reviews
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At the end the hardware requirements of each distribution depend much on its components (Desktop Envorinment, Window Manager,…) which are in many distro’s the same, what makes PClinuxOS different from the rest is that PClinuxOS is “Radically Simple”. I have not found anyother distribution which is simpler.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. has launched its next-generation portal solution, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, offering organizations a flexible, open source alternative for building, deploying, integrating and managing on-premise and cloud-based applications.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 9 KDE.
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Phones
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Mobile Linux is an unprecedented success. In a market that has been dominated for years by the likes of Nokia and Microsoft, it’s a credit to our favourite operating system that it has been able to quickly adapt and slot into the mobile ecosystem over a such a short period of time. It’s also amazing that our open source operating system is rivalling Apple without the massive research and development budgets, without the singular vision and without curtailing users’ freedom, albeit with help from the likes of Google.
What’s most impressive is that Linux-based mobile phones can beat the iPhone without resorting to free software idealism. In many cases, they’re just better. Simple functions like modifying your home screen, or replacing your music and photo browsers, are almost impossible on the iPhone, and ridiculously easy on all three of the platforms we’ve looked at. Their APIs aren’t controlled by a single developer, they don’t force draconian limitations on their use, and you’re free to create and install any kind of application you choose, regardless of the moral judgements of the developers behind the platform.
But the best reason is that they all run Linux, and while you might not be able to get into the operating system as much as you can on your desktop, you can’t completely escape from it either. Many Linux tools and applications have been ported to these devices, and much of the third-party software you find in their app stores has been derived from open source projects. This means you’re probably already familiar with them, and it also means that there’s a great sense of longevity in these phones. The hardware may change, and so too may the operating system and APIs, but the free software bedrock upon which they’re built won’t change, and can only go from strength to strength.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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I bought a Nokia N900 a litte more than a month ago, after having wanted one ever since when Nokia first released word that it was coming out with this new Linux based smartphone.
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The included software is pretty good, but if you are not going to install 3rd party software then this really is not the phone for you.
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Android
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The OS wars in the mobile space appear to be over and there are two left standing, the iPhone and Android, a Linux distro.
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LinuxMagic will incorporate the Open-Xchange software in its MagicMail offering that is designed as a turn-key solution for ISPs and telcos with 2,000 to 200,000 users. MagicMail comes with integrated anti-spam protection and support from LinuxMagic, one of the foremost experts in e-mail and spam security, as well as a stable redundant infrastructure built on Linux technology.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The new update of Firefox 4 Beta is now available in 23 languages for testing and feedback. Thanks to the help of the global Mozilla community, we’re now able to bring Firefox 4 Beta to more people around the world. This update to Firefox 4 Beta continues with changes to the look of Firefox with tabs appearing on the top of the browser and introduces the ability to turn tabs into App Tabs.
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The final browser is expected in October or November, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.
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Project Releases
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The next stable version of GNU make, version 3.81, has been released and is available for download from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/.
Openness/Sharing
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Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model.
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Open Data
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The topic of population is moving up the agenda again. It was very much discussed 40 years ago. Then, with the green revolution, people felt things would be fine because the world population was increasing and everyone wasn’t starving to death as predicted. But now we are facing a whole series of resource limitations. We are also facing the results of our own emissions – it is only in the last 10 years that we’ve had the hard evidence to say that rising levels of carbon dioxide really are leading to rising levels of global warming.
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Today’s Financial Times has a preview of a much-awaited World Bank report on land grabs. The Bank has, for months, been promising the arrival of a report that makes a cast iron case for why allowing rich foreign investors to buy land in poor countries is win-win-win-win. The release date for the report keeps slipping because it appears that even the Bank is struggling to massage the facts to fit its case. From a leaked version of the report:
“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.
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Environment
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This is the big pull-out quote from a profile in New York Magazine of the billionaire polluter behind the Tea Parties, whose family outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation.
NY Mag gives Koch free rein to spread that disinformation, with not a single quote by any scientist disputing it. Of course, if conservatives continue to listen to Koch and the groups funded by him, like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation — and block all efforts to get off our current emissions path — then we are headed towards very high concentrations of carbon dioxide, which will dramatically reduce the land available to produce food, even as we add another 3 billion mouths to feed (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water“).
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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On July 23rd, 2010, a Uyghur journalist, activist and blogger named Gheyret Niyaz (a.k.a. Heyrat Niyaz, 海莱特·尼亚孜) was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His crime, according to many reports, was “endangering state security” by conducting an interview with a Hong Kong newspaper shortly after the Urumqi riots of 2009. He played no role in the actual riots.
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Online privacy policies have taken center stage as social networking sites and search engines have recently come under fire for sharing user information.
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Complaints from drivers prompted Hounslow Council to switch off CCTV cameras in some part of the borough.
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CRUCIAL evidence of Blackburn town centre incidents could be being missed because of faulty CCTV cameras.
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The odds are pretty good that if you’re a big consumer of mobile apps, the private information on your phone has been collected and sent somewhere without your knowledge.
That’s the finding of the App Genome Project mammoth study by Lookout, a mobile security company that has scrutinized more than 300,000 apps on both the iPhone and Android mobile phone platforms.
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A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We were among those who were amazed at ASCAP’s misguided and factually incorrect attack on EFF, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons. ASCAP’s Paul Williams falsely made the claim that those three groups were against copyright and against compensating content creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. All three groups responded politely to the bizarre and factually incorrect attack, and many ASCAP members who support these groups and use Creative Commons licenses expressed their displeasure with ASCAP for such a blatantly misleading letter. Larry Lessig responded with a blog post, again pointing out the blatant errors in ASCAP’s attack, noting that these groups actually look to help content creators by providing them tools to better exercise their rights. In that blog post, Lessig also challenged Williams to a debate so they could iron out their differences and ASCAP could (hopefully) retract their false attacks on these groups, and focus on helping artists again.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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One of the consequences of this act is that internet service providers (ISPs) will be require to keep a dossier on individuals suspected of illegal file-sharing. Individuals will be identified via an IP address associated with them (an ID assigned to equipment connect to the internet).
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The Digital Economy Act, and the issues raised by it, will be addressed by a new Committee of the UK Parliament. At its first meeting yesterday, it was rights-holders v citizens. But where were the telcos?
Dell Streak
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Servers, SLES/SLED at 1:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell promotes SUSE for a change, but it also leaves OpenSUSE to continue struggling with downtimes
NOVELL has hardly done anything to promote SUSE this month (unlike Fog Computing), until it issued this press release, had Markus Rex write for Novell’s PR, made a buzz in the OpenSUSE community [1, 2, 3], and probably contacted journalists in order to generate some coverage [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] which included:
It has been a year since Novell launched its SUSE Appliance Program, which offers a set of online tools, dubbed SUSE Studio, for spinning up software appliances based on its SUSE Linux distro. The appliance tools were aimed at software developers who wanted to code appliances for their own purposes – perhaps as a means of more easily supporting and redistributing their own application software to their customers – not for distributing software appliances to the general public.
Now there is SUSE Gallery.
Novell uses these appliances to sell SUSE though some ‘open’ core companies that put SUSE Studio underneath. Novell also has some SUSE server collaborations going on with IBM [1, 2] and while more volunteers are needed in SUSE (packaging helps), there is also this OpenSUSE Build Service job opening. Novell’s Duncan Mac-Vicar P. produces Build Service for Android.
There is hardly any other OpenSUSE news, except perhaps for the release of OpenSUSE 11.3 (covered before), the end of 11.0, some work on the Wiki, and server downtimes (Novell does not properly support the OpenSUSE project, which is looking for sponsors as a result). If Novell neglects OpenSUSE, then it’s time to move on. █
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