08.21.10
Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cut Microsoft, don’t cut hardworking homeowners and their families
Summary: Microsoft legacy on crucial PCs (PCS-associated computers) not only leads to unnecessary layoffs but also helps cyber-criminals intrude people’s records
ONE of the world’s largest police forces appears to be using a system far more antiquated than anything used elsewhere in the world, pretty much in line with the NHS, which still insists on using Internet Explorer 6. Is there anyone out there who happens to know for a verifiable fact that people’s criminal records — not just medical records — are stored on the digital equivalent of Swiss cheese? If anyone can provide us with a detailed breakdown of the system’s composition, it would be exceptionally valuable — not necessarily just to crackers, but also to those who worry about the systems that store sensitive information and should therefore be upgraded to something solid like Debian. Disasters can be averted while leading to savings. █
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Posted in IBM, Microsoft at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Without any supportive evidence, Florian Müller blames IBM for the Spanair crash, though not without a challenge
MICROSOFT apologist (presumably for a living) Florian Müller continues his endless campaign against IBM — a campaign which even the FFII is publicly denouncing him for. As André Rebentisch puts it, “I am stunned, a top-competition lawyer like Thomas Vinje (who usually restrains himself) claims you worked for Microsoft Corporation in the Oracle case. You don’t refute it. I guess SAP pulled more strings behind the scenes in this case and Monty didn’t just pretend to be mad about the sale. But when Vinje says so the Commission does believe the same.” Read on, it’s worth it.
It has gone too far. Müller is even bringing up World War 2 to serve his cause when he loses the argument over IBM (trying to describe Microsoft is the “lesser evil”).
If that’s not bad enough, last night we spotted Müller sinking to new lows, trying to ascribe a tragic plane crash to IBM’s position in the mainframe market. “Shocking,” Müller states, “mainframe trojan may have contributed to fatal Spanair crash that killed 154 people”
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) immediately responded to him by saying: “I don’t see the word ‘mainframe’ anywhere in the story or its links. What’s described sounds more like a Windows PC.”
Now watch Müller grasping at straws by saying: “I quoted ZDNet. El País: “el ordenador central de la compañía Spanair” = Spanair’s central computer. Airlines typically use mainframes”
“I suspect a Windows PC used as a mainframe gateway”
–Steven J. Vaughan-NicholsSJVN says: “Could be. But, it was the ‘monitor’ computer that was infected with Trojans. I suspect a Windows PC used as a mainframe gateway”
The Müller spin machine does not give up yet. “The mainframe was supposed to raise the alarm => theoretically a frontend can also raise an alarm but usually it’s the central system,” he writes.
SJVN says: “In any case, the system was updated over 24-hours later. Seems more of a policy than a system problem”
Müller’s spin machine is now contracting itself and never retracting the original accusation (Müller is a longtime Windows user). He says: “Security is always a matter of policy as well: failure to install security patches, bad password choices. I didn’t say mainframe bug.”
He said “mainframe trojan”. What a weak spinner. It was probably a Windows Trojan (if anything), but campaigner-for-hire Müller does not let the burden of proof stand in his way. █
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Posted in Deception, Formats, Marketing, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 8:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft describes its proprietary, binary-only formats in the context of a “plugfest” — a term implicitly reserved for ODF events
THE TERM “plugfest” — at least when it comes to document formats — has a connotation to do with ODF. Last year we showed how those plugfests got ‘infiltrated’ (Microsoft’s term [PDF]) by Microsoft employees and partners, who sought to change the agenda there [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13].
One of the vicious campaigners against ODF, Microsoft’s Mahugh, is now co-opting the term “plugfest” by using it to describe discussion about Microsoft’s proprietary document formats.
Former Open XML evangelist Doug Mahugh announces a “Binary Format Plugfest” for October 18/19
We have given many similar examples where Microsoft hijacks words to paint OOXML, for example, as something “open”, which also sounds a little like “Open Office”. These are not coincidences; these are merciless marketing tricks. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Tadag sends a warning signal to anyone else who foolishly believes that Microsoft is a worthy partner to work with
TECHRIGHTS has already gathered many examples for a list of companies betrayed by Microsoft deals which had them abandon GNU/Linux and left broke. David Gale, tadag’s author, told me yesterday that Tadag would be another example of a company which Microsoft destroyed in this way, very much as it destroyed i4i, which subsequently sued Microsoft and won. For this who do not know the history of this dispute, Microsoft pretended to be an i4i partner, then it got a look at their idea, and then nicked it and incorporated that into Office. It was all deliberate and very shameless based on discovery by the court.
Now, check out Tadag’s front page to see the similarities:
In 2004, tadag’s owners engaged with Microsoft to discuss how tadag intellectual property rights (IPR) could be protected to enable discussions on joint development. The two were already closely involved as strategic partners working in public sector IT. Following the signing of numerous non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) facilitated by Microsoft, as well as a documented partnership mandate, multiple senior Microsoft security personnel, from all over the world, reviewed the new architecture and agreed that tadag represented a new vision for IT security.
[...]
In April 2005, at an executive briefing in Redmond, Microsoft shared a confidential security development to a group of development partners that included tadag’s author, David Gale. Unwittingly, a senior Microsoft employee presented the tadag architecture to the audience, under the banner of an ‘exciting, still-under wraps, Microsoft innovation’. A formal complaint was immediately logged, with assurances coming from Microsoft that a full internal investigation would take place. In 2005, three weeks after RamTec’s formal complaint, an exact replica of the disclosed component of the tadag architecture was filed for patent in the U.S. under the name of OpenID.
Following reassurances from senior Microsoft Corp executives that a resolution would be forthcoming, partnership activity continued. David Gale was lead reference presenter at the global launch of BizTalk Server 2006, at the London Stock Exchange and, for two years, a retained consultant to Microsoft, presenting on their behalf at major events across Europe. Despite Microsoft claims of having conducted a thorough internal investigation, by February 2007, Bill Gates was on a podium announcing Microsoft’s ‘sponsorship’ of OpenID. Since then, Microsoft has variously: issued instructions to employees to deny any memory of previous communications (evidenced in an MS lawyer’s internal email), prevented senior executives from pursuing an investigation, denied the originality of the IPR, refused to reveal the outcome of an internal email scan, disputed the existence of NDAs, then finally disputed the validity of the Microsoft originated NDAs copied to them.
This helps us show what happens to companies after signing deals with Microsoft, the sociopath. █
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Posted in Law, Microsoft, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The 451 Group advertises Microsoft, which continues to force many people to buy Windows even when they clearly don’t want to
A COUPLE of days ago we spotted some more hogwash and unnecessary Vista 8 promotion, which came from an unexpected place — Matthew Aslett from the 451 Group. For a few years we have been unable to find out if Microsoft pays this group (they cannot disclosure this information), but anyway, this piece raises a brow and there an attempt to balance it by dangling Oracle (talking not about software freedom but about “Open Source” instead).
Recently we have heard a great deal about crime in the computer industry, ranging from Dell to HP and to Intel. Microsoft too got an honorary mention for its bundling practices. Pogson writes:
How does a monopoly sustain itself? It can produce better products than anyone else or it can cheat, messing with competition and providing “inducements” to stick with the game-plan.
Obviously, without producing better products, M$ would not be able to maintain exclusivity on retailers’ shelves and OEMs product-lists unless they provided inducements. As we recently saw in SEC v Dell, it is not OK to keep those inducements secret if they are a substantial/material fact that could affect investors’ decisions. We know retailers and OEMs margins are tight so the inducements are material. M$ certainly has not produced better products than any other software house on the planet.
Tim from OpenBytes has been attempting to find a way to get a Vista 7 refund (more on that when we catch up with IRC logs and post them), but this is getting hard to do. Tim is not alone though. Yesterday we found another depressing story:
I placed a call back to Asus (thankfully I had the supervisor’s direct extension this time) and inform them on this. They apologize and inform me there is nothing they can do about this. They again suggest I contact Microsoft for the refund on Windows because “Asus does not process refunds” even though the EULA says they should.
The EULA is a binding agreement like a contract, if I can get into trouble for breaking it so should they, right? Is it even worth my time to try and sue Asus to get my money back? Maybe next year when I am done with school.
People should make a lot more noise about it. Microsoft continues to disregard the laws and OEMs are helping it, sometimes because Microsoft pays them to do so. █
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Posted in DRM, GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Security at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The bribing chipmaker scoops up a firm that is hostile towards Linux and the GPL, which may also mean that future chips from Intel will be more OS-specific and DRM/TC-laden
WHAT does it sound like when one hears about 100 billion vulnerabilities? Well, it turns out that flaws associated with Windows affect many other programs.
An unpatched problem with Windows applications is much worse than first thought, with hundreds of programs, not just 40, vulnerable to attack, a Slovenian security company said today.
As moreover stated in relation to this separate article, “It turns out this is a fundamental flaw in the way almost all apps for that other OS work and how that other OS [Windows] loads programmes, looking in the current working directory first. Oops. The bad guys put some malware in the current working directory and give it a familiar name and voila! the system is owned by the bad guys.”
Here are some new statistics from McAfee, which is hostile towards GNU/Linux by the way.
According to McAfee’s 2010 Q2 Threat Report, the most widely detected threat was the Genericlatr Trojan, AutoRun malware found on nearly 9 percent of machines scanned by the company worldwide. Then there is Stuxnet, Conficker and other malicious threats that have taken advantage of lax policies toward removable devices.
The news is in about Intel buying McAfee, which probably means lock-down or DRM in more future hardware.
Profit is the number one motive for malware these days with espionage close behind. Intel is in the process of buying McAfee for $7.68 billion. You can image what the whole anti-malware industry is worth if McAfee alone is worth that much. Intel is looking at tie-ins to hardware for this industry. Can you spell DRM? Expect locked-down motherboards and filters on top of Ethernet and USB ports and storage devices.
This type of prediction is further validated here:
Paving the way for embedded devices to include more built-in security features, Intel announced it will acquire McAfee for $7.68 billion in cash. Separately, Odyssey Software and Wavelink Corporation both released upgrades to their management frameworks for mobile devices.
There are other ideas about the purpose of the takeover. Either way, however, Intel taking aboard more Linux-hostile DNA is clearly bad news. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.
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IBM
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Remember ten years ago, IBM made a $1 billion bet on Linux, and in so doing, helped create the momentum for Linux in the enterprise data center that we all enjoy today. Back then, IBM concentrated on three areas:
- Making Linux better – providing contributions to help improve Linux with respect to reliability, availability and serviceability
- Enabling IBM products – both across major server lines and throughout the IBM middleware portfolio
- Extending Linux into new opportunity areas – Helping to expanding the total addressable market for Linux (e.g. Real-Time, HPC, SoNAS)
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Kernel Space
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The Linux 2.6.36-rc1 kernel was released earlier in the week and while it will still be a couple months until the Linux 2.6.36 kernel will be officially released, the developers behind the open-source DisplayLink graphics driver are already looking forward to the Linux 2.6.37 kernel. This next kernel release that will make it out in early 2011 will bring new features and fixes to this driver that supports many graphics products over USB.
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Graphics Stack
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Since our last R600g status report, some of the changes to this driver that will eventually replace the R600 classic Mesa driver include support for new TGSI opcode instructions, segmentation fault fixes, OpenGL occlusion query support, fixed pitch alignment, user-clip plane support, an improved texture format checker, point/sprite rendering support, and various other technical changes. Some of the new instructions supported include POW, COS, SIN, SSG, SEQ, SGT, SNE, FRC, FLR, DDX, DDY, SGE, SLE, TXB, and many more. You get the point.
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Nearly two hours ago we shared the news that there’s finally open-source 2D/3D/video acceleration for ATI’s Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of graphics processors, which is currently the newest and best consumer-grade GPUs from AMD’s GPG unit. At the time though only the xf86-video-ati DDX driver code was publicly pushed into a branch of the driver, but now the 3D portion of the code has publicly landed.
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LWN readers will have seen our reporting from the Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit (day 1, day 2), held on August 8 and 9 in Boston. Your editor was unable to attend the storage-specific sessions, though, so they were not covered in those articles. Fortunately, James Bottomley took detailed notes, which he has now made available to us. Many thanks to James for all of what follows.
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A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone’s credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally.
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Applications
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Lotus Symphony is an interesting project. Although somewhat archaic and seemingly outdated, it is a very useful office suite, with many new, modern features on top of an older design.
The 32-bit only version and the Hardy stamp for the Ubuntu version give an impression that IBM does not place too much focus on this program. And yet, lots of cool and modern options are available in the software, making it quite useful and relevant. It’s a confusing mix of old and new, wrapped in unique.
Overall, Lotus Symphony performed well. If you don’t mind spending some time getting used to new looks and some non-standard features, the office suite will serve you rather well. It has that deep, corporate tinge that only giants can offer. Well, it’s free, so you’re welcome to try and see for yourself.
Version 3 is coming soon and it will be based on OpenOffice 3, so you should expect a very decent, very modern office suite, with lots of IBM-specific additions. I believe Lotus Symphony 3 will be a very useful software. But only time will tell.
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After waiting two years for the service, most Linux users that want video chat capabilities are probably already using Skype or something similar by now. The next few weeks will tell for sure, but this service may not be of much interest to Linux users anymore anyway.
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Drop down terminals were originally inspired by in game consoles like ones found in first person shooters like Counterstrike and Quake. Yes, Guake is just Quake starting with a ‘g’ instead of an ‘q’. Drop down terminals run in the background and can generally be toggled on and off by pressing one of the function keys (F12 by default in Guake). This simplifies life for people that make regular or sporadic use of the command line. Instead of starting a new terminal window or navigating to a currently open one, you can toggle the terminal on, execute the necessary commands, and have it out of your way again by just hitting one key. It really simplifies tasks like compiling code while working on a project and routine administration tasks.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.1 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for drag & drop between X11 and OLE.
– New ipconfig.exe builtin tool.
– Support for favorites in builtin Internet Explorer.
– Beginnings of a shell Explorer control.
– A number of DirectDraw code cleanups.
– Improvements to the calendar control.
– Various bug fixes.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce
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GNOME and KDE may be the first desktops that come to mind when you think of the Linux desktop, but they’re not the only ones. From the overly minimalistic Rat Poison window manager to the eye candy of the Enlightenment E17 desktop, Linux has just about every type of desktop you can imagine. Want a desktop that’s lean and resource friendly without giving up features? It’s time to take a look at Xfce.
For many users, the major desktops feel a little bloated. Fast hardware is cheaper than ever, but performance is still king on the Linux desktop. The ideal desktop is somewhere in the middle ground, between overly minimalistic and overly bloated. Xfce is right at the center of the Venn Diagram of features vs. speed. It’s lightning fast and still offers most of the features users have grown accustomed to. The problem? Most new users, and even some experienced Linux users, aren’t familiar with Xfce.
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Next, we take a look at the popularity trends of PCLinuxOS, Puppy, Sabayon, and Linux Mint, with CentOS as a reference. Note how Linux Mint rises up above this group — apparently following in the footsteps of Ubuntu, on which it is based.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.
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Debian Family
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More than 1000 developers from all over the globe are part of the Debian community, their often-noisy debates and insistence on the values of free software often causing ructions far beyond their own mailing lists – which are open to the public.
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Debian and Ubuntu have a set of official membership roles that can be granted to regular contributors. Those roles come with rights that enable the contributors to do their work and to participate in the project governance (elections and other official decision-making processes). It’s also a way for the distributions to acknowledge the work done: most contributors are proud of the status they reached.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Last summer we reviewed the ASRock NetTop ION 330, which was the first Atom-powered NetTop computer that had come out of this vendor known for their affordable motherboards. The NetTop ION 330 combined an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA’s ION platform to provide a low-power PC while offering modest computing and graphics capabilities.
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This is why I get so frustrated when people quickly dismiss Linux. I don’t have a problem with them preferring Windows, or even passing up the idea of giving Linux a try. But I do find it quite depressing that there’s no appreciation of what’s going on under the surface. I’m not talking about a sudo command, or lines of code. I’m talking about an ethos that standards are there to help consumers, to provide a level playing field for us all.
Instead, it seems the legwork is being done, and then greedy manufacturers are rubbing their hands with glee as they mess around with said standard in a bid to line their own pockets. It can and should be stopped. But sadly, I fear that not enough people – aside from a quick grumble in a pub – really care that much. For what it’s worth? I do.
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ChipWrights announced a Linux application development kit (ADK) for its CW5631 SoC, aimed at low-cost IPTV STBs and IP cameras. Like ChipWrights’ Linux-based CW5631 SDK announced earlier this year, the H264-ready ADK supports the CW5631, which combines a 400MHz ARM9 core, a DSP, and a RISC core.
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A Linux-ready evaluation kit called the MPC830x-KIT is available, containing a single MPC830x carrier card. There are also system-on-modules available for each of the MPC830x devices, and Freescale also offers an MPC8308-RDB reference design board.
All the evaluation boards and modules are provided with a Linux 2.6 board support package (BSP) that includes optimized drivers to support peripherals, says the company. The BSP is also said to include a quick-start guide and a six-month evaluation license for CodeWarrior development tools.
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Phones
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Android
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Christmas came early at Engadget HQ this year, as evidenced by the picture above — you’re looking at two Dell Thunder prototype smartphones, each with some surprising quirks, and hints that they might include global HSPA, AWS for the likes of T-Mobile, and maybe even a dash of CDMA support. We’ll warn you ahead of time that these are labeled EVT1 for “engineering verification test” and date back to the April leak, so they’re about as early as you can get — don’t expect the final handset to arrive without some significant differences. Good? Then peek the gallery below, hit the break, and let’s get on with the show.
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These shots of a real, live G2 confirm what we’d already suspected from renders: this is basically an Americanized version of the upcoming HTC Vision.
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Android 2.2, or Froyo, is just now rolling out to smartphones including the Droid 2 and HTC Evo 4G, but the blog TechRadar today is citing “multiple sources” as confirming that the next version of Android will be called Honeycomb, following the dessert-themed monikers of the mobile OS. Prior versions of Android were codenamed Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froyo.
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What we’re looking at here is allegedly the leaked over-the-air update to Froyo that Verizon plans on deploying to Droid X customers in the next few weeks, which means two critical things for customers: it should generally be faster all the way around, and — of course — you’ve got support for Flash, which was a big topic of interest at Motorola’s launch event for the phone a couple months back.
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It was merely a week back when Coralic, through his blog enlightened how to develop a chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS.
A week back Armin Coralic, posted on his blog details on how to create chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS. However this Ubuntu Linux version is a stripped down form of the same. Later, Coralic posted a step-by-step method of porting Ubuntu on Galaxy S.
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System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.
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If true, the move will fulfill Google’s announcement earlier this year that it would launch Chrome OS tablets in time for the holiday season.
However, it’s not yet clear how Chrome OS tablets will coexist with those running the Android operating system, which is also offered by Google. Will they be targeted at different markets?
Also, could Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) lawsuit against Google hamper sales of Chrome tablets?
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Adobe has confirmed that it will deliver its cross-platform Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment for Google’s open source Android mobile operating system by the end of this year.
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Tablets
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While most smartphones and tablets have touch capabilities, the feature has been slow to reach netbooks and laptops. A few laptops, like Dell’s Latitude XT2, have touch capabilities.
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Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.
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Urbi source code is licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).
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The number of servers (both physical and virtual) is becoming uncountable. Automation of system administration is a must to handle the deluge; else swarms of sysadmins would be needed to handle all these systems.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Google on Thursday patched 10 vulnerabilities in Chrome, but it didn’t award any of the researchers who reported bugs its new top-dollar reward of $3,133.
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Mozilla
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Healthcare
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Project Releases
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Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 is derived from OpenSolaris Build 134, which is roughly what was supposed to be released as OpenSolaris 2010.02, then OpenSolaris 2010.03, and lastly prior to its slow death was just referred to as OpenSolaris 2010.1H. Nexenta CP 3.0 is also carrying various back-ports and other fixes onto the b134 stack.
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Inspired by frameworks such as Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted, Node.js avoids thread based networking and moves to an event driven model, where one thread executes all the code as demanded by events, such as the opening of network connections, or the completion of I / O operations. This has the advantage of being memory efficient and avoiding dead-lock issues, as there are no locks. Within Node.js code, HTTP is a first class protocol, with a library designed to allow for the handing of streamed data through the framework.
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The Clojure developers have released version 1.2 of their dynamic programming language. Clojure is one of the youngest programming languages executable on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and has recently been competing for public attention with the increasingly popular Scala language. The Lisp dialect is dynamically “typed” and was developed specifically for the JVM. A general-purpose language, it aims at combining the advantages of script languages with those of multi-threaded programs.
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Licensing
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The GNU GPL might seem the obvious answer. After all, the GPL was drawn up specifically to make collaboration work and to create a community based on sharing code. But the experience of the last ten years of open source business has shown that, ironically, the GNU GPL actually allows companies that adopt it to act more, not less, like a traditional closed-source company.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wired states that the first instance of open-sourcing occurred in 1839, which is much earlier that most people might think. This progenitive incident also has some basic principles in common with more recent events in the computer field of somewhat dubious distinctions. I will leave those particulars out, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which companies I’m talking about in the events to follow.
Try to guess which modern examples follow the example set by Louis Daguerre if you want.
Before Daguerre came along, a permanent photo would take about eight hours to make. At the time, photographers could only make a negative image on a pewter plate. Daguerre worked out a chemical process that reduced this time to mere minutes, and etched out a positive image. Without that process, a significant step in the history of photography might never have happened. So what tips can we glean from Daguerre’s example
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Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.
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Security/Aggression
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On Friday Pete was informed that he needed to fill in a form for permission to sell his car – and would need to renew it after four weeks.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Spain has become the latest country to launch an investigation into the collection of sensitive wi-fi data by Google.
Google has admitted that its Street View cars had “accidentally” collected data from unsecured wi-fi networks in more than 30 countries.
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Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange responds to a BBC question about why it provides encrypted files for download.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Last week a crowd of about 100 people marched to Google’s headquarters in California to present boxes that they said contained 300,000 signatures upholding the values of net neutrality, a founding principle of the net that states that all web data is treated equally no matter where it comes from.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 co-sponsors — including three Republicans — and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I — well, not I, but someone who can sew — can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.
We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: If people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable — exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.
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In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students’ presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.
Richard M. Stallman Speech DebconfII Indonesia
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08.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A recent survey of IT decision-makers leads to the inescapable conclusion that FLOSS on the server will soon take many mission-critical roles that it has not already taken. Competitive forces will do the rest. Business is about making money and if your cost/performance is better with GNU/Linux you have the potential to compete well against others who cling to the old ways. About the only thing soon left to the monopoly will be managing its own clients. FLOSS can do everything else much better. Eventually the last barrier will fall, acceptance of that other OS on the client as the standard.
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Sony’s PlayStation 3 was long popular with the homebrew and tech-savvy gamer crowd, in part because Sony initially supported running Linux on the console. However, Sony removed Linux capability in a firmware update earlier this year, allegedly to staunch game and content piracy, and since then PlayStation 3 security has been garnering more than a little attention from enthusiasts and console modders eager to get back inside the console.
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Hopefully Playstation 3 users won’t lose more functionalities (like Linux) because of this.
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According to PSX Scene a bunch of open source hardware hackers have released a dongle called PS Jailbreak that will turn the PS3 back into a Linux machine.
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The remaining 7.7 percent answered ‘Linux system’.
“I’ve been using Linux for too long. I can see no good reason to switch to Windows,” commented octal.
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Desktop
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but it took in only $2.9 billion for consumer PCs. Imagine if those PCs had shipped with GNU/Linux and they had been able to pocket another $50-$100 per PC. That would have been another $100-$200 million revenue. Compare that to a $21 million loss.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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Google‘s new Chrome OS cloud-based operating system is about to make its first appearance, not on netbooks, as was first thought, but on tablet devices instead.
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Kernel Space
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The summit was widely seen as a successful event, and the participation of the memory management community was welcomed. So there will be a joint summit again for storage, filesystem, and memory management developers next year. It could happen as soon as early 2011; the participants would like to move the event back to the (northern) spring, and waiting for 18 months for the next gathering seemed like too long.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn’t yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.
The ATI Radeon HD 5000 series family launched back in September of last year with the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards, which was followed by the launch of other GPUs like the Radeon HD 5750, Radeon HD 5770, and Radeon HD 5970. Following those product milestones, in December there was the release of some Evergreen shader documentation and by this February, there was finally Evergreen KMS support for utilizing kernel mode-setting and other basic functionality with your new ATI Radeon hardware. This initial KMS support was merged into the Linux 2.6.34 kernel, but it went without any X-Video or 2D EXA acceleration support. In April there was another AMD code drop for Evergreen and it implemented the command processor, interrupts, and graphics initialization support along with providing new microcode for these ASICs.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs like gLabels and capable desktop publishing apps like Scribus, most general office users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor of the office suite they feel the most comfortable in, like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is certainly a good choice, too; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful.
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If you’ve been itching to try Linux but are intimidated by all the command line work, free download CLIcompanion will ease your fears, providing a customizable list of popular commands and what they do.
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Wine
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Tomorrow will be the last day of our huge 50% off sale of Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenSolaris.
Bordeaux for Linux and BSD has been marked down to only $10.00 and Bordeaux for Mac and OpenSolaris will cost you only $12.50 during this sale.
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Games
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Wildfire Games announced the release of 0 A.D. this morning. “This release comes with aggressive units that attack enemies on sight, lifelike animals that escape danger, two new maps, in-game multi-player chat and much more.” This open-source 3D game is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
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3.
There are many more factors than 7 that could have been tested. Updates, local services, games, etc. all may affect choices. Installing and trying things out from several distros is an option users of that other OS lack. Installing using a package manager is cool. It’s fast and you use the same tool to install the OS as the applications. Be sure to visit Distrowatch.com to help choose your distro.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.
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Cloud Linux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today announced that GARM Technologies, a hosting provider, will add CloudLinux to its shared hosting infrastructure. The company says that GARM Technologies specialize in shared and VPS hosting and selected CloudLinux for its new Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology that will deliver substantial performance improvements to its hosting customers.
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Red Hat has added an additional 3 years to support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) via its new “Extended Life Cycle Support” (ELS). Available as a paid subscription, the added package prolongs the support of the Linux distribution for corporate customers from seven to ten years; this of particular interest to customers who are currently still using RHEL3, which was released in October 2003, as the regular support for this distribution will expire at the end of October.
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Oppenheimer is out with a research report this morning, where it reiterates its Outperform rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT); it has a $40.00 price target on the stock.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Proposed welcome screen looks pretty, readable and non-intimidating. Thats more like it. As a long time Ubuntu user, I really know how far these changes can help a newbie trying his luck in the new found Ubuntu world.
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A few months back we reported that the IA64 and SPARC versions of Ubuntu were in trouble and would be decommissioned if no individual(s) were to step-up and maintain these ports of Ubuntu Linux for these architectures that are much less popular and common than x86 and x86_64 hardware. Well, there still is no one backing the Intel IA64 and Sun SPARC versions of Ubuntu Linux so they are being dropped completely.
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No user-specific data is sent, Phoronix notes; rather, the package reportedly transmits only the operating system version, the machine product name and a counter.
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The release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2011.
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It’s hard to say why features are left the same or barely upgraded, but it is most likely done to familiarize the general public with Microsoft Windows itself. Interestingly enough, it comes in many forms and with different features, and the price seems to always be somewhere in the clouds, large price to pay for something so stale.
Perhaps one of the worst features of Microsoft Windows are the fact that users are extremely bound by computing law, even if they haven’t noticed it because of customizable features. For example, Microsoft Windows cannot match the customizing abilities of Mac and Ubuntu, and it never will.
One should find it hard to believe that developers would even consider working with Microsoft Windows to create new applications and games if it wasn’t for its popularity. The operating system itself is extremely unstable, one rouge application could crash the whole system or at least freeze the screen.
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Ubuntu 10.10, code-named Maverick Meerkat, will not be ported to the Itanium and SPARC platforms. The Ubuntu developers were already dissatisfied with the quality of the two ports in the recent 10.04 LTS release, because the two processor platforms have been without a dedicated maintainer for some time.
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Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) and RoweBots today announced the immediate availability of Unison, an ultra tiny Linux® compatible OS for SmartFusion™ devices. Developers now have the option for Linux-based embedded design when using SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. With continued broadening of its ecosystem, Actel continues to provide ease of adoption of SmartFusion devices for embedded designers.
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ChipWrights, Inc.’part of AD Group’New Linux Application Development Kit for the CW5631 System-on-Chip provides the components to develop low-cost IPTV set-top boxes and IP cameras and significantly improve time to market. The Kit’based on the OpenEmbedded build system’leverages thousands of open source packages.
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Phones
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Other open source mobile platforms are available, including Maemo on the Nokia N900 and the LiMo platform. Palm’s WebOS is also worth keeping an eye on, which is Linux based even if closed source. That said, none of these make programming quite so easy as Google have just done for Android.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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…the last N-Series device from the Finnish company to offer Symbian OS, with future devices running the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.
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The Nokia N9 is a slider device with what looks like a full aluminium body, sliding device and amazing QWERTY keyboard. This Linux based device could well be perceived as a Nokia Booklet 3G Mini as it certainly looks as though it could be a full-bloodied portable computer.
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The first unofficial pictures of the Nokia N9 have appeared. This device is apparently going to be the replacement for the N900, and the first phone based on MeeGo, an operating system still in development by Intel and Nokia.
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Android
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“The software giant will have a difficult time maintaining its market share above 5 [per cent] as the launching of its new Windows Phone 7 OS has been delayed to the fourth quarter and sales of Windows Mobile smartphones [are] still showing no signs of rebound.”
We have hand it to Digitimes for showing such diplomacy. A more frank version would be that the Vole is sinking without a trace, Windows Phone 7 will be late and nobody wants its current crop of phones, but then again not everyone displays our lack of tact and sensitivity.
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Unlike the rigidly controlled Apple App Store, the Android Marketplace is a bit freewheeling. It can be hard to tell the gold from the dross. To help you find the gems, here’s a list of 75 of the best apps the Android Marketplace has to offer.
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When Google first briefed the media last November on its plans to help spawn a new generation of Chrome OS-powered netbooks, the company said the first set of devices would be released this fall.
Despite some analyst’s skepticism that the effort is on track, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), as recently as last week, said it expects Chrome OS netbooks to be available later this year.
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Acer’s ARM/Android-based tablet PC is expected to be delayed to the first quarter of 2011, from the fourth quarter of 2010, as the company plans to wait until Google launches Android 3.0, which will feature support for larger display resolutions, according to sources from notebook players.
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Tablets
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HTC is building a Chrome OS tablet for Google, set for a Verizon launch on Nov. 26, an industry report claims. Meanwhile, Pandigital released its second seven-inch Android-based e-reader tablet, with more memory than before plus a smaller, lighter design.
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Google Android was always going to be the heart of many Linux-based iPad like devices. That’s not news. What is news is that Google and Verizon appear to be working together to create a Chrome operating system-based tablet.
According to a report from the Download Squad, HTC is building the Chrome OS tablet. The device will be sold in partnership with Verizon starting on November 26th. That date is already engraved in every retailer’s heart as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and usually the biggest shopping day of the year.
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Some proprietary software businesses assume that FLOSS projects/businesses will die from lack of income. They expect they can buy up the projects and convert them to proprietary products or kill them. They don’t get FLOSS. It’s the licences that keep FLOSS free, not the price. FLOSS can be forked and escapes the trap. The current suit by Oracle to capitalize on Java or to kill it will fail both because there is no legal basis for the suit and because even if Java is killed, FLOSS can work around the problem. If Oracle wishes to become a patent troll, its days are numbered as everyone will know it is risky to do business with them. They cannot sue the world as SCOG found out.
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OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A bug in the Firefox browser that can be used to bypass an alert for obfuscated URLs is unlikely to trick users, according to Mozilla.
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Mozilla hopes to release its fourth beta of Firefox 4 on Monday, adding hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users but leaving it turned off by default.
Also coming is a major user interface change called tab sets, formerly known as tab candy.
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Databases
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The test confirmed that TPS levels of CUBRID and MySQL database systems increase on SSD equipped machines. During the I/O Bound workload CUBRID had 4.2 times increase in TPS, while MySQL had 2.8 fold improvement.
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Oracle
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The next to fall victim was the PostgreSQL database. Although not owned by Oracle, the open source database software is a competitor to MySQL, now owned by Oracle. Sun Microsystems was contributing servers for the development of PostgreSQL, but at the end of July Oracle shut these down, leaving PostgreSQL work in limbo, and raising further questions about Oracle’s commitment to open source.
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I begin to wonder if Oracle is beginning to build its own stack. What brings this to mind is the announcement by Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, that Oracle wants to give companies access to a world where data centers have become “service centers.”
Oracle has long had many of the parts: an operating system, Unbreakable Linux, and now Solaris; a DBMS, of course; and with the acquisition of Sun, Java and all the middleware you could ever want.
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I have written many articles in the past about how much I love OpenOffice.org. In fact OpenOffice is one of the applications that first gave me the confidence to switch to GNU/Linux six years ago. Today I downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice, version 3.2.1. This is the best version of OpenOffice that I have ever used from a technical standpoint. However, there were a few things that I noticed that gave me great reason for concern. Based on what I saw, I have serious doubts as to whether OpenOffice.org will continue to be free software/open source in the distant future. Oracle seems to be allowing forces that could be seen as hostile influence, or at least interact with, the OpenOffice community. Perhaps more disturbingly, they appear to be trying to distance OpenOffice from the free software license under which it has propagated for so many years.
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I can think of all kinds of reasons why Oracle is suing Google over its use of its Java IP (intellectual property) in Android. Making money from its Java patents strikes me and most experts as the most likely reason. But, I’ve also heard suggested, time after time, that the real reason is that Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO is buddies with Steve Jobs, aka Mr. Apple and he wanted to help Apple fight Android.
Could that be the case? Here’s the logic that supporters of this theory use. First, Google and Apple are competiting head-to-head in the smartphone space. The iPhone certainly has more users, but the Android phone family is quickly catching up.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department sees advantages in using open-source software to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, but it anticipates several problems if it takes that step.
The VA issued a request for information Aug. 11 asking for industry to deal with anticipated concerns related to open-source development for VistA.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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* Free Software has come from being ignored and ridiculed to being required by everyone. The world of IT now depends on Free Software.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Mike wrote a guide for programming MSP430 microcontrollers using the TI Launchpad under Linux. It makes use of the open source compiler MSPGCC rather than using a code-limited proprietary IDE.
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Standards/Consortia
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A version of Flash is being built using Java, two years after Adobe Systems opened the player’s closed formats to external inspection.
Programmer Joa Ebert has demonstrated a Java build of Flash executing SWF. The player is apparently called JITB, and it was recently unveiled at an event in San Francisco.
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The leading Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional printed the word “censored” across a white space on its front page today.
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Almost none. This weekend, the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page article looking at where all the forfeiture money is going. I’d like to link to it, but in an apparent effort to keep the paper as irrelevant as possible, the Star has lately adopted a policy of not putting its most important pieces online. But as it turns out, Indiana attorney Paul Ogden actually beat the paper to the story by several weeks. Last month, Ogden put up a post on his blog that came to many of the same conclusions the Star published this weekend. Here’s what Ogden found:
* Of Indiana’s 92 counties, just five have paid any forfeiture money into the school fund over the last two years. Three of those made just one payment. One county made a single payment of $84.50. Only one county could arguably be seen as complying with the law: Wayne County made 18 payments totalling $38,835.56.
* The total amount of forfeiture money paid into the account from all 92 Indiana counties over the two-year period was just $95,509.72.
* To put that figure into perspective, Ogden notes that attorney Christopher Gambill—the private attorney who, as I noted in my article, handles civil forfeiture cases for three Indiana counties and argued the case for Putnam County to keep Anthony Smelley’s money—made $113,145.67 in contingency fees off just a single forfeiture case.
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Earlier this year, we wrote about the odd decision of Warner Bros. studio to personally sue Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who successfully represented the heirs of the creators of Superman to win back some of their copyright, by using copyright’s termination rules. Toberoff is making a career of this, and has been helping numerous other content creators start the process of reclaiming rights using the termination process — which makes him somewhat… disliked in the entertainment industry. Still, to sue him personally seemed quite extreme. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit seemed to be based on the idea that Toberoff is a jerk and a savvy business person. As we noted at the time, that doesn’t appear to be illegal.
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I was horrified to read, “The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close.” All those lovely GNU tools about to be replaced by automatons. Sigh. Change is a given in IT. Fortunately my system is small enough my home-made configuration works well and it will take some effort to implement puppet or one of the other automatic systems.
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From a cultural perspective, though, this whole story again shows how culture is changing in very interesting and powerful ways. When we talk about things like “remixing” and “mashups,” we tend to hear from a chorus of folks who brush off such things as mere copying and not worthy of being considered art in itself. But there’s a lot more to it than that. What makes culture culture is the shared experiences around that work. This song is not only musically interesting, but also calls attention to a horrible incident that happened as well. And, again, some will brush it off as being meaningless, but the power with which it has interested so many people is not something that should be ignored.
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Security/Aggression
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Medway Council’s CCTV spy car has once again been captured parked on double yellow lines.
The all-seeing camera car, one of two operated by the council, was parked in a cul-de-sac outside Blockbuster’s Chatham town centre store, off Best Street, on Saturday, July 31.
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Derek Evans started tending the cemetery where his mother is buried after noticing the grass needed cutting.
The Army pensioner bought a £300 lawnmower and within a year was helping spruce up the gravesides for more than 70 grateful owners.
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Gutsy students from Medway have been snatching shoppers’ cigarettes, in an effort to persuade them to kick the habit.
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Federal prosecutors will not file charges against a school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students.
U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.
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Sources say that the final section of combat troops in Iraq, the United States Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade, based at Fort Lewis, Washington, have made their way across the border between Iraq and Kuwait, formally ending combat operations within Iraq.
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Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.
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Facebook’s login system continues to spill information that can be helpful to phishers, social engineers and other miscreants attempting to scam the more than 500 million active users of the social networking site.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Last week, a federal district court judge in northern California issued an injunction against planting biotech sugar beets next year. Why? He accepted the activist argument that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must issue a full environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act before permitting the improved sugar beets to be grown. An EIS is required when a federal government agency engages in actions that might be “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”
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Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world’s plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.
Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain’s annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
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In early March, just days after the Kingdom of Morocco announced plans for a landmark environmental charter called “the first commitment of its kind in Africa and the Arab world”, Mohamed Attaoui was sentenced to two years in prison in the Atlas mountains. His crime? Speaking out against illegal logging of shrinking cedar forests and corruption among the ranks of the forest service and local government officials.
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Hundreds of climate activists have occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters in protest at its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries, including firms involved in exploiting Canadian tar sands.
The protesters cut through a perimeter fence on Wednesday night, erecting scores of tents and marquees on landscaped meadows a few hundred metres from the headquarters building.
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A 22-mile plume of droplets from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico undermines claim that oil has degraded
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Finance
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Barclays – which is settling criminal charges of breaking US sanctions by effecting wire transfers with Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma – was accused of stripping out identifying data in the transfers, it has emerged. The bank is awaiting court approval for the $298 million (£190 million) settlement.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Independent testing commissioned by the Food Rights Network found toxic contaminants in San Francisco’s sewage sludge “compost.” In the sludge product given away free to gardeners from 2007 to March 4, 2010, are contaminants with endocrine-disruptive properties including PBDE flame retardants, nonylphenol detergent breakdown products, and the antibacterial agent triclosan. The independent tests were conducted for the Food Rights Network by Dr. Robert C. Hale of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.
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USA Today’s article emphasizes the decentralized nature of the Tea Party movement, reinforcing the idea that it is solely a grassroots movement. That has been far from the case. USA Today doesn’t mention that, unlike other “grassroots movements,” the Tea Party benefits from major media sponsorship by Fox News, and receives financial backing from corporate lobbyists. The article also fails to describe the many factions of the movement and their origins, which are confusing to many: the Tea Party Patriots (arguably the least well funded and most “grassroots” faction of the movement); the for-profit Tea Party Nation (a domestic for-profit business entity that sells baubles like bejeweled tea bags for $89.95 apiece) and the Tea Party Express, which is basically a professional PR campaign sponsored by FreedomWorks, which is headed by former Republican Majority Leader-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey.
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Documentary movies about the American food industry, like “Food Inc.,” “Fast Food Nation”, “King Corn” and “Supersize Me” for the first time gave millions of people a hard look at modern food production practices, including distasteful realities like factory farming. As a result, more people have become skeptical of modern farming practices and mindful about where their food comes from. But big farmers are starting to fight back.
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Last month, it was revealed that Target contributed 150,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of conservative, anti-gay candidate Tom Emmer. Agit-pop activists have something to say about that: “Target ain’t people so why should they be, allowed to play around with our democracy!” Watch:
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google Inc.’s plans to launch its “Street View” mapping service in 20 German cities by year’s end has ignited a debate in Germany over how to reconcile the country’s cherished privacy laws with the realities of the digital age.
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9) wi-fi – if you’ve got wi-fi at home, give it a good password (see above). Otherwise it allows intruders in with few barriers to overcome.
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The award is judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.
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Filmmaker Michael Moore is praising an Army private suspected of releasing classified war records to WikiLeaks and said he would contribute to his defense.
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South Korea has blocked access to the official North Korea Twitter account, a matter of days after the secretive state started posting messages.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Earlier this month, Creative Commons asked for comment on the new Public Domain Mark (PDM), “a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.”
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Robert writes that he received an exciting e-mail from his Internet provider, Comcast. They were giving him a better connection! Faster downloads! Then Comcast followed up a few days later to say, approximately, “hey, remember that e-mail we sent saying that your Internet connection is faster now? Yeah, it’s not actually true.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It should be no surprise that various malicious typo squatters have targeted The Pirate Bay with fake sites that try to install malware, however Torrentfreak looked a bit deeper and found that one of the typo squatters, a company called BladeBook, appears to be trying to trademark the actual name, as well. Apparently, BladeBook’s Craig Pratka first filed for the trademark the same day that it was announced that The Pirate Bay had been sold to GGF, a deal that eventually fell apart (as did the initial trademark application).
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Copyrights
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In my classes in IP law and copyright, I sometimes have difficulty conveying to students the “cost” side of the copyright regime. That is, though we often make reference to implementing the right copyright “balance” in our law, I think students (and others, for that matter) are often uncertain as to exactly what is being balanced against what. The benefits of a copyright regime are pretty obvious — if you give people a property interest in their creations, they’ll be able to work out market arrangements to receive compensation for them; knowing that in advance, they’ll create more works of art than they otherwise would absent that protection, and we’re all better off as a result. That’s easy enough to see. What’s harder to see is why that principle should ever be limited — if protection yields more creative works, why won’t more protection yield more creative works (to the benefit of all)? Why not make copyright perpetual, and copyright rights as broad and as deep as possible — won’t that get us even more creative works to enjoy? [That’s a viewpoint that many in Congress apparently share, as copyright protection has indeed gotten longer and longer and deeper and broader over the past 50 years or so — helped along, I suppose, by those stacked bundles of unmarked hundred dollar bills left in Congressional anterooms by representatives of the “copyright industries” — hey, don’t sue me, that’s just a joke).
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Here is one of the nation’s most prominent television critics at the time effectively admitting that a single copyright suit prevented countless of creative comedic works from being produced at the time – a shameful fact that is surely ignored in most law school and history classes today.
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After several months of battling App Store reviewers, the on-demand music service finally released its official iOS app last week. The reason for the app’s removal? According to the Grooveshark blog, Apple received a takedown notice from Universal Music Group UK.
In February, UMG filed a lawsuit against Grooveshark over the service’s use of IP. Grooveshark has also battled — and settled — with the music label EMI.
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We’ve seen all sorts of really bizarre and downright dangerous plans to change copyright law to favor newspapers, but a new one, posted at Henry Blodget’s Business Insider may be the most ridiculous of all. It starts off with a bunch of really bad assumptions, and then suggests special copyright protections for publications against aggregators, including that no one could repost (even fair use reposting) any content from a daily publication for 24-hours or a week for weekly publications:
A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.
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Amusingly, the article also has the Righthaven folks admitting some “kinks” that need “to be worked out,” such as the time it sued the very source for an article (apparently, this has happened more than once). In the one case that we wrote about, after that came to light, Righthaven dropped the lawsuit. I’m guessing that after some more lawyers start fighting back against Righthaven, it’s going to discover quite a few more “kinks” in its system.
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Rocker John Mellencamp said on Tuesday that the Internet was the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb, although new technology could paradoxically delay the inevitable demise of rock ‘n’ roll.
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This is a key point that often gets lost in business model discussions. When we talk about different offerings, it’s amazing how much people discount the importance of authenticity as a scarcity. We see it all the time with companies who want to sponsor something, and then have tremendous level of control — losing all of the authenticity and, with it, much of the value (and, eventually, audience). It’s nice to see a situation where a company (in this case, Microsoft) properly recognized when not to get too involved.
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“Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures.”
What’s with the many movies we watch at home launching with this threat? You can’t even fast-forward past it! And what’s with day-care centers being threatened for decorating with Mickey Mouse images? And club proprietors who must caution open-mike artists against strumming published songs? Are rockers who fold in a few seconds from some popular work, and visual artists who quote commercial imagery, really thieves?
It wasn’t always that way. Such cultural expression was, for centuries past, sharing, not theft. We’ve moved radically far in a long process of intellectual enclosure, privatizing and shutting down a vigorous cultural commons.
Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Kenyon and Harvard, offers a brilliant and absorbing account of the development of restrictive and enduring private ownership of shared experience. “Common as Air” develops, in Hyde’s own words, “a model and defense of our ‘cultural commons,’ that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.”
Microsoft The Embarrasing moments
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