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10.15.10

Links 15/10/2010: Ubuntu Unity uTouch, Motorola’s Linux-based Phone Proliferate

Posted in News Roundup at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Did you ever tried Google Search Engine for Linux users?

    Google offers a good search tool targeted for Linux users.

  • Linux Foundation sets record for stating bleeding obvious

    Until this morning, I was convinced that the late Benjamin Disraeli had it down pat when he said that there are three forms of deception – lies, damn lies and statistics.

  • Server

    • Smart Clusters: Intelligence Is As Intelligence Does

      The following topic scares me for two reasons. First, maybe I read too many sci-fi novels about Artificial Intelligence (AI) going wrong (or right, we’ll get to that in bit). Second, most HPC people are pragmatic individuals who deal with numbers and results that have a firm mathematical underpinning. Talking about AI as an HPC application is not quite a mainstream discussion.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Book Excerpt: Linux Kernel Development, 3rd Edition.

      In this chapter, we introduce some of the basics of the Linux kernel: where to get its source, how to compile it, and how to install the new kernel. We then go over the differences between the kernel and user-space programs and common programming constructs used in the kernel. Although the kernel certainly is unique in many ways, at the end of the day it is little different from any other large software project.

    • LinSched Advances For Testing The Linux Scheduler

      While we are close to seeing the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, this week LinSched for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released. LinSched is a simulator that allows testing the Linux kernel scheduler in user-space for modifying and observing its scheduling behavior.

      LinSched is not a new tool, but it comes from the academia world (University of North Carolina) and has since seen adoption by new developers looking to understand the kernel scheduler and is also used by corporations like Google. This new release of LinSched is based upon the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and now supports several additional features of the kernel.

  • Applications

    • Command Line Little Helper: CLI Companion
    • Introducing: Recipe Manager

      Three years ago, Daniel Taylor (of Arista fame) made a small application designed to store and manage your favourite recipes. It was simple, lightweight, elegant. He called it Recipe Manager (got a better, unique name, anyone?) and released a “technology preview” along with the file format spec onto this website.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • HTML5: Up and Running
      • Inside MySQL Character Sets & Settings

        Character sets are ways of storing string or text data in a database. Since the world’s languages use different character sets for their writing systems, a database must support many different types of character sets to store information in those languages. For Western European languages, for example, there are alphabets with many overlapping characters, but in addition some require accents, different currency characters, and so on. For Asian languages with many more characters, a multi-byte character set is required since one byte is not large enough to store all the characters that can be represented in that language.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Using digiKam with MySQL

        By default, digiKam uses SQLite as its back-end for storing important metadata and thumbnails. But the photo management application also provides support for the popular MySQL database engine, and it comes with a database migration tool that can help you to move your data from SQLite to MySQL. Of course, you might wonder why you’d want to switch to MySQL when SQLite already does a good job of managing the data? Using MySQL as digiKam’s database back-end allows you to store the data on a remote server. This way, you can use multiple digiKam installations (e.g., on your notebook and desktop machine) to access and manage your photo collections. You can also use MySQL tools to back up and analyze digiKam’s data.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GTK+ Continues To Become More X11-Agnostic

        As good news for those of you interested in GTK+ applications on Mac OS X and other operating systems, or to even run such applications within a Wayland Display Server on Linux rather than an X Server, this tool-kit used by GNOME continues to become more X11-agnostic and easier to port.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 14 Spotlight Feature: Keeping Secure with OpenSCAP

          Back by popular demand, we’ll again be posting a series of blogs leading up to the Fedora 14 “Laughlin” release, which highlight some of the cool new features planned in the latest Fedora distribution. Up first is a feature that boosts security in Fedora 14: OpenSCAP.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 10.10 Unity uTouch demo

          One of the more exciting aspects of Ubuntu 10.10 is undoubtedly the Unity shell in Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the uTouch touch screen capabilities bundled with it. In his latest blog entry Canonical’s Gerry Carr unveils this new user experience in a cool video demonstration that shouldn’t be missed…

          “One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them,” explains Carr. “But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.”

        • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

          This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • we’re getting fast

        Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team!

  • Oracle

    • Why Is Microsoft So Scared of OpenOffice?

      Microsoft and its supporters have a long history of applying all kinds of FUD to any discussion of free and open source software. Whether it’s Linux or other free alternatives to Microsoft’s high-priced products, it seems no conversation can take place without the inevitable insinuations about higher total cost of ownership, lack of support, and other baseless fearmongering.

    • What does IBM joining OpenJDK mean for Java?

      This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle’s OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like “Great!”

      Isn’t it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project?

      Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I’ll try to explain why.

      The first point is that IBM are not just saying they will support OpenJDK. They are also saying that are pulling effort out of Apache Harmony. Apache Harmony is a project to build an Open Source JVM under the Apache license, rather than the GPL which is the license under which OpenJDK is available.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF initiates “Respects your Freedom” hardware endorsement

      The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the “Respects Your Freedom” hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Net Positive: A Conversation with Clay Shirky

      The Internet has brought about a sea change in the way societies organize and operate. Few scholars anticipated the trend sooner, or articulated it with greater force and optimism, than Clay Shirky. In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Shirky described how new social structures were being created spontaneously as a result of the Web’s astounding ability to enable people to coordinate—instantly and across distances—not only with other individuals, but with the masses. Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, develops his ideas further. He sees a revolution in the way people are beginning to pool their free time. “Cognitive Surplus,” he says, “is essentially answering the question, What is Wikipedia made of? What is Linux made of? What is YouTube made of? It is made of the coordinated contributions of the world’s connected citizenry.”

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Antidepressant reboxetine no better than a placebo, study finds

      An antidepressant prescribed in the UK over the last 13 years is ineffective and potentially harmful, according to a damning study published today.

      The drug, reboxetine, which is known in the UK under the trade name Edronax, works no better than a placebo, or dummy pill, say scientists in the British Medical Journal, who accuse the manufacturer, Pfizer, of failing to disclose the results of trials which show its inadequacies.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Western lifestyles plundering tropics at record rate, WWF report shows

      The Earth’s population is using the equivalent of 1.5 planets’ worth of natural resources, but the long-term decline of animal life appears to have been halted, a WWF report shows.

      The latest Living Planet report, published today by the conservation group, also reveals the extent to which modern Western lifestyles are plundering natural resources from the tropics at record levels.

    • Deepwater drilling: risks and consequences

      What if officers of corporations in the oil, coal or auto industry were to face arrest and possible prosecution, when their actions in the US – as in Hungary – result in deaths? Might that change the calculation of acceptable risk?

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

Clip of the Day

Java Swing GUI Demo


Credit: TinyOgg

Novell Persists With Non-Free Software Focus

Posted in Site News at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Clouds

Summary: A weekly glance at what Novell has been doing and how it gets characterised by the news

NOVELL is not sold yet and its stock has been keeping steady. Articles about the stock this week (from old to recent) are [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and the company also got mentioned in some partners’ press releases [1, 2].

One of Novell’s more recent partners is Amazon, which signed a Linux patent deal with Microsoft after it had hired many executives from there. Both Novell and Amazon put Microsoft patent tax on GNU/Linux and they still celebrate a Fog Computing alliance:

In US cents per hour for the European market, SUSE is pitching in at 12.5 cents for a default implementation. This is a half of a cent more expensive than Windows. Amazon’s Linux at 9.5 cents is somewhat cheaper but Red Hat Linux, at 21 cents, appears much more expensive, especially when you add its $19 per month per customer surcharge.

The confusing issue is that Red Hat controls its distribution and its charge includes support. Support from AWS for basic Linux is the same as it charges for Windows. This is a monthly charge of $100 for Silver level and $400 for Gold. Support for Novell is charged by Novell at the equivalent of around $230.

There is a growing mass of evidence that Novell has decided to aim for Fog Computing, including some new articles that make that explicit, more recently in the Middle East [1, 2].

Another side of Novell, mail and collaboration, is purely proprietary. GroupWise support is still mentioned in some places and GWAVACon is coming despite Novell’s unknown future.

Here is a new press release about GroupWise support and here is a defection:

County offices, including the sheriff’s department, changed policy on how long emails should be kept in fall 2009, when the county switched its email service from Novell to Microsoft, the county coordinator said.

Here are some new security issue and an old story of data loss resurfacing in the news:

In 2003, only three days after DiGioia moved from New York to Florida to start his Altamonte Springs IT job, the city’s network engineer walked up to him and said, “We’ve just lost everything. All the Novell servers, the Novell clusters, the backup, the SAN. Everything’s gone,” he recalls.

A little something about ZENworks:

LiveTime is pre-integrated with Novell ZENworks Configuration Management (ZCM) 10 and 11, ZENworks Desktop Management 6.5 or later, ZENworks Asset Management 6.5 or later, as well as eDirectory and closed loop email management with Groupwise 6, 7, and 8. This comprehensive integration allows customers to leverage their existing infrastructure for immediate ROI and improved customer service. In addition, LiveTime integrates with Novell’s Identity Manager 4 and runs on all editions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The PR blog of Novell is still just marketing proprietary software roughly 90% of the time. One example of that was triple-posted by Michele Hudnall just a few days ago [1, 2, 3] and Novell’s marketing chief John Dragoon calls or compares marketing to business, still relying on the widely-held misconception that marketing actually produces something. It only changes how people think or feel. Novell is good at that. █

Microsoft Uses GNU/Linux for DNS, But Still Stuck at Beginners’ Level

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“In Ballmer’s naively managerial mind-set, if Wood said it would take two months, then in reality it could be done in one—if only people would get fired up.”

–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul

Summary: Microsoft DNS servers are said to be attacking other servers and Microsoft ignores the problem for weeks; Microsoft partners are accused of using DNS to harm and defame critics too; the MSBBC provides some more perception management by giving Microsoft a platform

It’s happening again. Microsoft reveals to the world that even Microsoft can’t help using GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It’s just too awesome to avoid!

Unfortunately for Microsoft, it clearly lacks the skills to operate Free software. There’s no in-house talent and internal operations are moreover outsourced/off-shored to Infosys where wages are lower. So anyway, what’s it all about? Microsoft uses Linux for DNS and avoids its own ‘solutions’. We have already given many links on security flaws in Microsoft's DNS implementation and Windows zombies with resultant DNS downtimes. Microsoft is now trying Linux and it allegedly misconfigured the servers, which obviously get hijacked as a result. [via]

For the past three weeks, internet addresses belonging to Microsoft have been used to route traffic to more than 1,000 fraudulent websites maintained by a notorious group of Russian criminals, publicly accessible internet data indicates.

The 1,025 unique websites — which include seizemed.com, yourrulers.com, and crashcoursecomputing.com — push Viagra, Human Growth Hormone, and other pharmaceuticals though the Canadian Health&Care Mall. They use one of two IP addresses belonging to Microsoft to host their official domain name system servers, search results from Microsoft’s own servers show. The authoritative name servers have been hosted on the Microsoft addresses since at least September 22, according to Ronald F. Guilmette, a researcher who first uncovered the hijacking.

Two days ago it was confirmed:

According to network security researcher Ronald F. Guilmette, the Microsoft IP addresses had been used to host the websites’ authoritative name servers since at least September 22. El Reg ran the data he supplied by experts in DNS and botnet take-downs, and most said it likely indicated that one or more machines on Microsoft’s network had been infected with malware.

About 24 hours after The Reg article ran, security reporter Brian Krebs reported that one of the two Microsoft IPs had been used to coordinate a massive denial-of-service attack against his website, KrebsOnSecurity.com. Shortly after the attacks began on September 23, researchers were able to pinpoint the Microsoft IP and within hours they notified Microsoft of the compromised IPs, the site reported.

Remarkably, the machines weren’t unplugged from Microsoft’s network until Tuesday, almost three weeks later, shortly after The Register article was published. Also notable, according to Krebs, the machines that were compromised were running Linux.

“It’s not very clear why Microsoft failed to properly investigate the report at the time and allowed the abuse to continue on its network for another three weeks,” say other sources and Brian Krebs probably has the most detailed analysis:

The attack on my Web site happened on Sept. 23, roughly 24 hours after I published a story about a criminal online service that brazenly sold stolen credit card numbers for less than $2 each (see: I’ll Take Two MasterCards and a Visa, Please). That story got picked up by BoingBoing, Gizmodo, NPR and a variety of other sites, public attention that no doubt played a part in the near-immediate suspension of that criminal Web site.

At first, it wasn’t clear what was behind the attack, which at one point caused a flood of traffic averaging 2.3 gigabits of junk data per second (see graph above). Not long after the attack ended, I heard from Raymond Dijkxhoorn and Jeff Chan, co-founders of SURBL, which maintains a list of Web sites that have appeared in spam. Chan sent me a message saying he had tracked the attack back to several Internet addresses, including at least one that appeared to be located on Microsoft’s network — 131.107.202.197.

Damage control came later:

Update, 7:34 p.m. ET: Christopher Budd, Microsoft’s response manager for trustworthy computing, sent this statement via email: “Microsoft became aware of reports on Tuesday, October 12, 2010, of a device on the Microsoft network that was possibly compromised and facilitating spam attacks. Upon hearing these reports, we immediately launched an investigation. We have completed our investigation and found that two misconfigured network hardware devices in a testing lab were compromised due to human error. Those devices have been removed and we can confirm that no customer data was compromised and no production systems were affected. We are taking steps to better ensure that testing lab hardware devices that are Internet accessible are configured with proper security controls.”

This exercise in damage control meets Pogson who writes that Microsoft “has been outed running GNU/Linux on some unsecured testing machines. The machines were being used to route surfers to spam sites.” He then asks:

All kinds of questions arise:

* What was M$ doing with DNS servers running GNU/Linux open to the web?
* Why were they unsecured?
* Why did they take weeks and media coverage to get them taken off-line when a target of a DDOS attack organized by those servers reported to M$ promptly weeks ago?
* If they were in a testing lab, why weren’t they being tested???
The Register article was published. Also notable, according to Krebs, the machines that were compromised were running Linux.

Damage control fail. Sorry, Microsoft.

Speaking of DNS, G-WAN alleges that Microsoft “is (illegally) Hijacking 16 of our Domain Names”. We have not worked to verify this, but it’s worth looking into.

This whole thing is becoming a PR disaster for Microsoft because it shows that the company uses Linux for its internal operations (whilst also attacking companies which use Linux), does not use it properly, and to make matters worse, it does not care if it harms other people’s systems because of its misconfigured Linux boxes. And by the way, it’s definitely a human problem, not a Linux problem, according to IDG:

Microsoft blamed human error after two computers on its network were hacked and then misused by spammers to promote questionable online pharmaceutical websites.

What a multi-dimensional PR disaster. Can the MSBBC rescue Microsoft’s reputation? It sure can try.

The MSBBC has just published this rubbish ‘article’ where rather than say that about one in two Windows PCs is compromised decided to go to Microsoft for material, again (Windows zombies are just "sick" PCs, according to the MSBBC which quotes Microsoft's Charney).

Watch them using Microsoft-supplied/given numbers to talk about Windows and thus only deceive the public while pretending to inform:

The US leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of botnets, reveals a report.

More than 2.2 million US PCs were found to be part of botnets, networks of hijacked home computers, in the first six months of 2010, it said.

Says Microsoft. It’s always orders of magnitude off target.

This article is so poor that it ends up making Microsoft look like a saviour rather than the party to blame for botnets. Technology propaganda continues to arrive from the MSBBC, which is occupied by former Microsoft UK executives. No surprise there, ever, but that’s okay because it’s so predictable. █

With Patent Quality This Low, Who Needs Any?

Posted in Apple, Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bar signTime to raise the bar of patents, not lower it

Summary: Another new batch of embarrassingly-trivial patents (the bar is set too low), Twitter’s reluctance to have anything to do with patents, and news from Europe and Apple

“Breaking: Amazon 1-click invention is patentable subject matter, says Justice Phelan of the Cdn. Fed. Ct. Reasons,” claims Yuri Chumak who points to this new decision [PDF]

They can’t be serious, can they? One-click shopping is a patentable “innovation” now? Someone, somewhere, please revisit the charter of the USPTO. This is becoming somewhat of a farce of international proportions. And it gets worse. Rollover image is now a patent too, according to this report.

“Dear website owner, congratulations on your excellent site, which includes features covered by our registered patent, #5,251,294. As the description indicates, many of the components on your pages, particularly your menus, rollover images, and shortcuts, are detailed in our claim. We would be delighted to lease these to you at a reasonable royalty rate of $80,000. Please call our offices at your convenience to arrange a payment schedule.”

Nuts, right? We wish. Meet the Webvention Company, which appears to exist largely for the purpose of collecting money from companies whose online sites include commonly used features that can be construed as part of patent 5,251,294.

It’s not a joke. It’s an actual patent granted by the USPTO and Microsoft’s Traul Allen has similar patents which he sues everyone with. Then there’s the infamous JPEG on a page patent covered in [1, 2]. It’s tied to Niro, the father of patent trolling [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. The exact nickname of the patent is “The JPEG-on-a-website patent”.

Just how far is the USPTO willing to go? There are more software patents being announced with great pride this week. What does that really contribute to technology? Have we learned nothing about the harms of monopoly? Just consider the harms of Microsoft bundling and its effects on progress in computing. As one blogger has just put it:

This is a nice phrase to startle computer sellers in most stores. Why is it that most computers come with Windows preloaded? To satisfy the users?? I guess that the price reductions on Windows licenses for OEMs –and price increases if they dare to sell equipment without Windows preloaded–have nothing to do with it. Nor does Microsoft’s interest in fair competition and fair play.

So…if Windows comes with the computer, does that mean that Windows is part of the computer?

Clearly not. Microsoft licenses mean that the software is neither part of the computer nor yours. For the vendors, the licenses mean they have the permission to install it. What is yours is the permission to use it in your system. Do you own a copy of Windows? No, you don’t. All of them belong to Microsoft, but they give you the privilege of using it–for a *small* price, of course! This resembles communism so much if you ask me. The differences are the entity that owns the goods and how people are granted the permission to use them. And still some say that Open Source equals communism??!!

Going back to the subject of patenting, BNET says that Twitter — despite its near-monopoly in its area — is not interested in patents:

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams predicted yesterday that the social media company will hit a billion users in time. It seems like wishful thinking if you look at the company’s traffic trend lines, but there’s no question that Twitter is big in social media. That’s why I find its patent strategy curious. Check US Patent Office records week after week and you begin to notice that Twitter doesn’t appear to ever file an application, let alone receive a granted patent.

Contrast that with Facebook, whose Microsoft-loving management has begun hoarding software patents [1, 2, 3, 4].

Over in Europe it’s an entirely different story. Patent trolling is very scarce there, it hardly exists in fact (patent trolls utilise software patents, which are broad and impact a wide range of companies). The Geneva-based WIPO has been kind enough to give Free software proponents a room in the discussion over patent law and the nearby reporters from IP Watch covered the proceedings: [via]

Patents aren’t what they used to be at the World Intellectual Property Organization. Discussions to come up with a work plan at the Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) this week and in recent meetings point to the possibility of a sea change in thinking over what matters about intellectual property policy and law.

This article also speaks about royalty-free standards:

“Seeing as royalty-free standards can be implemented by anyone, where exactly do you see a barrier to trade in that?” added Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. The FSFE position on patents and standards is here.

The FSFE and the FFII have both been effective at exposing attempts to push software patents into Europe. Microsoft and its front groups try to do this via pseudo-standards and protocols/APIs (F/RAND), aided by corruptible or innocently misguided politicians. Apple does not appear to have real presence among the lobbying groups, but its actions too are a deterrent to innovation in the EU. Yesterday we wrote about the so-called 'anti-sexting' patent from Apple. A more professional name for it is “text message filtering” and it still brings memories from last month’s censorship of SMS transmission by a large US carrier (done without user consent). Apple apologists may say:

Apple’s invention, which may or may not ever find its way into an actual product, aims to stem the scourge of offensive texting.

Last month we saw such software being used not by actual customers but by the babysitting carrier. One day it may be just “offensive texting” (or “terrorism” and “child porn”) and as time goes by, political dissent, just as an hypothetical example, can be automatically intercepted too. See this video which we posted earlier today.

Hugo Roy, the FSFE member who famously got in touch with Steve Jobs, shares news about another new patent from Apple. This article says: “A batch of approved patent applications from Apple issued by the U.S. Patent Office this week include descriptions of significant multi-touch innovations, such as pinch-to-zoom and knob controls.”

Keep it classy, Apple. If Apple gets sued more often, maybe then it will stop amassing software monopolies. █

Links 15/10/2010: Fusion Fedora 14, MeeGo 1.1 for ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Five problems Linux still needs to overcome

    Greg Kroah-Hartman’s, a Linux kernel developer and a Novell engineer, Linux Driver Project (LDP), has been creating Linux drivers for years for anything that any vendor brought to the project that needed one made for it for years now. Kroah-Hartman and his crew of open-source developers charge nothing to create Linux hardware drivers. Despite that, a handful of companies still won’t release Linux drives. Other companies, like Wi-Fi chip vendor Broadcom, that have been slow to release Linux drivers has recently taken to making them. So what’s the real problem?

    I think there are several problems hiding under the ‘drivers’ issues. First, even now some hardware doesn’t have any Linux drivers, or, more commonly, the drivers aren’t that good. That’s true of Windows as well, but people seem to give Windows a pass for this kind of thing.

  • Aruba Revs Its Wireless Gear with ArubaOS 6.0 release

    ArubaOS is the underlying network operating system that powers Aruba’s wireless access points and controllers, and is built on top of a Linux base. With ArubaOS 6.0, new spectrum analysis, security and quality of service capabilities are being baked in. The new ArubaOS comes as Aruba is growing its market footprint following a partnership deal with Dell.

  • Linux users to get AUSkey access before Christmas

    The key replaces the need to separately log into online government services with a username and password, and is integrated into commercial software to provide businesses with a point of access to the Australian Tax Office (ATO) portals, its electronic commerce interface, and the Australian Business Register.

  • Desktop

    • Christmas? It’s Still 90 Degrees Here..

      But for us with with The HeliOS Project, it’s one of the most satisfying times of the year…haranguing advertising notwithstanding.

      Last year, between November 1st and December 25th, we built and gave away 41 computers. Three of them I delivered and set up on Christmas Day.

      [...]

      We’ve blown through the machines gathered at this year’s Linux Against Poverty event, planned and hosted by Lynn Bender. Having such an all-encompassing event twice in one year is just too much to ask of anyone…it takes months to plan and over 50 people to execute.

  • Server

    • Linux Foundation highlights growth, but what versions?

      The Linux Foundation survey also highlights continued gains for Linux at the expense of Unix, with 19.8% of respondents indicating a decrease in their use of the OS (compared with 18% decreasing use of Windows and only 1.8% decreasing use of Linux). Those planning on increased use were 76% for Linux, 41% for Windows and 19.5% for Unix. We also wonder whether Oracle’s end of support for OpenSolaris will perpetuate Unix-Linux migration?

  • Google

    • Google Testing Chrome OS Release Candidates. Official Release 1 Month Away?

      At their official unveiling event 11 months ago, Google promised that Chrome OS would be ready to by the end of this year — before the holiday season. It looks like they will be able to keep that promise, as bug comments on their Google Code site for the project indicate that the OS has already hit “RC” status — also known as “Release Candidate”.

  • Ballnux

  • Kernel Space

    • Solid-state storage devices and the block layer

      Over the last few years, it has become clear that one of the most pressing scalability problems faced by Linux is being driven by solid-state storage devices (SSDs). The rapid increase in performance offered by these devices cannot help but reveal any bottlenecks in the Linux filesystem and block layers. What has been less clear, at times, is what we are going to do about this problem. In his LinuxCon Japan talk, block maintainer Jens Axboe described some of the work that has been done to improve block layer scalability and offered a view of where things might go in the future.

    • Aava Mobile Joins Linux Foundation

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Aava Mobile has become its newest member. It will participate in the MeeGo project with specific emphasis around x86-based devices and the mobile user interface.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Solid Sprint Enhances Key KDE Platform Technologies

        Solid is the part of the KDE Platform that handles interaction with hardware, making it easy for application developers to deal with things like network availability by abstracting underlying libraries within a familiar KDE-style API. As such it is an essential component across all kinds of KDE software. It is getting clear that Solid is becoming a well defined team within KDE and everybody is exited about the idea of attracting more developers interested in hardware support to the desktop, mobile devices, netbooks, media center and beyond. There are now quite a few developers working on Solid so it was a good time to get them all together for a sprint in Madrid, Spain.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fusion Fedora 14 Remix beta Debuts

          Fusion Linux is a completely free and open source based Linux operating system, it is also a Fedora Remix. It is a installable Live DVD/USB image that includes multimedia functionality out of the box with added desktop tweaks for better usability and additional software.

        • First Look – Fusion Fedora 14 beta Gnome – Review

          Conclusion:

          Pros:

          * Very stable for a beta
          * Easy and safety-concious installer rivals or exceeds Ubuntu’s Ubiquity
          * Extra software via the RPM Fusion repositories and others
          * Nice Chrome web browser didn’t crash at all, as it does in some distro’s
          * Fast and no noticeable slowdowns or freezing under load
          * Great detection of video on both my testbed PC’s
          * Stylish and easy-to-use Desktop and menu
          * Rivals or maybe exceeds some aspects of Ubuntu though still beta

          Cons:

          * Somewhat large install, maybe release a Netbook or single CD version (probably already happening
          * Will it support nVidia proprietary graphic’s drivers, including Legacy?

        • Fedora 13: Fixing sound and video for the Lenovo G555

          In order for the “standard” fix to work for sound, I needed 2.6.34 and the full ALSA version 1.0.23 to go with it. Unfortunately, I had to get the missing ALSA bits — meaning the ALSA-driver — from another repo, as they’re not in Fedora 13′s official repository (and seemingly not needed to have working ALSA for reasons that continue to elude).

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Unity and uTouch

          One of the most exciting things about the Ubuntu 10.10 release has been the delivery of the Unity ‘shell’ in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. For the uninitiated, this delivers a very different user experience to that in the main desktop edition. For a start the icons of the most popular applications are permanently featured on the left-hand side of the screen. This borrows more from the smartphone interfaces but is adapted for use on, in this case, netbooks. So there remains a workspace where users still have sufficient room to watch video, edit photos, create documents, play games, read the web, write emails – all of the usual tasks we use a computer for, day to day.

        • Maverick Upgrade *sigh*

          I’m fairly conservative when it comes to upgrading Ubuntu, every upgrade fails in some way on this System76 laptop. One week after the release of 10.10 and after asking lots of people if they had any problems. I decided to upgrade.

          I shouldn’t have bothered.

        • Installing Ubuntu 10.10
        • 50+ Beautiful Hand-picked Ubuntu Wallpapers

          Ubuntu is a computer operating system originally based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software with additional proprietary software available.It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu (“humanity towards others”). Ubuntu provides an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation. Web statistics suggest that Ubuntu’s share of Linux desktop usage is about 50 percent, and upward trending usage as a web server.

        • Ubuntu – The Flagship Linux Desktop Distro

          The year after Ubuntu’s first release the amount of searches of “Ubuntu” versus searches for “Linux” was 13 to 1

        • 10 Reasons to Install Ubuntu 10.10

          It’s been a few days since I installed Ubuntu 10.10 and my initial good impressions have not only been confirmed, but exceeded. In my PREVIEW and REVIEW articles I covered some concepts and features that I considered innovative, surprising or simply welcome. Today I want to present 10 reasons why this release is totally worth it installing.

        • Spice up Ubuntu 10.10 desktop with Cairo-Dock

          Ubuntu 10.10, the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution, which was just reviewed here, ships with the same blank desktop that has come to identify the Ubuntu desktop. But you do not have to live with it. You can spice it up with a very simple and elegant application. You can go from the default desktop shown below, to a more sexy desktop.

        • Open Source Technologies: Ubuntu 10.10 Cozies Up to Android, iPhone and the Cloud

          The October 2010 release of Ubuntu Linux brings the usual slate of free and open-source software updates, alongside unique new capabilities around cloud services integration. The distribution’s Ubuntu One personal cloud service adds interoperability with Android and iOS-based mobile devices, as well as new support for Windows.

        • Ubuntu 10.10 builds on app store, cloud service strengths
        • Askubuntu Support Site Has Good Pedigree

          All in all, it’s great to see this kind of crowdsourced support for Ubuntu, and given the fact that lack of support is so often cited by IT administrators and users as a shortcoming with open source software, it could make a difference for the new version of Ubuntu. Check it out.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • $250 ARM9 computer supports PoE, sips two Watts

      The Linux-based Gateway Express 2 (GWX2) Embedded Computer incorporates Techsol’s ARM9-based SA2410 Medallion module, and offers up to 64MB of SDRAM, a microSD slot, an Ethernet port, and four USB ports, says the company.

    • Phones

      • The biggest mistake Palm has made with WebOS

        Palm’s WebOS (a Linux variant) based phones have been out for a while but I haven’t had the need to consider them until recently (in the form of my Treo 650 broken down).

        My Treo 650 was a real workhorse, containing hundreds of contacts, thousands of calendar entries (I use the calendar actively and like to keep entries for a very long time for reference), lots of todos and memos. As a long time Linux/Ubuntu user, I have synchronized and backed up my Treo with JPilot, which is an excellent Linux application. In the past, I have used several Palm devices and I was always able to migrate my complete PIM database with ease between the old device and the new one.

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • MeeGo 1.1 for ARM handsets gets closer

          The MeeGo project says MeeGo 1.1 will be available soon for the Nokia N900 smartphone, which will be able to boot into either the MeeGo or Maemo flavors of Linux. Meanwhile, Aava Mobile, which is porting MeeGo to its Intel Atom N6xx based Aava Mobile smartphone reference design, joined MeeGo’s overseer, the Linux Foundation.

        • Nokia Prepares to Give Developers a Look at High-End System

          As previously reported, Nokia has high hopes for the MeeGo operating system, which merges Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based operating systems, to lead its next-generation mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet computers.

          [...]

          In the blog post, titled “MeeGo calling – on N900,” Mr. Hakulinen said that after months of work the team is in its last phase of development for MeeGo version 1.1, which will give smartphone application developers something tangible to work with. Mr. Hakulinen also said they’re close on an update that will allow users to run both the current N900 operating system, Maemo, and MeeGo on the device.

      • Android

        • LEGO Launches Robot-Controlling Android App

          Semi-autonomous robots are already available in a number of forms: the most notable being iRobot’s Roomba and Scooba line of single-purpose devices. And the new MINDdroid app isn’t going to replace such commercially available robots. But for now, my son and I can look into using a smartphone to remotely control the robot arm we built a few months back.

        • Opera Mobile for Android Coming Soon
        • HTC Releases Source For T-Mobile G2

          Is it that time already? Like clockwork, HTC has released the source code for the G2 – only this time, it doesn’t appear that they’re being very vocal about it. Instead, a few G2 enthusiasts in the #G2ROOT channel on Freenode have managed to find it while digging through HTC’s site.

        • Google: We’re on Track to Make $1 Billion this Year from Android

          Google held a financial earnings conference call earlier today and threw out some interesting mobile-related stats to prove that their desktop search strategy isn’t the only thing poised to earn them some big bucks. According to Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg, if you take all of last quarter’s earnings and extrapolate the trends over the next year, they could be looking at over $1 billion in revenue. It’s a far cry from the $10 billion goal they’ve set before, but it’s a good first step.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle

    • Java wars: IBM joins OpenJDK as Oracle shuns Apache Harmony

      Prior to acquiring Sun, Oracle was one of several companies that sided with Harmony and called for the test suite to be made available under suitable terms, as stipulated by the JCP policy. Oracle reversed its position, however, after completing its acquisition of Sun. Like Sun, Oracle intends to exercise its control over the test suite licensing in a manner that will drive open source Java adopters towards OpenJDK, the implementation that it controls.

    • Will Oracle and IBM Help Java Move Forward?

      As concerns over Oracle’s allegedly territorial behavior toward Java continue to spread, with its lawsuit aimed at Google regarding parts of the Java code used in the Android mobile OS fueling the wall of worry, Oracle’s agreement to cooperate with IBM on advancing Java is drawing mixed interpretations. Are two of the biggest software titans necessarily going to proceed with the kind of open goals and focus on open standards that Sun Microsystems did?

    • Microsoft Launches FUD VS OpenOffice.org

      Were did all these quotes come from? None other than twelve Microsoft cases studies (You can find a full list/links to these on ArsTechnica). When watching the video you will also notice clever advertising tricks such as a brown colored background whenever they are speaking about OpenOffice and a pleasant blue colored background whenever Microsoft Office is mentioned. This video is nothing other than pure FUD, plain and simple. If Microsoft really does love open source they have a strange way of showing it.

    • http://ostatic.com/blog/will-oracle-and-ibm-help-java-move-forward

      And, this is hardly the first time that Microsoft has shown its poker hand regarding the OpenOffice suite. Jonathan Schwartz, who was Sun Microsystems CEO and had deep involvement in the progress of OpenOffice, started a blog after he left Sun called “What I Couldn’t Say,” which contains very interesting items from his tenure as Sun CEO. In this post from the blog, he notes the details of a meeting that he had with Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates years ago:

      “As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, ‘Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.’”

      It’s clearer now, more than ever, that Microsoft takes the OpenOffice suite seriously as competition. Let’s hope Oracle and the OfficeLibre community do right by the suite.

    • Microsoft Starts A FUD Campaign Against OpenOffice.org

      Here is the Microsoft video…

    • Key binding compatibility options

      As I posted on the libreoffice development list, I’m currently working on adding a new option page in the Options dialog, to provide a quick way to switch key bindings between LibreOffice’s default and OpenOffice.org’s for Calc. For the most part, the default key bindings are identical between LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org as far as Calc’s concerned, but there are some differences, which are enough to annoy those users who are accustomed to the old key bindings from OOo Calc.

  • CMS

    • WordPress and Drupal: Convergence?

      Obviously, as a once-upon-a-time core developer for the project, and as someone who continues to work in that community, I am pretty familiar with WordPress. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I’m not hip-deep in WordPress code and news. I’ve watched its evolution over these past 7+ years as it has moved from a simple blogging system towards becoming a more full-featured CMS.

      [...]

      WordPress started with good usability, but a limited architecture and feature set. Drupal started with a strong architecture, but a very developer-centric user experience. But WordPress has been steadily improving its architecture. And Drupal has been working on its UI. They had different origins, and they have taken different paths, but they are both evolving towards CMS Nirvana. And we users get to ride along.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Respects Your Freedom

      Even if consumers have been brain-washed to feel it is OK for manufacturers of hardware and software to restrict their use of IT for commercial advantage, those who are aware should tell them there are alternatives and we should promote alternatives on all levels. Some day the freedom to use a PC free of arbitrary restrictions will be one of the considerations when purchasing PCs and peripherals and the monopoly will be truly broken. That day is coming soon.

Leftovers

  • The latter-day ‘scarlet letter’ of sex work

    In the waning days of the last millennium, I worked as a stripper to pay for university. It requires no courage to admit this now, but had I written it a few years ago, when I taught high school, I would have been fired on the spot. My continued presence in the classroom would’ve set a bad example for the innocent teenagers in my charge, because we can’t let “The Children” think sex-industry workers could ever be decent people or anything.

  • Italy to combat prostitution by cutting trees

    Environmental organisations today expressed outrage over a plan by local authorities in the Abruzzo region of central Italy to combat prostitution with deforestation.

    For decades, local law enforcement and politicians have struggled to police the Bonifica del Tronto road, a haven for the sex trade that runs inland for more than 10 miles from the Adriatic coast alongside the river Tronto. Over the years, cameras have been installed, raids mounted, 24-hour patrols implemented and the mayors of towns near the road have signed bylaws imposing fines on prostitutes’ clients. All to no avail.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Where’s Da Bread?

      If you like cramming Lucky Charms and Wonder Bread into your piehole, you’re probably white. But you’re also probably somebody who should go to this Action Center to End World Hunger deal tonight at 6. Harper’s contributing editor and Vice contributing contributor Fred Kaufman will be there to outline how those dastardly diablos on Wall Street are responsible for starving millions of people and why you may not be able to afford to be such a fat piece of shit for much longer.

      Fred’s cover story for Harper’s June issue, “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It,” picks apart the relationship between Goldman Sachs and the 2008 food crisis that increased the number of hungry people in the world by a good 250 million. It can be a tough read if you’re not familiar with hedging, selling short, demand shock, perpetually selling long on wheat futures, or any of the weird, made-up bullshit that constitutes finance, but the story should be a wakeup call for those of us who take cheap food for granted, aka probably 99.999999% of us.

    • MERCK SUED: HomeAgain® PET CHIP IMPLICATED IN CANCER

      Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has been served with a lawsuit over claims its HomeAgain® pet microchip induced cancer in a cat. Animal rights attorney Steven Wise seeks “reasonable compensatory damages” for a malignant tumor “likely” induced by a HomeAgain® ID chip implanted in his client’s cat, Bulkin

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate change could lead to Arctic conflict, warns senior Nato commander

      One of Nato’s most senior commanders has warned that global warming and a race for resources could lead to conflict in the Arctic.

      The comments, by Admiral James G Stavridis, supreme allied commander for Europe, come as Nato countries convene on Wednesday for groundbreaking talks on environmental security in the Arctic Ocean.

      The discussions, in the format of a “workshop”, with joint Russian leadership, are an attempt to create dialogue with Moscow aimed at averting a second cold war.

    • Brussels plans strict new controls for offshore oil drilling

      The European commission is to reveal plans for tougher controls on offshore oil and gas drilling tomorrow. It would force national governments to abide by rules set in Brussels and extend liability for oil companies in the event of a disaster, The Guardian has learned.

  • Finance

    • French protesters join forces in last-ditch attempt to derail pension reform

      French workers, students and schoolchildren today joined forces in a last-ditch day of strike action and street protests aimed at derailing Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reform.

    • New wave of French strikes raises spectre of May 1968 protests

      The battle between President Nicolas Sarkozy and the French unions over pension reforms enters a crucial phase today with a new wave of strikes and protests across the country.

    • US bankers set for record pay and bonuses for second year

      US bankers are set for record compensation for a second consecutive year, shattering both the illusion of pay-reform and the expectation that bank bonuses would be tempered while the US economy remains weak.

      With third-quarter figures from JP Morgan expected to begin a bumper profit reporting season today, a study of more than three dozen banks, hedge funds, money-management and securities firms estimates they will pay $144bn (£90bn) in salary and benefits this year, a 4% increase on 2009.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • RepubliCorp

      The Cabal of Multinational Corporations is pleased to formally announce RepubliCorpTM, a new combined entity following our complete merger with the Republican Party.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Schneier: invasions of privacy a “byproduction of the IT society”
    • The Coalition and Civil Liberties

      It was surprising and disappointing to watch as the Labour government – which gave us the Freedom of Information Act – became the most authoritarian British regime in modern times. As we at Big Brother Watch pointed out in our manifesto before the election, the arrival of a new government offered an opportunity to undo some of that work – and indeed, both parties in the Coalition pledged before the election to reverse the rise of our surveillance state, and reaffirmed that intention in the Coalition agreement.

    • Guest Post by Yasin Akgun: Facebook’s Privacy Problem

      There are only two reasons that Facebook is allowed to get away with their overzealous demands over your personal information. They can get away with it because people will simply obey and because there are no national or international laws governing who has a right to demand what personal information you hold and who does not hold these privileged rights. Both issues lie with one group of people, the members of the public. We have the power to do something about it, whether or not we choose to exercise this fast diminishing power is another matter.

    • Bolivian newspapers stage protest

      Several Bolivian newspapers protested last week against a proposed law that would allow the government to shut down media outlets it deems guilty of racism. They carried front pages bearing a single slogan: “There is no democracy without freedom of expression.”

    • The Values of Everything

      Progressive causes are failing: here’s how they could be turned around

    • Liu Xiaobo’s wife under house arrest

      The wife of Liu Xiaobo, this year’s winner of the Nobel peace prize has been placed under house arrest as part of a crackdown by the Chinese authorities aimed at stifling celebration following the award.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Council of Europe Agrees That Net neutrality is Key to Freedom of Expression

      On September 29th, 2010, the Committee of Ministers at the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a declaration on network neutrality1. The declaration is overall a very good news for the protection of freedom of expression and communication in Europe. It is one more indication that governments are finally realizing the importance of the Internet’s core architectural principles for the future of rights and freedoms in our democracies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda

        Copyright has long been viewed as one of the government’s most difficult policy issues. It attracts passionate views from a wide range of stakeholders, including creators, consumers, businesses, and educators and it is the source of significant political pressure from the United States. The latest chapter in the Canadian copyright saga unfolded in June 2010 as Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage James Moore tabled Bill C-32, copyright reform legislation billed as providing both balance and a much-needed modernization of the law. The introduction marked the culmination of months of public discussion and internal government debate.

      • ACTA

Clip of the Day

uTouch on Unity


Credit: TinyOgg

‘Trusted’ Computing in the Big Brother State

Posted in Security, Videos at 3:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Video explaining the impact of surveillance and the connection to software lock-down


Credit: TinyOgg

10.14.10

Links 14/10/2010: Mozilla’s New CEO, More on IBM Joining OpenJDK

Posted in News Roundup at 2:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Digital Media: Achilles heal or new cash crop?
  • Should Linux focus on the desktop?

    Linux has been far more successful at just about every application for one simple reason. Linux has the flexibility and ability to easily fill, without overflowing, any container it is poured into and it is not surprising either. It is all due to the real focus of Linux which should not be split.

  • CLI

    • The Trouble With GUIs

      “Like everything else in life, it boils down to having the right tool for the right job … and the command line is like that all-purpose screwdriver that we all have,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “It opens paint cans, makes a handy chisel, pry bar and wedge — we grab it, get the job done, and move on.”

    • The Command Line: Nothing to be scared of

      It’s getting close to Halloween but the Command Line shouldn’t be something that you are spooked about. The good old command line has been around for ages. And it’s still around today and as popular as ever. Why? Because it’s extremely powerful, and allows you to get to the root of most operating systems. Sure, the nice GUI-based applications are great and all, but the command line can greatly simplify some tasks.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 139: Alfresco

      Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for enterprise content management (ECM).

      Guests: Luis Sala, Chief Community Officer and John Newton, CTO for alfresco.com.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel To Have Sandybridge 3D In Mesa Done By Q4

        Intel’s Ian Romanick has just written an e-mail message entitled What I’m working on to the Mesa development list. With Intel’s new GLSL compiler being used by Mesa and can be found within the Mesa 7.9 release, Intel’s open-source graphics developers have worked onto working on some other areas of their 3D driver stack.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE’s Plasma To Be Reworked, Use More OpenGL

        While we already know that by the time KDE Software Compilation 4.7 rolls around it may optionally support OpenGL 3.0 within the KWin compositing manager, but with time KDE’s Plasma may begin using more OpenGL too. Aaron Seigo has written a lengthy blog post about what he hopes to achieve with Plasma and its library going a few releases out into the future. This includes a rather extensive rework of Plasma and its drawing, which would include the use of more OpenGL to allow for greater hardware acceleration.

      • OpenCycleMap server changed – don’t forget to update

        As you probably know, you can download a lot of additional Marble maps with the “Get hot new stuff” framework. The reason for this entry is that OpenCycleMap is now using a different server for their map storage. For all users of the OpenCycleMap in Marble it means that they will have to update their map configuration if they want to see updated maps.

      • Fourteen Reasons to be KDE

        In case you’re sleeping under a rock today, KDE is celebrating its 14th birthday.

      • KWatchman – An Idea given Birth

        First of all: Thank you everyone for you comments and suggestions. They really got me on the road and showed my that there indeed is interest enough to do some more serious work. So I sat down and made myself a little planing and even some (small) coding today.

      • Faenza-Cupertino icons available for KDE

        That Faenza icon set. It gets everywhere. Not content with being one of the most popular icon sets of the year Faenza’s success has spawned an enviable army of ‘spins’ and derivatives including a ‘green’ Faenza-Mint version and the following Mac OS X inspired ‘Faenza-Cupertino’ set.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Arch Linux review

        If after reading this, you want to try Arch Linux, it is a great idea, but it might not be as good as you think if you are beginning with Linux, if you are a newbie, start with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora.

        Once you know more about Linux, switch to Arch Linux, you will never miss any other distribution. Arch Linux gives you almost the same control you may find in Gentoo, but it is a lot easier to run.

        The more user friendly distributions, make a lot of things for you, but then, maybe that is not what you need. I mean not always the same configuration is good for everybody, you need to tweak your configuration to fit your needs, and your likes.

    • New Releases

      • Parted Magic 5.6 adds System Stability Tester

        The Parted Magic developers have released version 5.6 of their open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Summit and JBoss World Call For Papers Now Open

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the call for papers is now open for the seventh annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. These premier open source events will take place May 3-6, 2011 in Boston at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center.

      • Business-critical logistics systems migrated by Jeppesen to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation

        Already a long-time user of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite Jeppesen has migrated business-critical systems to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 15 Might Be Dubbed Malmstrom, Woody

          Rather than coming up with the codename for the next Fedora release deep within Red Hat, the community is leveraged with anyone being allowed to propose a potential name prior to these names being reviewed by Red Hat’s legal department and the voting on the final name then commencing by Fedora contributors. With this open process, there’s also more than a few interesting name proposals with each release. Case in point, Fedora 14 could have been called Fytnargin. With the release of Fedora 14 now being just a month out, name proposals for Fedora 15 have started.

    • Debian Family

      • SimplyMepis 8.5 Challenge: Conclusions

        Even though both distributions work with KDE very well, they both have certain issues:
        MEPIS: When opening kmplayer, KDE crashes. I think that it is because of the mess I made with codecs trying to install VLC. Sometimes MEPIS suspends the composition and the effects are therefore disabled temporarily.
        MANDRIVA: The clock sometimes freezes (only in the netbook). This is corrected by enabling the display of seconds in the clock options.

        Concerning performance and ease of use, both distributions can satisfy the needs of users who lack technical computer knowledge or formal Linux training. I feel that SimplyMepis might be a better choice for users who want a simple system and do not really care much for eye candy. In addition, Mepis comes with Java pre-installed, whereas you must install it in Mandriva.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Is Ubuntu 10.10 Worth the Upgrade?

          I’ve been running 10.10 betas and the RC for weeks, and had been running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a few machines before that. Honestly, it’s hard to see much difference between the two. Plus several points for consistency, but that doesn’t add up to rushing to upgrade at the first opportunity.

        • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Palm Gives WebOS Homebrew Hackers a Little Love

        Up until recently, if you wanted to hack your Palm Pre, you hopped over to the Pre-Central forums for all of your hacking needs, where you could find concise and usually simple explanations from the experts of WebOS Internals and the like. It was all at your own risk, of course, but you were treading a path that someone who knew more than you had already trail blazed (and uploaded screenshots in a how-to form). Well, those days seem to be over–and for the better. Palm has made Rod Whitby’s Preware Homebrew Documentation available for download, and with it they’ve put the knowledge, tools, and know-how of a few years worth of hacking into every WebOS users hands. Now everyone can have thousands of well-made and free applications, patches, themes, and assorted customizations all rolled into one package by a supportive community.

      • Android

        • Motorola to start rolling out Froyo update to European Milestones

          In a post on its Facebook page, Motorola has confirmed that, from next week, it will start user trials of an over-the-air (OTA) upgrade for its European Milestone smartphones that will upgrade the onboard version of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system to version 2.2, code named “Froyo”. The company says that, once the trails are completed, it will go into the approval stage and a roll out to all users is expected by the end of the year.

        • 35 Amazing Android Apps: Inform, Update, Manage

          Have Android app, will travel. In the digital age, managing the steady deluge of information that confronts you every day can be a challenge. But with the right apps, the Android can be a powerful tool to help you stay on top of that deluge.

          There are Android apps to manage your news feeds, gather the weather, find the scores of your favorite sports teams, track your finances and keep up-to-date with your appointments and updates of all kinds.

          To help you find the cream of the crop, here’s a list of 35 of the best Android apps for tracking, managing and updating your information.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Released: Netbook Review

        Its been a little while since my last post and some might be wondering whats been going on in technology here at the PMC, especially since the last post promised insight into some of our production software.

        Well, thats all still coming. We DID get in our new desktop for our Media Center, and I am working on compiling a few videos showing its construction. I’ve also been working on updating and testing the production software to give everyone a better picture of what can be done with our Open Source resources. All that is coming, and you can now receive shorter updates and info through the PMC Tech Blog Twitter and Identi.ca feed (For those of you unaware, Identi.ca is an Open Source microblogging service, similar to twitter). Follow me and get much more frequent updates about things going on here at the PMC and in the Open Source world in general.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Apache Shindig Gets Social

    For developers, including social networking technologies into modern Web applications is often a key priority. The OpenSocial standard, originally developed by Google, is one mechanism that developers can leverage for social networking applications.

    But standards are one thing, and implementation is another. That’s where the Apache Shindig project comes into play. Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container that enables developers to handle OpenSocial application content and gadgets. The project recently hit its 2.0 milestone as it continues to track the latest OpenSocial standardization efforts.

  • Zimbra Desktop 2.0 integrates Web 2.0 services

    Open source groupware provider Zimbra has announced the arrival of version 2.0 of its Zimbra Desktop client. The new version of the open source, web-based mail and calendaring solution includes significant performance upgrades and introduces a number of new features.

  • 10 Young Open Source Projects to Watch

    New open source projects launch all the time and there’s so many great ones out there it’s hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Here are 10 promising young FOSS projects to keep an eye on as their development grows. Download or use them in the meantime as they develop, they are awesome!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Introducing Gary, Mozilla’s New CEO

        I’m very happy to introduce Gary Kovacs as our new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation. I think he’s going to be great for Mozilla, and that our broad community will like him and be well served by him.

      • Introducing our new CEO: Gary Kovacs

        Prior to joining Mozilla, Gary held senior leadership roles as Senior VP of Markets, Solutions & Products at Sybase (through its acquisition by SAP earlier this year), as General Manager and VP of Mobile & Devices at Adobe and as VP of Product Marketing at Macromedia (through its acquisition by Adobe).

      • Mozilla foot soldiers unleash ‘Army of Awesome’ on Twitter

        Mozilla has hooked itself up to Twitter and created an “Army of Awesome” for Firefox users needing help with the browser.

        In other words, those surfers with a short attention span can now find out all they need to know via 140-character bursts.

  • Oracle

    • An Unexpected Pleasure

      Today’s announcement that IBM is going to join forces and work with Oracle on OpenJDK is good news for Java, and by extension for Eclipse. All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation.

    • IBM and OpenJDK

      IBM and Oracle are going to bring their combined resources together to collaborate in OpenJDK. The natural question arises about what this means for the Apache Harmony project.

    • IBM joining OpenJDK – repeat after me “pragmatic”, “pragmatic”, “pragmatic”
    • IBM to join OpenJDK
    • Good For Java?

      List of the people working on Harmony. Not only is the list apparently out of date, it has such a strong IBM contingent (I wonder how many of those “independents” are actually IBM or Intel contractors) that I am amazed it has escaped Apache Board scrutiny for so long.

    • IBM joins Oracle on OpenJDK

      The basic announcement today was that IBM would join with Oracle to work on the OpenJDK. The reciprocal IBM announcement said the same thing.

    • Microsoft posts video of customers criticizing OpenOffice
    • Oracle and IBM Collaborate to Accelerate Java Innovation Through OpenJDK

      Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment.

    • Microsoft slags off Open Office

      Apparently it can even affect the grades of students although it did not mention anything about causing kittens to die. The quotes appear to have come from case studies and press articles from the last four years, most of which are hosted on Microsoft.com.

    • Microsoft running scared from OpenOffice.org

      Open-source office suite OpenOffice.org is apparently getting under software giant Microsoft’s skin – so much so, in fact, that it appears to be starting a propaganda campaign to protect its revenue stream.

      Microsoft Office is one of the company’s biggest selling products. It’s near-ubiquitous in the world of business computing, to the point where its file formats have become the norm for sharing content – at the expense of locking out cross-platform, open standards.

    • OOo’s put the willies up Microsoft
    • Oracle Confirms Committment to OpenOffice.org

      As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their committment to OpenOffice.org. “Oracle’s growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community.” This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools. For example, Ingrid Halama recently posted of some of the new features coming to Chart, (part 1, part 2). Niklas Nebel also shared some improvements in DataPilot.

      This all comes a month after the formation of The Document Foundation and the announcement of LibreOffice. Charles-H. Schulz recently reported that LibreOffice was downloaded 80,000 times its first week and a new user forum quickly followed. A second beta emerged on October 11.

  • CMS

    • Commonwealth Games using Drupal

      Though the games have only one more day to go (they were from October 3rd to October 14th this month), the XIX Commonwealth Games website runs on Drupal, and looks great. This 2010 Commonwealth Games were held in Delhi, and is the largest multi-sport event conducted to date in Delhi and India. Certainly a big win for Drupal!

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Hardware we all want: FSF announces criteria for hardware endorsement program “Respects Your Freedom”

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today that it has published an initial set of criteria for endorsing computers and other devices. The FSF seeks both to obtain feedback on the criteria, and raise interest in the program among hardware manufacturers. Ultimately, the FSF plans to promote an endorsement mark to be carried on products that meet the criteria: respects your freedom.

      “The desire to own a computer or device and have full control over it, to know that you are not being spied on or tracked, to run any software you wish without asking permission, and to share with friends without worrying about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)—these are the desires of millions of people who care about the future of technology and our society. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers have until now relied on close cooperation with proprietary software companies that demanded control over their users. As citizens and their customers, we need to promote our desires for a new class of hardware—hardware that anyone can support because it respects your freedom,” said Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF.

  • Government

    • GOSCON Highlights Benefits of OSS in Public Sector

      With the US mid-term elections coming up, the direction of the US government may be set to maintain its current direction, or change significantly, depending on who wins what election on Nov. 2.

      Whether you think a change (or lack thereof) is a good thing or a bad thing, one direction many governments are trending towards in this economy is the use of open source.

      Faced with budget tightening and cost-control measures that threaten to deplete government services to beyond the bare minimum, local, state, and Federal organizations are taking a very hard look at the cost and performance benefits of open source software–to the point where it’s not a question of if governments will widely adopt open source technologies, but when.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • How Crowdsourced Data Can Predict Crisis Impact: Findings from Empirical Study on Haiti

      One of the inherent concerns about crowdsourced crisis information is that the data is not statistically representative and hence “useless” for any serious kind of statistical analysis. But my colleague Christina Corbane and her team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) have come up with some interesting findings that prove otherwise. They used the reports mapped on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform to show that this crowdsourced data can help predict the spatial distribution of structural damage in Port-au-Prince. The results were presented at this year’s Crisis Mapping Conference (ICCM 2010).

Leftovers

  • Dell settlement approved

    A federal judge on Wednesday approved Dell Inc.’s $100 million settlement with the government of civil fraud charges.

    Approval of the settlement by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon came after company Chairman and CEO Michael Dell assured Leon in a hearing that the computer maker will carry through the reforms it promised.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission had said that Dell improperly used payments from Intel to pump up its profits to meet Wall Street targets over five years.

  • Austin Man Sues Entrepreneur Media, Claims Reverse Domain Hijacking

    An Austin businessman has sued Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur Magazine, after the publication sent a cease and desist to him for registering EntrepreneurOlogy.com.

  • Processor Whispers – About MIPS and MIPS

    When two quarrel, the third rejoices: while ARM and Atom were slinging mud at each other, MIPS could advance unhurriedly. And the abbreviation MIPS – with a different meaning – plays an important role in chip manufacturing, too.

  • Science

    • SpaceShipTwo First Glide Flight Details From The Pilot

      After Sunday’s first glide flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, one of the first thoughts going through the head of test pilot Peter Siebold after coming to a stop on the runway was that it all went by too quickly. He and co-pilot Mike Alsbury had been released from the mother ship, Eve, just 13 minutes earlier at 45,000 feet.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • The FBI is Tracking Whom?

      They’re tracking a college student in Silicon Valley. He’s 20, partially Egyptian, and studying marketing at Mission College. He found the tracking device attached to his car. Near as he could tell, what he did to warrant the FBI’s attention is be the friend of someone who did something to warrant the FBI’s attention.

  • Finance

    • David Faber’s CNBC Program: Goldman Sachs: Power and Peril

      That said, Goldman is potentially everywhere in the financial markets, potentially on any side of a particular risk situation. That’s what being, in effect, as one guest pundit echoed, a publicly-traded hedge fund means. Which is what Goldman Sachs currently is.

      Again, this is hardly news. Entertainment, when packaged sensationally in an hour-long format? Probably for the less-informed viewers.

      But certainly not news. Not really fair….and incredibly biased.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Public to vote for ‘worst EU lobbyists’

      The ‘Worst EU Lobbying Awards 2010′, organised by Friends of the Earth Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory, LobbyControl and Spinwatch, seek to “clean up the lobbying scene in Brussels, discourage controversial lobbying practices by publicly exposing the worst offenders, and discredit the big business lobby among EU decision-making circles”.

      This year’s nominees were chosen for their attempts to influence EU financial regulation and climate change legislation, because “these two categories best show how EU policymaking has been captured by the corporate world,” according to Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe, who launched the awards at a ceremony in Brussels yesterday.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Red Bull Won’t Be Skydiving From Space

      Red Bull has pulled the plug on its plan to have daredevil Felix Baumgartner skydive from the edge of space, because it is being sued by a California promoter who says Red Bull stole his idea.

    • Canon blocks copy jobs by keyword

      Canon has demonstrated Uniflow 5, the latest version of its document management system that can prevent users from printing or copying documents containing specific words.

      Uniflow allows printers, scanners, copiers and multifunction devices to be managed centrally.

    • A community-building perspective on the Gap logo controversy
    • What Monsanto’s fall from grace reveals about the GMO seed industry

      According to The Times’ Pollack, Monsanto’s troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent on Roundup, Monsanto’s market-dominating herbicide, has run out, exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2) its target audience — large-scale commodity farmers in the south and Midwest — are turning against its core offerings in genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.

      I agree with Pollack’s diagnosis, but I want to add a third and even more fundamental problem to the mix: Monsanto’s once-celebrated product pipeline is looking empty. As I’ll show below, its current whiz-bang seeds offer just tarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for more than a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile, judging from the company’s recent report on its latest quarterly earnings, the “blockbuster” traits it has been promising for years — drought resistance and nitrogen-use efficiency — don’t seem to be coming along very well.

    • Copyrights

      • Lawyer: BREIN Anti-Piracy Spy Uploaded Pirated Movie To Usenet

        In the legal battle between Usenet community FTD and Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, some controversial allegations have been made. There are claims that not only did BREIN have as many as 15 undercover investigators working at FTD masquerading as regular users, but one of them – allegedly a direct BREIN employee – actually uploaded a ‘pirate’ movie to Usenet and posted its whereabouts on the site.

      • Pirate radio: a revolt that just won’t die (even with $30,000 fines)

        Until a few days ago, Datz Hitz was broadcasting gospel and Caribbean music to Boston neighborhoods Mattapan and Dorchester—plus news and live discussion about local cultural and neighborhood events. Its 99.7 FM signal had a range of a few city blocks—maybe a mile on good days. One of the staffers, with whom we briefly spoke, described the operation as a community radio station.

      • Inflatable Giant Gorilla Attacks Google (for Copyright Infringement)–Scherba v. Google

        Scherba makes giant inflatable gorillas. See an example. A little improbably, it has a copyright registration for a 3D sculptural work called “Gorilla Inflatable”–the work being its inflatable product blown up.

        [...]

        So Scherba sued Google for copyright infringement for showing the picture of an inflated gorilla in its ad copy. All morning, I’ve been scratching my head trying to puzzle through the issues.

      • Details In Mulve Arrest Highlight How Weak The Case Is

        Last week, in talking about how one of the guys behind Mulve was arrested by UK police, we noted the similarities to the arrest a few years ago of OiNK administrator Alan Ellis on “conspiracy to defraud” charges that were eventually thrown out as Ellis didn’t actually break the law.

        TorrentFreak now has the details of the Mulve arrest, where police are using the exact same charges, even with a failure to get those charges to stick against Ellis. And, the article details why such charges are even weaker against the Mulve guy they arrested. First of all, he had nothing to do with the software itself, but merely registered the domain and created the video highlighting how to use the software. But, much more interesting are the details behind Mulve. It’s not even a search engine by itself. It’s simply an interface for an existing search engine on a Russian social network, which anyone could sign up for and get access to already. In other words, going after Mulve totally misses the point, and it’s difficult to see how Mulve itself actually violates UK law.

      • French Subsidy For Music Downloads Gets EU Nod

        France’s strategy to combat illegal music downloads by contributing to the amount young people pay for them won European Union approval and praise for promoting cultural diversity.

        Under the scheme, French residents who purchase a card – the Carte musique – to download music from subscription-based website platforms, will only pay half the cost of a €50 ($70) credit included in the card, with the French government paying the rest.

      • Creative Commons launches Public Domain Mark; Europeana and Cultural Heritage Institutions lead early adoption

        Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.

      • ACTA

        • “Final” Version of ACTA Must be Rejected as a Whole

          ACTA AS A BULLYING WEAPON FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES

          By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.

Clip of the Day

It’s not easy being Green (in South Carolina)


Credit: TinyOgg

BSA, ACT, and Other Microsoft Front Groups Still Try to Shoot Down EIF in Europe While Promoting Software Patents

Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Patents, RAND, Standard at 9:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

David Hammerstein
“SOS,” writes former MEP David Hammerstein, “European Interoperability Framework proposal under fierce attack by MS and M. Barnier Int. Market Commissioner vs. Kroes and citizens.” [Photo by Mara]

Summary: Some real drama is seen in Europe as Microsoft lobbyists have a face-off with representatives of Europe’s real interests, including royalty-free standards

THINGS are getting hot in Europe. As Andy Updegrove has just put it, “If IT Policy is Your Thing, Keep an Eye on Europe”:

[L]et’s take a look at a kerfuffle that emerged yesterday when two lobbying associations reacted to a pre-release copy of the latest version of that extremely interesting and much battered document called the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), version 2.0.

Now, the EIF is a very interesting document, with a long history (you can read more about it here). It’s been around for awhile in version 1.0, and the direction that its next version would take has been hotly debated by large software companies.

At issue, as you might have already guessed, is what EIF does, and does not, say about patents, and more specifically, patents in the context of interoperability standards. Why does it matter? Because the EIF is part of a master plan that will influence how the EU ultimately spends up to the equivalent of $50 billion a year in public IT procurement funds.
This being politics, perhaps it should be no surprise that one of the groups is engaging in over-generalization and misrepresentation, not to mention inaccurate labeling (saying the approach taken in the new EIF draft “echoes” Chinese procurement policy – which in fact has been turning towards more traditional approaches of late).

We already wrote quite extensively about EIFv2. See for example:

  1. European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Corrupted by Microsoft et al, Its Lobbyists
  2. Orwellian EIF, Fake Open Source, and Security Implications
  3. No Sense of Shame Left at Microsoft
  4. Lobbying Leads to Protest — the FFII and the FSFE Rise in Opposition to Subverted EIF
  5. IBM and Open Forum Europe Address European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Fiasco
  6. EIF Scrutinised, ODF Evolves, and Microsoft’s OOXML “Lies” Lead to Backlash from Danish Standards Committee
  7. Complaints About Perverted EIF Continue to Pile Up
  8. More Complaints About EIFv2 Abuse and Free Software FUD from General Electric (GE)
  9. Patents Roundup: Copyrighted SQL Queries, Microsoft Alliance with Company That Attacks F/OSS with Software Patents, Peer-to-Patent in Australia
  10. Microsoft Under Fire: Open Source Software Thematic Group Complains About EIFv2 Subversion, NHS Software Supplier Under Criminal Investigation
  11. British MEP Responds to Microsoft Lobby Against EIFv2; Microsoft’s Visible Technologies Infiltrates/Derails Forums Too
  12. Patents Roundup: Escalations in Europe, SAP Pretense, CCIA Goes Wrong, and IETF Opens Up
  13. Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely
  14. Europeans Asked to Stop Microsoft’s Subversion of EIFv2 (European Interoperability Framework Version 2)
  15. Former Member of European Parliament Describes Microsoft “Coup in Process” in the European Commission
  16. Microsoft’s Battle to Consume — Not Obliterate — Open Source

There is a big lobbying battle doing on in Brussels, which is the heart of European politics in many ways. Belgium’s Quickenborne plays a role in the ‘community’ patent (bad for the free/open source software community) and we wrote about this in [1, 2, 3]. There’s more in here:

In this situation the compromise proposed by the Belgian Presidency was “not considered sufficient to remove the deadlock”, since it apparenty does not meet any of the above-skeched national interest.

However, the Belgian Presidency is still confident that the next Competitiveness Council in November can find a fair compromise on the EUpatent, as expressed by the Belgian minister in charge of the dossier, Vincent Van Quickenborne, underlining that a compromise is still possible.

This is just one part of the problem which we’ll deal with separately on another occasion. What matters is that Microsoft pressure group Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), which is faking SMB positions as usual, is also pushing for the ‘community’ patent, aka EU patent, aka harmonisation, unification, etc. It’s a trap. Some people fall for it, thinking that the ‘community’ patent is a beneficial thing because they were deceived. And when it comes to EIF, there’s an ongoing conversation and it’s going on at Twitter/Identi.ca, where Carlo Piana (Samba lawyer) says to Karsten Gerloff from the FSFE:

@karsten true #swpats ‘r analized with the eyes of holders (“property”), but economy sh’d research their huge #externality costs

Gerloff responds:

@carlopiana …and for software, patent system’s cost/benefit calculation gives negative result #FSFE

Zuck was there too by the way, according to Gerloff. Have lobbyists not been banned yet?

@carlopiana I confirm. Yesterday at #WIPO, Thomas vs Benoit Mueller and Jonathan Zuck was a treat.

The BSA too is a Microsoft-funded lobbyist and not a representative of European interests. Microsoft has been using the BSA to lobby for RAND in Europe for at least a couple of years. CompTIA has been absent from Microsoft’s ranks of lobbyists in Europe recently, but it was there before (pushing Microsoft’s side in EIF drafts).

David Hammerstein, a former member of parliament who occasionally shares information about Microsoft’s lobbying inside the Commission [1, 2], is now saying: “SOS: European Interoperability Framework proposal under fierce attack by MS and M. Barnier Int. Market Commissioner vs. Kroes and citizens.”

Microsoft is betting on patents as its weapon against software freedom and here’s another new footstep which we mentioned yesterday. Patents seem like this company’s last resort.

For those who want to know more about Microsoft’s ‘RAND fight’ against competition, there’s a new transcript from the FSFE’s Gerloff. “Delivered FSFE statement on #swpat at #WIPO #SCP15, will post shortly. Very good reactions from some states. EPO not so happy,” wrote Gerloff. Quoting a portion of it:

Some argue that the inclusion of standards in patents on RAND terms is a necessary incentive for companies to innovate. Free Software Foundation Europe begs to differ. We join the Development Agenda Group in highlighting that the monopoly power conferred by a patent is exponentially increased when the patent is included in a standard.

If a company has been awarded a patent, it has already received a strong incentive to innovate, in the form of a 20-year monopoly on the use of the invention, to the exclusion of all others. Why should society incur a further, even more substantial cost by handing this patent holder a means to effectively control competition in the marketplace, by letting it control the price of a patent license?

Today’s software market is already rife with monopolies and dominant companies in several domains. It should be the goal of norm-setting efforts to reduce the obstacles to competition in the software market, rather than increasing them.

FSFE believes that it would be most useful for the SCP to analyse the various approaches on the grounds of their inclusiveness of the entire IT industry and all innovators, and identify the minimum requirements that are necessary to uphold standards as drivers of competition, innovation and economies of scale.

We also recommend that in its deliberations, this committee should be careful to distinguish between different areas for standardisation, as the requirements in each area are quite diverse.

Let’s keep shining a light in the face of lobbyists. They don’t like it when people find out who’s paying their bill; it delegitimises them and they deserve it. Europe deserves it. █

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