Summary: News about initiatives and companies that under the guise or true intention of promoting Free software actually promote proprietary software and software patents (with Microsoft “patent tax”)
EVERY NOW AND THEN we politely name those players in the industry whose actions contribute to software patent entanglements and thus barriers to software freedom. The intention is not to provoke but rather to inform. So today we’ll start by naming Peer-To-Patent again. It’s hard to criticise the project, which takes a ‘pragmatic’ approach and has some inter-personal roots in Linux-friendly companies; we — as well as others whose approach is similar — have been critics of Peer-To-Patent because it is promoting “good” software patents, albeit passively. Groklaw seems to like Peer-To-Patent and their staff is always sending us E-mail, however we — along with others like FFII and TechDirt — are rather sceptical because valuable time of volunteers is being spent gardening the work of people who applied for patent monopolies on software. TechDirtsays that Peer-To-Patent may be coming back; it’s better than nothing at all, but there may be better ways (also better than OIN) to eliminate the problem. TechDirt starts by stating:
We’ve been a bit critical of the Peer-to-Patent program that was tested in the US a couple years ago. The idea — which I appreciate — was that certain patent applications would be opened up in a “crowdsourcing”-style, for the wider community to provide evidence of prior art. My problem with it wasn’t the concept of involving others, but the idea that prior review during the application process would really be all that meaningful or useful in the long run. That’s because it’s often tough to get the necessary people to care about a bad patent or bad patent application until it’s being used against them. So the incentives to keep swatting down bad patents just isn’t that exciting. Second, the worst of the bad patents are ones that are asserted later, for something that seems completely different or unexpected, but which the patent holder claims violates their patent. It’s tough to predict that ahead of time. Finally, the program only focused on prior art, not obviousness, which is an even bigger issue.
Yes, you could argue that such a peer review system wouldn’t hurt, but it often felt like the program’s backers thought it would solve most of the problems of the patent system, where I can only see it maybe helping out at the margins. That’s why we weren’t surprised at all to find out that the program had quitely shut down last year and almost no one had noticed.
Another player which is hard for us to criticise is Tuxera, which actually did bring some invaluable software to Linux (NTFS) before it signed a deal with Microsoft and started selling software patent licences rather than just software. Well, Tuxera’s NTFS is coming to Macs now. It’s not entirely clear what role Microsoft plays in it (if any) now that these companies are together in a patent bed.
There is another company called Likewise which helps sell Microsoft UNIX/Linux patent licences (Active Directory and the likes of it). Likewise uses the latest release of Ubuntu to sell its patent ploy again [1, 2], taking advantage of users who are not already familiar with Samba. “Likewise Integrates Alien Systems with Microsoft Active Directory” says this resultant article. For those who do not know, Likewise has roots in Microsoft and so does Black Duck, whose CEO will become part of an “open source” think tank (even though Black Duck is a proprietary software company). Black Duck is located next to Novell’s headquarters and not far from Microsoft’s other attempts to harm GNU/Linux from the inside (Cambridge labs), by means of fusion with software patents. To quote a new article:
Black Duck CEO Yeaton joins China open-source think tank
Waltham-based Black Duck Software announced last week that it had acquired open-source online resource Ohloh.net, an online directory of open-source-related software and people.
Ohloh is not open source, either. Like Black Duck, it only takes advantage of open source, just in the data sense. The products themselves are proprietary, but the data they get applied to is free/open source software source code.
“Apple is now devising software patents as path to an exclusive censorship mechanism.”Another company which loves to pretend that it is an “open source” player is Apple, even though software patents are a high priority at Apple and the latest outrageous patent raises a brow and makes many headlines (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]). To quote one article: “Apple has just been awarded a patent for what people are already calling ‘anti-sexting’ software.”
It’s still about restrictions at Apple because Apple knows best and it wishes to impose its beliefs/preferences on customers. Jobs has already spoken about “freedom from porn” and that’s a classic example of where freedom comes to mean the exact opposite. Orwell once warned: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
Apple is now devising software patents as path to an exclusive censorship mechanism. Does society need restraint to be imposed by gadgets? Need it be a monopoly, too? █
Summary: Additional proof that the “Open Source” policy at Microsoft is still something along the lines of “We are not allowed to be seen as attacking Free software but quietly we have to”
THE RECENT REMARK from Hernán Rincón (insulting “Open Source” [1, 2, 3], which gets adopted widely where he works for Microsoft around Brazil) have helped a lot of people see that Microsoft it no friend of “Open Source”, but this does not prevent Microsoft from carrying on with this PR charade. Microsoft’s booster Marius Oiaga is helping them right now:
Microsoft, once the anti-open source poster child, says that the company has evolved as the world changed and that it is now committed to openness.
Watch them use their beloved Novell to spread this lie:
Microsoft made a critical move in 2006, when it inked a Windows and Linux interoperability alliance with open source vendor Novell.
Since then, both Microsoft and Novell have made investments into making sure that Windows Server and SUSE Linux can play nice together for customers that need to run both platforms in their heterogeneous environments.
Let’s face it, Microsoft’s biggest cash cow is suffering (that’s Office) and while Microsoft keeps pretending to harbour “open source” on Windows it is actually attacking OpenOffice.org for Windows, even though it’s “open source” and for Windows. What does that say about Microsoft’s attitude towards “open source” on any platform at all?
Microsoft’s hiring of people specifically to fight OpenOffice.org (and LibreOffice or Lotus, by extension) is something that we covered before [1, 2]. It has turned rather pathetic. Microsoft is now blatantly lying in new videos. “Source of one of the quotes in #MSFTvOOo video,” says Jan from Red Hat, is a case “from 2006(!) about Windows 2003(!)” (he also gave a pointer to Microsoft.com). Someone who prefers to remain anonymous has chosen to study Microsoft’s ‘beef’ in this latest FUD campaign and here is what he or she found, based on this video:
The people quoted in the spot against OpenOffice:
James Fleming, Infrastructure and Support Manager, Speedy Hire
Jeff Cimmerer, Director of Technology for the Pittsford School District
David Sterling, ICT Manager, Central Scotland Police
Bülent Türker, Product Manager, Scarves Department, SARAR Group
Eugene Mariotto, ICT Director, Cobra Automotive Technologies
Eros Borgogelli, Information Systems Coordinator, Ciar
Randall C Kennedy, InfoWorld
Tisome Nugent, Educator, Orange County Public Schools
Sergey Sakharov, Business Process Optimization Manager, Art of Transport Logistics
Darek Muraszko, Information Systems Admninistrator, Kaczmarski Inkasso
Igor Gentosh, Head of System Integration Department, Kredobank JSC
Tiziano Battilana, Information Systems Coordinator, Euromobil Group
Joerg Lenze, System Administrator, Heinrich Berndes Haushaltstechnik GmbH & Co. KG
Leonid Medvediev, Head of IT Department, CJSC SPC, BorschagivskiyChemical and Pharmaceutical Plant
Bailey Mitchell, Chief Information Officer, Forsyth County Schools
I am in the process of checking the quotes and I have noticed they are effectively taken from quite old “success” stories, here some examples:
David Sterling, ICT Manager, Central Scotland Police
Source of the quotes:
This is a “success” story of 2006 about a migration to Office 2003/Windows 2003. Linux desktops in 2003 and OpenOffice in 2003 are ancient IMHO, not really a good way to convince customers NOW
You can find more, for example:
Tisome Nugent, Educator, Orange County Public Schools
Microsoft has a long-established practice of disarming competition by not acknowledging it, because acknowledging the competition gives it power. Well, the Redmond giant has changed stance when it comes to OpenOffice and launched a video attack on the free alternative to the Office software suite.
A few hours after this story was published, Microsoft set the video as “private,” meaning it can no longer be viewed by the public. We found it hosted on Microsoft.com, however, so if you have Silverlight, go watch it there.
Educational organizations get locked-in and so do students. What happens if a student goes to work at a place that uses OpenOffice.org on GNU/Linux? Are they doomed? Nonsense. It’s a GUI and they point, click and type. For a school district to spend $millions annually on software they can do without should be a crime or at least a breach of fiduciary responsibility to use the tax payers’ money wisely. What does it teach a kid that his school spends more on software that they don’t need when the system has to be cut back somewhere else because the premise of the whole situation was that the budget was tight? Do you think they might have to cut something that does educate students, Homer?
Oh! The Horror! The Horror of educational systems that cannot do the maths. There are thousands of systems that have deployed OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux with no problems except what to do with the savings.
In due course, more details emerged of how Mindcraft had been able to draw directly on support from Microsoft when tuning the system, but had not involved Red Hat, whose distribution was being used for the tests, in the same way. This meant that several important tweaks that would have improved the latter’s performance were lacking. Indeed, it later turned out that the tests had actually been conducted in a Microsoft laboratory.
[...]
It seems that Microsoft has forgotten this important lesson. For it has put together a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched from OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office.
The criticisms made in the video are not really the point – they are mostly about OpenOffice.org not being a 100% clone of Microsoft Office, and compatibility problems with Microsoft’s proprietary formats. The key issue is the exactly the same as it was for the Mindcraft benchmarks. You don’t compare a rival’s product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don’t make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor.
Just as it did in 1999 for GNU/Linux, Apache and Samba, the company has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.
The most popular open source office solution is OpenOffice, original released as an office suite for Linux but later released for Windows.
OpenOffice features the Writer, Calc, Impress and Base applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and database management, all free, while technical support is provided in the form of help documents on the website and a directory of consultants, although this last option is intended only for businesses. OpenOffice is available from download.openoffice.org.
Note that in the near future, OpenOffice will be available as LibreOffice.
Oracle Open Office
If Open Office appeals to you but you require online support, then Oracle Open Office might be your best choice. Offering the same functionality as OpenOffice, Oracle Open Office is available to purchase from www.oracle.com as an enterprise-class office suite based on the same open standards as OpenOffice.
Oracle is spinning its participation in a forthcoming Open Document Format (ODF) event as proof of its continued commitment to the OpenOffice.org community.
Gavin seems to be the one spinning, not Oracle. He too seems interested in hurting OpenOffice.org, so it’s not just Microsoft which does it very publicly right now. If it hurts Microsoft, it means we need more of the same. It’s an indication of weakness. █
The video is from 94 and it says “Novell is UNIX” at the end. That’s still true, even though SCO wishes to dispute it.
Groklaw is still catching up with missing (undocumented) parts of the SCO case, gradually exposing more parts of the March trial. Here’s some of the latest:
Let’s continue with the second part of the events of Day 9 at the second SCO v. Novell trial, before the Hon. Ted Stewart, a continuation of this article, part 1, where you’ll find the complete transcript as text. We ran out of space, so you may want to open up the previous article alongside this one, so you can follow along with the transcript.
So we’re still talking about the events on March 18, 2010. When we left off, Dr. Christine Botosan was on the stand, enduring cross examination by Novell’s lawyer, Sterling Brennan. I do mean enduring, because she was very much on the defensive, and as you will see, it gets worse for her.
“Another SCO Creditor Sells Its Claim to Argo,” Groklaw says:
Tech Marketing Ink of Orem, Utah, a creditor in the SCO bankruptcy, has sold its claim to Argo Partners. I guess it figured a bird in the hand and all that. At this point, the company may feel that there’s no getting blood from a stone and the likelihood of getting paid by SCO in bankruptcy court is slim. You can sell your claim if anyone will buy it, usually for a price that may be less than you are owed, but at least you have something. In real money. In a real world.
Novell’s sale is very important not just because of SUSE (with liabilities from the notorious Microsoft deal) and Novell’s many software patents; it’s also important because of UNIX, which needs to be put in safe hands such as IBM’s. A dead Novell is in some ways more menacing than a Novell that’s alive and helping Microsoft. █
Posted in Finance, Novell at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The absurd bonus of Ron Hovsepian grabs the attention of news sites other than Techrights
NOVELL’S CEO Ron Hovsepian is currently overpaid, as we argued just one week ago. This is now being noted by PC Pro, which has the article “Top tech execs paid millions for failure”. It says:
Ronald Hovespian of Novell, for example was the lowest-paid CEO on the 25 Overpaid list, receiving a paltry $5.2 million in total compensation last year.
Although the pay level is considered “quite reasonable” compared to other executives, it came during a year in which Novell’s stock dropped 12% and the company reported a negative return on equity of 21%.
There is more about it here and in a new article from India the author says that “Eric Schmidt stepped out of the comfort of being in large companies like Sun and Novell with thousands of customers, to join what was then a virtually unknown start-up, Google. That too as a part of the three-member management team with the founders who were actively involved in running the company with him. His compensation was $250K+bonus, far less than the $600K base he had at Novell and, perhaps, even Sun before that.”
How does Hovsepian justify getting paid more than 100 times what some of his workers are paid (including those who got laid off)? And in bonuses alone???
Plymouth, MI-based Stardock today announced the hiring of a new senior producer who was recruited from outside of the games industry for his project management background at infrastructure software company Novell.
When exactly did he leave Novell? Is this another project manager who ended up leaving Novell? █
There have been fears among free and open source software community members that Mono could prove to be a patent trap and this statement from De Icaza confirmed that people were right to entertain such fears – after all if he had boldly gone beyond the ECMA specs, he could well have incorporated code that violated patents belonging to Microsoft.
[...]
Blogger Jason Melton, who follows the progress of Mono much more closely than I do, said that at least one vocal Mono supporter “has said that they will not separate the portions and have abandoned plans to do so, because ‘people would just complain anyway’.”
[...]
I haven’t asked either De Icaza or Novell about the release of the ECMA-compliant Mono source – neither will respond, of that I’m sure. De Icaza only deals with journalists who are willing to swallow his spin. The same applies to Novell.
Will Novell and Microsoft step up and clarify? If all the above is true, then Mono is a patent trap as a whole, not just parts of it. Mono, Novell and Microsoft apologists love to just mock, daemonise, intimidate or at best ignore those who point out the obvious. █
Humans are creatures of habit, so after years of using Windows–or Mac, if that’s the case–it’s hard not to expect what you’re used to every time you use a computer.
Ubuntu and recent Linux distributions have incorporated many user-friendliness features from their Windows and Mac competitors in recent years, so there is actually going to be quite a bit of similarity these days–much more than there used to be. When it comes right down to it, though, even consumer-ready Maverick Meerkat isn’t Windows, and you shouldn’t expect it to be.
This is not–I repeat, NOT–to say that things are harder. Linux is not more difficult to use, especially if you’re on a modern distro like Ubuntu. It is, however, different. It might take you a little bit of time to get used to its slightly different way of doing things. Don’t let that put you off–a small learning curve will gain you a lifetime of advantages.
Many banks use UNIX or GNU/Linux for servers because they want performance and reliability. Why do these guys settle for less? I would guess they have been working on false assumptions for a while to get so locked-in.
Talk about price/performance. The software they will be using cost so little, the LSE bought the company and will be selling the product. They expect to get 8 transactions to the millisecond.
For those of you that have been wondering about the state of hybrid graphics support for notebooks running Linux, sadly the situation has yet to improve, which still puts it in shambles.
Ajaxterm is a web based terminal. It was totally inspired and works almost on all OS. Ajaxterm written in python (and some AJAX javascript for client side) and depends only on python2.3 or better. Ajaxterm is ”’very simple to install”’ on Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, cygwin and any Unix that runs python2.3.
The thing that needs improvement is bicycle routing. I mean in general it works, but when using it in practice it matters a lot (a) what bike you use and (b) what kind of driver you are. So it’s nonsense to have a single bicycle routing profile. I want:
* MTB offroad
* MTB shortest route
* racing using the shortest route (traffic doesn’t matter)
* racing using the “nicest” route (cycleways, not too much traffic)
* family (cycleways only if possible)
So I started using the GNOME Desktop last millennium, and over the last more than a decade have overall been quite impressed with the level of polish. It made a nice change in some ways from Enlightenment, and CDE, which were my previous desktop environments, and I coul live with the RAM footprint (after all, enlightenment is using 1.3GB of RAM now).
The last few years in particular have seen a growing trend to be more (but not quite) Mac-like, with lots of advanced features being buried over time, and over-simplification (for example, with sound controls). These are minor frustrations, but they can typically be worked around without much hassle and the experience remains overall quite good on GNOME 2.0. Things that used to be a hassle – like notifications, events, etc. and lot of plumbing have been worked out nicely by now. I love the work David Zeuthen and co. have done in particular, but many others have done good things.
[...]
For now, my advice is to run “desktop-effects” and switch back to regular panels…
Cloudera, a leading provider of Hadoop-based data management software and services, today announced its final major update to Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop version 3 beta release. Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop (CDH) is the most comprehensive Hadoop-based data management platform available, comprised of an integrated set of the eleven leading Hadoop projects, all available under an Apache license.
Listening to a review of the new Ubuntu release I could not help but notice the amount of hype Shuttleworth’s little distribution can generate. Can you feel it? The buzz is orders of magnitude greater than with any new major distro release. I’ve criticized Ubuntu in the past, but there is no denying that Ubuntu is a milestone in desktop Linux and has done a great deal of good by making Linux adoption easier for the masses.
I decided to once again examine the Distrowatch distribution rankings. While these are just a very rough estimates based on site analytics, they give us a relatively good picture of the current state in GNU/Linux land. In this article I would like to highlight a few distributions that have, to put it bluntly, left me completely confused as to where the projects are heading.
The bad news is that you won’t be able to use ZFS as your root filesystem in Debian Squeeze with the official installer. The blocker is missing support in GNU Parted. Unfortunately the patch I sent in August wasn’t integrated in time for the freeze (and still isn’t, but there’s no hurry now, it’ll hopefully be there for Wheezy).
Ubuntu 10.10 final is released and we already had a massive post describing the different customizations possible with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Now it’s time for some wallpapers. Here is a quick collection of wallpapers for Ubuntu 10.10, mostly branded ones.
By far the most popular Linux distribution ever, Ubuntu has been the forerunner in terms of development and use aimed at new linux users coming from Windows or Mac. This is “the” distro when new Linux users want to experiment and eventually migrate from Windows to the free alternative; Linux.
Ubuntu Tweak is every newbie Ubuntu user’s closest companion and we have already seen how Ubuntu Tweak is slowly evolving into one among the must have installation candidates for Ubuntu in our Ubuntu Tweak review. And with the new mockup UI, the next phase of development for Ubuntu Tweak has only started.
KPK arrives in Kubuntu 10.10 dressed for success. With an application-centric interface, new features, tools, and improvements, we finally have a default package manager to be proud of. I sure am floored by it.
Direct Insight announced a SODIMM-sized computer-on-module (COM) based on Freescale’s ARM9-based i.MX28 system-on-chip. The 455MHz, 2.7 x 1.0-inch Triton-TX28 module offers extensive I/O, including Ethernet and USB 2.0 On-The-Go and host, plus an available “StarterKit-5″ baseboard with a Linux board support package, says the company.
French carrier SFR briefly advertised a “Palm Pre 2″ on its website, raising speculation that the Pre 2 is the WebOS-running device HP has slated for early 2011. The Palm Pre 2 has a faster 1GHz processor, improved battery life, faster boot time, and a WebOS 2.0 release that offers push integration, according to the advertisement.
The Nokia N900 mobile-phone was released nearly one year ago with the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system, but earlier this year is when Nokia and Intel decided to combine their Linux-based Maemo and Moblin operating systems, respectively, to form MeeGo. The MeeGo Linux distribution is now running well on Intel Atom netbooks and other devices and there is is even MeeGo IVI for your car and a MeeGo handset preview. However, support for the N900 within MeeGo hasn’t been up to speed compared to the level of Maemo support or that of other devices playing well with MeeGo. The support though is slowly but surely catching up for the Nokia N900.
Better modularisation is also on the agenda. For example, as the QtWebkit component for rendering HTML is seeing rapid enhancement, the developers want to be able to easily update that component without updating the entire framework. Another focus of the development work is the full integration of gestures and tactile feedback into the Qt framework.
The Android implementation on Acer’s recently launched dual-boot netbooks feels more like a technology preview than a usable product. It is buggy and inextensible, with no possibility to install extra applications from the Android Market or any other repository. As such, it is limited to basic tasks, such as Internet browsing, web interaction, image viewing and media playback. It’s hard to say who the product is intended for – the Windows crowd will take one quick look and never boot into it again, while any Linux geek will surely prefer a proper Linux distribution or one of the netbook-oriented variants. Perhaps the only positive point is that by providing a Linux-based alternative on its netbooks, Acer was forced to build these computers from Linux-friendly hardware components, so there are no unwelcome surprises when it comes to hardware support.
Sony just made the first actual Google TV official with their new 46-inch GT1 Sony Internet TV. Billed as the first television with the ability to enjoy apps, watch HDTV, and browse the internet on one device, it runs $1,399 and comes with an RF QWERTY keypad remote with integrated optical mouse.
Sony unveiled four Sony Internet TVs and an Internet TV Blu-Ray Disc Player, all running Android-based Google TV software. Employing an Intel Atom-based CE4100 SoC, the new Internet TV devices range from 24-inch to 46-inch HDTVs, ship with a QWERTY-enabled remote, and offer Wi-Fi, HDMI, and USB connectivity.
Android is behind the second-quarter successes of HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, reports iSuppli. Meanwhile, global smartphone sales during the quarter reached 60.4 million units, up from 55.8 million units during the first quarter, representing a growth of 8.2 percent, says the research firm.
Acer announced a dual-boot Windows 7/Android netbook, featuring Intel’s dual-core Atom D550 or single-core Atom N450 processors. The Acer Aspire One Happy offers a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, up to 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive (HDD), plus 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB ports, and eight hours of battery life, says the company.
I think it will play very much like the iPhone played out. I think for the first year or so, it’s going to be advantage, Apple. But I think that as more of the Android tables come out and get optimized, you’re going to see some very stiff competition.
As a category, the tablet is undeniably going to be the winning category in mobile computing in the next decade, but as far as the market share win, ultimately we think that Apple won’t have the majority of the market share. It will probably be with Android-based tablets.
[...]
Microsoft is coming from a standing start. Unfortunately, for Microsoft, they’ve got a lot of work to do if they want to be relevant.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has projected that Android is likely to surpass Apple in a fast-growing tablet market that he says is “fundamentally shaking” the PC industry. The battle between Android tablets and Apple’s iPad will be close, said Munster on BusinessInsider, with the iPad coming up big in a place where you’d least expect it — the enterprise.
While Android 3.0 will bring a lot of nifty improvements, for users as well as developers, tablets running earlier versions of the operating system will be perfectly capable devices in their own right. And when we do get 3.0, we’ll be lusting after 3.1 and 4.0 instead – and the circle begins anew…
ZTE Corp, China’s No.2 telecommunications equipment maker, on Tuesday launched its first tablet PC, the latest entrant to a market that has received a new lease on life with Apple Inc’s iPad launch.
Over the last few years, many advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the banner of piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace advocates of piracy as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? I believe that, unintuitively, if we take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced “middle ground” response to piracy is possible. On free culture and free software’s terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an shortsighted and unwise way to try to promote sharing that we should not support.
The point of Open Source 4.0 is that collaborating with community development is not to the detriment of putting food on the table. In fact, collaborating with community is fundamental to putting more food on the table than would otherwise be possible with vendor-led development, open source or proprietary.
Siemens and VMware Ink Hosted Desktop Pact for VMware View 4.5-Based Service Offering; VMware View 4.5 Dramatically Lowers Datacenter Acquisition Costs for Virtual Desktops — Delivers First Sub-$300 Price Point; New Zimbra Desktop 2.0 Delivers Offline Access to Zimbra Collaboration Suite While Integrating New Social Tools
I swear, my intention was to go for a break. A year taking pictures, sharing them over the web, writing texts, running, kayaking, just being social. Honestly, ask my family and friends!
But this was not to be, in spite of what I said when I announced my resignation just days ago. Instead, I am joining SkySQL Ab, the startup that aims to become a new centre for the MySQL universe. My role will span Marketing and Engineering, and is like the title “EVP Products” inspired by Zack Urlocker’s role at MySQL AB.
Oracle and IBM 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.
With today’s news, the two companies will make the OpenJDK community the primary location for open source Java SE development. The Java Community Process (JCP) will continue to be the primary standards body for Java specification work and both companies will work to continue to enhance the JCP.
That Java the ecosystem is a larger work, a massive collective effort, is not in dispute. But as the JCP’s more vocal critics have observed in the past, Sun was for better or worse the commercial entity behind Java. Whether or not the profits from its work matched that of others in the ecosystem.
Pentaho Corporation, the leader in open source business intelligence (BI) and data integration, today announced plans to enable Pentaho Data Integration for Hadoop to easily integrate with Hadoop data stored in Amazon Elastic MapReduce. As a result, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) customers can leverage Pentaho’s ETL capabilities to deploy a hybrid data model whereby they can easily move data between Amazon Elastic MapReduce and databases, data warehouses and other cloud based and on-premise data stores.
Developed by Quest, OraOop is designed as a freeware plug-in to Sqoop, Cloudera’s existing open-source framework. OraOop provides a faster, more scalable solution for the enterprise that has performed up to five times faster than Sqoop alone for highly clustered data during testing. OraOop also avoids scalability issues that can occur with Sqoop when data has no primary key or is not stored in primary key order, and provides users with a reduced overhead on the Oracle instance – up to 80 percent reduction in CPU consumption, and up to 95 percent reduction in IO time.
In addition, Release 6.3 includes enhanced capabilities for monitoring large-scale networks through the inclusion of the Cacti network data collection project.
The FFII calls for better access to public data for commercial and non-commercial purposes. A consultation is now open for public contributions. Citizens, companies, and stakeholders can weight in on opening data for re-use.
“The idea is that it will teach people about how to best extract and interpret the data to produce meaningful statistics which may be useful to them as individuals or their organisations,” say the organisers.
Things got pushed back a few times, but now, as announced in a new thread, all new videos uploaded to YouTube in WebM will be available in WebM, finally giving uploaders the ability to make sure their videos can be viewed in a free format using HTML5. This is an important step, and hopefully it will serve to increase the use of free formats for video offline as well. Towards that end, perhaps they can also make sure videos uploaded in other free formats like Ogg Theora are viewable in WebM too.
You may have noticed the percentage figure I used before when I said that the computing world is more than ninety percent run on inertia. I chose that figure for a particular reason. Not only is a certain software platform installed on more than ninety percent of computers it is also a fact that more than ninety percent of the users of this platform use it purely because it comes preloaded and not because they choose to use it. They have no real understanding of this operating system and to them a computer is no different to a television or toaster. Much to the delight of spam, virus and botnet maintainers.
I don’t know about you, I am tired of all this fraudclosure stuff…I am concerned that our best and brightest will not be adequately rewarded for all their good works!
Health insurance industry front groups and their allies are flooding the airwaves with political ads presenting false information about health reform and its supporters, so Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is using laughter to fight back. HCAN, the coalition that led the successful fight for health reform, collaborated with celebrated actors Jack Black and America Ferrera to create a hilarious video lampooning corporate liars for hire—front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads and 60 Plus Association. These kinds of groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on political propaganda to mislead voters in advance of the November election. On the most important questions facing the country’s future—the economy, energy, financial reform and health care—the anti-progressive myth-making machine is going at full tilt, fueled by mountains of campaign cash from unidentified sources.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the health insurance industry and a slew of new front groups that refuse to reveal their funding sources (like the 60 Plus Association and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads), have been pouring millions of dollars into advertising campaigns that present false information about health reform, financial reform and the economy.
If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, “Propaganda,” by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.
For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.
Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, “It will come to him as his own idea.”
Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is “disease branding.”
To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Panic disorder, reflux disease, erectile dysfunction, restless legs syndrome, bipolar disorder, overactive bladder, ADHD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, even clinical depression: All these conditions were once regarded as rare until a marketing campaign transformed the brand.
While noting that it took seriously the concerns raised by EFF and others in an amicus brief, a federal judge in New Jersey in the case of U.S. v. Lowson yesterday decided to delay a decision on the thorny question of whether the government can use the Ticketmaster website’s terms of use to smack ticket resellers with criminal charges. The Court allowed a federal indictment under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of online ticket vendors to go to trial in order to develop a more complete factual record.
A new billboard on I-70B between Grand Junction and Clifton is creating quite a stir.
It is a political cartoon of President Barack Obama. The billboard is being paid for by a local man who wants to remain anonymous. But, the artist he hired met with KJCT News 8 to talk about his work.
A new report by the SaveOurNet coalition gives the New Democrats top marks for its political leadership on net neutrality. The coalition – comprised of citizens, businesses, and public interest groups – advocates for clear rules on Net Neutrality and the protection of the Internet’s level playing field.
Piracy is stealing, piracy is a crime, piracy is (fill in the blank). We’ve all heard what piracy is as per RIAA, MPAA among others. But what really is piracy from a consumer point of view?
Michael Geist’s edited collection of essays on copyright reform is being released on October 14th, and you are welcome to attend its launch. This exciting and timely publication, entitled ‘From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda’, contains twenty chapters written by copyright scholars from across Canada. It is to Geist’s credit that he was able to pull this book together on a tight timeline over the summer so that the views expressed therein can have a bearing on the reform process as it continues to unfold. Of course, the speed of this process also reflects a keen sense amongst Canadian copyright scholars that something important needs to be said (and heard) sooner rather than later.
I was honoured to be included as a contributor, and to have this opportunity to add my voice to the chorus of voices expressing concern about latest copyright reform bill, Bill C-32 (the Copyright Modernization Act. My contribution, ‘Locking Out Lawful Users’, explores the proposed fair dealing and other user exceptions, both in their own right and in relation to the proposed anti-circumvention provisions.
This book responds to the need for non-partisan, informed analysis of Bill C-32. An exceptional group of Canadian scholars from coast-to-coast have come together to assess Canada’s plans for copyright reform and the digital agenda in this timely volume that features context for the reforms, analysis of its impact on technology, business, education, and creators, as well as a look ahead to future copyright and digital issues.
Not a lot of happy Canadians over on the comments page for CBC Radio’s program Spark. The producers for the radio show, blog, and podcast on technology issues have disclosed that the program won’t be using Creative Commons licensed materials any more.
Here at Linux Format HQ we’ve got oodles of spare discs from previous issues of the magazine. Instead of sending them all to the recyclers, we’d love to get them in the hands of prospective Linux users. So, if you work in education, run a Linux User Group or have any other opportunity to spread the word of free software, email Mike DOT Saunders AT futurenet DOT com with your address and we’ll put a collection in the post.
The Linux Foundation says Linux is poised for significant growth in the enterprise, some of it at the expense of Windows servers. 76.4% of companies surveyed are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months. 41.2% are increasing their Windows servers, while 43.6% will decrease or stay the same. Over the next five years 79.4% of businesses surveyed plan to add more Linux servers compared to other operating systems, while only 21.3% plan to add more Windows servers.
Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) is taking aim at the enterprise with a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switching platform that is the cornerstone of its new Application Fluent Networks strategy.
The OmniSwitch 10K platform can scale up to 256 10GbE ports, delivering up to 5.12 TBS of total switching capacity. The new switching platform includes technologies from Alcatel-Lucent’s experience with service providers. The OmniSwitch 10K is also the first enterprise platform from Alcatel-Lucent to leverage its new Linux-based AOS 7 network operating system.
The Linux Foundation conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 enterprise users and found that 76.4 percent of respondents are set to add Linux servers in the next 12 months. In contrast, only 41.2 percent of respondents indicated that they planned to be adding new Windows servers during that same period. The picture looks even brighter for Linux when looking at the five year view. According to the Linux Foundation’s data, during the next five years 79.4 percent of enterprises will be adding more Linux servers, while only 21.3 percent will be adding new Windows servers.
The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 2, ArchBang 2010.10, Calculate Linux 10.9 and Ubuntu 10.10.
QNAP has announced its VioStor Pro Series of Linux-based Network Video Recorders (NVR). The company claims the VioStor Pro Series is the world’s first Linux-based NVR to offer PC-less quick configuration, IP monitoring of cameras over a network, and HD video playback on a monitor or TV.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has confirmed Linux users will finally have access to its AUSkey authentication software within two months, following compatibility complaints in May when the service eas launched with for Windows and Mac OS X only.
The initiative comprises the use of an encrypted software key for the Standard Business Reporting (SBR) scheme launched this year, and seeks to save time dealing with up to 12 state and Federal government agencies for financial reporting and to access services.
The picture that emerges is very consistent: people using GNU/Linux are happy with it, and intend installing more of it, for more mission-critical tasks. Interestingly, they are even beginning to swap out Windows systems as well as the old Unix boxes. An important shift is that GNU/Linux is now sufficiently mature and familiar in this context to be seen as “more strategic” to the organisation in the CIO/management’s eyes. The main driver for adoption among correspondents is Features/technical superiority, ahead of TCO and security.
SGI is a venerable name in high-performance computing, but the company was buffeted by the arrival of mainstream technology that could match its highly specialized equipment. Its MIPS processor and Irix version of Unix gradually lost out to Intel and AMD processors and to the Linux operating system. In 2009 hardware upstart Rackable bought SGI and adopted its name and stock ticker.
The London Stock Exchange has completed the first “dress rehearsal”, a test with its customers online, of a new Linux-based system due to replace Microsoft-centric architecture.
The capability to run the Rational Developer for Power Systems Software (RDP) development environment on Linux-based PCs is one of the big new features that IBM has included with RDP version 8, which was unveiled last week and ships later this month. Also, a new “Power Tools” feature should make it easier to combine Java, RPG, and COBOL development on the IBM i platform.
Last month we carried out our fourth annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we sought feedback from the Linux community about the most common graphics drivers and hardware in use, what display/GPU-related features desktop users are most interested in, and collect other metrics to aide developers. Here are the results from this year’s survey.
Have you cleaned up your Linux installation lately? On its face, that question might wrongly mark me as a Linux newbie, much like a Linux newcomer asking about antivirus and antimalware software. But I am far from being a newbie to Linux. That said, three program packages designed to clean out your Linux dustbins can keep your OS working like new.
The expanding role of Linux in our lives is undeniable. From the servers that run our favorite websites to the smartphones that keep us on the grid, Linux continues to make a major impact in the way we connect, transfer and manipulate electronic data. However, few books have plumbed the depths of the heart of the Linux OS. Does this latest attempt by author and Linux hacker Michael Kerrisk satiate this market need? Read on to find out.
In previous posts, I have highlighted some of the outstanding new native Linux games that are coming out soon or have been out but may not be well known. For many Linux gamers, however, the pool of native Linux games is still too small.
As most already know, it is possible to play some Windows games in Linux using Wine. Additionally, there are two prominent commercial spin-offs of Wine that are both designed specifically for gaming: Cedega and CrossOver Games. At one time, there was little difference between the three, other than the graphical configuration interfaces. But over time, each has developed its own feature set and, in some cases, support for Windows functionality that the others do not possess.
First, I’d like to note that none of this would be possible without the fantastic work going on at Nokia’s Qt development offices. They are tackling hard and interesting problems with gusto and producing some very nice results in the process. QtComponents is being developed very much in the open right from the start: an open mailing list for all dev discussion, a public git repo that even contains experiments and early code sketches, a set of use cases and open tasks in Jira. Outreach to community members such as myself, which allowed me to join their design sessions last week, is just one more piece of this. This open from end-to-end, right from the beginning development model is part of the “new Qt” ecosystem that is the culmination of years of consistent effort on the part of many individuals involved with Qt. It’s paying off now, and I hope that all new Qt components undertake a similar, or even the exact same, type of approach.
In the Free Software ecosystem, nearly everybody has heard about KDE. People associate us with a great desktop environment and some interesting applications. On other desktops there may be installations of KDE software, but those people may not know a single KDE application. This is why Torsten Rahn and Bastian Holst went to INTERGEO this year to present Marble.
In GNOME Shell an “activity” is a virtual desktop, the same thing we’ve all come to know and love since X got support for them in 1989 based on work done earlier at Xerox PARC. Virtual desktops rock, and GNOME Shell has added an enforced overview (with +/- buttons to easily add and remove virtual desktops, something also in KWin these days) along with an integrated application and document launcher sidebar to the idea. They call this “activities” in an attempt to make the abstract and geekish “virtual desktops” more approachable to people. It is not, however, what most humans would call an activity in every day conversation. It’s just a more recognizable name for an old concept that they gave some polish.
Skolelinux is often refered to as Debian Edu or the educational subset of the GNU/Linux distribution Debian. It is a Debian Pure Blend, a subset of Debianskolelinux-logo that has been tailored to be used out-of-the-box in schools.
Ubuntu 10.10, code-named “Maverick Meerkat,” entered beta testing earlier this month. The software makes some incremental improvements over Ubuntu 10.04, the current version, including continued beautification of its GUI, broader application support and streamlined management under the hood.
Apparently Taiwanese hardware manufactures are collectively betting that Dell is going to be first to market with Ubuntu 10.10 on its netbooks. According to Digitimes, we’ll be seeing Canonical’s consumer friendly Ubuntu 10.10 Linux flavoured Dell netbooks shipping within a month.
I have spent a little time with Ubuntu 10.10 over the past few days. I never bother “reviewing” Ubuntu any more, mostly because it’s veered far wide of what I want from a distro.
With Ubuntu 10.10, the latest version of the world’s most popular Linux distribution, having made its debut on October 10, it’s time for a new release cycle to begin. To get a sense of what Ubuntu developers might be focusing on going forward, I spoke recently with Canonical’s Steve George, VP of business development. Here’s what he had to say.
The release of Kubuntu 10.10 includes both the “standard” KDE Plasma Desktop and the special Plasma Netbook desktop. During the boot processing, KDE determines which of these two is more likely to be “correct” for your system, presumably based on screen size and/or resolution, although I don’t know the exact parameters.
UberStudent comes as an interesting experiment. After having reviewed openSUSE 11.3 Edu-Li-f-e and mFatOS a few weeks ago, I see it this way: openSUSE Edu-Li-f-e is a great educational distribution, with tons of programs and spotless integration; mFatOS is a fairly successful Ubuntu conversion. Now, what happens if you combine the two? Can you have a great educational distribution based on Ubuntu?
This is going to be a little different from my normal fair as this is going to be a brief overview of a great little router I recently learned about (and purchased). In the future I may do additional guides on it, but for now I’m just going to give it a good overview in-case anyone is in the market and might have use for it.
Before we get into it though, the topic of focus, the ASUS RT-N16, is a Gigabit and Wireless-N compatible router that uses a Linux kernel based firmware (essentially, the operating system) by default. The default firmware (or, operating system) on the router can be replaced with a different operating system (OS) such as TomatoUSB.
Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), provider of award-winning embedded Linux solutions and expert Linux support, today announced the addition of a new solution, LinuxLink for Rich Multimedia User Interfaces (Rich MUI). The new solution allows developers to easily build multi-media UI-based devices and reduces platform and application development startup time from months to days.
Policy group New America has written a scathing blog entry that criticizes the HTC G2 for including a “hardware rootkit” that prevents users from installing custom firmware on the device. The report appears, however, to be based on a misunderstanding of technical issues raised in an XDA discussion thread. The G2 isn’t unique in blocking third-party firmware, and it doesn’t come with anything that could correctly be described as a rootkit.
Mozilla has announced the launch of a new community care programme to help Firefox users get answers to their everyday questions about the cross-platform, open source browser. In a post on the Mozilla Blog, Mozilla Community Builder William Reynolds says that, “Every day, thousands of people tweet their Firefox questions”, and that the developers, “wanted to set up a lightweight way for them to get answers right away from fellow Firefox users”.
In a move which analysts say demonstrates continual commitment to Java, both vendors announce new initiative to drive the open source platform including Open Java Development Kit and Java Community Process.
As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0), BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions as feasible under current laws. I believe that better communities for software development are enabled by these liberal licensing situations. Rather than creating a single power with significantly more rights, as seen in the “open core” movement, liberal open source development encourages real, dedicated and sustainable contributions, made by companies with business models other than selling support and ‘enterprise features’.
Little added that IBM’s commitment to open source development for OpenJDK is consistent with Red Hat’s philosophy and they are happy to support it. Considering that Red Hat has already been at the OpenJDK table for three years, Little’s comments don’t surprise me.
Oracle and IBM announced on Oct. 11 that the companies will collaborate on the OpenJDK reference implementation. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation (most of it under the GPLv2) of Java Standard Edition (SE) 6.
In a press conference, IBM and Oracle officials said that the collaboration will center on the OpenJDK project and its related Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). At the same time though, the Java Community Process (JCP) will continue to be the primary standards body for Java specification work and both companies will work to continue to enhance the JCP.
Open source enthusiasts have claimed independence for the free office software Openoffice.org, from Oracle’s Sun Microsystems after 10 years.
“The community has been discussing this opportunity for years, but Sun and Oracle have not been in the listening mood. It is time to move and become independent, in order to express the entire potential of the project and the community,” says Italo Vignoli, member of Libre Office volunteer group, The Document Foundation.
OpenOffice.org went live just ten years ago, on the 13rd of October 2000.Having been a community member for over 8 years, it is a good chance to recap what I have done until now.
Oracle sought to dispel any doubts about its commitment to OpenOffice.org on Wednesday, announcing its participation in the ODF Plugfest event in Brussels this week and talking up future development plans for the open source productivity suite.
While some users of the Lenovo G555 laptop and its Atheros AR8132 Ethernet interface report no trouble with networking in OpenBSD using the alc driver (courtesy of FreeBSD) that made its debut in version 4.7 of the operating system, that wasn’t the case for me.
The agenda includes several items of great interest to the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the Free Software or open source community at large. Free Software relies on licenses to give users the freedom to use, study, share and improve a program. These licences in turn rely on copyright. Free Software is, however, fundamentally incompatible with patents on software.
Free Software underpins an economy the worth of which is approaching 50bn. It has come to be widely used not only in general purpose computers, but even more so in embedded devices such as cars, televisions and elevators.
A quick note to let you know that the GreenPois0n download for Linux is now available. Up until now, only the Windows version was available on the site.
Or imagine Microsoft as Ford and that Bristol is seeing the birth of Toyota. The problem is the only work Bristol City Council will have for local open source developers is in support of the Microsoft software they have been forced to buy because proprietary Microsoft standards are as sure a drain on progress as any protectionist trade agreement foisted by European colonial powers on hapless African chieftains.
That’s not any reason to hate Microsoft, as they say. Not any more than a teenager might hate an overbearing parent.
It’s all part of growing up. And the turn of generations. Something has to give. Because from Bristol’s perspective, “the only realistic alternatives are revolution or continued dependency”, to quote the development sociologist Ian Roxborough.
In a 2005 interview with the BBC, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee referred to the rise of wikis, or “editable Web spaces,” as meeting his original vision for a readable and writable communications medium. The success of such a medium was already apparent, as Wikipedia (only four years old at the time) had already surpassed 750,000 English language articles and today ranks among the highest trafficked websites on the planet.
Sugata Mitra began with a question: “What would happen if I cut a hole in the wall that separates my New Delhi office building from a neighboring slum… and embedded a computer for children to access?”
The challenge in working for government transparency is that you are always working against its opposite: opacity. What we don’t see is often what’s most harmful to us. When the Upper Big Branch Mine exploded in West Virginia last April and killed 27 miners, we were surprised because most of us had never seen it coming. The sad thing is, many of the experts didn’t see it coming either.
The Evans Data Open Source Software Development Survey of over 350 developers also found that 16 per cent of those developers spent more than half of their work hours developing those applications.
Venky Hariharan explains: “The risk is that they will create a mountain of data and one day end up losing it because the person or company that owns that particular format has disappeared or because the royalty fees that are being charged on that formats are extremely high. By using open standards, you can completely avoid all these issues.”
In the first part of this two-part series on the importance of open standards, Hariharan details what open standards are, why open standards are appropriate for e-government, and why you should care about how your government preserves your data.
Anyway, the System/360 project had a huge mandate from IBM: the design had to include software which would hide the differences among the different System/360 models. (That software became OS/360, from which experience Fred Brooks wrote the inestimable volume The Mythical Man-month.) The system was a success, despite numerous obstacles, and became so popular that today’s powerful System/390 will still run programs built on the original System/360.
This philosophy on programming by intentions, rather than to the hardware, gave rise to the compact and highly symbolic (hence immensely popular) C programming language, designed by the originators of the portable Unix operating system.
[...]
Some may deride such “old school” studies. My response is to remind them that great work comes from great challenges. The sonnet form gave William Shakespeare a framework for the greatest soliloquies in the English language. What would Georges Seurat’s paintings be like without the slow, dot-by-dot technique? The first running version of Unix was on a PDP-11/20, the very first delivered PDP-11 model, very weak by today’s standards.
British journalist Andrew Marr has angered bloggers by suggesting they are “inadequate, pimpled and single.” Marr, who was formerly the BBC’s political editor, also said that citizen journalism is “spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night”. He made the comments at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, saying: “A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.”
With the recent news coming out that the feds plan to introduce dangerous legislation early next year to mandate backdoors for wiretapping into every form of internet communications, plenty of people have expressed their horror at such a plan. It’s not just the basic questions of due process and privacy, but the massive burdens lumped upon all sorts of companies, combined with the equally worrisome security holes opened up by such demands.
ublic health systems in Europe can no longer pay their pharmaceutical bills and have started to do something about it
What began in Spain and Greece as a response to budget deficits has now become a general trend. Now national drug-pricing authorities across Europe are taking on run-away health spending in the context of severe financial constraints.
Underway is a new harmonization in the way governments asses the value of medicines.
At a time when IT budgets are closely examined for cuts that can be lived with, a survey among senior executives of 17 companies (including Fortune 500 companies) across the financial services and government sectors reveals whether the benefits of software security assurance investments outweigh the drawbacks.
The military is scrambling to identify disgruntled or radicalized troops who pose a threat to themselves or their buddies. So the futurists at Darpa are asking for algorithms to find and pre-empt anyone planning the next Fort Hood massacre, WikiLeaks document dump or suicide-in-uniform.
Taking a cue from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are seeking to re-engineer the Internet and other digital communications networks to make them easier to spy on.
In the week since the plan became public, it has been roundly condemned by civil liberties groups and security experts — and rightly so. While the proposal described in Monday’s New York Times probably won’t do much to hinder sophisticated criminals or terrorists, it does threaten to undermine the security of global communications and stifle technological innovation.
The Federal Reserve is leaning toward taking two steps to boost the economy: Buying more Treasury bonds to drive down loan rates, and signaling an openness to higher prices later to encourage more spending now.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues appeared to be nearing consensus on those ideas at their September 21 meeting, according to minutes of the closed-door deliberations that were released Tuesday.
A Minnesota bank filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming that a law overseeing debit card swipe fees is unconstitutional and requested that it be overturned.
The legislation, which Congress passed this summer as part of the wide-reaching financial overhaul package, directs the Federal Reserve to study the fees that banks receive from retailers each time a shopper uses a debit card to make sure they are “reasonable and proportional.” But in the first legal challenge to the law, TCF National Bank says that the language does not allow the Fed to consider all the costs of providing and maintaining consumer debit cards. It also argues that the legislation is unfair because it applies only to banks with $10 billion or more in assets.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of the architects of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, said Tuesday that the White House was likely to nominate a director for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the coming days, but he was doubtful that a nominee would be confirmed before the new Congress takes over in January.
Mr. Dodd, speaking at New York University Law School’s fourth annual Global Economic Policy Forum, said he would support Elizabeth Warren, above, the Harvard law professor who is setting up the new consumer bureau, if the White House nominates her to be its director. But he reiterated his view that Ms. Warren, a strong consumer advocate, would have trouble being confirmed because of opposition from Republicans and the financial industry.
Federal regulators are proposing rules that would mean shareholders and other creditors of big failed financial firms seized by the government should expect to suffer losses and won’t receive any taxpayer money.
For most Americans at risk of losing their homes, the brutal business of foreclosure goes on.
Bank of America halted foreclosures across the country to address paperwork problems, but three other banks did so only in 23 states. Other banks holding millions of mortgages have not suspended any foreclosures.
A government watchdog is investigating government-owned GMAC Mortgage after a company employee admitted to approving thousands of foreclosures without reading the paperwork.
The special inspector general for the $700 billion financial bailout is looking into the improper foreclosures, which led GMAC Mortgage to halt foreclosures in 23 states, a spokeswoman for the watchdog said.
Amid a snowballing foreclosure fraud crisis, President Obama today blocked legislation that critics say could have made it more difficult for homeowners to challenge foreclosure proceedings against them.
The bill, titled The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2009, passed the Senate with unanimous consent and with no scrutiny by the DC media. In a maneuver known as a “pocket veto,” President Obama indirectly vetoed the legislation by declining to sign the bill passed by Congress while legislators are on recess.
This email came to me from SEIU – Service Employees International Union – a union, who for the most part, supports “the people”. I say, “for the most part” because there are times when I do disagree with them but as far as unions go, this is one of the better ones.
Facebook may be making strides in some areas of privacy, but the company is still struggling when it comes to deleting user photos—or not deleting them, as the case may be.
Readers of e-books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers.
Sooner or later, publishers are going to have to decide which they want: DRM and more piracy, and no DRM and less piracy. While I doubt that anything will ever completely eliminate illicit downloads, I think dropping DRM would go a long way toward cutting their numbers—especially if at the same time publishers focused on building communities the way Baen has. Baen books are very rarely seen on pirate sites, in part because the community gives “faces” to the people who it would hurt.
I’ve just posted two new papers on the size of and ‘value’ the EU Public Domain. These papers are based on the research done as part of the Public Domain in Europe (EUPD) Research Project (which has now been submitted).
IRISH CABLE OPERATOR UPC has won a landmark case against the ‘three-strikes’ punishment of Internet filesharers that is being pushed by the entertainment cartels.
The Irish High Court has ruled against Warner Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG and EMI Records for leaning on UPC to implement the draconian three-strikes system to prosecute filesharers.
Four of the world’s largest record companies have failed in an attempt to get the “three strikes” rule enforced against illegal filesharers in Ireland.
Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI brought the case against UPC, one of Ireland’s largest broadband providers, in order to establish a legal precedent that would force internet service providers to cut off illegal filesharers’ internet connections.
Lord of the Rings Online Executive Producer Kate Paiz announced during a panel at GDC Online 2010 today that Turbine has done it again: Lord of the Rings Online has doubled its revenue and created over a million new accounts since going free-to-play early last month. That’s the second MMO Turbine has taken from a paid subscription to a hybrid microtransactions-based business model, with Dungeons and Dragons Online doing the same thing last year (important to note: Paiz was in charge of both transitions, switching to LotRO in July). Paiz told us after the panel that LotRO wasn’t in trouble, but rather that Turbine did the math and decided the switch would work. “We knew there was more out there for us,” she said.
If you follow copyright issues online, by now you’ve undoubtedly heard of the famous Lenz case, involving Universal Music issuing a takedown to YouTube on a 29-second home video a mother took of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song. While Universal didn’t protest the counternotice, the EFF sued, pointing out that it should have taken fair use into account.
NON-PROFIT ORGANISATION Creative Commons (CC) has announced its release of the Public Domain Mark (PDM), a way of distinguishing works that are free of known copyright.
CC said the PDM will “increase the value of the public domain” by making those works that carry it easier to find over the Internet. It is being pitched to academics and artists to show that they are able to freely re-use the material without fear of triggering takedown notices or risking litigation.
We had just written about the rise of a bunch of new pre-settlement shakedown shops, who send out massive amounts of lawsuits over claims of file sharing in order to get people to pay up. Just recently, some had noticed that these firms all seem to copy from each other, and now two of the firms may be heading to court over it. Seriously.
EXCLUSIVE: Last month, Fox News filed an unprecedented lawsuit against Democratic senatorial candidate Robin Carnahan, claiming she violated its copyright by using a Fox News clip in a campaign commercial against her challenger.
Now, Carnahan has struck back, telling a Missouri District Court that Fox News sued before properly registering copyright on the clip.
Notice how the ACTA negotiators conveniently left out the exclusion at the end. So for all the talk of how the new ACTA would only focus on “commercial scale” infringement, by subtly changing (mostly via omission) the definition of “commercial scale,” ACTA now covers an awful lot that most people would not, in fact, consider to be “commercial scale.” We’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether these omissions were done through incompetence or for other reasons.
Many ACTA supporters get very upset any time anyone refers to ACTA as a “treaty.” That’s because, technically, it’s an “executive agreement.” Of course, in reality, it is a treaty. The only real difference is one requires Congressional approval and the other does not. Even the State Department seems to admit that. Of course, technically speaking, a treaty can carry the weight of law in the US, while an executive agreement, by itself, cannot. And yet, in reality (again), there is little difference, as lobbyists will point to executive agreements, often calling them treaties, insisting that we need to “comply with our international obligations” and get lawmakers to change the law anyway.
Summary: Microsoft staff is spreading the love in public but does not name the paymaster
MEET Kurt. Microsoft pays him a wage and he wanders around Twitter promoting Microsoft products, working around the clock at the moment for Vista Phone 7 [sic] (see tweets like [1, 2, 3]). We’ve also learned that he is sometimes interrupting other people’s conversations in attempt to control the mood, so to speak, especially around the release of Vista Phone 7 [sic], the operating system so far behind that it can only rely on marketing and patent threats.
His blog seems like it may have been migrated from the now-dead/expiring Live Spaces [1, 2] and an old post from 2005 says:
I’ve been working for Microsoft since 1995 as a Systems Engineer. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that position, it’s basically a pre-sale technical sales role. Back in the 80′s, it was common for a single salesperson (Account Executive) to speak to customers, manage licensing contracts, and demonstrate products. Some time in the early 90′s, it was deemed near impossible for one person to accomplish all 3 tasks with the exploding number of products that we were creating. So in addition to the Account Exec role, we produced a role called the Systems Engineer, similar to what IBM had, whose responsibility was to understand and explain the usage and implementation of our technologies and how they could be best used together.
It is not unusual for Microsoft to use Twitter for marketing purposes and we wrote about the subject in posts such as:
Kurt has another blog from which our reader Tim quotes: “The thoughts expressed in this blog are my own and not representative of the opinions of my employer, the Microsoft Corporation.”
“Bingo!” says Tim, “He’s a Microsoft employee….now its all clear.
“There’s another advocate of Microsoft products….shame he’s an employee…I wonder, when will they get a person supporting them who isn’t on the payroll? [...] that one was too easy….. and it has reminded me why I started OpenBytes, to expose this type of thing….been sort of sidetracked by great FOSS software over the years… I should be basking in the glory of the find….unfortunately he was far too easy….. he interrupted a twitter conversation with a little WP7 promotion…. This is the blog he advertises on his Twitter profile: http://kurtsthoughts.com/ … and this is his wordpress blog (notice date of the latest post (11/10/10 so its current) http://kurtsh.wordpress.com/ [...] this is his twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/kurtsh [...] on his “official” twitter blog he doesn’t seem to mention his association [...] If you compare the pictures between the blog and the twitter account, I think you’ll agree its the same person. [...] It’s a little bit of a hollow victory, he was far too easy….did make me nostalgic for exposing these “impartial” Microsoft employees that forget to mention who they work for. [...] I discovered Kurt on the journey home on the train, so Im not getting much satisfaction from the find…it was about 10 minutes work [...] One last thing on my new best friend Microsoft Kurt……. He said on Twitter (before I found out who he was) Quote “our presumption of understanding my purported “self-imposed preference limits” based on a 140 char Twitter descriptn is laughable. [...] To which I answer…well not really, I was spot on.”
The above is from IRC. We are having connections issues with IRC at the moment, so we’ll resume posting the full logs for all the days shortly.
Kurt’s antics reminds us of Microsoft’s Wong, who was heckling our Web site one year ago (he did not disclose the fact that he was working for Microsoft). We wrote about this in:
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[satipera/@satipera] Excuse my Anglo Saxon but the Palestinians really are stuck in a game where the referee is a wanker. http://ur1.ca/21tnr #occupation
