10.27.10
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Partying like it’s the Tea Party
Summary: One of the Microsoft Mobbyists, Mr. Müller, is provoking Techrights for suggesting the connection between Gemalto’s anti-Android lawsuit and Microsoft, then proceeds to promoting Vista Phone 7 [sic]
IT IS ALWAYS interesting to analyse the reaction of mobbyists to Microsoft’s attacks on Linux or just generally to attacks on Linux. They celebrate the latest lawsuit against Google, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. It is a lawsuit from Microsoft's partner Gemalto (Gemalto also works with Linux, as we showed in [1, 2]) and there ought to be some assessment of the motives. Here is the LWN discussion, which this time for a change was not disrupted by .NET developer Florian Müller. He typically emits a lot of FUD there and it’s a problem because he is somewhat of a ‘fraud’ pretending to be a FOSS advocate while he’s actually the very opposite of that. The same goes for his stance on software patents. He seems to playing a role in Microsoft’s attack on Linux, which is why he is blocked and heavily criticised by a lot of people in the FOSS world (and ironically he puts “FOSS” in his user account, where he continues spreading FUD against FOSS).
“WP7 would be better deal then”
–Microsoft MüllerMüller is hardly fooling anyone anymore, which is why we no longer write about him (except this time because his sheep clothing got shaved and he keeps vilifying us). He is boosting Windows (Vista Phone 7 [sic]) using patent FUD against Linux right now. Where is the evidence? Well, he posted it in Twitter rather impulsively perhaps because he deleted this shortly later (maybe regrets, it was not reposted). Consider one tweet (broken link) where he said: “Microsoft reportedly collects patent royalties from Taiwanese manufacturers using Android http://bit.ly/c6Mh5P WP7 would be better deal then”
This tweet was also deleted:
IDG report on Microsoft allegedly collecting royalties on Android from Taiwanese manufacturers
We can only venture to guess that he tries not to speak too much like a Micros~1 lobbyi^H^H^Hampaigner for his clients. Here are later tweets that say:
Paying $10-15 per Android device just for Microsoft patents (not *everyone’s* patents) makes WP7 at $15 a bargain.
And this from Müller:
Google celebrates 100,000 Android apps but right now would rather have 10,000 patents in diverse fields for cross-licensing.
Google should quit patenting software (which it never used offensively). Google — unlike Microsoft — has not lobbied in favour of software patents, but the mobbyist is trying to paint Google as the problem, just like Glenn Beck would wish to portray President Obama as the cause of the financial crisis (which he merely inherited and must cope with). He never criticises Microsoft; what’s more, he is linking to his new friend Dana Blankenhorn, whom he has been feeding talking points for several months now. Blankenhorn says that “Microsoft strategy against Android comes together” and while it’s true that this is what Microsoft does against Linux and Android (nothing new), the mobbyists only promote it rather than do something about it like attempting to prevent it. That’s where sites like Groklaw, for example, are very different. Groklaw is against software patents, but Müller is attacking Groklaw. The FSF is against software patents, but Müller is insulting the FSF. The FFII is against software patents, but Müller has been attacking the FFII. And the list goes on…
“The FSF is against software patents, but Müller is insulting the FSF. The FFII is against software patents, but Müller has been attacking the FFII.”Funnily enough, the only people Müller seems to be getting along with these days are other mobbyists, corporate Microsoft ‘journalists’ like Ed Bought, and Microsoft folks like Miguel de Icaza (whom Müller admires because he is a .NET developer who uses Vista 7 exclusively). For those with decent Google-Fu, Müller seems to be blogging all about it, excusing Microsoft of course and telling fellow mobbyists something like: “Someone claims they’re a Microsoft Gold Partner or something like that. But no reason to believe they’re anything but independent”
That “Someone” is apparently yours truly and Müller is taking shots at me with silly humour like: “Maybe #boycottboy finds evidence that they buy their toilet paper from the same supplier and calls this a new form of entryism.”
Notice the use of words like “toilet paper”. Real classy mobbyists. And that’s part of an ongoing conversation with a stalker whose main existence on the Web (with this pseudonym) is attacks on Techrights. S/he is not alone and it’s possibly just another sockpuppet account of someone else, saying things which would otherwise get the real name (person) in trouble. They are like some kind of a mob and some of them try to intimidate me (e.g. threats of contacting employer again, veiled insinuations of lawsuits). These are the same old tactics.
We’ll end this post with more FUD from Müller: “I have to admit I hadn’t heard of Gemalto before its patent suit against Android. But the combination of *all* those suits is massive.”
Coming from the same person who says that the fight against software patents is lost (he wants people who fight against them to surrender), the above is to be taken as exaggeration if not sensationalism. Mobbyists love drama. That’s why people should only rarely feed them (ignore and ideally block, even when they provoke, as Müller just did with his “toilet paper” remarks for example). █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Security news of interest, mostly about Microsoft but also unsolicited mail
● When is a security update not a security update? – When you’re a Windows user!
Can potentially? It’s yet another piece of “ware” that Windows users need to look out for, yet another thought of suspicion when a legitimate security update is offered, it’s yet another concern for people to keep in mind when they are using their PC and trying to be productive. I’d say regardless of if a user gets it or not, this WILL cause harm, even if it’s just more paranoia and distrust that a Windows user has when being online.
As I Linux user as I say I don’t have concerns such as this…
● Microsoft’s Internet access control plan deserves a chance (rather absurd take on Microsoft’s Charney lobby [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12])
Microsoft’s plan isn’t new; in fact, it was featured in Trustworthy Computing chief Scott Charney’s RSA Conference keynote back in March. In a nutshell, Microsoft believes the only way to prevent consumer PCs from continually falling prey to malware is with broader, more aggressive Internet access control measures to inspect and clean infected computers before granting them unfettered access to the Internet.
● 1 in 10 Websites Spews Spam
The spam research firm revealed spam created by websites has risen by 110 percent since October last year. Furthermore, one in five websites automatically opt-in consumers when it comes to sharing their details with third-parties, despite the fact its breaches e-mail marketing best practice.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, Windows at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Microsoft grows irrelevant and Apple grows more dangerous to software freedom as the world moves towards devices
THE news about Ray Ozzie’s departure [1, 2] was not surprising (we predicted it months ago) but it was massive. He was seen by some people as Steve Ballmer’s heir, to to speak, his likely successor at Microsoft. Little was said by Ozzie himself about his departure, but we now have his ‘goodbye Microsoft’ letter and a ‘doomsday’ memo which IDG says “warns Microsoft of post-PC days”:
Departing Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie’s just-published memo is a “doomsday-ish” missive that calls on the company to push further into the cloud or perish, an industry analyst said today.
Microsoft is facing intense competition from Linux (not a company) and from Apple, amongst other companies.
“In years to come it is possible that Apple will be a greater threat to Linux than Microsoft is.”As we showed earlier this month, Microsoft hardly appears in the media compared to some other companies, mostly ones whose infrastructure is GNU/Linux based. A decade ago Bill Gates said: “Our most potent Operating System competitor is Linux and the phenomena around Open Source and free software.”
He was right. His words were sent to colleagues only (at least at the time), not the press.
In years to come it is possible that Apple will be a greater threat to Linux than Microsoft is. When it comes to handhelds and other devices, for example, Apple is already more scary than Microsoft, based on this news:
Nintendo More Scared of Apple Than of Microsoft
Which company is the greater threat to Nintendo’s gaming business–Apple or Microsoft? According to Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, it’s Apple–at least in the short term. “Do I think that in the near term [Apple] can hurt us more than Microsoft?” Fils-Aime said to Forbes. “Absolutely.”
And it appears Apple already is. According to some statistics trotted out at its annual September music event, Apple’s developed quite a hold on the portable gaming market. The company claims a 50 percent share of the portable gaming market and says the iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined. And that hold will only strengthen with the recent launch of Apple’s Game Center–a new interactive gaming service included in iPhone OS 4–and the proliferation of cheap and increasingly more sophisticated games for the platform (seen Epic Citadel, yet?).
Apple — like Microsoft — is already suing Linux/Android and it is piling up software patents. It is also possible that Apple and Microsoft coordinate these actions, but that’s mere speculation without evidence. Here is one of Apple’s latest patents:
A reissued patent for Apple (AAPL), just made public today, covers a way of employing profiles of users’ interests to help rank the relevance of search results. The language of the claims is broad enough in scope as to potentially cover what such companies as Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), and even Facebook do. If unchallenged, it could provide Apple with a significant bargaining chip in business negotiations with many other companies.
Apple is a patent aggressor. There is no reason to just label the above “permanently defensive”.
One might say that Apple earned a place at the table because its products are great, but we at Techrights believe a major part of it is just marketing and appeal to the niche of people with a lot of money to spare. Technically, Apple continues to be a disaster sometimes, with basic bugs like this new one:
iPhone 4 lock screen bypass discovered
A security flaw has been found in Apple’s latest iPhone which allows strangers to bypass the handset’s passcode-protected lock screen with a few button presses.
Most users set up a password to prevent others from accessing the phone’s contents, but a Brazilian man posted a video of himself on the internet showing a quick way of getting around it. He taps the “emergency call” button, then enters three # signs, taps the green call button and immediately presses the button on the top of the phone that locks the screen.
Well, it’s apparently so “easy to use” that anyone can use it, even an intruder. There is a good reason why many experts rank Linux higher than Apple for security. In any event, despite huge investments in marketing, Microsoft remains irrelevant in this space. █
“I’d put the Linux phenomenon really as threat No. 1.”
–Steve Ballmer, 2001
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Kernel Space
-
So this is just a reminder – I’m trying to make sure that everybody is aware of the fact that in my 2.6.36 announcement, I was talking about trying to do a short merge window. Why? So that I could release -rc1 by the time the kernel summit started, despite the release of 2.6.36 being delayed.
-
In February of this year the Clang C/C++ compiler for LLVM hit the milestone of self-hosting itself after Clang’s C support was declared production ready (with the recently released LLVM 2.8, the C++ support is now deemed feature-complete) just last October. In April another achievement was reached for LLVM/Clang and that was building much of FreeBSD’s base operating system. Today another milestone has been hit and that’s building the Linux kernel for Debian to the point that it’s functional and can run the X.Org Server both on bare metal and this can also be done within a QEMU virtualized environment.
-
When looking at the Core i7 970 at its stock speeds with turbo boost capabilities, the CPU performed very well and practically winning every benchmark. Granted, the CPUs we used for this comparison were limited to what we had access to, and that meant no six-core AMD tests or any of Intel’s Extreme Edition processors. The only tests where the Core i7 970 “Gulftown” did not come out the winner was with the software that did not have enough work to keep all twelve CPU threads busy and so the Core i7 870 commanded the lead due to its higher turbo frequency. The Core i7 870 quad-core with Hyper Threading can be boosted up to 3.60GHz when needed, but with the Core i7 970 in most cases you can overclock this CPU to at least 3.6GHz if not 4.0GHz. Of course, that is unless the motherboard (or cooling) limits you in doing so as we were faced with in this set of tests.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
So xorg-server-1.9.1 went out fairly smoothly and will probably be the version tied to the Katamari release.
-
The Wayland Display Server continues moving forward and is nearing the point of usability by enthusiasts and those interested in easily trying out this display server that leverages the latest and greatest Linux graphics technologies.
-
The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here’s a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.
-
Applications
-
Rosegarden is a tool for making and understanding music, a general-purpose MIDI and audio sequencer, score editor, and music composition and editing environment that is released under the GPL, and runs exclusively under GNU / Linux.
-
Compiz 0.9.2 has been released with a lot of bugs fixed but also new features such as:
* a new MultiAnim which allows for mutliple copies of windows in animations
* minimized live window previews (experimental) – a feature many have been waiting for to use in DockBarX (among others)
* natural scale mode which pushes windows apart based on their distance from each other already when overlapping
* re-written group plugin
* simplified shadow storage in the decorations
* support for KDE 4.5′s blur hint
* Allow resizing from the center of the window
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Overall, with the less GPU demanding games, Windows 7 tends to take the lead over Ubuntu 10.10 when running at higher resolutions, but Ubuntu 10.10 did secure some significant leads at lower resolutions. In the toughest multi-platform environments presented by Unigine, the performance was the same across operating systems.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
This move could anger at least some open source enthusiasts, but it probably shouldn’t. Ubuntu is clearly trying to further differentiate itself in a Linux world filled with UIs and user experiences that are extremely similar. It is a risky bet, but Shuttleworth says that developers need not worry because fragmentation can be avoided by using FreeDesktop.org to ensure that desktop integration mechanisms are standardized and interoperable. Whether that will be enough to alleviate all possible issues or silence the critics of this decision remains to be seen.
-
-
I was vocal enough in the past so I guess there is no need to reiterate again how much I dislike GNOME Shell… I see now Canonical is practically forking GNOME and replacing the Shell with Unity for the next Ubuntu release. In both the case of the Shell and Unity I can’t understand why people behind those projects persists in trying to make a Desktop OS act and feel like a mobile phone OS, like being targeted exclusive at clueless users.
-
It is the super secret service that does all the work behind Gwibber. It is not without improvements this cycle, most notably Geolocation support, the ability to display maps about where your friends are, inside it and the the ability to store you and your friends’ profile data offline.
-
There is going to be some questions about this decision in relation to GNOME. I want to make something crystal clear: Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME, but we continue to support the latest GNOME Shell development work in the Ubuntu archives.
-
Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.
-
As Debian is to Ubuntu so GNOME is to Unity. What do I mean by that? Well, once upon a time there was an operating system called Debian. It was, and is, a powerful version of Linux. Outside of the Linux community though almost no one had ever heard of it. Then Ubuntu came along, built its own easy-to-use distribution on top of Debian, and now it’s arguably the most popular Linux in the world.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
Asturias
Blarney
Lovelock
Pushcart
Sturgis
-
I was doing an installation of Debian Squeeze to a USB drive, and unfortunately the Debian installer was eager to drop its own GRUB on the Master Boot Record — not on the drive to which I was installing Debian but to the first hard drive on the system, which contains Fedora 13 and Windows 7.
So I had a dead GRUB on the Master Boot Record of my drive.
-
-
-
-
So we just got done signing off on the gold images for Fedora 14. I’m amazingly proud of the whole little release management group – development (especially Anaconda team, who were awesome), release engineering, and QA teams: we had an unbelievably smooth ride through the Final validation testing stage. Unprecedented in the annals of Fedora history, we span one publicly-announced Test Compose (TC) build (there were five unannounced ones, but they were just to test small fixes which we needed an image compose to verify) and exactly one Release Candidate (RC) build, which was the build signed off as Gold today. We have never needed just one candidate build to get a release right before.
-
Fedora 14 has gone gold. According to Adam Williamson, Red Hat Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, the Fedora 14 Final Release Go/No-Go Meeting resulted in the unanimous decision that RC1 should be declared Gold. Attendees were pleased that the quality tests had gone so smoothly and this is the first time a first release candidate would ship as final. An email with the good news will go out to mailing lists on Thursday.
-
Debian Family
-
Squeeze includes not only Shotwell but the GIMP and Inkscape. It also includes OpenOffice and what’s known as GNOME Office, the latter including Abiword and Gnumeric.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
-
I’m writing this blog post in a chair in the ‘Grand Caribe Convention Center’, at the end of the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in preparation of the 11.04 Natty Narwhal release. It’s been a very interesting first day to say the least.
-
Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has reached EOL (End Of Life). It is no longer supported by Ubuntu with security updates and patches. You have known this day was coming for 1.5 years, as all non-LTS Ubuntu releases are supported for only 18 months.
I have no plans to delete the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty AMIs for EC2 published under the Alestic name in the foreseeable future, but I request, recommend, and urge you to please stop using them and upgrade to an officially supported, active, kernel-consistent release of Ubuntu on EC2 like 10.04 LTS Lucid or 10.10 Maverick.
-
This is it! Porting the Unity view to Compiz, comibing the Desktop and UNE editions, and defaulting to UNE for users who can run it. This is is a huge opportunity for the Ubuntu community to make something that can deliver free desktops to millions and millions of people who don’t have software freedome today. And also, having a lot of fun with our friends doing something really big along the way.
-
The Ubuntu Font Family, which was only available for Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 (in the official repositories) has just been uploaded to the official Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 9.10 Karmic Koala and 8.04 Hardy Heron repositories.
-
Mint
-
The Digital Prism Screencast covers both Drupal and Linux Mint.
-
-
MintUpload is one of the Mint Tools, it’s a simple drag & drop FTP / SFTP / SCP client. It allows multiple services, folders or sites to be set up for different purposes. It’s a notification area widget and desktop widget.
-
-
Phones
-
Nokia/MeeGo
-
Well, this was inevitable. After Samsung and Sony Ericsson abandoning Symbian for their line of smartphones, and after Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams leaving the company for “personal reasons”, there’s now a report that the Symbian Foundation is winding down its operations, in preparation for closing up shop entirely.
The news comes from a “source close to Symbian”, and basically states that Lee Williams’ successor as executive director, chief financial officer Tim Holbrow, has been appointed to wind down the Symbian Foundation’s operations. This seems in line with Holbrow’s background in finance, whereas Williams worked within Nokia on S60.
-
Recently a project called “Qt Modularization” was initiated. This is a project that aims to modularize Qt at every level. As you may know already, Qt is currently modularized on the DLL level; each module has its own DLL. However, the project as a whole is still monolithic; all the code is being hosted in a single repository, and you cannot build a leaf module without building the modules on which it depends at the same time. This project aims to change that, so that the modules are hosted in different repositories, with a separate maintainer for each, and the modules may have different release schedules.
-
-
Qt Quick provides a declarative framework for building highly dynamic, custom user interfaces from a rich set of QML elements. Qt Quick helps programmers and designers collaborate to build the fluid user interfaces that are becoming common in portable consumer devices, such as mobile phones, media players, set-top boxes and netbooks. Qt Quick consists of the QtDeclarative C++ module, QML, and the integration of both of these into the Qt Creator IDE. Using the QtDeclarative C++ module, you can load and interact with QML files from your Qt application.
-
‘It also aligns the Qt application and UI framework with the planned version for the MeeGo 1.1 platfrom (Qt 4.7). Qt Mobility 1.0.2 APIs for mobile development are also included’. Essentially, even without MeeGo1.1 handsets, you can built now apps for it using the N900 running PR1.3, and Qt4.7.
-
Since setting up Zimbra, the email migration has gone quite well. The Outlook-connector works as expected and the more adventurous users are enjoying the fully-featured Zimbra web interface (which is much better than Outlook and Gmail, it could only be better if it made you lunch).
[...]
For agenda and contact synchronization I finally settled on Funambol, which has native mobile clients for Blackberry, iPhones, Nokia and WM and provides a J2ME client for other mobile platforms. Another plus over BES is that Funambol is both open source and very easy to deploy (it does require a server- and a client-side install though).
-
The children had been designing images to go on bags that could be sold for charity to aid flood victims in Pakistan. They came to work with Jelena to actualise their ideas. They were introduced to a piece of open-source software called Inkscape (download here) and were shown how to produce high quality designs and manged to achieve some incredible results in a total of only four hours.
-
Of course, Grace Hopper is a conference for women in all sorts of computing, which includes lots of proprietary software and the ratio of women in proprietary software is significantly higher than it is in free software. At 20%+ vs 2% (respectively) one would expect the strategies and tactics to be a little different. Yet, despite the differences in the two communities, I don’t think advancement is out of reach for us.
-
AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.
Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.
-
Databases
-
LWN.net has a nice article on their front page on Drizzle’s and MariaDB’s recent beta and RC releases. it is behind a paywall for a few more days, but using the link below you can already read it.
-
Oracle
-
Whether the proposal was backed by Oracle or not, some long-term contributors are resigning already. On Friday, October 22, Charles H. Schulz announced his resignation in a blog post. He said it saddened him to have to resign, but was also a relief due to the tension at OpenOffice.org lately. He said the proposal and subsequent behaviors and discussions were unprofessional and showed a complete lack of understanding of Free and Open Source Software. He and others have stated that both projects will now lose out due to a competitive atmosphere instead of the desired cooperation. Schultz said the LibreOffice will now become an official fork since Oracle et al. “refuse to play ball” with The Document Foundation. Schultz will continue to contribute to The Document Foundation.
-
Hi Louis, all,
This mail to inform you that I’m resigning from being Louis deputy at
the CC. Please remove my role from the site. I unsubscribe from the list
just after this mail.
Kind regards
Sophie [Gautier]
-
Hi Louis, all,
With respect for my friends in the community I hereby resign from myposition as deputy for Charles in the community council.
I’m sorry that this is a necessary step.
Good luck in the future. I hope we can meet one day – still as friends and free software enthusiasts.
Cheers,
Leif Lodahl
-
The Java Community Process truly was a great hope for peace. A neutral place where everyone from developers to vendors could work together to produce specifications, reference implementations and tests to drive the success of Java.
-
For one thing, as much as people may have complained about Sun’s guarded control of the Java Community Process (JCP), concern is growing that Oracle’s commitment to Java may benefit it more than it benefits the wider Java community. Oracle, perhaps recognizing that it had a PR battle to win, has repeatedly emphasized Java’s central importance to it, leading the Java community to mostly give Oracle the benefit of the doubt.
-
Business
-
For example, when I teach a class about OpenNMS, I often ask the students if they are subscribed to the main OpenNMS discussion list. Usually, less than one in ten raise their hands. In fact, more than half of our commercial customers contact us for the first time without ever having installed the software. And that’s because our customers don’t come to us looking for open source software. They come to us because they want to find the best solution to their problems—and, in many cases, that solution includes open source software.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today their partnership in the FTA’s Associate Partner Network. The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of free software and free standards.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
I believe history – especially recent history — teaches us something very different. While information technology markets certainly go through cycles, they tend to oscillate between open and closed more fluidly than Wu suggests – and that dynamic is accelerating today. Moreover, during periods which Wu regards as more “closed,” things aren’t always as closed as he suggests. Or, more importantly, the “closed” models typically spawn more innovation than Wu and others bother acknowledging. It’s during what some regard as a market’s darkest hour when some of the most exciting forms of disruptive technologies and innovation are developing. Finally, to the extent some markets are completely locked-down for a time, it’s more often than not due to public policies that facilitate that lockdown or the “closing” of systems.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
This website has W3C-compliant, CSS3 and HTML5 -based website templates with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
-
“Unions set to fight plans for £6bn cuts” was the front page news of the Financial Times yesterday, May 24th, in the aftermath of the well-trailed and assiduously leaked initial skirmish in what we are told is to be a long and multi-billion War of Austerity pitilessly fought out in the next couple of years.
-
-
Boingboingdave sez, “Outside the Conway-Rand Paul debate in KY, Paul supporters held down a woman from MoveOn while another stomped on her neck and head. The woman was attempting to present Paul with a mock Employee of the Month award from Republicorp representing the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech.”
-
Asserting that Jammu and Kashmir’s accession with Union of India is full and final, the BJP State President Shamsher Singh Manhas today said that no body can dare to challenge it and any one who does should be put behind the bars.
-
The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia, the website’s founder, Julian Assange, told a leading Moscow newspaper Tuesday.
-
-
Fifteen past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have issued a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao, asking that the newest winner, Liu Xiaobo, be released from his 11-year prison sentence, and that his wife, Liu Xia, be freed from de-facto house arrest.
Chinese police seized a woman from her house in the middle of the night after she tweeted her intention to demonstrate with a banner congratulating jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel peace prize, a friend said today.
-
If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the WePay team, and they’re trolling PayPal’s conference in an effort to tell everyone in attendance that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course.
-
The 159 dummy accounts all have obviously-fake names (such as the ‘dd1′ pictured) and curiously seem to only have contributed to submissions from Digg’s publishing partners. The suspicious activity began after an algorithm revision that took place on October 15.
-
On Monday, following a report in AllThingsD that publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards was bailing for a start-up, Pixazza, CEO Matt Williams e-mailed staffers to announce that “the burn rate is too high” at the company and that it would be laying off 25 of its 67 staffers, a total of 37 percent. At its peak–at the time of Adelson’s departure–the number of employees was slightly over 100.
-
Science
-
A newly discovered class of materials known as “topological insulators” could help physicists to obtain new ways of defining the three basic physical constants – the speed of light (c); the charge of the proton (e); and Planck’s constant (h). That’s the claim of a team of physicists in the US, which has proposed a new experiment to measure the fine-structure constant (α), which is a function of h, c and e, by scattering light from such a material. Topological insulators are unusual in that electrical current flows well on their surface, but not through their bulk.
-
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.
Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year’s harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.
-
Security
-
-
-
SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If you login to a social media site, it is likely that you will be getting a session cookie to keep you logged in (usually turned on by the “Remember Me” button). This cookie will identify you as already having logged into the system, and therefore its possession will allow you to connect to the social media site without having to identify yourself again. So, now imagine you are in a coffee shop with open wifi and you have your laptop with you, and you are also logged in with a session cookie to Facebook or Twitter. Guess what? Any person in the possession of Firesheep will be able to intercept that session cookie, and therefore will be able to connect to your Facebook account. Not only that, Firesheep will capture all of the unencrypted cookies flying around in the open wifi environment.
-
There’s been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby cafe, and then easily view, delete, and add comments using their name on these sites.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
Leading the attack on whistleblower web site WikiLeaks, Fox News editorialist and former Bush-era US State Department official Christian Whiton said on Monday that the US should classify the proprietors of WikiLeaks as “enemy combatants,” opening up the possibility of “non-judicial actions” against them.
“So far, the Obama administration appears to have been asleep at the wheel in responding to this,” he wrote for FoxNews.com on Monday. “The same is true of the Democratic-controlled Congress, which has no fewer than ten committees of jurisdiction that could be doing something about this—but which are not.”
-
The U.S. Defense Department is quietly taking on an expanding role in defending U.S. critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.
In a break with previous policy, the military now is prepared to provide cyber expertise to other government agencies and to certain private companies to counter attacks on their computer networks, the Pentagon’s cyber policy chief, Robert Butler, said Oct. 20.
-
Finance
-
As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
-
The coalition government has torn up figures that pegged the cost of plans by the intelligence services to store records of every online communication at £2bn.
A Home Office spokesman told The Register that the previous government’s estimate of the cost of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) has been abandoned.
-
-
This week, EFF is taking part in the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, where we urged the Privacy Authorities to call for the repeal of the European Union’s 2006 Data Retention Directive, which requires Internet service providers operating in Europe to retain telecom and Internet traffic data about all of their customers’ communications for a period of at least six months and up to two years, for possible use by law enforcement.v
-
A federal judge ruled late Monday that government requests for detailed information about Amazon.com customers violate Internet users’ rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy. The ruling came in a lawsuit originally brought by Amazon to stop the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) from collecting personally identifiable information about customers that could be linked to their specific purchases on Amazon. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation and ACLU of Washington intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of several Amazon.com customers whose information was at stake.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
-
I’m coming back from JISC and again sitting on the floor among the Bromptons. Alice and Bob are in their regular seats. They must get out earlier than me or rush along platform Zero faster than the average punter. (The 1645 is not a good train to arrive just-in-time for unless you like bicycles). Anyway I catch part of their conversation.
-
A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that global P2P traffic is expanding, with BitTorrent as the key player. In North America, more than half of all upstream traffic (53.3%) on an average day can be attributed to P2P. The report further signals some really interesting regional differences in P2P use, such as the dominance of Ares in Latin America.
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
“The color PURPLE is a trademark of 3M.”
-
Earlier this year we covered how Facebook was suing a site called Teachbook.com, claiming that any social network that ended in “book” was infringing on its trademarks.
-
A civil society group this week warned government officials gathered here against patents on “climate-ready” crops and what they characterised as an attempt to obtain an exclusive monopoly over plant gene sequences. The group asked states at the United Nations biodiversity conference to recognise that such patents are a threat to biodiversity and to the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources.
Yesterday, the ETC Group held a side event and presented a paper [pdf] alleging that the six largest global agrochemical and seed corporations are filing wide-scope patents with the aim of obtaining a monopoly on plant gene sequences that “could lead to control of most of the world’s plant biomass” for food, feed, fibre, fuel or plastics.
Biomass is defined by the group as “material derived from living or recently-living biological organisms.” Biomass includes all plants and trees, microbes, but also by-products like organic waste from livestock, food processing and garbage, they said. “Climate-ready” crops are engineered to address climate change challenges.
-
In a landmark 2010 declaratory judgment decision, a Southern District of New York court invalidated claims from seven Myriad patents associated with the BRCA1/2 breast and ovarian cancer genes. The patents include both composition claims covering isolated DNA molecules and method claims covering the processes of detecting and screening for BRCA mutations. The lower court held that these claims all fail the patentable subject matter eligibility test of 35 U.S.C. §101. A typical invalidated claim includes Claim 1 of Patent No. 5,747,282 which reads “1. An isolated DNA coding for a BRCA1 polypeptide, said polypeptide having the amino acid sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:2.” (The amino acid sequence No. 2 was provided as a part of the patent filing).
-
Indigenous Peoples previously protested the position of Canada opposing the language in the 21 October preambular text “noting the significance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 21 October 2010). The CBD secretariat is housed in Quebec, Canada.
“The protocol must meet standards consistent with the internationally accepted rights of Indigenous Peoples,” said Harry. “If it does not, the ABS protocol will facilitate the misappropriation of genetic resources from indigenous lands and territories, and alienate the traditional knowledge implicated in benefit sharing schemes,” she said, adding that this would lead to a further impoverishment of the “world’s most vulnerable peoples.”
Today, a group of Canadian indigenous peoples published a press release about Canada’s alleged undermining of the biodiversity negotiations. They said that in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, John Duncan, Canadian minister of Indian affairs and northern development, “claimed the ABS issue was a diversion. “What is being discussed in Japan is about intellectual property, so to think that has anything really significant to do with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is inappropriate,” he was reported saying.
-
Copyrights
-
Nobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France’s new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country’s “three strikes” law.
-
IP Dragon is concerned that the owners of internet cafés and the operators of planes, trains, ships and buses are not charged for showing foreign films. This is not only discriminatory to foreign film makers, and in violation of international treaties, but it will hurt the fledgling Chinese film industry. There is not really fair competition if you have to pay or Chinese films and foreign pirated films you can use for free. The National Copyright Administration of China has already announced that this will not change in the near future. Maybe Hollywood, Bollywood and the European filmindustry can change their opinion.
-
Many people, including myself, have said it’s inevitable: digital music is going to be given away legally for free, while musicians and songwriters try to make livings in other ways. But just how inevitable is it?
-
With this salon, CC Denmark would like to invite the public in to discuss the benefits of using open licensing models in business. Presenting each of their work, renowned speakers from three international projects will elaborate on using CC licenses and sharing ideologies in their respective fields.
-
Well, here’s a fun one. Apparently, there’s a local news site known as The North Country Gazette (don’t click that just yet…) covering parts of upstate New York via a blog format. Rather than putting in place an actual technical paywall, the site has apparently decided to go with a paywall-by-threat model.
-
ERIKA: Like I said earlier, it’s made me re-think how you interact with the trolling, toxic readers that everyone inevitably picks up when their work starts to attract an audience.
-
The Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has ceased all its operations after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA. Limewire was ordered to disable all functionalities in the current application to prevent users from sharing copyrighted material. The verdict is expected to have an unprecedented impact on the P2P file-sharing landscape.
-
ACTA
-
När det gäller det redan så hårt kritiserade ACTA-avtalet , så är kristdemokraterna (EPP) och de konservativa (ECR) i Europaparlamentet mycket angelägna om att det även skall omfatta så kallade geografiska indikatorer (GI). In the case of the already much-criticized ACTA treaty , so is the Christian Democrats (EPP) and the Conservatives (ECR) in the European Parliament is very keen that it should also include so-called geographic indicators (GI).
Det innebär i korthet att de vill att geografiska produktmärken (Champagne, Parmaskinka mm) skall få samma skydd som vanliga varumärken mot förfalskning. That basically means that they want to geographic marks (Champagne, Parma ham, etc.) shall receive the same protection as regular brands against counterfeiting.
EFF Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Animation by Nina Paley
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.26.10
Posted in Site News at 2:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Report from the trial of Microsoft’s co-founder’s Traul [sic] Allen versus Google et al.; Microsoft’s partner Gemalto sues Google over Android
GOOGLE HAS been having a tough time in Land of the Fee, where lots of patent trolls love to charge a fee using software patents that had been blessed by the USPTO and often changed hands. Fortunately, not the whole world had yet been ‘infected’ by the same sort of distorted patent law and judging by world economics, it is possible that the USPTO will adapt to the rest of the world, rather than it working the other way around (software patents dying internationally instead of going international).
As we pointed out before, Microsoft is a major breeding ground for patent trolls and Traul Allen is one of its creations/exports. Traul decided to sue Google back in August and Groklaw has early details about the case:
Google et al respond to Paul Allen with Motions to Dismiss, Sever – A Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On
[...]
All month there has been a flurry of activity on the part of the defendants in Paul Allen’s patent infringement litigation, Interval Licensing v. AOL, et al, against Google, Apple, Yahoo! and pretty much everyone else you can think of — mostly all the companies have been busy getting lawyered up. I see Yahoo! has added Morrison & Foerster’s Michael A. Jacobs to its legal team, so I am getting quite excited about what we may get to watch.
The Linux-powered Android has just been sued by yet another company. It is called Gemalto and it’s a buddy of Microsoft, based on its own Web site [1, 2] (they recently collaborated around Microsoft Forefront, which died a month later). The Register says:
Security chip maker Gemalto has launched its own attack on Android, claiming to own patents essential to the use of Java as a mobile OS.
The suit, filed in patent-friendly Texas, accuses Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung of infringing Gemalto’s patents which, according to the company, cover techniques essential to the use of a high-level language such as Java on a device with limited resources.
Microsoft and Apple have also sued Google over Android; Oracle sued Google for the Java-like part of Android alone.
It is worth seeing the reaction from mobbyists who use this to spread FUD about Linux/Android. One of them is also linking to stuff like this one tweet from O’Gara (FUD galore) where she summarises with: “freebie operating system is quite a little suit magnet ”
For those who do not know O’Gara, read older posts such as:
In short, O’Gara is one of those longtime foes of Linux and people who work with Microsoft PR. O’Gara can be considered one of the mobbyists because she went as far as stalking and harassing Microsoft critics. She is part of the mob. And speaking of mobbyists, do not believe them for a second about the status of software patents around the world. As hinted in the previous post, they seemingly try to spread defeatism among the Free software developers/community by saying that software patents got their way around the world. The matter of fact is, Amazon is still struggling (for many years!) with its controversial ‘one-click’ patent which it wants to spread to Canada and to Europe. We wrote about this patent last week [1, 2, 3] because it gets a lot of people involved and they protest against software patents. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Patents at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft keeps pressuring Europe to give up its sovereignty and restrict the use of Free/libre software for newly-conceived legal reasons (European parliament photographed above)
ON the heels of FFII actions and FSFE-BSA stand-offs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] the FSFE’s head Karsten Gerloff writes to rant about software patents at WIPO and the FFII’s president shows us that WIPO gives room to Microsoft [PDF]. See the time slot which says: “14.30 – 15.00 Mr. Jean-Yves Art, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation”
To quote part of Gerloff’s long summary and analysis:
This week’s meeting of the SCP was mainly supposed to discuss the study prepared by Professor Bently and his team of experts, in particular the section on software. On the agenda was also further discussion of the relation between patents and standards. That’s a topic which FSFE has long been working on in various fora, including the European Commission and the Internet Governance Forum.
We got to make three statements. The first was a general statement, outlining FSFE’s viewpoint on the issues on the agenda. The next two were more detailed.
In our second statement, we talked about the relation between standards and patents. This has been a topic for the SCP for several sessions. We argue that software standards need to be implementable by anyone, whether in Free Software or otherwise. Free Software licenses don’t allow you to impose additional conditions on the person you give the software to. You can’t say “you’re free to use, study, share and improve the software, but when you pass it on, you have to pay for a patent license”. That’s why patents included in software standards need to be licensed royalty-free to anyone who implements the standard.
The third statement talked about excluding software from patentability. Professor Bently’s study discusses at some length the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant patents on software, even though this contravenes the letter and spirit of European law, namely the European Patent Convention’s Article 52, which says that software “as such” is not patentable. Our statement discusses this in some detail.
For those who do not remember, the tightening between standards and patents is promoted by Microsoft and its lobbyists, who are now joined by mobbyists. There is this mysterious Twitter account called “European Innovation” (@EUinnovation), which calls itself “the number one source for #EU #innovation news!” Well, we linked to it before because we suspected it could be funded by Microsoft to push the idea of software patents in Europe. This account is apparently connected to “Microsoft Europe” (@MSEurope) and it has just begun following the president of the FFII (see list of recent additions). How come?
Anyway, “European Innovation” is mostly propaganda for more patent monopolies in Europe and “harmonisation” (more of the same party line) gets pushed by ManagingIP, which summarises its new article as follows:
Five areas for global patent reform: harmonisation back on the agenda
As the name ManagingIP implies, it is biased in favour of patents.
Microsoft must be pleased with above now that it turned to litigation just like SCO. Software patents may be Microsoft’s last weapon and resort, but software patents are hardly accepted in the world. It’s mobbyists, patenting maximalists, and gullible journalists who believe lawyers and mobbyists who spread the perception that the fight against software patents has been lost. What utter nonsense in ZDNet. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Novell uses Mono to spread proprietary software to proprietary platforms and exclusively make money from this practice
OUR reader Brandon pointed out the obvious about Mono’s vested interests yesterday. To Novell (and to Microsoft), Mono is means for (up)selling proprietary software. It oughtn’t be so shocking that Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza publicly spoke at Microsoft less than a year ago about how software freedom makes it hard to make a living. The hypocrite himself is very rich and he has just published this post which says “I will be in Redmond from Tuesday afternoon until Friday night.”
Anyway, to quote Brandon, who is now a Fedora Ambassador (IRC log from the same date as above):
| Ender2070 |
So much for open source: http://www.go-mono.com/store/ |
Oct 26 05:13 |
| TechrightsBot-tr |
Title: Store – Mono .::. Size~: 27.8 KB |
Oct 26 05:13 |
| Ender2070 |
“If you are the only individual planning to use Mono Tools for Visual Studio, then the Professional Edition is right for you. Your non-transferable license entitles you to one year of updates. $99 USD “ |
Oct 26 05:14 |
| -TRIdentica/#techrights-[diablod3/@diablod3] Mono goes closed source http://ur1.ca/25p4o #wtf #microsoft !fsf |
Oct 26 05:16 |
| TechrightsBot-tr |
Title: Mechanical Keyboard Guide – Overclock.net – Overclocking.net .::. Size~: 167.66 KB |
Oct 26 05:16 |
| Ender2070 |
SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension is a .NET application framework that enables organizations to run Microsoft .NET-based server applications on Linux. Based on open source Mono technology and run in conjunction with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension delivers all the performance, scalability and hardware support of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform to the .NET application |
Oct 26 05:17 |
| Ender2070 |
environment. $200 a year |
Oct 26 05:17 |
| Ender2070 |
I think there is a profit motive for pushing mono everywhere |
Oct 26 05:17 |
| Ender2070 |
and its there for everyone to see |
Oct 26 05:17 |
| Ender2070 |
if people recommend other languages nobody is going to want to buy this from Novell |
Oct 26 05:19 |
| Ender2070 |
no conspiracy theories required |
Oct 26 05:19 |
We pointed this out many times before and it is clear that other people independently reach the same conclusion. When you support Mono you also support Novell/Microsoft and proprietary software. Mono is 'open' core, putting aside the API and patent issues. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
