03.29.11
Posted in EFF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is gunning down dissidence (for oppressive tyrants only) by deliberately leaving people who use Microsoft software exposed to surveillance and other abuses
THE subject of Free software as a tool of autonomy goes many years back. For a computer user to be in control of the software rather than the servant of this software, there are characteristics which need to be present in the code. The FSF gives one good definition of these characteristics, although there may be others. Richard Poynder explains how “Citizenship and Software” relate to one another in an atmosphere where software is increasingly politicised:
Lawrence Lessig came to understand the power of software to construct and shape our world when he was (briefly) “special master” during the Microsoft antitrust case. As he later put it to me, “[Y]ou can code software however you want, to produce whatever kind of product you want. And that capability is unique with software: you can’t, for instance, say that an automobile will be something that is a transmission and a radio wrapped in one. But you can do exactly that with software, because software is so plastic.”
As such, he added, the Microsoft case was just “a particular example of a more general point about how you need to understand the way in which technology and policy interact.”
Yet, as more and more of our lives are organised and controlled by computers, and the role that software plays in society becomes increasingly central, most people still assume that the virtual world that opens up before them when they switch on the computer, and the choices they are offered onscreen, is how things are and ought to be — not a consequence of the way in which the underlying software has been coded.
People who use Microsoft software are completely controlled by the political inclinations of Microsoft and those governments which Microsoft collaborates with (basically just about any government, for the sake of profit). The recent stories from Russia [1, 2, 3] were a shocking reminder of it and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that “Microsoft Shuts off HTTPS in Hotmail for Over a Dozen Countries”. As André Rebentisch put it, “Hotmail does not offer https for authoritarian nations” and here are the nations in short:
According to an EFF deeplink Hotmail apparently disabled the https default option for its users who set their location to the following nations: Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Brad explains why “Political Activists Need Linux” — a subject we addressed here many times before.
Over and over again I have stressed the advice of computer security experts: if you must use Windows, do NOT use Internet Explorer. And I’ll go one step further: if you have any reason to believe you may be targeted for attack — either because of your political beliefs, or your business activities — then stop using Windows.
There is also an interpretation from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Here we have yet another example of Microsoft harming computer users. Won’t people learn from Egypt about how governments identify and arrest the opposition following surveillance? █
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
–Bill Gates
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
–Steve Jobs
Summary: Continued Mono lobby in Apple’s platforms; The empires of ripoff show their continued exploitation of freely-shareable and free/open source-implemented ideas
WHEN MICROSOFT MVP Miguel de Icaza is not praising Microsoft software like Silver Lie and Moon Lie (he is still at it, delivering on Microsoft’s contract/agreement with his employer) he is also promoting hypePad like it’s a badge of honour. He wants to popularise Microsoft’s C# (Java ripoff) on Apple products. That’s what he does. He promotes C# under the guise of ‘open source’ (Mono) and he is still boosting Monospace, which was organised by fellow Microsoft MVPs. It is clear what they are up to. It’s a case of assimilation (to Microsoft), which they also have a go at when it comes to Linux-powered platforms (making mobile Linux more C#-dependent). Aside from that, in Twitter (de Icaza snubs Identi.ca), he apparently defends Apple’s side and mocks GPLv3 in light of this news:
The upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Server will remove the formerly bundled open source Samba software and replace it with Apple’s own tools for Windows file sharing and network directory services.
One thing that Apple and Microsoft have in common is that they dislike GPLv3 and that says a lot. GPLv3 defangs software patents lovers, so those who dislike GPLv3 are often pushing for patent monopolies and software riddled with patent traps (such as Mono).
As an aside, regarding Apple, Robert Pogson explains why Apple is not a success based on grounds measured by the GNU/Linux world (freedom for example) and even market share.
Less than 2% MacOS usage in Asia, Africa and South America… Is that success?
Ballmer’s own slide shows this:
Apple may be popular in some Western countries, but that’s about it. Linux is a major rival to Apple, especially in phones, tablets, portable gadgets, etc. Sooner or later people realise that Apple is just a badge and that Apple’s staff cannot even deal with DST properly (not even in 2011!). To quote the MSBBC:
Some iPhone owners were heading in to work late on Monday after a glitch caused their alarms to malfunction.
Users found their wake-up alert coming one hour late, one hour early or not at all.
The problem, related to the clocks going forward for British Summer Time, does not appear to have affected everyone.
Apple has yet to comment on what caused it, but similar problems have previously hit iPhones in the US.
Maybe Apple is not reusing enough Free software. A lot of Apple’s code is derived from code it merely exploited and contributed almost nothing to (Apple’s version is proprietary). Who would wish to support such a company by rewarding it for these deeds? █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Law, Microsoft at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s distortion of the law goes more global with the attempt to marginalise freedom in software using legal instruments, not technical merit
IT IS easy to beat the competition when it can simply be called illegal or borderline criminal and in a later post we are going to write about Microsoft’s use of software patents to do exactly that. Over in New Zealand (see background) Microsoft has been lobbying to make software patents legal — a lobby/fight that New Zealand carries on fighting against, even in the face of Microsoft- and IBM-backed lobbyists and the patent lawyers of those companies from overseas. One of them, a person among “lawyers at Chapman Tripp,” is still betraying New Zealand by trying to convince his government that giving multinationals a monopoly on algorithms would be a good thing. IDG prints this baloney, which in some sense validates opinions on technical matters courtesy of legalese experts (one of whom, Mr. Quinn, keeps on daemosing open source right now because it a threat to those who make a living from litigation). Here is a taste of the baloney:
Champions of software patents are urging Parliament to revisit the ban on patenting “computer programs” in the presently drafted amendments to the Patents Act 1953. They suggest the law as it stands will be unclear and will possibly contravene existing international agreements.
What international agreements will these be? Some speculative consent to sell out sovereignty, a la South Korea? People of New Zealand don’t fall for it. As one person from New Zealand told us recently, over there it is still the people who control the government, not the other way around, and that is increasingly rare. In Western parts of the world the balance of power long ago shifted and evidence of this exists in the fact that companies like Microsoft break the law in its existing form and in order to make themselves more powerful. This last example of it shows how Microsoft wants to criminalise not selling Windows. As Brad puts it, “Do You Sell to Washington State? Dump Microsoft.”
If you sell products or services to any customers in the state of Washington, you need to be aware of a new legal liability you might face. (Obligatory disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, and this is not legal advice.) Microsoft has successfully lobbied to get new legislation passed there, in their home state, that will allow your customers to be sued if you use any “stolen IT” (Information Technology).
Microsoft keeps distorting the system (legalised bribery through lobbying) and it is starting to attack the customers for some extra income, as Groklaw explains: “But the real question is, Why? Why is Microsoft doing this? Does Microsoft need a new revenue stream, now that folks are switching to smartphones instead of PCs? Or is it something worse, something Machiavellian? I ask that because I noticed two things, one, that Microsoft said that it came up with the laws because it is dissatisfied with patent law and two, something odd and frankly alarming in the Washington State version of this bill that leads me to suspect that this is Microsoft’s Plan B in its litigation storm against Linux — its Ace in the hole in case the Supreme Court decides that its software is unpatentable.
“Not that Microsoft would mind having more than one way to harass Linux and it competitors in general, or two revenue streams without having to actually work to make better products. I’d like to show you how Open Source is deliberately excluded, though, a deliberate carve out.”
That is part of a long and fascinating post from Pamela Jones. For a shorter version of what Microsoft is scheming, see Edmundo Carmona’s “Is Microsoft trying to equate selling computers without Windows to software piracy as a new world policy?”
Very recently (as recently as 23rd of March) there was a small event in Mexico. An independent computer builder and a Microsoff legal representative had a meeting at the Legal Direction of Mexico’s National Institute of Author’s Rights. Apparently Microsoft wanted to make a statement specifying that they could take any legal action Microsoft considered pertinent given the builder’s lack of a Microsoft certificate of authenticity or original license included along with a computer built/sold by the independent builder. The builder states that given that they sell their computers with Free Software instead of Windows, the software has licenses and that Microsoft doesn’t have anything to complain about given that they don’t own copyrights for said software.
Greed knows no bounds, said Microsoft at one stage. The hypocrites. As Robert Pogson explains and as everyone else so well knows, counterfeiting has been beneficial if not essential to the monopoly. To use Pogson’s new words:
Illegal copying is just one of the means that non-free software suppresses the distribution of Free Software. It is similar to the tactic of making sure that only non-free software is found on retail shelves. Free Software is not about price but freedom to run, examine, modify and distribute software, something anathema to some big names in the industry of selling licences to software. Because of the four freedoms, Free Software tends to have a low price and purveyors of non-free software treat illegal copying of their software as an advertising cost.
There is no limit to how much Microsoft will distort the truth and distort the law (through lobbying) just to ensure it can squeeze out more money out of the population, which Microsoft software is controlling. Well, ideally, the user/population should control the software i uses. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Yesterday Linus voiced his anger towards DRM, once again.
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“Jobs and Events are the primary Upstart concepts,” writes James Hunt Ubuntu Upstart maintainer at Canonical. “The version of Upstart provided with Ubuntu Natty provides a new “initctl” command “show-config” which when coupled with a new tool “initctl2dot” allows these interactions to be understood visually.”
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It’s the 20th Anniversary of Linux in August and the Linux Foundation is kicking off celebrations at The Collaboration Summit which takes place April 6-8, 2011 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. A highlight of the campaign is the annual Video Contest, which this year focuses on the 20 year celebration and will be judged by Linux Linus Torvalds himself.
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Graphics Stack
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Version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is set to be released in a little more than a week, but what will it mean much for users in terms of performance? We will be looking at the LLVM 2.9 and Clang performance in the coming days (along with GCC 4.6, which was just released). We are beginning this weekend by providing a look at how using LLVM 2.9 affects the performance of the Mesa Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver relative to the previous LLVM 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 releases.
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Applications
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The business office is where the Linux desktop should reign. Why? Linux is a reliable, stable, secure solution that would have any business user working day-in and day-out without fail. With an unheard of resistance to viruses, trojans, and worms, the office user enjoying the Linux desktop would have no concerns about down time as does the average Windows user. But what tools are there available for the usual office worker? Plenty!
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Linux is a wonderful and underrated audio production platform, with great applications for every audio task. MuseScore and LilyPond bring elegance and sophistication to score writing, and Chordii is a wonderfully simple guitar sheet-music maker.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Last week I introduced tmux, a handy “terminal multiplexer.” This week, we’ll take a look at basic tmux usage and configuration.
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Wineskin Pro 2.0 today. Wineskin Pro 2.0 is our initial release of Wineskin for Intel based Mac computers. This release has a custom built Xquartz X11 server that Microsoft Windows Games require to run in full screen mode. We also provide binary Wine builds as well as binary CodeWeavers CrossOver builds from their public source code. Wineskin Pro also comes with Graphical tools to assist you in installing and configuring Wine as well as building your own custom Wine builds from source.
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Games
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After Sintel open movie project by Blender Foundation, now Sintel The Game is in development for almost a year which is a video game adaptation of the original movie. The game showcased its pre-demo in Blender Game Contest 2010 in January this year and stood at second place.
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Big Fat Alien, a Kelowna based indie game development studio is coming up with new fun space explorer and platformer for Linux in this April called BEEP.
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There’s just one week left to win one of three copies of Unigine’s OilRush game, which is a real-time strategy for Linux / Mac OS X / Windows operating systems that’s built atop Unigine’s impressive game engine with first-class Linux support.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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When tweaking photos in digiKam, you probably would want to keep the originals intact. And this is where the Versioning feature can come in rather handy. It allows you to save each edited version of an original photo as a separate image complete with a list of all applied actions.
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Martin Gräßlin has been making some very interesting advancements to KWin in the past year or so, after having issues with open-source Mesa drivers, this German developer has made this compositing window manager for the KDE Plasma desktop run on OpenGL ES 2.0 and even optional support for OpenGL 3.x. He wouldn’t mind some help though, so this summer for KDE’s involvement in Google’s Summer of Code he has proposed three fairly interesting projects, two of which benefit KWin on Wayland.
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GNOME Desktop
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I believe Gnome 2.X will be the last version of Gnome I will be using, at least based on my current findings, but hey, anything can change. And despite major progress with KDE, I’m not looking forward to the inevitable switch down the road, should the jab come to stab.
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How is Debian the king of Linux distros
As with everything else in software, every distro is much loved by its followers and there is great difference of opinion on which is the best of linux distros. Debian is a point in example of what a good linux distro should be and is the template for almost every other distro to have ever appeared. Hence the discussion was more on how powerful the features of Debian are rather than proving others are no match to this classic distro. Almost every distro has powerful features that set the tone for the entire distro to develop and evolve. Debian is perhaps the only linux distro that is so feature rich that every feature by itself can be spun into an effective application or tweaked to become another distro.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Less than five months after releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0, Linux distributor Red Hat has now announced the beta phase of the first RHEL6 update. As usual in this phase of the RHEL version families’ seven to ten-year life cycle, minor release 6.1 offers not only bug fixes and minor improvements, but also various new functions and hardware drivers.
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Fedora
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According to Wikipedia, 2,350,000 hits came from Fedora of 111,806,000 hits that came from GNU/Linux (including Android/Linux). Unfortunately some of Fedora’s counts may be for multiple IP addresses to the same machine (DHCP), and some of the machines could be servers.
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I’ve been keeping up with Fedora 15 development. I installed a nightly build on my wife’s dual-boot computer. I setup a Fedora 15 KVM virtual machine in preparation for my remix compose… which isn’t quite there yet.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Community contributed wallpapers collection for Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” is finally released. The collection include 17 brand new wallpapers and this latest set of community contributed wallpapers for Ubuntu is definitely the best so far in my opinion.
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Introversion Software, indie developer of hits Darwinia and Uplink, have now launched the aforementioned titles on the Ubuntu Software Centre. The titles are currently selling for US$10 each.
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But, as I asked before… Are there 10 reasons to upgrade to 10.10? Probably not. Canonical itself says that most improvements in 10.10 compared to 10.04 are related to netbooks, cloud computing, photo applications and fonts. Are you netbook user? If you’re working on 10.04 and happy with it, why worry? Just use whatever fits you better. Don’t get into arms race!
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Ubuntu Software Center got a really cool feature in Ubuntu 11.04: it lets you test drive applications without having to install them.
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Yesterday, I was talking to one of my relatives (whom I shall refer to as $relative) about computers, and I inquired as to whether $relative was still using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” that I had installed on $relative’s laptop shortly before I left for college. Do note that $relative is pretty computer-averse when it comes to anything other than using a browser or using a productivity suite. To my surprise, $relative said yes! I also asked if $relative’s printing issues were sorted out, because the printer connected is made by Lexmark, and Lexmark printers play as badly with Linux as Broadcom wireless cards do (i.e. they don’t mix). To my further surprise, $relative said yes again!
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These ads were spotted running on www.theregister.co.uk through Google/DoubleClick ad services.
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FRISK Software International, the developer of the world famous F-PROT Anti-virus ‘Fire & Ice’ family of software, is proud to announce that the Virus Bulletin has certified its Home and Enterprise editions on Ubuntu, Long-Term Support Version 10.04. Ubuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions and is maintained by Canonical Ltd., an Open Source software company founded by Mark Shuttleworth.
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Flavours and Variants
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In case you didn’t know, Wikipedia articles are case sensitive. The page that had stuck around for about two weeks was located at Bodhi_Linux. Another of our users (not realizing we already had one) put up another page with the title Bodhi_linux. This page was correctly flagged as a duplicate and promptly deleted – the issue? The moderator that deleted the duplicated page also took a look at previous page and this moderator decided there was not enough about the project there for the page to exist. Never mind the fact that it had already been up for two weeks and had already been approved by another moderator.
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After your first fifty distribution reviews, a certain ennui creeps in. Most have the same selection of software, and GNOME or KDE for a desktop, and, if they are new, are derived from Ubuntu. Under these circumstances, features worth writing about tend to be rare. That is why Bodhi Linux has been attracting attention from reviewers — because it has actually done a few things differently.
Not that Bodhi is revolutionary. You can find other distributions with small footprints, such as Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux, and other distributions such as Elive that use the Enlightenment window manager as a desktop. However, except for using Ubuntu’s Lucid repositories for packages, Bodhi’s choices are not exactly routine, either, and their integration are enough to make Bodhi stand out among the army of clones that are the typical modern distribution.
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Hats off to Jeff Hoogland and the Bodhi Linux team!
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Foremay is shipping a NAND solid state drive (SSD) claimed to be the world’s smallest SSD “disk-on-chip.” Its OC177 DOC chip measures only 0.87 x 0.87 x 0.07 inches (22 x 22 x 1.8mm), supports standard IDE or SATA host interfaces, and is available in 32GB capacities, with a read/write speed of up to 70/40MB/sec, says the company.
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Phones
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A surge in shipments of smartphones during 2010 saw 295 million units shipped – a 74 per cent increase over 2009, according to a research report by Berg Insight.
The researchers reckon shipments of smarter mobiles will reach 1.2 billion units in 2015 – a compound annual growth rate of 32.4 per cent.
There are now an estimated 470 million active smartphone users on the planet, if Berg’s research is to believed. The number crunchers reckon this figure will reach 2.8 billion in 2015.
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Android
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I spend a lot of time on airplanes. It used to be you’d often strike up a conversation with the person next to you on a plane. Over the years I met the editor of a newspaper in Roswell, New Mexico (and, yes, he was human as far as I could tell), an LA Laker Girl (no kidding), and many other interesting characters. But these days, you don’t get much chance to visit with your flying neighbors because everyone has an iPod, or a laptop, or some other gadget to keep them busy.
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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is working to let Android users make purchases using their mobile devices at retail points of sale, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
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Sub-notebooks
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We first glimpsed the CR-48 prototype Google Chrome OS netbook at CES in January and they’ve finally appeared in the UK courtesy of the Big G.
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Asus’ latest swing at the tablet scene is the Eee Pad Transformer, a Honeycomb tablet that can be combined with an optional keyboard docking station that turns it into a notebook computer, more or less. The Transformer’s guts seem to be on par with most other Honeycomb tablets in the field, but will its keyboard accessory be enough to make it stand out in an increasingly crowded space?
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Tablets
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That is all changing with the move to notebooks and smart thingies. Notebooks are over 50% of shipping units and smart thingies shipments are expected to exceed x86-like PCs in 2011. This has changed how people use their person computers and how IT is done. More people are using stuff from outside the monopoly at home and bringing it to work. I saw it last year, out in the bush… People were bringing all kinds of web-enabled gadgets to school even though there were rules against doing so for students. Many of the gadgets were from Apple but now Android/Linux and other Linux variations are appearing.
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The floodgates of products that look somewhat like “normal” personal computers but run ARM and Android/Linux are cracking open. One by ASUS is great but priced too high for wide adoption. ASUS and others do want to recoup costs of development and there is a market for “new” at any price.
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Let’s get real. There are only two great tablets out there today: Apple’s iPad and the iPad 2. Android has always had the potential to be a wonderful tablet operating system, but most Android tablets have been non-starters and, even the best of them, the Samsung Galaxy Tab aren’t as good as an iPad. But, the iPad may soon have a serious Android opponent: Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color.
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Sparkpad has begun selling customizable display computers at sizes ranging from eight to 15 inches, complete with a touch-ready, Lua-based Linux SDK and promised Android support. Sparkpad’s Wi-Fi enabled tablets and panel PCs run on ARM11-based Telechips 8902 processors, and are touted as enabling customers to develop and deploy their own touch panels, digital signage systems, and tablets quickly.
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It’s hard to beat stellar earnings as proof of a technology’s business value, and Red Hat provided that for Linux with its Q4 report last week. Adding further fuel to the celebratory open source fires over the past few days, however, have been several batches of awards recognizing the global impact of various free software projects and contributors.
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As a former technical writer and a sometime reviewer of software, I don’t need anyone to tell me how important documentation is — nor how often it is the last part of a project if it is considered at all. But recently, I had a frustrating reminder.
The reminder came when I was setting up my new computer. All went smoothly through my backup, installation, and restore, during which I suffered nothing worse than boredom. I was just wrapping up the final touches, indulging in the obligatory musings about how, these days, I hardly had to worry about GNU/Linux hardware compatibility — when, suddenly, I found myself in undocumented territory.
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Events
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at the Flourish Conference, April 1-3 – Chicago, Illinois and the Southeast LinuxFest, June 10-12 – Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4′s victory is “just another sign that Microsoft is past its prime when it comes to generating excitement,” opined Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot. “For decades users have internalized the ‘upgrading Microsoft products can put you in a world of hurt’ meme: ‘What I’ve got works. Let someone else be the guinea pig.’ Can you blame them?”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Java is entering a renaissance following a period of darkness under Sun Microsystems, according to Oracle and computing giant IBM.
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Education
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I recommended some changes that could be made:
* Using GNU/Linux would reduce licensing costs and improve performance,
* using thin clients would reduce the workload of staff while improving performance, and
* mounting monitors and thin clients on the wall might make better use of space.
A lot of FLOSS has been written by teachers and used by teachers in just such situations. It works for us.
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In my view the best Linux distro for the job of being used in a school which is both fast and user-friendly would have to be Ubuntu, as it has a great community and lots of support available. Certainly the Ubuntu distro which I would chose would have to Lucid Lynx (10.04) which is a Long Term Support (normally called LTS)distro meaning that it will be updated as much as possible for around 3 to 4 years by the Ubuntu developers and community. In some respects Linux Mint 9 would be a better choice for schools because most children and teenagers won’t have tried Linux before and Mint is more like Windows in the menu aspect of it. Mint is also a spin-off of Ubuntu so it is like it in many ways including the Software Center and the different applications available for it alongside the the ability to install .deb files easily.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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“Propriety and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere” – Gerrard Winstanley, 1649
“If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism isn’t enough – you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal. In other words, you need to be pragmatic” – Richard Stallman
Free software is and was an idealistic proposition. Its aim was to change the world and the way we live, work and play, albeit with particular reference to computer programs and the way they are put together.
In the beginning, the idea that software should be free was deemed unrealistic and laughable, and then unworkable. Now, for the most part, it is deemed acceptable and desirable – not just as a workable approach to writing software, but as a means of writing better software.
Free and open source software is no longer a fringe movement. But, as Dan Cohen points out, “if the movement toward shared digital openness,” (he is also writing about the wider issues of open access and digital freedom), “seems like a single groundswell, it masks an underlying tension between pragmatism and idealism.”
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Licensing
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Free Software Foundation chairman Richard Stallman has weighed into the debate over whether Google may be guilty of a GPL violation or not by saying that what the search giant has done is not limited by copyright.
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In an effort to revolutionize the world of open source, a free software advocate has submitted a new license to the Open Source Initiative. The document is two years in the making, and it’s known as the CDL, short for Chicken Dance License.
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The trouble with open source is that most coders aren’t lawyers and most lawyers aren’t coders. And even if everyone did wear both hats, there would still be ample room for disagreement. The law, you must remember, is subjective.
Two intellectual-property lawyers have told the world that Android is at risk of legal attack because it uses Googly versions of the original Linux header files. But Linux daddy Linus Torvalds says this is “totally bogus”. The truth lies somewhere in between. But good luck finding it.
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Openness/Sharing
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This is the terrible bargain of free content: in exchange for content we don’t have to pay for, everyone pays in crappy content, ads masquerading as news and reviews, and wholesale invasion and exploitation of our privacy and personal business. We already have crappy advertiser-controlled TV and radio, why would anyone want to extend that to movies, books, and music?
Jose_X wrote an interesting comment on the hurdles to making money in a digital economy. This shiny new digital marketplace is completely nuts, and I think it’s going to settle into a tip jar economy, which Jose_X talked about, whether we want it that way or not. It’s already most of the way there because despite the best efforts of the brainiacs at Sony, RIAA, MPAA, and our other beloved titans of the entertainment and publishing industries, treating copyright infringement like shoplifting doesn’t work.
Digital copying and distribution are so easy, and making people pay for it is so hard, it seems obvious that trying to keep the old retail model going is not going to work. Market value is irrational in so many ways. I think digital media should be worth more– you can copy it to multiple devices and modify it in all kinds of ways to suit your own needs, for example run an ebook through a reader so you can listen to it, get glorious color copies without the high cost of color printing, print out just the pages you want, copy and paste and assemble selected passages onto one page. With movies and music you can erase the dirty words if that is your desire, do-it-yourself karaoke, put yourself in the movie, convert them to lower-fi formats, store thousands of them on a single small computer, copy to multiple devices. It’s the ultimate in convenience and flexibility.
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Standards/Consortia
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“In cooperation with the Dutch Digital heritage Foundation and the Club for History and ICT, we will be celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011 in Royal Library (National Library for the Netherlands) in The Hague this year on March 30th. The theme for this event will be “Open Heritage”. The importance of information and open formats is in this branche very well known, because of broad availability, openness of information and endurable access.
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Science
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Scottish researchers have helped to create a device which improves memory storage for technology including MP3s, smartphones and cameras.
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More cores mean better performance, right? That’s not what Amdahl says. Learn one of the foundations of parallel computing in “Amdahl’s Law.” Prepare yourself for math. And lawn mowing.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party has warned that its “cyber jihadists” will “crush” internet-based dissent.
It follows an increase in anti-government campaigns organised on Facebook and Twitter.
Senior NCP official Mandur al-Mahdi warned opposition groups that its “cyber battalion” was leading “online defence operations”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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You may be one of the millions of people who’ve enjoyed videos of slow lorises behaving adorably while being tickled or clutching tiny cocktail umbrellas. However, according to animal rights activists, these endangered lorises have been illegally trafficked, brutally mutilated, and are doomed to die from infection, covered in their own feces and urine.
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Finance
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They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty.
They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
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Privacy
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Google has been hit with a fine by France’s privacy watchdog CNIL over the personal data it mistakenly gathered when setting up Street View.
The £87,000 (100,000 euro) penalty is the largest ever handed out by CNIL.
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Don’t believe me? Read the Amazon Cloud Drive Terms of Use for yourself. In particular, take a glance at: Section 5.2:
“5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law”
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DRM
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The American hacker who unlocked Sony’s PS3 has denied fleeing the country to avoid legal action.
George Hotz, also known as Geohot, said his trip had been planned for months and added that he was still in contact with his lawyers.
Sony had raised questions about the reason for his sudden disappearance in recent legal papers that it filed in California.
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Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI
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Parts of the Digital Economy Act that deal with illegal file-sharing are being challenged in the High Court.
Internet providers BT and TalkTalk demanded the judicial review, arguing that the legislation was rushed through parliament without proper debate.
Customising The GDM Login Screen
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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IBM
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In 2011, Linux is a fundamental component of IBM business—embedded deeply in hardware, software, services and internal development. It is present in every IBM business, geography and workload, and its use only continues to increase.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Three Rings Design, known for developing innovative online games like Puzzle Pirates, is coming up with a new multi-player online RPG, Spiral Knights on April 4th.
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Reviews
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Looking at GhostBSD from the view of a migrating Windows user, again there is nothing wrong with what’s on offer here but I think for someone who has led a Windows lifestyle, they are going to want more “bells and whistles”. I say that though with a little reservation since I have seen nothing from the developers which suggests its specifically aimed at such a user.
For established Linux users, again, I cannot see anything which would tempt them over. I say that not to create flame as I would really love to say that GhostBSD offers something really special, much hard work has obviously gone into this but as it stands I can best sum up the distro as: stable, solid and “does what it says on the tin”.
The homepage for GhostBSD is certainly starting to look the part. I say starting because it has typos and incomplete sections to it. I would stress that this is not a harsh criticism because a lot of hard work has gone into the distro and its very generous of the GhostBSD devs to spend their time working on this great project. With that in mind I think new users will not be filled with confidence in a project where the site intended to promote it has so many obvious errors and omissions. This is a shame because GhostBSD is in no way lacking functionality or stability and I think errors on its homepage will undersell GhostBSD.
In closing, I would expect it’s a welcome release for established GhostBSD users but new users may find that it’s neither polished or packaged as fully as they would like.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is the S&P 500′s top performer this morning with the stock trading at $46.77 representing 17.01% versus the previous trading session. Shares of Red Hat, the world’s leading open source technology solutions provider have defined support at $38.47 and resistance at $41.98.
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“Strong demand for open source Cloud infrastructure drove billings growth of 31%, materially above consensus of 17%. Results correlated to our recent survey findings, which indicated resellers finished above plan and observed an improving pace of business,” Piper Jaffray writes. “We see ongoing catalysts, as inroads into the large Windows market have only just begun and RHEL6 adoption won’t peak for 6 to 12 months.
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Red Hat Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 46.09, -0.25, -0.54%) said Wednesday its fourth-quarter net income rose to $33.5 million, or 17 cents a share, compared to $23.4 million, or 12 cents a share in the same period a year earlier. The provider of open-source business software said total revenue for the period ended Feb. 28 rose 25% to $244.8 million. On an adjusted basis, Red Hat said earnings for the quarter were 26 cents a share. Red Hat said earnings benefited by 2 cents share in the quarter, thanks to the U.S. research tax credit. Analysts polled by FactSet Research had expected Red Hat to report adjusted earnings of 22 cents a share, and $235.9 million in revenue.
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Investors sent shares of Red Hat Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. higher Tuesday evening after each company issued quarterly results that surpassed Wall Street’s projections.
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Three years ago, Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that his company would be the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in revenues. Red Hat is now nearly there.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has nixed Ubuntu Netbook Remix from it’s plans, and it will not appear starting version 11.04, which is also Natty Narwhal. So we say goodbye to an experiment that lasted a few distros at the time netbooks were the “in-thing.”
The core around Ubuntu Netbook Remix will now be integrated an edition called Ubuntu Desktop edition for laptops, Ubuntu said in a blog entry on March 9.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, the distribution AriOS made it to DistroWatch’s database. I had read Dedoimedo’s review of AriOS earlier, where he said that it is a user-friendly and very pleasant distribution to use, and it is much better than its predecessor mFatOS. Intrigued, I decided to try it out.
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I managed to get Zorin OS 4 distributive downloaded. This OS has several versions, and some of them are not free. You need either purchase DVD with distributive or donate to get a download link. But there are still Core and some other versions available for free. Moreover, Core is available in 32 and 64 bit. My choice was for 32 bit.
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The LiMo Foundation says it has approved four mobile device class specifications for the LiMo 4 mobile Linux stack. Citing first-time tablet support plus three different smartphone specs, the Foundation projects commercial releases within multiple LiMo classes starting in the second half of this year.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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Android
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In the great mobile-device wars, Google (GOOG) has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary software—Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Research In Motion (RIM:CN).
Unlike its rivals, Google makes the underlying code for its popular Android operating system publicly available, and anyone can access it and tailor it for use in mobile phones, tablets, television set-top boxes, even automobiles.
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The Java world got a bit of a surprise this morning when Java creator James Gosling revealed that he is now working for Google.
In his blog entry today, Gosling announced the news in brief fashion:
“Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying ‘no’ to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”
One can only imagine the opportunities Gosling has been offered since he left his former employer Oracle last year. But Google, it seems, is his next landing pad.
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he latest quarterly statistics showing US smartphone market share show Microsoft’s task with Windows Phone 7 is daunting, as the new OS is already losing ground. The latest US smartphones figures from comScore cover November of last year through the end of January, and while the figures are largely as expected the drop of market share by Microsoft is a bit of a surprise.
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The reasons that Android phones are either slow to get system updates, or fail to get them entirely are pretty clear. The process of getting an update ready to push to a handset is decidedly non-trivial:
1. Google creates, tests and releases a system update.
2. Handset manufacturers take the system update and apply their vendo-specific tweaks to it (MotoBlur, HTC Sense, etc.), then test it on their various devices.
3. Carriers then test the update, certify it, and push it out to the handsets.
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Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi, the Android-powered tablet will be available in Canada this April.
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Quick, across the entire history of Amazon, and all the types of products that the site has sold, what is its top selling product ever? The answer is that the Kindle eBook reader is, and that feat was attained while the Kindle functioned as a reading device, without the bells and whistles found on popular tablet devices. No Harry Potter book or other product comes close to the sales Amazon has reaped from the Kindle, and those sales have, of course, driven sales of lots of content from Amazon. For these reasons, and because of the increasing unpopularity of Apple’s policies regarding in-app purchasing, the Kindle could emerge as the biggest competitor to Apple’s iPad, if Amazon plays its cards right.
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The open source mobile app space is getting increasingly crowded. The recent opportunities for developers to produce and distribute mobile apps through a range of app stores is taking the developer world by storm. If, as the saying goes, all people dream of writing a poem at least once in a lifetime, then perhaps there aren’t many developers out there either who haven’t dreamed of building a great mobile app themselves.
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Of course, the FOSS movement has had notable leaders over the years, ranging from Linus Torvalds to Richard Stallman, but there is no single charismatic leader who regularly keeps open source and open standards topics alive in public conversations. While one person with enough charisma might make a big difference, though, what FOSS really needs is more unified messaging, and on the commercial open source front, more unified marketing.
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u can succeed in starting an open source community:
* Be honest with those people you are trying to recruit about your reasons for working in open source. Clearly state your goals and how you will measure success for yourself and the community.
* Contribute your code, but accept improvements or better solutions.
* Give up sole control of the project to a more democratic leadership in order to get a better code base that you can use, at a lower development cost to yourself. Don’t stack the leadership group with cronies or puppets.
* Don’t act like a prima donna just because you started the project.
* Trust that if you and everyone else plays fairly but works hard, you’ll get something of great value that many can use.
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Last week following a dispute among several core FFmpeg developers, FFmpeg was forked as libav. The group remaining in the “FFmpeg” this week have now merged the ffmpeg-mt branch to their SVN trunk code-base. This is the code that’s been worked on now for nearly three years to provide multi-threaded decoding support in FFmpeg.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chrome 11 beta is loading with a handful of amazing features. In this post we will review them briefly!
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 is finally released today by Mozilla that brings a feature packed, fast, minimal and a secure next generation web browser to the world.
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So how do you get Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 or even 4.0 on your Debian Squeeze, Lenny, Wheezy/Testing or Sid/Unstable box?
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Mozilla Firefox 4 is out, and I’m using it now. It’s now fast enough and stable enough that it has rekindled some of the old excitement I felt when I first started using Mozilla Firefox and when I started using a new version of the browser. At the same time that I started using it, I saw this article (Ed Bott, ZDNet) which posits why Microsoft Internet Explorer will survive and Mozilla Firefox won’t, and I felt like I should respond to it.
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SaaS
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Education
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Raising open source awareness in any organization is a very important, and sometimes difficult, task. Particularly important is open source awareness among college students. These are the engineers and computer scientists of the next generation who will be able to usher these modern practices into their workplace. This article discusses the process that was used to form the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), a very successful open source center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Programming
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If you watch new projects that are added to source forge then two weeks ago you might have noticed that Tiny Core Linux was added to their projects.
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Standards/Consortia
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This morning brings news of what may become another new and important consortium – the Open Network Foundation (ONF). This time the goal is to adapt network architecture to streamline its interoperation with cloud computing. And while the news is intriguing, the way in which it has been broken is a bit odd, on which more below.
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Science
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Paul Baran, whose work with packaging data in the 1960s has been credited with playing a role in the later development of the Internet, has died at age 84, his son said.
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A computer scientist from Binghamton University has recently scored about a half million in funding–$450,000 from the National Science Foundation, and $50,000 from Google–that will help support his interested in “green” software development.
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Jean Bartik, the last of the original ENIAC programmers, died this morning. She was 86.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Chinese democracy activist has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power.
Liu Xianbin was charged after writing a series of articles calling for democratic reforms.
He was convicted after a trial lasting only a few hours; the third time he has been sent to jail for his activism.
Dozens of lawyers and activists have been arrested or detained in China recently following calls for Middle East-style protests.
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The escalation and the attack on Qaddafi’s Lybia to enforce the no-fly zone is a brilliant strategic move of Nicolas Sarkozy and the French nation. Sarkozy’s right wing challenger Marine Le Pen took a more traditional French position, and voiced scepticism in recent days. Even Internal Market Commissioner Barnier intervened in the matter, a highly unusual move for an EU official. It is common knowledge that France had good relations with Qaddafi which makes the French intervention and Sarkozy more credible. Even the abstention of Germany in the UN security council perfectly fits the scene because it strenghtened the leadership of the neighbour on the matter.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The cataclysm visited upon Japan this March has produced an understandable debate over the future of nuclear power. As so often is the case, however, these post-crisis conversations presume the freedom to decide new policy choices when such choices, by society, have already been made. Decades after the advent of nuclear power, this modern energy source still provides only 5% of total global primary energy supply. Reality tested, risk adjudicated, and cost denoted, nuclear power has been given more than enough time to be adopted. We can talk all we like. There is little reason for nuclear optimism. | see: Global Energy Use by Source 2010 (estimate).
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Finance
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I got into writing financial blogs three years ago for one reason. It was the mortgage insurance industry “PMI” that got me out in the open. I saw first hand what a terrible concept this was. I saw (in advance of the problem) that PMI was going to result in a mortgage explosion for the country. Of course it did.
I had a family member working at one of the big PMI firms. I argued with them regarding the insanity of what they were doing. Before the crisis the response was always the same, “We’re doing God’s work of getting people into their own homes. Plus we’re making a boatload in the process.”
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It is interesting that Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is appearing before the court as a witness for the prosecution of Rajat Gupta, ex-member of Goldman Sachs’s board. Blankfein confirmed that Gupta violated the company’s “confidentiality policies” when he gave tips to outsiders about Goldman Sachs’s financial position.
It’s the pot calling the kettle black!
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This part of the memo ( pages 7-10 with footnotes omitted) explains Goldman Sachs’s Conflict Between Proprietary and Client Trading, and its Shorting the Mortgage Market. It is easy to see the role that Goldman Sachs played in bringing the financial system to its knees and the CEO was not above lying about the profits GS made.
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If someone described a bank by what it does rather than by what it says, he/she would find that getting high fees for risky and poor quality products is what matters; that creating junk CDOs for investors and using CDSs for making a huge profit is common practice; that taking a short position on the toxic mortgage market and thereby cashing in with billions of dollars at others’ expense is the way to do business; that taking advantage of clients’ positions and creating a conflict of interest is not material; that paying a small fine for a civil action suit where clients were not properly informed is a small price to pay for profit; and that, finally, using naked CDSs on assets it did not own to bet against the mortgage market and making huge amounts of revenue for itself shows little in the way of ethical conscience. That would be Goldman Sachs!
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A Manhattan federal judge on Friday named three pension funds as co-lead plaintiffs in an investor lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc to recover losses tied to the Wall Street’s bank’s alleged misleading statements about Abacus, a product linked to subprime mortgages.
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California reported its job numbers on Friday, and once again it was not good news. Although total California employment in January “rose” to 15.905 million people, this is only because December was revised down from 15.945 million to 15.878 million people.
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IT HAS long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that, despite years of auto-industry hardship, the economy of Michigan is still the same size as Taiwan’s?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The $2.76m contract was won by Ntrepid, a Californian firm, and called for an “online persona management service” that would enable 50 military spies to manage 10 fake identities each.
The personas should be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent”, a US Central Command (Centcom) tender document said.
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The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
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This is essentially the situation we find ourselves in with Twitter. They do have APIs that can be used to query their user data. But it is all “rate-limited”, meaning only a certain number of requests can be made per IP address per day. So it is impossible to get a running stream of all activity (a “video”) or even a snapshot of all activity at a single time (a “still camera”). But what we can do is access the “Twitter Public Timeline“, which will give you the most recent 20 tweets. This can be queried every 60 seconds, up to your daily limit.
I’ve been capturing the Twitter Public Timeline since late 2009. I have now nearly 6 million records, each one containing the message, of course, but also the name of the user and their “Followers” and “Following” count at that point in time. I started doing scatter plots of this data and was amazed at the detailed structure evident in the data, that illustrate some interesting ways in which Twitter is being used. No single graph can show it all, so I’m giving you a series of charts, each one showing an area of the Following/Followers phase space 10ox larger.
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[FURTHER THOUGHTS: Did Samsung mean for us to understand that these were imaginary users or not? The more I think about it, the more befuddled I get. The Raw Feed's Mike Elgan points out that the company's PR director earnestly described the "project" during the event in a way that made it sound real. And commenter Karl notes that Samsung referred to the users' tales as "true-life stories." But the bits with Hess and Kolinski are so profoundly artificial that they could have involved Madge the Manicurist and the Maytag Repairman. Actually, Kolinski seems to be channeling a certain real-life "leading New York real-estate CEO."]
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DRM
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First up, they object to SCEA’s attempts to establish jurisdiction of the case in Northern California. Hotz lives and works in New Jersey, and, as an individual and not a corporation, really doesn’t have the cash on hand to traverse the country defending himself in a district court on the other coast.
SCEA claims (PDF) that some of the people who jailbroke their PS3s lived in Northern California and thus, it should be where the case is tried. Hotz’s lawyers argue that this is an effort to stack the deck in SCEA’s favor, as the U.S. District Court of Northern California has historically sided with technology companies over individuals.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Now imagine that some lobbyists have staked out part of Antarctica and brought suit in federal court against tourists who trespassed on “their” land. Fine, you say: After all the lobbyists got there first. Replace “Antarctica” with “ideas” and you have the surreal world of “intellectual property.” Unfortunately, while you and I cannot both mine for gold in the same spot, we can certainly make use of the same idea, and therein lies the heart of this story.
A good spot to start the tale is in 1998, when a panel of judges ruled that software was patentable, thereby starting the intellectual property equivalent of the California gold rush (State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group). Every child knows how to answer the door: “Knock knock.” “Who is there?” But what if I taught a computer how to say, “Who is there,” and patented the idea? Absurd, you say. Well, we all understand how to run an auction—but do not try doing it with a computer because the holder of U.S. Patent 7,702,540 (also known as e-Bay) will sue you. And that in a nutshell is what software patents are all about.
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Copyrights
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We applaud the rejection by Judge Denny Chin of the Google Books class action settlement with authors and publishers regarding the digitization of books. SFLC filed a letter with the court on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and author Karl Fogel, urging the court to reject the settlement as it was last proposed and asking the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.
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Google’s vision of a universal library archiving all books ever published on Earth is once again at odds with laws protecting the authors of those books.
A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a settlement deal Google hammered out with publishers over its controversial Google Books archive, saying the proposed agreement went too far in giving Google control over the digitalization of books.
“The question presented is whether the [settlement agreement] is fair, adequate, and reasonable,” Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court in New York City wrote in his 48-page ruling. “I conclude that it is not.”
PullQuote
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Site News at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Return to wired connection ought to put the site back on track
After my Bad Telecom (BT) experience [1, 2, 3, 4] we’re back to normal operation*, so the IRC logs will be uploaded and published very soon, then we’ll resume posting daily links and articles (including out-of-date stuff, which was missed at the time and is important to cover). There will also be Identi.ca activity while I catch up with three ‘lost’ weeks. Microblogging is sometimes easier when ruished. Thanks to all those who E-mailed with concerns and sent condolences. It was not expected. █
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* Long story short, they deactivated and reactivated the wrong line, cutting the phone line too in the process (leading to a chain of unfortunate events).
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