11.28.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 9:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why SUSE lags behind the competition (in GNU/Linux) as indicated by news
NOVELL has become some historical entity whose news this month is mostly about an old case against Microsoft (here is a very recent video about that). We do not intend to cover this case because it is about the ‘old Novell’ of Noorda et al. It is not the same company that we boycott and the old case is only indirectly relevant to us.
So, Attachmate has this new release of OpenSUSE, which comes with a KDE side or a GNOME focus, depending on one’s preferences. The Fog Computing hype gets used for marketing as well, not just real features that are not mere buzzwords meaning “server”.
According to this, SUSE continues to work according to the plan we wrote about before:
Attachmate’s Suse division is also working on OpenStack software designed for ease of deployment in private clouds.
SUSE is not the best option though. For example, there is no SUSE support from AMD’s new chip:
As for operating system support, it’s helpful to note that the Opteron 6200 16-core chip is actually more like eight dual-core “Bulldozer” chips balled onto a single die. AMD says the 6200 supports all operating systems except Novell SLES 10 and 11,
How sad for Novell/SUSE, which is sponsored by Microsoft to help tax Linux (and still cannot beat RHEL and CentOS). They can’t even get fonts right. How come? Some font rendering features were historically disabled due to Apple and Microsoft patents.
In any event, it seems clear that there are no compelling reasons to give OpenSUSE any crown. It is the master of nothing and not a jack of any trades, either. It has Microsoft as its master. Nobody wants that, except perhaps close Microsoft partners like SAP. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Server
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Applications
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Google Reader is the undisputed champ among Web-based RSS and Atom feed-readers. But while the search giant gets plenty of karma points on the software freedom front, Google Reader’s status as a commercial product means that from time to time, features have to come and go. The latest change is the removal of social-networking “share this” functionality, as Google Reader gets merged into Google Plus. The open source feed reader NewsBlur is ready to make a play for your attention, adding not just link-sharing but multi-user rating and intelligence.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The wait until now was for a Linux client to run games Desura streams. However, now that it is here, users face a new dilemma – Download from Desura or desuraUbuntu Software Centre?
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Remember that source code project to overhaul the Quake 3 Engine and make it more secure, viable and updated for game management projects? Well, the same team behind the ioquake3 source code project, which overhauled the engine for better and more platform support as well as all sorts of other goodies, is at it again this time using the Doom 3 source code.
For now the project has only been just announced and that means that the team is consolidating resources and setting an outline for what the project will eventually blossom into.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat makes money giving away software and selling support services.
Adam worries about a future where “copyright exists on paper only,” but all of the above business models rely, in one way or another, on copyright protection. Hollywood uses copyright law to shut down pirate movie theaters. Apple uses copyright law to shut down unauthorized clones of its hardware products. Even Red Hat relies on copyright law to help it enforce the GPL license, which prohibits third parties from incorporating open source code into proprietary products. The fact that these businesses have chosen monetization strategies that don’t involve selling copies of content directly to the general public doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from copyright protection.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Some publication stirred the bee’s hive when they cited Distrowatch ratings as an indicator that Ubuntu is losing it’s popularity to LinuxMint and other Linux-based distributions.
One needs to be extremely careful while taking into account Distrowatch’s ratings because that is not the ‘goal’ or ‘purpose’ of Distrowatch. It provides info about the latest releases. Period.
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Phones
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Android
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Science is the effort of trying to understand how the physical world works. From observation and experimentation, science uses physical evidence of natural phenomena to compile data and analyze the collated information.
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SwipePad is a simple application that lets you launch any app with a single swipe action from within any other app. Upon being recommended by a friend of mine, SwipePad was one of those applications I installed immediately after receiving my first Android phone. Since then, SwipePad has become an integral part of my daily life that I almost started seeing it as one of those core apps for Android which comes as default.
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In its eagerness to put a computer running its software on every desk, Microsoft has spawned a number of ancillary industries, the most pernicious of which is the anti-virus group. McAfee is a major force in this industry.
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You probably use open source software every day, but it’s equally as likely you have no idea what it is or who is building it.
Fortunately for us, Gavin Jackson is one chap who knows what it’s all about and he came into the studio to give Louise Maher the low down.
“Open source software is any software that has been released under a licence that allows people to download the source code for viewing, for modification and also for redistribution,” Jackson explained.
“A lot of big business relies on open source technology, they probably wouldn’t exist without it, so it’s an interesting phenomenon.”
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HTML5 development shop appMobi will now open source key elements of its mobile technology in an attempt to accelerate industry migration to HTML5. This move will see the appMobi cross-platform device APIs released to the community contribution model of development and, as a consequence, also embrace support of HTML5 development for both Android and iOS platforms. appMobi will also release the source code for its mobiUs browser, which sets out to allow HTML5 web apps to perform identically to native apps.
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Finance
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On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GPL, Microsoft at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. [...] So that’s how you use journals that we control. The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate.”
–Microsoft's chief evangelist
Summary: How Microsoft infiltrates its rivals and a new example from Yahoo! and others
“INTEL INSIDE” was a famous slogan a few computer generations ago. “Windows inside” was just assumed because Microsoft signed dubious deals that later had Microsoft sued. But what happens when Microsoft — not Windows — embeds itself in other companies?
Ryan, citing and quoting this report, says that “Microsoft has to partner with vulture funds to stay under the antitrust radar, but it controls the vultures it “partners” with”
“DOJ,” he jokes, would say something along the lines of: “Oh, you’re back with sockpuppets? Alright then!”
This is about Microsoft’s malicious hijack of Yahoo, which saw former Microsoft executives being put in charge (e.g. the CTO) after the antagonists got chased away. According to this, Microsoft seeks the same type of secrecy is it needs for patent extortion in order to do its possibly illegal activities (or antitrust violations). To quote:
The two giants are rumoured to have signed a deal, allowing Microsoft to look into the state of Yahoo’s business.
Appalling. How is that allowed when both are public companies? Just look what happened to Nokia and its shareholders.
A few years ago we saw Microsoft sockpuppets spreading AGPL and GPLv3 FUD. It was all just a PR campaign as we demonstrated at the time. “The source code and instructions for installation are available for download on Github under a GNU AGPL license,” says this new example of AGPL adoption and there are many more. The GPL has been constant attack by Microsoft front groups and friends, even though it was embraced by many. The third version of the licence was another excuse or a back door for Microsoft FUD. Microsoft even had its former marketing manager create a company that now commands information on GPLv3 adoption. We are talking about Black Duck.
Other companies with Microsoft roots are Likewise, which does something similar to the stuff described in this new release from Centrify. They spread the Microsoft APIs. It is important to stay aware of the elusive presence of Microsoft inside its opposition’s territories. Failing to do so would lead to erosion of elements like the FSF and other Microsoft resistors. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Security, Windows at 4:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Joi Ito
Summary: Why the weakest link is Microsoft Windows (which therefore should not be used for storing sensitive information), whereas Android is just the target of a lot of FUD this month
TECHRIGHTS targets and addresses FUD, but sometimes the FUD is already sufficiently debunked by others, so a citation would do. There is some new FUD about Android and we put many links about it in our daily summaries, notably those which cite Chris DiBona.
Matt Asay says: “In the case of Android, which is apparently a malware-maker’s dream, Google’s open-source programs manager Chris DiBona has already gone on the defensive, arguing: “Virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you BS protection software for Android, RIM, and, iOS.”"
The short story is (for those who missed it), rogue applications that the users themselves have to foolishly install can do bad things. Surprise, surprise. These are not viruses, not even when the BBC uses this lie. If people want programs that spy on them and occasionally ask for more money, they can install Windows. Heck, many OEMs already install this malware whether the user wants it or not, due to secret bundling agreements.
In other headlines we find reports of Windows allowing intrusion into NASDAQ: [via "FBI Blames NASDAQ Hack on UnPatched Windows, Bad Firewalls"]
Forensic investigators found some PCs and servers with out-of-date software and uninstalled security patches, Reuters reported, including Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The stock exchange had also incorrectly configured some of its firewalls.
Microsoft ‘quality’ at work. Here is a warning about putting Microsoft in charge of people’s medical records (where leakage can have devastating effects on the public). Mr. Pogson has this to say:
In an attempt to persuade Australia to allow Australian government documents to be stored off-shore, M$, in a discussion paper wrote, “Any company with a presence in the United States of America (not just those with headquarters or subsidiaries in that country) may be legally required to respond to a valid demand from the United States Government for information the company retains custody over or controls, regardless of where the data is stored or the existence of any conflicting obligations under the laws of the country where the data is located”.
Only a few days ago we explained why governments should not do business with Microsoft (and other proprietary software vendors for that matter). █
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Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Klaus-Heiner Lehne / Source: Europa.eu
Summary: Various updates about the patents situation across Europe
LAST year Apple decided that it could not compete fairly against HTC, which now sells more phones (running Android/Linux) than Apple in the United States. Apple dropped to third, trailing Samsung.
So Apple sued HTC and found favour in its home country, as expected. In Europe it has been a different story and Apple is failing to block Linux/Android-powered devices from Samsung. Even the regulators get involved right now, which ought to make Apple worry. But Europe has had some elements in it that are dangerous in the sense that they play ball for US-based multinationals. They also try to legalise software patents by harmonising US- and EU-based patent regulations. Anne-Cat Lorrain writes: “European Commission: “the creation of a EU patent court is on a good track”. Audience not so “optimistic”… #ictsp11″
Once again we also see Lehne getting involved. He is mentioned in the following new article for his role. It says that:
The EU patent “package” moved a step closer to final approval on Tuesday, when the Legal Affairs Committee approved a mandate to open formal negotiations with national governments to agree to create unitary patent, so as to cut costs for firms and boost the EU’s competitiveness. Parliament will strive to adapt the proposed regime to small firms’ needs.
The European Parliament’s rapporteurs, who will negotiate with national governments, will treat the three proposals (unitary patent, language regime and unified patent court) as a package, meaning none will be agreed without the others. According to the mandate, approved by the committee with 16 votes in favour and 3 against, the MEP negotiators will also ask that the three laws enter into force at the same time.
The aim of creating an EU patent is twofold. First to reduce current patenting costs by up to 80%, so as to improve the competitive position of EU firms vis-à-vis their counterparts in the US and Japan, where patents are substantially cheaper. Second, it should help to avoid the legal confusion created when dealing with differing national patent laws.
Lehne is named by Glyn Moody, who writes:
MT @zoobab @VisaePatentes OUTRAGEOUS: #JURI mandates #Lehne to negotiate #unitarypatent with Commission/Council behind closed doors>>shame
Zoobab also notes that the “Polish Presidency turn its coat for software patents through a central patent court,” according to this post which says:
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent a letter to the presidents of the EU institutions, on 18 November, pressing for an agreement on adoption of the harmonised European patent system. “This is one of the most important projects for the common market, to which the latest Council Presidencies have devoted considerable work and attention,” said Tusk. “In a context of increasing competition at global level, we cannot afford to keep the current system, which is one of the world’s costliest and which limits both innovation and the competitiveness of our enterprises.”
We wrote about this stance of the Polish Presidency in [1, 2, 3]. The president of the FFII (Zoobab) argues that the “European Parliament JURI committee [is] against ban of software patents, so pushing for them via central caselaw, was to be expected”
He also points out that the “EU patent draft introduces joint Member States liability for any failure of the patent court to apply EU law”
Patent lawyers from London wrote about this as follows:
Anyone who has encountered the AmeriKat in the past two weeks will have been subjected to a “what are you doing to help get the Unified Patent Court to London” style of questioning. During and outside of her workday she is still doing a fair amount of London cheerleading, so much so that she has failed to pick up the recent House of Commons Select Committee on European Scrutiny’s report on “Enforcement of Patent Rights”. In May of this year the IPKat reported on the Scrutiny Committee’s scrutiny of the unified patent system and Baroness Wilcox. More recently, on 9 November 2011, the European Scrutiny Committee considered a recent, but not the latest, Draft Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and draft Statute. The European Scrutiny Committee does what it says on the tin/can – they scrutinize draft EU legislation on behalf of the House of Commons and determine which proposals are of political or legal importance. Good news – the UPC ticks both boxes! The Committee flags up these proposals to the House through their weekly Committee Reports and by recommending that some draft legislation be debated – either by the European Committees or by the House of Commons. For a list of members of the Scrutiny Committee click here.
Surely the problems remain very real in Europe, especially due to patent lawyers and politicians who sometimes work for patent firms on the side. As Zoobab once put it, Lehne works for "Taylor Wessing, active in EU lobbying and pushing for software patents.” █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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IBM has filed its Memorandum in Opposition [PDF] in opposition to SCO’s motion to partly reopen SCO v. IBM. SCO would like to go forward with its side of the case, the little bits it thinks are left on the table after the whipping SCO got at Novell’s hands. SCO wants IBM’s hands to remain bound by the bankruptcy stay while it tries to beat it up. IBM seems to think that would be unfair. And it believes that the Novell ruling has killed off all of SCO’s claims anyway, but it indicates an interest in pursuing its counterclaims. It taunts SCO, suggesting it should just ask the bankruptcy court to lift the stay so all the claims and counterclaims can be litigated together.
And a new presiding judge has been assigned, the Honorable Clark Waddoups (here is a little bit of background for you), because Chief Judge Tena Campbell has recused herself. She assumed senior status in January, which means the judge qualifies for retirement but instead of walking off into the sunset volunteers to stay around with a greatly reduced case load instead. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her caption on the order [PDF] about her recusal and the case being sent to Judge Waddoups. It reads “Caldera Systems and SCO Group v. IBM”. Caldera Systems is what they were calling themselves until 2003, many moons ago, but they haven’t used that name for years and years.
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The decision was made after an appeals court turned down The SCO Group’s appeal of a jury verdict and other rulings from a 2010 trial in a related lawsuit against Novell.
“Now that the dust has settled in the litigation with Novell, we have turned to the remaining litigation assets of the estate,” Fatell said in an email. “We reviewed the status of the claims against IBM with Boise Schiller, [SCO’s] counsel, and have concluded that the Novell ruling does not impact the viability of the estate’s claims against IBM.”
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Applications
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MiniTube is very useful YouTube player that shows the YouTubr videos without using a browser. And the other interesting features is that it also allows you to download the YouTube videos in HD quality.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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You may have noticed several Phoronix articles in recent weeks using a ZaReason notebook built around Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” processor. This is one of the new notebooks from ZaReason that had been in our labs for testing. Here is a last look at the Strata 6880 notebook from this Linux-focused PC vendor.
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GNOME Desktop
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For those interested in the GTK3 tool-kit on Windows, improvements are forthcoming.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12
· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 2011_11_24
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The final version is scheduled for an early May 2012 release, almost a full six months away. So if you will not be testing this or any other pre-stable release, the following screenshots of the KDE 4 and GNOME 3 editions will give you an idea of what to expect.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There’s an active discussion on the Fedora mailing list concerning a “software center” for Fedora Linux.
A new Fedora contributor sparked a discussion about a software center for Fedora on this devel mailing list thread.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Finally Linux Mint 12 has been released with a code name “Lisa” and it’s available to download. Few weeks ago we have seen the earlier Release Candidate of Linux Mint 12 with Gnome 3 desktop, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions “MGSE” and new panels Mint-Z theme, backgrounds artwork.
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inux Mint has signed an exclusive deal with DuckDuckGo, the new search engine which uses Microsoft Bing in the back-end.
If you search DuckDuckGo for open source office suite, you will not find LibreOffice on top. It’s buried at the bottom, similar to Microsoft Bing. On the contrary if you search Google for the same keywords, LibreOffice is the second result. If you search for simply office suite then also you will never reach to LibreOffice. So, DuckDuckGo users will never know there exists an office suite called LibreOffice.
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The Linux Mint development team has, today, officially announced the arrival of version 12 of its popular Linux distribution. The project’s lead developer, Clement Lefebvre, also announced the project has made its first income-raising deal with a partnership with search engine company DuckDuckGo. In Linux Mint 12, DuckDuckGo will be the default search engine. Lefebvre pointed to the company’s lack of tracking or personalisation based on web history, along with its range of features and a commitment to supporting the open source community, as reasons why the relative newcomer in search, established in 2008, was selected to be the Mint default.
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Linux Mint 12′s foundation is built on the base of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions out there, not to say that Linux Mint isn’t popular but with this edition, things might change.
With the latest release in Linux Mint “Lisa”, there has been a shift in what it feels its users deserve in the desktop environment that they choose. When Ubuntu 11 came out there was a big backlash in the Ubuntu community about the desktop Unity, being used and not allowing those which are more familiar with Linux a full Gnome desktop.
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While reading the Ubuntu weekly news, I came across a link to some comparisons of various versions of Ubuntu that drew my attention because an old friend of mine, who is now living in Australia, had mentioned in email that he finds both Apple MacOS and Microsoft Windows to be inadequate in many ways that are irritating to him. I recommended that he try a version of Ubuntu on an old computer. He said that he had a turn of the millennium Gateway laptop. I pointed out that as long as he had sufficient spare disk-space then he could rejuvenate the computer by running Linux in some form that coexists with Windows, allowing him to try Linux and back away from it if it proved not to his liking, while preserving his data. Before sending him the links to the comparisons, I looked at them myself and was intrigued by a mention of Bodhi Linux that is based on the most recent Long-Term-Support version of Ubuntu. Bodhi Linux is built using the E17 version of the Enlightenment window manager. These days I am more in a Buddhist meditative frame of mind that embraces simplicity and minimalism; so, what with this and disliking the direction in which Ubuntu is going with the Unity desktop, I took a look at Bodhi Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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T-Mobile officially unveiled a fresh self-branded blower this morning, putting Android smartphones in pockets for under £100.
The T-Mobile Vivacity rocks up with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 3.5in capacitive display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 5Mp camera and an iPhone-esque – silver band around the sides, I ask you – design.
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If the standard black DROID Incredible 2 wasn’t to your liking, hold out until November 24 as Verizon appears primed to release a full-on red version. We aren’t sure if this has anything to do with Project Red or not, but it would certainly fit the theme of that organization. Specs and price will likely remain the same. Not a bad way to re-launch the product ahead of the holidays though, right?
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How much Apple’s founder Steve Jobs hated Android is evident from his last conversations with his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs claimed that Android was a rip-off of Apple’s iOS and that he will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong, to destroy Android. This created an uproar. In an interview with Reuters, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, said that all these allegations are baseless and that Android project started well before the iPhone effort. Let’s find out how true a statement that is.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Amazon’s new Kindle Fire is almost certain to be a financial success for Amazon, and may finally make a name for Google’s Android in tablets. If only the success and acclaim were deserved.
Amazon has done quite a bit to soften Android’s rough edges, but in my experience it hasn’t gone nearly far enough to rival the iPad for elegance and polish. Then again, it doesn’t need to: at $199, Amazon’s Kindle Fire doesn’t have to be great. It just has to be good enough.
I have been looking forward to the Kindle Fire for months. I have an iPad and and an iPad 2, and have spent quite a bit of time with other tablets too: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 8.9, Motorola’s Xoom, and Research in Motion’s Playbook, in particular. But what I really have wanted was something that felt more like my second-generation Kindle in my hand, but with the ability to run a few apps and occasionally watch video. The Kindle Fire seemed to fit the bill.
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Today I want to present an open source software created for the asset management OCSInventory, and in the next days i want to post information about Fusioninventory and GLPI. I will focus on programs that allow you to have an inventory of your hardware and software that allow you to manage everything with discovery tools, reports and alerts, but first let’s see what’s the mean of Asset Management:
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Rob O’Callahan runs Mozilla’s New Zealand office, in Auckland. A New Zealander, he was working in the US when he was approached by Novell to do some Mozilla work. He said he’d prefer to return home, and Novell agreed. Subsequently Mozilla itself recruited him and agreed to his building an Auckland team.
The team is currently about five strong with a few other developers working “pretty much full-time” for Mozilla from Wellington and the South Island. O’Callaghan is a passionate advocate of openness in internet applications and is disquieted by Google’s and Apple’s domination of the mobile market. He is scheduled to speak about this at the ITEX conference in Auckland on November 23. Stephen Bell caught up with him for a foretaste of his views and practical ways of furthering them.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’m sitting on a train waiting to leave Paris for Barcelona, returning from the 2011 GNU Hackers Meeting. It was fantastic, clearly the best we have had yet. Thanks a lot to Ludovic Courtès for organizing it, and to IRILL and Sylvestre Ledru for hosting. I hope to write more about it in the future, but this essay will be long enough 
I gave a talk entitled “The User in the Loop”, which made the perhaps obvious argument that “extensibility is good & stuff”. I hope that it did so in an entertaining and illuminating fashion. It also argued that Guile is a great fit for the extensibility needs of the GNU project. The video will be out shortly. Slides are available here, though you probably just want the notes instead.
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GNUstep, the leading free software implementation of Apple’s Cocoa Objective-C libraries and related Mac OS X components, has reached a new version. GNUstep runtime 1.6 is this new version with many new features after being in development for more than one year.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Last week the Minister Clement issued a press release announcing some of the progress the government has made on its Open Government Initiatives. Three things caught my eye.
First, it appears the government continues to revise its open data license with things continuing to trend in the right direction.
As some of you will remember, when the government first launched data.gc.ca it had a license that was so onerous that it was laughable. While several provisions were problematic, my favourite was the sweeping, “only-make-us-look-good-clause” which, said, word for word: “You shall not use the data made available through the GC Open Data Portal in any way which, in the opinion of Canada, may bring disrepute to or prejudice the reputation of Canada.”
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The Open Mobile Alliance (a coalition of over 140 mobile providers) discussed how they were also planning on rolling out a federated social Web client. However, there was concern from some that the underlying technologies could be patented, which would prevent their roll-out in products. This would be prevented if they were released under a license like the W3C Royalty-Free License.
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You can’t help but empathize with Sony after the terrible year that the company has suffered, with natural disasters that might make the superstitious wonder if God is angry. I don’t believe that God is behind natural disasters anyhow, actually, but still, it’s been an unusually awful year, with an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown interfering with normal operations.
So I struggled with whether or not to tell you the latest from the PS3 class action litigation, particularly because of what I’d have to write about it. I don’t like to kick anyone when he’s down. But I have gotten emails asking me what’s been happening since the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint back in March, and while the judge has yet to render a ruling on Sony’s motion to dismiss it, we do have the transcript [PDF] of the oral argument at the July hearing on it. The court has lifted the sealing, so I’ll show it to you.
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Security
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Smartphone malware may be rising, but users should be more wary of “charlatan” security vendors, says Google’s open source program manager Chris DiBona.
DiBona took exception to claims that Android has a “virus problem” because it is based on open source and lacks Apple-like checks for its own Android Market Place.
Echoing Symantec’s recent advice in a report that pitted iOS against Android, DiBona wrote on his Google + page:
“No major cell phone has a ‘virus’ problem in the traditional sense that windows and some mac machines have seen. There have been some little things, but they haven’t gotten very far due to the user sandboxing models and the nature of the underlying kernels.”
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A report from an Illinois intelligence fusion center saying that a water utility was hacked cannot be substantiated, according to an announcement released Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security.
Additionally, the department disputes assertions in the fusion center report that an infrastructure-control software vendor was hacked prior to the water utility intrusion in order to obtain user names and passwords to break into the utility company and destroy a water pump.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The army’s former chief legal adviser in Iraq has accused the Ministry of Defence of moral ambivalence and a cultural resistance to human rights that allowed British troops to abuse detainees and beat the Basra hotel worker Baha Mousa to death.
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Egypt’s revolution has been plunged into fresh uncertainty after hundreds of thousands of angry demonstrators rejected a promise by the country’s military council on Tuesday to accelerate the transition to civilian rule.
In an extraordinary display of people power, protesters at a mass rally in Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanded the immediate departure of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), just as they had demanded President Hosni Mubarak’s humiliating exit in February.
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Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber on Tuesday imposed a moratorium on the death penalty for the remainder of his term, saying he’s morally opposed to capital punishment and has long regretted allowing two men to be executed in the 1990s.
Kitzhaber’s decision gives a temporary reprieve to a twice-convicted murderer who was scheduled to die by lethal injection in two weeks, along with 36 others on death row. It makes Oregon the fifth state to halt executions since 2007.
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A pregnant woman who was pepper sprayed during the Occupy Seattle protests in the US claims she had a miscarriage five days later as a result of injuries allegedly inflicted by the police.
Jennifer Fox, 19, claims that she was also struck in the stomach twice – once by a police officer’s foot and once by an officer’s bicycle – as police moved in to disperse marchers on 15 November.
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While the United States, Britain and Canada are planning to announce a coordinated set of sanctions against Iran’s oil and petrochemical industry today, longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh questions the growing consensus on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. International pressure has been mounting on Iran since the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency revealed in a report the “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear activities, citing “credible” evidence that “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” In his latest article for The New Yorker blog, titled “Iran and the IAEA,” Hersh argues the recent report is a “political document,” not a scientific study. “They [JSOC] found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization,” Hersh says. “In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities to build the bomb. This is simply a fact.” [includes rush
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The excessive and gratuitous use of police at Occupy protests, especially in New York and other large cities, has led a number of people to wonder how cities are paying for the police to patrol demonstrations and encampments. Now, with a report from AP circulating, those who despise the Occupy movement or have grown impatient with it have ammunition to lash out even more.
According to AP, the movement has cost “local taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services.” AP finds the “heaviest financial burden has fallen upon law enforcement agencies tasked with monitoring marches and evicting protesters from outdoor camps. And the steepest costs by far piled up in New York City and Oakland, Calif., where police clashed with protesters on several occasions.”
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Cablegate
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A Malaysian tribunal has found former US President George W Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of committing crimes against humanity during the Iraq war, Press TV reported.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Climate scientists have mounted a robust defence of their work and debates over science after more than 5,000 personal emails were leaked onto the internet in an apparent attempt to undermine public support for international action to tackle climate change.
More than 39,000 pages of emails to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were loaded onto a Russian server and a link to them posted on climate sceptic websites on Tuesday, almost exactly two years after a similar release of hacked or leaked emails in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009.
Norfolk police have also responded to criticism that their invesitgation into who released the 2009 emails had yet to make any arrests. A spokesperson described it as an unusual and complex case, adding that the inquiry had “been determined and persistent in following all relevant lines of enquiry”, including the latest email dump.
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Finance
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The cynic in me has to note that PBS Newshour decided to cover the issue of why no banksters have gone to jail on what has to be one of their lowest traffic days of the year. And I have a sneaking suspicion I got the call to go on the show because it was not exactly easy to find people willing to be taped late in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving (they did have to go to the trouble not only of arranging for a studio in Alabama, but also finding a makeup person, since I’m not in the habit of taking my TV warpaint with me when I travel).
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Public services across Portugal ground to a halt on Thursday as trade unions held a 24-hour walk out. The strikers are protesting against a raft of austerity measures introduced by the government in exchange for financial aid.
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As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?
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Censorship
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THE EUROPEAN UNION COURT OF JUSTICE has ruled that national court injunctions that require an internet service provider (ISP) to install a filtering system to prevent the illegal download of files are prohibited under EU law.
The ruling relates to a case where Belgian music firm SABAM obtained an injunction against ISP Scarlet Extended SA by the Brussels Court of First Instance over users illegally downloading songs over peer-to-peer networks.
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Civil Rights
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An unpatched security flaw in Apple’s iTunes software allowed intelligence agencies and police to hack into users’ computers for more than three years, it’s claimed.
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A few recent legal developments affecting U.S. online privacy have rightfully troubled privacy advocates and civil libertarians on American soil. In addition to the Patriot Act’s relaxed regulation of law enforcement’s access to private data, recent court rulings have made it clear that U.S. authorities can secretly request data from tech companies without the user ever knowing.
If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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DRM
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Napster Canada has advised its customers that it is shutting down operations effective December 16, 2011. The move comes weeks after Napster US became part of Rhapsody and users were assured that Canadians would be unaffected by the move. The company warns users to create backup copies of downloaded music since purchases may be lost due to its digital lock system. The company warns:
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The Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network is back in the news today with a refreshed version of its 2007 report that recommended new border measure powers, legal reforms, and a massive increase of public tax dollars for enforcement and education programs. Many of those same recommendations are back with claims that the government should pour millions into anti-counterfeiting activities, increase criminal penalties, expand seizure powers, and ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
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Michael Geist is writing a series of posts called The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter. Beginning October 3 and right up to today, Geist is presenting the arguments that various organizations have made publicly against the idea of digital locks, which Bill C-11 would protect, making it illegal for Canadians to circumvent them. (More background on C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, here.) The bill is in its second reading in the House of Commons.
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The debate over C-11 resumed this week in the House of Commons with Paul Calandra, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, invoking a claim that raises the question of how the Canadian digital lock rules compare to those found in Europe. In response to the ongoing concerns with Bill C-11′s digital lock rules – they are easily the most discussed issue during the debates – Calandra stated:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This morning the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee began another evidence session looking at the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. Among the four panellists in the morning session were Baroness Wilcox, the Minister for Intellectual Property, and Adrian Brazier, a senior civil servant from DCMS. You can watch the session here.
The hearing started with a positive discussion of our work (read our original post here) to reveal that the Government holds no evidence on the effects of copyright infringement online, or of the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with it. Mr. Brazier said that we ‘had a point’ about the ‘opaque’ evidence used in the Digital Economy Act, and that the methodologies behind the evidence used in the Digital Economy Act was not publicly available – or indeed available to the Government.
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Trademarks
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An American company, which registered the name Koha as a trademark for software in New Zealand, has offered to hand ownership of the name to a non-profit representing the Koha community.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is an international trade treaty, drawn up over the past five years, that aims to improve ‘global standards for the enforcement of IPR, to more effectively combat trade in counterfeit and pirated goods.’ Having been negotiated in international fora, the treaty now requires national Parliaments and negotiating parties (including the EU as a whole) to sign and ratify it. This is what’s going on now.
ACTA raises a number of extremely controversial issues, all of them outlined very well in this booklet from Access, EDRi and the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue. Concerns include a further drift towards private companies being forced to police the Internet and the further pressuring of ISPs to carry out surveillance of their users.
One of the most troubling aspects, which is the focus of this post, is procedural – the persistent opacity that has surrounded the negotiation, and now ratification, of the treaty. It has seemed at every stage as if the process has a momentum and direction beyond the reach of the people it will affect. It has been formulated in closed international fora, with transparency an afterthought. Civil society groups have been consistently frustrated when seeking a mechanism to clearly put forward their objections in a meaningful and constructive way.
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On the same day that the European Parliament had its first secret meeting on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), the Dutch parliament decided it will not take ACTA into consideration unless all ACTA negotiation texts are published.
A few weeks ago, the Dutch House of Representatives’ committee of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation requested the ACTA negotiation texts (the earlier versions of ACTA). The minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, Maxime Verhagen, sent the texts to parliament, adding a non disclosure obligation. In debates, Members of Parliament may not refer to the documents, nor quote from them.
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Posted in Apple, Law, Microsoft, Patents at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some bits of news that seem relevant to the patent wars which affect Linux and Free software in general
THE US patent system is as broken as it has been since the start of this year (and probably more broken than ever before).
Lodsys the patent troll extorts a company, proving just how ridiculous things have become and The Economist says: “The number of patent applications in the world rose from around 800,000 in the early 1980s to 1.8m in 2009, according to the World Intellectual Property Report 2011, newly published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).”
This is not a good thing and it also shows that patents are not indicative of innovation. Innovation did not just double in a couple of decades. What we see here is a world that gets increasingly troubled and disturbed by patent monopolies.
When patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures are the ones rising while other companies — real companies that make products — declare bankruptcy, then innovation is truly doomed.
The corporate press continues playing along with this whole “IP” extravaganza and The Register shows Apple trying to get monopolies in the field of Computer Vision, which is a field I work in. According to this article:
Apple secured a patent yesterday on software to create and identify 3D models of faces, animals, aircraft, military vehicles and tumours in one of the more unusual tech patents to be awarded in recent months. This came to light after the US Patent and Trademark Office published a series of newly awarded patents.
Shame on Apple for claiming monopolies on mathematical methods. That’s what Computer Vision is about, mostly manipulation of matrices. There is no excuse for granting exclusive rights on use of geometry. Whose laws of nature are these anyway?
Over in New Zealand the Pirate Party does good work that tackles the patent question (like the Pirate Party in Australia) and in its latest move we find more evidence of that:
Party president Tommy Fergusson said the key issues for the party were the “three strikes” copyright regime that came into force in September, under which people can be fined up to $15,000 for downloading copyright material, software patents and a filtering system set up by Internal Affairs to block access to child pornography sites.
The part relevant to us is about software patents. Other parties do not talk about it. Over in Europe, regulators get involved and one source says that “The European Commission ‘s vice president for competition, Joaquin Almunia, has for the first time publicly voiced his concern about how certain high-tech companies may be using intellectual property rights unfairly to thwart rivals and distort competition, reports Reuters.
“Almunia’s decision to speak publicly could signal that an official investigation is in the works.
“In particular, the European Commission is looking into the spate of smartphone patent battles between Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Samsung Corp. , but it has not yet launched an official probe. The EC requested information from Apple and Samsung, but Almunia said he has not received answers. (See Euronews: Vodafone Guns for UK Govt Deals.)”
How does any of this patent confrontation which Apple started benefit the European buyers? Here is what Murdoch’s press quotes in relation to this:
“The patent system is very seriously screwed up,” says Ed Black
Ed Black was paid by Microsoft and even he is able that the patent system lost its way.
Some of the better examples of the patent system being broken come from the smartphones sector. Here is a new article about this which says:
Smartphone sector in a patent arms race
[...]
Specifically, an eruption of patent lawsuits has occurred between almost every major developer of smartphone hardware and software in the industry. In many respects, companies are buying insurance against future legal action, injunctions, etc.
Microsoft is currently using Nokia as a patents weapon, probably against Android (through MOSAID). The president of the FFII writes: “Nokia patent lawyer gives no solution for SMEs attacked by trolls, left them in the cold by dark software patent system”
The Pirate Party in New Zealand has also just stepped in (yes, again) and gotten involved in the news again. No other party seems to be doing anything substantial about it. Those who do simply struggle to get funding and those who do (like the German Pirate Party) sell out by taking money from supporters of software patents. Here is what happens in New Zealand:
Internet users in Hamilton East and Wellington who are concerned about the “Skynet” copyright regime will have a chance to make a protest vote at the election tomorrow.
The Pirate Party failed to garner the 500 members it needed to contest the party vote in the election, but is fielding candidates in the two constituencies.
What we desperately need in all nation is a political presence that realises what patents are really about. Not some online petitions which give a shallow impression of the public being listened to; we need real action. The Against Monopoly Web site cites a new article that tackles an issue related to software patents and remarks as follows:
The New York Times ran a surprisingly long and tough piece from Reuters titled Making Sense of Patent Law link here. It opens, saying “The United States Supreme Court has a chance to reverse the mission creep in patent law. The system is supposed to reward inventors but not stifle innovation. Fuzzy and overly broad concepts like thought processes generally are not protected. Yet one company, Prometheus Laboratories, reckons it owns a method for interpreting how patients react to a drug.”
It then traces the history of patent law covering ideas which consistently forbade such patents but by 1994, was patenting “any software with a practical purpose.”
What example can be cited of a software patent bringing real progress and lowering costs? Innovation is supposed to be about benefits, not the hoarding of paperwork and legal fees that accompany this. █
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