05.17.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lock-in, not security
Summary: News and analysis of UEFI ‘secure boot’ (lockdown), including the new role played by the Microsoft-funded SUSE
The UEFI Forum contacted me yesterday, seeking to arrange an interview with UEFI executives. I clarified that my intent is to focus on the impact UEFI has on freedom and choice. It’s not just a Microsoft problem, but Microsoft uses a ‘feature’ in UEFI to impede adoption of GNU/Linux.
Novell, which is close to Microsoft not just due to CPTN (Novell was funded by Microsoft and so is SUSE), has had its former developers help spread UEFI [1, 2], much to Microsoft’s chagrin. They did this inside the Linux Foundation. OBS, another Novell project that got into the Linux Foundation, is helping UEFI restricted boot even further. To quote Mr. Larabel: “OBS, the Open Build Service developed largely by openSUSE, has reached version 2.4. With Open Build Service 2.4 comes support for a new package format, Secure Boot signing, and other features.”
“By refusing to bootstrap a compromised system UEFI would offer neither cure nor prevention.”Therein lies the issue with Microsoft influence. Even Torvalds appears to have complained about this influence.
Microsoft did not need restricted boot for security. It is nonsense. Days ago Microsoft announced 33 more security holes in its software (the real numbers are higher, but Microsoft keeps some holes hidden for vanity purposes). Well, that’s where the real security threat exists, not in boot time. Microsoft essentially calls for setting up an alarm system in premises that have neither walls nor fences. Microsoft is also spying on people in the name of 'security' (Skype), leading to this reminder that software freedom matters (“Skype is following your links – that’s proprietary for you”).
By refusing to bootstrap a compromised system UEFI would offer neither cure nor prevention. All it does is prevent people from having choices, █
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Posted in Site News at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Sites that deal with patents and with FUD as well as their respective ages
Techrights recently (a few days ago) became 6.5 years old, amassing almost 17,000 blog posts and earning respect from past critics who saw our predictions come true. Groklaw, however, is celebrating a much more special anniversary, having just turned 10. Here is some coverage about it:
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One of the amazing things about free software is how it has managed to succeed against all the odds – and against the combined might of some of the world’s biggest and most wealthy companies. That shows two things, I think: the power of a simple idea like open collaboration, and how individuals, weak on their own, collectively can achieve miracles.
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When I started, I thought I’d do a little fiddling around for a couple of months to learn how to blog. But then all you guys showed up and taught me some important things that I didn’t know, and vice versa I hope, and here we are, on our 10th anniversary, still going strong, together on a very different path than I originally imagined. The important moment for me was when I realized the potential we had as a group and decided to try to surf this incredible wave all of you created by contributing your skills and time. I saw we could work as a group, explain technology to the legal world so lawyers and judges could make better decisions, and explain the legal process to techies, so they could avoid troubles and also could be enabled to work effectively to defend Free and Open Source Software from cynical “Intellectual Property” attacks from the proprietary world.
I donated to Groklaw a few times because no site has been nearly as valuable to our causes as Groklaw. It inspired us, too.
I am pretty certain that we too can reach the tenth anniversary and still be an active site (thanks to all who donated; we welcome more donations to help cover hosting fees). The fight for software freedom and against software patents is far from over and the outcome of this fight depends on activism. This site is a purely voluntary activity from yours truly and others in the community. The motivation is idealogical, not financial, but there are operating costs. █
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Posted in America, EFF, Patents at 3:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hostility towards the practice of patenting software is seen in a nonprofit organisation, a corporation, and a government branch responsible for patenting
Dr. Glyn Moody says that “at last [the] EFF contemplates software patents abolition,” citing EFF positions in the essay “What’s At Stake in CLS Bank—Do Software Patents Hold Up The Sky?”
“Remember that i4i is a Canadian company best known for its lawsuit against Microsoft.”The essay comes from Mr. Nazer, whose positions we wrote about in [1, 2]. Earlier on he was targeting just trolls, not software patents. In his latest essay he says: “It is important to realize that software patents and the software industry are not the same thing. As Judge Moore’s own scholarship shows, patent issuance is “a poor measure of innovation value.” And there are straightforward economic reasons why patents and software are a bad fit. Far from being an incentive, software patents tend to operate as a barrier to entry and a tax on innovation.”
In other news cited by Moody, Newegg beat what some call a “corporate troll”. One summary says that “Newegg’s policy of not backing down from patent trolls, even ones as large as Alcatel-Lucent, continues to result in victory. Earlier this year, Overstock and Newegg successfully defended themselves with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent’s main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle. ”
Lastly for this week, Moody points out that there are more pushbacks against software patents, this time in Canada. As a short summary puts it: “The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has recently published two notices for patent examiners relating to patent interpretation, and in particular computer-related/business method type patents saying: ‘for example, what appears on its face to be a claim for an “art” or a “process” may, on a proper construction, be a claim for a mathematical formula and therefore not patentable subject matter.’”
Here is the corresponding article. Remember that i4i is a Canadian company best known for its lawsuit against Microsoft. There are other notable examples of patent parasites in Canada and we covered them before. █
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Corporate AstroTurf versus grassroots FOSS
Summary: Microsoft’s front group which pretends to support Free/Open Source software (FOSS) is using a guest post to entertain the idea of software patents inside Free/Open Source software
WHENEVER we see Open Source and software patents in the same sentence, there is the possibility that there is Microsoft spin-doctoring going on.
There is Microsoft-coordinated AstroTurf (with Microsoft lobbyists like Association for Competitive Technology) which tries to portray Open Source and software patents as symbiotic. Microsoft tries to tear apart the GPLv3 and by calling its lobbyist Florian Müller “FOSS Patents” it contributes to this nonsense. Black Duck and Microsoft-funded events like OSBC (that gave them an opponent’s platform) generally remain part of this problem too, not to mention Microsoft’s surrogates for FOSS groups, where the Microsoft equivalents push Microsoft licences, Microsoft proprietary stacks, and of course software patents. It’s all just a cunning plan to disrupt the opponent.
“Don’t let Microsoft teach the world that software patents inside Free/Open Source software are legitimate.”There is a relative of Matt Asay in the pseudo “Open Source” group of Microsoft. The monopolist has been finding him handy as of late and here again he does a guest post for Microsoft, pushing it into circles that are perceived as FOSS-friendly, such as Slashdot. It is “pushing software patents,” writes iophk, “Clark Asay, isn’t he Matt’s brother?” No, but he is a close relative of his. There seems to be a real issue these days with people whom Microsoft is “schmoozing”. The other day we wrote about Ubuntu getting a top manager from Microsoft; Ubuntu is part of the company where Asay had served as COO. Jono Bacon already responded to my post, but Jono’s first comment did nothing to disprove that post of mine, instead stating that he practices loyalty to his boss who came from Microsoft and telling us that Microsoft has nice people (giving the fake ‘Open Source’ fronts as examples), despite many in the FOSS world knowing otherwise. Jono himself received at least one gift from Microsoft after the company had also tried to hire him (he was strong enough to decline, so I commend him).
See how Microsoft privately describes what it refers to as "schmoozing". It is very telling, it is part of an infiltration strategy which Microsoft specifies in dozens of pages. Don’t let Microsoft teach the world that software patents inside Free/Open Source software are legitimate. █
Update: The Microsoft FUD is already seeding some harmful coverage, such as “Is Patenting Open Source Software The New Normal?”
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Besides well known devices like Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle etc, Linux is powering some of the most amazing devices around the globe and in the sky.
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Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.
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We’ve seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.
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Server
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LONG TIME LINUX SUPPORTER IBM has opened an office in Beijing that will help developers port Linux applications to its Power architecture.
IBM has been pushing its Power architecture for over 20 years, with its RISC chips intended for use in mission critical systems. Now the firm is working with Red Hat and Suse to help Linux developers port applications to the Power architecture by opening an office in Beijing.
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Scale Computing is scaling up its server business with a new HC3x server.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: There’s a critical vulnerability in the kernel. But relax, it’s been fixed. The International Space Station is switching from Windows to Debian. But not Debian 7, which has just been released. The beginner’s programming environment, Scratch 2.0, is out and the Raspberry Pi gets a super-light camera module. As always, hear our discoveries, our reports on the challenge and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Linus, has dived in to save the day. Where did the robot come from? What is it’s purpose? Can the Iron Penguin stand against it?
Find out next time. Same penguin-time, same penguin-channel.
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Applications
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Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.
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So, you have a machine running Linux which is also used by kids. We all know how the Web may be dangerous, especially for youngest of Internet fans. But do you know how to shield your Linux system and control what your kids do online?
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Proprietary
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Since the first free software implementation of the Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC) in Samba 4 became available, the large variety of potential scenarios for updating Samba 3 has made it difficult for Linux distributors to add the full set of features to their installation packages. Usually, they will choose one part or the other – the Samba 4 source code includes two daemons: samba for operating an AD-DC, and the Samba-3-compatible smbd for file server or domain member operation. However, the distribution packages usually only include one daemon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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So as usual behind the scenes I have been doing digging contacting various developers to find out if they have Linux versions planned and here are a few that got back to me! Games including Edge of Space, Battlepaths and more, all of these are currently on Desura.
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The Left 4 Dead 2 Beta for Linux has been released for a few days now, but it seems that players are not swarming it, as expected.
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Akaneiro: Demon Hunters the ARPG that draws from Little Red Riding Hood is now in Open Beta for Linux! Sadly it’s not going very smoothly and I am not impressed so far.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.
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Hi there, while we’ve been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven’t forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.
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The Calligra team has released version 2.6.3, another bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a number of important bug fixes to 2.6.2 and we recommend everybody to update.
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digiKam team is proud to announce the 3.2.0 release of digiKam Software Collection. This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.
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The Qt developers at Digia are moving at a pace – just over a month after releasing the Qt 5.1 alpha, they have announced the first beta of Qt 5.1. Mostly, the beta continues to deliver the features of the alpha – Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Layouts, a serial port module for hardware and virtual serial posts, an updated Qt Creator, support for static Qt builds, and official support for the Qt sensors module. The Android (Qt Quick 1 and 2) and iOS (Qt Quick 1 only) support has been refined in the beta release, though it is still at the level of a technology preview.
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This week I decided to do some research for the Wayland porting of the KDE Plasma workspaces. One of the features we will need in future is a Wayland session compositor which runs nested on a Wayland system compositor. Of course one could think of setups without a system compositor, but overall I think that a nested compositor simplifies the setup and allows to have all the low level technologies in one place without duplication in all the various compositors. +1 for working together.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.8.2 has been officially launched and it features a lot of fixes, documentation and translation updates, not to mention a sleuth of new features.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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New Version of NXTera 6.3 makes it possible for legacy Entera applications to run on Linux Redhat Enterprise 6 with support for SOA integrated JAVA, C, C#, FORTRAN, and COBOL applications.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.
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As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical’s next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.
Discussed just now during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit were bug-fixes and enhancements for the desktop Unity version in Ubuntu 13.10. Unity 7 improvements being planned for the October release include presenting new Unity indicators, more Unity scopes, the in-dash payments method, and selected design bugs will be addressed.
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A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu “community” Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here’s a look at the details.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, “Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named “Olivia”, is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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What does every development team want? New contributors!
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Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot.
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Phones
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Android
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Few of the announcements at Google’s I/O conference have involved open source software, but one announcement did: Android Studio, a new IDE environment for Android application development. Although Android Studio is only an early preview at the moment, Google is looking at it to eventually become the default development environment for Android applications, replacing the current solution of the Eclipse IDE and ADT Plugin.
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The challenge with a conference like Google I/O, where the announcements arrive one after another, is to see both forest and trees. Analysis of individual announcements – such as Google’s new Pandora/Rdio/Spotify competitor All Access, or the granular pricing for its compute infrastructure – is relatively straightforward. What’s more important, however, is perceiving the larger pattern.
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The company also launches new APIs to improve Android apps
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Rumors suggested that a white Nexus 4 might appear at Google IO, and they were right. We obtained the elusive white Nexus 4 and we can confirm it’s a carbon copy of the previous Nexus 4, just with a different color casing. That might not be the most exciting news, but we also learned the white Nexus 4 would hit the Google Play store on June 10th and it would be accompanied with Android 4.3.
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Archos has announced its latest Android tablet, the 80 Xenon, will be available in June with a $199 price tag. The 8-inch tablet is 3G-ready (SIM unlocked HSPA), runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and features the gull Google Play Store experience.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Three weeks ago I mentioned that OLPC Association has been remarkably quiet about the Android-based Walmart XO Tablet which it had introduced at CES 2013 in early January. Since then things have progressed a little bit with the Web site receiving a bit of a facelift.
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Events
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The last year has been a whirlwind of activity for Apache CloudStack. Citrix proposed CloudStack for the Apache Incubator in April of 2012, and just over a year later we’re gearing up for a second collaboration conference – this time in Santa Clara, CA, from June 23-25.
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Web Browsers
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NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE COMPANY Opera has settled the £2.2m lawsuit against ex-employee Trond Werner Hansen.
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Chrome
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At this week’s Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, “to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies.”
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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Ok, I know… the ‘E’ in Firefox ESR does not stand for ‘Enterprise’, but it should. The ESR – Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.
I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it’s a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes – break – with the fast release cycle of Firefox.
The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.
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Business
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Back in April, during SugarCRM’s annual SugarCon Conference, the company announced it would integrate ProcessMaker into it’s suite of cloud-based services, allowing seamless use of business process management tools directly from the Salesforce interface. About the same time the company also announced the new SugarCRM mobile application powered by HTML5 and offering a fast, easy way to access SugarCRM’s powerful features on mobile devices.
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The OpenFlow protocol stands at the center of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, and at the center of OpenFlow stands the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). As the revolution progresses, however, vendors are attempting to look beyond OpenFlow. Where does that leave the ONF?
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend’s data integration platform is being aimed at solving the complexity issues that surround deployment of Apache-Hadoop-based solutions. The developers have been focusing on creating Apache Pig developer tools and creating code in Pig Latin, which is said to remove the need to learn about MapReduce, the fundamental architectural element behind Hadoop. Users work with Talend’s Big Data graphical tools and that generates Pig Latin code which is then run on the Hadoop cluster; to optimise its running, a graphical mapper can be used to rework the data flow and mapping within the cluster.
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Funding
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Canadian venture capital firm Vanedge Capital has made a US$3 million Series A investment in OpenGeo Inc., a New York-based provider of commercial open source geospatial software. At the same time, the company spun out from its incubator
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The OpenGeo Suite is widely used for managing and sharing spatial data. OpenGeo has led the industry shift toward flexible, interoperable geospatial software infrastructures and will use this Series A funding to further enhance its industry-leading product and training offerings and reach a broader array of customers.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Researchers from FOKUS (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems) in Germany have released the Fuzzino data fuzzing library as open source software. The library allows existing test tools to be prepared for fuzzing and aims to make the development of new fuzzing tools unnecessary. Fuzzing is the process of testing a system for hidden weaknesses by presenting the system with random and sometimes erroneous input data.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open (government) data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen open data flourishing all over the world over the last three years. About three hundred open data catalogues have been identified so far.
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The rapid rise in the number of mobile devices has led to a concomitant rise in the amount of location data available. Proprietary services are emerging to take advantage of that data, but open source has a strong foothold in the form of OpenStreetMap.
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Programming
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PHP is the latest addition to the range of languages supported on Google’s App Engine. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) already supports Python, Java and Go and, like the languages before it, PHP is being introduced first as a limited preview experimental feature.
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Standards/Consortia
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VP9 is an open source and royalty free video compression technology under active development by Google with which they hope to replace the popular H.264 standard. The development of VP9 begain in late 2011 with two goals in mind, to provide a 50% reduced bit rate compared to the older VP8 codec while maintaining the video quality, and also optimizing it to the point that it becomes superior to the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (H.264) standard as well. We have to keep in mind that H.264 is pretty old now and the same standard is getting an update to H.265 which as much as doubles the data compression rate compared to the older H.264 standard.
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Google/MPEG-LA deal showed promise, but Google’s requirement for user licenses may bring a backlash
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Health/Nutrition
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Farmers “concerned” for ruling’s implication on upcoming suits against the biotech giant
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Security
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30 million open resolvers in the domain name system and a 200 per cent increase in the number of attacks in 2012 – these alarming figures were discussed by administrators at the 66th meeting of the RIPE IP address registry in Dublin this week. A panel discussion revolved around how to motivate the black sheep to implement long overdue security measures before large-scale attacks call the regulators to action.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Canadian government doubles advertising spend on tar sands
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Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing — quite literally sometimes — with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale’s April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans’ conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to “the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted.”
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Censorship
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Around May Day, we received advance notice that the Swedish Prosecution Authority had filed a petition with the Stockholm District Court requesting the seizure of two domain names, thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se. Now, this comes as no surprise and our General Counsel, Elisabeth, has already blogged about this.
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Prosecutors in Sweden have sued the root domain registry of .SE domains to kill the domain name of The Pirate Bay. The root registry fights back heavily. This case is important to watch, as it can have thoroughly chilling results for the Internet’s domain name system if criminal secondary liability is established at the DNS level.
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Privacy
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The independent review on public data prepared by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board, has just been published. Much of what Shakespeare recommends is very good stuff, and includes things that ORG has been proposing for some time. But we have some disagreements, particularly on the analyses and proposals around privacy.
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Civil Rights
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If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?
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Geneva 16 May 2013 – The world’s leading retail labels commit to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh before the midnight deadline. The Accord now covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories. Implementation starts now!
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Clean Clothes Campaign is calling for immediate action from all international brands following today’s collapse of the Wing Star Shoes factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The collapse of the ceiling cost the lives of at least two people, and injured seven. The workers were stitching sneakers for sportsbrand Asics when the ceiling caved in on top of them.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, addressed a press conference on 16 May 2013 at the WWW Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Berners-Lee used his address to state his support for the Marco Civil da Internet, (Marco Civil) a landmark draft Bill in Brazil that many have called ‘a Constitution for the Internet’.
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Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related.
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DRM
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Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In March, the Ninth Circuit declared that Canada-based BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is not entitled to protection under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA due to its conduct many years ago. IsoHunt filed a petition for a rehearing before a jury, but yesterday a Ninth Circuit panel unanimously rejected it. Isohunt lawyer Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that the right to a jury trial is protected by the constitution and isoHunt is now in the process of requesting a Supreme Court review.
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One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it’s more important to preserve copyright “inviolate” than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the “proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities” for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.
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