12.28.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Highlighting a soon-to-end petition which bemoans the bizarre state of affairs at today’s EPO and its controversial impact on Europe
THE previous post focused on today’s talk which led us to the following petition [PDF]
, sent to us by several people almost simultaneously. We wish to bring it to the attention of EPO examiners and generally, as so many people are affected by the EPO, any EU citizen who is eager to take action to defend Europe’s interests and the interests of science and technology, not conglomerates like Microsoft. Watch what kinds of patents Microsoft is getting and using aggressively, based on this latest rant from the EFF (just published). To quote the EFF:
For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design.
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Microsoft’s patent claims against Corel are unsurprising in light of how much money is potentially at stake. If Corel is found to infringe even one of Microsoft’s design patents through even the smallest part of Corel Home Office, current Federal Circuit law entitles Microsoft to all of Corel’s profits for the entire product. Not the profits that can be attributed to the design. Not the value that the design adds to a product. All of the profit from Corel Home Office.
We previously wrote about the EPO’s special relationship with Microsoft, whereupon the EPO sent several threatening letters to me (all of them about Microsoft and the EPO). What are they so desperate to hide? They never withdrew these threats. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents, Videos at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Today’s talk about software patents in Europe and a petition calling for action to stop these (again)
AS EPO examiners probably know by now, despite software patents (“as such,” as per Brimelow) not being legal in Europe, the EPO does occasionally entertain patent applications that pertain to software, even if it euphemistically names them CII to nymshift and add smoke to the debate. This can devastate famous European companies.
A CCC talk which was mentioned here over the weekend is now available for viewing online. It was presented earlier today and we were hoping to find a static file (Ogg/WebM preferable) as soon as possible in order to share information about software patents in Europe. EPO workers might wish to watch this in order to better understand how the management dodges the rules. The above video is from YouTube (the speaker has just sent it to us) and the MP4 version is already mirrored in the FFII’s Web site (1.1GB file in a heavily-patented multimedia format, ironically enough).
“A CCC talk which was mentioned here over the weekend is now available for viewing online.”“Henrion and colleagues are on at 32C3 now,” a reader wrote to us earlier, so some people were evidently streaming it live. This reader of ours tracked down the petition mentioned at the end of the talk. “It seems risky,” the reader said, as more people now realise that the EPO is out of control and UPC needs to be shunned. “According to the petitioner,” says the European Parliament’s Web site, “the European Patent Office is an international European institution which does not fall under EU law. He proposes that the EU contacts the EPO in order to conclude an interinstitutional agreement which would enable Members of the European Parliament to address parliamentary questions to the EPO and improve the parliamentary supervision of the EPO. The petitioner also asks the European Commission to harmonise national substantive patent law so that patent law becomes part of the acquis communautaire and the major differences which currently exist between the national patent law systems are removed. The EPO cannot deal with these differences, but has become the de facto harmoniser of patent law owing to its position as the provider of patents. According to the petitioner, the current situation is lacking a legislator and the development of patent law is concentrated in the hands of the executive and the judiciary. This is contrary to the separation of powers. The lack of balance between the powers means that it is difficult to respond to the fact that patent law affects areas other than that of EU policy, such as industrial policy, European standardisation and research policy. Moreover, the petitioner believes that the lack of harmonisation of substantive patent law weakens the negotiating position of the EU in matters relating to patent law with respect to third parties (WIPO, SPLT, TRIPS+, etc.).”
Incidentally, earlier today we found more articles about India rejecting software patents (for now…)
An article by RNA, who call themselves “Intellectual Property Attorneys” (it’s not hard to guess whose side they’re on), was published earlier today, around the same time of an article with the title “The Murky Waters Of Software Patents”.
“The one side isn’t “patent supporters” but mostly large corporations.”“India has announced a hold on plans to clarify the software patent process within the country,” wrote the reporter of the latter article, “a move that has both critics and supporters up in arms. In one camp, patent supporters argue that the investment in a new piece of software has to be protected both financially and by reputation against cheap imitators, while critics of software patents claim that software patents do nothing but lead to expensive litigation to fight infringement claims.”
The one side isn’t “patent supporters” but mostly large corporations. They’re not even Indian. They support not patents but software patents in India, which makes no sense for this economy that thrives in software and isn’t wealthy enough to withstand legal actions from aboard (mostly north America, obviously). That’s the kind of thing which UPC passage would enable, attracting all sorts of patent trolls and bring them to Europe with their software patents (that’s what trolls typically use for extortion purposes, where small companies are attractive targets that cannot afford legal battles and may quickly settle instead).
Learn from the mistakes of patent scope at the USPTO (whose official site is reportedly still not fully working today, based on IP Kat‘s comments, even 4 days after the outage). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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Desktop
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Open Saucers have got under the bonnet of North Korea’s glorious Linux Operating system and discovered it is more oppressive than any proprietary licence can dream up.
Linux is supposed to open up the world, but the Red Star OS limits you to a North Korean government approved view of the world which is more proprietary and bat shit crazy than a company getting a patent for a rounded rectangle.
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Server
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One star eclipsed all others in the enterprise in 2015: Amazon. Or, rather, its cloud division, AWS.
It somehow became a given that AWS leads in Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), with the one-time ebook shop now a major IT infrastructure provider.
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Kernel Space
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Ok, clearly there _is_ some rest for kernel developers, because rc7 is
pretty tiny. I think a third of the patch is from the sparc updates,
and those weren’t that big either.
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The short answer, as far as I’ve seen through my testing, is no. There were no major breakthroughs this year for extending Linux battery life nor any magical optimizations/fixes like a few years ago with the wide-spread ASPM issues. There were continued improvements to Intel’s P-State drive and the generic CPUfreq driver along with some new CPUfreq drivers in the ARM space and various processor-specific improvements, but nothing really incredible.
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The Linux community has a couple of very important dates to celebrate, the release of the Linux kernel on August 25, 1991, and the birthday of Linus Torvalds on December 28, 1969.
Linus Torvalds is now one of the most influential people on the planet, and he doesn’t really like this role. If his appearances and speeches have taught us anything, it is that he doesn’t like the spotlight and that he’s still interested in good code for the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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The Rockchip DRM driver for supporting the display component of the company’s ARM SoCs is now ready with its support for atomic mode-setting.
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This year Mesa made a heck of a lot of progress on advancing open-source 3D driver support for Linux and other operating systems. While Mesa isn’t yet caught up with OpenGL 4.5, over the past twelve months there was a heck of a lot of progress made on OpenGL 4 support.
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This year the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau) continued to evolve with improvements for re-clocking, the start of OpenGL 4 support, and other new functionality. Here’s a recap along with some performance benchmarks showing how the OpenGL performance evolved over the past 12 months.
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AMD’s open-source graphics driver stack continued maturing in 2015 while Catalyst (now known as Radeon Software) releases were rare. AMD’s open-source driver stack now supports OpenGL 4.1 for GCN GPUs and select pre-GCN graphics cards plus the other driver stack also matured in other ways this year.
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Applications
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As far as web server performance is concerned, there are many different factors at play, e.g., front-end application design, network latency/bandwidth, web server configuration, server-side in-memory cache, raw hardware capability, server load of shared hosting, etc. To compare and optimize web server performance under such a wide array of factors, we often perform load test (or stress test) using a web server micro-benchmark tool. A typical benchmark tool injects synthetic workloads or replays real-world traces to a web server, and measures web server performance and scalability in terms of varying metrics (e.g., response time, throughput, number of requests per second, CPU load, etc).
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Text editors can be used for writing code, editing text files such as configuration files, creating user instruction files and many more. In Linux, text editor are of two kinds that is graphical user interface (GUI) and command line text editors (console or terminal).
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Family history (or genealogy) software is computer software used to record, organise and publish genealogical data. With this software, you can help unlock the past, discover secrets and surprises from your past. Genealogy, the study of one’s ancestry, allows people to personalise the past.
There are useful websites devoted to helping would-be genealogists. Further, radio and TV programmes such as the immortal Who Do You Think You Are?, and other shows such as Secrets of the Clink have encouraged a growing band people to trace their roots, sparking new interest. It’s not just celebrities when tracing their ancestry who come up with secrets and surprises from their past.
There are a huge raft of sources to trace ancestors including the General Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, Census Returns, International Genealogical Index, National Burial Index, Parish Registers, Wills and Other Probate documents. These traditional sources are often available to review over the net, although it’s often not free access. Not all records are online (particularly those before 1837) so visiting local records offices, churches, graveyards or libraries can help in the quest. Huge online genealogical databases also help people discover their history.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Several weeks ago, I read a quick but thoroughly interesting news snippet about a, well, ahem, new (not anymore) WINE release, which included additional experimental DirectX 11 support. Wait, what? DirectX 11 support? Sounds massively cool.
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Games
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A recent job vacancy posting at Frontier Developments may be a signal that a Linux port of Elite: Dangerous is in the offing. Both TweakTown and Softpedia reckon the job vacancy advert might give away Frontier’s intentions of creating a Linux port of its premier open-world Space exploration and adventure games title.
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Independent developer Galaxy Trailer has announced Freedom Planet 2, a follow-up to their iconic and throwback platforming game.
The developer said the game will follow a similar release schedule as the first game, meaning it will launch for PC, Mac, and Linux first, followed by Nintendo platforms, as well as potentially more platforms, “depending on resources.”
Most of the voice cast and characters from the original game are returning in the sequel, however the above trailer definitely gives more insight as to what you can expect in the new game.
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OpenRA is an open source project that recreates and improves upon the classic Command & Conquer and that has C&C: Tiberian Dawn, C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000 games in one collection.
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This information isn’t based on much, though the job description is specifically for a systems programmer for helping to create cross-platform libraries for online services, and it does mention having the ability to “…write platform-independent code for deployment on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and current generation consoles.”
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It’s been a while since I last dug up my 760 and did some benchmarking, so I decided that I would run some to celebrate the last days of 2015. I’ve picked some new games this time around to show the performance of both the open source and the proprietary drivers.
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Itch.io has fast become a popular distribution platform among developers for its many and flexible tools for distributing and promoting games. The co-op bundles, which lets developers team up to bundle their games and agree on the split caught my attention when it was announced in April. There have been some interesting bundles since, but from what I’ve seen as an outsider, it hasn’t generated much attention. The desktop app instantly became much more popular when it was released earlier this month, and it’s the first real DRM free alternative we’ve had to the Steam client for Linux in a while (not counting clients independent of distribution platforms, like Lutris).
What many might not know is that itch.io isn’t just host of jam games and thousands of amateur projects, but that it also has a good selection of high-quality professional games, like Gone Home, Tales of Maj’Eyal, Electronic Super Joy, VVVVVV and Super Win the Game. You’ll also find several of my biggest favorites from this year there, including Dropsy, Snakebird, BLACKHOLE, A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, and many more.
Here’s a look at some popular games released on itch.io this year that we didn’t cover before.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The development team of the Gnumeric open source spreadsheet editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems had the pleasure of announcing this past weekend the availability of Gnumeric 1.12.25.
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The end of the year best-distro nomination is approaching fast. But before that, let’s narrow it down a bit and focus on what KDE and Plasma had to offer the Linux user in 2015. Undoubtedly, it was a very tough year, with some really awesome distributions released in the spring, some rather awful editions coming out earlier this autumn, the birth of Plasma and its attempt to win my heart.
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The fall of one empire usually signals the rise of another. Five years ago, if you asked a typical Linux desktop user what environment they favored, the answer would most likely be KDE or Gnome 2. But today, the answer is probably Unity, Cinnamon, maybe Plasma. And Xfce. The underwhelming underdog has taken upon itself to exploit the gap left by the turbulent change in the Linux desktop world and ascertain itself as a top player.
The exploits (not in the security sense) of Plasma leave even more room for aesthetic maneuvers and dominance by Xfce. This desktop environment holds a very interesting market position. It’s a product of old, trying to captivate the modern user, with focus on performance and stability, but without having to lag behind the fancy, modern rivals in terms of style and elegance. So let us, like we did the year before, vote on the one Xfce distro that does its job the bestest.
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Solus
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After a long wait and a few delays, the guys over at Solus, a groundbreaking Linux kernel-based computer operating system, have finally announced the release and immediate availability for download of Solus 1.0 on December 27, 2015.
Solus has been in development for quite some time now, and it was previously known to the world first as SolusOS, and then as Evolve OS. Because of some trademarking issues with the name Evolve, the distribution returned to its origins, and it is now dubbed Solus.
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The Solus 1.0 release didn’t happen on Christmas as originally planned, but nevertheless it’s available this morning for its premiere release and formal introduction of its own desktop environment.
Solus 1.0′s desktop is called Budgie and it’s a simple, GTK-powered desktop environment that ships with a nifty applet/notification/customization center, and various other features of the new desktop.
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Now that the Solus operating system has reached version 1.0, the developers are looking towards the future, and they have explained what they are planning for the coming year.
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New Releases
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Zbigniew Konojacki had the great pleasure of informing us earlier today about the release and immediate availability for download of the final build of his 4MLinux 15.0 GNU/Linux operating system.
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Arch Family
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We’ve been informed by the developers of the Apricity OS GNU/Linux distribution about the release and general availability for download of a new Beta release for the month of December 2015.
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A new Manjaro Cinnamon 15.12 stable version has been released and is now ready for download, developers have announced.
The Manjaro community is a very active one, and they have a ton of flavors going, covering pretty much all of the window managers and desktop environments available right now that are still being maintained. It’s a huge undertaking, but it’s a task that seems to be gladly handled by the Manjaro fans.
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The Manjaro community has just released the Manjaro Mate Edition 15.12, which is now ready for download and testing.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Last year first ever openSUSE Summit Asia took place in Beijing. From all the reports it sounded really awesome and I regretted that I couldn’t go. This year, I was lucky enough to manage to go. I was selected to do a board keynote and I got some of my travel expenses sponsored by Travel Support Programme (big thanks!). So how was this years openSUSE Summit Asia from my point of view? In short, amazing
In long, read on…
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) reported a fine third quarter last week. Sales rose 15% year over year, adjusted earnings per share increased by 14%, and full-year guidance targets were lifted across the board. Analysts responded with mass price target upgrades (even some of the bears!), and Red Hat shares spiked to prices not seen in 15 years.
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Wall Street analysts have placed a $88.882 short term stock price target on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) company shares. This is the consensus, or average number, based on the 17 weighing in on the name. The most lofty target stands at $97 while the most conservative analyst has a $75 on the equity.
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) appreciated by 0.42% during the past week but lost 0.92% on a 4-week basis. The shares has underperformed the S&P 500 by 2.29% during the past week but Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has outperformed the index in 4 weeks by 0.48%.
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Fedora
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We already had a number of blog posts regarding how Globalization (G11n) Fedora Activity Days (FADs) went. After all of these reports, it makes sense to have one post discussing the achievements from our Activity Days.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The developer who made the excellent uNav GPS Navigation is now looking into the possibility of building a dedicated scope for Ubuntu Touch with the same function.
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Streaming video to monitors and TVs from Ubuntu mobile devices via Miracast is set to become one of the open source operating system’s new features, further blurring the lines between the GNU/Linux experience and proprietary operating systems.
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The ZFS file system is coming to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and it’s just one of the many new features that are going to be implemented in the new OS.
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Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, has announced a few minutes ago, December 28, 2015, an upcoming feature for the Unity desktop environment used in recent versions of Ubuntu.
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Back in October we heard Ubuntu was planning for better ZFS support and to make it part of the distribution’s “standard offering.” Work in that direction has continued to advance for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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The roughly 15-year old experiment called Embedded Linux has by several accounts surpassed real-time OSes and Windows Embedded in recent years. If you include phones, tablets, and consumer electronics using the Linux-based Android, that lead turns to dominance.
This year, Linux has continued to control the fledgling home automation market, and it’s increasingly shaping up as the OS of choice in robots and drones. In consumer electronics, Linux and Android lead in categories such as media streamers and smart TVs. As manufacturers upgrade industrial equipment for wireless Internet of Things capability, Linux has become the OS of choice when an OS is needed at all.
This two-part series looks at embedded Linux trends over the last year in six broad segments, listed roughly in order of market maturity. This installment covers mobile, embedded boards, IoT and home automation. And part two covers media-focused consumer electronics, robots and drones, and emerging technologies like wearables and automotive.
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There’s a crowd funded piece of technology that aims to change all of that. The Turris Omnia is a router of a completely different nature. Not only does it automatically update its firmware (as soon as a vulnerability is discovered and patched), it can serve as a DNLA (Digital Living Network Alliance), a backup server (you have to plug in an external drive for this), you can insert a SIM card to ensure connection failover, connect to SFP, and much more. The Omnia is based on OpenWRT and is, as you might expect, open source).
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The year 2015 that started with an exciting display of Linux at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is now coming to an end. This year saw some great Linux-powered devices. Let’s have a look at the most impressive ones.
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Phones
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Android
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A leaked video showcases a new versatile app model for advanced edge functionality on the S6 edge.
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There was a time before cloud storage that we all wanted large device storage for image files, but once you shoot an image and share, storage on the device is unnecessary and a liability.
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Microsoft was barely a blip on the radar with 1.7 per cent, with sales also showing a downward trend worldwide.
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Let’s face it, television as we knew it – circa 1990 to early 2000’s – is dead and gone. Enter the age of multimedia, multi-platform, cloud-based content that you can stream to your big screen TV through a bevy of Android TV consoles that give you the same (if not even better) Android experience on your TV. These holidays, here are some of the best that you can purchase for your home entertainment system.
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The biggest advantage Android still holds in the mobile ecosystem is the elevated level of customization it offers. You can go crazy with the features but even if you aren’t a pro, changing how your Android phone’s software looks is a piece of cake with a few downloads.
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Google’s tinkering with notifications continues, apparently, as folks on Android 6.0.1 have awakened to find that a recently returned feature of Marshmallow’s Do Not Disturb has once again gone missing.
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The Moto 360 Sport is a solid Android Wear device for recreational runners who don’t listen to music when they run and I award it an 8.0 rating.
If it played music as flawlessly as the Apple Watch, Samsung Gear S2 3G, or Sony SmartWatch 3 then I would consider buying one as my running watch. However, if you don’t care about your heart rate and want an Android Wear device to run with and enjoy music then the older Sony SmartWatch 3 is the watch to buy.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As part of its efforts to grow the OpenStack talent pool and global community, the OpenStack Foundation has announced a new professional certification program that is meant to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge and be accessible to OpenStack professionals around the world. Some of the first steps in advancing the program are taking place now, and other companies are also advancing OpenStack certification plans. Here is a sampling of the educational opportunities.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Open source projects often stem from businesses attempting to solve an internal problem, before being offered up to a wider community. And increasingly in recent years it has been the internet giants such as Facebook and Google which have offered the technology which underpins their huge, hyper-scale computing environments.
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BSD
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Licensing
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It’s been a year of open-source projects. Both enterprises and startups have been releasing their code into the wild as a way to grow their capabilities. It’s not just the code that’s important; it’s the programmers and contributors that can get their hands on it, alter it, fix it, and make it better.
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Q: Which open source license is best?
A: Unlike bilateral copyright licenses, which are negotiated between two parties and embody a truce between them for business purposes, multilateral copyright licenses — of which open source licenses are a kind — are “constitutions of communities”, as Eben Moglen and others have observed. They express the consensus of how a community chooses to collaborate. They also embody its ethical assumptions, even if they are not explicitly enumerated.
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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Apple’s Lightning cable cartel be damned: Switzerland is moving forward with a plan for a single, universal phone charger across the country, standardizing phone chargers across the board. While the exact standard hasn’t been mentioned yet, it wouldn’t be hard to guess the standard: Micro USB, used across phone platforms, most especially Android, which has a gigantic chunk of the cell phone market worldwide.
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Security
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The well-being of critical infrastructure and transportation has long been the elephant in the room when it comes to cybersecurity: plenty of researchers have warned about the possibility of attacks on power-plants, the national grid, and, more recently, even the emergence of internet connected cars.
Now, researchers are warning of the gaping holes in the security of railroad systems. On Sunday at Chaos Communication Congress, a security, arts and politics conference held annually in Hamburg, Germany, members of the SCADA StrangeLove collective presented a long list of problems with railroad systems that attackers could exploit.
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To make a long and complicated story short, a bad guy who exploits this vulnerability places a malicious DLL into your browser’s Downloads folder, then waits. When you run an installer built by an earlier version of NSIS from that folder, the elevation prompt (assuming it runs at admin) shows the legitimate installer’s signature asking you for permission to run the installer. After you grant permission, the victim installer loads the malicious DLL which runs its malicious code with the installer’s permissions. And then it’s not your computer anymore.
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At the heart of much of the Internet’s security is the use of Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), which provides encryption for data in motion. Certificate Authorities (CAs) are the trusted entities that issue TLS certificates, and as a group, the CAs are gearing up for big year in 2016, with multiple efforts designed to improve the security of the Internet.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Thousands of homes are being evacuated in York after “unprecedented” levels of rain caused the Foss and Ouse rivers to burst their banks and the city’s flood barrier to be lifted.
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Minsters were warned by the Government’s own climate change advisers that they needed to take action to protect the increasing number of homes at high risk of flooding – but rejected the advice.
The decision not to develop a comprehensive strategy to address increased flood risk came in October just a few weeks before the flooding in Cumbria before Christmas and the most recent flooding in Lancashire and Yorkshire.
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One of the biggest environmental disasters in US history is happening right now, and you’ve probably never heard of it.
An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company.
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Finance
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The US-based website that publishes a daily unofficial exchange rate between American dollars and Venezuelan bolivares has recently filed a vigorous defense in a strange international lawsuit. The site, DolarToday, was sued in October 2015 by the Central Bank of Venezuela (CBV) in federal court in Delaware, where the site is based.
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Sinn Féin MEP Martina Anderson has said that a study carried out on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture shows that EU Agriculture would be the gross loser in any of the three scenarios considered.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Numerous Journalists Took Apart O’Reilly’s Falklands War Tales. O’Reilly has repeatedly attempted to bolster his reporting credentials by claiming over the years that he reported “in the Falklands” during the 1982 Falklands War. A Mother Jones exposé, however, found that O’Reilly fabricated his reporting resume and his former colleagues said he was actually 1,200 miles away in Buenos Aires. O’Reilly also claimed to have reported on a 1982 Buenos Aires protest in which “many were killed,” but numerous journalists who reported from the scene and a historian disputed his story. Furthermore, O’Reilly claimed to have helped an injured CBS photographer during the protest, but his colleagues have no recollection of that incident.
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Censorship
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He said self-censorship was important to see that the information they received and believed were valid and not detrimental and disruptive to harmony in society and country.
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Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Dr Salleh Said Keruak today called on the people to use their power of self-censorship to reject or accept any information posted on the social media.
He said self-censorship was important to see that the information they received and believed were valid and not detrimental and disruptive to harmony in society and country.
“The important thing is, we should not be confused between news and views. Views are people’s own and not necessarily accurate and our views could differ from each other’s. But news contain facts, the veracity of which are verified before being disseminated.
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The global hacktivist group, Anonymous has now turned its eyes to the varying degrees of censorship being practised in Asia. The Asia Pacific Telecommunity website (apt.int) has not only been hacked by members of the Anonymous hacker collective, and they also have got entry to the site’s admin panel (running Drupal), and also have been able to get their hands on a database dump.
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Anonymous hacker collective has attacked the official website of Asia Pacific telecommunity and defaced it in protest against growing plans for internet censorship in Asia.
The hackers gained access of the website’s admin panel (running Drupal) and from there, leaked all the data stored on the website along with defacing the site with one of their own pages.
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A New York District Court has granted Elsevier’s request for a preliminary injunction against several sites that host academic publications without permission. As a result the site’s operators are now ordered to quit offering access to infringing content, while the associated registries must suspend their domain names.
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India’s 2016 film calendar will begin on a controversial note. Two Bollywood adult comedies starring the same actor are releasing within a week of each other in January. Both Maastizaade and Kya Kool Hain Hum 3 are releasing after facing considerable objections from India’s censor board.
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For more than a decade, the internet has become a seemingly borderless land of free flowing information. It began as a not so open U.S. military data system decades ago, but it evolved over time into the public digital domain it has become.
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In the fall of 2014, we wrote about a plan by public documents guru Carl Malamud and law professor Chris Sprigman, to create a public domain book for legal citations (stay with me, this isn’t as boring as it sounds!). For decades, the “standard” for legal citations has been “the Bluebook” put out by Harvard Law Review, and technically owned by four top law schools. Harvard Law Review insists that this standard of how people can cite stuff in legal documents is covered by copyright. This seems nuts for a variety of reasons. A citation standard is just an method for how to cite stuff. That shouldn’t be copyrightable. But the issue has created ridiculous flare-ups over the years, with the fight between the Bluebook and the open source citation tool Zotero representing just one ridiculous example.
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Privacy
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The latest pop-up message to consumers, outed on Reddit, removes the explicit option to opt out of the upgrade, instead offering two options: ‘Update Now’ or ‘Update Tonight’. Simply closing the box will make it go away (we’re still trying to ascertain for how long) but it seems that this is a deliberate attempt to prey on the less tech savvie.
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“I’m not high-tech, but I’m like, ‘This isn’t that complicated. This is just some guy behind a computer,’” he recalled saying to himself. “In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I’m like, ‘Well, that stuff still works.’ ”
Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name “altoid.”
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Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the controversial law is the Chinese government’s attempt to curtail the activities of militants and political activists. China already faces criticism from around the world not only for the infamous Great Firewall of China, but also the blatant online surveillance and censorship that takes place. This latest move is one that will be view very suspiciously by foreign companies operating within China, or looking to do so.
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A new law passed by China’s Parliament on Sunday requires technology companies to assist the government in decrypting content, a provision that the country maintains is modeled after Western law.
A new law passed by China’s Parliament on Sunday requires technology companies to assist the government in decrypting content, a provision that the country maintains is modeled after Western law.
ISPs and telecommunication companies must provide technical assistance to the government, including decrypting communications, for terrorism-related investigations, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.
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So, again, to all the politicians and lawmakers supporting backdooring encryption, what’s your response when China uses it to say that’s why they’re doing it as well?
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Right, except so far officials haven’t been able to show evidence of any of those cases actually using encryption. Similarly, law enforcement has failed to show that criminals using encryption have really been that much of a problem either. And that’s because it’s not a problem. Even in the (still mostly rare) cases where encryption is being used, criminals still reveal plenty of information that would allow law enforcement to track them down. It’s called doing basic detective work.
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Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Indian government has spent much of the last year trying to craft net neutrality rules, and had recently been fielding public comment on whether or not Facebook’s zero rating effort, Free Basics, violates net neutrality. As we’ve covered at length, Facebook’s been trying to corner the developing nation ad market with a zero rated program that offers free access to curated, Facebook approved content. Critics and Free Basic content partners alike haven’t been comfortable with giving Facebook that much control.
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Facebook Inc. Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers for the country to allow a free Internet service that has stirred controversy and invited questions from regulators.
Facebook’s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care, and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Yet activists say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites.
The backlash in India centers on net neutrality, the principle that all Internet websites should be equally accessible. Critics accused the world’s largest social networking company of favoring a limited swath of the Internet and excluding rival services. And Facebook’s broader Internet.org initiative, including Free Basics, is seen as an effective way to draw more users onto a social network already used by over a billion people.
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Last week we noted that India had shut down Facebook’s Free Basics program, arguing the company’s plan for zero rating Facebook-approved content and services is effectively glorified collusion; an attempt to eventually corner global ad markets under the banner of altruism. The country has been trying to craft net neutrality rules, and has slowly realized that whatever neutrality looks like, Facebook deciding what content Indians get access to isn’t it.
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For years now we’ve noted that while broadband ISPs rush toward broadband caps and usage overage fees, nobody is checking to confirm that ISP meters are accurate. The result has been user network hardware that reports usage dramatically different from an ISPs’ meters, or users who are billed for bandwidth usage even when the power is out or the modem is off. Not only have regulators historically failed to see the anti-innovation, anti-competitive impact of usage caps, you’d be hard pressed to find a single official that has even commented on the problem of inaccurate broadband usage meters.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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For more than a decade many Cubans have been pirating the latest entertainment without a proper connection to the Internet. Instead, they have built their own person-to-person distribution network to share a weekly package of pirated material: El Paquete Semanal.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Europe, Marketing, Patents at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Watch out and be prepared for the massive Unitary Patent PR campaign
Summary: A look at highly expensive lobbying for personal gain by Bill Gates in just one area (among many) and how this relates to EPO lobbying for the UPC, which basically helps make the rich even richer
BASED on the EPO’s spendings of nearly a million dollars for a US company to promote the Unitary Patent in the US, there is definitely something going on and we cannot help thinking of Gates’ promotion of Common Core, which he profits from (we no longer cover this, having written hundreds of articles on the subject). It’s all about Big Business, which is already treated more favourably than others at the EPO.
A few days ago we found this promotional EPO article that says: “Reflecting in statistics, the European Union is the second-largest overseas filer with the SIPO, accounting for 28% of foreign filings in 2014. In the same year, Chinese filers contributed more than 9% filed with EPO, mainly clustering around the sectors of digital communication, computer technology and telecommunications.”
“It’s all about Big Business, which is already treated more favourably than others at the EPO.”Well, actually, many of the filers are big businesses from China (some are government-connected and enjoy a fast lane at the EPO). Battistelli has been visiting China and posing a lot with Chinese officials recently, not because they have so much in common in terms of human rights but because Battistelli serves globalists, not Europeans. He serves the world’s billionaires, people like Bill Gates.
Incidentally, last night as we reorganised some old feeds we found alarming headlines from the past 2 years. In them, Bill Gates’ push of Common Core came under fire. Like the Unitary Patent in Europe, there’s a big PR campaign behind it. See articles (written by teachers) such as “An Audit of Bill Gates’ Common Core Spending” or “Bill Gates: An infographic”.
“It’s an information war.”Having essentially bribed the Seattle Times for favourable coverage before [1, 2] (like Adelson does right now in Las Vegas, despite getting caught), Bill Gates is doing it again. To quote some headlines, “Bill Gates funded the Seattle Times “Education Lab””, “Bill Gates funds the media then secretly meets with them” and “Bill Gates funds the media, including the Seattle Times’ Education Lab, then secretly meets with them”. He gives them marching orders like he did in the New York Times with his occasional visits. Gates also pays notable British press like the BBC and The Guardian in exchange for favourable coverage. It’s an information war. He is buying out the media and the front groups, making them incapable of resisting and rendering them just puppets catering for his agenda, masquerading as lots of interest groups of various different stakeholders. Here are some headlines from the aforementioned teachers’ blog:
A lot of the above reminds us of Battistelli and his precious Unitary Patents. He has an agenda to sell and obscene amounts of money are now being (mis)used for an unacceptable PR campaign. Who benefits? Certainly not the public.
Don’t believe anything that EPO management says, including whatever it may say about the Unitary Patent. Sadly, the EPO is now poisoning also the media and it sets up events that serve as Unitary Patent propaganda. █
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