09.10.21
Posted in America, Google, IBM, Patents at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the EPO (Europe), the regime is an aggressive dictatorship of corporations and litigation giants, served by António Campinos and Benoît Battistelli; in the US, it’s the corporations themselves
Where are the civil servants?
Summary: It’s hard to swallow the idea (myth, fiction) that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office protects the ‘small person’ when it’s run by Mr. Iancu, an old Trump associate (protecting a high-profile fraud), preceded by Mr. Kappos (Microsoft and IBM lobbyist) and Michelle Lee (Google)
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08.29.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Google, Kernel, Microsoft, Windows at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum ea4893af387306b6eb8e46e9d2d32748
Summary: Linux is 30, Android is Linux-based, and Windows is smaller than Android in terms of market share; but the biggest challenge right now is bringing software freedom to more people
EVERYBODY has been speaking about Linux turning 30 (although the actual anniversary of importance is debatable, as Alex Oliva explained last week).
“…Android is one of the Linux-based operating systems that harm one’s privacy and freedom (even if AOSP is mostly Free software) because it comes with loads of proprietary “apps” and typically tracks locations.”No doubt Linux “has won” so to speak; but Linux is not software freedom, it is just a GPL-licensed kernel which many freedom-respecting operating systems use for practical/pragmatic reasons (Linux has very extensive hardware support that is almost impossible to match). As noted in the video above, Android is one of the Linux-based operating systems that harm one’s privacy and freedom (even if AOSP is mostly Free software) because it comes with loads of proprietary “apps” and typically tracks locations (see “Google’s Software is Malware”).
The Linux (or GNU linux-libre) work by Oliva mostly involves ‘taming’ Linux to make it more freedom-respecting, in turn allowing freedom-oriented distros to avoid the more malicious parts of Linux. Oliva’s work is invaluable!
“The Linux (or GNU linux-libre) work by Oliva mostly involves ‘taming’ Linux to make it more freedom-respecting, in turn allowing freedom-oriented distros to avoid the more malicious parts of Linux.”In the video above I’ve repeatedly alluded to how ubiquitous Android became (one might say “popular”, but that’s not the same thing). Android news is everywhere, all the time, very likely outpacing Windows ‘news’ (mostly paid-for vapourware and puff pieces) because billions of people care about their phones and tablets more than laptops and desktops. There are also tons of anniversary articles about Linux, including some from Android-focused news sites. There’s growing recognition that Linux “has won” in some sense or some senses.
At whose expense?
Mostly Windows!
Microsoft is doing so poorly that it’s buying vendors and rebranding them “Azure” (in order to fake 'growth'), pretending that Azure is somehow an “operating system” now (it is not; they also reused the brand "Surface" in this way). Things have gotten so bad for Microsoft that we caught Windows at 28% market share earlier this year (here’s the latest data in OpenDocument format) and right now it’s still hovering around 30% while Microsoft constantly makes false claims about its market power, in effect defrauding shareholders. Here’s Android/Linux versus Windows, as per the end of August; if Android is combined with ChromeOS and GNU/Linux (“proper”), we’re talking about something close to 50% market share. █
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07.31.21
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Google, Linspire, Microsoft, Xandros at 9:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum ab5b8a4ae65a514a3fdcc1898424c8e0
Summary: The brand “Linspire” was brought back, but the agenda seems to be more or less the same, namely pushing proprietary software and serving Microsoft’s commercial agenda (in ‘Linux’ clothing)
FOURTEEN years ago we called for a boycott of Linspire for its patent collusion with Microsoft. The same happened with Xandros, which would buy Linspire and temporarily push Freespire. That failed just like Novell and Turbolinux. Where are they today? Nowhere! Making alliances with Microsoft always leads to major blunders… and eventually commercial failure.
“That failed just like Novell and Turbolinux.”Well, the name “Linspire” has been repurposed. A few years ago this strange comeback was noticed with a worrisome slant — a Microsoft-centric “Linspire”, pushing Microsoft vendor lock-in, surveillance etc.
Trying the same thing all over again is assurance of failure
Not much has changed since then. Below we add two new links [1,2] (comments here; it’s boosted by Microsoft boosters who simultaneously promote other attacks on GNU/Linux) showing Linspire/Xandros as boosters of monopolies and surveillance, not just by Microsoft but also Google. That’s missing the whole point of GNU/Linux, pushing some sort of Microsoft-centric ChromeOS instead. They push Microsoft proprietary software out of the box (“With the Office 365 edition Bing will also be the default homepage and the default search engine in Google Chrome”) and brag about selling this. Whose agenda is served here? The issue is discussed in the video above. █
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What started off as Lindows twenty years ago as an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with great Wine integration and easy application support but then changed to Linspire following a Microsoft lawsuit has had quite a journey. PC/OpenSystems LLC revived Linspire after a multi-year gap following the closure of Xandros and since then it’s been a rather peculiar platform. Today they are now shifting focus once again.
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For the past year we have internally at PC/OpenSystems LLC launched a project called CLOUD9. The aim of this project was to create an OS that utilized cloud apps in replacement of traditional desktop applications. Some of those manifested themselves into Xandros Cloud but we wanted to bring that to all of our desktop users. Some of the efforts were successful (Xandros Cloud Office 365 was our best seller for our education customers and some of our enterprise customers) But we wanted to make the best Cloud centric OS that we could.
[...]
Xandros OpenDesktop 2021 will come in two flavors. Standard Edition with all the Google services preinstalled and Office 365 edition which will utilize Microsofts web services. With the Office 365 edition Bing will also be the default homepage and the default search engine in Google Chrome. Both will ship with .NET Core, Powershell and Visual Studios Code. Local apps will include, Chrome, Video Player, Rhythmbox, games, Shotwell and Krita for image editing. Both editions of Xandros OpenDesktop will also include all the proprietary media codecs and DVD/Blu-Ray support
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07.28.21
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum bdb7fdcb69239f51ea841f32963e79d5
Summary: Google has got almost a monopoly on (nearly) real-time news syndication; this is why, for our Daily Links at least, we still rely on Google News to a certain extent
THE way we gather news has evolved a lot over the years; it actually predates this Web site as I’ve posted many GNU/Linux-related links on a daily basis since 2004 or 2005 (back then it was mostly in newsgroups/USENET, later social control media such as Digg.com).
“The Google monopoly in this area generally lowered Google’s incentive to maintain any sort of proper quality control (same as in social control media).”I’ve seen the rise and fall of blogs, I’ve witnessed the demise of RSS feeds, and various incarnations of social control media — partly responsible for this still-ongoing war on RSS.
Although Google barely advertises RSS feeds anymore (and the Google-funded Mozilla also reduced focus on such user-centric technology), they’re still available, albeit sometimes a little hidden.
Google News is the only thing from Google that I still use because sadly there’s no potent alternative to it (other than subscribing to many thousands of sites over RSS and then filtering the results, which can be a lot of computational work that barely scales for one user or few users).
In this video I explain how I manage to overcome the truly awful signal/noise ratio that plagued Google News in recent years. Sadly, they also started syndicating and including spam/plagiarism sites while delisting totally legitimate sites.
The Google monopoly in this area generally lowered Google’s incentive to maintain any sort of proper quality control (same as in social control media). Spying increased too, but by blocking JS and redirections one can mitigate a bit.
That’s just my personal experience. Let us know yours, e.g. in our IRC channels (incidentally, there this decent new article about IRC today). █
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07.07.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google at 1:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Posted 2 days ago
Summary: Another facepalm-worthy moment or a dumb post from Mozilla; they’ve just missed an opportunity to keep quiet, instead writing about “DATA STEWARDSHIP” (they should reject data collection instead, but they hire surveillance capitalists and are funded by them, too)
New spin on spyware won’t make Mozilla any more popular. It’s already bad enough as it is, with Mozilla getting into politics where there’s no real need to. Why do they keep doing this? Burying Mozilla’s own grave as a company…
I still remember some Canonical staff writing in defence of Raspberry Pi staff putting Microsoft spyware inside millions of Raspberry Pi devices, without users’ consent and moreover covertly…
On what planet do these people live? Do they even understand why people adopt Free software?
“Remember that the ‘data masters’ of Audacity are also the masters of Firefox . Same tentacles, same mouths.”For some background, see what we wrote about all that yesterday (there has been further coverage about this since). To be clear, it’s very much possible that this tactless post boils down to the opinion of one single person, not the whole company (whose stance is the collective opinions of more than one person), but hours ago it was posted not just in the personal blog but also in “Data @ Mozilla” (blog.mozilla.org). The author is one of their “Telemetry” or “Data Science” people, who use proprietary Microsoft spyware (GitHub/NSA/PRISM) to develop spyware for Firefox. “Data @ Mozilla” = surveillance by Mozilla. I’ve long warned Mozillans to not veer in that direction… but in a Google-funded Mozilla it can be frowned upon when you berate surveillance, not when you support it or make excuses for it. All that “privacy” posing from Mozilla is ruined by the true face of the company, now citing a talk for a notorious DRM player/giant (Ubisoft Data Summit 2021) as if to say that some spying is just “Responsible Data Collection”.
This was said in reference to Audacity, so should we assume that using an application which does not need an Internet connection (audio editor), unlike a browser, to spy on the user for the US government is OK? Is that what Mozilla is trying to tell us? Either way, this merely reaffirms the idea that Firefox funded by Google is just a coat of “open” paint on malware.
Of course it’s possible for application developers and vendors to just not collect any data in the first place; if authorities insist on accessing some users’ data, there’s no route for compliance, hence the requests are moot. And that’s how it should be. Remember that the ‘data masters’ of Audacity are also the masters of Firefox . Same tentacles, same mouths. █
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06.07.21
Posted in Deception, Google, IBM, Microsoft at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: Corporate trolling by corporate actors is not a new strategy; they try to portray themselves as a force for good, whereas communities are supposedly unruly, racist, sexist and so on; this video discusses some new examples from the weekend’s news
YESTERDAY we mentioned the common misconception that unscrupulous Google and racist IBM are somehow our 'friends', unlike Microsoft. In reality, however, they’re just a different kind of foe. They don’t truly care about our freedom and they only ever pretend to value ethics.
“Ethics don’t get passed in a top-bottom fashion. They’re being demanded from the bottom by grassroots activism, not Public Relations firms employed by the rich and connected to corporate media (for puff pieces to be seeded/planted).”In the video above I allude to reports such as this one about Google and several about Microsoft, from media that’s habitually bribed by Bill Gates and media that basically amplifies face-saving lies from Microsoft officials [1, 2], e.g. this passage: “The photos were taken down globally from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, on Friday — the 32nd anniversary of the event. A Microsoft spokesman said they were taken offline by mistake, attributing the removal to “human error.” The images reappeared around the world — outside of China — on Saturday.”
So Microsoft censored not only for China inside China (removing history) but also for China outside China. This is the same company that profits from racism and shows no remorse for it.
In the case of Google, it takes quite the audacity to claim any sort of empathy for women. Google paid millions of dollars in secret to hide abuses against women by Google’s top executives [1, 2]. “That Google is stirring that up is an indication that they are wishing to distract from other matters,” an associate of ours noted.
Generally speaking, beware of the idea that sociopaths and career-climbing psychopaths are about ethics. At the EPO we’ve long seen Benoît Battistelli trying to paint himself as champion of “diversity” while surrounding himself by a French cabal; António Campinos is just as bad.
Ethics don’t get passed in a top-bottom fashion. They’re being demanded from the bottom by grassroots activism, not Public Relations firms employed by the rich and connected to corporate media (for puff pieces to be seeded/planted). █
“Microsoft, a rather new corporation, may not have matured to the position where it understands how it should act with respect to the public interest and the ethics of the marketplace.”
–U.S. District fudge Stanley Sporkin
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06.06.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, IBM, Novell at 2:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“An analogy [of Microsoft] would be the owner of a toll bridge, which is the only bridge across a river, paying the owner of land to deny access to a site where a competitive bridge is partly built.”
–Judge Robert Bork, former US Supreme Court nominee
Summary: There’s a tendency to focus on just one “Evil Empire” (a reductionist over-simplification), but at the moment software freedom faces threats from GIAFAM and more; even Intel (the “other I”) is problematic
THE threat posed by Apple (to software freedom) is real and has long been recognised, even if Apple is posing as “UNIX” something. But a lot of people wrongly assume that Google is our friend because of programs such as Summer of Code (never mind abuses of privacy and ‘GPL condoms’ like Google’s attempt to replace Linux in Android) and that IBM, being the owner of Red Hat, is mostly benign if not beneficial. We increasingly find that IBM is the new Novell, not just because many people from IBM ran Novell and both companies fought in court against SCO but because both bought GNU/Linux vendors and then (still) leveraged software patents, liaised with Microsoft, and attacked the Free software community in a number of ways.
“And IBM would do just about anything — even desperate measures like killing CentOS — in pursuit of money, just to meet quarterly targets.”Microsoft is still very dangerous (for many different reasons), but let’s not lose sight of the potent threat posed by what figosdev called “GIAGAM” (I for IBM). IBM is dying but not dead yet. And IBM would do just about anything — even desperate measures like killing CentOS — in pursuit of money, just to meet quarterly targets. To better understand what goes on inside IBM watch these threads any day (I watch these about 10 times a day) as many are from insiders and former insiders. They think IBM is going down the bin, just like Novell did. They live on borrowed time, profiting from legacy products/profits/clients while they still last (and while they experience brain drain, a staff exodus, never mind layoffs). █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Kernel at 2:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Very large and increasingly monolithic projects (lack of modularity, constant changes everywhere) pose a threat to some of the Four Freedoms; while in theory it’s possible to control all the code in practice it’s becoming infeasible and very frequent ‘stable’ releases make that even harder, quite likely by intention
WE NEED to talk about an issue that more and more people have spoken about in recent years. It’s not a case of “trolling” or “bashing”; there are technically legitimate concerns therein.
We’ve long written about feature churn, too frequent a release cycle, OSPS and all that jazz. In a nutshell, for those who don’t know the basics, there are some projects that call themselves “Open Source” but are very much akin to “Proprietary Software” (the “PS” in “OSPS”). Chrome (or Chromium for openwashing’s sake) is one example and systemd is another. Linux is also released very often (RC every week, typically late on Sunday, and a final release every 6-8 weeks), it’s extremely large (the same is true for Chrome and systemd, which had over 36,000 files last year), so prospects of forking are slim to none. Even just compiling takes ages and much skill. It would take a massive scandal to induce a reorganisation large enough for momentum (like Oracle buying projects it has no intention of properly maintaining, hence LibreOffice exists). The benefits espoused in relation to Free software are mostly obsoleted, except if you want to remove some malicious feature and repeat for each release cycle. Mozilla Firefox with its version inflation (they used to release infrequently and test more extensively before final releases) is basically mimicking what Chrome is doing; recently, Google further increased the Chrome release frequency and further added restrictions (such as access to Google (dis)services) to discourage derivatives, forks, etc. Who didn’t see that coming?
“Recently, as in last week, Richard Stallman alluded to Rust as moving to fast. He said it would help to fork or branch out Rust (maybe call it “crust” to avoid trademark-related restrictions), then maintain that instead. So it seems clear Stallman is at least vaguely aware of those things.”If this is the best we have, what level of freedom are we truly enjoying/exercising at the level of studying, modifying, and redistributing code? After all, most of us need a “Big Browser” (at least sometimes, e.g. for online banking) and a kernel with extensive hardware support. How many of us can feasibly change those and keep up with new versions/releases? How many projects can do so? Not even Gentoo or Debian have enough developers to study and garden millions of lines of such code. Not without a salary and full-time job.
Free software will need to cope with or handle this issue. A good start would be at least talking about those sorts of issues. Without talking about them there will be no widespread recognition. Recently, as in last week, Richard Stallman alluded to Rust as moving to fast. He said it would help to fork or branch out Rust (maybe call it “crust” to avoid trademark-related restrictions), then maintain that instead. So it seems clear Stallman is at least vaguely aware of those things. This talk is not online yet, but certainly it will be some time soon (I watched it live, but exact quotes require something other than a livestream). There are several other issues with Rust (we covered some before), but they’re a footnote in the context of what Drew DeVault wrote a few months back. █
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