04.06.13
Posted in Microsoft, Red Hat at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Trojan bears
Summary: More on Red Hat’s unprecedented move of hiring executives from Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft has already infiltrated — in the staff sense — several large companies such as Novell, VMware, Nokia, Amazon and Yahoo, to name just a few notable examples. It’s always the same story. One Microsoft mole enters a top position, then fires many who are unfriendly to Microsoft’s agenda, only to hire more former colleagues from Microsoft (or cancel projects that threaten Microsoft, replacing those with Microsoft collaborations). Red Hat should watch out because UEFI Restricted Boot shows signs of Red Hat softening too much*. Red Hat recently hired from Microsoft — news that continues to fascinate many, e.g.:
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Balakrishnan had been with Microsoft since 1997, according to his LinkedIn biography. His positions included:
* Group Product Manager, Windows Storage Server;
* Chief Competitive Officer, India;
* Director, Virtualization and Private Cloud
* Senior Director, Cloud Platform
He was at Microsoft for 15 years, so it’s not some rushed escape from Microsoft. It was several years ago when someone who had worked for Microsoft lobbied against Ogg on behalf of Nokia, which is now attacking VP8 and Android. Simon Phipps is trying to explain why Nokia is doing this:
Last month, I wrote about the battle between open source video tools and the entrenched industry around video. Google announced it had reached an accommodation with MPEG-LA to no longer imply that VP8 was threatened by MPEG-LA patents and it hoped to have VP8 standardized by MPEG.
At the IETF meeting where Google’s staff explained the proposal, it was clear that the standards arbiters working for the companies with deep investments in MPEG H.264 were not going to make life easy. In contrast with the treatment received by other speakers, the Google speakers were constantly challenged by meeting attendees associated with H.264 — almost to the point of harassment. It also became apparent that Nokia — a company that, prior to its change of direction to become part of Microsoft’s hegemony, had supported open source approaches — was poised to mount a challenge to VP8.
And therein lies the problem. Microsoft moles can change a lot from the inside. Red Hat is no longer void of Microsoft veterans. Never before did we see Red Hat hiring for its management team from Microsoft. █
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* Other distro makers feel differently, but Canonical, itself already semi-infiltrated by Microsoft, did the same as Red Hat. “Explaining the concept of evil to a Canonical employee,” wrote Will Hill, is not simple. Quoting JoinDiaspora: “He said, “Bill Gates isn’t evil, he just likes getting a lot of money,” as if money turns any harm into good. It’s not often that you see such a naked expression of “It’s OK because he does it for money.”" The “yuppie nuremberg” defense won’t work in justifying the hiring from Microsoft.
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04.03.13
Posted in Red Hat, Ubuntu at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Red Hat hires Microsoft veterans and Amazon continues to do so too; Ubuntu desktop driven by a Microsoft veteran
Some worrisome news came through this press release from Red Hat, which has been too soft on Microsoft in recent months/years. As one tabloid put it:
Radhesh Balakrishnan will oversee Red Hat’s OpenStack and enterprise virtualization technologies. He used to work on Microsoft’s Azure, private cloud and data center products.
Why are they hiring from Microsoft? Amazon made that mistake several times. “Whatever it is,” says one reader of ours, “it won’t be that good for Amazon” (it hired a Microsoft AstroTurfer just now).
As a recap, years ago Amazon hired many Microsoft managers. One of them became Kindle chief and soon thereafter Amazon started paying Microsoft for Kindle’s Linux and also for the servers, i.e. Red Hat for the most part. This latest hire is of an AstroTurfer, aka “evangelist”. To quote TechCrunch: “Former Windows Phone developer evangelist, Charlie Kindel, has joined Amazon to head up an undisclosed project. Kindel left Microsoft in mid 2011 to work on his own startups but, according to his LinkedIn profile, is “now at Amazon working on something wonderful”. The profile lists him as ‘Director, something secret’ at Amazon in Seattle. That something secret may be mobile-related, judging by another paragraph of description which reads: “I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers.””
Here is more for the curious. It makes no sense unless one understands that many in the company are already from Microsoft. It’s a friend-brings-a-friend phenomenon, just like in VMware, Yahoo, and Nokia (also Microsoft-occupied).
For those who wonder why Canonical and Red Hat helped UEFI, bear in mind that a Microsoft veteran got promoted to Ubuntu desktop manager. They don’t learn about moles, do they? █
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03.31.13
Posted in Patents, Red Hat at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Rackspace helps beat software patents, with additional help from Red Hat
THE EFF is happy with the outcome of a trial that Dietrich Schmitz covered on Friday. “Luckily for the defendant,” he said, “the judge ruled early on before the case got under way and was saved a substantial sum in litigation fees for fighting a frivolous lawsuit.” But the main point here, patents got thrown out for being reducible to math, just like all software patents. This is major.
Here is an article about the decision:
Today was a big day in patent law, which is important to anyone who thinks they might one day have an original idea for a product, and wants to protect it. In particular, if that idea involves an algorithm or software.
First, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas threw out a claim against cloud storage company Rackspace, stemming from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA. The case, according to a TechCrunch report, asserted that the “processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation.” In other words, a processing method, or counting method, might be the exclusive property of Uniloc.
Here is other good coverage and some from the SFLC:
Several times in recent years, opponents of software patents have looked hopefully to Congress and the Supreme Court for a solution to the expensive problem of software patents, and several times we’ve been disappointed. The narrow Bilski v. Kappos ruling invalidated one business method patent but left the question of software patents to one side, and even arguably weakened a rule—the “machine-or-transformation” test—intended to limit the scope of patentability. The reforms of the America Invents Act were half-hearted; they provided additional opportunities to challenge patents at the USPTO, but did not fundamentally affect the rules for patenting software.
Despite these missed opportunities, there are signs of slower but consistent reform in the courts, and yesterday’s ruling in the Eastern District of Texas in Uniloc v. Rackspace is one of them. The Uniloc ruling is about as good as it gets for a defendant in a software patent case: the judge dismissed the case at an early stage on the grounds that the claim at issue described an unpatentable mathematical formula.
LWN wrote about this and Mark Webbink, formerly of Red Hat, covered this in Groklaw. Many correctly call Uniloc a patent troll, including this headline:
A patent troll that accused Rackspace of violating a patent merely by selling Linux-based servers has seen its case thrown out. A judge ruled the patent claim invalid because it describes a relatively simple math operation.
The company in question is Uniloc, which has a long history of suing tech vendors. In 2009, a US District Court judge overturned a $388 million verdict Uniloc had won against Microsoft. That litigation was finally settled late last year for an undisclosed sum. Uniloc continues litigating however, with at least a dozen lawsuits filed just last week.
Uniloc sued Rackspace in June 2012 in US District Court in Eastern Texas (PDF), claiming Rackspace violated its patent “by or through making, using, offering for sale, selling and/or importing servers running Linux Kernel (version 2.6 or higher), which is used to process floating point operations carried out on Rackspace’s servers including those servers used in conjunction with Rackspace’s hosting solutions/products.”
The fight of Rackspace against patent troll Uniloc is not Rackspace’s only battle against software patents, as was covered here before. Here is the press release about the outcome:
Plaintiff Uniloc USA, Inc. is a frequent litigator, having brought patent lawsuits against many high-tech companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Sony and Symantec. Rackspace provides its customers with managed servers running the Linux operating system. Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense as part of Red Hat’s commitment to standing behind customers through Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program.
Here’s more:
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) announced that they have won a federal court decision granting early dismissal of all claims in a lawsuit brought by the patent assertion entity Uniloc USA, Inc.
Plaintiff Uniloc USA, Inc. is a frequent litigator, having brought patent lawsuits against many high-tech companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Sony and Symantec. Rackspace provides its customers with managed servers running the Linux operating system. Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense as part of Red Hat’s commitment to standing behind customers through Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program.
The press release calls Uniloc plaintiff rather than troll. How polite. “Uniloc USA, Inc.” is not a company, this is a façade. Here is a good article from a FOSS news site:
Red Hat and Rackspace have won the court battle with patent troll Uniloc USA, Inc. The company alleged in its complaint that the processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system violated U.S. Patent 5,892,697. A federal court decision had granted an early dismissal of all claims in a lawsuit brought by Uniloc USA, Inc.
This bit of news got heaps of coverage (here is some in German), probably more than coverage of Red Hat’s financial results. Let’s hope this case has maximal impact on US law. █
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03.24.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, OpenSUSE, Red Hat at 9:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new OpenSUSE is out and it is in Microsoft’s Azure lock-in, helping Microsoft tax GNU/Linux while controlling it entirely
The Microsoft-funded SUSE gets integrated with Microsoft Azure following a lot of Azure openwashing. The VAR Guy says this may be part of a bigger battle, fought between Linux and Ballnux (Ballmer-taxed Linux). To quote his new article:
Red Hat and SUSE are shifting their old Linux battle to a new market: Big Data. Both open source companies made major Big Data statements this week, but they are attacking the market using completely different strategies. Here’s what channel partners need to know.
Techrights ignored the release of OpenSUSE this month. It ought to be remembered that the role of SUSE as a whole, now financially tied to Microsoft, is to normalise Microsoft ‘Linux tax’. This site was founded to oppose exactly that. █
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03.16.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Red Hat at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Locked in at more levels
Summary: Hardware and communications — not just software — increasingly a target of Microsoft power grab
With UEFI Restricted Boot, Microsoft controls many new PCs at hardware level. We wrote about it many times and we hope to see formal complaints being made by some large companies, even though — to be realistic — players like IBM are very much in the same TPM conspiracy, so we are unlikely to see open computing defended by anyone with sufficient clout. There has been UEFI PR at IDG (talking points from UEFI staff) and now a piece from Jamie Watson in CBS (or ZDNet). Critics of UEFI Restricted Boot are told/sold some talking points, leading to this type of output from Fedora staff:
Some key problems according to Mo:
1. The Grub2 theme out of date (leftover from F17)
2. Confusing Grub timeout bar, looks like boot progress
3. Mismatched and disproportioned logos
4. “It takes too long a time to load the desktop from GDM login”
5. Newly-installed kernels added to main Grub2 menu rather advanced options
6. No Braille display at install boot
7. “Changing video modes makes the screen flash”
8. Error display issues
9. “We may not be adhering to the bootloader spec”
10. Grub2 menu not hiding extraneous entries
It’s not about GRUB, which in itself is an issue because UEFI helps marginalise it (along with the GPLv3); the problem is boot control. Let’s not lose sight of the big issues. To say, as Fedora does, that GRUB can be abandoned, is to play into Microsoft’s hands, just as Canonical was going to.
Meanwhile we learn from an expert that Microsoft back-doored Skype after the acquisition and now there is this:
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ARCEP, the French telecom authorities, have informed the Paris state prosecutor (the State Attorney) that, since Skype provides communication capabilities to French citizens, they must submit to the French laws concerning electronic communications operators – one such law requires operators to allow the French police to listen in on any calls.
So basically, they want what Germany/Austria (and possibly China) have pretty much got already. We wrote about lack of privacy in Skype before and we urge people to remember what Skype in the hands of a US-based company means to privacy. Our daily links under the section “Privacy” ought to provide some legal context.
Microsoft used to abuse control of software. Now it is also abusing our (VoIP-based/virtual) phonelines and the hardware which is no longer made OS-agnostic or generic. Where is the outrage? Have the financial meltdown (passage of wealth) forced many activists into silence, apathy, and perhaps lack of time for activism? This has become rather disheartening. █
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03.08.13
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Red Hat, Security at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Wave of GNU/Linux scare-mongering
Summary: Percoco chooses to chastise Linux over security issues, even though upon pressure he admits that he is not aware of any particular issues
Recently we saw some remarkable GNU/Linux FUD coming from Trustwave [1, 2, 3], which is a Microsoft pal. Watch this new article which says: “eSecurity Planet met up with Nicholas Percoco, senior VP at Trustwave SpiderlLabs, during the RSA conference last week to discuss the state of PaaS security. Percoco specifically took aim at the Red Hat OpenShift PaaS in his demo, though he cautioned that OpenShift is not necessarily vulnerable.”
Why did he pick Red hat as his target? Sounds like deliberate FUD. The author is the article is a Linux proponent, so with the above interview he helped show what we consider to be selective criticism. Trustwave works with Microsoft, so it would not be smart for it to say negative things about Windows. THis is not a sole example of such FUD patterns. █
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02.25.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Red Hat at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Red Hat an accomplice in Microsoft’s restricted boot plans and Linus Torvalds is not happy
Torvalds’ complaints about UEFI restricted boot are nothing new. That anticompetitive scheme from Microsoft is polluting the kernel with binaries which merely serve to help discriminate against Linux and Torvalds has just opened his mouth again, sending out a “NSFW Red Hat rant”:
Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has again vented his spleen online, taking on Red Hat employee David Howells with a series of expletive-laden posts on the topic of X.509 public key management standard.
The action takes place on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, with Howell posting a request that Torvalds “pull this patchset please”.
Howells wants the patchset pulled so Red Hat can “”embed an X.509 certificate containing the key in a section called ‘.keylist’ in an EFI PE binary and then get the binary signed by Microsoft.” This arrangement, he suggests, is more elegant than the way the Linux kernel signs certificates today. Torvalds’ initial response is “Not without a lot more discussion first”, because “Quite frankly, this is f*cking moronic. The whole thing seems to be designed around stupid interfaces, for completely moronic reasons. Why should we do this?”
For future reference, here is the original context dated Thursday, 21 Feb 2013 15:47:58 (GMT). Thanks, Torvalds, for doing the Right Thing® in this case. █
Update: Linus Torvalds To Secure Boot Supporters: This Is Not A Dick-Sucking Contest
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02.23.13
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ‘Security’-themed FUD against Red Hat is back, despite the fact that Microsoft admits gaming the numbers it uses to make its case
LAST WEEK we saw Trustwave, a Microsoft partner [1, 2], spreading some Linux FUD and there is still dissemination of this Linux FUD in Web sites which seem not to know the background and instead go by press releases (lazy ‘journalism’). To quote this one example which was found yesterday:
According to a recent report by the security firm Trustwave: Vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel fixed in 2012 went unpatched for more than two years on average, more than twice as long as it took to fix unpatched flaws in current Windows Operating Systems.
No, Microsoft uses the strategy of hidden patches to game the numbers, which is possible because Windows is proprietary (hidden source code). Those claims should be dismissed and the Microsoft partner treated with extreme suspicion. When Microsoft talks about “security” it does not mean real security (see what Torvalds said) but about financial security for Microsoft. UEFI is a good example of the misuse of the word security, which is more about making it inconvenient to use GNU/Linux (Dedoimedo is the latest to address the subject). █
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