04.13.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:55 am by
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Accepting the award on Torvalds’ behalf will be conference keynote speaker Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin works with the world’s largest technology companies, including Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Nokia and others, to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.
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Graphics Stack
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Here is our look at this new graphics card with accompanying Linux benchmarks.
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Applications
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One of the big advantages of using Linux is that its security tends to be so much better than that of the competing alternatives. That’s due in large part to the way Linux assigns permissions, but it’s also certainly true that the open source operating system is targeted by malware writers far less frequently than Windows is, in particular, simply because it’s less widely used and so much more diverse.
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There are, of course, countless other security tools for Linux out there, many of them excellent as well.
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Proprietary
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Opera 11.10 aka Barracuda has been released today. With the new, more flexible Speed Dial your favorite sites are better looking than ever. Speed Dial automatically uses website logos and lets Web developers make content tailored for speed dial. And in Opera 11.10 you can add as many sites to Speed Dial as you like.
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Opera Software today announced the final release of Opera 11.10, an incremental update with a barrel full of subtle changes. Perhaps the biggest one is a revamped and faster Turbo that’s up to four times as fast as before, the Norwegian browser maker claims. Part of the secret sauce in the recipe for faster Turbo is the added support for Google’s WebP image format, which provides lossy compression for photographic images.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Project Bossanova has high hopes to develop “the first 3D game built especially with Linux as the first priority. It will set the standard in gameplay, graphics, compatibility, community integration and more.” In addition, they plan to have the game, now announced as RunServer’s MMT, to be open-source. This is an MMOPRG game and it’s being built using the Unigine Engine.
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For the next 14 days, you can get Wolfire Games’ freshly-released Humble Frozenbyte Bundle! Like the first two bundles, you pay what you want to download five independent, DRM-free, cross-platform computer games, and choose to divide your money between the game developers, Child’s Play, and EFF. The Frozenbyte Bundle includes Trine, Shadowgrounds Survivor, the unpublished game Splot, and gaming prototype Jackclaw, in which you get to rampage through a city, throw cars, and generally cause mayhem.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE Spain is organizing Akademy-es 2011, the annual meeting of KDE users and contributors in Barcelona, Spain from May 20th through May 22nd. Akademy-es is an important event in the KDE calendar. Attendance and the technical quality of papers have increased significantly during each of the previous events.
New this year, Akademy-es will take place in two different locations. The events of each day are designed to fit ideally with the surroundings. On Friday, Akademy-es will be held at the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and weekend activities will be at The School of Sant Marc de Sarrià.
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The default desktop opens with a shaded cover that is actually a desktop lock. You can drag that away to unlock and reveal these “plasma strips” that are for KDE widgets. One is an RSS feeds list and another is a weather widget. Clicking on a feed title opens the article or post in Firefox – one might expect Konqueror. You can drag the strips with your mouse cursor as a whole to reveal any additional strips that didn’t fit on the display. You can add more widget strips by clicking the “plus sign” at the end of widget strips. On each strip is a configuration icon that can be clicked on to reveal another configuration icon and a quit icons. If you drag the original configuration icon to the newly spawned configuration icon that opens the configuration dialog for that particular widget. Using the handle at the bottom of the screen will drag the whole strip containment out of sight to reveal an almost normal appearing desktop.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s soon-to-be released Unity are the first GNOME desktops designed from the start with usability principles in mind. Not that releases in the GNOME 2 series ignored usability, but in GNOME 2, usability was an addition to the desktop, comparable to adding the foundation after the house was built.
Whether you use GNOME 3 or Unity will probably depend on your distribution’s choice. But assuming you have a choice, which should you use? Suggesting an answer is hard, because in many ways the two are distinctly similar in design, with the differences largely in the details.
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Red Hat Family
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The New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse are planning a move to a single cash equities trading platform, understood to be based on Red Hat Linux, in a crucial step towards saving €79 million (£64 million) in annual IT costs and delivering robust, fast messaging.
If the merger goes ahead, the exchanges will also integrate “complementary” derivatives businesses, and combine their US options platforms. The savings represent 26 percent of the €300 million total planned cost cuts, which also include more efficient clearing and market operations.
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Fedora
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Votes :: Name
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2204 :: Verne
1662 :: Beefy Miracle
1522 :: Omoto
1241 :: Nepia
1207 :: Bonnet
1157 :: Barona
908 :: Llullaillaco
845 :: Legation
607 :: Mt. Orne
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The Fedora community has voted on the name for the next major release of this Linux distribution.
There were some 2,204 votes cast for the winner…
Verne
Yes, Verne.
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Debian Family
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Generally because Knoppix is meant to be used as a live CD too much customization will not always be necessary.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With an announcement on the security mailing list, Canonical has confirmed that support for Ubuntu 9.10 will cease on April 29 2011. This came as no surprise as it adheres to the expected support cycle of a .10 Ubuntu release, and 9.10 is now 18 months old.
The recommended upgrade path from 9.10 is to Ubuntu 10.4. 10.04 is a long term support (LTS) release, and support will end on April 2013. Note that, according to official Ubuntu documentation, it’s not possible to skip a release version when upgrading. So, it’s not possible to go straight from 9.10 to 10.10. It is possible to upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 and then to 10.10. That’s quite a lot to go through, and personally, I’d be tempted to make a fresh install and migrate the user data.
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This cycle we started off determined to make it easy for anyone who wanted to contribute to Ubuntu Unity to have no roadblocks in their way. We concentrated on making our work processes as smooth and easy as possible. We had Q+A sessions in IRC, Ask Me Anythings on Reddit, and regular status reports so that anyone who wanted to dive in this cycle could grab Unity and fix a bug.
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Flavours and Variants
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Should Linux users try Moon? Since it is more of a creative spin-off of Ubuntu, and not a completely self-made distro, it really is more a matter of taste, computing style, and personal preference than functionality or utility. Former and current Mac users looking for an easy to use, friendly distro with a familiar interface can find refuge in MoonOS to ease any transition pains they might experience in swapping to Linux. Of course, like Ubuntu, MoonOS is an excellent beginner’s distro, and it will provide most of the tools a former Windows user may be looking for in Linux. Even those who are tired with Ubuntu and wish to try a different approach will discover Moon to be just as easy as – if not easier than – Ubuntu with its Docky alternative. MoonOS’ default theme is arguably more attractive, although whether Moon’s green is more likable than Ubuntu’s brown is a purely subjective matter. Also, all Ubuntu users have to do is change their default appearance, and the argument ceases to exist.
Finally, more experienced users could decide that Moon does not meet their advanced needs, and Ubuntu fans and Linux veterans may be annoyed by Docky and unimpressed with the original artwork. Nevertheless, with its alternative take on Ubuntu and its colorful, customizable Docky, MoonOS remains easy enough for anyone to use and interesting enough for even a dedicated Linux user to try.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation is its newest member.
Renesas is a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, including microcontrollers (MCUs), systems-on-chip (SoC) solutions and a broad range of analog and power devices. The Japan-based company is aggressively investing in the areas of next-generation automotives, mobile phones, set-top boxes and other increasingly sophisticated electronics that are running Linux. For example, Renesas recently announced new SoCs for next-generation mobile phones and for dashboard-mounted car navigation systems, respectively, that support advanced human machine interfaces (HMI).
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Phones
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Android
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According to All Things Digital, HTC is currently bigger than Nokia in terms of market caps by about $1.04 billion and RIM by $5 billion. This according to Robert Chen is due to “a very unique business model and ecosystem strategy.”
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Events
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LinuxFest Northwest, held in Bellingham, Washington April 30- May 1, 2011, announces finalized schedule of events.
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Web Browsers
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I’ve never been a fan of Flock, the ‘social’ web browser. Personally, I’ve long argued that Flock is little more than an overlay.
At first Flock was an overlay of social add-ons to Firefox, then it moved to Chrome.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is doing an admirable job of helping users get the most out of Firefox 4, including posting lists of add-ons that can lead to performance problems. But its rapid release cycle is new, and it remains to be seen–especially since previous Firefox development proceeded much more slowly–if Mozilla is ready to follow the cycle that it has announced.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Recently I was asked by a family member to set them up with a copy of Publisher. Apparently, they weren’t aware of the cost involved in purchasing this software, so I suggested we look into some free alternatives that might better meet their needs. After some thought, I remembered that Microsoft Publisher is just Word with a few additional bells and whistles at the user’s disposal. And remembering that most desktop publishing software is a bit overwhelming for most folks, I instead chose to make due with OpenOffice Writer. Why not simply choose Serif PagePlus Starter Edition? Honestly, as great as the software is, there is just too much going on. At this point, I might as well have suggested Scribus. No, keeping things limited to drawing tables and inserting images was where it’s at. But this leaves us with the need to get some decent clip art inserted into Writer so that it’s ready to go.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Ross Turk is the new director of community at Talend , a company that’s not afraid to say they use an open core model. In this H Half Hour, The H asks Turk about how the open core model works at Talend and how the company is building a community around its data transformation and management tools.
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Funding
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Venture capital funding for open source software-related vendors declined 14% in the first quarter. According to our preliminary figures, OSS-related vendors raised $79.8m in Q1, compared to $92.5m a year ago.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the GNU Project, spoke Monday on the benefits and threats of digital inclusion in society.
Stallman defines digital inclusion as the creation of an inclusive information society in which all people have access to information and communication technology.
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Openness/Sharing
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Slowly but surely, biology and biotechnology efforts that follow open source principles are improving, and as they mature, they could have a profound effect on healthcare, longevity, disease control, and much more. Biotechnology reporter Luke Zimmerman’s latest dispatch on the work of Sage Bionetworks founder Stephen Friend offers a case in point. With gene sequencing efforts going on all around the world–but mostly going on in silos, where information is not shared in optimal ways–Friend is convinced that shared data could bring on huge advances in biotechnology. His is only one of several promising efforts in this area.
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Open Data
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What platform versions are being downloaded? What geographies is your service popular in? Which APIs are being consumed? What progamming languages are most popular? From web analytics of your documentation to user activation data, you can answer these questions. But this isn’t happening at present.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The Portuguese Parliament approved on the 6th of April 2011 a Law for the adoption of Open Standards on public IT systems. This law represents the consensus reached by the represented parties following two proposals submitted by PCP and BE, that were discussed and merged on the Working Group that produced the final text.
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Nearly 120 stakeholders and another 34 webinar attendees gathered for the April 5-6 ANSI Workshop: Standards and Codes for Electric Drive Vehicles in Bethesda, MD, to examine the standards and conformance activities needed to drive the safe, effective, and large-scale deployment of electric drive vehicles (EDV).
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Here I extracted a few quotes from the European Parliament resolution of 6 April 2011 on a Single Market for Enterprises and Growth which show its special emphasis on improving interoperability conditions for the single market. Strassbourg sents a clear message.
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This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile. The new organization is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and the winner is . . . well, we’ll come back to that a little later. Suffice it to say for now that the fifteen year battle to control the digital future of the automobile could be at an end, and that its resolution may tell us something about the future of the digital desktop as well.
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We may have set a new low for idiotic lawsuits. Jonathan Tasini, a freelance reporter who was famously involved in a lawsuit with the NY Times, concerning copyrights on a database of freelancer articles, is now suing the Huffington Post for not paying him while he wrote for it by choice. The basis of the lawsuit is the already discussed fact that a bunch of folks who blogged for the Huffington Post are stupidly upset that Arianna Huffington sold her site to AOL for $315 million, and that they didn’t get any of the money. Of course, they didn’t invest their money in the site. They held no equity and, most importantly, they wrote for the site for free by choice. If they didn’t like the “deal”, they shouldn’t have done it.
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Huffington Post bloggers who think they ought to get paid for their volunteer writing have been litigating their case in the court of public opinion. Now they’re taking it to a real one.
Today, a group of bloggers led by union organizer and journalist Jonathan Tasini filed a class-action suit against the Huffington Post, founder Arianna Huffington, and AOL, which acquired the news-and-blogs site in February.
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Health/Nutrition
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The NYT has a front page story on the debate over Representative Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare. The article is an entirely in the form of he said/she said, providing readers with absolutely no information that would allow them to assess the arguments over the plan. This is especially important since the article reports that changes like those in the Ryan plan are necessary to control costs.
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Democrats who think Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues have foolishly wrapped their arms around the third rail of American politics by proposing to hand the Medicare program to private insurers will themselves look foolish if they take for granted that the public will always be on their side.
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Miles C. CollierOn March 23, 2011 a group called Revere America issued a dire-sounding PRNewswire press release titled, “Americans Fear Loss of Freedom on Anniversary of Health Care Reform Law.” It warned that “a majority” of Americans view health care reform as “a threat to their freedom” and cited a poll by Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies to prove it. The release came well after Revere America had spent $2.5 million on attack ads in the 2010 mid-term elections to defeat Democratic candidates in two states — New York and New Hampshire — who had voted in favor of health care reform. Just prior to the mid-term elections, in the autumn of 2010, Revere America ran a a slew of false and misleading attack ads against the health care reform bill that erroneously called health reform “government-run healthcare” (a Republican and insurance industry buzz-phrase). The ads said that the new law will result in higher costs and longer waits in doctors’ offices. In another false claim aimed at inducing fear, the ads told viewers that “your right to keep your own doctor may be taken away.”
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Today will go down in the public relations history books as the day health insurers and their allies began a coordinated campaign to ensure that the health care reform law is implemented in ways that will benefit them way more than the rest of us. Today is the day they plan to launch their brand new front group — drum roll, please — the Choice and Competition Coalition (CCC). But first, a bit of context.
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Cablegate
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In India, after the initial stunned reaction, the tone of the official response to our publication of the India Cables was set by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh questioning or disputing in Parliament the authenticity of the cables and what the U.S. Embassy and consulates were reporting back to the State Department. Here’s what he actually said in the Lok Sabha, our House of Commons, on March 18. He said the government “cannot confirm the veracity, contents or even the existence of such communication.” This seems to have set the Indian government apart from the rest of the governments, the rest of the world, at the receiving end, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
Have you come across this reaction anywhere else?
We have not come across this reaction and that reaction disturbed me. Because Hillary Clinton had been involved in informing the Indian government, in December [2010], as well as many other governments, that this was coming. There has been no question as to the credibility of any document we have ever published in the last four years, let alone the [U.S. Embassy] cables — which have been authenticated by the very aggressive action of the State Department towards us and by hundreds of journalists from the most reputable institutions across the world.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed legislation requiring California utilities to get one-third of their power from renewable sources, giving the state the most aggressive alternative energy mandate in the U.S.
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Natural gas, with its reputation as a linchpin in the effort to wean the nation off dirtier fossil fuels and reduce global warming, may not be as clean over all as its proponents say.
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Gas prices are approaching record highs, but so far most Americans do not appear to be drastically cutting back their driving or even their spending as they did in 2008.
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Corporate insiders peddling the claim that drilling for methane gas will solve America’s energy needs just scored big in Washington — and for these insiders fracking for gas is very lucrative business. House Resolution 1380, given the feel-good moniker of the “New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act ” or “NAT GAS Act,” was announced on Wednesday, April 6, in the U. S. House of Representatives. The bill is 24-pages long and rewards the fracking industry with tax credits and products to help “drive” consumption. The bigger the vehicle, the more tax credits given.
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Finance
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Moral hazard in the financial system “looms larger than ever before,” even after the Dodd- Frank law gave U.S. federal agencies tools to regulate institutions that may be deemed too big to fail, said billionaire investor George Soros.
“The evidence is overwhelming that the first priority of the authorities is to prevent a market collapse, and everything else has to take second place,” Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, said yesterday at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
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In yesterday’s post, I compared two ways of solving the long-term Medicare deficit: (a) increasing payroll taxes and keeping Medicare’s current structure or (b) keeping payroll taxes where they are and converting Medicare into a voucher program. As a person who will need health insurance in retirement, I prefer (a), but others could differ.
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Oil dropped to the lowest level this month on Tuesday as energy experts said the world will remain flush with surplus oil this year despite the loss of Libya’s exports and increased demand from Japan.
Oil was also pushed down after Goldman Sachs warned investors that the price had already topped its second-quarter forecast and is due for a “substantial pullback” in the near term. Traders took special notice of Goldman’s warning because the investment bank is considered a big player in oil markets, and it’s known for bullish price forecasts.
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The fiscal savior of this country will be the person who persuades us to bite the bullet: Accept some pain now to remain prosperous later. That person will not be Rep. Paul Ryan.
The reviewers agree: The Path to Prosperity, aka the Republican budget proposal for 2012 that was released a week ago by the House Budget Committee — which Ryan chairs — is one helluva read. To liberals, it’s the nightmare of a madman with an ax chasing you down a long hallway. To conservatives, it’s a sweet dream of wonderland, where angels dine on Heritage Foundation press releases. Right or wrong, it is said, Ryan has at last set the stage for an honest debate about government spending and the federal deficit.
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Higher taxes have been missing from the fierce budget battle that nearly shut down the federal government. But President Barack Obama is about to put them on the table – at least a modest version that he had pushed before and then rested on the shelf.
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It’s been a little unclear what, exactly, President Obama could say on Wednesday that would count as a new plan for long-term deficit reduction. His pledge to avoid raising taxes on people making less than $250,000 means most taxes are off the table. The Affordable Care Act means most of his health-care reform ideas have already passed into law. The five-year non-security discretionary spending freeze got announced in his 2012 budget proposal, and though you could imagine defense cuts entering the picture, the White House hasn’t seemed eager to go down that road. That leaves tax reform and Social Security, neither of which the administration would be interested in attempting alone.
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California bankruptcy court Denies US Bank as trustee relief from stay; Court says recording is required BEFORE foreclosure, not after.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Fool junk mail recipients once, and then Fake penkeep fooling them over and over again. That’s the hope of a Virginia-based direct mail marketing company that has developed a specialized machine that makes junk mail envelopes look like they have been hand-written.
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On April 6, 2011, FOX News announced it would help Beck “transition” into other ventures, which include for-air projects and FOX News’ websites. What the press release did not mention was the successful campaign against Beck initiated by Color of Change, an organization rooted in equal political access for people of color.
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The Wisconsin state elections board and Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office have revealed a money laundering scheme involving illegal contributions to Scott Walker’s campaign committee by the head of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Company.
The months-long investigation found that William Gardner, the CEO and president of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad (WSOR), instructed employees to make political campaign contributions for the 2010 elections and then reimbursed those donations from WSOR’s corporate account. Through this money-laundering scheme WSOR spent a total of $53,800 on political contributions in the 2010 election cycle, vastly exceeding the $10,000 per person (or per corporation) limit required by Wisconsin law; Gardner used corporate funds to reimburse 11 contributions from himself, his girlfriend, his daughter, and several employees. The majority of that spending, nearly $50,000, went towards the Friends of Scott Walker campaign committee.
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Censorship
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Yesterday Ed Vaizey’s website blocking ‘Working Group’ met to discuss a plans for a voluntary scheme to block access to websites accused of infringing copyright. It’s an idea that has caused quite a stir; 2,000 people have so far written to their MPs and the terms ‘The Great Firewall of Britain’ and ‘Hadrian’s Firewall’ were coined on Twitter
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Nominet’s discussions about domain suspensions started yesterday. Over 3,000 sites have so far been ‘suspended’ at the request of the Police. This has been taking place without any formal procedure, although an appeals mechanism has handled 12 complaints, of which 9 were upheld.
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Hugo Roy asked my thoughts about the recent case of Google’s employees being convicted in Italy for a video that has been online a few months on Google Video (now YouTube).
I have already said so by and large, microblogged extensively on that. My opinion is that the decision is a shame for my Country.
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Google, as soon as it was informed of the problem, took the content down and possibly thought it was over.
Not quite, as the Prosecutor in Milan, where Google is based in Italy and where the content was allegedly put online, decided to indict four Google executives. Recently the Court of Milan decided that the executives have violated Italian Data Protection Law and convicted them.
This is what I have learned from public sources, I hope I have not reported them inaccurately. I have no direct knowledge of the facts.
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Filtering == censorship
It is impossible to put enough people in line to watch, inspect, report of each and any video that is uploaded. Too much information is put online per second, period.
So the solution for the Prosecutor seems to be “you are doing this in China, you can do this here”. What Google is doing there is censorship. So we want censorship here too.
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Privacy
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Over the last couple of days, I’ve blogged a bit about the proposed legislation that came to be known as Bill C-52 in the last session of Parliament. (See: Canadian police state legislation needs closer examination, and Conservative majority would pass lawful access within 100 days. Also check out Michael Geist’s excellent post: The Conservatives Commitment to Internet Surveillance.) Bill C-52 fell off the order paper when the 40th Parliament was dissolved for the current election, but I think it really needs to be extensively discussed in the current election. (I should note that this is not necessarily a partisan issue, since it was originally proposed by the Liberals many elections ago.)
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The company which has Microsoft, the creator of the world most insecure software products, as a partial owner [Microsoft has $250 million invested in Facebook and holds stakes in the company] can’t stay safer. Facebook, the social brokering site, continues to put users data and critical information at risk.
The company which harvested Gmail users data but refused to give them access to their own Facebook data to sync it with their Google account continues to put that sensitive data at risk.
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Civil Rights
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Beijing has a doctrine of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, but the State Council Information Office releases an annual report on the US human rights record as a riposte to Washington’s criticisms. The document says it underlines the hypocrisy of the US and “its malicious design to pursue hegemony under the pretext of human rights”.
Last week the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, criticised China’s “worsening” record – citing the detention of artist Ai Weiwei and others – as she released the annual state department survey of the human rights situation around the world. An introduction to the Chinese document, by the state news agency Xinhua, said the report was “full of distortions” and the US “turned a blind eye to its own terrible human rights situation”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Next Tuesday, April 12th, the EU Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) will hold a major vote for the future of wireless communications in the European Union. By amending the radio spectrum policy programme proposed by the European Commission, Members of the Parliament have an opportunity to boost wireless Internet access. By encouraging shared and unlicensed uses of the spectrum, they can create the next generation of WiFi networks that will improve access to the Internet in urban as well as rural communities, and launch the next wave of innovation in mobile communications. But the risk is for Europe to give in to media or telecoms corporations who would like to control the airwaves – a public resource. La Quadrature calls on EU citizens and NGOs to step into this important debate on the future of our communications system, which forms the structure of our democratic societies.
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The Industry Committee of the European Parliament has adopted amendments to the EU Spectrum Policy Programme allowing for a free use of airwaves for citizens, which will lead to the development of the next generations of free wireless Internet communications (“next generation WiFi”). This vote is encouraging and must be confirmed in plenary, despite the pressure that broadcasters and telecoms industries will inevitably put on the European Parliament to keep airwaves under control.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Chris Castle is a Lawyer who specializes in the Music Industry. Of the many lawyers who weigh in on copyright issues, Chris is the one I have the most respect for. Chris admits up front that he has a strong economic interest in the issue, unlike Barry Sookman, James Gannon, or Richard Owens, who pretend that they do all of their writing out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Chris Castle is a Music Industry Lawyer. I classify Chris as an honest lawyer, he has his opinions, and he’s quite willing to admit that his opinions are biased by his employment.
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The Conservatives have launched another campaign over the iPod Tax today complete with website, video and Twitter account. I posted a lengthy account of the claims last December (short version – the Liberals on record now as opposing, the earlier record is open to debate), but the issue keeps returning. Given the attention to the issue, it is worth noting that Bill C-32, the Conservatives own copyright bill, would likely have led to a doubling of the fees that Canadians pay on blank CDs. Alternatively, it would have led to a dramatic reduction in revenues for Canadian artists. The reason stems from the government’s commitment to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties and the legal requirements found in those treaties.
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In the coming days, a college meeting of the European Commissioners will take place to decide the future of European copyright policy. This revision takes place in conditions that raise severe concerns from a democratic perspective and put fundamental rights at risk, especially when it comes to the Internet.
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Controversial copyright-enforcement company Righthaven was already catching a lot of flak for its lawsuit against Brian Hill. Denver alt-weekly Westword was eagerly reporting that its biggest competitor, The Denver Post, was trying to make extra cash off its photos and articles—by working with Righthaven to sue a 20-year-old, chronically ill, mildly autistic hobby blogger. Now Righthaven has dropped that case. But the same Colorado judge who showed little patience for Righthaven’s tactics in the Hill case is overseeing dozens of other Righthaven cases.
The Internet World Wide Web 1994 – 1998
Credit: TinyOgg
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04.12.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:23 pm by
Summary: Truths about Techrights and how to get involved (preferably IRC)
A longtime reader has repeatedly suggested that we introduce Techtrights properly, at the very least to those who do not know it or have heard about it from people who defame us/incite against us and sometimes retaliate against those who mention us. Yes, we are being defamed by those whom we criticise, usually those whose interests are directly and squarely against those of Free software. Groklaw was subjected to the same type of treatment for almost 8 years (especially when touching controversial subjects like Mono), but those who spent time around the site would know that its detractors simply lie. So, here are a bunch of myths we wish to address:
Myth: Techrights hasn’t many people participating.
Reality: In Techrights, communication used to rely on blog comments and E-mail, but ever since the middle of 2008, Freenode-hosted IRC has been the favoured means of communication (real-time, groupthink in the positive sense, etc.), which also goes public in the form of daily logs (conversations in IRC are less formal, so they get separated). In addition we use a wiki component, many of those who are involved use identi.ca for coordination, and in 2009 we decided to restrict blog comments to registered readers only. This lowered the amount of comments by almost 90%.
Myth: Techrights is a rebrand of Boycott Novell
Reality: A long time ago the site expanded in terms of scope (like SCO in the case of Groklaw) and we needed to organise the site in a way which divides the causes a little more effectively. So Boycott Novell became just part of a bigger domain, called Techrights. The transition was long overdue and it took years due to technical reasons which we resolved only to an extent (using the wiki, URL redirects, and so on).
Myth: Techrights is edited by some crazy person
Reality: People who know my qualifications and know me in person would beg to differ. I never hid my identity, either. I am working as a post-doctoral researcher specialising in image analysis and statistical modeling and I won some awards for my technical achievements, in addition to many trophies for achievements in physical, competitive sports. I also have an affinity for UNIX/Linux servers administration, with particular interest in the use of clusters to improve performance (necessary for the aforementioned job as I work with many gigabytes of 3-D datasets). People who defame the messenger’s character based on personal as opposed to technical arguments (cheap smears) are only stooping as low as one can get. The ruder defamatory comments doubt my doctorate degree or claim that I went to some obscure college when in fact I earned my degree at a 5*-rated department (highest in the UK), having been supervised by its Head of Department who received an OBE from the Queen of England. My software engineering credentials are ranked First Class with Honours. I still code on a daily basis and my software is free/libre. I do not interject my personality into this Web site because the site is not about me, it is about issues that more and more people care about. I’ve sacrificed a lot to grow its community and scale of content (body of diverse work) despite the many threats and attacks against me, so those with vengeance must remember that I too am a person with feelings and being lied about can be unpleasant, not just unethical. I am very approachable, I am not angry or dangerous, and those who still believe the stereotypes are encouraged to contact me as I always respond.
Myth: Techrights breeds hatred
Reality: The site could be interpreted in this way when it comes to a push called “Boycott Novell”, but the person who chose the name “Boycott Novell” no longer writes here, due to lack of time and other personal reasons. The reality is, the history of people who write here shows a track record of GNU/Linux advocacy (yes, mostly the GPL camp), not criticism of companies. Many of us are developers who actively contribute to the community. As the daily links in this site ought to show, this is still a focus of ours. Good news need not generate responses, whereas bad news tends to require discussion centered around rebuttals. This is why the subjects we cover in standalone posts are typically of negative nature. Many site are like that and it’s called “progressive”.
Myth: Techrights is editorially dependent on other sites
Reality: With the exception of the many external links we provide (some opponents of ours rant that these are not enough because we also cross-reference extensively), we are editorially independent. I used to write for news sites, but owing to my dependence on an editor’s judgment and de facto censorship I decided to concentrate my efforts on Techrights. People who contribute to Techrights do not have their sentences minced or their views discouraged to the point of self-censorship.
Myth: Techrights censors
Reality: In almost 5 years of running this site, we have never deleted any blog comments, not even vulgar ones which bear X-rated words and maybe threats. Over time this led us to requiring that users at the very least register, which leads to some certain liability/responsibility for what is said. “Anonymous cowards” tend to be reckless and IP addresses from Novell headquarters used to comment here anonymously as well (they are reportedly doing so from outside this site now, sometimes anonymously).
Myth: Techrights got cracked
Reality: Techrights was never cracked. This is part of the mythology spread by Internet trolls and stalkers, who try to defame the site by all means available, even libel which they themselves ‘plant’ on the Web and then cite as ‘proof’. When we came under DDOS attacks which downed us for days some clowns dared to suggest that we had DDOSed ourselves. Right, because that’s the most logical explanation…
Myth: Techrights gets paid to ‘shill’ for freedom
Reality: Neither I nor anyone else who is associated with this site ever received any incentive — money of otherwise — to run this site. This Web site is a form of grassroots activism and it is a hobby.
With all that in mind, please consider making us stronger by rebutting the lies which get repeated around the Web and also by making first contact in the IRC channels. That’s where a lot of our activity takes place and it is very amicable. █
Today’s Groklaw News
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“Groklaw,” the website created and maintained by paralegal Pamela Jones to fight on behalf of Linux in court battles filed by software firm SCO, is shutting down.
Jones, also known as PJ, waged a fierce battle against SCO, a company that threatened the Linux world with its suits against IBM and Novell [for Unix]. SCO ended up losing in court, and Jones wrote on at Groklaw on Saturday that she was shutting it down.
“I know a lot of you will be unhappy to hear it, so let me briefly explain, because my decision is made and it’s firm. In a simple sentence, the reason is this: the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won. SCO as we knew it is no more,” she said.
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Pamela declares victory, resists the temptation to diversify and announces Groklaw will no longer publish original articles. Personally I think this is a great loss for the wider software freedom community; an investigative community venue is definitely needed to counter the mesh of conspiracies I know are the daily work of industry lobbyists and standards professionals.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:56 pm by
Contents
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When laptop sales overtook desktops, “Microsoft didn’t care,” Hudson pointed out. “Either one meant the sale of a Windows OS, and often other software.”
The switch to “mobile-everything,” on the other hand, “is already having a huge impact, because in most cases it marks the loss of another customer to Apple or Linux.
“Maybe it’s not the year of linux on the desktop, but it’s also not the year of Windows on mobile devices, and it never will be,” Hudson concluded. “Mobile is where the growth is, for both business and the consumer, and that market is being divvied up between Apple and Linux, with Linux dominating.”
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Server
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation this week officially released the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification (CGL).
CGL provides a set of specifications which helps to define the requirements of carrier and network equipment vendors. The CGL 5 specification is the first major revision since CGL 4.0 was released in February of 2007.
The new CGL 5.0 specifications have been available in draft form for months, and vendors including MontaVisa and Wind River have already released products that will support the new specification.
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Applications
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VLC is beyond doubts the most popular open source, cross-platform media player and multi-media framework written by VideoLAN projects. VLC player is small in size,vlc-logo
just about 17 Mb and immensely powerful! In this post we will explore the player and list 20+ things you can do with VLC player.
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With each passing day, I find myself more amazed at the level of innovation shown from within the browser community. Both open source and closed source browsers on the Linux desktop manage to extend browser functionality far beyond the usual. This has proven both exciting and problematic. Exciting in the sense that we can now do more than ever thought previously with our browsers, yet problematic in that we have more moving parts that malfunction us.
In this article, I’ll highlight the best browsers for the Linux platform and offer some additional thoughts on how they have made an impact on our lives.
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Most of us know about portable apps for Windows, and how useful they can be sometimes. It’s great to simply have your favorite programs and add-ons with you, especially in the case of browsers. However, portable Linux apps have been nonexistent, at least until now. Lately a decent collection of Linux portable apps have showed up, and are now worth mentioning for those who want to try them out.
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Whenever you’re on the go, it’s very important that you can take notes and keep track of them. Gnote is a great choice because it’s lightweight and doesn’t have Mono as a dependency. It’s easy to use, has lots of formatting and organizational features, and doesn’t take up much space. It’s your best bet to jot down those sudden ideas.
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Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour’s native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies – see the advertisements on the site – and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour’s audio capabilities and Harrison’s unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.
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There’s no shortage of quality free media players to entertain your eyes and ears, regardless of your computer or operating system. With cracking cost-free solutions like VLC (often considered the king of media players) and iTunes alternative JetAudio, you really shouldn’t be paying for this sort of software.
Universal Media Player, or UMPlayer for short, is yet another addition to the media player category which uses the MPlayer backend to chew through any media you give it. The app promises to play everything and integrates various web services into one desktop solution.
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Proprietary
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The bugs are dying at an incredible pace in Norway today, as the Opera Desktop Team has put forth another release candidate, these last few coming with point numbers! The latest, and 2nd for this very long spring day, is RC 4.1, which brings lots of presentation bugs to an end.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For a comprehensive tutorial on sed, check out the Introduction and Tutorial of sed by Bruce Barnett.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Plasma Quick initiative aims to take libplasma, which is the underlying infrastructure for Plasma based applications, and make it an even better solution for devices that it already is.
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Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, “In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors.” For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds.
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GNOME Desktop
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With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that’s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it’s only in experimental for now.
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For those that prefer a “dock” approach to launching apps, the GNOME Shell has that option covered as well, just add your favorites to the dock and click to launch. The dock is also an easy way to switch between open apps.
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GNOME 3 Shell seems a lot more mature and usable than it did two months ago, while GNOME 3 fallback mode presents a compelling traditional alternative to GNOME 3 Shell.
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CTKArch is a distribution, or perhaps more a spin, based on Arch Linux that is using Openbox as default window manager. It’s minimal in size, if you believe that anything under CD size is minimal these days, and seems to be designed first and foremost to run from CD or USB as a live system, so it has a lot in common with ArchBang. Only a few days ago, 7th April, v. 0.7 was released into the wilderness of the Linux distribution jungle. I had toyed with 0.6 on and off for a few weeks and thus am in the position to make a few observations.
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Reviews
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Red Hat Family
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That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
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Last summer, in fact, it was named the most popular Linux distribution in that area, with almost 30 percent of the Linux server market.
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LINUX DISTRIBUTION CentOS has released a major update following in the footsteps of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, which has been updated to version 5.6.
CentOS is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the same versioning scheme as RHEL, with both distributions now on version 5.6. CentOS is essentially a free version of RHEL built with the same packages as Red Hat’s commercially supported version but without the Red Hat branding.
While Red Hat released RHEL 5.6 in January, it has taken a few months for the CentOS lads to get around to removing all the necessary branding to avoid infringing Red Hat’s licences. However the delay has been made worse by having to split effort between CentOS 5.6 and CentOS 6.
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Debian Family
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. My conclusion is CrunchBang appears to be a good tool, I just haven’t found any task for it.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For the last few months, on nearly every site I blog for, I have been saying that Ubuntu 11.04 was going to be a big setback for Ubuntu. This “setback” was mostly due to Canonical’s decision to use Unity as the default desktop. This decision sidestepped GNOME and GNOME 3 all together. Well, after using Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1 for a few weeks now, I have to say I was wrong. Although there are a few weak spots in the release, this beta release has gone a long way to showing me that Ubuntu hasn’t fallen off the tracks, jumped the shark, or is about to lose it’s way. In fact, Ubuntu 11.04 will remain king of Linux for new users as far as I can see.
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In the short time since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 beta, the OS has received mixed reviews. Some testers say it is the worst Ubuntu beta release ever, while others say they are impressed by its new features.
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The new Unity interface is surprisingly usable. Of course, it does have some rough edges and power users may find it limiting in many ways. Still, we think that the new interface has great potential and is already good enough for day-to-day computing. Naturally, Ubuntu 11.04 is more than just a fresh interface, and the new version brings a slew of other updates and improvements that make it a solid release indeed.
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Not to say i hate everything about it. I like the speed, and it looks great. The new app launcher is excellent so far despite one or two crashes. The idea of a dock isn’t horrible, but i’d like more control over it, not some hidden options in the Compiz settings.
And a final note for anyone who’s going to troll… get used to articles like this as Linux becomes more popular… it’s called constructive criticism, and i noticed the Linux community often doesn’t take it very well. This is just an opinion, you’re free to po
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Ubuntu announced its 8.04 Desktop release almost 36 months ago, on April 24, 2008. For the LTS Desktop releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 36 months. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop will reach end of life on Thursday, May 12, 2011. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop.
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As I read the reviews of Unity that have started to appear around the web, I see there is a concern regarding the graphics hardware support for Unity. Some users are concerned that Unity will not run on their hardware, and so they will have to use Unity 2D instead. Let me tell you about the choices we made.
As time goes, hardware becomes old and obsolete. This is very much true for GPUs. The rate of graphics advance over the last 10 years has been impressive. What was great 5 years ago isn’t enough to run all types of real-time 3D graphics programs anymore. For Unity we looked at the visual effects we wanted to do and the level of performance we wanted to achieve. To minimize the number of draw calls per frame in Unity, we needed GPUs to have support for frame buffer objects. With frame buffer objects support, we render only the parts of the interface that need to be updated and leave the rest untouched. For rendering, we wanted to have flexibility and the best visual results possible. So we decided to require ARB vertex and fragment support.
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The Linux Foundation announced the availability of the Yocto Project Release 1.0, which includes a version of OpenEmbedded’s bitbake build system, major improvements to its developer interface, and Linaro technology for improved ARM support. The Linux Foundation also announced new Yocto Steering Group members Dell and Mentor Graphics to help oversee the embedded Linux standardization project.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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But what strikes me is that these do not address what is, for me, the central question: why does Nokia need Qt in the long term – that is, beyond the short-term requirement to “harvest additional value” from the platform, as Nokia put it so charmingly? Until that question is answered, I remain pessimistic about the long-term effects of Nokia’s moves on Qt and open source in general – however many refutations the company issues on other points.
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And if Qt has no future, why on earth would Nokia continue to invest money and people in producing the open source version that would be commercialised by someone else? Surely it is bound to pass the open source side across to Digia at some point, or maybe to some other party, although it’s hard to see who would want to pick up the non-commercial part of Qt when the money-making aspect resides elsewhere.
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Android
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Google is baking specifications for a tablet based on its Chrome OS into its open source Linux code, the company confirmed. Meanwhile Google flattened its executive structure, promoting Android creator Andy Rubin and others to senior vice president roles, and has also acquired Pushlife, makers of an iTunes-like music app for Android.
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LinkedIn released the final LinkedIn for Android 1.0 app to help professionals view and manage LinkedIn connections. In other enterprise-related Android news, Google upgraded its security and device management programs for Android with three Google Apps updates, including a Device Policy update, a Google Apps Lookup app, and a Honeycomb tablet encryption feature.
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A report today from Taiwanese Digitimes shows some explosive estimates for $150 and cheaper, contract free Android phones. Specifically, the paper says it expects to see 20-25 million entry level Android devices ship in 2011, up from 2.5-3 million in 2010.
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OLPC
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Alan Garcia, the President of Peru, just announced that the country will be handing out their one millionth XO laptop by the end of this year and will soon be building manufacturing facilities to build the laptops locally. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program created the XO laptop as an inexpensive tool for children around the world to learn with. The OLPC program in Peru has a goal to have laptops in 100% of the country’s public primary schools by the end of 2011.
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Tablets
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Housed in aluminum, the Iconia Tab A500 includes Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth connectivity, but for now foregoes either 3G access or the need for a wireless carrier contract. The tablet is said to offer 10 hours of battery life, but measures 10.24 x 6.97 x 0.52 inches and weighs 1.69 pounds, making it heftier than the iPad 2′s 1.33 pounds and 9.5 x 7.31 x 0.34-inch frame.
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A Google engineer has released an open source Java client for Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency that may eventually revolutionize online transactions.
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Gene sequencing has gotten incredibly fast and cheap, and researchers around the world are pouring huge volumes of genomic data onto their private servers, in the hope they will sift through it all to make groundbreaking discoveries. Should so much genomic data be so closely guarded, or should it be poured into a free and open database that all scientists share?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has committed to a more aggressive release schedule for the Firefox Web browser. There were nearly three years between the launch of Firefox 3 and Firefox 4, but Firefox 5 is expected to be introduced in a matter of months at the end of June. There are some benefits to the rapid release schedule, but also some potential pitfalls.
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Mozilla has announced that it will release the first update for Firefox 4 on April 26, about a month after the original release, back in March 22.
New with this release is that Mozilla will start using code names (somehow related to the main branch codename, in this case Tumucumaque) for udpates as well, as a way to help developers that follow Firefox development closely, more clearly understand what is coming when.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Healthcare
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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking to establish a Custodial Agent (CA) that will facilitate the establishment and operations of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) Open Source software development ecosystem and define the relationship between and interactions among developers, users, vendors and service providers.
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Last week I wrote about the UK government’s “new” IT strategy, which is designed in part to avoid some of the costly mistakes of the past. And as far as the latter go, there aren’t many bigger or costlier than the NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NpfIT).
Now, some of us might say that one of the reasons this was such a disaster was that it did just about everything wrong: it was imposed unilaterally from the top, and built around huge slabs of proprietary code – but you’d expect me to say that. So here’s someone else opining much the same, slightly more politely:
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Business
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Since free software was originally created by hackers for hackers, it’s no wonder that the first programs they created were tools – things like Emacs – and something to run them on – GNU/Linux. The second generation applications were key infrastructural elements – Web servers, databases etc., while more recently, we’ve seen the rise of applications like enterprise content management and CRM, as open source moves closer to the end users.
But one class of software that seemed totally absent was that for managing human resources – HRM apps. I thought this was something of a lack, but that would be filled in due course. It turns out that it was filled quite some time ago – 2006, to be precise – and that I somehow overlooked the open source OrangeHRM product completely since then. To remedy this, I met up with Sujee Saparamadu, the CEO and cofounder of the company, to catch up on the subject.
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Programming
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I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.
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Standards/Consortia
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There are two undeniable facts in the information technology industry today, which often end up being forgotten in our day by day activities:
Corporations are monopolistic by nature and technological dependence is at the base of the information technology industry economic model.
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Network engineers and hard-core Web architects know that HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), the data transfer method used by the Web, isn’t the most efficient data transfer protocol around. So, back in November 2009, Google started working on a faster replacement: SPDY, pronounced “speedy.” And, now, if you’re using the Chrome Web browser, and visiting Google Web sites, you can see SPDY in action according to Conceivably Tech.
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I would be falsely modest if I said that I am not proud that our pleadings have been entirely endorsed by a panel of three highly authoritative judges. The facts are simple and very well described in the order. Basically, typing in the Google search field “Name Surname” of my client, the autocompletion and the “suggested searches” (now “related searches”) offered to complete it with “con man” (“truffatore”) and “fraud” (“truffa”), which caused a lot of trouble to the client, who has a pulic image both as an entrepeneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance. Google argued that it could not be held liable because it is a hosting provider, but we showed that this is content produced by them (and by the way, they do filter out certain content, including terms that are know to be used to distribute copyright infringing material), although through automated means. Therefore in this case the search engine cannot avail itself of the safe harbour provision of the Ecommerce Directive.
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Cablegate
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JULIAN ASSANGE: We have increased our publishing since late last year when my present difficulties began to include over 63 media organisations from around the world. We have now published over 7,000 US Embassy cables relating to Cablegate, so, yes, we’re continuing on. Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing.
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Finance
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By mid-March, as the government tells it, Matthew H. Kluger knew the FBI was closing in.
As a lawyer for three of the nation’s premier corporate law firms, most recently in the Washington office of Wilson Sonsini, he had allegedly stolen secrets that yielded tens of millions of dollars of insider trading profits. Now he was trying to eliminate the evidence.
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Privacy
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A federal grand jury has opened an investigation into mobile apps and what kind of personal data they might transmit about users, Pandora has revealed. The streaming music company recently amended its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to note that it had been subpoenaed to produce documents about its user data collection on Android and iOS devices, which the company believes is related to an industry-wide probe into how mobile apps capitalize on user information.
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Google and Facebook are among a group of net heavyweights taking the French government to court this week.
The legal challenge has been brought by The French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) and relates to government plans to keep web users’ personal data for a year.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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A federal appeals court on Monday rejected as “premature” a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s pending rules aimed at keeping Internet service providers from blocking access to certain websites or applications. The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, is a first-round victory for the FCC and its chairman, Julius Genachowski. But the real battle over the agency’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has barely begun. Several broadband companies, and some consumer advocacy and public interest groups, are likely to return to court this year to challenge aspects of the rules. Edward McFadden, a Verizon spokesman, said Monday that the company intended to refile its lawsuit this year. The House will take up a joint resolution condemning the new Internet access rules this week.
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DRM
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Here’s the joint statement. There is a permanent injunction, but no admission of wrongdoing by Hotz, who, as he said from day one, was never trying to enable piracy. I commend SCEA for taking this step, and I mean that sincerely.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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WASHINGTON—A U.S. federal appeals panel, hearing a case over Myriad Genetics Inc. patents for identifying breast- and ovarian-cancer risk, Monday probed whether it makes sense to continue allowing the patenting of human gene sequencing.
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A relatively quiet but intense struggle in the federal courts will decide under what conditions a company can patent the building blocks of life — or in some cases the building blocks of death — for profit.
The struggle almost certainly will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
For now, those fighting the case are waiting for a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, which decides intellectual property issues.
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On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit today against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant’s patents on genetically modified seed. The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should they ever become contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, something Monsanto has done to others in the past.
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And Sheen is also getting into the intellectual-property game. According to a variety of news reports, Sheen has filed trademark applications on 22 of his catchphrases, including the expressions “Duh, Winning,” “Vatican Assassin,” and “Tiger Blood.” Click here for the NY Post story.
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Newspapers
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Last week I got in a bit of an argument with Adam Thierer, Randy Picker, and others about the New York Times paywall. I think a paywall is a bad business strategy, but my opposition to paywalls is mostly a matter of (as I tweeted to Adam) “personal principle rather than business advice.” Adam seemed confused by that statement, so let me see if I can elaborate.
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I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry’s stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.
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Copyrights
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So, how can we little people – the ones that are actually paying for all this work, but that are never allowed to provide any input – head off this danger of a biased, misleading report emerging from RAND Corporation?
I think the only way is to starting making noises about the fact that it *might* be biased and misleading, so that those preparing it at RAND Corporation know that we are watching them like proverbial hawks, and that we will assuredly tear their methodology to pieces when it comes out, and will thus be certain to find – and brandish – the slightest lack of rigour or bias therein.
Got that, RAND Corporation people? Excellent.
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As the Report from the European Commission to the European Parliament rightly says: “this initial evaluation of the effectiveness of the Directive comes at the right time.” The world of digital content is evolving so quickly that the current form of IPRED is sadly out of date, and urgently needs to be re-thought in the light of new evidence in this field.
The Report goes on to make the following comment: “Several studies carried out by international organisations and industry have shown that infringements of intellectual property rights have reached a significant level, with certain of these goods posing a danger to consumers’ health and safety.” This statement requires closer analysis.
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One of the striking features of reports purporting to estimate the “damage” caused by piracy – both of software and content – is that without exception, as far as I can tell, their numbers and methodology simply do not withstand close scrutiny.
The trouble is, when it’s a question of lone voices like mine or even that of Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, probably the most dogged debunker of piracy FUD, the content industries can ignore such posts, presumably in the belief that our quick analyses somehow don’t count.
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Ars Technica freelancer Eriq Gardner was recently sued over a photo that appeared in a piece he wrote for us last year. The flimsy lawsuit was quickly dismissed, but the company behind it lives on—and has sued 50+ people in Colorado for their use of the same photo. Now, the federal judge overseeing all these cases has made it clear that he sees through the company’s “lawsuit as revenue generation” strategy, and that he’s not interested in enabling it. Righthaven is already backing down.
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Last year, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) appealed its loss in its copyright lawsuit against YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), and the video-sharing site has now filed a reply (embedded below) to Viacom’s arguments. Many of the arguments in the 107-page brief repeat what was argued in the courts below, but it’s interesting to observe the tone set in the opening pages of the brief. YouTube takes its time before getting to the legal points, showing that it’s really a good corporate citizen of the internet.
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San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of advocacy groups have asked a federal appeals court to reject attempts to thwart federal copyright law and saddle online communities with new litigation fears in the appeal of Viacom v. YouTube.
Sintel Lite – Tour 1
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8:13 am by
Summary: Intellectual Ventures, the patent-hoarding and patent-trolling operation which was set up by Bill Gates and his friend Nathan Myhrvold, is still causing a lot of trouble
THE world’s largest parent troll, Intellectual Ventures, has just created/’manufactured’ another patent deal rather than create/manufacture a product. The Seattle press (source favourable to Microsoft) quotes: ‘”Dashwire deal is kind of a unique one,” said Joe Chernesky, VP and general manager of global licensing sales at Intellectual Ventures. “They’re a smaller company and a component of the deal is access to our portfolio. A separate component to that deal is that they’ve acquired some patents from us to help them build out their patent portfolio and more aggressively defend themselves from companies with certain patents against them.”‘
“To Microsoft, “bad” patents are those which cause trouble to Microsoft and “good” ones basically remove Microsoft’s competition from the market or make that competition a Microsoft cash cow.”Actually, to say that they’re “a smaller company” is deceiving because these are not companies (no more than the mafia is), these are just legal firms that comprise extortion, litigation, and generally market distortion. Microsoft would like people to think that its backing of Intellectual Ventures is a case of “respecting IP” or something along those lines, but as the i4i case helps demonstrate, that’s just total nonsense. Microsoft knowingly ignores patents that stand in its way until it gets pulled into the courtroom, in which case it wants those patents removed. To Microsoft, “bad” patents are those which cause trouble to Microsoft and “good” ones basically remove Microsoft’s competition from the market or make that competition a Microsoft cash cow.
As we showed earlier this month, Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft both lobby to make the patent system worse (regarding this bill which they derail or distort by funding lobbyists). They help create a pyramid scheme or a bubble which they know will burst sooner or later, leaving those at the bottom broke and allowing those at the top to sweep up all those who are way down at the bottom. Here is a new article titled “Welcome to the age of sub-prime patents – or mutually assured litigation”:
US Outlook: Remember the chaos that ensued when mortgages stopped being a contract between you and your bank, and instead became financial chips bought and sold by gamblers on the world’s markets?
Funny things started happening. People who shouldn’t have gotten loans got them, the housing market became twisted out of shape, and a host of financial intermediaries, from corrupt mortgage brokers to reckless Wall Street bankers, managed to get filthy rich without adding a penny of value to the real economy.
Now consider the US patent system. An explosion in the number of patents being filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, up from 312,000 a decade ago to 509,000 last year – an increase of almost two-thirds – is, sad to say, only partly a result of the increasing innovation of American business.
It’s not about innovation, it’s about protectionism; Intellectual Ventures protects its bottom line and also protects the bank accounts of Microsoft and Bill Gates (for reasons we explained before). The whole operation is a racket which needs to be dismantled. Instead, this insane doctrine expands overseas, due in part to lobbying from Microsoft which now puts in New Zealand the trap and the same trick as in Europe. As Jan Wildeboer has just put it:
New plan for NZ: Software Patents NO, but when embedded OK. http://ur1.ca/3ttq3 #notgood #swpat
He links to this new article about patents in New Zealand:
New Zealand and Australian inventors and patent attorneys are being invited to respond to a proposal for a single body to regulate patent attorneys in both countries.
Calling for comments on a discussion paper, New Zealand Commerce Minister Simon Power and Australian Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr say it is important that government regulations take into account the needs of the patent attorneys and innovators who use them.
In New Zealand, software patents are to be phased out, under amendments to the Patents Act, but devices that contain embedded software will be able to be patented.
This is not good enough and we explained Microsoft’s role it at the end of 2010. They still manage to spread the patent bubble to other continents. It’s obvious who benefits. █
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Posted in Uncategorized at 7:38 am by
Summary: SCO sort of nym-shifts and already tells lies to the public, regarding Unix ownership
AS GROKLAW declares victory and ceases new activity (starting middle of May), SCO’s new lies will be harder to find and respond to. According to this new press release, UnXis [1, 2, 3, 4] is already lying, so it is not a great time for Groklaw to exit; it already disputes the following part, which is a lie: “UnXis is committed to investing $25 million over the next 18 months into product and technology developments, as well as building upon its world-class management, sales and customer support team. UnXis has retained all customer contracts, the UNIX and UNIXWARE trademarks and an installed base of 32,000 customer contracts maintained in 82 countries, including McDonald’s, Siemens, Sperbank, China Post, Thomson Reuters and the US Department of Defense.”
Actually, Novell owns Unix (likely to be passed to AttachMSFT soon).
Who would be left to rebut and counter disinformation from SCO^H^HUnXis? Speaking of disinformation, when Microsoft Florian is not busy making legal threats against those who expose him (we are still not not sure if Dana Blankenhorn got fired from ZDNet because of a post arising from Florian), he is lobbying hard and bragging. Such mobbyists only write about one strand of issues this week (except correspondence with Microsoft MVPs and boosters) and it’s Groklaw or Techrights; it’s his familiar intimidation and defamation tactics. Watch this Slashdot thread:
o on over to LWN and look at Florian’s continued meltdown about how PJ isn’t relevant and he is.
http://lwn.net/Articles/437650/ [lwn.net]
There’s a lot said there that exposes Florian’s true colors.
He heaps praise on the people who spread the most FUD about Linux. Robert Enderle, MOG, Dan “Lyin’” Lyons, and Ed Bott led the charge in the media against Linux. The only person he left out to praise was Rudy De Haas (“Paul Murphy” pseudonym). I’m sorry, but the list of above people have nothing worth listening to and his defense of them shows what side of the fence he’s on.
See other comments. Exposed pretty badly, eh? But looking ahead, the mobbyists will have more time to defame and distort the reality about Groklaw (revisionism), while Groklaw is no longer there to defend itself. We fear that Pamela Jones’ departure is a massive loss to everyone except SCO and Microsoft. █
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Posted in Uncategorized at 7:06 am by
Summary: Yanking Mono from android would be Google’s next logical step; Vista Phony 7 update tool yanked
GOOGLE uses Dalvik inside Android. It relies to a certain degree on the success of Java, even though SCOracle is suing Google for its use of Dalvik.
Neil Richards, a Mono critic whom we mentioned before, writes about what he calls “Mono’s Commercial Attack On Android” and explains it as follows:
Microsoft has been defeated by GNU/Linux avers The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. But, there are Microsoft partners like Novell (and Mono) which will not give up so easily.
Mono team continues to bombard the free software world with Microsoft’s C# language and .Net implementation. Unfortunately, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has become an unaware puppet playing as proxy friend of Microsoft by making Banshee the default music player of Ubuntu. It means a hell lot of Mono will be pre-intsalled on your Ubuntu machine.
Every bit of Mono on my computer means hours of developer’s time wasted working on growing opium crops [Mono] of Microsoft. The dangers are more than we see at the surface. The more Ubuntu uses Banshee or Mono, the more stronghold Microsoft will find in the Linux world – a world Microsoft fantasizes of destroying.
I have no problem with Banshee as music player, I appreciate the hard work done by the developers. I have problems with its base – C# and .Net. I don’t want Microsoft to be in control of major applications that I use on the Linux devices. I can’t trust Microsoft — the repeated assaults on Linux companies — latest being Barns & Nobel — proves nothing has changed in Microsoft’s DNA. The company is and will always remain anti-competition.
Google ought to just yank MonoDroid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], which pollutes Android with Microsoft code, APIs, and patent traps. Here is how Microsoft handles dubious software on its platform which very few people actually use:
Developer yanks unauthorized Windows Phone 7 update tool
[...]
Just hours after launching a tool that let Windows Phone 7 owners grab smartphone updates directly from Microsoft, the developer yanked the utility from his Web site.
[...]
Last week, a Microsoft executive apologized for the fiasco and acknowledged that customers were right to be angry. “We didn’t set out to let you down. But it’s clear we did,” said Eric Hautala, the general manager of Windows Phone 7′s customer experience engineering team, in a March 30 blog entry.
[...]
“Be careful when using unofficial hacker tools,” Prengel said, according to a translation of his original message in German. “They can put the phone in an undefined state [making] the installation of future updates impossible. Use at your own risk — neither Microsoft nor the device manufacturer or network operator assume liability for the consequences.”
It may be interesting to find out if Microsoft threatened the developer somehow. We may never know, but it got yanked, just as Microsoft had hoped. █
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