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12.05.12

Apple to Reveal Secret Settlement (Patent Extortion) Details to Comply With Judge’s Demands

Posted in America, Apple, Asia at 2:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple’s imperialistic behaviour to enjoy no backroom treatment anymore

A while back we wrote about Apple’s inability to keep extortion secret (the HTC case). Based on this analysis, only the extortion fee (if any) will stay secret:

The judge in the Apple v. Samsung case, the Hon. Lucy Koh, has just ruled that the HTC-Apple license agreement that was signed on November 11 will be made public, the only exception being the pricing and royalty terms, which will be sealed. Samsung’s lawyers have already gotten to see them, but we won’t. But we will get to see the list of patents covered by the agreement. If the patents on the list are the same patents as in this case, it will make it much easier for Samsung to avoid an injunction. As you just saw in the Microsoft v. Motorola case in Seattle, if money can make you whole, you normally can’t get an injunction. And if they aren’t, there is a Samsung argument that customers don’t care about those features enough to pay for them, which could impact the damages figure. This will be part of what is discussed at the hearing on the 6th.

A lot of this is the result of software patents, which Apple hopes to take global (India’s policies on patents, suggests this new article, still appears to be influenced by the software patents lobby). Why do companies from Taiwan and Korea need to bow to US courts and play by the rules of some bureaucracy known as USPTO, run by an American cartel of multinationals? Is Asia now a US colony? These phones are all made in Asia, even though Apple is trying to USA-wash the hypePad with labels like designed and assembled (boxed?) in USA, based on a report from last week. █

12.04.12

Links 5/12/2012: NetBSD 5.2, Linux 3.7 RC8, New KDE Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Circuit Design?
  • OpenSUSE’s Jos Poortvliet: Collaborate or Become Obsolete

    Last month, Jos Poortvliet’s job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.

  • 4 open source software to analyse big quantity of log files

    Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

  • Web Browsers

    • Browser battle: Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE vs. Opera

      After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.

      Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome Stands Out at Beating Phishing Attempts

        Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.

    • Mozilla

      • Moodle 2.4 is now available!
      • Mozilla’s WebRTC Marries Video Calls and More with Firefox Browsing
      • Mozilla demos WebRTC-based Social API in Firefox

        Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla’s demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.

      • Firefox 17.0.1 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Mozilla and Google Rally Against New Challenge to a Free Internet

        Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a “father of the Internet,” writes: “Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn’t even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba…Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas.”

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • MariaDB fixes zero day vulnerability in MySQL

      A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.

    • Open-source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle

      MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.

      Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”

  • CMS

    • Rules for Drones

      The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a “pilot” sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?

    • Crimes in Yemen: Militancy, Regime Attacks, and US Drones

      t…arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.

  • Funding

    • Who wants to be an (open source venture capitalist) millionaire?

      Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm’s ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.

      The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as “Investor Growth Capital” as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 5.2 Released!

      The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.

    • NetBSD 5.2 Brings Small Updates

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Philadelphia Announce Mobile App To Access L&I Property Data

      The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • International Open Data Day — An Update

        Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.

    • Open Hardware

      • Sometimes Being an Open Source / Open Hardware Evangelist Really Stinks

        My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It’s emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.

      • The first open-source 3D-printed gun

        In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.

      • Toward An FSF-Endorsable Embedded Processor

  • Programming

    • A code hosting comparison for open source projects

      If you’re starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you’ll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you’re not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tobacco companies ordered to admit they lied over smoking danger

      US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking

    • The Year According to Monsanto: A GMO ‘Roundup’

      Monsanto’s marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what’s really going on in the fields.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Senators’ effort to add Internet sales tax to defense bill falls short

      An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.

    • Corporate profits are highest-ever share of GDP, while wages are lowest-ever

      Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn’t. But that’s because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they’ve ever been.

    • Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

      In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.

    • How Boehner’s counteroffer raises taxes on the middle class

      The “fiscal cliff” plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich

    • Starbucks to slash paid lunch breaks and sick leave

      Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill

    • WaMu Trustees Seek Goldman Probe

      Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.

      If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual’s Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Where Did All those Super PAC Dollars Go? 1/3 of All Outside Money Moved Through Handful of Media Firms

      In 2012, the total spending of outside groups — the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns — amounted to about $1.3 billion.

    • Common Cause WI: Incoming Senate Majority Leader Launches Nonsensical Attack on the Non-Partisan Elections Board

      The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin’s economy? Apparently not.

      Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights/Sppoks

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN Agency’s Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

      he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.

  • Copyrights

    • Top BitTorrent Sites Have Domains Put On Hold Pending Legal Action

      Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.

      [...]

      Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.

    • HBO Has A Distribution Problem, But Just ‘Going Without’ Does Nothing To Push Them To Solve It

      Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.

    • A hearing transcript or a comedy screenplay? A must-read for those who think about settling
    • Porn trolling case thrown out for “attempted fraud on the court”

      Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.

      In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say “alleged” because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, “attempted fraud on the Court” for sending a “representative” to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.

    • Editorial: How piracy changed my life

      lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.

      I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.

    • UK ISPs Block Pirate Bay’s Artist Promotions

      Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

    • Stop BT, Virgin Media and BE from blocking The Promo Bay: Let customers access promobay.org.
    • First Amendment Concerns About Internet Radio Bill Not Just Overblown But Completely Backwards

      I’ve been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven’t had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don’t seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn’t just wrong. It’s completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let’s dig in a bit.

    • BitTorrent Book Promotion Drives 40% Of Downloaders To Book’s Amazon Page

      Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it’s run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and… doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute “an exclusive bundle” of extra, related, content. That’s still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.

    • News Corp Is Shutting Down iPad-Only Newspaper The Daily

      The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will “cease standalone publication”.

      The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.

    • Unauthorized Remix Improves On Landmark Unauthorized Mashup, The Grey Album

      Jay-Z has since referred to it as “genius” and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 — a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.

      Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he’s one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song “Crazy” a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn’t “harm” them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, “it’s not a question of damage, it’s a question of rights.”

    • Homeless Man Who Got Free Boots From Cop Now ‘Wants His Cut’ Of YouTube Attention

      Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be “owned.” You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.

    • Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia

      In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?

French National Assembly Views Unitary Patent as Illegal

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Winter in France

Winter in France

Summary: Another nation shows discrepancies which can help stop patent ‘globalisation’; more than just software developers affected

Not just activists against software patents in Europe hate the Unitary Patent. “Stop the EU Unitary Patent!” says the headline of this page with the subheadline “New EU Patent Court in conflict with public interest”. Here is what it says:

Munich/ Brussels, 26 November 2012. On 14 November the Council of European Union presented a new Draft Agreement on a Unified Patent Court. This agreement is part of a legal package to establish an EU Unitary Patent which aims to accelerate the granting of patents within the EU. The European Parliament is supposed to adopt this draft until 10th of December 2012. The international coalition of No Patents on Seeds! is raising the alarm about the consequences of the planned new EU Unified Patent Court for three reasons:
the decisions of the new court will escape the control of European Court of Justice;
high costs for legal procedures are likely to prevent non-profit organisations from running legal oppositions in front of the new court;
meaningful national limitations of the effects of patents will be prohibited.
“A broad public discussion should be expected in the light of the new proposal. Instead enormous pressure is being put on the European Parliament to adopt this Unified Patent Court in a fast track procedure. We are very much concerned that this agreement will only serve those who have an economic interest in patents while ignoring the general public. No Patents on Seeds demands that the Draft Agreement be rejected. ”
The new proposal came about because the UK government rejected a compromise that had already been agreed amongst Council, Commission and Parliament. In a meeting of Member States on 18 October 2012, the UK delegation explained their strategy. According to the protocol that was brought to the attention of No Patents on Seeds!, the UK Government explained that stakeholders with economic interests from the UK as well as Business Europe wanted to avoid involving the ECJ in the interpretation of European patent law in any case. (unofficial translation from the protocol in German.)

It is becoming clear that not only programmers should get involved. Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, the author from the Unitary Patent site and “Volunteer Activist Neurone against Software Patents” by his own description, says in Twitter that the “FR national assembly sees #UnitaryPatent is illegal, just makes patent microcosm swell, but nevertheless push for it…”

I cannot read French, so I cannot verify from this link. Can anyone help?

Italy and Spain (and to a lesser degree the UK) also opposed it [1, 2, 3], so they got blackmailed. This is undemocratic. █

SCOTUS Can Show Support for Public Interests by Stopping USPTO’s Systemic Corruption

Posted in Patents at 5:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Super frog

Summary: The USPTO, which under leadership of an IBM veteran (i.e. monopoly/cartel) grants monopolies on pseudo-code and life code, can be challenged by the Supreme Court, but given its track record, optimism is unjustified

“The problem [with patents] is not just quality,” writes Pamela Jones in Groklaw. “It is the inability to recognize abstract ideas,” she expounds, responding to David Kappos at the USPTO Web site. But this controlled opposition, people who argue that “bad” patents and not software patents are a problem, remain a barrier to progress. They help stack panel with so-called ‘moderates’ who won’t let software patents go away in one fell swoop. Those moderates now include Red Hat and few other FOSS-using companies like Google. They are part of the system, they don’t want to be called 'extremists' (typical tactic).

We have created a wiki page about SCOTUS because we recognise it as part of the problem too. It seems eager to let genes be patented; when genetics are brought to the SCOTUS we expect the same pro-profit decisions to be made, but we shall wait and see. Wired says: “The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.”

This harms poor people and hits Ill people the hardest. Monopolies let prices go trough the roof, e.g. by selling drugs for 1000 times their production costs. Here is what India has to teach us. From the German press:

For years, India has refused to respect the patents of foreign pharmaceutical companies suspected of slightly altering their drugs merely to extend their profitability. In doing so, it helps not only the growing number of domestic generic drug makers, but also the millions who can hardly even afford the copycat drugs.

Some companies that use patents on life go further. DuPont, for example, uses Sisvel tactics [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] by sending thugs to enforce monopoly with patents:

DuPont Co. (DD), the world’s second- biggest seed company, is sending dozens of former police officers across North America to prevent a practice generations of farmers once took for granted.

The provider of the best-selling genetically modified soybean seed is looking for evidence of farmers illegally saving them from harvests for replanting next season, which is not allowed under sales contracts. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company is inspecting Canadian fields and will begin in the U.S. next year, said Randy Schlatter, a DuPont senior manager.

At the end of the day, as Dan Gillmor (whom me mentioned a lot before) correctly puts it in his new article:

Instead of rewarding invention, US patents just help corporations work monopolies and legal ‘trolls’ make parasitic profits

In a matter of unspecified amount of time we will know if SCOTUS still protects monopolies or protects the public. Let those who are responsible know what you think. Public backlash can alter outcome (see SOPA in the US and ACTA in the EU). The problem is, the media is owned by large corporations like GE, which based on the news continue to lobby in favour of patents, with nonsense like this:

The chief intellectual property counsel for GE argues that patent protection provides a crucial incentive to innovate.

That’s nonsense, especially for software. Ask any developer. But GE is a lobbyist for software patents [1, 2, 3]. Remember who founded GE and what he had done with patents. GE is a classic representation of the issues with patents. It’s a protectionism instrument. █

12.03.12

Links 4/12/2012: Tiny PengPod is Coming, More Games Coming to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How open source is outliving the hype 13 years later

    Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as “SOA,” but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source’s demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being “faux-open source” with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code).

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Comment: OpenOffice’s Tale of Two Cities

      Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn’t be more different. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this, it’s “go the whole hog or not at all”.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • DARPA Project Using LLVM For Better Code Security

      A software research project being funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with its Cyber Fast Track program is looking at ways for providing a flexible and integrated security infrastructure by using LLVM for dynamic and static security tasks.

Leftovers

  • Making the web more accessible for people with disabilities
  • Dear journalists: grow up

    Please stop saying “This is the thin end of the wedge. Once legislation is introduced, it will grow.” You are possibly the best informed and, if not the most powerful, certainly the most vocal lobby in this country. It’s not like additional legislation will slip past you.

    Please stop saying “There is already adequate protection in the law.” You know full well this protection is only available to those with money, time, knowhow and connections. I was having a beer with a buddy last night, who used to work in the tabloid press. He tells me that the single deciding factor in running or not running a less than well founded story is usually the subject’s financial ability to sue.

    Please stop saying “We are special. We perform a vital public service. We should be protected.” The same applies to doctors, pharma companies, lawyers, police, farmers, the fire service, pilots. They are all, quite rightly, regulated. A badly put together article might leave me dissatisfied. A badly put together gas boiler can leave me dead. The imposition of professional standards in a fact of modern life.

    Please stop saying “We have already changed. It will be different this time.” You sound like a recalcitrant abusive alcoholic begging his wife in hospital not to press charges.

  • Two examples why we don’t need the draft Communications Data Bill
  • Don’t Promise $1 Million For Your Lost Laptop Via YouTube & Twitter If You’re Not Prepared To Pay

    The Hollywood Reporter has the somewhat amusing cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t use various social media tools to make promises you can’t back up. Hip hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie apparently lost his laptop recently while on tour in Germany. He then went on YouTube and posted a video offering $20,000 if anyone returned the laptop. He noted that the laptop contained music and videos that he wanted back. Another video was posted later with a message that reads: “In the interest of retrieving invaluable intellectual property contained on his laptop and hard drive, Mr. Leslie has increased the reward offer from $20,000 USD to $1,000,000 USD. He also tweeted the same info directly, saying: “I raised the reward for my intellectual property to $1mm.”

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WPEA Signed into Law, Protecting Federal Food Safety Employees

      Today, the Government Accountability Project’s (GAP) Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is praising President Obama for signing into law the strongest federal whistleblower protections in history. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate earlier this month. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections.

      This law’s enactment plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those workers charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers who desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but chose to stay silent for fear that existing whistleblower protections will not effectively shield them from retaliation.

    • The Toxic Legacy of Depleted Uranium Weapons

      We all should be aware of the dangers posed by the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons have 10,000 plus nuclear warheads. And, especially post-Fukushima, we now understand firsthand the potential danger of nuclear power plants, many which are aging and highly vulnerable to natural disasters. As of August 2012, 30 countries are operating 435 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. Sixty-six new nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries.

      But how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.

      In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.

    • Meet Monsanto’s number one lobbyist: Barack Obama

      During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.

      These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”

      Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.

      Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”

      Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037310_Barack_Obama_Monsanto_lobbyist.html#ixzz2Dv0TB5GX

    • The Day I Blundered Into The Nuclear Facility

      I am at a loss to explain how, even in the 60′s or 70′s, an unsupervised kid was able to walk into anyplace where one could see Cherenkov radiation with their own eyes, at such a short distance. I understand that water is a good radiation shield, and don’t believe that I received any significant radiation exposure. This experience left me, for my lifetime, more sanguine than the average person regarding radiation hazards.

    • Your Couch May Be Killing You
    • Where oil and gas development goes, health problems often follow.
    • Tax the Rich, Take Your Hands Off Medicare: Overwhelming US Majority

  • Security

    • The Woman Behind CryptoParty

      In August, the Australian Parliament passed a new cybercrime bill that increased the powers of law enforcement to require Internet service providers to monitor and store their users’ data.

      The country’s privacy advocates were up in arms. One of them was Asher Wolf (a pseudonym), a 32-year-old who had built up a following on Twitter for tweeting news about WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement and who cared deeply about online privacy. A friend of hers, @m1k3y, tweeted that in light of the new legislation, maybe now was the time to have an “install-the-crypto-apps party,” referring to the programs for computers that help protect a user’s privacy. Wolf half-jokingly agreed: “Let’s get together in the backyard with some chips,” she said, “let’s have a CryptoParty.”

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • The Wikileaks, Julian Assange Diplomatic Standoff — Animated
    • Whistleblower’s treatment exposes dark side of Obama

      OVER the past 2½ years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed late last week, when the 23-year-old US army private, who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, testified at his court martial about the conditions of his detention.
      The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures he endured, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced them as ”cruel and inhuman”. President Barack Obama’s State Department spokesman, retired air force colonel P.J. Crowley, resigned after condemning Manning’s treatment. A prison psychologist testified last week that Manning’s conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantanamo Bay.

    • Quantico Psychiatrist: Military’s Mistreatment of Pfc. Manning ‘Unprecedented’

      The government psychiatrist charged with evaluating Pfc. Bradley Manning during his early detention at the military brig at Quantico told the judge at a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday that his recommendations for the Manning’s treatment were repeatedly ignored by the Marine guard unit responsible for him.

    • Two Years of Cablegate and Bradley Manning Still Awaits Trial

      Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — messages sent between the State Department and its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as an alleged source.

    • WikiLeaks suspect’s guards describe him crying in jail

      FORT MEADE, United States / Maryland: Two of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning’s former prison guards have denied abusing him in custody, and described an incident in which the US Army private suddenly burst into tears.

    • Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too

      For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.

    • Bradley Manning: Prisoners of conscience

      Obama said that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Tax paid by some global firms in UK ‘an insult’
    • Students Seize Cooper Union Room to Protest Possible Tuition

      Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates.

    • Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency

      Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.

    • Morgan Stanley Trader Faces Inquiry on Possible Manipulation

      On paper, Glenn Hadden seemed to be the ideal person to run a large bond trading operation at Morgan Stanley when he was hired in early 2011. Mr. Hadden, a former Goldman partner, was one of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street.

      But there was more to his story than just stellar financial results. He had left his previous employer, Goldman Sachs, after questions about his trading activity. And now, Mr. Hadden is under investigation over his trading in Treasury futures while at Goldman, according to a regulatory filing.

    • 9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare
    • Mark Carney’s ‘shock’ appointment means more of the same

      Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at the Bank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England’s obsession with inflation targeting and “price stability”. Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured – to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail.

    • It’s a Great Time To Be a Banker in America

      Matt Yglesias passes along this remarkable chart from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker showing that 88 percent of all the profit growth in the S&P 500 this year has been concentrated in ten firms in a grand total of two industries: technology and finance. In particular, seven of the ten firms are financial companies. Keep this firmly in mind the next time some Wall Street titan complains yet again that Obama hates banks and is out to destroy them. This is not a sign that Obama has done anything serious to hurt the financial industry; it’s a sign that America’s bankers are comically thin-skinned whiners.

    • Shameless Disaster Capitalism: How Companies Are Already Planning to Get Rich Off Superstorm Sandy
    • Israel halts Palestinian tax transfer over UN bid

      Israel will not transfer tax and tariff funds its collects for the Palestinians this month in response to their successful bid for upgraded UN status, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.

    • Sen. Sanders: Wall Street CEOs are the ‘Faces of Class Warfare’

      Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should “lower their expectations” when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new “face of class warfare” in the United States.

      “I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.”

    • Publicly auditing debts owed to the UK

      It seems outrageous that powerful, ruthless “vulture funds” can threaten action which may result in “an end to Argentina’s recovery” and a fresh round of turmoil in the global financial market (Comment, 26 November). Another aspect is the legitimacy of debt incurred by regimes that are not democratically elected. If an individual borrows vast sums of money and spends it on the high life and doesn’t repay it in their lifetime, it is right that creditors can use the law to go after all the funds and assets of the estate. It would not be right if they could use the law to go after the children and grandchildren of the debtor, forcing them to live in penury to pay back money they did not borrow nor benefit from. It seems the same logic applies when vast sums are borrowed by a corrupt dictator and the citizens of the country are forced to pay back the debt.

    • Greeks turn to the forests for fuel as winter nears

      It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.

    • Who Really Crashed the Economy?

      In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.

      Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.

      The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various spending programs that further raised the deficit.

    • Offshore secrets revealed: the shadowy side of a booming industry

      A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies

    • City of London Corporation: ‘last rotten borough’ faces calls for reform

      A campaign to radically reform and open up the secretive workings of the powerful local authority governing the City of London has been launched by a diverse group whose supporters include activists from the Occupy movement, clerics and the Tory MP David Davis.

    • McJobs Should Pay, Too: Inside Fast-Food Workers’ Historic Protest For Living Wages

      As low-wage service jobs become the new normal for millions of families, we should rethink the balance of power between fast-food workers and their corporations

    • 10 Corporations That Still Get New Government Contracts, Despite Alleged Misconduct

      The EPA surprised quite a few people on Wednesday when it announced sanctions on BP related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP won’t be allowed to get any new government contracts until it cleans up its act, the agency said.

      This was announced in a short press release that wasn’t really very specific about what that penalty means in practice. It could bar the company from new contracts for as long as 18 months—and potentially longer, if there are ongoing legal proceedings against the company. And it’s not just BP’s Gulf of Mexico affiliate—this suspension applies to all of BP’s affiliates, barring the company from billions of dollars in potential future contracts.

    • MI6 told agent they could not kill al-Qaeda leader

      MI6 passed up an opportunity to kill a senior leader of al-Qaeda because lawyers advised them they would be breaking the law, it can be disclosed.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Access to private net, phone use up by 20% – without warrants

      AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.

    • The Government is Profiling You
    • Mediator Joins Contentious Effort to Add a ‘Do Not Track’ Option to Web Browsing

      Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.

    • Assange: Google, Facebook run “side projects” for US spooks

      …nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”.

    • Senate committee takes an important step towards protecting your inbox

      In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus’ sex scandal—uncovered largely through the disclosure of explicit e-mails between him and his mistress—the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a new amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on Wednesday.

      The bill as it stands now (PDF) would require a warrant by law enforcement agencies before they can go digging through e-mail, social networking posts, and other data stored on cloud-based services. If it passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president, it would mark an important shift in privacy protection for electronic communications. As we’ve reported for some time now, those protections (or lack thereof) are woefully out of date.

    • What does your cyber signature say about you?

      Changing the behaviour of citizens to reduce the demand placed on public services is now a top priority for both central and local government. From voting or volunteering more, to simply accessing council services online, new habits must be developed to meet the financial challenges the government faces.

      With direct human-to-human contact being replaced with human-to-screen interaction, local government websites have a central role to play in delivering that change in behaviour. But behaviour change is fundamentally a soft skilll; you do it with emotions, not excel spreadsheets. So how do you put the human back into that virtual relationship?

    • City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs

      When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.

    • Video: NSA Whistleblower William Binney Explains How All Americans are Under Gov. Surveillance

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The Internet Isn’t Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To ‘Fix’ It?

      We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

    • The Real Threat to Internet Freedom Isn’t the United Nations

      This article arises from Future Tense, a joint effort of Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate that looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and for society. On Thursday, Nov. 29, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of Internet governance. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation’s website. The event will also be streamed live.

      The Internet is often seen as a place of chaos and disorder, a borderless world in which anonymous trolls roam free and vigilante hackers wreak havoc. But as a crucial United Nations conference on the future of telecommunications looms next week, there are fears governments are secretly maneuvering to restructure and rein in the anarchic Web we have come to know and love, perhaps even ushering in a new era of pervasive surveillance. So just how real is the threat of change and what might it mean?

    • Former spy chief says U.S. has had its cyber ’9/11 warning’

      The United States faces “the cyber equivalent of the World Trade Center attack” unless urgent action is taken, a former U.S. intelligence chief warns.
      John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton and then as director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and President Obama, told the Financial Times (subscription required) that such an attack would cripple the nation’s banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure.

    • Julian Assange: The Web can create revolutions — or jail revolutionaries
    • Tales of the Unexpected: the Communications Data Bill

      We await with interest the report from the joint committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, and trust the committee has properly considered the substantial evidence submitted. The debate is hotting up, with Theresa May pitching hard in the Sun.

      We are very interested to see if the Committee took a look at the submission by Caspar Bowden on page 102 of the written evidence highlighting the testimony given by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre), in support of the draft Bill. Mr Davies gave an example of a murder case in Lincolnshire in which increased data retention could have helped.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Editorial: NZ must not settle for less than golden deal on TPP

      Auckland has seldom hosted a more globally important meeting than the nine days of negotiations that start today on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
      The TPP offers the most promising advance of free trade since the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round. Regional free trade treaties are a poor substitute for a global agreement but when they are based on the same principles and open to all countries that can meet their standards, they are the next best thing.

    • Copyrights

      • How the Hobbit dispute was used to justify curbs to the actors’ union

        Guardian readers may have followed the industrial dispute that played out in New Zealand over The Hobbit. This dispute arose because a union of performers (Equity) sought to exercise its members’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain. It was nothing more and nothing less. What played out was an unexpected journey of misrepresentation, led partly by the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers, but particularly by the New Zealand government.

      • Congressional group briefly opens up on radical copyright reform, then takes it back

        Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as “copyleft” licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law’s protectionist character.

        Yet open source licenses (in their current forms) rely on copyright law. Copyright law supplies the bundle of statutory rights that empower the “keep it open” requirement of an open source license. Without copyright law, an author would have to find another legal theory to prevent others from, for example, taking a developer’s code and hiding it behind technological walls. And what do you sue for when someone violates the terms of an open source license? Copyright infringement (among other things).

      • PromoBay block

        Reports from TorrentFreak that the legitimate website PromoBay.org is being blocked by several UK ISPs highlights some of the problems with website blocking as a strategy and practice.

Android Brought Linux World Domination. What Next?

Posted in Site News at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

ForwardSummary: How to move forward from here; feedback welcomed

THE Vista 8 failure has been shown everywhere we look. It is a mainstream position to say that Windows monopoly is dying. There is no denying the fact that Vista 8 is an apt name; the difference is, the public learned its lessons from Vista. Microsoft is already given buyer’s remorse to the few who bought Surface and the prices remain too high. Android has more applications and much better prices. All that Microsoft can at this stage now is distort the market with patents, jointly with Apple and other Linux foes.

Now that Novell is gone Windows is collapsing should we start covering more topics (except for patents)? What about surveillance and Internet freedom? I should have more time for this in 2013. Suggestions are needed though. The site is shaped by trends of threat to freedom and justice, but it also depends on the readers’ preferences. We have almost 16,000 blog posts and their focus evolves over time. █

Apple Trial Against Android Devices Resumes This Week

Posted in Apple, Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mobile phone

Summary: Now that Android- and Linux-powered devices easily outsell Apple’s we find clear nervousness at Apple

Android and iOS have both just been hit by a European patent troll, which is an unusual thing; we have never heard of Arendi before (hard to find a Web site for it also), but here it is in the news:

Arendi S.A.R.L, a Luxembourg-based technology company, unleashed a torrent of patent infringement suits against a who’s-who of technology companies including Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and in Delaware federal court Thursday over three patents covering computer programs.

Apple fan sites are not happy, but Apple is in no position of deserving sympathy. Groklaw says that Apple is preparing to strike Android again, in a matter of days:

I think Apple may be feeling a little nervous about Samsung winning a new trial in Apple v Samsung. As the December 6th hearing on both parties’ motions for summary judgment draws near, there has been a flurry of Apple activity.

First, they have finally voluntarily told [PDF] the court — voluntarily as in after Samsung filed a motion to compel Apple to respond, but before the judge ruled — that they didn’t know about the jury foreman’s litigation with Seagate until after the trial. They did know about the bankruptcy but they didn’t delve into it. This, of course, is helpful to Samsung, in that Apple’s argument that Samsung shoulda-coulda known earlier about the litigation and failed to pursue it now bites the dust. Or it should. But the truth is, no matter what they said, it helps Samsung, but this is the least harmful to Apple. Presumably it’s also true.

The Microsoft booster says that Cook got himself a press platform already:

A rare interview with Apple’s chief executive will air the same day the company heads back to court with rival Samsung.

Trial by media? “The hearing is Dec. 6th,” writes Pamela Jones, “but I doubt there will be a ruling that day. More likely would be that the judge takes it under advisement and issues a written decision thereafter. But it’s an interesting decision to do the interview. I wonder if it means Apple is finally waking up to the news that a lot of folks genuinely hate the patent war it is waging.”

One thing is for sure; Apple created a lot of hostility towards patents. It also helped many realise that the problem is not just Microsoft and that swapping Microsoft with Apple is misguided; for innovation and for the betterment of society we must journey towards software freedom. █

12.02.12

IRC Proceedings: November 25th-December 1st, 2012

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: November 25th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: November 26th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: November 27th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: November 28th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: November 29th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: November 30th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: December 1st, 2012

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Enter the IRC channels now

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