Summary: Novell’s passing of patents to Microsoft et al. is likely to be the only barrier to Novell’s sale
A COUPLE of new posts, composed by Fabian Scherschel and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN), say a little more about Novell’s claim of getting stockholders’ approval. We wrote about this three days ago, emphasising that several barriers remain (although lawsuits can be resolved by settlement with compensation rather than total withdrawal from the deal). SJVN’s analysis of this is exceptionally comprehensive and relies a great deal on Groklaw:
Novell, which as Pamela Jones of Groklaw points out now describes itself as “the leader in intelligent workload management,” instead of the producers of “best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform.,” still faces anti-trust inquires from both the German Federal Cartel Office and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Neither of these agencies are concerned about Attachmate a formerly obscure software company buying Novell with Microsoft financing. No, the governments; concerns are about Novell’s patents landing in the hands of CPTN Holdings-a company made up of Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle.
For Attachmate to end up with Novell, the patent deal must go through. If Microsoft and friends don’t end up with the patents because of government intervention then the Attachmate deal is dead. Or, as Novell explains it: “The patent sale to CPTN remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of closing conditions, including receipt of antitrust approval in the United States and Germany. As previously disclosed, Novell and CPTN received a request for additional information from the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice regarding the patent sale. The requests have the effect of extending the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 until 30 days after both parties have substantially complied with the requests, unless the waiting period is earlier terminated. Novell is in the process of gathering information to respond to this request and is continuing to cooperate fully with the Department of Justice in connection with its review. Novell continues to work toward completing the merger as quickly as possible and currently anticipates that the closing of the merger will occur following the completion of the waiting period and the satisfaction of other closing conditions.”
I do not mind DRM that much. It sucks when it gets in the way, but all software gets in the way anyways. I like the benefits of it.
Sure he does. Would he not love it if Microsoft took even more control of Novell? It would make him stronger, richer, and more influential. Miguel works for Miguel (and Steve), not for Free software. █
Summary: Problems for Apple in China, trouble in a market increasingly dominated by Android, and antitrust actions
THESE TIMES are wonderful for Linux, but usually it’s not called “Linux”, it’s just called something like “Android” or “Red Hat” and even “Ubuntu”. Linux is everywhere and it commoditises the platform much to the regret of Apple and Microsoft. They have their own problems. Security-wise, Apple’s proprietary software still fails right now (this time it’s hypeToons) and the “iPhone [is] ‘becoming less popular’” based on other new reports.
Research from the uSwitch.com mobile tracker found that HTC handsets, which are made in Taiwan, were doing particularly well.
The firm compiled a ranking of the most prized smartphones, based on web searches and sales, and HTC were in each of the top three places with its Desire, Desire HD and Wildfire models.
Apple has already started suing HTC using software patents (a sign of Apple getting miserable) and it falls under antitrust scrutiny these days. Rik Myslewski says that “Apple ‘greed’ tax spreads beyond music, movies, magazines”:
Apple’s recently enacted “give us 30 per cent of your subscription revenue” dictum is metastasizing beyond online magazines, newspapers, music services, and video apps, ensnaring at least one software-as-a-service app as well.
Steve Jobs’ App Store police have rejected the iOS version of Readability – an online service that allows you to read online stories stripped of ads, Flash, and other distractions – saying the app’s developers provided no way for Apple to take its cut of subscription revenue.
The irony is that Apple uses Readability’s open source code to enhance its own Safari browser. And Readability creator Rich Ziade isn’t too happy about the turn of events.
Apple increasingly behaves like a thug and “‘Poisoned’ Chinese workers turn to Apple for help,” says the MSBBC this week. To quote: “Chinese workers injured while making touchscreens for mobile devices, including iPhones, have written to Apple asking it to do more to help them.
“Some 137 workers suffered adverse health effects following exposure to a chemical, known as n-hexane.”
Summary: Another Catch-22 for Microsoft customers as phones commit suicide because Microsoft pushes bad patches; other security problems affect only Windows
IT IS not a good week for Microsoft. Many of Samsung's clients suffer from bricking because they made the mistake of experimenting with Vista Phony 7. Microsoft was trying to ‘bolt in’ some security and instead it killed a lot of phones, as well as its reputation (what’s left of it). Microsoft boosters are all over this [1, 2, 3] and since Microsoft has no official spin (not yet anyway) they put it quite bluntly, e.g.:
Microsoft just can’t seem to get Windows Phone 7 right — this time it’s botched a minor update to Samsung phones that “brick” the devices so that they’re useless. Then it compounded the error by apparently not pulling the update after it said it had. This is no way to catch Android and the iPhone.
Techrights has been tracking Microsoft’s mobile business (the reality of it) for several years, so the above is not surprising at all. There was a period of time in the last decade when Microsoft had the potential to become dominant in mobile, but it blew it. Now it just blows a lot of money in vain (Windows Mobile 6.5, then SideKick and KIN, now Vista Phony 7).
“Microsoft Mobile Running Out of Chances” says the headline of this new short article which states:
More bad news for Microsoft, which can’t seem to get out of its own way when it comes to getting its mobile business untracked. Just yesterday came word that the first update for Windows Phone 7 ran into some major issues, going so far as locking up some phones. news for Microsoft, which can’t seem to get out of its own way when it comes to getting its mobile business untracked. Just yesterday came word that the first update for Windows Phone 7 ran into some major issues, going so far as locking up some phones.
AN EVOLVED VERSION of the Zeus trojan that targets mobile phones has been discovered.
Security firm F-Secure published an alert about the Zeus variant ‘Mitmo’, which targeted the ING bank in Poland. It attacks mobile phone based two-factor authentication by stealing mTANs, which are mobile authentication numbers sent via SMS by some banks to authorise an online transactions.
There is also this from the MSBBC, which characteristically avoids naming Microsoft or Windows in relation to the problem:
The proportion of websites secretly harbouring malware has reached one in 3,000 according to security firm Kaspersky.
It found a surge in the number of web-based attacks in 2010, with more than 580 million incidents detected.
What platform is it that the malware affects? Just don’t ask the MSBBC. It has too many former Microsoft UK employees in today’s management. When Microsoft’s OneCare deleted people’s inboxes Microsoft’s Arno Edelmann said: “Usually Microsoft doesn’t develop products, we buy products. It’s not a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing.”
Yes, Microsoft is a marketing (and increasingly lawsuits) company, which is why controlling the MSBBC is the type of thing that pays off. “Microsoft Is Not A Software Company” as Gordon titled his latest essay which says:
Microsoft don’t write much of their own. They buy, copy or just pilfer from others, and do the re-branding and Windows only lock-in changes to then present it as a Microsoft creation. They also seem pretty isolated in their views of the markets they’re in, to the extent that they seem oblivious to what the competition has done, and what the customers of that market expect as a bare minimum. How else could they release products that are years behind the competition?
Also years behind completion based on the bricking and the lack of basic features like tethering. Microsoft is somehow stuck now. The future is to a large degree all about mobility; Microsoft cannot succeed in mobility, but on the other hand it must try (or die trying). █
Summary: OOXML is shown to be broken just as the fifth ODF plugfest starts in Maidenhead town hall (UK)
SEVERAL years after Microsoft’s push for OOXML really began it still remains rather extinct. People make a mental note which says that .docx is a format people dislike and are often unable to open. Search engines too can provide some evidence of the scarcity of OOXML on the Web. Technical people know that OOXML such a bad, poorly-constructed specification, whereas computer users who are less technical usually view it as alien and unfamiliar (even if Microsoft assigns the same icons to OOXML). Rob Weir highlights the important findings about OOXML breaking apart and causing great trouble:
Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format, now officially called just Open XML*, has an embarrassing bug in its Office 2010 and/or Office 2007 implementation, as reported by Dennis O’Reilly on Cnet.
In a nutshell: if you save a document from Word 2010 using the default .docx format, and send it to a user with Word 2007 but who has a different default printer driver, then a few seemingly random spaces may get dropped from between words or sentences when it is opened on the other machine. When saved in Word 2007, the spaces remain missing if the document is re-opened in Word 2010.
Some readers took exception when I stated in a post from last month on future-proofing your data archive that Microsoft’s proprietary Office file formats may not stand the test of time. Well, compatibility problems have already surfaced between the two most recent releases of MS Word.
Several people report spaces being dropped randomly from documents created in Word 2010 when the files are opened in Word 2007 on another machine. (A post on the Microsoft Answers forum explains the problem in more detail.)
So there we have another lesson regarding the failures of OOXML. Support for ODF, on the other hand, keeps expanding. Incidentally, the UK-based ODF plugfest starts today. It started 2 hours ago. █
Just a quick shout about new release of Synapse – 0.2.4! There aren’t too many user visible changes in this release, besides a few new plugins. Mostly polishing and more polishing.
1. I bought a product that I couldn’t use out-of-the-box;
2. in order to use it, I was sent to a site I had never dealt with before;
3. the site requires me to enter part of my credit card to use it;
4. it then takes me to a totally broken page, which, thankfully, has a license key;
5. that license key is rejected for some indeterminate amount of time by vmware.com;
6. once it’s finally not rejected, vmware.com still merrily asks me to give it an email that it knows damn well it didn’t give me.
If you’re a Linux system administrator, chances are you’ve got more than one machine that you’re responsible for on a daily basis. You may even have a bank of machines that you maintain that are similar — a farm of Web servers, for example. If you have a need to type the same command into several machines at once, you can login to each one with SSH and do it serially, or you can save yourself a lot of time and effort and use a tool like ClusterSSH.
Version 2.91.90 of GNOME Shell and Mutter were released last night and they carry some last minute changes to these major components of the GNOME 3.0 desktop.
With GNOME Shell 2.91.90, there are workspace handling changes, a PolicyKit authentication agent, visual refreshments, suspend support is now shown from the power-off menu while the power-off button is concealed by default (hold down Alt to see), message tray improvements, Shell Toolkit improvements, memory leak fixes, Telepathy support being ported to a telepathy-glib library, and other work. The visual refresh is improving the appearance and behavior of the overview dash, using larger icons in the application browser, improving the top panel and round corners of the screen, and improving the search entity in the overview. Read more in the release announcement.
The Debian Project is happy to announce that it will again be represented at this year’s CeBIT IT fair in Hanover, Germany from the 1st to the 5th of March. Debian will again be a present as “special guest” at the booth of Univention GmbH, whose motto this year is “Open source keeps the promises of the cloud” and which can be found in hall 2 stand D36.
Members of the project will be available for questions and discussions and demonstrate new features of the recently released Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, including the new port to the kernel of the FreeBSD project. Visitors will also have the opportunity to bring USB thumb drives or blank CDs in order to get a free copy of Debian 6.0.
This is a very interesting read, about how the good folks at Google are using eCryptfs to secure user data on ChromiumOS devices. I found a few of the design points particularly interesting, such as the hashing of user names and integration with the TPM. I was also pleased to see that eCryptfs was chosen, in part, in accordance with their design needs for both performance and power consumption.
* Lots of enhancements in the places speedup (with unfortunatly some crashes in some cases)
* We can now define static quicklists in .desktop files. This is something we can just add to launchers for things like “Open a new window”, or “Create a new document”, even if the application doesn’t explicitly support quicklists. A proposal has been made on the xdg-list for an OnlyShowIn=unity property. Here’s an example with gnome-screenshot.
Edubuntu 11.04 is becoming an amazing Ubuntu flavor. For instance, it seems that Edubuntu will ship with both Unity 2D (according to the latest edubuntu-meta) and Ubuntu Classic desktop by default (but the regular Unity will still be available). Unity 2D will also be used as fall-back for those that try to use the regular Unity but don’t have a capable graphics card. Further more, LibreCAD (formerly CADuntu), a great 2D CAD drawing tool based on the community edition of QCad ported to Qt will also be included by default starting with Edubuntu 11.04.
Bugs may sound cute and harmless, but often even small software bugs can have a huge impact on the overall user experience.
The current development version of Edubuntu, codenamed “Natty Narwhal” which will in time become Edubuntu 11.04 is shaping up quite well. However, quite often attention is focussed on the big issues and sometimes the smaller problems just don’t get the attention they also deserve, which results in feedback like “Hey! Why didn’t you fix this, it would’ve only taken you 15 minutes!”.
Executive summary: Despite the omnipresent burden of responsibility, and the inherent risk of failure, there’s an excitement and pleasure in working on one’s own behalf that was for the most part missing entirely from my Nokian experience. The word I keep coming back to, in my head, is “unbound,” and it’s an unbelievably lovely and liberating sensation.
My experience with a project we’re working on, even at this very early stage, might serve as a small illustration of why the entrepreneurial life has already been so rewarding, and incidentally, why I wouldn’t look for innovation from large organizations. At any rate, it’s as good a way as any to comment, hopefully constructively, on Nokia’s recent and ongoing troubles.
Since Nokia announced it was going to leap off its “burning platform” and into the arms of Microsoft, there have been plenty of arguments about whether the link between the two companies is going to work or not. Even here on GigaOM there’s been some division: I argued that two wrongs don’t make a right, while we also heard that it could be good news for developers.
Mobile communications can easily be surveilled. One step you can take to prevent tracking is to install Tor on your phone.
Orbot, developed by the Guardian Project, is an application that implements Tor on Android phones. It allows mobile phone users to access the web, instant messaging, and email without being monitored or blocked by their mobile internet service provider. Learn more about Tor at https://torproject.org or visit our how-to guide for using Tor on your computer.
What options do Android users have, today, to protect themselves against eavesdroppers? Android does support several VPN configurations which you could configure before you hit the road. That won’t stop the unnecessary transmission of your fine GPS coordinates, which, to my mind, neither SoundHound nor ShopSaavy have any business knowing. If that’s an issue for you, you could turn off your GPS altogether, but you’d have to turn it on again later when you want to use maps or whatever else. Ideally, I’d like the Market installer to give me the opportunity to revoke GPS privileges for apps like these.
Android users have long been able to merge their Facebook and Google contacts, a genius way to quickly get phone numbers, emails, and photo ID’s when available. But that privilege has been stripped from the latest update to the Nexus S and future lead devices from Google.
Facebook was previously granted an exception from Google’s requirement that developers use the Android contacts API, but Google has revoked that access in the name of “data portability.” Regardless of the reasons given, this is really about Google’s effort to gain more user data, and this play for power will do nothing to hurt Facebook. Why? Because Facebook is already teflon in the mobile arena.
The first tablets running Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be hitting the streets on Thursday Feb. 24th, and we’ve just posted the full SDK release. We encourage you to test your applications on the new platform, using a tablet-size AVD.
Developers who’ve followed the Android Framework’s guidelines and best practices will find their apps work well on Android 3.0. This purpose of this post is to provide reminders of and links to those best practices.
There’s a new tidbit about the Motorola Xoom every 20 minutes, so I decided to combine all of them into one post so you don’t get overloaded with Xoom news Here’s the latest information about the world’s first Honeycomb tablet – or at least the most recent stories that are sure to be old news when a million new things come out next hour.
The Android 3.0 platform introduces many new and exciting features for users and developers. This document provides a glimpse of some of the new features and technologies, as delivered in Android 3.0. For a more detailed look at new developer APIs, see the Android 3.0 Platform document.
Ex – Proprietary Technology vendor are much fanatic then us
* M$ never try to create any product for non-FOSS, we FOSS guys prepare platform-independent code
* M$ do not recognise grub but we can fix windows and mount them
* M$ do not recognise ISO standard (odt) and blindly follow its close standards
* M$ create patent and promote a FOSS-incompatible environment.
* This list is very long and prove that proprietary and close technology vendors are much fanatic for their technology and ideals.
Free Technology advocates are used to being misunderstood. Between open source, creative commons, and the plain old law, it’s sometimes hard for the layman to figure out what free tech is for and what it’s against. That’s where the Free Technology Academy comes in.
The FTA is like no university you’ve ever seen – even though they offer accredited classes – partly because you can’t see it. The project is a collaboration between the Free Knowledge institute and universities in The Netherlands, Spain, and Norway, but has no campus. The courses in the FTA program stretch from the theoretical (“The concepts of Free Software and Open Standards”) to the practical (“Software development”, “Web applications development”), but all are devoted to the propagation and increased use of free technology. Students who wish to enroll in classes taught by professors pay small tuition fee and interact with their teachers through the FTA’s web interface. But what’s so free about that?
In the coursebook for the FTA “Concepts” class mentioned above, they use Richard Stallman’s (the movement’s grandfather) four-part defintion for what makes free software free
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Chemistry has graduated from the Apache Incubator as a Top-Level Project (TLP). This signifies that the Apache Chemistry community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.
Prince of Asturias Foundation has invited CENATIC to nominate a candidate for the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award. During the last weeks CENATIC Foundation has been evaluating potential candidates, intending to find the one with the biggest chances of winning the award, which would, at the same time, represent the interests of all the agents of the Free and Open Source Software sector in Spain.
LibrePlanet 2011 will be a one-day conference on Saturday, March 19th 2011 at Bunker Hill Community College, in Boston, MA. If you’re coming in for the weekend, we have plans for Friday and Sunday as well, although these are informal.
Many users rely on apps to provide timely notifications for things like calendar events and incoming chat messages, but find it cumbersome to always keep a Chrome window open. Extensions and packaged apps can already display notifications and maintain state without any visible windows, using background pages. This functionality is now available to hosted apps – the most common form of apps in the Chrome Web Store – via a new background window mechanism.
I am not really sure if this is a new feature on Google Chrome. It might had been there for a long time now. But I only noticed it yesterday and I was totally taken aback. Instant-inside-omnibox is a very useful and very innovative feature in my opinion.
The latest Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo is now available from the Android Market and on your Nokia Maemo device. This release was focused on continuing to improve stability and performance.
Firefox 4 Beta is faster and easier to use. You’ll experience better responsiveness to panning and zooming, faster start up time and with enhanced JavaScript performance you’ll see faster page load times. We also worked to make major stability improvements in this release.
According to Nokia, there are currently 200 million Symbian users around the world. The Finnish outfit said it expects to sell about 150 million Symbian devices going forward.
A little over two years ago, I did a bunch of posts about the idea of recruiting ‘the next million Mozillians’. My thinking at the time: we need to grow our community dramatically. We need to build even more creativity, reach and resilience into who we are. This is how we build a 100 year organization for the open web.
In just one week, thousands of donors from all over the world did the unbelievable: You all donated more than 40.000 € for setting up The Document Foundation as legal entity. Honestly, we never ever even dreamed of achieving that in such a short period of time – what happened is just amazing, awesome and beyond imagination. Thank you, thank you, thank you so very much! You all contributed to the dream of a Foundation, and with 10.000 € left until we have the required capital stock, we’re close to making it a reality.
LibreOffice 3.3.1 also brings new colorful icons based on The Document Foundation branding guidelines, and includes updates to several language versions.
One of the fun parts of blogging for PCWorld.com is getting reader response e-mails from all over the world. You never know who is going to read what you write. Sometimes they’ll spot the blog post on the PCWorld Web page, or as a link in a tweet or even as a Google search result several months after the blog post was published.
I’ve blogged previously about Inkscape, the free vector drawing program for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows, so I was thrilled to receive an e-mail from Sheena Vaidyanathan, who teaches Inkscape to elementary school students in Los Altos, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Here is how Sheena explained her teaching to me: “I started adding Inkscape as an art unit, then as an after school program and it was so popular, that the school district asked me to start a program called Digital Design for all 7 elementary schools. I teach 20 classes each week to 4th-6th graders, and each class is an average of 25 students. After one trimester, I get a new set of students, so in one year I teach all 4-6th graders, about 1500 students! It is a lot of work, but I love teaching and sharing my enthusiasm for art and technology with kids. I love using Inkscape and other free open source software (I also teach SketchUp, and Scratch) because the kids can actually install it at home and use it outside the classroom. I am not sure if there are any other public schools that have a program like this, but it is a fantastic way to get kids excited about technology, and learn to use computers to express their creativity.”
An open source company is naturally a company that produces open source code for others to consume. But how does the notion of producing software code in the open affect company culture?
I believe that an organization cannot produce open source code if it is not generally open itself. By this I mean having culture of transparency and of openly sharing information and ideas. The same basic environment that is often found in open source development–a sense of open community, where everyone is welcome to share their opinions and ideas–is often present in open source companies as well.
But a company is different from an open source community in a key way: in every commercial entity, there is information that cannot or should not be shared with everyone. How does an organization hold a balance between being culturally open and maintaining the level of professional discretion required by its customers, its board of directors and others? How do employees know when to act open and when to keep closed?
Massimo Babieri is an IT manager at the Earth Science Department, of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. As well as holding a Ph.D in Geology, Massimo leads the band The Radiostars, releasing their music under a Free license. As well as being a member of the LUG Scandiano, he has been very active in the ongoing success of the PDFreaders campaign in Italy.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all Free Software users. Igalia deeply appreciates their hard work driving the Free Software movement since its beginning and goes a step further by providing financial support for this organization.
A German court has asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to clarify whether or not a company can sell second-hand versions of downloaded business software in a case involving software company Oracle.
Oracle took action against usedSoft, arguing that that its sale of used licences for software is illegal. Customers who buy second-hand licences from usedSoft then download software from Oracle for their own use.
As I find them, I will list resources, information and discussion about the mind bending free culture concept.
A lot of people think the idea of “free culture” means that nobody gets paid. And in fact, no one is compelled to pay. The way that it really works, is that people pay what they can when they can, because we know supporting the artists/musicians/fimmakers/designers/developers/writers allows more of the creations we want to be created. This means consumers only pay for what they like.
What organisers believe will be the biggest single literary event in history is to raise the curtain on next month’s World Book Night, itself billed as “the biggest book give-away ever”. On 4 March London’s Trafalgar Square will be given over to a “glittering celebration of the written word”, with 10,000 people expected to attend.
The free event will feature appearances from numerous celebrated authors, ranging from Alan Bennett to Nick Cave, reading from their favourite books.
Like buses, you wait ages for local councils to publish their spending data, then a whole load come at once… and consequently OpenlyLocal has been importing the data pretty much non-stop for the past month or so.
We’ve now imported spending data for over 140 councils with more being added each day, and now have over a million and a half payments to suppliers, totalling over £10 billion. I think it’s worth repeating that figure: Ten Billion Pounds, as it’s a decent chunk of change, by anybody’s measure (although it’s still only a fraction of all spending by councils in the country).
The multimedia holes in the HTML5 spec The primary aspect of multimedia capability to be resolved this spring is multitracking for audio and video, though the W3C isn’t committing to having this capability in the final HTML5 spec. Multitracking would, for example, enable a choice of spoken languages to accompany a video, allow the presentation of a video within another video, and permit applications like chat rooms to display simultaneous audio from multiple people.
My friends have always entertained my unconventional musings. A favourite being my desire to live a life of “freedom” on a sailboat in some remote sea passages of the Canadian West Coast. This didn’t seem to compute in my favour as a 28yr old single female. Hence, meeting another outdoor enthusiast with a handy streak and possessing the same desire struck me as … trouble! Having a small prior stint in living aboard a sailboat, I was fully aware that it’s not as romantic as it sounds, nor does it allow for much more storage than a suitcase of clothing. I was skeptical my well-dressed, large-dog-owning loved one understood the gravity of this.
SFU health sciences student Justin Long of Vancouver has supplied the university with four letters, believed to have been hand-written and sealed by Earhart. The envelopes were opened at the end leaving the gummy seal – and hopefully Earhart’s saliva – intact. Long acquired the letters froma collection of 400 pieces of the aviator’s correspondence collected by his grandfather Elgin Long, a lifelong Earhart biographer.
Nowcasting is a term used by the folks at Google to represent an analysis of large volumes of data that can be used to “forecast” current events for which official analysis has not been released. For instance, using these techniques one can “nowcast” what the current unemployment rate is before the official unemployment rate is determined. Google also calls this “predicting the present.”
Another example is the way Google was able to pinpoint the emergence of flu outbreaks by monitoring outbreaks of search terms for flu-related words, as a proxy for the flu itself. As they put it: “web searches may not only be useful as a reliable indicator of the health-seeking behavior when facing the influenza pandemic but also they may contain a useful information for predicting the present stance of economic activity some time ahead of the official release of relevant data.”
We’re getting reports of many Google Calendar users suffering missing data right now. It appears that the when users load their accounts, all calendars and entries are missing.
What prompted Reid to call for abolishing prostitution wasn’t clear. In the speech, he framed it as a matter of economic development — but also a matter of shame.
College textbook rental startup BookRenter has raised $40 million in funding from Adams Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Focus Ventures, Lighthouse Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. This brings BookRenter’s total funding to $60 million.
As with most things, it’s easier to lament a loss than come up with a solution. Joe Wikert took The New York Times article mourning the death of marginalia in digital books head-on, choosing the more difficult path of coming up with a solution.
Journalism is changing fast. And as news businesses experiment with new ways of creating and delivering journalism in the digital age, Google is keen to play its part on the technology side. Over the last year, we’ve been partnering with publishers around the world to develop technological solutions—including, most recently, One Pass—to find new and engaging ways of presenting stories online and to generate greater revenues.
As well as our focus on technological experimentation, we’re also investing at the grassroots level. Last October we announced that we would be giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organisations working on developing new approaches to journalism. At that time, we allocated around 40% of the total fund to the Knight Foundation in the U.S.
Nicolas Sarkozy is facing an unprecedented revolt by French diplomats who warn that his foreign policy gaffes have left France pathetically diminished on the world stage.
After weeks of embarrassing French slip-ups – including Paris blindly standing by the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships until the last minute – a group of diplomats have published a scathing attack on the president in Le Monde.
The discovery of a new technique will make it possible to create a whole new collection of plastics with metallic and/or superconducting properties.
According to the University of New South Wales, plastics normally conduct electricity very poorly and they are used to insulate electric cables but, by placing a thin sheet of metal onto a plastic film and mixing it into the polymer surface with an ion beam, Australian researchers have displayed that the system can be used to make inexpensive, durable, flexible and conductive plastics.
Rolls-Royce cars have never been known for their fuel efficiency – after all, if you can afford to buy one, you’re probably not that concerned about the price of gas.
For the record, on Saturday 18 August 2007, 58 Faucheurs Volontaires [2] had neutralised a GM maize seed trial at Poinville in Eure-et-Loir. They had come from the four corners of Northern France – Brittany, la Vendee, le Centre, le Nord – to accomplish a non-violent act of defiance and to contest the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ by an act of civil disobedience – a tradition, dating from its first proponent David Henri Thoreau in 1849, which helped Gandhi liberate India from the British yoke and others like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to make their mark and change the course of history …
An EU committee voted yesterday (22 February) to allow traces of unapproved genetically modified (GM) material in animal feed imports, the European Commission said, in a bid to secure grain supplies to the import-dependent bloc.
Reports indicate Verizon’s network failed to connect 10,000 calls to 911 numbers in Washington’s suburbs during the Jan. 26 storm, the Federal Communications Commission said in a letter to the carrier today that was released by e-mail.
As the revolt started by Anonymous in Tunisia slowly spreads across North Africa, moving inexorably towards Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with all that implies for the oil-dependent world, the lamescream media and ‘intelligence’ agencies try to pin down the amorphous ungroup.
Anonymous is now what must be the most powerful universal force for change the world has ever seen. And that terrifies the Powers That Used To Be as they watch the control they once exercised over the Great Unwashed, disintegrate.
HBGary’s Aaron Barr came unstuck when he claimed to have penetrated Anonymous. And you can be sure he still thinks there’s some kind of Anonymous Central where all the Operation Paybacks and other anon activities are planned and plotted.
On Wednesday, the Gadhafi regime ordered two of its pilots to attack the opposition stronghold of Benghazi – part of the Libyan government’s ongoing attempt to bomb activists into submission. But rather than make that attack run, Abdessalam Attiyah al-Abdali and his co-pilot Ali Omar al-Kadhafi bailed. They parachuted out of their Russian-made Sukhoi 22, and let the jet crash about 100 miles west of Benghazi.
The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti ( Brazil):
The members of the Security Council were briefed on the situation in Libya by B. Lynn Pascoe, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, and the Permanent Representative of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, whose Mission had requested a meeting of the Security Council.
The brutality in Libya has prompted the State Department to issue several statements in recent days strongly condemning the Libyan government and calling the bloodshed “completely unacceptable”—though it stopped short of threatening sanctions.
The country’s dictator, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, said on Tuesday that the protesters who have been killed “deserved to die,” and he vowed to fight “until the last drop of my blood.”
Soldiers and police in Beghazi, Libya’s second city, have thrown in with protesters on the ground and declared the city to be “Free Benghazi.” The Guardian is carrying eyewitness reports of more than 4,000 foreign mercenaries being brought to the country to fight for Gadaffhi, some of whom are in custody of the revolutionary army.
A very senior diplomatic source told me yesterday that Berlusconi is frantic lest Gadaffi falls and the channels are revealed by which Berlusconi gets a cut on the huge amounts of Libyan oil and gas lifted to Italy. Just at the moment that would be too much even for Berlusconi to survive.
To the shock of President Hamid Karzai’s aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.
The exact language Petraeus used in the closed-door session is not known, and neither is the precise message he meant to convey. But his remarks about the deadly U.S. military operation in Konar province were deemed deeply offensive by some in the room. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.
An inquiry set up by David Cameron to examine Britain’s involvement in torture and rendition since 9/11 is running into trouble even before it has begun hearing evidence, with human rights organisations warning that it will fail to meet the UK’s obligations under international and domestic law.
Such is the level of concern that some NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are considering whether they should boycott the inquiry due to be headed by Sir Peter Gibson, because they fear it will not be sufficiently independent, impartial or open to public scrutiny.
Venezuela played host to 28 heads of state and representatives from 33 other countries at the Second Africa-South America (ASA) Summit on September 26-27 on the island of Margarita. Portrayed by President Chavez before and afterwards as an historic display of unity between long-oppressed continents, the Summit appears to have instead highlighted differences among participants over both substance and style. Despite efforts by Venezuela and Libya, the Summit declaration itself contained few unexpected provisions. Following the Summit, President Chavez signed a series of bilateral energy and mining agreements, and joined six other South American Presidents in signing a “constituting agreement” for his proposed regional development bank, Banco del Sur. Some Summit participants reported that their most lasting memory may well be the preparatory and logistical mess that the delegates encountered.
5:05 Academics debate whether students, or anyone, even reading WikiLeaks are breaking the Espionage Law. The absurdity burns. But a good read, from Philly Inquirer.
3:05 The Bradley Manniing Advocacy Fund launched today, with this endorsement from Dan Ellsberg: “There has been a concerted effort to paint Bradley Manning as a terrorist and traitor. He is neither. He is a patriotic American who deserves better than to be tried in the media – as is happening day after day on the basis of misinformation – before he has had any opportunity to speak publicly for himself or to present his own case in court. I hope others will join me in supporting the Bradley Manning Advocacy Fund to ensure a free-flow of information on PFC Manning and give him a fair shot at due process and humane treatment.”:
2:05 More major fallout from WikiLeaks usually overlooked: Why do we currently have no U.S. ambassador in Libya? Because he (Gene Cretz) was recently recalled after uproar over his cables critiquing Gaddafi. “Certainly doesn’t help in current crisis. (h/t Kevin Gosztola)
12:30 Lengthy new piece on Wikileaks finances, past and present, and call for “transparency.”
Contrary to what Julian Assange might tell you, most ambassadors do not worry that the wrong people will read their cables, but that the right people won’t. The U.S. State Department receives several million cables a year, and while most deal with mundane administrative matters, several hundred thousand report on political and economic developments. The secretary of state reads just a handful of these, and assistant secretaries read a small portion of the cables from their geographic regions. Even the desk officer might only have time to scan the post’s voluminous cable traffic.
Bill Keller, an editor with The New York Times, has recently published an article titled “Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets.” In the article, the author wrote how the newspaper was working with secret cables. From what the article says, it seems that Russia appears to be a real stronghold of freedom of speech.
Keller wrote: “Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.”
The next meetings would take place in the form of daily conference calls. “Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.”
Julian Assange is expected to lose his battle against extradition to Sweden today.
Legal sources in London believe that the magistrate, Howard Riddle, will grant the European arrest warrant forcing the WikiLeaks founder to face accusations of sex crimes in Stockholm.
However, it could take nine months to a year before a verdict, as both sides have already signalled their intention to appeal against today’s decision should it go against them, taking the extradition request to the High Court and the Supreme Court.
In the eight months since Kenneth R. Feinberg took over the $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he has been attacked by many of those filing claims and by coastal state politicians who argue that the process is opaque, arbitrary and slow. Many of them have also argued that Mr. Feinberg’s recently published estimates of future damage to those in the gulf are too optimistic, and thus his offer of compensation in a final settlement is too low.
If they can do it to us we can do it to them. That’s the sentiment expressed in a new online poll showing a majority of Canadians want to impose a travel fee on visiting Americans if their proposed tax goes through.
You may have heard the old adage that “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” but money also has a lot to do with the politics of mother’s milk.
Last week Rep. Michele Bachmann, R., Minn., criticized Michelle Obama for announcing that she would work to encourage breastfeeding as part of her campaign against childhood obesity, accusing the First Lady of encouraging a “new definition” of a “nanny state.”
What was missing from the stories that followed, however, was that the powerful infant formula industry has tremendous influence in Washington, with PACs, employees and their family members of the three biggest producers donating $1 million to federal candidates and party committees in the 2010 election cycle and the companies themselves disclosing lobbying spending of $9 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As simple background, the U.S. started the policy of requiring airlines to submit the detailed biographical and behavioural information on all travellers to the U.S. In fact, the U.S. first required that all data on all passengers’ travel (not limited to the U.S.) be transferred to the U.S. authorities for any use under the sun.
After years of debate and deliberation between the EU and the U.S., the EU agreed to the transfer of the information to the U.S. (with some limitations), and the EU began to seek its own passenger surveillance scheme. The Bush Administration clearly has left its mark on EU policy. This is the practice of ‘policy laundering’ that for years we have worked on: one country adopting the surveillance policies of other countries.
There is a lot of discussion about Do Not Track at the moment. The FTC has announced support for the idea; Mozilla has added a Do Not Track header option into Firefox betas, and Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a Do Not Track bill. Other proposed privacy legislation, such as Rep. Bobby Rush’s bill, could also achieve similar objectives. And yesterday, EFF submitted comments urging the Federal Trade Commission to defend online privacy by supporting the header-based Do Not Track feature.
Do Not Track is important because it creates a policy mechanism to augment the privacy enhancing technologies that we currently have. There is an arms race between practical privacy tools and ubiquitous online tracking, and we fear that the trackers have powerful techniques that will almost always allow them to win the arms race against ordinary people.
Ian’s, a pizzeria near the Wisconsin state capitol that is sympathetic to the demonstrators, has been facilitating the process of supporters around the world who want to send pizza to the protest. They’ve fielded an order from Egypt — now that’s solidarity.
Seats on one side of the Indiana House were nearly empty today as House Democrats departed the the state rather than vote on anti-union legislation.
A source tells The Indianapolis Star that Democrats are headed to Illinois, though it was possible some also might go to Kentucky. They need to go to a state with a Democratic governor to avoid being taken into police custody and returned to Indiana.
The House came into session twice this morning, with only three of the 40 Democrats present. Those were needed to make a motion, and a seconding motion, for any procedural steps Democrats would want to take to ensure Republicans don’t do anything official without quorum.
I’m writing this on a plane, having just passed through Security at Heathrow airport. An obviously nice young mother was distraught because she wasn’t allowed to take on board a tub of ointment for her little girl’s eczema. The security man was polite but firm. She wasn’t even permitted to spoon a reduced quantity into a smaller jar. I couldn’t quite grasp what was wrong with that helpful suggestion, but the rule book was implacable. All the official could do was offer to fetch his supervisor. The supervisor came and, equally polite but firm, she too was regretfully bound by the rulebook’s hoops of steel.
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How often does a dangerous criminal walk free, not because evidence has been examined but simply because of a ‘technicality’? Perhaps the arresting officer fluffed his lines when delivering the official ‘caution’. Decisions that will gravely affect a person’s whole life can turn on the powerlessness of a judge to exercise discretion and reach a simple conclusion which every single person in the court, including the lawyers on both ‘sides’, knows is just.
Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, just did something wonderful. Murphy, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch, called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, currently in the midst of attempting to crush the public employees’ unions. “Koch” got through to Walker (who hasn’t been taking calls from the Democratic state Senate minority leader). He taped the call and put it online.
So Walker will happily take a call from a Koch brother. He says that he considered “planting some troublemakers” among the protesters. He is convinced that everyone is on his side. Like most people who only watch Fox, he has a skewed impression of the popularity of his union-crushing proposals. (His plan is, nationally, roundly unpopular. Except on Fox.)
Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, along with Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) today fought to protect the network neutrality rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last December. In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Senators opposed any efforts to use the appropriations process or the Congressional Review Act to keep the FCC from doing its job and implementing these network neutrality rules.
Industry Minister Tony Clement is determined to promote Canada’s digital economy, and if that means overturning the CRTC on Internet usage-based billing for small providers, so be it.
“We asked (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to review their decision, and if they come back with the same decision the cabinet would overrule it because it wouldn’t be consistent with government policy … promoting competition and choice,” he said Wednesday after a forum with University of Alberta students.
“You can’t have competition and choice if you allow a major carrier to force its business model onto an independent service provider.”
In preparation for the Contact conference that I am helping to organize this October in NYC, I’ve been in discussion with many different communities about the types of initiatives they would like to bring to the table. The purpose of the event is to ‘realize the true potential of social media,’ and determine what infrastructures need to be in place to enable peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and governance.
Well, this is certainly an amusing rumor. Apparently, the folks at Sony are attempting to build a “hack-proof” PS3. Although definitely an admirable initiative from a corporate perspective, we all know that any system is (eventually) crackable.
I’ve covered my views on this before, so I won’t go over old ground, but suffice to say in the face of a vibrant pre-owned market, coupled with services like Lovefilm, I do have to wonder how many sales are actually lost through sharing software, look at how many isp offer “unlimited usage” with one hand and then sucker punching you with “fair use” with the other. For me, my unlimited data seems to stretch as far as 25gig a month, then it appears it’s no longer unlimited and out rolls the “fair use”. Consider how much gaming could be downloaded with even 25gig, not much I’d wager and then adding a few streamed HD movies on Lovefilm and its quickly eaten away. As far as I can gather, fair use applies to most if not all UK ISP’s, so that’s a very large group of users who just don’t have the facility to go on a downloading free for all….infringing or not.
George Hotz is in the middle of what could be a long, punishing legal battle with Sony, and his money is running out. “Media, I need your help. This is the first time I have ever asked. Please, if you support this cause, help me out and spread the word,” he wrote on his newest blog entry. “I want, by the time this goes to trial, to have Sony facing some of the hardest-hitting lawyers in the business. Together, we can help fix the system.”
Ars Technica contacted Hotz’s lawyer to make sure this plea for cash was legitimate, and attorney Stewart Kellar confirmed that yes, the money raised goes to Hotz’s legal fund to fight Sony. It also appears Hotz has friends with deep pockets: The first round of fundraising is already over, and more lawyers will be hired for Hotz’s defense.
We’ve seen different companies respond in different and creative ways to companies making knockoffs in the past. One of my favorites was the South African clothing firm that created an entire (secret) knockoff line of clothes to “compete” with unauthorized knockoffs.
The International Music Score Library Project, a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of musical treasures available for free. This public domain repertory of classical music includes Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies, and much more: by simply following the example of Google Books and Project Gutenberg it has grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere.
We’ve already written about the news that ex-Senator Chris Dodd has gone back on his promises and his principles to take the top lobbying job at the MPAA, but this recent article in Hillicon Valley, talking with interim MPAA boss Bob Pisano, is bizarre in that it shows how incredibly misguided the MPAA’s entire strategy is. We’ve seen that the MPAA has an entire “content protection” staff, but doesn’t appear to have a staff of folks dedicated to actually helping filmmakers to adapt and to succeed in the modern era. But it strikes me as ridiculously short-sighted that the MPAA admits that its number one priority is getting the government to “fight piracy.”
In its final days, the Government is believed to be rushing through a statutory instrument that will amend the existing Copyright Act and which will give judges the power to grant injunctions against ISPs in relation to copyright infringement cases.
The move is believed to stem from October’s court case between the music industry (Warner, Sony, Universal and EMI) and UPC in which the judge pointed to a key gap in Irish copyright laws.
Siliconrepublic.com has learned that the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation and the Department of Communications have tabled the legislation which is currently in the hands of the parliamentary draftsman with a view to passing it by Friday.
In this review today at Phoronix we are testing out the Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor-X 1GB graphics card to see how this popular AMD Radeon graphics processor is performing under Linux.
In my experience, earlier OpenShot versions were somewhat unreliable, but most of the functionality was there. Effects worked as expected for the most part, and while the interface was a bit awkward to work with at times, most of what the application was offering was there to be used. Having said so, my main problem with OpenShot was performance. Even when working with videos well below HD quality, the application would choke on them. Simply trying to add a single audio track to a single video track was a nightmare, for the preview render would be useless, thus leaving me editing blind.
Nothing on any other platform even begins to approach the raw power of the Amarok media player. Not even close. Scripts, add-ons, smart playlists, Amarok provides the kind of jukebox experience that actually made me want to switch to Linux full time years ago. I was using Linux back then anyway, but when I first saw everything Amarok could do…there was NO contest. The only thing lacking is access to a mainstream music store. Alternative artists are well supported here though.
GTimelog is a simple task-tracking tool that doesn’t make you adjust your own work habits in order to conform to the way it works. It’s not exactly pretty to look at — there isn’t much going on in the GUI department. But it’s easy to learn, and for users who want to maintain strict control over a time-management app, its lack of full automation is actually an asset.
I’ve been writing about SSDs for awhile now. It’s a cool technology that has great potential. However, given the universal law of TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”) there are some trade-offs in the design of SSDs. One of the ways to better address some of the trade-offs is to put more compute power or more capability into the SSD controller. But even this idea is a trade-off (TANSTAAFL again).
After investigating the work being done on KBibTeX a few months ago, we turn our attention to Kile, KDE’s LaTeX and TeX editor. LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system built on top of the typesetting system TeX. It is frequently used for scientific publications as an alternative to word processors.
GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
Gnome is going for a major makeover with version 3 which will hit this summer. There is a lot of talk around the new Gnome Shell 3 which will redefine the user interface for Gnome, the way KDE did with KDE 4.x. Gnome Shell 3 and KDE 4x also show how progressive and innovative GNU/Linux based systems are as compared to Windows or Mac.
Coming back to Debian, our famous distribution seems to be slowly drifting toward invisibility. It’s not loosing relevance, since many important and popular distributions are based on Debian, but ever less people install Debian on their computer because they find a derived distribution that better fit their needs. Debian is becoming a sort of framework to build distributions where the invisible features like security, reliability, and coherence in licenses are ever more important.
Everywhere you look these days, there is a new device for sale designed to get music, movies, and entertainment to your TV without the hassle of old-fashioned delivery systems like cable or satellite. So when media-center maker Boxee announced last year that it was adding a Linux-based set-top hardware device to what used to be a software-only product, it took on a decidedly tougher market.
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But in addition to the design, the navigation itself is also improved. I’ve used several generations of Boxee on Linux, and previous versions fell into what I call arrow-key-traps — where you can use (for example) the right-arrow key to move the cursor into some particular menu, but then the left-arrow key can’t get you back out. MythTV themes are riddled with these problems. On the Boxee Box, the arrow keys always move the direction they look like they should, the “pause” button always pauses, and “menu” button always brings up the menu — even if what you’re currently doing is watching a Flash-powered video via the built-in browser.
The Small Form Factor Special Interest Group (SFF-SIG) has comes up with a ruggedized alternative to SO-DIMM that offers more flexibility in memory sizes compared to memory soldered to a CPU board. The RS-DIMM Rugged Memory Specification, supported by two upcoming Swissbit and Virtium Technology modules, defines a rugged, DDR3 mezzanine memory module with a pin-and-socket connector optimized for small CPU boards.
Seamless Software Updates is a term coined by Nokia to refer to the pain-free method of updating the OS of your Nokia Internet Devices like the N900.
With the company now defecting to the Windows camp, the maintenance of Maemo 5 has virtually fallen on the shoulders of the community. To enjoy continous updates of your OS from the Maemo Community, you’d need to install the Community Seamless Software Updates or CSSU.
Free Android apps are wonderful things. If you’re on the hunt for yet more free Android apps for your phone, here’s a list of 50 free apps you should consider.
1) SlideScreenThis app replaces your traditional home screen with one that shows summary information for SMS, Gmail, phone calls, Calendar, Google Reader, Stocks and Twitter, making seeing all your important information at once a snap.
Barnes and Noble launched the Nook Color last year with the aim of enabling a more interactive user experience and tighter Web integration than conventional e-book readers. The device’s color touchscreen and assortment of Internet-enabled applications help differentiate it from Amazon’s increasingly ubiquitous Kindle.
The Nook Color is an intriguing product, but its most compelling feature isn’t listed on the box. Beneath the e-book reader facade, the Nook Color runs Google’s powerful Android mobile operating system. Barnes and Noble intends to eventually expose more of the Nook’s Android functionality to end users in future updates, but Android enthusiasts have already gotten a head start.
Motorola made a splash with a big Super Bowl ad for this device, but this machine is also reportedly loaded and ready for enterprise use. Like the bigger Samsung, it will sport a 10.1 screen and run Google Honeycomb. At a reported price tag of $800, it’s going to be more expensive too. It could be available as soon as this week.
I believe no mobile OS could beat Android 3.0 Honeycomb at the moment. But since we haven’t seen the next version of iOS (to be released around Q2) yet, I will just keep my mouth shut and won’t make any comparison in the scope of operating system being used.
Google has announced the availability of the full SDK for Android 3.0. Good news for developers is that these APIs are final so they can start developing apps for this new platform. The new API level is 11.
The SDK has been timed well as Honeycomb running tablets are about to hit the market with Motorola Xoom leading the pack.
Frequently, Datamation puts together lists of top open source software. This time we’ve done something a little different and made a list of top open source Web sites.
Of course, literally thousands of sites and forums provide news and information about open source software. To narrow things done, we focused on sites that provide a lot of links of open source applications – the top places to download open source software.
Monday 21st February 2011 saw the first ‘Open Source System Integrators Forum’ held by the Cabinet Office and I’d like to share a few modest bits of news with you all…
Firstly, the occurrence of the event itself is news! The Cabinet Office assembled all the big System Integrators who make up the majority of UK Government and Public Sector IT spending, currently running at between £16billion to £21billion every year. I was there too, not due to the proportion of this spend which comes Sirius’ way I hasten to add, but simply to provide some Open Source expertise..
This conference has been designed by school leaders and others in the Open Source Schools’ community to showcase to school leadership teams the best of educational free and open source software, whether used alone or blended with proprietary software.
Todd Miller will be presenting at SCALE later this week on the latest developments in the upcoming SUDO 1.8 release. We took a moment to connect with him to learn about his work at Quest Software on the upcoming release, and his presentation “Extending Unix Command Control with Sudo 1.8″. Quest Software will be on our exhibit hall floor as well demonstrating their identify management solutions for Linux.
SCALE: For our readers who aren’t familiar with you, can you share a little about your background?
Todd Miller: I’ve contributed to various Open Source projects since the early 90s including Sendmail and ISC cron. I’ve been a member of the OpenBSD project since 1996, focusing primarily on the userland libraries and utilities. In a former life I was an upstream maintainer for the SELinux toolchain. I’m probably best known for maintaining Sudo for the past 18 years.
In this tutorial I will show you how to install multiple separate Firebird 2.1 servers on a single Host, lets just say you are short on budget and you want to have your testing/integration database running on the same environment as your production database, which is usually not preferable, but in some weird cases you find yourself needing such a setup. Or for instance you have a number of production environments and you want to have them a bit seperated from each other saying you want to be able to kill all open sessions of a certain production environment, sometimes this can be very useful but like I said usually you shouldn’t really do this. But anyways I was asked once to do exactly such a setup and I wanted to share my knowledge on how to do exactly this with Firebird 2.1, the same procedure should also be adaptable to other versions of Firebird as long as you want to use Classic Server. Mixing different version should also work cause the required libraries will all be isolated in single directories.
A contribution to The Foundation Document shall not be considered as a price for using LibreOffice. LibreOffice is free to use! But a contribution is to be considered as a recognition of the many volunteer hours that are being used around the world.
In Magenta we use LibreOffice, and we make money by providing service to our customers. Were it not for open source software – including OpenOffice and LibreOffice – we could not lift the tasks for our customers as we do. We have therefore chosen to donate an amount of money to The Document Foundation. Also because we think that LibreOffice is a healthy and reliable project.
OpenOffice.org math formulas can similarly be added to other document types including as Impress (like PowerPoint) and Draw (somewhat like Visio).
OpenOffice.org’s math editor is sufficient for math homework and casual math use, but if you are writing a scholarly paper, TeX is the de facto standard.
Bjoern Michaelsen from the Canonical’s development team managed to integrate Ubuntu’s 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) default office suite, LibreOffice 3.3, with Unity’s global menubar.
The Document Foundation write a post on their blog a couple of days ago, welcoming Canonical‘s contributions to the LibreOffice development. In particular they are welcoming Bjoern Michaelsen’s LibreOffice improvements.
A few minutes ago, The Document Foundation company launched the first maintenance release of the LibreOfficeb 3.3 open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms. LibreOffice 3.3.1 brings stability improvements, bug fixes and new colorful icons.
LibreOffice 3.3.1 is available now (see download links at the end of the article), for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, and ready to be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 operating system. It updates several language versions, it is much stable than the previous release, and it brings new colorful and beautiful icons based on company’s branding guidelines.
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 3.3.1, the first micro release which brings new colorful icons based on The Document Foundation branding guidelines, and includes updates to several language versions.
The long-awaited fourteenth release of WordPress is now available. WordPress 3.1 “Django” is named in honor of the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Version 3.1 is available for download, or you can update from within your dashboard.
The Open Compliance Program continues its mission of making it ever easier for companies to achieve compliance with FOSS license obligations. I am pleased to announce the publication of our sixth white paper, titled “Keys to Managing a FOSS Compliance Program,” which can be freely downloaded (along with all our other white papers) from the Linux Foundation’s publications website. Our new white paper examines the managerial practices needed to plan, coordinate, and control a successful compliance program. Managing a FOSS compliance initiative requires establishing a plan, gathering sufficient resources, allocating the resources where they will do the most good, tracking accomplishments to plan, adjusting the plan as needed, and so on. This white paper focuses on a handful of the critical project management techniques needed to assure a successful compliance outcome, namely resource estimation, progress tracking, metrics collection and analysis, and use of management tools.
Forget 24-hour news or sports: starting Feb. 28, it will be all chicken, all the time on channel 208 for Rogers digital subscribers in Ontario. At launch, the Rotisserie Channel will feature non-stop footage of glistening chickens turning on a spit.
First off, the crux of the story is that a guy named Dennis Montgomery seems to have concocted an elaborate con on the US government that worked for years. He created some software, supposedly originally designed to help colorize movies, but it was later pitched for its capability to (I’m not joking) read coded messages in the “crawl bar” on Al Jazeera which (it was claimed) provided clues to planned terrorist attacks. Various US government agencies basically kept handing over millions and millions of dollars to Mr. Montgomery and partners. Some of those former partners now admit that Montgomery’s technology was a hoax, and his presentations included doctored videos and test results.
In November the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its Program for International Student Assessment scores, measuring educational achievement in 65 countries. The results are depressingly familiar: While students in many developed nations have been learning more and more over time, American 15-year-olds are stuck in the middle of the pack in many fundamental areas, including reading and math. Yet the United States is near the top in education spending.
Using the OECD data, Figure 1 compares K–12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world’s major industrial powers. As you can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. spends the most in the world on education, an average of $91,700 per student in the nine years between the ages of 6 and 15. But the results do not correlate: For instance, we spend one-third more per student than Finland, which consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math.
Imagine strapping a giant rocket engine on the International Space Station (ISS), inflating a few balloon-like structures to hold your luggage, and adding a spinning carousel-wheel for artificial gravity.
This ungainly-sounding assemblage, dubbed Nautilus-X, (“Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States eXploration”) has been proposed by the NASA Technology Applications Assessment Team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The group is chartered with examining key technologies that can advance space exploration in a timely and affordable manner.
Chinese police staged a show of force yesterday to stifle a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution”, apparently echoing pro-democracy demonstrations in the Middle East.
But the campaign did not gain much traction among ordinary citizens and the chances of toppling the Communist government remain slim, considering Beijing’s tight controls over the media and the internet. Police detained known activists, increased the number of officers on the streets, disconnected some mobile phone texting services and censored internet postings about the call to stage protests in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other major cities. A student-led pro-democracy movement in 1989 was crushed by the military and hundreds – perhaps thousands – were killed.
The wife of the jailed Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo said she and her family are “hostages”, according to a friend. The comment is thought to be her first contact with the outside world for four months.
Supporters have been unable to reach Liu Xia since shortly after October’s announcement that her husband had won the award. It was initially thought she was under house arrest at the couple’s home in Beijing, but it is now believed she may be being held at her parents’ house.
Five undercover police officers from Germany were sent to the G8 protests in Gleneagles to infiltrate activist groups, German police have privately admitted.
The officers took orders from the UK’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), the secretive police division that employed Mark Kennedy to spy on activists across Europe, said Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany’s federal police.
Uganda’s long-serving President, Yoweri Museveni, has won another term in office, the country’s election commission said yesterday, but the main opposition leader claimed the vote was fraudulent and vowed to reject the results.
The electoral commission said Mr Museveni won 68 per cent of the votes cast in Friday’s poll, allowing him to extend his 25-year hold on power. The commission said challenger Kizza Besigye – the President’s former doctor – took 26 per cent of the vote. Badru Kiggundu, the electoral commission chairman, said 59 per cent of voters in the East African nation participated.
Palestinians are planning a “day of rage” on Friday in response to the US wielding its veto against a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
U.S. forces uncovered a gruesome scene Tuesday off the Somali coast: Four Americans who had been taken hostage by pirates aboard their yacht were shot fatally by their captors. That prompted a deadly U.S. response.
A raiding team came aboard the captive vessel Quest after pirates shot at U.S. forces from the yacht at about 1 a.m. local time. According to a statement from U.S. Central Command, the team killed two of the pirates, detained another 13 and found the corpses of two others, dead from a different incident. The command assessed that 19 pirates were involved in the capture of the Quest on Friday, though it’s not clear what happened to the final two.
A new survey – the first explicitly to compare US and Canadian attitudes to climate change – has found that Canadians are vastly more likely to believe in global warming.
[...]
The differences in opinion between the US and Canada are also reflected by people’s willingness to pay a bit more for renewable energy. Only 55 percent of Americans said they’d be prepared to pay an extra $50 per year, compared with 73 percent of Canadians.
More than one-fifth of Americans said they thought the Federal government had no responsibility at all to try to reduce global warming, compared with just eight percent in Canada.
The United Nations will call on Monday for 2% of worldwide income to be invested in the green economy, a move it says would boost jobs and economic growth.
The call is expected to be matched by statements of support for low-carbon investment from heads of state including President Barack Obama of the US and Hu Jintao of China, and several chiefs of multinational companies.
Nothing better shows corporate control over the government than Washington’s basic response to the current economic crisis. First, we had “the rescue”, then “the recovery”. Trillions in public money flowed to the biggest US banks, insurance companies, etc. That “bailed” them out (is it just me or is there a suggestion of criminality in that phrase?), while we waited for benefits to “trickle down” to the rest of us.
As usual, the “trickle-down” part has not happened. Large corporations and their investors kept the government’s money for themselves; their profits and stock market “recovered” nicely. We get unemployment, home-foreclosures, job benefit cuts and growing job insecurity. As the crisis hits states and cities, politicians avoid raising corporate taxes in favour of cutting government services and jobs – witness Wisconsin, etc.
David Cameron is to “completely change” public services, bringing in a “presumption” that private companies, voluntary groups or charities are as able to run schools, hospitals and many other council services as the state.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph about the plans, to be published in a white paper in the next fortnight, the prime minister says he is seeking to end the “state’s monopoly” over public services, with only the security forces and judiciary exempt.
I’m sort of amazed at the silly and childish political games being played concerning attempts to cut funding here and there, but, seriously can anyone give me a logical explanation why the same folks who are so quick to demand that we stop funding NPR and PBS are so vehemently in favor of sponsoring NASCAR?
Madison, Wisconsin — The Capital Times reported on Tuesday that Koch Industries had quietly opened a lobby shop in Madison. This news comes amid concerns about the influence of the company and the billionaire brothers who lead it ,and the bankrolling of multi-million dollar ad campaigns like the one that helped sweep controversial governor Scott Walker into office. The company’s political action committee was also one of the largest PAC donors to contribute directly to Walker’s election, giving his campaign $43,000, second only to the realtor PAC. Amid controversy swirling around a provision in the budget bill Walker introduced that would allow his administration to sell off state heating, cooling and power plants or their operations “for any amount” in no-bid contracts and without any external oversight, Koch Industries denied last night that it was interested purchasing power plants here to go along with its pipeline, refinery, and coal companies in the state.
Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor is getting ready to call a general strike if the state’s legislature passes Governor Scott Walker’s bill to curtail collective bargaining rights. The Federation, which represents 97 unions and more than 45,000 workers in six counties, on Monday voted to endorse work shut-downs by both union and non-union workers around the country if the bill passes and the governor signs it.
It’s midnight Monday. A quiet snow is falling outside the Wisconsin State Capitol, and clean-cut fire fighters are rolling out their sleeping bags and getting ready to sleep on hard marble floors with students who looked a bit shaggy after five nights of the same. Since Tuesday, February 15, tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents have been flooding the State Capitol in Madison in protest of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposed budget “repair” bill that would savage Wisconsin’s 50-year history of collective bargaining for state, county and municipal workers. Tuesday, February 22 will be a critical day in the fight. The Wisconsin Assembly will take up the bill, introducing over 100 amendments, starting at 11:00 a.m. and the Republicans in the Senate will attempt to lure their Democratic colleagues back into the state from their undisclosed location by scheduling votes on the bill the Democrats deplore. (Watch floor action on the Wisconsin Eye website).
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did not campaign for office calling for the destruction of public unions, but a closer look at his past actions shows that he acted rashly toward union workers before, with disastrous and costly results.
In early 2010, when Walker was Milwaukee County Executive, he fired 26 union security guards who worked at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. They were public employees and were represented by a union, but he fired them anyway, in favor of hiring private security guards. The county board opposed Walker’s security-outsourcing move, but he pressed ahead with it anyway, claiming the action was needed due to a budget crisis, to help ameliorate a potential 2010 year-end deficit of around $7 million. After firing the guards, Walker hired private security contractor Wackenhut G4S to provide security services at the Courthouse, as well as two other venues in the county, under a $1.1 million contract.
Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill effectively dismantles over 50 years of public sector collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. While bill supporters have obscured the reasons that hundreds of thousands have been protesting (acting as if the controversy is really about pension and healthcare contributions rather than union-busting, and claiming the fiscal gaps created by Walker’s tax cuts leave the state with no choice but to crush unions), others recognize the attack on collective bargaining rights but nonetheless support it as applied to taxpayer-funded public servants. Should public sector workers be allowed to organize?
This morning, Mother Jones reported that Jeff Cox, an Indiana deputy attorney general, had called for using “live ammunition” against Wisconsin protesters. Cox’s bosses have issued a statement noting that they are conducting an “immediate review” of the prolific tweeter and blogger and that the state attorney general will take “appropriate personnel action” when the review of the “serious matter” is complete.
It turned out that lawyer, Jeff Cox, is a deputy attorney general in the state. And — perhaps unsurprisingly — he’s left a long online trail of controversial statements and diktats.
“[A]gainst thugs physically threatening legally-elected state legislators & governor?” he tweeted back at Weinstein. “You’re damn right I advocate deadly force.”
Six days ago he opined, “Planned Parenthood could help themselves if the only abortions they performed were retroactive.”
And on his personal blog, Pro Cynic (now deleted), he compared former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich to a Nazi, and concluded that George W. Bush’s words to the Iraqi people — “Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country” — are appropriate for citizens of America under Barack Obama, among other inflammatory statements.
This fits squarely with what the American government has been saying about the importance of open communications platforms to the cause of democracy. Yet the inspiring words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are seemingly at odds with other administration and legislative efforts to expand the government’s powers to combat intellectual property infringement. (The Department of Homeland Security has its ICE web domain takedowns; there’s also a bill in Congress that would expand Department of Justice powers to do much the same.)
A year ago, a lot of folks were quite surprised when a court ruled that the federal government had violated wiretapping laws with its warrantless wiretapping campaign. The government had fought hard against the lawsuit at every turn, and went to ridiculous lengths to stall and even ignore the judge. The whole case revolved around the one situation in which the government revealed that it was wiretapping some people without the required warrant. Previous lawsuits over the program had been dropped, because without specific evidence from someone being spied on, no one actually had standing to sue. Yes, this is a bit Kafkaesque when you think about it. Basically, so long as the government keeps its illegal spying activity secret from those it’s spying on, no one can take legal action to stop it.
Alaska State Rep Sharon Cissna, a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy, was barred from flying home to Juneau from Seattle by the TSA when she refused to allow a screener to touch the scars from her operation.
Fed up with what he views as crappy treatment from the TSA, the owner of a restaurant near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has decided to put all TSA agents on his No-Eat List.
“We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren’t allowed to come into our business,” one employee tells travel journalist Christopher Elliott. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone.”
The Obama administration is appealing the first — and likely only — lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless-surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.
A San Francisco federal judge in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their attorneys $2.5 million for the costs of litigating the case for more than four years.
Last week, the CRTC called for comments on whether it should expand the scope of its Review of Usage Based Billing (more formally known as: Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2011-77: Review of billing practices for wholesale residential high-speed access services).
Vint Cerf takes his title of Chief Internet Evangelist for Google seriously, and is knee-deep in several projects to bring the next versions of the Internet into being. These projects include pushing for worldwide IPv6 adoption, but they don’t include plans for an IPv7.
Cerf sat down with Network World’s Cisco Subnet editor, Julie Bort, at the annual Digital Broadband Migration conference in Boulder, Colo., to discuss the future of IP, home networking, the Internet of Things, preventing the so-called Internet “kill switch,” and other topics. Here is part one of the edited interview.
The parties in SCEA v. Hotz have conferred and now have sent a 17-page joint letter to the Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero, informing him that certain disputes about jurisdictional discovery have been resolved but others need his intervention.
The Documentary Organization of Canada appeared before the C-32 committee last week and gave a strong presentation on the need for anti-circumvention exception for fair dealing, noting that the current approach raises free speech concerns
A European Parliament majority this week approved a free trade agreement with Korea with strong provisions on intellectual property rights protection, according to Robert Stury, rapporteur of the lead EP Committee on the dossier.
The FTA, linked here, and welcomed by the conservative, socialist and liberal parties, carries expectations of creating new trade in goods and services worth €19.1 billion for the EU and save EU exporters €1.6 billion a year. It is the first of a series of FTAs passed under the Lisbon Treaty with additional scrutiny from the EU Parliament.
So I was interested a few weeks ago when Michael Weinberg, a lawyer at Public Knowledge, put up a discussion about whether or not there was an IP violation in doing 3D printings of Catan pieces. He explained why there actually was no actual violations there. In reading that, I realized that most of the same arguments would apply to software as well… and like magic, someone popped up in the comments to that post, noting that he had written an Android clone of Catan, and their lawyers had forced it down. Weinberg has now written a detailed explanation of why the lawyers for Catan are flat-out wrong and are abusing intellectual property law to stifle competition.
He has armed himself with an unwritten secret recipe that he claims allows him to fry the best bird in town. His main weapon, he says, is ownership of the trademark for the Kennedy Fried Chicken brand, which has spawned hundreds of imitators as far south as Georgia, and has become to oily drumsticks what the ubiquitous Ray’s name once was to New York pizza.
That Kennedy, named after the former president, was itself a deliberate imitation of Kentucky Fried Chicken, down to those familiar initials — and that it had its own trademark battle a generation ago — seems to make little difference to Mr. Haye, 38. A wired and wiry resident of Whitestone, Queens, he began working as a chicken fryer when he was 17, soon after he immigrated in 1989, and describes his rivals with ire similar to that he reserves for the Taliban.
Listen—do you hear that creaking sound? Don’t be too alarmed. It’s only the coffin lid slowly closing on your ability to get high-definition video via the analog component-video connections on your Blu-ray player.
After decades of effort, Hollywood is finally “plugging the analog hole,” as it’s inelegantly been called, thanks to new restrictions imposed by the licensing administrator for the AACS, the copy-protection scheme used in Blu-ray players.
Dodd’s hiring comes after reports that several candidates turned down the chance to represent Hollywood on K Street.
[...]
But the MPAA is optimistic about its legislative prospects this Congress, thanks to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last year before stalling in the full Senate.
The MPAA is among the strongest supporters of the legislation, which would give the Justice Department expedited authority to shut down domains found trafficking in counterfeit or pirated content.
TorrentFreak is noting that Google has, perhaps for the first time, waded into any of the lawsuits concerning torrent search engines, filing an amicus brief in the ongoing IsoHunt appeal. In the past, other torrent search engines have been somewhat upset that Google has stayed quiet, noting that many of the arguments used against them could equally apply to Google. Google, of course, has stayed away because it goes to great lengths these days to avoid any appearance of “supporting piracy.”
A child pornography investigation led to the unintentional temporary shutdown of thousands of lawfully operating Web sites last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed.
Three months after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission told MuchMusic it can’t air fewer music videos than it already does, the same federal agency has denied a request to play more of them on a cable music channel that’s become a launching pad for dozens of independent Canadian artists.
The CRTC ruled last week that AUX TV, a specialty music channel owned by GlassBox Television, can’t allow music videos to account for more than 35 per cent of its broadcast content under its current licence because that could make AUX “directly competitive” with MuchMusic.
We were among many different commentators who mocked the recent op-ed in the NY Times by Authors Guild boss (and best selling novelist) Scott Turow, in which he seemed to suggest that to incentivize the next Shakespeare, the world needs much stronger copyright laws. The day after that op-ed was published, Turow was at the Senate speaking out in favor of censorship in the form of the COICA law. This is somewhat startling, and if you’re a member of the Authors Guild, you should be asking serious questions about an organization that supports censorship.
Adding Sarah Palin to any event makes it bigger, more high profile and, for one restaurant owner in Manhattan, more litigious.
Padriac Sheridan wanted to draw customers into his restaurant, Murphy & Gonzalez, on Waverly Place near NYU, by showing the 2008 Vice Presidential debate, featuring Palin and Senator Joe Biden.
[...]
On September 13, 2010, Sheridan received a letter from an attorney representing a company claiming that Sheridan’s web site stole their photograph of Palin, and they wanted him to pay for it.
The thing is, the more I read the details, the more I actually think that ivi’s legal argument makes sense, even if the court disagrees. The problem here is the way the laws are written. A strict reading of Section 111 certainly suggests that ivi probably qualifies and can rebroadcast network TV with a nominal payment to the Copyright Office.
Resumen: La Unión Europea toma la pendiente resbaladiza de la aplicación excesiva, mientras que Microsoft se vuelve más militante sobre las patentes.
El presidente de la FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre) nos advirtió a principios de este mes en el que la Unión Europea parece tener previsto tipificar como delito violaciónes de patentes y en la actualidad la FFII nos muestra este documento titulado “Hacia una más eficaz aplicación de sanciones penales de los derechos de propiedad intelectual”[http://register.consilium.europa.eu/servlet/driver?page=Result&typ=Advanced&cmsid=639&fc=REGAISEN&srm=25&md=100&lang=EN&ff_DOCKEY=%22ST18259/10ORI%22]. Para el tratamiento de las infracciones como un delito sería absolutamente irracional y hasta peligrosa. Y aquí es otra historia escandalosa de patentes[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110216/02040613124/lawsuit-claims-miller-high-life-loyalty-program-infringes-patent.shtml]:
Si por supuesto, donde “evidentes” y “Internet” se encuentran, casi siempre hay patentes en el camino. Mike Wokasch nos alerta sobre la noticia de que una empresa llamada Carlson Marketing Worldwide está demandando a la cervecera MillerCoors más de su “Programa de Lealtad High Life Miller Extras.” La patente en cuestión, 6.039.244 es muy corta … y amplia, y abarca una forma de crear una base de datos para un programa de fidelización. Es sólo tres reclamaciones de largo, con la primera reivindicación de ser el único que importa. Lea que dicen y explicar cómo esta patente se encontró nunca a ser de fiar.
Las patentes son la forma más baja de la competencia. Ellos son los falsos “productos” que las empresas utilizan cuando pierden. Los mobbyists de Microsoft está golpeando duro con el caso de Oracle contra Android que sigue adelante sin un acuerdo alcanzado[http://www.itpro.co.uk/631294/oracle-vs-google-java-case-to-continue]. Microsoft Mientras tanto parece estar atras de las patentes de Nokia[http://techrights.org/2011/02/22/toxic-swpats-tactics_ES/ (ver también [1[http://techrights.org/2011/02/13/microsoft-boosters-love-nokia-microsoft/], 2[http://techrights.org/2011/02/11/elop-pours-gasoline/], 3[http://techrights.org/2011/02/14/legal-action-and-nokia/], 4[http://techrights.org/2011/02/15/nokia-swpats-strategy/]]) para más ataques contra Android (especulativo en esta etapa) y además de que existen las patentes de Novell en CPTLN (acuerdo no retirado, en contra a las reclamaciones que el video demuestra a continuación[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1uaHAGhcQo]). Como un resumen, véase:
* CPTLN Muestra Microsoft convertirse en un agitador de Patentes Al igual que Kodak, cuyo tiempo pasó[http://techrights.org/2010/12/20/kodak-and-microsoft-strategy/]
* El Cartel de Microsoft se retira de Patentes Después de denuncia oficial, pero ¿Por qué? (Actualizado)[http://techrights.org/2011/01/11/cartels-and-escapes/]
* Cartel de Microsoft de Patentes (CPTLN) Esquiva la Oficina Federal de Cárteles de Alemania[http://techrights.org/2011/01/13/germany-investigation-hindered/]
* Orndorff Benjamín de Microsoft / Gates y Ellis Representa el Cartel CTPN Patentes[http://techrights.org/2011/01/19/hard-evidence-re-cptn/]
* OIN es muy diferente de CPTLN y Riesgo UNIX es Revisited[http://techrights.org/2011/01/19/cptn-and-attachmsft-over-unix/]
* En defensa de la OIN y Android[http://techrights.org/2011/01/21/why-oin-and-android-are-good/]
* SCO, CPTLN, y UNIX[http://techrights.org/2011/01/22/unix-safe-hands/]
* De las Batallas UNIX a las Batallas NET[http://techrights.org/2011/01/26/reasons-to-sue-linux/]
* Fundación para el Software Libre en la Declaración de Microsoft/Novell/Ataque de Patentes CPTLN contra la Libertad de Software[http://techrights.org/2011/02/05/fsf-re-novell-swpats/]
* Un Punto de vista Paralegal en las últimas de Microsoft contra Google (y la Lucha contra el software libre)[http://techrights.org/2011/02/05/fsf-re-novell-swpats/]
* Novell Acumula más Patentes de Software, Alimentando a un falso Sistema[http://techrights.org/2011/02/21/more-swpats-novell-utah/]
En el próximo post vamos a tratar con el triste estado de Microsoft en el mercado móvil. Lo único que queda son las patentes y que también es una batalla que esta perdiendo. █
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
Example of abysmal service at the EPO, where high staff turnover and unreasonable pressure from above may be leading to communication issues that harm stakeholders the most
Battistelli's circle (or "Team Battistelli") is starting to disintegrate, perhaps in anticipation of a tough year full of new leaks ("WillyLeaks" as some put it)
In light of Trump's awkward history with judges (e.g. attacking them) one can hope that upcoming patent cases at the highest court won't be affected by his pro-big corporations agenda
Free/Open Source software (FOSS), which encourages sharing, is increasingly becoming infested or subjected to software patents barbwire, courtesy of those who want to monopolise rather than share
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), led by David Ruschke, continues to function as another 'layer' that ensures patent quality by weeding out bad patents and here are some of the latest cases
Nokia's saber-rattling (and now lawsuits) against Apple are a worrying sign of what's to come, impacting Android OEMs as well as Apple, which is why the post-Microsoft Nokia is dangerous
Now is the time for Australian software developers to explain to their government that they don't want any software patents, otherwise their voices will be hijacked by a bunch of law firms that totally misrepresent them
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