04.28.09
Posted in Google, Law, Microsoft at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s involvement in US policy-making is worth attention
THE CURRENT US ADMINISTRATION appears to be carrying on with the policy of letting industry run the country, be it the RIAA/MPAA [1-12] or in this latest case — Microsoft. Obama-Microsoft proximity is an issue we’ve already covered in [1, 2, 3], but to be fair, Google too is in there [1, 2] (although it is not an abusive monopolist).
Watch out for other jaw-dropping appointments or advisories. When policy is driven primarily or exclusively by big corporations, it’s real trouble. █
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[1] Joe Biden promises a blank check to the entertainment cartel
VP Joe Biden stood up in front of a bunch of Hollywood execs and promised to appoint a copyright czar, and furthermore, that this would be the “right” person to protect their interests. I would have voted Dem in the last election, if I got a vote, but make no mistakes: the Dems are the party of stupid copyright laws.
[2] Administration Lobbyist Ban Not Doing What It’s Supposed To Do
We’ve already seen how the Justice Department is, for example, being filled with lawyers who regularly worked with the RIAA, MPAA and BSA — three of the biggest copyright lobbying organizations, and those individuals have wasted no time in expressing their desire to continue pushing those industry’s viewpoints in their new positions.
[3] Copyright debate heats up over Obama appointments
The president has, in fact, filled out some high-level Justice Department positions with lawyers favored by the copyright industry, including attorneys who have represented the Recording Industry Association of America and the Business Software Alliance. The signatories of the April 2 letter said the Justice Department’s intervention last month in favor of a record label in a file-sharing case heightens their concern.
[4] Biden promises ‘right person’ as new U.S. copyright czar
“It’s pure theft, stolen from the artists and quite frankly from the American people as consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income,” Biden said, according to a White House pool report.
[5] MPAA reaches out to lawmakers
The occasion: the second biennial summit sponsored by the industry’s chief lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
[6] I got you, babe
Obama is whistling the music industry’s tune
[7] Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept.
President Barack Obama is tapping another RIAA attorney into the Justice Department.
Monday’s naming of Ian Gershengorn, to become the department’s deputy assistant attorney of the Civil Division, comes more than a week after nearly two-dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions urged the new president to quit filling his administration with lawyers plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America.
The move makes it five RIAA lawyers Obama has appointed to the Justice Department.
[8] Obama administration sides with RIAA in P2P suit
The Obama administration has sided with the recording industry in a copyright lawsuit against an alleged peer-to-peer pirate, a move that echoes arguments previously made by the Bush administration.
[9] Obama Sides With RIAA, Supports $150,000 Fine per Music Track
[10] U.S. Sides with RIAA in Filesharing Case
[11] Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets?!?
When the Obama administration took over, there was a public stance that this administration was going to be more transparent — especially with regards to things like Freedom of Information Act requests. The nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International took that to heart and filed an FOIA request to get more info on ACTA. The US Trade Representative’s Office responded denying the request, saying that the information was “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.” This is a treaty about changing copyright law, not sending missiles somewhere. To claim that it’s a national security matter is just downright scary. As KEI points out, the text of the documents requested have been available to tons of people, including more than 30 governments around the world and lobbyists from the entertainment industry, pharma industry and publishing industry.
[12] Obama names Doerr, Phillips to economic board
Two Silicon Valley leaders have been appointed by President Obama to a 16-person committee that’s charged with offering economic advice during what has become an unusually sharp and deep recession.
John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, is one. Doerr was involved in funding companies including Google, Amazon.com, Sun Microsystems, and Cypress Semiconductor; he currently serves on the board of companies including Amazon and Google and has recently turned his attention to green tech.
Charles Phillips, the president of Oracle, is another. Phillips became president in May 2003 and previously was with Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Division. He’s a Linux aficionado and said in 2005: “On demand is the future of software for many years to come and we are building it on Linux.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A Dutch university has landed a European Research Council grant to continue work on a Unix-type operating system that aims to be more reliable and secure than Linux or Microsoft Windows.
The €2.5 million (US$3.3 million) grant will fund three researchers and two programmers, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands.
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It’s this attribute that appeals to programmer Mark Seaborn, a non-Google programmer who has successfully contributed to the project. He’s been working on a Native Client version of a major supporting library used by GNU and Linux. “That could bring open-source software from GNU/Linux to a wider audience, because it could then run on Windows under NaCl without needing to be ported to Windows,” Seaborn said.
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According to Wolski, prospective cloud buyers were looking for self service and automation as well as protection from unexpected deployment and storage costs. Eucalyptus, built from commodity Linux components, currently has a services and consulting model but plans to offer premium enterprise products.
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The Linux version of Boxee’s eponymously-named multimedia platform has finally been updated to include several new features introduced into the OS X and Windows versions over the past few months. Key additions include an “App Box” and restored support for Hulu.
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Kernel Space
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The software loaded easily on the Mac and I was able to get the Linux machines on speaking terms with the printer quickly. With a bit of trepidation, I approached the Windows XP machine. I looked at it, it looked at me. Neither of us was looking forward to an ordeal loading the HP software.
Although I had loads of trouble with HP’s software for the other printers, Loading the Officejet Pro 8500 software took only about 20 minutes. Only one problem was experienced with the procedure. The registration software wouldn’t work with Firefox, my primary Browser on all of my systems. It insisted that I use Internet Explorer 7. Since that software isn’t available on all of the other systems in use here, it has not been loaded on any of the systems.
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The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.
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Intel’s Eric Anholt has announced the release of version 1.0.0 for the intel-gpu-tools package.
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Applications
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A few early screenshots of Alien Arena 2009 can be found on their project web-site. So far it does look like the graphics have improved a fair amount compared to the 2008 release, but we shall see once it is released. Let’s hope that more open-source game projects continue to refine their graphics capabilities.
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KDE
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According to the official announcement, the next release will be more suitable for general use, and this one is intended for testing purposes only, it’s just a preview.
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Not too many releases this week, but we do have the big Jaunty release that resulted in quite a few other releases.
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That’s not the case with the other sort of Sugar. Sugar, the kid-friendly open source desktop that was featured first on the OLPC XO laptop is now available (in a beta release) as a liveUSB image. The Sugar on a Stick environment is powered by Fedora 11 and features familiar Sugar desktop applications and functions, as well as new educational and collaborative tools, such as the InfoSlicer online content editor, remixer, and delivery application.
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Italian embedded vendor QSD Sistemi is shipping a single-board computer (SBC) that runs uClinux on a Freescale Coldfire MCF5329 system-on-chip (SoC). The Q129 board ships with a choice of 5.7- or 7-inch touchscreen displays, and provides Ethernet, USB, serial, and CAN-bus connectivity, says the company.
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Phones
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Last fall, T-Mobile became the first wireless provider to offer a handset based on Google’s Android platform: the T-Mobile G1. And the world rejoiced. Now, some six months after that debut, Samsung has jumped in the game with its own Android offering.
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Sub-notebooks
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Intel has started turning its supply priority of Atom processors to second-tier and China-based vendors hoping to clear inventory, added the sources.
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There is no “magic” to commons-based peer production. Most of the techniques that have brought free culture products ranging from software to art to electronic hardware have been in play for hundreds or thousands of years. But they do run counter to the patterns of commercial proprietary industry. Due to the massive improvements in communications and authoring technology, we have reached a point where we can be more productive in our “leisure” than we are in our “work”. And any labor of love is almost always going to be superior to labor alone.
[...]
Yet, the commons-based organization of the community, as exemplified by Wikipedia, shows up their productivity. GNU and Linux easily exceed their quality standards. Free arts may well exceed their artistic scope. In a few short years, the commons-based enterprise has out-produced centuries of corporate and government production.
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When James Turnbull had his first look at the Puppet configuration management system two years ago, he had no inkling of the extent to which he would get involved in the project.
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Funding
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In other words, using OSS isn’t about being anti-Microsoft or believing in some sort of open-source ethical rightfulness, using OSS is simply a smart business move. Indeed, at $387-billion in value, OSS is twice as valuable as Microsoft’s current net worth of $183.5-billion. Not bad for ‘free software’ is it?
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In addition to direct donations to this cause, community members can help support all of the Linux Fund sponsored projects by applying for a Linux Fund Visa credit card. As a card holder each purchase you make will contribute to funding development of open source software.
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Government
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FOSSFA and OSIWA, in their Free and Open Source Software for West Africa and Beyond (FOSSWAY) project are set to invest in FOSS research in West Africa. In the recently published Call for Tender both organisations are awarding a research contract up to the tune of 65 000 US dollars for a Study to be carried out in five West African Countries.
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Companies, agencies, and organizations are interested in — and exploring — their open source options. The timing is falling into place, and there’s now, obviously, a demand — and a great opportunity — for those offering open source support services.
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Licensing
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In general, of all the aspects of OSS that are interesting (and there are many), I find the GPL family of licenses as the brightest examples of law engineering, and I believe that a substantial reason for the successes of OSS are dependent on it. Of course, there are other economical aspects that are relevant, and I agree with the fact that OSS is in general more efficient (as I wrote here, here and here). I disagree with both the premise and the conclusions, however, as I believe that the set of barriers created by the GPL are vital to create a sustainable market here and now, and not in an hypotetical future.
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The iMagic OS weird EULA
“You may not (and shall not allow any member of Your Household or any other third party to): (i) copy, reproduce, distribute, relicense, sublicense, rent, lease or otherwise make available the Software or any portion or element thereof except as and to the extent expressly authorized herein by Licensor; (ii) translate, adapt, enhance, create derivative works of or otherwise modify the Software or any portion or element thereof; (iii) decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer (except as and to the extent permitted by applicable local law), or extract ideas, algorithms, procedures, workflows or hierarchies from, the Software or any portion or element thereof; (iv) use the Software or any portion or element thereof to provide facility management, service bureau or similar services to third parties; or (v) remove, modify or obscure any identification or proprietary or restrictive rights markings or notices from the Software or any component thereof. You shall keep a current record of the location of each copy of the Software You make.”
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Open (But No Source Code)
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My talk is “Open Semantic Data in Science”. I’ll probably write 3-4 blog posts on the various aspects of this, and at present I’m thinking of:
* What is Open? (this post)
* What is semantic? And what do we require for it?
* What is data?
* What are we able to offer (with some modest emphasis on our own endeavours).
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Identifying corruption, says Swartz, requires more than a mere re-arrangement of data rows; data is just a veil – and usually useless at that -to more sinister activities – lunches with lobbyists and voting under emergency provisions – which almost never show up in official voting records that are being digitized and scrapped by Sunlight and its grantees (this is what Swartz means by “reality doesn’t live in databases”).
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Programming
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JavaME is on almost every phone, Sun has traditionally gotten revenues from support contracts for it, and there is much work going on on JavaFX mobile applications. In acquiring Sun, Oracle will also acquire quite a lot of Java momentum on mobile platforms–a space where it has had nearly no presence in the past.
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Applications
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Even with full details on BIND 10 missing, ISC sketched out some cornerstones of its design. One among them is that BIND 10 will support DNSSEC. Many security experts called for higher security measures as a critical Internet infrastructure for DNS after they publicized holes in the protocol.
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The latest nightlies of upcoming Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 now feature a new option in the History menu to restore recently closed windows and not only individual tabs as in previous versions.
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The developers have announced the first release candidate for Blender version 2.49. Blender is a free, cross-platform, open source, 3D content creation suite that allows users to model, shade, animate and render 3D objects.
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Standards/Consortia
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Can anyone tell me what OOXML is for, other than for opening legacy Microsoft documents? What else is it for? When would you choose OOXML and when would you choose ODF, if you were, let’s say, a government or a government agency?
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Rick Jelliffe recently said that OOXML “is fundamentally intended to document a format for a pre-existing technology and feature set of recent proprietary systems.”
Gulp. How is that a proper purpose for an “open” standard?
Well, leave that aside for the moment. Let’s assume that you are a government or an agency and you really want to make sure all citizens can access documents and interface with them, including GNU/Linux users and Microsoft users? Then when would you use one or the other?
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Indeed, both the music and book publishing businesses are pushing for P2P sites to be included in the DNS block list to prevent anyone in Germany accessing them.
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Here we go again: German book publishers are tying to force local ISPs to block Rapidshare and similar websites through a controversial new Internet censorship bill. The bill, which received the backing of the German government two days ago, is meant to crack down on child porn with a centralized DNS block list that would include 1500 or so illegal child porn websites.
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Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.
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The Home Office has been accused of colluding with online ad firm Phorm on “informal guidance” to the public on whether the company’s service is legal.
E-mails between the ministry and Phorm show the department asking if the firm would be “comforted” by its position.
The messages show Phorm making changes to the guidance sought by the ministry.
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Copyrights
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Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls “Pirate Bay for textbooks”.
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Lawyers who helped prosecute The Pirate Bay have become the latest targets in an internet backlash over the decision to jail the site’s founders.
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While all eyes were on the Pirate Bay trial, Swedish parliament passed the IPRED law, making it easier for copyright holders to go after illicit file-sharers . The law has only been in effect for one month and anti-piracy outfits are already facing problems using it, as ISPs take measures to protect their customers.
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The MPAA said there was no fair use defense to copying personal CDs. The MPAA presented that argument as it demanded a federal judge to continue barring sales of a DVD copying software that RealNetworks briefly put on the market last year. The MPAA also said RealDVD was based on the work of Ukrainian hackers.
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A federal judge overseeing the approval process for the Google Book Search settlement has rejected an attempt by the Internet Archive (IA) to intervene in the action. In a short ruling released today, Judge Dennis Chin wrote that he construed the IA’s letter to the court, filed last week, as “a motion to intervene,” and denied it. “The proposed interveners are, however, free to file objections to the proposed settlement.” Objections and comments must be filed by May 5.
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Via Boing Boing comes this link to a NY Times article from 1897 (yes, you read that right, not 1987) about the struggle of the music industry against “pirates” (you can see the original via the NY Times site here).
Natasha Humphries on globalization and job security with Free Open Source Software 11 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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04.27.09
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 6:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Windows XP, Vista 7, and OpenSUSE lose to Ubuntu
FOR A WINDOWS user, there is no decent place to turn. On the one hand there is Vista, which is detested even by some of the most avid fans of Windows; then there is Windows XP, which continues to have problems, the latest example being the following intriguing report:
“XP SP3 Doesn’t Play Nice with Heavy I/O Operations on NTFS Volumes”
Windows XP fails to play nice with heavy I/O operations occurring on volumes formatted with the NTFS file system, Microsoft informed. According to the Redmond company, the issue is related to the “Compress drive to save disk space” option. The software giant did not offer an explanation of the problems, but indicated that both Service Pack 3 and SP2 for Windows XP were affected. Post-XP releases of the Windows client, including
Windows Vista and Windows 7 are not impacted by the issue.
Why is Vista 7 even named? It does not exist as a product. In fact, according to today’s report from SJVN, Microsoft’s artificial scarcity stunts for Vista 7 have not died out. He explains why:
It’s funny that some people actually think that anyone is “pirating” Windows 7 betas. It’s clear that Microsoft is deliberately leaking them to build up buzz around the new operating system. Don’t believe me? Then why does Microsoft give away free authentication keys that will let any copy of Windows 7 work? If the company didn’t want those copies of Windows 7 out there, it wouldn’t do that. This tactic is fairly subtle: By making people work — but not too hard — to get copies of Windows 7, Microsoft is leading them to believe that they’re onto something special.
Where to turn then? When XP is old and deficient, Vista is considered a train wreck, and Vista 7 is still alpha-grade vapourware, one can upgrade to GNU/Linux. But as the following new review probably suggests, SUSE is no ideal escape route from Windows and Microsoft.
Ubuntu 9.04 Review – Desktop Emphasis on the Jaunty Jackalope
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This is the Distro. The Distro that has finally won me over from the SUSE camp. The swaying points were the theme, stability and speed.
To put it in better words, this distro takes over from openSUSE as my primary distro. At least, until SUSE 11.2.
This is an inspiring story which shows that Novell’s SUSE fails to capture an audience. Obedience to Novell and Microsoft is still low and ISV support will accordingly degrade (for SLE*). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reasons to keep Windows out of the hospital; botnets without solution within sight
FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW we have been keeping track of the effect of Conficker on (Windows in) hospitals. Here is a not-so-shocking new discovery that the number of affected hospitals cannot be disclosed.
The Conficker worm infected several hundred machines and critical medical equipment in an undisclosed number of U.S. hospitals recently, a security expert said on Thursday in a panel at the RSA security conference.
Some named hospitals have already been struck by Conficker. For example we have:
Will this ever end? That’s highly doubtful. “The fight against botnets is largely ineffective,” exclaims the headline of this new article from Heise.
Stewart believes that the cunningly decentralised peer-to-peer structure of the Whaledac and Conficker botnets is the result of the earlier conspicuous switching off of some C&C servers.
It is very irresponsible to use a platform that is so routinely hijacked simply because it's designed to permit intrusion. █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft embraces but quickly extinguishes features or services
A few days ago we wrote about last week's closures/cancellations at Microsoft. More such missteps carry on appearing and here is the latest:
Microsoft ditches Live Search product upload tool
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The firm confirmed to users that the tool, which was used by retailers to get their products into Microsoft’s search database, had been discontinued late last week.
Following Microsoft’s exceptionally poor results [1, 2], SJVN’s column has inspired an article which states that “Microsoft is history” although it’s obviously an exaggeration.
PC WORLD’S Steven Vaughan-Nichols has claimed that Microsoft’s recent 32 per cent drop in earnings is the beginning of the end for the software giant.
For more details, check out this summary/roundup which is titled “Microsoft’s worst third quarter ever.” █
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