04.14.15
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Windows at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Pretending to be a journalist, actually a Microsoft ‘asset’
Todd Bishop meets his maker
Summary: Microsoft’s attempt to assimilate (to confuse) bears some fruit and the Microsoft-linked media plays a considerable role in it
SOME READERS of ours, commenting on a recent headline, were not yet familiar with the term Google bomb, which was mentioned here over the weekend. When we say that Microsoft is “Googlebombing” (iophk’s interpretation of it) we mean to say that it is trying to make proprietary software come up (highly ranked) in search results for “open source”. It’s rebranding or reinvention by confusion and ambiguity.
Microsoft’s booster Todd Bishop (we have written a lot about him over the years, including financial support from Microsoft) continues this ugly campaign by openwashing a Windows font (yes, font!). Well, to be accurate, this font isn’t even a part of Windows, but it doesn’t prevent Bishop, who literally meets and chats with the highest-ranked Microsoft officials (like Brad Smith the other day), from spreading these misleading headlines in Microsoft-linked media, only to be repeated by other Microsoft boosting Web sites.
“It’s rebranding or reinvention by confusion and ambiguity.”We have grown rather tired of seeing Microsoft’s reckless and shameless attempts to associate itself with the competition. That’s how Microsoft hopes to devour the competition. We were disappointed to see complicity — not merely a waste of space — in Linux Journal today. It’s about .NET. Linux Journal is labeling it “FOSS” despite the reality which very is different, as explained here repeatedly before. Those who insist that Microsoft .NET is “Open Source” should try to fork it (not possible), then redistribute. Good luck with the patents. Phoronix also helped the openwashing of .NET a day or so ago. Microsoft is using other people’s code to openwash .NET, so Michael Larabel jumped into the trap and made a story out of it. “They also intend to improve LLVM’s support for C#,” he writes. This is more like an “embrace and extend” approach. Microsoft is trying to make Free software merely a client (or tool) of proprietary software. What’s there to celebrate?
Based on what Martin told us yesterday in the IRC channels, Microsoft is now pressuring governments in Europe to adopt proprietary software with data in NSA PRISM (Azure) by pretending it’s Open Source. The “look but don’t touch” interpretation of ‘Open Source’ by Microsoft is, based on sources, now being used to bamboozle governments in Europe. If people who demand Free software (“Open Source” they say) don’t understand what it means — let alone understand technology on general — then they’re easy to fool. The pressure (lobbying) from Microsoft in Europe is capable, combined with enough openwashing and Googlebombing (misleading headlines), surely fools EU politicians. Microsoft is reportedly (the reports are not in English) using back room (closed doors) deals in East Europe to sell back doors (pun intended) to the EU, reminding us that Microsoft is still fighting very hard against Free software and GNU/Linux. Microsoft is also fighting very hard to keep it all secret, bias the media, and so on.
Don’t be Microsoft’s “useful idiot”. Microsoft is not a friend, it’s a predator. █
“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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Posted in FUD, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft gets a free pass for insecurity
“I don’t want a back door. I want a front door.” — Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), only days ago
Summary: All versions of Microsoft Windows are found to have been insecure since 1997, but the bug responsible for this is not named as candidate for back door access, let alone named (with logo and marketing) like far less severe bugs in Free/libre software such as OpenSSL
WHILE many journalists still refuse to call out Windows (see this new piece from Dan Goodin, who writes about crackers hoarding Windows hosts by the millions — in botnets — while mentioning the word “Windows” only once, very deep inside the article), some have no choice by to acknowledge that not every single computer runs Windows and therefore we should call out Windows when it’s clearly to blame.
“This wouldn’t be the first time it happens; recall how Google had to alert Microsoft for 3 months about a serious flaw while Microsoft did absolutely nothing (as if the intention was to keep Windows insecure, albeit secretly, very much like Apple).”Although there is no “branding” yet (as Microsoft buddies from a a Microsoft-linked firm like to do to Free/libre software bugs), there is a very serious bug in all versions of Windows (even the one still in development) that Microsoft’s allies at the NSA must be very happy about, especially as the bug is 18 years old (meaning that Windows has allowed remote access since 1997, or around the time Microsoft was seeking to appease the US government after it had shamelessly broken many laws).
The bug was found not by Microsoft but by this team (press release), which probably has no access to Windows source code. This wouldn’t be the first time it happens; recall how Google had to alert Microsoft for 3 months about a serious flaw while Microsoft did absolutely nothing (as if the intention was to keep Windows insecure, albeit secretly, very much like Apple).
ISPs should now restrict or ban Windows use, as it poses a huge risk (botnets and DDOS, never mind risk to all data stored on machines running Windows). Here is some early coverage of this [1, 2], some correctly emphasising that it’s a 18-year-old vulnerability [1, 2].
Let’s see if this starts a big debate about the insecurity of proprietary software (as other bugs with “branding” did to Free software, by means of gross generalisation). This “New Security Flaw Spans All Versions Of Windows” (similar wording in this headline). 18 years, eh? It even predates 9/11. It’s older than some readers of this Web site.
Watch this disgraceful piece titled “Will Microsoft’s Security Measures in Windows 10 Tarnish Open-Source Development?”
Yes, it’s more propaganda; The disingenuous openwashing of Windows continues, as we’ll show in our next post. █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A call for OnePlus to reconsider any future updates from Microsoft’s Trojan horse, Cyanogen
LAST MONTH we wrote about speculations that Microsoft is about to buy Cyanogen. We wrote a lot about Cyanogen prior to this, noting that Microsoft was using Cyanogen to disrupt (as in interfere) with Android using words and actions. OnePlus dumped CyanogenMod very soon afterwards because it had developed and quickly turned to its own version of Android (not a Microsoft proxy) and according to this new article, despite OnePlus moving away from Cyanogen, this Microsoft proxy (CyanogenMod) keeps trying to embed itself in OnePlus phones. Users of OnePlus (or owners of such devices) should be smarter than this. They ought to avoid any of CyanogenMod altogether. Cyanogen became a Microsoft proxy that harms users in many ways as we’ve explained over the past month.
“Remember that Replicant is based on Android, perpetually living in coexistence.”Microsoft does not need to bribe/buy Cyanogen if it can get friends to ‘invest’ in it and then pump money (bundling “deal”) to pay these friends back through Cyanogen. This seems like a clever passage of payments. Cyanogen is inherently destroyed. It’s like Nokia, Yahoo, Novell and so on after their Microsoft deals.
The story of Microsoft and Android/Linux/Free software is very much like that of “The Scorpion and the Tortoise”. The ‘new Microsoft’ — if there was ever such a thing — learned to champion entryism, patent lawsuits by proxy, FUD by proxy, bribery, and lobbying. Do not believe for a second that Microsoft means well or comes in peace. It has become exceedingly obvious that disruption of Free software (Android for example) is the strategy of choice, not creating better products. There is also a lot of incitation, e.g. accusations of monopoly by Google. Microsoft manufactured several lawsuits over the years, aggravating and publicly vilifying Android backers, developers, etc. Android has been wrongly viewed as a destroyer of competing Linux-based mobile environments, but it can be complementary (for desktops too). Inciting GNU/Linux users — not just politicians and proprietary software users — against Android seems to have been one rather clever strategy against a leading platform that eats Microsoft’s lunch (cow cash). AOSP, Alien Dalvik, ARC Welder etc. dispel many villainous myths about Android as “bad” for GNU/Linux, despite it being a step in a good direction (not ideal, but at least good). Remember that Replicant is based on Android, perpetually living in coexistence. As long as Android is doing well, Replicant and F-Droid will be fine. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Malta is one of those places where the small size allows one to see significant migrations to GNU/Linux desktop in their full glory. Notice the ascendance of GNU/Linux in the same week that school started that year.
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Ask any casual Linux enthusiast whether Linux is easy to use and they’ll tell you once installed, it’s very simple to navigate. The problem with the Linux desktop in 2015 isn’t how easy the desktop environment(s) are to work with, but whether the applications provided are easy enough for the average user at a workstation.
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Server
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IBM is making further inroads into getting its cloud computing tools and infrastructure solidified with the U.S. government. Big Blue recently announced that the U.S. Army is using IBM Hybrid Cloud to power one of the biggest logistics systems in the federal government. The new hybrid cloud system will be part of an ambitious Army data center designed to connect the IBM Cloud to the Army’s on-premise environment to enable use of data analytics. The Army foresees cost savings of 50 percent over its current cost structure, based on migrations to IBM’s cloud tools.
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Kernel Space
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Linux hits a new milestone, as live kernel patching lands in the new release. Linus Torvalds, however, doesn’t see a lot of special new features in Linux 4.0.
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Linux is not an operating system, but a kernel. This is an important distinction, as not all Linux-based operating systems are equal. For example, Ubuntu, Android, and Chrome OS are all Linux, but hardly the same. What makes something qualify as being Linux, is simply the utilization of this kernel.
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LINUS TORVALDS has announced the release of version 4.0 of the Linux kernel in a flurry of what T S Eliot would describe as “not with a bang but a whimper”.
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After seven release candidates, the Linux 4.0 kernel is now generally available. Linux 4.0 began its merge window life as Linux 3.20 but got renamed after Linus got community input about his ‘the numbers are too big’ concern.
Officially the name for the new Linux kernel is – Hurr durr I’ma sheep. No that’s not a joke that’s what Torvalds has in Git.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released version 4.0 of the kernel, which incorporates the capability for live kernel patching under certain circumstances.
The release was originally to be known as version 3.20 but was changed after a poll conducted by Torvalds. The live kernel patching code was submitted by SUSE developer Jiri Kosina back in February. It uses code from both kpatch (Red Hat’s solution) and kGraft (SUSE’s solution) and was planned at last October’s Linux Plumbers Conference.
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Linux 4.0 is here. Linux head honcho Linus Torvalds sent out an update to the Linux Kernel Mailing List on Sunday that explained the “pretty small” release fits in with an earlier agreed schedule as opposed to there being any big changes to the Linux Kernel.
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Last night, Linus Torvalds issued the final commit for the latest stable Linux kernel, and while on an ordinary day, that’s a cause for some light celebration, this stable version is a bit more special: it enters us into the 4.0 generation.
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Linus Torvalds has released version 4.0 of the Linux kernel — one of the core components of operating systems ranging from Ubuntu to Android to some of the firmware that runs on wireless routers.
Linux 4.0 comes more than 20 years after the launch of the first Linux kernel and nearly 4 years after Linux 3.0. So what’s the difference between Linux 4.0 and the version that came right before it? Not all that much, really.
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A new stable release of the Linux Kernel has been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list.
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After being in development for years, KDBUS has been called for integration into the Linux 4.1 kernel by Greg Kroah-Hartman.
KDBUS is effectively D-Bus in the Linux kernel for high-performance and secure IPC with the kernel. KDBUS has been especially sought after by systemd developers, is being used for new Linux sandboxing of apps, and PulseAudio will likely end up using it for data transmission, among many other potential use-cases.
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GNU Linux-libre is a project to maintain and publish 100% Free distributions of Linux, suitable for use in Free System Distributions, removing software that is included without source code, with obfuscated or obscured source code, under non-Free Software licenses, that do not permit you to change the software so that it does what you wish, and that induces or requires you to install additional pieces of non-Free Software.
Our releases can be easily adopted by 100% Free GNU/Linux distros, as well as by their users, by distros that want to enable their users to choose freedom, and by users of those that don’t.
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Just hours after Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.0 kernel, the GNU Linux-Libre 4.0 kernel was released by the Free Software Foundation of Latin America.
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After yesterday’s announcement for Linux kernel 4.0, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced today, April 13, the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of Linux 3.19 kernel, along with new point releases for the LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernels 3.14 and 3.10.
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Steven Rostedt is seeking to add the TraceFS file-system to the Linux 4.1 kernel with a pull request sent in today for Linus Torvalds.
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Applications
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We are glad to announce the release of the next version of LabPlot – 2.0.2, which can be downloaded here. Though we’ve only increased the minor number (we’re still in the process of completing the 2D-plotting part), there was a lot of development done for this release. Many new features were implemented and the responsiveness of the application was improved in many cases.
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GCC-5.1 release candidate 1 just branched. Lets take a look what changed in the inter-procedural optimization (IPA) and link-time optimization (LTO) frameworks.
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GCC developer Honza Hubička has written a lengthy blog post about the features coming up for GCC 5, what will be initially released as GCC 5.1 in the next two weeks.
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Instructionals/Technical
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At the request of many Softpedia readers, we’ve decided to write a quick tutorial about how to install Linux kernel 4.0 on the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system.
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Games
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Now that I’ve pumped many, many hours into Dying Light, it’s time to give my real thoughts on it.
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xoreos is a FLOSS project aiming to reimplement BioWare’s Aurora engine (and derivatives), covering their games starting with Neverwinter Nights and potentially up to Dragon Age II. This post gives a short update on the current progress.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Just one week after the EFL 1.14 Alpha 1 release marks the availability of Enlightenment Foundation Libraries’ 1.14 Beta 1 debut.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The dates for the sixth edition of the Randa Meetings are set: Sunday, 6th to Sunday 13th of September 2015. The first Sunday will be the day of arrival and the last Sunday accordingly the day of departure.
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I’ve been alerted a few weeks ago that the Skrooge web site had been hacked, using some URL Injection. After attempting some enquiry and cleanup, I gave up : I couldn’t find the compromised code, and was not able to fix it. This is how I realized that sysadmin is a real job, and I am not one ! After asking some help on kde-www, Albert quickly prompted me to kde-sysadmins, and Ben Cooksley offered to clean the website and host it on kde servers.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Gnome 3.16 was released recently and I considered it to be one of the best Gnome releases ever. A few weeks ago we did an extremely popular story on some of the best distros which offer great Plasma experience. So I decided to check out which distros offer a similar kind of Gnome experience.
I have been using Gnome 3.16 on several machines and I am extremely impressed with the improvements, though I think there is still a lot to be improved. From among all the distros that I used, I picked those that offered the best Gnome experience out of the box.
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Reviews
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Version 3.0 of SuperX can be downloaded as a 1.6GB ISO file. There are two builds available, one for 32-bit and another for 64-bit machines. Booting from the live media brings up the KDE desktop environment. The desktop’s wallpaper is soft blue. On the desktop we find a single icon for launching the distribution’s system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find the application menu, task switcher and system tray. Clicking the application menu button brings up a full screen application menu with large, colourful icons. I want to talk about the application menu more, but first let’s briefly talk about SuperX’s system installer.
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Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a desktop distribution that’s based on Debian. It’s from the same folks responsible for Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu Desktop.
The latest edition, Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 (LMDE 2), code-named Betsy, was released on April 10 (2015). Upgrading from LMDE 1 to 2 is not yet supported, but that should change soon. If you’re using Linux Mint 17, do not attempt to upgrade because the distributions are not compatible.
Installation images for the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments were made available for download. This article offers a very cursory review of LMDE 2 Cinnamon.
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Gentoo Family
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This weekend has been a little slower than usual for work, so I have a little more time to do a review. Several weeks ago, I downloaded the latest version of Sabayon and kept it for a time (as now) when I’d be free to do a review. Moreover, looking through the archives of this blog, I realized that it’s been almost 3 years since I’ve looked at Sabayon, so a fresh review is long overdue.
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Arch Family
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On April 12, the Antergos development team, through Dustin Falgout, announced the immediate availability for download of an updated installation media for their Antergos Linux distribution based on the upstream Arch Linux operating system and featuring the latest GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.
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Red Hat Family
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RDO is a version of OpenStack designed for use on CentOS, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Actually, “based on” is a bit of a stretch, because CentOS is basically the RHEL source code recompiled by third parties—which is totally legal and kosher with Red Hat, of course, since the source is open. The only difference between CentOS and RHEL is that the former comes with no enterprise-class support or ecosystem integration.
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Fedora
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It’s a great time to make sure your virt workflow is still working correctly with the latest packages in Fedora 22. No requirement to run through test cases on the wiki, just show up and let us know what works (or breaks).
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Debian Family
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After announcing the release of Linux AIO Ubuntu, a set of Live DVD ISO images that contains all the relevant flavors of the Ubuntu operating system, Željko Popivoda had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of an updated Linux AIO LMDE 2.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu has launched two new devices which are targeted at developers. One of them is the famous Dell XPS 13 laptop and the other is Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation.
The Dell XPS 13 laptop is the most popular device among current ones. The laptop is highly praised by the critics and most of the reviews out there have termed it as the best laptop of 2015 so far. It has gotten such praise because of its great design and display.
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We announced at the end of February 2015 that Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system is being ported to the OnePlus One smartphone device.
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Approximately two weeks ago, we informed our users about a contest where they can win an Ubuntu-powered smartphone from BQ, the first ever Ubuntu Phone device, just by folding an Ubuntu Origami Unicorn.
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Flavours and Variants
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This weekend, the elementary OS team released the latest version of their Linux distribution focused on usability and high-quality visual design, code named “Freya.” And, if I were a member of the Ubuntu or Linux Mint teams, I would take serious notice.
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The team behind the Elementary OS Freya operating system that is based on Ubuntu Linux, but it uses the Pantheon desktop environment rather than Unity, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or LXDE.
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Right off the bat, you have many more Android Wear options because a bunch of different companies have taken their own shot at an Android-powered smartwatch, including Motorola, LG, Huawei, Samsung, and Sony. There are 8 different designs so far.
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3DRobotics today announced its first Linux-based drone, a Solo quadcopter touted as the first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to support full control of GoPro cameras and deliver live-streaming HD video to mobile devices. The ground controller, as well as the drone’s Pixhawk 2 autopilot, integrates a 1GHz Cortex-A9 computer running Linux. The Solo is available for pre-sale at $1,000, or $1,400 with a GoPro gimbal, with units shipping via 2,000 locations starting May 29.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The cute little Talking Tom Cat has previously been available on iOS and Android devices, and has now found its way to the Tizen Store thanks to the Android Compatibility Layer (ACL) by Open Mobile. This is possibly the second Android App that uses ACL to run on Z1 that we know of. The first was WhatsApp, but that has now been replaced by a ported version of the iOS application.
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Android
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Android is based on Linux, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the same as your average Linux distribution. A redditor wanted to know why Android is so different from the desktop distributions that we all know and love.
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The wait for Android 5.0 to arrive on the LG G3 has varied widely based on carrier—AT&T managed to get it released rather quickly and T-Mobile just rolled it out a week or two ago. Now it’s Verizon’s turn to get the Lollipop update done.
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When the latest version of Google’s Android app arrived last week, there was a hint that a new method for unlocking a device was on the way. Well, it seems the wait is over… for some.
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If you’re waiting to see what the next LG flagship phone looks like, wait no longer. Here’s the LG G4, in all its leather-clad glory. It’s no clone.
The secret site the images were snarfed from didn’t give much of a clue about the hardware specs — what was there were clearly placeholders — but if you like stitched leather, you’ll love the G4.
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So there I was, poking around some of the more arcane settings on my Moto G, when I stumbled across something that took me aback: an archive of every voice command I’d ever spoken to my phone.
Turns out that each time you say something to the Google Now search box, Android saves a copy of what you said in your “Voice & Audio” history. Your voice history can go back months or even years, and it includes a transcript of what you said plus a playback button, so you can relive the moment.
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Back in December 2013, I hailed the first generation Motorola Moto G as the best affordable smartphone on the market. If you want a reasonably compact 4.5-inch device, then, arguably, it still is the best, thanks to a midlife facelift that added a microSD slot and 4G reception.
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Android 5.0 Lollipop is ready to roll on half a dozen Sony smartphones.
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Even though the successor to Motorola’s Android Wear smartwatch, the Moto 360, seems to be right around the corner, the original is still considered one of the better smartwatches currently available. Through Best Buy’s newest promotion, that purchase just became much more easygoing on your wallet.
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We’ve been using the Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update for a number of weeks. And now that the update is rolling out in full force, Nexus 5 users are faced with a decision about whether to install Google’s latest firmware. With some experience under our belts, we want to help with your decision. This is our Nexus 5 Android 5.1 review at the three week mark.
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Hey there, app hunters! As we do each week, we’ve combed through the Android and iOS stores once again to look for something interesting for you to download and play around with. Keeping track of the new apps that come out for the lighthearted, so should you desire to have a look at some fresh offerings each week, yet feel daunted by the heap of information you’d have to dig through, feel free to check back regularly.
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Think an iDevice is the only way to get HBO’s new streaming service? Think again. For $9.99 you can sling it just about anywhere — for three months.
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Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop update is missing for a number of Nexus devices though it looks like we can finally take the Nexus 4 Android 5.1 update off of the list. With an OTA in sight, we take a look at what users need to know, right now, about the Nexus 4 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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Last week, Google announced a set of official partnerships with a handful of companies willing to make watch bands for Android Wear devices. One of those companies is E3 Motocycles, a shop out of Brooklyn, NY, who specializes in hand-made products that use quality materials like Horween leather. Out of the group that was announced by Google, the E3 watch bands were the closest to our personal tastes in watch bands, so we picked a few up. Man, these are incredible.
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Android 5.0.2 is now reaching the Sony Xperia Z1, Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The update is being disseminated to certain regions only, and offers build number 14.5.A.0.242. The update includes the new Material Design, Lock Screen notifications, the new 64-bit ART runtime compiler that will open apps faster, new “Recent Apps” screen, Project Volta for extended battery life, and more.
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Updates get us excited, especially when they involve making the leap to the latest version of Android. But for some Nexus 5 users, the transition has come at the expense of their camera. Following the release of Android 5.1, they’ve been unable to reliably activate the camera without getting hit by crashes.
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Square Enix games are hardly missing from mobile devices, but most of what you’ll see from the company are ports of its older games. Dragon Quest VIII, which originally launched on the PlayStation 2, was about as recent as it gets. At least it was until now.
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When Google announced Android 5.1 Lollipop last month, the new version of Android quickly began rolling out to multiple Nexus family devices. There are still a few Nexus handsets that have yet to see the update, but today we can check one more off the list – the Nexus 4. The OTA, which is available now, weighs in at only 174MB and will bring your device from build number LRX22C to LMY47O.
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A new report indicates that HTC will skip Android 5.0.2 for the HTC One M8, which will go straight to 5.1 Lollipop at some time in the future. The older HTC One M7 may get 5.1 as well, despite a recent announcement that it will not.
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Opera Mini, the little brother to Opera’s regular mobile browser, is getting a major makeover on Android today. The company says the new design, which is pretty much in line with the regular Opera mobile browser, is meant to give the browser a more native look and feel.
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There has been something very surprising about the levels of interest I’ve seen with the S6 and S6 Edge, namely that the interest seems to be focused now, as the phone goes on sale, on the S6 instead of the Edge.
This is the reverse of what I noticed when I published my initial hands-on reviews of the device from a pre-brief held in London ahead of their launch at Mobile World Congress. And indeed, I was at MWC – I was a guest of Samsung, covering the show for one of my British publishers – and the buzz there was all about the Edge.
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Geode and GemFire compete directly and indirectly in the market with SAP HANA, Teradata and Oracle products.
Pivotal, EMC’s big data development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) division, on April 13 released Geode, a distributed in-memory database, to the open-source community as a key part of the eventual release of its entire big data platform to the community.
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You can’t help but wonder if EMC Federation boss Joe Tucci is reaching for his stress ball today. His company’s spawn, Pivotal Software, is open sourcing the core of GemFire, its distributed in-memory database.
We asked Tucci to comment, but he hasn’t gotten back to us yet. And though his press spokesperson told us “we’re for it,” when it comes to open source, we suspect that it might feel a bit like watching your teenager turn your mansion into a commune.
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“Open source was a key requirement of the PARCC non-summative assessment tools delivery system because it allows us to more easily integrate the platform with other partners and opportunities in the future, as well as leverage the collective open source community contributions to the platform development,” said Jeff Cuff, director of technology at Parcc Inc., the nonprofit organization that manages the assessment system on behalf of the PARCC states, in a prepared statement. “Even more importantly, it is a highly economical approach for the states participating in the consortium, providing significant savings for maintenance compared to other options.”
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The move is the latest step for Curoverse, a startup that emerged from George Church’s Personal Genome Project at Harvard. The PGP was a plan led by Church to sequence more than 100,000 genomes in the U.S. and link them to individuals’ health information. (The same kind of aggregation, but of 1 million people’s genomic and other health information, is a goal of the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative.) Church needed a massive database to house all that information, and that’s what led to the creation of Arvados. It’s a database capable of storing giant amounts of genomic information, it’s shareable, it can run on both public and private cloud services, and it’s an open source platform, so anyone can use or modify the source code.
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Making good on its promise from earlier in the year, Pivotal has released as open source the distributed in-memory database that powers GemFire, a featured part of Pivotal’s Big Data Suite Hadoop product.
It’s another step on Pivotal’s road toward building an open source base for its Big Data Suite rather than keeping them on a proprietary leash. However, Pivotal still sees ways it could monetize its Hadoop products — even as advances in open source squeeze companies with proprietary offerings.
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For the concluding part of may talk, I explored how this open source methodology manifested itself in the world of open publishing. The fact that it is net-based is hugely important, because it means that the barrier to publishing has been lowered almost to the point of disappearing. That matters, because as A. J. Liebling famously said: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. Today, thanks to the Internet, we have all the advantages of owning a press without any of the massive costs or organisational issues.
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Events
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The lunch session on E-diplomacy: Tradition and Innovation was attended by 50 diplomats from Europe and Asia. The session was hosted by the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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For those that don’t know, droidcon is a global developer conference series and a network focusing on the best of Android.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Barnes is hoping for more people to move to HTTPS by limiting new browser features from becoming available over insecure HTTP, in the name of security. He wrote in a mailing list post, “In order to encourage web developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, I would like to propose establishing a deprecation plan for HTTP without security. Broadly speaking, this plan would entail limiting new features to secure contexts, followed by gradually removing legacy features from insecure contexts. Having an overall program for HTTP deprecation makes a clear statement to the web community that the time for plaintext is over — it tells the world that the new web uses HTTPS, so if you want to use new things, you need to provide security.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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Several days after HP seemed to announce that it was going to stop offering public cloud services, the company is now stating that it will continue to offer its OpenStack-powered Helion public cloud.
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Philly became the center of the action for those who use a massive open source project called OpenStack last month.
Comcast hosted one of the OpenStack community’s regular meetups, drawing more than 150 developers from companies like Rackspace, Time Warner and Red Hat to The Hub in Rittenhouse Square for the two-day event.
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CMS
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BSD
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If you’re a Solaris admin who’s wondering what this all means to you, you can do several things to prepare for the future. One is to install OpenBSD somewhere (an LDOM in a spare corner of your T-series kit or an M-series domain will do, as will most kinds of x86ish kit) – preferably, also buying a CD set.
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Openness/Sharing
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There are a lot of reasons to consider reproducing. Tax breaks are near the top of the list, and a bizarre obligation to ensure the survival of the species following closely behind. The pinewood derby, though… Where else are you going to get a chance to spend hours polishing axles and weighing down bits of wood so they can roll faster?
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In this brave new world of heterogeneous projects that combine hardware, software, printed, cloud, and other pieces, we are going to see an cacophony of different tools for building these different parts of an idea and project. We have GitHub for collaborating around code, Thingiverse for 3D models, Trello for project management and coordination, Moqups and Balsamiq for user interface design, specific toolkits for building drivers and integrating with sensors, and more.
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In the tiny barrio of San Luis, perched precipitously on the hills above Bogotá, a hundred university students are hard at work. Split into 10 groups, they glue, drill and screw things together to make 50 low-cost street lights.
The lights’ beauty lies in their simplicity: A 3-watt LED lamp is connected to a controller and a battery pack, which is powered by a small solar panel. The light fixture’s protective casing is an old plastic soda bottle. Each lamp costs around 176,000 Colombian pesos ($70) to build, and nothing to run. Parts are sourced locally and the battery can power the lamp for three consecutive nights without charging. Once completed, the students install the lights throughout the neighbourhood, brightening dimly lit alleyways and dark clearings.
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Open Data
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‘Open data’ and ‘open technology’ are identified as trends in ways of improving interoperability in EU countries. Openness and reuse of government data, open specifications and open source are emphasised in many countries and interoperability initiatives.
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Programming
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Git has changed the way that software is built — including the Ceph open source distributed storage platform, says Ceph Creator Sage Weil. Ceph has used the Git revision control system for seven years, since it switched from SVN. It has changed the project’s work flow and how they think about code.
“Instead of thinking in files and lines, you think in flow of changes. Instead of having a single repository that everyone feeds from and into, everyone now has their own repository, their own branches. The meaning of branch changed,” said Weil, Ceph principal architect at Red Hat. “Everything just fell in place, as if the people who designed it really knew software development at scale.”
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Hardware
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The number 256 is what broke the original arcade version of Pac-Man. As a game with no proper exit condition, Pac-Man relied on faith that players would eventually get tired of it before the 256th level. This was reasonable given that every single level after the 20th was just a repeat of level 20. But video games lend themselves to obsession like few things, even in 1980, so of course some players took it as a challenge—a test of endurance and concentration. Those that made it to 256 were in for a strange sight, what computer scientists would call “undefined behavior.” This was the result:
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Security
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While changes in technology are generally a mark of progress, they are not always immediately for the better. Certain hardware and software vendors would do well to understand that reality — Apple, for instance.
Apple has long enjoyed a unique position in the marketplace in that it controls both the hardware and software running on its various platforms. This tight integration has allowed the company to produce some of the most stable and functional computer hardware ever made. This has also allowed Apple to make dramatic changes in both hardware and software without appearing to care a whit for its users, often condemning them to vast frustrations for no logical reason.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Think of it as the American half-century in the Middle East: from August 17, 1953, when a CIA oil coup brought down democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the Shah as Washington’s man in Tehran, to May 1, 2003, when George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of southern California. (The planes from that aircraft carrier had only recently dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq.) There, standing under a White House-produced banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” the president dramatically announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and hailed “the arrival of a new era.”
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WASHINGTON — As prosecutors put the finishing touches on the 2008 indictment of Blackwater security contractors for a deadly shooting in Iraq, the F.B.I. agents leading the investigation became convinced that political appointees in the Justice Department were intentionally undermining the case, internal emails show.
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Three former employees of the US private military contractor once known as Blackwater were sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday and a fourth received a life sentence, closing a sordid chapter of the Iraq conflict relating to the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad.
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One by one, four former Blackwater security contractors wearing blue jumpsuits and leg irons stood before a federal judge on Monday and spoke publicly for the first time since a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq.
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The episode could have been a chapter from the thriller written by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida about a shadowy Saudi role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
A top F.B.I. official unexpectedly arranges a meeting at Dulles International Airport outside Washington with Mr. Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after he has pressed for information on a bureau terrorism inquiry. Mr. Graham, a Democrat, is then hustled off to a clandestine location, where he hopes for a breakthrough in his long pursuit of ties between leading Saudis and the Sept. 11 hijackers.
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President Obama is in Panama this weekend for the Summit of the Americas, where he’ll meet with regional leaders who have grown increasingly determined to assert autonomy from the US.
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At heart, this is a fight over what to do about Iran’s challenge to U.S. leadership in the Middle East and the threat that Iranian geopolitical ambitions pose to U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.
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A Texas-born man suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn this month. Two years earlier, his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.
The denouement in the hunt for the man, Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was arrested last year in Pakistan based on intelligence provided by the United States, came after a yearslong debate inside the government about whether to kill an American citizen overseas without trial — an extraordinary step taken only once before, when the Central Intelligence Agency killed the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
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When Americans look out at the world, we see a swarm of threats. China seems resurgent and ambitious. Russia is aggressive. Iran menaces our allies. Middle East nations we once relied on are collapsing in flames. Latin American leaders sound steadily more anti-Yankee. Terror groups capture territory and commit horrific atrocities. We fight Ebola with one hand while fending off Central American children with the other.
In fact, this world of threats is an illusion. The United States has no potent enemies. We are not only safe, but safer than any big power has been in all of modern history.
Geography is our greatest protector. Wide oceans separate us from potential aggressors. Our vast homeland is rich and productive. No other power on earth is blessed with this security.
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Andreas Schüller is an attorney on the staff of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. He is the lead attorney on a suit being brought by ECCHR and Reprieve against the German government on behalf of three Yemeni survivors of a U.S. drone strike. The case will be heard May 27th in Cologne.
Their suit argues that it is illegal under German law for the German government to allow the U.S. air base at Ramstein to be used for drone murders abroad. The suit comes after the passage of a resolution in the European Parliament in February 2014 urging European nations to “oppose and ban the practice of extrajudicial targeted killings” and to “ensure that the Member States, in conformity with their legal obligations, do not perpetrate unlawful targeted killings or facilitate such killings by other states.”
I’ve always thought of drone murders as illegal under the laws of the countries where the murders happen, as well as under the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact. I asked Schüller: Is your suit seeking prosecution for murder where (or in one of the places where) the act is committed from a distance?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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California’s in the middle of an epic drought — but that hasn’t stopped bottled water production in the state. Even as residents face mandatory cutbacks and fields lie fallow, companies continue pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year into plastic bottles — sometimes straight from a municipal water supply.
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In California, alfalfa production has been scrutinized at a time when both exports of the crop and public awareness of the drought are growing. The expanding global dairy industry, particularly in China, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates, is driving demand for alfalfa as animal feed. Much of the alfalfa that the U.S. exports is grown in water-scarce western states.
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Finance
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When students kicked in the door of the main administrative building, the Maagdenuis, at the University of Amsterdam on February 25, the “New University” – or “De Nieuwe Universiteit” – movement introduced a new aesthetic dimension of protest.
The Maagdenhuis occupation, a protest against the financialization of higher education and against the concentration of decision-making power at the university, disrupted the everyday flow of doing, changing the normal organization of human sense experience on campus. By taking a building and reorganizing human activity inside, with emphasis on dialogue, deliberation and shared decision-making, occupiers created new aesthetic conditions necessary for a new politics, as philosopher Jacques Rancière, who recently visited the Maagdenhuis to show solidarity with UvA students, suggests.
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Privacy
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Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International have announced today they are taking the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights over its indiscriminate mass surveillance practices.
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Andrew Lewman, our current Executive Director, is leaving The Tor Project to take a position at an Internet services company. While at Tor, Andrew was passionate about using our tools to help people from diverse backgrounds and points of view benefit from online privacy. We thank Andrew for his contributions and wish him well.
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Time for law enforcement to come clean on how stingrays spy on Americans’ cellphones
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The NSA isn’t interested in a sneaky back door into your smartphone or computer any more, it just wants you to leave the front door wide open. While arguments continue around just what the National Security Agency can and can’t get access to – dragging more than one big tech name into the controversy – the spy organization’s chief is suggesting a far more blunt approach: in effect, handing over the keys to encryption upfront.
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First introduced in the House of Representatives in 2011, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is once again back in play and is being considered for legislative action this month. Much of the same concerns that accompanied its introduction in 2011 remain specifically that it is a blank check for cybersurveillance dressed up as a bill to promote cybersecurity.
The earlier version of both SOPA and CISPA were defeated due in part to staunch opposition from numerous corners of the internet. CISPA initially contained language that included intellectual property issues as falling under the act making it essentially SOPA-light.
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Civil Rights
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Lincoln did not think blacks were the equals of whites.
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Tsarnaev’s attorney knew that evidence would play no role in the case and focused on trying to save Dzhokhar from a death sentence by blaming the older brother who was killed by police. Perhaps Dzhokhar’s attorney remembered what happened to attorney Lynne Stewart who was sentenced to prison for representing a client for whom the government only wanted a pro forma representation.
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Rowley warned Mueller that launching unjustified war would prove counterproductive in various ways. One blowback she highlighted was that the rationale being applied to allow preemptive strikes abroad could migrate back home, “fostering a more permissive attitude toward shootings by law enforcement officers in this country.” Tragically, the recent spate of murders by police has proved Rowley right.
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TSA thug Melendy got all up the side between my thigh and my labia — four times.
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An autistic sixth grader in Lynchburg, Virginia was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, PRI’s Susan Ferriss reports.
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The success of the Joint List is an example for the wider Arab world, says Ayman Odeh, its leader. Odeh, a 40-year-old lawyer from Haifa, is now one of the country’s best-known politicians. He won widespread accolades for his calm, reasoned response to being verbally abused on television by Avigdor Lieberman, a former foreign minister. “We live in the Middle East, in an era when people are being killed because they have a different ethnicity, religion or ideology. We have a different message: to accept differences, and work side by side to achieve our goals. We hope our example will affect all the Arab world,” he said.
[...]
The model is Martin Luther King, says Odeh. King and his supporters marched to Washington in 1963, demanding jobs and freedom. Odeh has prepared a 10-year plan to close the civic and economic gap between Israel’s Jewish and Arab population. “We intend to march to Jerusalem, to raise awareness for our 10-year plan and to demand democracy and justice for all.”
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The Washington Post knows who gave Natasha McKenna repeated high-voltage shocks just before she suffered a fatal heart attack–but it isn’t telling its readers.
The Washington Post (4/11/15) ran a troubling story about an African-American woman who died after Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff’s deputies repeatedly used a taser on her while she was already in shackles. The deputies administered four 50,000-volt shocks to Natasha McKenna, a prisoner at the Fairfax County jail who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, in an effort to force her into a chair for transport; minutes later, her heart stopped.
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The New York City Police Foundation received a $1 million donation from the government of the United Arab Emirates, according to 2012 tax records, the same amount the foundation transferred to the NYPD Intelligence Division’s International Liaison Program that year, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
A 2012 Schedule A document filed by the New York City Police Foundation showed a list of its largest donors, which included several major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and Barclays Capital — but also a line item for the “Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.” The Intercept obtained a copy of the Schedule A document, which is not intended for public disclosure and only shows donors above the threshold of donating $1 million over four years.
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John Legend has launched a campaign to end mass incarceration.
The Grammy-winning singer announced the multiyear initiative, FREE AMERICA, on Monday. He will visit and perform at a correctional facility on Thursday in Austin, Texas, where he also will be part of a press conference with state legislators to discuss Texas’ criminal justice system.
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My career—I guess I can officially call it that now—was not my idea. When my editor, Jim Andrews, recruited me out during my junior year in college and gave me the job I still hold, it wasn’t clear to me what he was up to. Inexplicably, he didn’t seem concerned that I was short on the technical skills normally associated with creating a comic strip—it was my perspective he was interested in, my generational identity. He saw the sloppy draftsmanship as a kind of cartoon vérité, dispatches from the front, raw and subversive.
Why were they so subversive? Well, mostly because I didn’t know any better. My years in college had given me the completely false impression that there were no constraints, that it was safe for an artist to comment on volatile cultural and political issues in public. In college, there’s no down side. In the real world, there is, but in the euphoria of being recognized for anything, you don’t notice it at first. Indeed, one of the nicer things about youthful cluelessness is that it’s so frequently confused with courage.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Back in March, the FCC’s 400-page net neutrality order arrived, and made waves because of the agency’s vote to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service. The FCC argued that it created “clear and enforceable rules” to protect consumers, but broadband providers and others bristled at the regulation proposals.
Over this past weekend, the net neutrality rule was published in the Federal Register, the daily journal of U.S. government initiatives, and legal action from those opposing it could be imminent.
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The move follows the historic decision by the FCC to impose more stringent net neutrality rules than anyone had expected in a vote at the end of February which saw the motion pass by three votes to two.
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The Motion Picture Association has written to Brazil’s Justice Minister seeking exceptions to the country’s fledgling “Internet Constitution”. In a submission to the government the MPA says that the Marco Civil’s current wording on net neutrality deprives courts of the opportunity to order the blocking of ‘pirate’ sites.
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According to the most popular British talk show host on American premium cable, net neutrality is one of the most important regulations for the future of telecommunications (and, by extension, all of humanity under the age of 50). Net neutrality is about making sure your ISP can’t control what you view on the Internet and how fast you view it — or, as the aforementioned talk show host put it, “Preventing Cable Company Fuckery.” How could anyone possibly be against something as basic as that? The answer, as the following reactions to net neutrality prove, is “by being hilariously stupid.”
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Send this to a friend
04.13.15
Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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IBM wants to sell a lot of Power8 iron running the Linux operating system Down Under, and it wants to do it fast. Like before the end of the second quarter, which comes to a close in June. To that end, IBM New Zealand and IBM Australia have kicked out some pretty steeply discounted iron that is sure to get the attention of prospective buyers–maybe even those who might otherwise opt for Linux on X86 machinery.
Under the deal announced in Australia last week in announcement letter ZA2Z5260A, IBM is giving discounts on eight different configurations of the Power S812L, Power S822L, and Power S824L machines, configured with varying numbers of processors cores, memory, and 15K RPM disk drives.
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According to Avi Cavale, Docker not only is ready, his company already runs thousands of Docker containers in production per week. Cavale is the co-founder and CEO of Shippable, a containerized continuous integration (CI) platform, and he says that Docker provides opportunities to radically accelerate how DevOps is “re-engineering the corporation” for IT.
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Kernel Space
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Today, April 12 is a big day for all fans of the Open Source movement, as Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 4.0.
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Linux 4.0 is upon us.
Linux Lord Linus Torvalds made it official with a typically brief post to the Linux kernel mailing list.
The new number isn’t a sign of a major upgrade. As we’ve chronicled, Torvalds thinks that it looks a bit silly when version numbers go beyond x.19. He therefore decided it would be best to tick over from 3.19 to 4.0 for the sake of neatness, rather than to celebrate any particular milestone in the kernel.
Which is not to say this release is devoid of improvements. Notable inclusions are the addition of non-disruptive patching, support for Intel’s Quark systems-on-a-chips and better support for the Z13 silicon powering IBM’s latest mainframes. A handful of new ARM chips also get support and there’s the usual round of improvements and tweaks to graphics and sound performance.
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Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux Kernel 4.0, as expected after the RC7 release, last week.
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Applications
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This model of federation is criticized by many new users who land on GNU social having had the experience of socialization of Twitter and Facebook. They label this difference “federation issues” and complain that conversations they participate in only show messages from the person that they themselves follow or other people in their node. The solution is as technically simple to implement as it is dangerous.
What such a request would do, in reality, is break the federation of content based on implicit contracts and open the doors to the aggregation of everything, everywhere, breaking any chain of trust. That is, it would remove the basis for allowing the nodes to create spaces for real conversation. By breaking this model of federating content, we would be importing the social model of the great centralizers, the Facebook-Twitter model, into the spaces and networks that we built on the basis of tools like GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica, etc.
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A short time after branching GCC 5 and initiating GCC 6.0 development, the first GCC 5.1 Release Candidate has surfaced in marking the big GCC 5.
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GCC 5 is to be the first release under the GNU Compiler Collect’s new versioning scheme. The new versioning scheme is outlined on the GCC develop page. Right now the code is at GCC 5.0.0 for the GCC 5 branch but it will become GCC 5.0.1 when in the pre-release state and GCC 5.1.0 will be the first release from the GCC 5 branch, GCC 5.2.0 will be the second release from the GCC 5 branch, etc.
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Soon after my daughter was born, I became increasingly concerned about sharing her pictures in Facebook. I’d usually post one picture of her, and see it quickly reshared by family and friend. Yes, it was flattering, but with privacy concerns growing daily, it left an uneasy feeling.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve is now offering its entire catalogue of games to the Mesa developers in order to reward them for the work they’ve put into this open source project.
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Valve are giving away their games for free again, and this time it has been extended to include developers of the Mesa project.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The mini-Debconf Lyon 2015, in addition to being a great meeting to meet both friendly and new faces, has been the occasion for me to update and enrich the GNOME for system administrators course.
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New Releases
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Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on the testing packages from the Debian project that’s using GNOME as the desktop, has been upgraded to version 7.5 Test 2 and is ready for download and testing.
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It’s finally here, elementary OS Freya is the first release since August 2013. The highly polished OS comes with over 1,100 fixes, improvements and new features including better notifications, a refined look and feel, UEFI support and a new captive portal assistant to make connecting to public WiFi easier.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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This week we have Hack Week at SUSE. The whole engineering team works on projects of their choice during this week. Everybody is free to innovate, to learn, and to collaborate with others.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The promise of a smartphone powered by Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, is quite an old one but it seems that 2015 is finally the year when it all takes flesh. First among the promised batch of Ubuntu phones, bq unveiled its Ubuntu-flavored Aquaris E4.5 at MWC 2015 last February. Now that very same device is available for purchase, but limited only to the European Union. Late to the market and limited availability, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, might have an even harder time breaking into the space than, say, Firefox OS.
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Flavours and Variants
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Entroware has become the first hardware partner for Ubuntu MATE, meaning that users can now purchase a laptop powered by this operating system.
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OpenEmbed announced a “SOM5360″ module that runs Linux or Android on a Cortex-A5 Atmel SAM5D34 SoC. The COM adds a Cortex-M3 chip plus CAN and LCD I/O.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Digital Photography Review is a well established and respected Photography enthusiast site that was founded back in 1998, and which specializes in reviews of consumer digital cameras. Recently they have got hands on with the Tizen based Samsung NX1 Smart Camera and have carried out a full in-depth review, which is what they are famous for. This was a production Samsung NX1 running the latest firmware 1.22.
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Android
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Google’s Nexus 6 Android 5.1 Lollipop update has been rolling out slowly for several weeks and we’re finally starting to see Google make a big push with the roll out. We’ve shared how to install the latest software, gave it an initial look and tested performance, and now we’re sharing additional details in our Nexus 6 Android 5.1 Lollipop update review.
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The days when iOS had all the fun are over – these Android games are as good as any you’ll find round Apple’s way
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Google has been experimenting with Android Wear so that Android smartwatch owners could use them with their iPhones. Apple, of course, would have to allow it in the Apple Store.
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We’re not exactly sure where the little green robot that’s become the staple of Android’s branding originated. But apparently it just started to “show up” all over Android’s apps.
“So the robot [is] starting to show up,” one person who worked on the Android team in its early days told Business Insider. “Some engineer, somebody created it. I don’t even know who. And then they probably showed it to Andy [Rubin], and he said ‘that’s cool,’ and he took that robot and he open sourced it.”
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Samsung’s latest Lollipop update for the Galaxy Note 4 — Android 5.0.1 — doesn’t just bring some crucial bug fixes, but also a proper mute mode that’s been missing from Android since Lollipop made its public debut last fall.
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Prolific software programmers of XDA Developers Forum have released the latest CyanogenMod CM12.1 series custom ROM to the Sony’s 2013 flagship smartphone Xperia Z1 (aka Yuga) model.
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I must confess that, at first, I did not like the idea of taking a phone out when I am jogging. However, I like to listen to music while on the street. Moreover, there are apps that can actually motivate you to keep going. For Android, my favorite is RunKeeper. For Firefox OS, Run-Bike-Hike is my app of choice.
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OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei has now confirmed that the eagerly anticipated CyanogenMod 12S update for the OnePlus One smartphone has received certification and will be rolled out within a few days.
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While last month HTC reportedly started rolling out Android 5.0 Lollipop OS to HTC One handsets in India, the Taiwanese tech firm is now reportedly rolling out the update to the HTC One (E8), Desire Eye, and Butterfly S.
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The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has announced the arrest of a 25-year-old, believed to be the creator of a particularly harmful strain of Android money-stealing malware, known as Svpeng, that had infected as many as 350,000 Google devices last year. Four other suspects thought to be members of the cybercriminal gang, who were said to have a penchant for Nazi iconography, were also detained.
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The recent news around Nebula shutting its doors has stirred speculation that OpenStack startups are struggling because of the state of the OpenStack market. There is even a piece claiming that the OpenStack dream is on “life support.”
This couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that winning in open source requires a playbook that is drastically different from one that most VCs investing in technology today are used to.
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I’ve felt this tension firsthand. My company, PencilBlue, an open source content management system, was instantly dismissed by a well-known venture capitalist because, as he put it, “No website creation tool makes money unless it completely gets rid of the need for developers.” This is someone who made seed investments in multiple household-name tech startups, and he had no clue that more than 70% of all websites are created by developers and that the $21 billion web development industry is ruled by open source platforms.
That open source startups are hard to find in the investment-first ecosystem is not surprising, because they’re usually started by people who actually build the product. Most of the time, seeking early stage investment for an open source product doesn’t make financial sense. On the other hand, there’s much to be gained from the business and marketing knowledge in local startup communities, so being sequestered from them can put open source developers at a disadvantage.
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Events
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With three days to go, innovative new conference Open Source // Open Society (OS//OS) has sold out.
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CMS
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Over the next year, political pundits will spend far too much time dissecting the horse race, scandals (real or imagined), the electoral college and more polls than you can shake a stick at. I’m doing none of that. I’m just looking at websites.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Opening up the code could give enterprise customers more input into what new features are added into future versions. For Pivotal, the move provides an entry to those corporate clients that have adopted policies of using open-source software whenever possible, said Roman Shaposhnik, Pivotal’s director of open source.
The company also hopes the software, released under the name Project Geode, will find a wider user base, one looking for big data analysis technologies speedier than Hadoop or Spark, Shaposhnik said.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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We use git extensively for documentation in OpenStack so that we can “treat the docs like the code”—and I’m seeing this trend many places especially in the Write the Docs community.
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Security
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The head of the French TV network that suspended broadcasting following last week’s hack attack has confirmed the service exposed its own passwords during a TV interview, but said the gaffe came only after the breach.
“We don’t hide the fact that this is a blunder,” the channel’s director general Yves Bigot, told the AFP news service.
The exposure came during an interview a rival TV service broadcast on the TV5Monde attack. During the questioning, a TV5Monde journalist sat in front of several scraps of paper hanging on a window. One of them showed the password of for the network’s YouTube account. As Ars reported last week, the pass code was “lemotdepassedeyoutube,” which translates in English to “the password of YouTube.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Police in northern India have reportedly acquired pepper-spraying drones intended for use on protesters and others labeled as threats to public safety.
“They can be used to shower pepper powder on an unruly mob in case of any trouble,” said Yashasvi Yadav, police superintendent of Lucknow, a major city in northern India, according to the Times of India.
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Transparency Reporting
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Government secrecy has long been a hallmark of Britain, where neither laws nor traditions made it easy to obtain the documents and records that are the underpinnings of any bureaucracy. But a decade ago, the doors were swung wide open to allow the sunshine of public scrutiny into agencies, bureaus and councils, and the result has been both gratifying and slightly alarming.
While Britain’s Freedom of Information law has established itself as a potent tool to scrutinize the work of public authorities and hold those in power accountable, it has also had some expensive consequences — and, in some cases, revealed the absurdity of public whim.
The hundreds of thousands of requests that have been received at various levels of government in the last decade have not only been time-consuming for agencies and councils, they have also proved extremely costly.
Such, though, is the side effect of transparency, say the proponents of open government, who also argue that the benefits outweigh the burdens.
“What people often forget is just how much F.O.I. saves money, because it exposes wasteful and extravagant spending,” said Paul Gibbons, a freedom of information campaigner and blogger. “Just one example: a local council in Scotland was spending thousands every year sending a delegation to Japan for a flower festival. Once F.O.I. came into force, they quickly realized they couldn’t justify doing that.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Despite having among the highest water availability per capita in the world and holding about 2.7 percent of the world’s total fresh water reserves, Nepal suffers from a chronic water shortage.
Set against a decade of political turbulence, acute mismanagement of water supplies and large in-migration from villages to the capital Kathmandu, the less socio-economically advantaged half of Nepal is increasingly left to fend for itself to gain access to clean water.
In Kathmandu, the Nepalese government’s Central Bureau of Statistics shows that one out of five households do not have a domestic water source, while two-thirds live with a water supply which most probably would fail the standard for being ‘clean and safe.’
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Finance
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As one watched representatives of the three most important IT companies in the world being grilled by an Australian Senate committee on tax avoidance last week, it soon became obvious that the whole show was a farce. The corporations have been fleecing Australia of billions of dollars in tax revenues for years and successive governments have been either powerless or unwilling to do anything.
In the revenue leeching stakes, Apple is by far the worst offender followed by Microsoft, with Google bringing up the rear only by the virtue of its Australian R&D activities.
The contempt with which all three companies view the Australian Government and the Australian people was obvious by the personnel they chose to front the Senate committee.
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For most of World of Warcraft’s history, the only way to buy in-game gold with real currency was to go through one of many gray market third-party services (which technically goes against Blizzard’s terms of service for the game). That was true until yesterday, when Blizzard introduced a $20 game time token that can be sold for gold at the in-game auction house on North American servers (European servers will get the feature at a later date). While the real-world price of those tokens is fixed at $20, the gold price is “determined dynamically based on supply and demand,” as Blizzard puts it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A front-page article is devoted to a flawed story about a campus rape in the journal Rolling Stone, exposed in the leading academic journal of media critique. So severe is this departure from journalistic integrity that it is also the subject of the lead story in the business section, with a full inside page devoted to the continuation of the two reports. The shocked reports refer to several past crimes of the press: a few cases of fabrication, quickly exposed, and cases of plagiarism (“too numerous to list”). The specific crime of Rolling Stone is “lack of skepticism,” which is “in many ways the most insidious” of the three categories.
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Privacy
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Rights groups have asked the European Court of Human Rights to rule on the legality of the UK’s large-scale surveillance regime.
Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International filed a legal complaint with the court today.
The scale of the surveillance carried out by GCHQ has been revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Angered by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the wiretapping habits of tri-lettered American agencies, Brazil is taking the internet into its own hands — and giving Uncle Sam the middle finger. Right now most internet traffic between South America and Europe travels through the overly inquisitive US, but that’s about to change. Next year, Brazil’s Telebrás and Spain’s IslaLink will begin laying £120 million worth of undersea internet cable to span the 5,600km of Atlantic Ocean between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal. The Americans can just follow their allies’ activities on Facebook like everyone else.
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Social network claims privacy report commissioned by the Belgian privacy watchdog ‘gets it wrong multiple times’ over what Facebook does with user data
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The approach is only one of several options being studied by the White House. One alternative under consideration would have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement officials conducting a criminal investigation could read text messages shortly after they are sent. To obtain encrypted photos, the judge could order the company to back up the suspect’s data to a server while the phone is turned on and its contents are unencrypted.
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Civil Rights
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Three months ago, Maj. Gen. James Post — the deputy chief of Air Combat Command — warned airmen that talking to Congress about the A-10 Warthog is an act of “treason.”
On April 10, the U.S. Air Force announced it had canned Post from his job.
To be sure, the flying branch doesn’t like the A-10 and is locked in a battle with legislators over the attack plane’s future. But it certainly didn’t like Post making veiled threats. He made the comments during a January gathering of airmen at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
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A D.C. dog owner did what anyone with a missing pet would do. He posted fliers — but then, he says, police threatened him with a $750,000 fine.
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The public is more concerned about access to justice than free healthcare, according to a poll commissioned by lawyers campaigning to reverse cuts to legal aid.
The findings from a YouGov poll have been released as the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats vie to pledge more and more funding for the NHS.
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The reserve Tulsa County Sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot and killed a man last week when he thought he had pulled his Taser, is part of a group of wealthy donors who make large contributions to the department for the privilege of playing police officer.
According to Tulsa World, Robert Bates, 73, who made the fatal mistake that cost a man his life, is a local insurance company executive who has donated multiple vehicles, weapons, and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008.
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Police in Singapore destroyed two pieces of evidence tied to the death of Shane Todd, whose body was found in his apartment there in June 2012, according to the American engineer’s family.
The 31-year-old’s parents, Rick and Mary Todd, have for months been demanding the Singapore government return the hand-made noose and towel around their son’s neck when his body was discovered by his girlfriend hanging from his bathroom door.
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Ever since the body of American engineer was found hanging in his Singapore apartment in June 2012, his mother Mary Todd has maintained that the five typewritten suicide notes found at the scene were not written by her son.
“My son did not write those suicide notes,” Mary Todd has repeated to anyone who would listen.
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Two pieces of evidence central to the death of 31-year-old American engineer Shane Todd — whose body was found in his Singapore apartment in June, 2012 — have been destroyed by police on the island nation, according to an official letter sent to the Todd family lawyer earlier this month.
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I can’t stop thinking about the strange circumstances surrounding the tragic death of a promising young American electric engineer in Singapore two years ago.
His name was Shane Todd and his story is a cautionary tale for sanctimonious ideologues like Edward Snowden.
Unlike Snowden, Todd defended America’s secrets and doing so may have cost him his life.
While local authorities in Singapore claim that Shane committed suicide, his family is convinced he was murdered. For better or worse, so am I.
Rather than recapitulating the circumstances surrounding Todd’s death, I would refer readers to an enormously compelling piece that appeared last year in the Financial Times about Todd’s death.
Ironically, the only evidence I can add is taken from a classified diplomatic cable sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about seven years ago from a federal export controls official in China. The cable, which was made public by Wikileaks, reviews an application from a Chinese company for a license to export the technology that Shane had worked on in Singapore – a metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial system for producing epitaxial materials like gallium nitride (GaN), a semiconductor circuit technology that offers disruptive capabilities in efficient microwave power generation.
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“Mom, I might be paranoid, but I have the feeling that they are threatening my life if I don’t stay,” Shane said. “I am so naive. Coming to Singapore was the worst mistake of my life.”
Just before his planned return to the United States, he was found hanged in his apartment. He already had a job lined up in the United States and had his family postpone celebrating Father’s Day and his brother’s birthday. He was going to be in a wedding in the summer.
Rick and Mary Todd flew to Singapore, where they met with police. The official account of Shane’s apparent suicide soon unraveled.
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The Singapore police told the Todds that Shane had hanged himself but, almost from the start, they did not believe it. Aside from having a new job, Shane had made summer plans with his brothers and had even asked his grandmother if he could use her car and apartment in the interim before he started his new job. He’d queried his future employer about the company policy regarding vacation time and publishing opportunities, Mary said.
Even as Rick Todd staggered off the plane in Denver, devastated by the news of his son’s death, Mary and her sons already had hatched a plan to fly to Singapore immediately. There’s no doubt that the Todds had an advantage given that Rick flew for a major airline and the entire family had passports at the ready. Seemingly overnight, they were in Singapore asking pointed questions of police officials.
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Peter Van Sant and 48 Hours return to a family’s quest to prove their son was murdered and did not commit suicide as officials in Singapore say, and they’re determined to clear his name in an updated edition of “Spies, Lies & Secrets,” to be rebroadcast Saturday, August 30 (10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
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With the sheer determination of a mother on a mission, I made a beeline for Shane’s bathroom. As I looked into the bathroom, I was perplexed and shocked. Nothing I saw matched IO Khal’s description. “Oh my gosh, John, come quickly, you’ve got to see this,” I yelled.
John ran to me and we both began to exclaim, “Where are the bolts, the ropes, and the pulleys? Why is the toilet not across from the door as Khal described it?” Perplexed, we ran our hands over the marble walls searching for holes that might have been patched, looking for anything that would back up what Khal had told us. Nothing!…
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A week and a half after we returned to Montana, we discovered through various media sources that Minister Shanmugam was still in Washington D.C. and was scheduled to meet with Senator Baucus, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Eric Holder, and various other government officials, including Arizona Senator John McCain.
Prior to these meetings, USA Today cited Sen. Baucus, emphasizing that the SPF and Singaporean government “have been less than forthcoming” in the Shane Todd case and that evidence he had seen so far raised “very, very strong questions” and “deep concerns about national security.” …
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Mary Todd is coming to New York in her quest for justice.
The mother of Dr. Shane Truman Todd, the American engineer found hanging in his Singapore apartment two years ago, has co-written a book, “Hard Drive: A Family’s Fight Against Three Countries,” with Shane’s cousin, Dr. Christina Villegas.
The California women claim Shane was murdered and that authorities ruled his death a suicide for political reasons.
“He had expressed fear for his life,” Villegas told me. “We don’t know who is responsible for his murder, but all three countries are guilty of destruction of evidence and the coverup.”
Villegas, who is coming with Todd to New York on Sept. 5, said, “The US State Department is fully aiding the perversion of justice. As soon as John Kerry met with Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam, the FBI lost all interest in the case.”
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Posted in EFF, Patents at 3:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at recent patent policies and actions from the EFF, as well as increasing secrecy at the USPTO
THE US patent system, which is the primary source of software patents and by far the biggest facilitator of patent trolls, has not enjoyed much publicity as of late, especially not good publicity. Writers are picking on lawyers who want more patents, including Michelle Lee who is said to be destined to head the USPTO. It’s a system guarded by those who don’t represent the population but rather represent their colleagues and friends. It’s a system of protectionism, empowered by a government that’s heavily influenced by large corporations.
“It’s a system of protectionism, empowered by a government that’s heavily influenced by large corporations.”“The biggest impact on patent quality would be the USPTO injecting certainty into the eligibility debate,” IAM said a while ago. Well, actually, as we pointed out last night, the USPTO has already issued guidance on that (new examination rules), it’s just that patent boosters — like IAM — don’t wish to accept it.
As this other new post points out, the USPTO recently had its 9,000,000th “customer” (patent), for which it is being mocked. “So maybe we shouldn’t be so shocked,” said the author, “that USPTO plays the same game. There’s actual evidence backing it up. Because patents issue at discrete, weekly intervals, the PTO has time generally to group patents of the same “class” together in contiguous blocks of numbers. That’s why you usually don’t see a floor wax patent immediately next to a dessert topping patent. (Unless, of course, it’s for both.)”
That’s quite a bizarre way of numbering patents. But more to the point, there’s a lot of secrecy and anomalies in the USPTO. It’s hard to know how it’s working, which contradicts or conflicts with its function/status as government-run. Recently, the EFF pressured the USPTO and the USPTO then demanded that the EFF censors its comments on patent guidance, as if the rules must be kept secret. Not bad for a ‘public’ office, eh? To quote TechDirt: “As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which it basically said that merely doing something on a general purpose computer didn’t automatically make it patentable. This has resulted in many courts rejecting patents and the USPTO being less willing to issue patents, based on that guidance. The USPTO sought to push out new “guidance” to its examiners taking the ruling into account. Soon after the Alice ruling, it issued some “Preliminary Examination Instructions.” However, it then issued the so-called 2014 Interim Guidance on Subject Matter Eligibility and sought public comment through March 16 of this year.”
“As you can see by the full filing,” TechDirt adds, “the EFF filing isn’t some sort of improper protest. Rather it is a clear demonstration of how the USPTO does not appear to be living up to what the courts are saying in the wake of the Alice ruling. It is difficult to see what the USPTO was thinking in trying to silence the EFF’s comment. It is beyond ludicrous on multiple levels. First, it suggests a skin so thin at the USPTO that you can see right through it. Second, it suggests that the USPTO doesn’t want people to recognize that its guidance is problematic in light of what actual federal courts are saying. And, finally, it suggests (still) a complete lack of understanding of how the internet and freedom of expression works, thereby guaranteeing that the EFF’s complete dismantling of the USPTO’s guidelines will now get that much more attention…”
The EFF did a fine job showing how unreasonable the USPTO has become. Where does it derive consent from? Only large corporations? It’s now shrouded in secrecy. It’s rogue, a bit like the EPO, which is becoming more alike.
Not too long ago the EFF “Outline[d] [a] Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System,” to use its own words, but Will Hill, citing Jan Wildeboer (Red Hat), said that EFF was not serious about fixing the real issues. To quote Hill: “This is not an issue that deserves debate. Software patents are wrong philosophically and no good has come from them. In the last two years, the community told EFF as much and people have been saying the same things since the US first allowed a software patent 25 years ago. Who does the EFF think they are representing and why would they rather reduce a harm than eliminate it? Shame on them.”
The EFF seems to be having turf wars between opponents of software patents and sponsors who love them because the EFF sometimes speaks out against them (not always). Not too long ago (just earlier this month) we learned that the EFF helped bust an infamous software patent on podcasting, so well done to them. Daniel Nazer from the EFF also used the term “Abstract Software Patents” to describe the kind of patents the EFF wants the USPTO to stop issuing, citing Alice. Here is what Nazer wrote: “The Supreme Court took a major step in cutting back on abstract software patents last June when it issued its landmark ruling in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. In essence, the court said that abstract ideas implemented by conventional computer process are not eligible for patent protection. Since then, the PTO has attempted to write guidance applying the law to pending patent applications. Unfortunately, the PTO has floundered and continues to grant far too many invalid patents. This week EFF filed public comments asking the Office to do more to ensure its examiners apply the new law.”
Also see the article “EFF: If You Want to Fix Software Patents, Eliminate Software Patents”. It seems abundantly clear that some elements inside the EFF (not all of them) do wish to altogether eliminate software patents and that’s good, it’s definitely progress. As Wired put it: “That is by far the most incendiary proposal the Electronic Frontier Foundation offers in its comprehensive report on overhauling a painfully broken patent system. The report, two years in the making, suggests everything from strengthening the quality of patents to making patent litigation less costly. And there, on page 27 of the 29-page report, is “Abolish software patents.”
“The argument is that software patents may not just be flawed, but utterly unnecessary. This hasn’t always been EFF’s stance on patents, says Adi Kamdar, one of the report’s authors. But as the group compiled the report, it received 16,500 public comments from people in the business, academic, and policy communities. The idea that patents should be eliminated entirely was a common theme.”
Vera Ranieri from the EFF meanwhile (earlier on) suggested that SCOTUS “Shouldn’t Reward Ambiguity”, stating:
EFF submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court yesterday in Commil v. Cisco, a patent case that asks whether having a “good-faith belief” that a patent is invalid means that someone can’t induce infringement of a patent.
The issue of what it means to “induce infringement” is a complex, esoteric area of patent law. Generally, inducement liability is where the person accused of infringement didn’t actually carry out infringing acts herself, but instead encouraged other people to do them. For example, telling someone “hey, use this product to infringe this patent” might be inducement, whereas just making a product without any knowledge of a patent on its use would not be.
In conclusion, the USPTO is out of order as it tries to censor and hide its practices while the EFF, which is not perfect either, is at least pressuring the USPTO to stop issuing software patents. Given the EFF’s history of being soft on software patents (or ambiguous at best), overall this is definitely a step in right direction. █
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04.12.15
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A dissection of media deception (or media being bamboozled) regarding the act of promising not to sue using patents, which in no way relates to Free/Open Source software
EARLIER today we wrote about Microsoft's googlebombing of the term 'Open Source' — a disgrace that one must fight in order to preserve the value and meaning of Open Source.
A few weeks ago we saw Panasonic (and especially the corporate media) using the term “Open Source” to speak about patents. It is grotesque and misleading. See our clarification regarding Tesla, which did something similar and now enjoys this misleading article titled “Why Tesla gave away all its patents” (the latest among hundreds of such articles about Tesla PR).
“Why Tesla gave away all its patents” an inaccurate and loaded headline. It implies that de-fanging something is the same as giving it away and many articles still wrongly equate that with “Open Source”. Now the same thing is happening in relation to Panasonic. It dilutes the Open Source brand and can definitely confuse a lot of people.
Consider headlines like “Panasonic To Open-Source Some IoT Patents” and other headlines that use the word “open”, “share”, “free”, “open” and “free”, “Open-Source”, “royalty-free”, and “intellectual property”. Nowhere is there anything like that. Here is the press release [1, 2] whose title only uses the “intellectual property” nonsense (propaganda term).
The word “free” has been widely (mis)used [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] not by accident but by design. So was the word “open” [1, 2], unlike some article that used none of these inappropriate labels, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Rather than name journalists here we should just state that if one chooses to call “Open Source” the act of promising not to sue using patents, then a whole lot of companies out there can be openwashed. Seriously now, does anyone genuinely think that Panasonic did something “Open Source” here? █
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Posted in Deception, Law, Patents at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The debate about software patents in this post-Alice era parallels the Net neutrality debate, where voices of people with vested interests contribute to confusion and meddle with largely-accepted views/consensus
OVER the past month and a half there have been quite a few articles about software patents. We have kept track of them and accumulated what amounts to an alta vista of sorts — a kind of zeitgeist of patent debate trends. Back when this site was born (2006 being the year of establishment, i.e. almost a decade ago) debates about software patents were habitual; later we saw these debates distracted, diluted, and then virtually extinguished, i.e. largely gone. It wasn’t an accident; the debates are controlled by corporate media, which is in turn motivated by the wills and itches of large corporations. Now they love to moan about “patent trolls”, despite the strong correlation between trolls and software patents, let alone the fact that many big corporations act just like trolls. Those who insist that the only problem worth tackling in patents is “patent trolls” are probably just trying to protect multinationals from them; this includes some patent lawyers who perceive trolls as a legitimacy problem (serving to discredit the system they make money from and thus must protect).
Alice Changed Everything
The article ““Ineligible Subject Matter” Patent Litigation Spikes In 2014″ (note date) provided an interesting perspective. “More than 20 lower court rulings since the Alice decision have invalidated software patents,” said this other article about the HP patents (see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] or this analysis which says one “can help to have these [HP] patents revoked by providing ‘prior art’ examples on Stack Exchange”). Clearly enough there continues to be progress in this area, but the media is largely absent from it. The voices of patent lawyers dominate and they contribute to the illusion that nothing has changed after the Alice decision, or that very little has changed.
“CAFC affirms invalidity of patent on computerized meal planning,” Charles Duan wrote the other day. “Case was so easy they didn’t issue an opinion.”
Now, for CAFC, the most overzealous pro-software patents court to do this must truly count for something.
“Lenovo Says Alice Kills Tranxition Software Patents,” according to this article which states: “Lenovo (United States) Inc. on Tuesday asked an Oregon federal court to find invalid two Tranxition Inc. software patents it is accused of infringing, saying the patents are abstract and unpatentable under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. decision.”
Also consider reading the article “Future Of Software Patents In Doubt After Supreme Court Decision Last Year”, despite it being a little older.
Vivek Wadhwa, a longtime critic of software patents, weighed in last month and said that “Patents are like nuclear weapons”. “Vivek Wadhwa,” said the introduction, “Indian-American tech entrepreneur and academician is an outspoken advocate of abolishing software patents in the US.” Vivek Wadhwa also published some other pieces in large newspapers, noting that the “Founding Fathers of the United States considered intellectual property so important that they gave it a special place in the Constitution: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.””
Satish Babu said that the “‘Improve Patent Quality’ campaign Is a distraction & doesn’t lead to elimination of software patents [according to] RMS delivering the keynote at #lp2015″ (recent event).
To quote an article about it, “Big companies that don’t really want to get rid of software patents but do want to get rid of nuisance patents have launched a competing, weak, not-worth-bothering campaign to quote ‘improve patent quality,’ unquote,” Stallman said, presumably in reference to the lobbying group United for Patent Reform, which launched in January.”
Stallman is right. As we’ll explain later, there is one effort to blame it all on “bad patents” and another to blame it all on “trolls”, as CCIA (a front group) likes to do. Uniloc, which is clearly a patent troll, was mentioned here a short while ago because “PTAB Will Review Widely Asserted Uniloc Software Patent”. To quote: “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board agreed Tuesday to conduct an inter partes review of a patent on software registration technology that Uniloc USA Inc. has asserted against dozens of companies over the years, in a win for Sega of America Inc. and other accused infringers.”
Here is another development in the realms of software patents. BreezyPrint dodges a software patents lawsuit in Texas, where the courts are very favourable to plaintiffs. Quoting Law 360: “A Texas federal judge ruled Thursday that BreezyPrint Corp., a small mobile printing company, did not infringe several printing software patents owned by rival PrinterOn Inc., which was recently acquired by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.”
“Software patents at center of abuse problem, report says” is the title of another report. Thankfully, some people do realise/understand the core issue and this issue has already been addressed to a large degree by the highest court in the US. One oughtn’t be surprised to see patent lawyers panic.
Lawyers Distort the Record
So all in all one might assume that we’re moving in the right direction and the world can finally grasp that software is not patentable, not even in the US. Sadly, however, patent lawyers and people in the patent ‘industry’ still flood the channels (news, forums, etc.) and it shows. They are fighting back against this new reality.
A Microsoft-backed pro-software patents lobbying group (BSA) was given the platform right here, promoting software patents of course. This piece of lobbying/propaganda was posted by Dennis Crouch, who is himself very biased.
Crouch gives his platform not just for lobbyists to exploit (for software patents around the world) and to dismiss Alice but also for other pro-software patents voices, usually patent lawyers. Consider this “Guest Commentary” by Robert Stoll and the notoriously pro-software patents Michael Risch (he believes and insists that some software should be patentable).
Other patent lawyers took on other media. An article by James M. Singer (Fox Rothschild LLP) remarks on Alice and Singer again did this when it comes to patent reform. They are pushing forth the interests of patent lawyers. “We’re hearing a lot of claims about the STRONG Act as an “alternative” to patent litigation reform,” wrote the CCIA-backed (and powered) site. “The campaign supporting the bill has been misleading at best.” This CCIA-backed site keeps focusing on trolls, as usual, as it last did even a fortnight ago. It’s not asking for real “Patent Progress” (the name of the site) but a ‘progress’ that its funders (which include Microsoft) want. A patent bill’s acceptability is determined by the paymasters and “trolls” remain the only mentionable issue. “According to Lex Machina’s data,” says Levy (CCIA), “in January this year, there were 442 patent cases filed compared with 334 cases in January 2014. That’s a 32% increase. In February this year, there were 500 patent cases filed compared with 440 cases in February 2014. That’s a 13.6% increase. For the year so far, there are about 22% more patent cases filed in the first two months of 2015 compared with the first two months of 2014.” But that’s not the point; the real issue is not just litigation but the scope of patents. Why not tackle the core issue?
Patent propagandist Gene Quinn published “The Road Forward for Software Patents post-Alice”, one among his many pro-software patents posts (he makes money from these). Gene Quinn derives revenue from this parasitic system, so his torrent of pro-software patents pseudo-patriotism and salesmanship (appeal to emotion with terms like “Problem Child”) should not be shocking.
In another lawyers’ site we find another post-Alice pro-software patents piece. “Given past precedent,” it says, “counsel should not expect the pendulum to stop swinging back-and-forth on software patent eligbility” (it has already swung).
In another lawyers’ site we found more of the same and other lawyers’ sites offer no exception. They are teaching patent lawyers what to do as they are trying to get around the rules and share tricks for doing so. That’s what lawyers do, not just when it comes to patents. They want to keep patenting software, i.e. generate business for themselves. Watch how one firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, selectively covered cases where software patents were upheld by courts. It’s this bias by omission that we covered in prior month.
In conclusion, the world is changing, but don’t expect it to change without aggressive and persistent resistance from the parasites. █
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- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
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)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
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
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
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
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
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