10.05.11

IRC Proceedings: October 4th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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Links – ACTA SIGNED!

Posted in Site News at 12:37 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • CANADIAN ICE SHELVES
    HAVE LOST HALF THEIR SIZE IN SIX YEARS

    The Ellesmere Island ice shelves, which covered 8,900 square kilometers a century ago and shrunk to 1,043 square kilometers in 2005, now cover just 563 square kilometers. … The shelves have been around thousands of years and are typically more than 125 feet thick. The scientists say that about 3 billion tons of ice have been lost.

  • Stop the Keystone XL pipeline

  • Coal pollution cost society twice the market value of the electricity produced.

  • New Gulf oil leak matches BP’s Macondo (Deepwater Horizon)

• Finance

  • Sorry, But This Trader’s Banking Confession Was No Prank

    Rastani is small potatoes, but he’s a real trader. And he said nothing that would suggest otherwise; he simply described what he does, more honestly than a true insider would … “Every night I dream of another recession,” Rastani said, and explained that it’s possible to make huge money from a big crisis even when millions of others lose their life savings, and worse.

• Censorship

  • Obama Admin PR Flacks Blocking the Public’s Right to Know

    these policies aren’t about ensuring consistency of message (unless you count silence as a message) and efficiency. They were about censorship.

• Privacy

  • Sign the EFF petition to fix US electronic privacy laws.

    The government should be required to go to a judge and get a warrant before it can read our email, access private photographs and documents we store online, or track our location using our mobile phones. …

    Related story and a petition to the FBI to come clean

  • 
    Internet services such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are making broad surveillance easy and cheap for governments around the world.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Free Press has sued the FCC for the weakness of its net neutrality rules for mobile Internet providers.

• ACTA

  • ACTA Signed last Sunday

    The United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on Saturday, an accord targeting intellectual property piracy. The European Union, Mexico and Switzerland-the only other governments participating in the accord’s creation-did not sign the deal at a ceremony in Japan but “confirmed their continuing strong support for and preparations to sign the agreement as soon as practical,” the parties said in a joint statement. The United States applauded the deal.

    The US is mostly responsible for this nasty and anti-democratic treaty that was hammered out in two years of secret negotiations CableGate exposure and increased protests have made the conspirators rush to complete sign – the treaty grants power to censor Wikileaks and the rest of the internet which was embarrassing them on this very point. Background and other ACTA news follows. See also EFF ACTA resources. 99.999 percenters should add this to their protests because it will cut them off completely.

  • Public Knowledge write up about the signed version.

    Statutory damages are required, which globalizes the kind of crazy fines ordinary file sharing seen in US cases. Seizures and forfeit of counterfeit goods goes beyond the counterfiet goods themselves to the statutory value of the goods, a license to loot everything found. Even worse treaties are on the way.

  • Mexico’s Congress rejected ACTA.

    Their senate had previously done the same.

  • ACTA will turn ISPs into censors

  • Quadrature du net analysis of leaked ACTA draft..

  • 75 law professors from all around the US petitioned Obama to stop ACTA..

  • ACTA targets generic medicines, not just counterfeit..

  • Hundreds of people from all around the world signed up as Faces Against ACTA.

  • The EU Parlament voted almost unanimously to oppose ACTA.

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10.04.11

Links 4/10/2011: Parted Magic 6.7, Red Hat’s Latest Takeover, Fedora 16 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Attachmate Apathetic and SUSE No Better Than Free GNU/Linux (With No Microsoft Tax)

Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Novell is a yawner

Summary: More evidence of inaction from Novell’s adopter and inaction from SUSE developers (who cannot offer more than their GNU/Linux counterparts)

Attachmate was recently mentioned for its general neglect of Novell products. We’ve managed to spot an Attachmate sponsorship, their staff writing articles, and even customers that they have, but examples are very few.

In more prominent articles we find some shuffling down under, including this one which mentions Novell:

Attachmate has appointed Ian Graystone as channel sales director for its Novell and NetIQ operations in Australia.

What can be done for Novell at this stage? We see its products declining in the market and one of the only emerging areas — that which is associated with Microsoft-taxed GNU/Linux — is now in Germany (SUSE).

An announcements was sent a short while ago about the beta of OpenSUSE 12.1 and The H wrote:

Following a more than one week delay, the openSUSE project has announced the release of a first beta of version 12.1 of its openSUSE operating system. Originally called Milestone 6, this release is aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, and was reclassified as a beta in September; this was done in order to give it a higher profile in the hope that it would receive more extensive testing. It will be followed by two release candidates (RCs); the final version is scheduled to arrive on 11 November 2011.

More about the GNOME side can be found in Jamie Watson’s detailed analysis which starts as follows:

The next release of openSuSE, 12.1 (code named Asparagus), made it to Beta release over the weekend. I actually wrote about this ten days or so ago, when it should have originally been released, but it was delayed at that time. Now that it is out, in addition to simply mentioning the availability, I decided to have a quick look at their Gnome distribution, which is now using Gnome 3. The default desktop is the same as Gnome 3 under Fedora…

So why not use Fedora then? Red Hat is not in the pocket of Microsoft, unlike SUSE. Back in the days, before Novell signed that treasonous deal with Microsoft, SUSE had actually innovated. It made 3-D desktop effects before Vista was even available and it also made some new menus that exist to this date (e.g. SLAB). Back then there was actually a reason to choose SUSE, as I did too.

We are doing to research and write more about Novell in the weekend. █

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Lobbying for Patents in the EU and the US

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Time at the lobby takes its toll on society as politicians like Marcin Korolec and predators like Carl Icahn promote what would harm people’s interests

SOME days ago we wrote about the Polish presidency [1, 2, 3, 4] and its stance on a framework which would help legalise software patents in the EU. According to patent lawyer Axel H. Horns, this open door for software patents in the EU is urgently being pushed for passage before the end of this presidency’s reign:

The EU Competitiveness Council met in Brussels on Thursday 29 and Friday 30 September under the chair of Mr. Marcin Korolec, Deputy Minister of Economy, and Mrs Barbara Kudrycka, Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education.

[...]

Commissioner Barnier will welcome progress made in recent weeks and stress the importance of reaching a final agreement by the end of 2011. He will highlight that reducing the costs and complexity of the existing European patent system has a substantial impact on innovation and growth.

We wrote about Barnier in relation to his work which was pro-patents (as covered here, here, here, here and here). He has a lot of power, so people should not lose sight of his actions and words. Another person who has a lot of power is Carl Icahn, who abuses this power to crush Yahoo! and have Motorola pretty much reduced to just a pile of patents. To quote patents boosters (patent lawyers) from IAM Magazine:

I wonder if the most significant event of the past few months for the developing IP market place was not actually the Nortel auction or Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility, but the statement from Carl Icahn prior to the latter occurring. Towards the end of July, billionaire investor Icahn, who has a fair sized chunk of Moto shares, said that the board should be looking to monetise the company’s patent portfolio, which he said had “significant value”. He continued: “There may be multiple ways to realize such value given the current heightened market demand for intellectual property in the mobile telecommunications industry.”

We now know that even before Icahn went public with his views Google and Motorola Mobility were in talks about a possible acquisition, indeed Icahn may even have known about them; but what his statement showed was that a serious investor had taken a close look at the IP position of one of the companies he had an interest in and had formed a significant position as a result. Of course, without the Nortel auction he probably would not have done so; but that is by the by – he did.

The turning of phone makers into just a pile of patents is a subject we tackled in a separate post. This works well for patent lawyers and companies that are extremely large. it really harms customers and impedes competition, so there is no justification for it. █

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Microsoft Products Are Still Dying

Posted in Microsoft at 10:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Windows Live Gallery is being shut down and it is merely the latest among very many such Microsoft services and products that are eventually being shut down

MARKET monopolist and unethical bully Microsoft is gradually breaking down into pieces. It is a process that has gone on for several years now. While some old monopolies bring home some bacon (although a decreasing amount of it), there is clearly an inability to evolve.

“There are more products that die at Microsoft without us noticing as we no longer track MSFT.”It has been a long time since Microsoft last brought a successful product to market. It just shuts down many projects as none of the new ones succeeds on the face of it.

We have an out-of-date wiki page about Microsoft’s dead products and now we can add another item to it. Windows Live Gallery is officially dead. Thanks to the reader who sent us the link. There are more products that die at Microsoft without us noticing as we no longer track MSFT. There are more pressing issues. █

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When Phones Become Just a Big Pile of Patents

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News suggesting (or even preaching) that computing in the mobile world should be treated as just negotiation (and extortion) over patents

The question about software patents is vital to Microsoft, which has essentially become a patent parasite that feeds on Linux/Android. The New York Times (NYT) was accused by Glyn Moody of posting a “puff piece” for Microsoft about the Samsung deal which harms Android. There are many more such examples, including some from Microsoft boosters pretending to report Android news objectively (instead, they spread Microsoft talking points).

According to another new piece from the NYT, Amazon might be after Palm for its patents. To quote:

Will Amazon Buy Palm for Its Patents?

Shares of Amazon fell about 2 percent in the first hour of trading on Friday, amid speculation that the online retailer might be angling to buy Palm, the fallen mobile device business that Hewlett-Packard bought last year for $1.2 billion.

It turns out that Nokia’s deal with Apple is now receiving or was receiving federal scrutiny. The Microsoft-led Nokia is now feeding a Canadian patent troll which is likely to attack Android [1, 2, 3].

Canadian companies such as RIM and Nortel get mentioned in the Canadian press, increasingly as part of the promotion of mobile technology as just a pile of patents. What a gross and dangerous simplification. To paraphrase a recent comment, great ideas need to turn into products, not patents. Anyway, from the Globe and Mail:

That means creating investment funds that can pool and manage nationally vital patents in areas such as software and biotechnology. It requires governments to wield a stick.

Did they really mean to lump software in? These are notoriously improper.

Google’s Schmidt meanwhile reassures that Google’s purchase of Motorola patents won’t be trouble. To quote CNET:

In an attempt to allay fears that Motorola Mobility would receive special treatment following the completion of Google’s acquisition, the search giant’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that competitors have nothing to fear.

More here on the same subject (Bloomberg promotes the “IP” propaganda, still):

Google Inc. (GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt said the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. may spur competition among phone makers using its Android software, and the company won’t play favorites with its partners.

“The Android ecosystem is the No. 1 priority, and we won’t do anything with Motorola, or anybody else by the way, that would screw up the dynamics of that industry,” Schmidt said in an Oct. 1 interview with Bloomberg Television’s Erik Schatzker in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Sony’s large patent collection has alleviated concern for some:

Sony Ericsson CEO Confident Company Will Avoid Patent Wars

Sony Ericsson, the mobile handset joint venture between Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson (ERIC) and Sony Corp. (SNE), will not become embroiled in the legal battles over patents engulfing its rivals because of its large existing patent portfolio and its policy of cross-licensing those patents, its Chief Executive says.

This still leaves smaller companies open to abuse. How is the patent system affecting competition really? Almost by definition, patents are about protectionism and not competition. Pro-patents Web sites that provide people tips on how to get software patents are doing a huge disservice to the producing industry and all those patent deals we keep hearing about are essentially a cancellation of the artificial limitation known as patents. Some companies issue press releases dedicated just to patents because they fail to actually make products. Microsoft increasingly falls into this category too. We seem to hear about Microsoft extorting Linux phone makers more than we hear about Microsoft’s phones (there have been several disparate attempts over the years, but all of them failed). █

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Update on Software Patents in the US, Australia, and New Zealand

Posted in America, Australia, Law, Patents at 10:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Opportunities remain for blocking or abolishing software patents in some key English-speaking countries

THE STRUGGLE to eliminate software patents before they spread further and become an international norm is perhaps in Obama's hands. Despite corporate sponsorship he will need to listen to the people, who clearly reject software patents and speak out about it [1, 2] after they voted him into office.

The White House still has a petition against software patents, but will it be answered? There are yet more new articles about it. One latest example says:

The petition has more than 12,000 signatures, which puts it among the top 10 petitions on the White House website.

In a separate post we will cover the latest situation in Europe and on Sunday we wrote about the latest situation in Australia, on which the FFII’s president comments as follows:

10 days left to file answers to the Australian Consultation to get rid of software patents over there…

This is even in Slashdot, but not quite receiving the level of attention it deserves.

Then there is the New Zealand situation with regards to software patents.. IDG warns that:

In August HP started the process of acquiring Autonomy for $US10billion; the fourth largest ever software/services acquisition in history. Its interest in the company “says a lot about what our competitive strengths are, as well as our intellectual property”, says Autonomy’s Australia/NZ managing director Dean Maher. The company has 170 patents across advanced knowledge management and search of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data, he says – casting a sidelight on the local debate over the value of software patents.

Not a pleasant thought. In the next few posts we’ll show the relevance to Free software. █

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