Summary: The latest Windows botnet crackdown is just a drop in the bucket and Microsoft Windows is once again just a keypress away from full compromise
A FEW days ago we wrote about just one large Windows botnet being addressed. It appears as though the FBI was involved. The FBI too has suffered from Windows malware, even internally [1, 2].
More details have emerged about a cybercrime investigation that led to the takedown of a botnet containing 12m zombie PCs and the arrest of three alleged kingpins who built and ran it.
That’s just peanuts. 12 million Windows zombie PCs are less than 3% of the world’s estimated total. To botmasters, there are still hundreds of millions of Windows zombie PCs to pick from.
“Users of Windows currently have to worry about hitting a particular physical key.”“Monster botnet held 800,000 people’s details,” says this other new report, so these Windows zombies have already caused theft and huge damages that are hard to measure (according to some estimates, the cost may easily exceed a trillion dollars in total, for Windows botnets as a whole). It is estimated that about one in two Windows PCs is is a zombie PC [1, 2], with Microsoft itself putting the optimistic bar at about a third (2009 figures).
Summary: Signs of weakness or dis-servitude at the US patent office, Alison Brimelow is leaving, and Apple wants to be paid for a Linux platform it does not develop
THIS post assembles some key news about the patent systems and how they affects Free software.
USPTO
The USPTO shoots itself in the foot by going beyond the making of hamburgers and sandwiches as patents. Now there is a patent on hotdogs:
So when he heard about this new pediatric warning, he went looking to see if any of the hotdog makers were offering pre-hollowed dogs — and instead discovered that in 2006 someone had applied for a patent on hollow hot dogs. Seriously.
According to this, things are bound to get worse, not better, because the US wants ACTA to cover patents as well.
Furthermore, the response confirms what became clear in the most recent leak, that the US sees ACTA as covering not just copyrights and trademarks — but patents as well (though, some of the other participants are against including patents).
Then there are those who hacked the system, such as Ray Niro (inventor of patent trolling, who also bullies critics [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]) and Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold, the world's biggest patent troll.
“I’ve always treated Myhrvold’s company with the greatest scepticism (I call them “Intellectual Vultures”) and this report is extremely believable,” says Simon Phipps, who caught up with the latest news (exposé) about Intellectual Ventures. “It fits in with the use of patents,” he adds, “especially software patents – by companies like IBM, who hide their patent shake-downs behind confidentiality, out-of-court settlement and fine language about their community credentials.”
EPO
André Rebentisch has this new post about “trade elitism”.
Still you may wonder if EU trade policy always adheres to Free Trade objectives. In the field of IPR, in particular geographical indications, common policies are incompatible with a classic Free Trade agenda.
The head of the EPO is leaving after her mistakes. “Defining the limits of patentable subject-matter in “new” areas (life, software, business methods) is a source of unease,” writes or quotes the president of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion. Based on IPJur, there is already a succession plan.
Earlier in May 2009 I had reported that Ms Brimelow is not going to apply for a second term in Office as President of the European Patent Office beyond her term ending in June 2010. After considerable woes, the Administrative Council (AC) of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg) eventually managed to elect her successor by a 3/4 majority of votes on March 01, 2010.
This long paper[PDF] had Henrion write: “European and European Union Patents Court, a somewhat uninspired label abbreviated as the troglodyte-sounding acronym EEUPC”
A “Union” patents court is an indication of an attempt to mix or rather to negatively contaminate existing patent laws that protected Free software developers. It’s policy laundering, just like ACTA.
Apple
Apple has decided to be a spoiled brat and attack Linux with software patents [1, 2, 3, 4]. According to this, Apple is aiming specifically at the Linux-based platform.
Commentators suggest that this action by Apple is actually targeted at Google’s open source Android operating system, rather than relating just to HTC’s smartphones. HTC is one of the most prominent handset manufacturers globally to have developed products based on the Android operating system, using it in its Hero and Nexus One phones.
AS ANDROID SWEEPS across the smartphone market like a wave of locusts over a land that is strewn with Windows Mobile devices cast by the wayside, Google’s idealistic open source, embrace all attitude is starting to look naive.
TechDirt has written about Apple’s sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty.
…Steve Jobs noted how Apple was “shameless about stealing great ideas.” But in the announcement about the HTC lawsuit, he has a different perspective: “competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
Apple’s iTunes store has always dictated the terms of its dealings with record labels. As such, the largest U.S. music retailer has never censured the labels over marketing or promotion strategies.
Apple is not a nice company; it’s probably not as bad to GNU/Linux as Microsoft is. Alas, it’s important to avoid Apple products in order to sustain Free software and help it thrive. █
Summary: AT and T to continue tradition of spying by diverting customer traffic to Microsoft datacentres
A FEW months ago, Microsoft sued TiVo with patents in order to support its buddy, AT&T. It is worth adding that AT&T is a lobbyist for more patents, an illegal spy, and unauthorised censor for the United States government [1, 2]. Here is a reminder of this from the news:
Here in the US, AT&T eagerly helped the administration in spying on users with no warrant and no official process (even allowing private info to be passed on with just a post-it note request).
More importantly, however, AT&T made a deal involving Windows Mobile a few weeks ago. AT&T has a close relationship with the patent bully [1, 2, 3, 4] (yes, that would be Apple attacking Linux phones) too.
To Microsoft, Yahoo! is a form of brand-washing. People use what they believe to be Yahoo!, but in fact they just use an alternative front end to Microsoft Bong [sic] (supporting an abusive monopolist and receiving ‘cooked’ results without realising it). Microsoft will harvest data and advertise based on its own biased preferences, but users will be presented with deceiving logos after the hijack. We recently found out just how friendly Microsoft is to warrantless spying. █
HE season of change is clearly upon us,” saysSimon Phipps, whose employer has been acquired by Oracle. “Seems even with Microsoft’s support Novell couldn’t cut it,” he asserts. Phipps is of course referring to what seems like the imminent sale of Novell (not necessarily to a hedge fund). We have covered the subject in:
There is an interesting new article in The Guardian, which speaks about proposed banning of “vulture funds”, such as the hedge fund which made an unsolicited bid to take over Novell (and also bought debt in developing countries in order to enslave and profit from them).
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds from using British courts to prey on poor countries when it comes to a vote on Friday .
Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last year against two so-called vultures. Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win debt relief from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets.
Sirleaf said: “We’ve been waiting for a parliament or an assembly to take this kind of hard decision. I hope the US Congress and maybe some others in Europe will pick up this gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain.”
An investigation for BBC’s Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other creditors accepted.
Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in full.
Here is a good video that explains how it works (previously included here). █
For a little over a year now I’ve been attending events and gatherings of the New York Linux Users Group (NYLUG). It’s been an interesting experience, and I’d like to share briefly a little about it.
So the question here is. If marketing and research companies want accurate statistics (assuming they do) then how can they count the real number of Linux installations? Quite simply they can’t. This means that 93.4% of the statistics recorded only show less than 9.8% of the true number of Linux installations (where did those numbers come from I wonder :).
The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective- now and long into the future.
Clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people are recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing FOSS to build fully customised media laptops and to create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet.
Stable kernel update announcements posted on LWN have a certain tendency to be followed by complaints about the amount of information which is made available. It seems that there is a desire for a description of the changes which is more accessible than the patches themselves, and for attention to be drawn to the security-relevant fixes. As an exercise in determining what kind of effort is being asked of the kernel maintainers, your editor decided to make a pass through the proposed 2.6.32.9 update and attempt to describe the impact of each of the changes – all 93 of them. The results can be found below.
With the Linux 2.6.33 kernel having been released last week where the ATI kernel mode-setting (KMS) DRM code left the kernel’s staging area, we knew a new ATI X.Org driver release was imminent. Over the night a new stable DDX driver update has been pushed out for xf86-video-ati as well as a new pre-release for the KMS-supportive 6.13 version that also carries other changes.
A few days ago we asked you which applications you would choose to be “featured” application on the shelves of the Ubuntu 10.04 Software Center. Since then the list has swelled from a meagre 4 choices a few days ago to a massive 17 selections now!
There’s an old saying “Use the right tool for the job” — common-sense advice that applies to pretty much any situation – especially in Software. But what happens when the ‘right tools for the job’ don’t actually exist?
Clementine is a half port half rewrite of Amarok 1.4, with its kdelibs dependencies stripped and all the code updated to use Qt4. Only in its 0.1 version, it works incredibly well. I’ve been looking for something like this since Juk became crusty and Amarok became too much and Exaile seemed slow and gtkish. Clementine is my new default player.
For those unfamiliar, CrossOver is a proprietary version of Wine that is used for running Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux. While there are other products that offer similar functionality such as Transgamings’ Cedega, CodeWeavers is the only one that immediately sends patches they create back to the Wine project to further enhance it’s functionality, making it.. in our opinion, the better choice of the two.
A loop in music is a section of the music that repeats itself continuously until receiving a signal to either stop or move on to the next section. A loop can be assigned to a single instrument or to a group of instruments. Compositionally, loops are used for a variety of purposes. For example, they may function as formal bass patterns over which a composition is built, or they may suppy a long but consistently repeating series of chords used to define the harmony for independently composed bass and melody lines. For many computer-based music-makers the loop’s most popular implementation is the drum loop, a rhythmic pattern of one or more measures of percussion sounds that can be repeated unchanged for simple lines or mixed & matched with other loops for more life-like variation.
Mention the phrase open source and, odds are, the thing that pops into most peoples’ minds is usually Linux or possibly OpenOffice; or, a developer might think of the Mono project or an artistic type will think of GIMP. While all of those are good examples of open source, there is more to life than work; occasionally, you need to capture a city or throw a fireball or two just to relax.
For the last several months, I have been wasting a vast amount of time (although I told my wife it’s research) on two games that I found on SourceForge: Glest and FreeCol.
As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE. Unfortunately I was unable to do so after openSUSE decided not to play nice. However my search did not stop there, and once the community edition was ready I jumped over to Linux Mint KDE CE. Finally I decided to once again try openSUSE, this time installing from a USB drive. This somehow resolved all of my installation issues.
I just saw an article about North Korean Linux distro, named “붉은별” from Russian blog. Although I don’t know anything about distro’s base, who developed and translated, who packaged, etc. The interesting part is that this distribution is using KDE, release 3.x. Also it is translated in “North” Korean standard, which is different from “South” Korean standard, especially in technological terms. North uses loanwords from Russian language, while South uses them from English. North try to keep pure Korean terms, South widely adopted foreign loanwords. As of linguistic and real world, maybe also political difference(south and north can’t communicate), we can’t mix and match the translation.
North Korea has reportedly developed its own version of the Linux operating with a graphical user interface that closely resembles Microsoft Windows.
A copy of the North Korean Linux distribution, called Red Star, was purchased in Pyongyang for US$5 by a Russian student named Mikhail, who then posted a brief review of it on his blog using the Russian embassy’s Internet connection, according to the English-language Web site of Russia Today, a Russian television news channel.
North Korea’s self-developed software operating system named the “Red Star” was brought to light for the first time by a Russian satellite broadcaster yesterday.
The Linux ecosystem is a complex entity. On one hand everyone gets along and benefits from work done by others, while on the other there’s often animosity and conflict between distributions and their communities (remember when Ubuntu came along?).
People often complain that there is simply too much choice in the Linux world and that we’d all be better off if there was just one, or two. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
I recently read a slashdot entry about Why Linux is not yet ready(there has been tons of those i know) and reading the comments i saw a lot of people arguing about different stuff, for example guys comparing the desktop and the server as if they were the same OS, in practicality is not, there are Linux distros for the server and power users and there are distros aimed at the Desktop.
RHCS offers a well thought out framework for managing a cluster, especially when it comes to service failover. Using RHCS makes securing your mission-critical systems easy, and makes them highly available with standard hardware.
The R in RHCS implies that this method only runs on RHEL machines – but this is not the case, as we will demonstrate in one of our upcoming articles.
Red Hat Linux has announced that its annual innovations awards will be presented at the company’s 2010 summit and JBoss World conference which will be jointly held in Boston from June 22 to 25.
And so it begins. As Canonical puts the finishing touches on Ubuntu 10.04 — a long term support (LTS) release — the company also is reaching out to potential Linux server and desktop software partners. In fact, Canonical says there are at least 10 reasons why ISVs should embrace Ubuntu Desktop Edition, and nine reasons why developers should embrace Ubuntu Server Edition. Will partners embrace Canonical’s Ubuntu pitch? Here are some thoughts.
First, a little background. Canonical views Ubuntu 10.04 (code named Lucid Lynx) a prime opportunity for application developers to build long-term business and customer relationships on Ubuntu Linux.
I have to say I have been very under excited by the news of the Ubuntu One Music store – Im not convinced we need another music store unless they are going to give us something that other stores dont – like flac support or something.
Ive just been reading Popeys blog about how to use the Ubuntu One Music Store and I have to say, unless Im missing something – what a massive FAF!
According to an Ubuntu wiki FAQ, the Ubuntu One Music Store will offer DRM-free and watermark-free MP3s provided by the London-based online music outfit 7digital. The store will integrate with the existing Ubuntu RhythmBox music player, and at some point, it will also be available as a plug-in for Banshee, Amarok, and “a few other” third-party applications.
For the past few releases, Canonical has put quite a bit of energy into making Ubuntu a first-class OS for use in the cloud. Ubuntu now has cloud support for Amazon’s EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (a “private cloud” system based on Eucalyptus). This means that it’s easy to spin up Ubuntu instances on EC2 or to make your own private cloud with Ubuntu … where you can spin up more instances of Ubuntu … there’s a lot of “cloud” going on here!
The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.
The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.
Ubuntu has seen a tremendous amount of growth and change since it was conceived in 2004. Back then it was a small project with strong ambitions and a handful of developers passionate about delivering a world class Linux Operating System that can compete on every level with Microsoft and Apple. We adopted a style based on the tagline “Linux for Human Beings”, and called it “Human”. Six years on we have made incredible progress. Ubuntu is a global phenomenon: we have carved out a pervasive culture of quality and design, thoughtful usability and great technology all fused together in a project that maintains the same commitment to community and collaborative development that we embraced back in 2004.
Finally, the Lubuntu developers have created a special interface for netbooks. I haven’t had much time to explore it yet, but hope to do so soon. Briefly, though, here’s what it looks like:
Then, Linux Mint caught my eye. Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition, to be precise. Just released, with a 2.6.31 kernel, and KDE 4.3.4. I downloaded the iso, and gave it a spin. It recognized all my hardware, including the Atheros wifi card. A very nice implementation of KDE 4.3.4. I played with it for a couple of hours, and decided to take the plunge.
Installation was as smooth and easy as it should be. Select the entire windows partition, wipe it clean, and divide it up for Linux. Answer a few simple questions, and very shortly thereafter, it was telling me to remove the DVD and reboot. I spent a little time putting up the plasma widgets I like, and in little over half an hour I had my desktop installed and looking like I wanted. Mint KDE is a very usable system, easy to use (if you like KDE4, like I do), and beautiful to look at. I turned on a bunch of eye candy I don’t usually, just because I could, and the system hardly noticed.
Feeding the e-book craze, a new hardware controller chip from Freescale aims to lower the cost of e-readers below the magic $98 price point while extending battery life to weeks.
Archos announced two low-cost, WiFi-enabled tablets that run Android on a 600MHz ARM9 processor. The Archos 7 Home Tablet offers a seven-inch touchscreen and is designed for mobile use, while the eight-inch Archos 8 Home Tablet is designed for fixed kitchen-computer and digital picture frame (DPF) duties, says the company.
STMicroelectronics says it is now shipping four Linux-ready SoCs (system on chips), based on similar ARM926EJ-S cores but targeting different market segments. The SPEAr300, 310, 320, and 600 have single or dual cores, run at up to 400MHz, and sell for as little as $7 in production quantities, the company says.
At CeBIT this week, Motorola demonstrated an Android-based “HS1001″ cordless IP phone manufactured by Binatone and built around the DSP Group’s DECT-compatible XpandR chipset. Meanwhile, DSP Group showed its own Android-based IP phone reference design based on the XpandR II chipset.
For much of the last decade, Linux-based landline-based IP phones made regular appearances on LinuxDevices, but with the rise of mobile phones, such announcements have become fewer and farther between. The few IP phones we’ve covered recently are typically multimedia tablet/kitchen-computer designs, such as the already defunct, Linux-based Verizon Hub, built by OpenPeak, OpenPeak’s Linux-based OpenFrame IP phone, or the Android-based Glass reference platform from Cloud Telecomputers. Typically, in these designs, IP telephony is just one feature among many other multimedia and Web browsing capabilities.
viaForensics, a computer and mobile forensics firm, has released a beta version of its Open Source Android Forensics application, which allows forensics examiners to export data from an Android device for use by law enforcement and forensic investigators.
Android’s beauty as an open-source operating system is that it allows any random manufacturer to develop a product and slap Android on top of it. This does, however, allow for some issues in terms of legitimacy of manufacturers. Case and point: The Haleron iLet Mini HAL.
“Ptex from Disney Animation is one of those premiere technologies that can only reach its full potential by releasing it as open source,” said Andy Hendrickson, chief technology officer. “It is a revolutionary idea, and though some would characterize it as a Disney competitive advantage, it has more value to the corporation as an industry standard in solving the time-consuming computer graphics problem of assigning textures to geometry. Setting a new standard is best accomplished by giving technology away for free.”
I was told once about someone called a “cyber hippie.” They dual boot with Linux and Mac OSX or Windows. They use open source browsers, instant messengers and office suites. They write their own code. They essentially live on Slashdot in lieu of professional news sites. The sinking realization that this idea may be true brought a certain horror to my thoughts, as I have a generally low opinion of anyone who claims to be a “hippie,” probably from too much South Park during my formative years.
It created an interesting dichotomy in my mind: Are the users of open source software the hippies of the Internet underworld and the users of closed-source software (MacOS, Windows) the conservatives?
[...]
We’ve ended up with a lot of great things from open source development in forms of freeware clones: Pidgin Instant Messenger, Cinelerra (video editing software), the Ogg Vorbis media format for audio and video, OpenOffice.org and, of course, Mozilla Firefox.
You can’t learn Blender overnight, unfortunately, even if you only need to use a sub-set of its tools, such as producing static 3-D images. But that’s because, for most people, thinking in three dimensions is hard, and drawing in three dimensions (on a two-dimensional screen) is even harder. All of the techniques Blender offers to build 3-D models — meshes, skins, NURBs, extrusion — are just shortcuts to help you get from the design you can picture in your head to a concrete, well-defined model inside the computer. They take some getting used to, and more than that, they take practice. But there’s no reason to feel intimidated by them.
If you’re like most Internet-connected people these days, the amount of information you take in from your favorite news sites, tech blogs, and the like is just staggering. The only way to stay on top of everything is with a solid feed reader to help aggregate everything you want to read. Of course, many folks rely on Google Reader to get the job done but if you’re looking for an open source option, here are five of our favorites.
Open source might not be about the money, but the financial interests (and stubbornness) of prevailing content providers have led to the creation of a draconian system for content distribution. This shouldn’t be news to you. What is baffling, however, is that companies are simply unwilling to see the tangible benefits of community-driven development for their assets–a concept that has proven out time and time again in open systems of all kinds. And if they aren’t busy sticking it to themselves, the system too greatly rewards their ill attempts at poisoning others’ livelihoods with their copyright-preservation anxieties.
The research organisation has built the system under the Mozilla Public License and hopes some of the 3700 downloads will result in feedback about the software.
OSQA is a specialized questions and answers website. It deals with Open Source and its every ramification. The site is absolutely free to join, and it can be entirely used at no cost too.
Over the past few years, enterprise-grade, commercially-supported open source content management and portal software has seen an increase in adoption by major enterprises worldwide. As these open source platforms have matured over the years, organizations are beginning to realize the benefits that can be gained, and the demand continues to grow as more organizations are working to achieve an Enterprise 2.0 environment in a cost effective manner.
As virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing force businesses to reevaluate the broader issue of acceptable network service levels, open source network monitoring tools are attracting heightened interest.
Both network administrators and open source advocates say the flexibility these tools promise at a relatively reasonable cost has made them a viable alternative to software offered by some of the largest enterprise technology companies.
Nexenta Systems is updating its NexentaStor open-source storage software with in-line deduplication, which increases the amount of data that can be stored on a server by storing it more efficiently, and support for three popular hypervisors.
Mr Mero said: “Open source data integration software allows you to integrate a company’s legacy system with other applications, enabling businesses coming out of the recession to benefit from efficient and cost effective upgrades as well as greater flexibility to develop data management techniques.”
Within hours of the earthquake, teams from the open-source and technology communities, as well as businesses large and small, began assembling exceptional civilian knowledge management capabilities through global networks of volunteers. This gave the U.S. government and the international disaster relief community unprecedented access to integrated and timely information about the disaster, some of which they used.
The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) is a conference for Open Source Geospatial Software. It will be presented at Barcelona (Spain), from 6th to 9th September 2010 and is an opportunity to unite behind the many successful geospatial products, standards and protocols.
Open Source has an enormous following in the EU, and there’s not only an Open Source Pavilion, but it’s not just a gathering of 10×10 booths with geek-speakers– far more interesting than that.
The H spoke with IPFire’s Project Leader and Developer Michael Tremer at this year’s CeBIT IT trade show in Hannover, Germany about his open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.
According to Martin Schaller, the Navit Project Leader, the German district of Brandenburg is trialling the Navit car navigation system for its Police System. Schaller spoke to The H at CeBIT 2010 about the trial. Navit is an open source, cross-platform car navigation suite that includes a built-in routing engine. Schaller says that, while the system is still considered to be in development, the district will be testing Navit this month with at least three of its cars.
The Vietnam Open Source Development Joint Stock Company (VINADES., JSC), the first firm operating in the field of open source in the country, made its debut on February 25.
Future of Web Apps (FOWA) event saw major companies like Facebook participating. But what was surprising to see was that Facebook focused a lot on open source this year. Facebook recently hired David Recordon to be more active at the open source side of the business. Recordon, who spearheaded the launch of the Open Web Foundation, is Facebook’s first really prominent open-source guru, and when it comes to Facebook’s marketing pitches, the open-source guys have taken a little more coaxing than the iPhone developers or widget-builders, reports Caroline McCarthy of CNET.
The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.
The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.
A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics, a capability that could open the door for more interactive Web pages from developers.
Some gaming companies have created plug-ins that allow 3D graphics to be viewed, but the latest method does not require one, which potentially would allow the capability to be used by more people, said Philipp Slusallek, a professor at Saarland University, at the Cebit trade show on Wednesday.
In the light of the recent phishing attack that compromised Twitter accounts of several prominent politicians, the UK government has announced that all its departments will have the freedom to opt for other web browsers as there is no rule about only using the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
The government has said its departments are free to consider any browser, and should consider open-source software including Firefox.
According to a parliamentary written answer from Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, there is no rule that says government departments must use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, even though it is the browser most widely used within Whitehall.
“I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: ‘(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.’ We have also been told to remove Firefox found on anyone’s computer unless they have specific authorisation from management to have it installed under special circumstances. Now, I could somewhat understand this if I was working in a company that sold and promoted the use of Microsoft software for financial gain, but I work in the publicly / government funded health system. Several of the IT big-wigs at the DHB are seemingly blindly pro-Microsoft and seem all too quick to shrug off other, perhaps more efficient alternatives. As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft’s infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft’s software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run. I would very much like to hear Slashdot’s ideas / opinions on this ‘Strategic Direction’ and the silencing of our technical opinions.”
During the last 10 years OpenOffice.org™ has evolved to a quite large project in the FLOSS world and a successful product in the office productivity suite market. Together with our product the OpenOffice.org brand spread over the world. This brand has a tradition of quality and it remains faithful to its origins. Instead of a complete new design we started a refresh. It points out the key components and improves the overall impression to gain even more strength and confidence.
The details for Document Freedom Day 2010 have been announced – it’s on March 31st and there will be events all over the world. This should be a year of celebration as well as campaigning, as we have made enormous strides in promoting liberty.
The open source CONNECT is being widely embraced as a health information exchange solution for NHIN connectivity, with many health enterprises abandoning proprietary solutions and opting instead for the CONNECT open source platform.
The CDC access to data is designed to run on NHIN-Connect, a nationwide data sharing network built under a government contract to Harris Corp. using open source tools.
2010 will see PostgreSQL release its first major new version for a long time: version 9.0. The release of version 9.0 is an important milestone in the evolution of PostgreSQL. Integral to this release are new features such as the operation of standby servers in read-only mode (hot standby) and an integrated replication solution.
Some of the biggest names on the web use MySQL, including Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and Twitter as well as other technology giants such as Dell and Cisco. Steve Shine from Ingres was also keen to play up the company’s influence in the banking sector and other mission critical applications. “We have major banks in our installed customer base and about 25% of all financial transactions go through an open source platform. One customer uses Ingres for flight and maintenance scheduling,” he says.
Zia Consulting extends and supports ECM applications and has frequently used Alfresco, an open source ECM product, for client applications. The company keeps its own content in an Alfresco repository as well, and wanted to be able to connect to it via smartphones. “We use an Alfresco solution that’s in the cloud, which is very convenient,” says Mike Mahon, president of Zia Consulting, “but we did not want to rely solely on laptops for connectivity when we were on the road. In addition, we wanted to give something back to the Alfresco community. So we decided to develop an app, Fresh Docs for Alfresco, for mobile platforms so that users could access content in Alfresco repositories.”
Drupal’s founder is calling for open source in the enterprise and in the cloud. This should be no surprise, coming from someone like Dries Buytaert. But it is still interesting, considering the source and the point he makes about the actual lack of open source in cloud computing.
[...]
Dries:
“….they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don’t allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.”
It’s in Dries view that this model can be disrupted by open source. For example, he says, the Drupal Gardens community improves the overall platform by contributing to it. The goal, as Dries says, is for people to export their Drupal Garden site in their entirety ” the code, the theme and data — and move the platform to any Drupal hosting environment.”
Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.
Open source software is now much more widely available than ever before, and many of the tools are robust and reliable. Names such as Apache, Protégé and Linux are well known and respected in the industry. There are, however, a couple of points to be aware of before going down the open source route.
Firstly, open source does not necessarily mean free of charge. Open source means that you are free to use the software and change and redistribute the source code under certain license conditions. So, to coin a phrase often used by the open source community, open source software is free as in speech, not as in beer! However, many open source software packages are also free of charge, but it is worth checking this as some require a fee and some only provide a basic version free of charge, with useful add-ons requiring a fee.
This last point is where you see the real problem with a cron-based solution. Cron and Task Scheduler were only designed to run regular housekeeping tasks on a single machine, but when you’re providing a service from a collection of machines then every single machine is a single point of failure.
Backed by Yahoo!, HP, and Intel, the computer science mavens at Carnegie Mellon University have added a new compute cluster to the worldwide Open Cirrus test bed, a collection of clusters designed to explorer the frontiers of interwebs-scale distributed computing.
Experienced users or administrators responsible for several machines or environments, know the difficult demands and challenges of maintaining such an infrastructure. The article outlines the steps involved in creating an internal FreeBSD Update Server.
Matthew Katzer probably didn’t realize that he’d be doing FOSS a favor when he appropriated Robert Jacobsen’s model railroad interface code without attribution. After years of litigation, Katzer agreed to pay $100,000 to settle the case, establishing that free software has actual monetary value.
While there are numerous open-source computer and electronics components available today, only a handful of complete tech gadgets are being developed under an open-source philosophy. However, what exactly defines a hardware project as being open source remains … well, open.
Now, following the path of so many other open source projects, companies including Red Hat and Cycle Computing are transforming Condor into a product. Condor allows large numbers of computers, whether servers, desktops or engineering workstations, to be used as a massive high-performance or high-throughput computing facility.
“Condor enables open and cost-effective high throughput computing to environments scaling up to 30,000 processors,” says Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, which offers support and management tools for Condor.
Unnoticed by the people of Britain, a transformation has been happening beneath our feet. In the first study of its kind, scientists have analysed the soil the country depends on.
In just the top 8cm (3in) of dirt, soil scientists estimate there are 12.8 quadrillion (12,800 million million) living organisms, weighing 10m tonnes, and, incredibly, that the number of these invertebrates – some just a hair’s breadth across – which in effect make the soil has increased by nearly 50% in a decade. At the same time, however, the diversity of life in the earth appears to have reduced.
Most experts predict Sana’a, the fastest-growing capital in the world at 7% a year, will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. That is the same year the World Bank says Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which currently accounts for three-quarters of the state’s revenues.
Seen on a recent Citibank (C) statement: “Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”
Basing their recommendation on government support being removed from some types of deposits, JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) says investors should look at Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) options because they should do better than their weaker competitors as a result.
The battle by Malcolm Calvert over charges he was involved with insider trading at the Cazenove unit of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) continues in London, as his lawyer communicated to a jury in London that there wasn’t any evidence concerning Calvert partaking in insider trading.
For the biggest banks, 2009 was a year of humility. In the U.S., top executives and millionaire traders were denounced by the Obama administration, Congress and the media for refusing to give up their bonuses.
Tens of thousands of striking Greek workers took to the streets today, some throwing stones at police, in a defiant show of protest against austerity measures aimed at averting the debt-plagued country’s economic collapse.
Riot police responded with teargas when, in sporadic bursts, masked youths charged them in Athens city centre. The violence coincided with a general strike that shut down public services and closed off Greece to the outside world.
“During today’s debate in the UK’s House of Lords on the much-criticized Digital Economy Bill, the unpopular Clause 17 (which would have allowed the government to alter copyright law much more easily than it currently can) was voted out in favor of a DMCA-style take-down system for websites and ISPs. The new amendment known as 120A sets up a system whereby a copyright owner could force an ISP to block certain websites who allegedly host or link to infringing material or face being taken before the High Court and made to pay the copyright owner’s legal fees. This amendment was tabled by the Liberal Democrat party, which had so far been seen as the defenders of the internet and with the Conservative party supporting them. The UK’s Pirate Party and Open Rights Group have both strongly criticized this new amendment.”
This installment of the Brads webcomic shows the 22 steps a reader has to take in order to borrow a DRM-crippled audiobook from the public library. A compelling argument for libraries to boycott this stuff.
Despite firm warnings from ourselves, Consumer Focus and others, Liberal Democrat and Tory peers Lord Clement Jones and Howard pushed through an amendment allowing the courts to order web blocking for ‘substantially infringing’ websites.
During another intense session in the House of Lords this afternoon a vote was finally held on the controversial Clause 17 of the UK’s Digital Economy Bill. This clause would have allowed the Secretary of State to amend the UK’s copyright law with a lot less oversight from parliament than usual. The government did not hide the fact that this provision would be used to clamp down on unlicensed file-sharers in various ways as the industry demanded. However, there was a bright side; the clause would have permitted Lord Mandelson (or more likely his successor) to do as he promised back in October and relax the UK’s copyright law by bringing in the ‘fair use’ exemptions it so desperately needs.
In a completely boneheaded move, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that they want to set up a system to charge people who tweet any part of song lyric.
As reported (in the Japanese language) on J-cast news, they haven’t decided on the details yet, but JASRAC insists it’s the law and everyone has to obey with their decree.
A Southern Indiana prosecutor has threatened criminal charges unless stores with DVD rental kiosks remove R-rated movies and other material considered harmful to children.
One of the reasons why economic forces work the way that they do, and the reason why infinite goods with zero marginal cost get pushed in price towards zero, is that buyers implicitly understand the difference between scarce goods and abundant goods. They implicitly recognize the marginal cost of making another good, and they mentally price products accordingly. Pretending that consumers don’t do that is assuming that consumers are stupid. And that’s an even bigger mistake than looking backwards instead of forward.
So what did Hollywood accomplish here? It shut down a software product that allows people to backup the DVDs they legally own — not to distribute them. In the meantime, of course, there are a bunch of DVD ripping programs out there that have no such restrictions. In other words, Hollywood’s brilliant legal strategists just pushed anyone who wants to back up their movies to use solutions that make it easier for them to share those movies with others.
One of the really amazing things in witnessing the reactions among various politicians to the ACTA negotiations is realizing how out of the loop they are as well. They’re often just as angry that things are being done in the name of their country that they have no visibility into. Of course, this adds to the impression that this whole process is not about figuring out what’s best for the people of each country, but an end run around the democratic lawmaking process, pushed mainly by big industries (led by the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries).
When the time comes, the apologists for ACTA will then be able to claim that it is not a wave of new legislation designed to shore up the business models of 20th century corporations at the expense of 21st century innovation and third-world needs. Instead they will claim ACTA merely “harmonises existing law globally”.
The stock market reaction to the offer was predictable: Novell’s stock surged 27 percent right after the news broke, and it should stay strong for a while until the market figures out if this is a Good Thing.
The Linux community hasn’t raised a big fuss, though I suspect they’re still absorbing the news. I know I am, for my part. In particular, I am wondering what will happen to Novell if they accept this unsolicited bid?
Some people in the know, like Canonical’s COO Matt Asay think this deal could work for SUSE. In his view, Elliot would do well to sell off Novell’s Linux division.
I wish I could agree with him, but I looked at Elliot Associates’ past history of taking “an activist approach to investing, frequently amassing significant but minority stakes in distressed or under performing companies and attempting to foment change,” and I don’t like what I see.
Elliot Associates is best known as a ‘vulture fund.’ They don’t make investments to turn companies around. They make investments to crush the cash out of them and then leave the picked over bones for someone else to pick up.
Andy Updegrove, a lawyer, calls it a “Game of Cat and Mouse”.
I haven’t seen any article yet, though, that describes in detail how the high stakes game of tender offers is played, and how the usual process maps (and doesn’t) to a high tech company like Novell. So I thought I’d provide an overview for those that haven’t had occasion to follow a tender offer in the past, and also my thoughts on what may happen over the next several months in this particular game of cat and mouse.
So here goes.
The tender offer game: First up, let’s talk about how the standard drama plays out. It starts with the acquiror trying to pick up as much stock as possible on the sly before it comes out of the closet. That’s because once word gets out that the company (referred to as the “target”) is “in play,” the stock will go up. So the acquiror wants to build as big as stake as possible at the cheapest price it can.
But the securities regulators have long realized that this presents two problems: first, the sellers will feel cheated if they later find out they sold at a steep discount to what others get a short while later, and second, the acquiror will vote all the shares it picks up in favor of the acquisition. So the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires any company that acquires more than 5% of the stock in a public company to make a public filing disclosing that ownership and its intentions.
That filing is made on form 14D, and it must be regularly updated as the acquiror’s ownership percentage changes, and as its intentions change. When an acquiror files a 14D, it could affirmatively state that it has no intentions of making a tender offer. Depending on the acquiror, that statement might be credible, or it might be viewed with suspicion. But if it affirmatively states that it intends to make a tender offer, or is keeping its options open, then the word spreads – fast.
Novell’s stock may be rising (the valuation of Novell’s assets is discussed at IDG), but that’s not the point. As Chips B. Malroy explains, “If Singer acquires Novell for 1.8 billion, the causal bid, and Novell has 991 million is cash, Singer is only paying 809 million actually. Singer has lowballed the bid, in hope another company will come in and bid more, so that drives up the price of the 8.5% that Elliot already has, profit, short term, mission accomplished. But if that doesn’t happen, and Novell will surely reject the bid, wait for some minor setback in the SCO case, or the next quarterly results from Novell, something bad, and then, true to form, Elliot will reoffer at a lower bid. That is Singer’s modus operandi. By doing this, he causes the stock to tank, so he can buy more cheaply.”
“Singer has lowballed the bid, in hope another company will come in and bid more, so that drives up the price of the 8.5% that Elliot already has, profit, short term, mission accomplished.” –Chips B. MalroyWe have already learned that lesson from Carl Icahn. Malroy comments further on “what Singer will do to Novell, should [he] buy it. He will get rid of almost all top management, and most of middle management. Stop all R&R mostly. Stop and or sell any parts of the company not profitable (and transfer the 991 million to Elliot first).”
Summary: Microsoft to be paid for Linux-powered products from I-O Data and Apple wants ‘Linux tax’ (from Android) too
SOFTWARE PATENTS are not illegal in Japan (it’s one of the very few countries that accept them rather than except them), but Microsoft continues to refuse to tell what makes its racketeering justified (see the Amazon deal for example [1, 2, 3, 4]).
Sanyo, which is based in Japan, is one of the companies that fell for exFAT, but what patents does I-O Data think that it’s paying Microsoft for? It will not tell. And so Microsoft’s extortion carries on:
This time it says “Linux” in the title of the press release from Microsoft. They get more and more aggressive all the time, deal after deal.
REDMOND, Wash. and KANAZAWA, Japan, March 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Microsoft Corp. and I-O Data Device Inc. have entered into an agreement that will provide I-O Data’s customers with patent coverage for their use of I-O Data’s products running Linux and other related open source software.
Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. said late Wednesday that it is in a deal with Japanese firm I-O Data Device Inc., where it will provide I-O Data’s customers patent coverage for their use of I-O Data’s products running Linux and other open source software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, however, the firms said that I-O Data is compensating Microsoft for the IP coverage. Microsoft has been inking a number of deals with companies–many of them network attached storage providers like I-O Data–over possible patent violations in Linux.
Just this week, Microsoft convinced Japanese hardware vendor I-O Data to sign up for Microsoft patent licensing to protect against Linux patent issues. Over the last three years Microsoft has been successful at getting multiple vendors including Amazon, Novell, Brother International Corp, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd, Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and TomTom International BV to buy into their argument that they need protection from Linux patent infringement.
SCO was never that successful.
Time and again, people in the open source community have asked that Microsoft lay their patents on the table so that Linux vendors could deal with Microsoft’s concerns. To date Microsoft has not done so.
So why has Microsoft succeeded where SCO failed when it comes to Linux patents?
This is similar to the deal with Melco, which Microsoft reportedly sued in order to extort.
Microsoft seeks to normalise unthinkable extortion and it needs to be stopped. Where are companies like IBM hiding when this extortion is happening? Don’t they see it as a duty to challenge this? Well, some of these companies like IBM and Google quietly support software patents, but with this conspiracy of silence they continue to hurt Linux, and especially Free software.
There are two aspects surrounding Apple’s patent litigation against HTC that demand further consideration. First, the severe problems with the U.S. patent system as a whole, particularly with regard to software patents. Second, the strategic implications of Apple’s decision to file suit.
Apple is challenging the whole of Android (and to an extent Linux too), as one member of the FFII put it. “Apple is a public danger that use[s] software patents to suppress competition,” says FFII’s president.
Most software and Internet firms have pledged not to sue unless someone first sues them. Sun, Google, Oracle, Cisco and many more think that patents would have an ugly effect on the market otherwise. Apple appears to have left that defensive ideal by waging patent war with Android using HTC as its proxy.
The problem is proprietary software, which usually goes hand-in-hand with software patents (IBM and Google are predominantly proprietary too). Support Free software and call for the abolishment of software patents internationally. █
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