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11.09.12

Android/Linux/FOSS is a Massive Problem for Apple

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU eats Apple - delicious or a forbidden fruit?

Summary: Linux/Android — and to a lesser extent GNU — take over the mobile/portable world, mostly at Apple’s expense

ACCORDING TO REPORTS sent to us by dear readers, Apple’s products are grossly overpriced, so Android devices — not just collectively — easily outsell Apple’s now. iPhone is easily beaten by Samsung’s phones. Apple loses its leadership, just as Nokia did. As I said a few days ago, Apple is the next Nokia. It’s like Nokia in 2007. Glyn Moody writes about this trend in his IDG blog, citing IDG data (IDC):

In the wake of the news that Android sales now represent around 75% of the global smartphone market during the most recent quarter, there’s still some surprise that this has happened. After all, this was a sector that Apple absolutely dominated just a few years ago. Some find it hard to understand how Android has pulled this off in just five years.

Of course, many of us in the open source world have been predicting precisely this kind of rapid rise to dominance. Android’s open ecosystem, which allows all kinds of handsets to be created, for all price points, meant that smartphones employing it were able to explore niches unavailable to Apple. In particular, there was no barrier to producing ever-cheaper handsets, which are crucially important in developing markets like Asia and Africa.

Samsung may no longer need Apple because demand is declining:

The Apple-Samsung war may have a casualty. Samsung has reportedly delayed building a planned logic fabrication facility as it digests the possibility of losing out on future chip orders from Apple.

Apple found a new production sugar daddy (nearly bankrupt), but this very expensive route will just make Apple bleed money (cash reserves, like the ones Nokia once had).

“Apple no longer a safe bet for investors” says a new article that states:

Uncertainty over the iPhone 5’s production and increased competition in the mobile space has resulted in some investors deeming Apple no longer a safe bet

To make matters worse, even a former Apple executive says that Apple is going down. To quote an article about it:

Dan Crow, a former engineering manager at Apple has given a damning verdict of the company’s future declaring that ‘it’s all downhill from here.’

The very public dressing-down came in the form of a column Crow wrote for UK newspaper The Guardian, in which he assessed the company’s current state of affairs as demonstrating a ‘slow but real decline.’

‘Why do I think Apple has passed its peak? There are a number of signs,’ Crow writes, ‘The most visible recent one is the Maps debacle. Replacing Google Maps with an obviously inferior experience shows how much Apple has changed.’

Android is taking it all, leaving Apple only to sue miserably. We’ll write about these lawsuits in the next couple of posts. █

Apple Trial Misconduct Seen as More Likely Than Before

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 7:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Apple: Where lies are acceptable

Apple headquarters

Summary: A question raised following Apple’s case against Android devices shows mysterious behaviour from Apple

MUKTWARE covers some interesting news from the most major patent case of Apple versus Android:

Apple has now declined to answer Samsung’s question in its motion that when did Cupertino learn about the jury foreman’s previous court case with Seagate. Apple in its response says that it is not compelled to respond as it was Samsung who accused Hogan of misconduct and not Apple.

Pamela Jones writes about this apparent trial misconduct, noting:

Apple very much does not want to have to answer Samsung’s question in its motion to compel about when Apple learned about the jury foreman’s earlier litigation with Seagate.

Denial like this does not bode well for Apple. It’s not as though Apple is an honest company; we have a whole resources page dedicated to Apple deception, which is now hiding an apology (for lying!) to further legitimise the label “reality distortion field”. Watch this response to what Apple has been doing:

Oh, Apple. As someone who (as yet) has no children, it’s been an educational experience watching the company’s reaction to a UK judge ordering them to put a public apology on their website over false claims that Samsung copied them. From the very beginning, it felt like Apple had gone out of its way to prepare me for raising children. It all started with a little “But, Daaaaad! He’s copying me!” Then, once parental admonishment is administered, Apple went into what child psychologists call “pouty-pants mode,” with the kind of apology statement that was almost literally playing one parent/country off of another, by which I refer to their referring to the fact that all of the other countries’ judges that had ruled opposite of the UK courts. And when the UK courts were less than thrilled with that petulance, they issued another apology, with a link buried at the bottom of the page — using a little javascript magic to ensure that you wouldn’t see it unless you were specifically looking for it. If this isn’t a perfect analogy for a young child mumbling a half-hearted apology to his little brother for kicking him, I don’t know what is, but I thank Apple for all the lessons in child-rearing they’ve given me. I feel, having watched the judge in this case, I have a good understanding on how to handle a petulant child.

This childish, bratty behaviour (as Jones called it in Groklaw) is what makes me reluctant or unwilling to buy a friend of mine an iPhone 5 for Christmas (like he asked me to). This even led to a small argument last night. Who would want to help such a spoiled, destructive company? How far can a boyoctt stretch? Well, today we’ll have several more articles about Apple. More education is clearly needed. █

Links 9/11/2012: Qt Creator 2.6.0, Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Builds

Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Windows 8 is a one way street for consumer PC users

    If you buy a Windows 8-powered HP consumer PC, or from any other PC vendor, you’ll get no help from them if you decide you’d rather have Windows 7. And Linux? Forget about it!

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • ending the cults of personality in free software

      Free software has a history of creating and supporting cults of personality. Since it is a widespread human phenomenon, it is easy to understand how this happens. It is, however, unhelpful and destructive and we really ought to actively discourage it, starting by putting aside the current cults.

    • The free software media and cults of personality

      .
      I’m not naming names, but if you follow community news, you’ll know that all these things have happened in the last month, as well as many, many times before. Moreover, each time that they happen, they distract people from more important matters.

    • Trying out Systemd
    • AMD Shuts Operating Systems Research Center, Fires Linux Employees
    • Did AMD shoot itself in the foot by laying off open-source talent?
    • The Z-Factor: Meet the Simon Cowell of Linux

      Such moves have not always been welcome. I’ve criticised the Linux Foundation for getting beyond its roots and getting in the way of its sponsors. By taking sides with MeeGo, for example, the Foundation threatened to undermine its credibility with other Linux-based mobile projects.

      [...]

      Zemlin and the Linux Foundation, however, go one step further. Zemlin is an active advocate for Linux, constantly in the news and on his blog, whether ripping on patents, taking pot shots at Microsoft Windows, or talking up Linux in automobiles. In other words, he helps to make the Foundation’s brand bigger, giving it more credibility within the development community and, perhaps particularly, the sponsoring vendor community. No one has raised money more successfully for an open source foundation than Zemlin has.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Benchmarking NVIDIA’s R310 Linux Driver Improvements

        This week NVIDIA began advertising their new “R310″ Linux graphics driver that “delivers [a] massive performance boost to Linux gaming” as a result of Valve releasing their Steam Linux Beta. The NVIDIA 310.xx Linux graphics driver not only improves the performance for Valve’s Source Engine games, but many Linux OpenGL games. In this article are benchmarks from three graphics cards to highlight the optimizations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Experimentation vs. Tradition: The Future of Innovation on the Linux Desktop

      A few years ago, users had two — maybe three — major choices for a Linux Desktop. Now, several user revolts later, they have eight or more.

      But while this increased choice may be good for users in the short term, how will it affect long-term development? It may be that this diversity means either less innovation in the future, or a constraint of innovation to one or two unpromising directions.

    • A New Day Dawns In Linux With The Near Arrival Of E17 (stable)

      If you want less of your system consumed by your desktop and more left to your apps, then E17 is pretty much right near or at the head of that field. – Carsten Haitzler, Enlightenment

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt Creator 2.6.0 Out, Includes Experimental Android Support
      • plasma sdk accreting

        If you have used plasmoidviewer, plasamengineexplorer or plasmawallpaperviewer from past releases of KDE Workspaces while developing Plasma components, you may be surprised to find them gone in the upcoming 4.10 release.

      • Qt Creator 2.6 Development Environment Released

        Qt Creator 2.6 introduces “Kits” as a replacement to the feature known as “Targets” in earlier versions, the integrated development environment also adds experimental Android support, improved C++11 support, and many bug-fixes throughout.

      • Qt Creator 2.6.0 introduces Kits

        Version 2.6.0 of Qt Creator has been released with a change that, its developers say, will affect almost every user: the new release of the cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) introduces “Kits” as a replacement for the “Targets” that were in versions 2.5 and earlier.

      • Slax 7.0 packs a KDE 4 live OS into 183MB

        With the arrival of a first release candidate, the next major release of Slax, version 7.0, is nearing completion. Slax is a fast and full-featured Linux operating system based on Slackware that includes KDE 4 as its default desktop. The small distribution weighs in at less than 190MB and is designed to run as a live system from a CD or USB drive.

      • Slax is bare bones modular Linux
      • Calligra 2.5.3 Released

        he Calligra development team has announced the third bug fix release (2.5) of Calligra office and productivity suite. As this is a stable release with numerous bugfixes, it’s advisable to upgrade to this release as soon as possible to enjoy the latest features and extra stability of the apps.

      • Guest post: Newcomer experience in KDE and other FOSS communities – Survey

        This is a guest post from Kevin Carillo, a researcher I’ve been working with to help us improve KDE’s newcomer experience. If you fit the criteria please do take the survey. It’ll help improve the experience of new contributors and thereby help improve KDE. Thanks!

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3.8 is dropping Fallback Mode
      • Gnome 3.8 To Drop Fallback Mode: Oops! I Did It Again

        As a Gnome user you know that in case you are using a computer that doesn’t support 3D acceleration by default, you will be switched to Gnome’s fallback mode. This mode though using GTK3, looks like the earlier 2.x version of Gnome shell. Users who were not satisfied by changes in Gnome 3 shell used the fallback mode as it looks and worked similar to older version. There is some bad news.

      • The Ups and Downs of GNOME 3

        One of the most interesting parts of being Executive Director of GNOME has been riding the wave of feedback on GNOME 3. I took the position after GNOME 3 was already released, and it was that beautiful vision of the GNU/Linux desktop that inspired me to leave a job I loved. Since then, the highs have been really high and the lows have been tough. One of the very visible disappointments we had was aggressive criticism from Linus Torvalds, which started a cascade of detraction by others and a perception of a real decline in the GNOME community. It’s been difficult to reconcile all of the ups and downs. At GUADEC, we had such a rich experience with great participation by a broad community (and with a very high percentage of active attendance by newcomers) while at the very same time the blogoverse was exploding with news that our contributor diversity had completely dwindled away.

      • GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes

  • Distributions

    • PUIAS Linux review – Say what?

      Alas, it was not meant to be. I was hoping for another solid RedHat clone, and this distro ought to be that, but probably in a more conservative setup, with mechanical disks or something of that sort. I must add that CentOS did not have any such issues, plus it comes with its own live CD/DVD versions, so you can test before committing.

      All in all, I do not really know what to say about PUIAS. Except the fact that it refused to install on SSD, there’s nothing else that I can add. I have no idea what it looks like, how it behaves, whether the extra repositories offer all the goodies normal people need and all that. Therefore, this review ends without a verdict. That would be all, gents. Almost pointless, I know, but then, I had to share.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Alpha Tests New Name, Mageia Needs Artwork

        The second alpha of upcoming Mandriva 2012, announced on November 6, reflects some progress while other issues remain. Mageia ran a contest for artwork during the version 2 developmental phase, and it was such a success, they’re doing it again for 3. So, test Mandriva and draw some pretty pictures for Mageia.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Two Weeks With Spacewalk

        After using Chef and Puppet, I have the opportunity to compare and contrast the pair with Spacewalk, the open source component of RedHat Satellite. Spacewalk represents one perspective on data center management applications, which if you are more inclined to work in the command line might not agree with you. Spacewalk, Chef, and Puppet are configuration management and data center automation tools, and if there is any truth to the state of such tools today, it is that we still have so much farther to go.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Delayed Further, To Be Released Next Year
        • Fedora 18 Linux Delayed to 2013
        • Happy Second Anniversary Fuduntu!

          Happy second anniversary, Fuduntu! Today we celebrate the second anniversary of the Fuduntu Linux distribution, and what a year it has been!

        • Happy Second Anniversary Fuduntu!
        • Fedora 18 slips into next year

          After five previous slips of the release date and a shortening of the beta cycle, the Fedora developers have had to now push the Fedora 18 release into January 2013. The revised schedule currently sees a beta release planned for 27 November and a final release on 8 January 2013. The original planned final release date was 6 November.

        • GNOME 3.6 Test Day today!

          It’s that Test Day time again, folks! Depending on where you are, tomorrow or today – Thursday 2012-11-08 – is GNOME 3.6 Test Day. We’ll be testing various areas of GNOME to ensure the desktop is working smoothly for the upcoming Fedora 18 release. If you have some time to drop by and help GNOME continue to get better, please do!

        • No Fedora
        • Fedora 19 Will Have Another Unique Codename

          After the codename proposal period for Fedora 19, the list of potential codenames for this next Fedora Linux release have been narrowed down by Red Hat and now it’s time to vote for the official name.

    • Debian Family

      • Reflecting on 14 years of free software

        14 years ago last month, I created my first PGP key to sign up to be a Debian developer. I recall what brought me to that place. I had been trying to improve my skill-set for my resume and wanted to learn to program.

        Considering Linux was free compared to development software on Windows (and it ran on my Pentium 90MHz CPU when BSD didn’t), it was an easy choice. However, I had no idea what I was getting into.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Builds Out
          • Ubuntu 13.04 Daily ISO Images Are Now Available

            The first daily ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system were made available by Canonical on the regular FTP website.

          • Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption
          • Note to EFF: FDE implementation in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity is only at 50%

            In Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Micah Lee gave the non-profit organization some credit for pushing Mark Shuttleworth and crew to implement full disk encryption (FDE) in Ubiquity, the graphical installation program of Ubuntu Desktop.

            That feature, together with LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, made their debut in Ubuntu 12.10, the latest release of the popular Linux distribution. (See Ubuntu 12.10 review.)

            while their’s no arguing the fact that the EFF’s campaign played some part in getting FDE implemented in Ubiquity, Micah’s article failed to mention that FDE is only available in the automated partitioning modes. What that means is that if you opt to create partitions manually for installing your copy of Ubuntu
            12.10, you lose the benefits of FDE. There are workarounds, but straight from the installer in Ubuntu 12.10, you cannot configure FDE on manually created partitions.

          • I don’t care

            There’s an old saying: to each their own. That’s how I feel about most things. Everything that I just mentioned, and more, is a matter of personal choice. Mine, yours, and everyone else’s. In my case, it’s also about what works for me. It’s not about ideology or what’s popular or even me going against the grain.

          • Welcome to the Skunk Works

            A few weeks ago, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced a new project initiative dubbed “skunk works”, that would bring talented and trusted members of the Ubuntu community into what were previously Canonical-only development teams working on some of the most interesting and exciting new features in Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 290
          • What Canonical Could Have Done With The Shopping Lens

            Ubuntu 12.10 was released last month with the Amazon shopping lens enabled by default. This was met with much criticism (even EFF raised its concerns) mainly about how user data is being handled or submitted to Amazon and other 3rd parties. While most of the issues have been addressed, the lens is still on by default. So if you search dash, you may likely find the Amazon results too, along with local files, apps and video results.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Facebook warehousing 180 PETABYTES of data a year

    Facebook’s data warehouses grow by “Over half a petabyte … every 24 hours”, according to an explanatory note The Social Network’s Engineering team has issued to explain a new release of open source code.

  • Trying out FreeDOS
  • Cross-device cross-platform incompatibility incongruence

    There is now, it seems, a cross-device compatibility imperative rising.

    We know this of course. Windows 8 is very much positioned as a ‘desktop, to tablet, to mobile handset’ cross-device operating system and Apple’s iOS has (arguably) already been in this space for some time already.

    Carrying this thought forward, we might argue that Android’s 68 percent share of the mobile market means that users will now be looking for a reliable way to interchange data between Android devices and Macs or PCs.

    The question is, with Microsoft plus Apple plus Android all potentially vying for a slice of the cross-device pie, will we run into a cross-device cross-platform incompatibility problem?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox to make life harder for HTTPS snoopers

        Mozilla has equipped its latest Firefox beta, 17, with a list of domains for which the browser must use HTTPS encryption for all communications. The feature is designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attackers from reading and manipulating plain text data traffic when particularly sensitive pages are accessed. The list complements the Strict Transport Security (HSTS) HTTP header extension that enables servers to force browsers to establish HTTPS connections only.

      • Mozilla Posts New Firefox OS Online Presentations for Developers

        Mozilla is moving quickly ahead with its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets. There have been many updates on the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform here, and Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has posted a Flickr gallery of screenshots of the young operating system.

        Any emerging mobile platform depends heavily on developers becoming attracted to it, and Mozilla Hacks is now reaching out to developers with new videos and slideshows. Here are the details.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Certification Program

      The Document Foundation has begun certifying premier developers in their quest for world productivity domination. Certification “is not just another piece of paper, or an abbreviation next to the name,” it means recognition for the “ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.”

  • Business

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

  • Programming

    • Examining Programming Language Framework Popularity

      Having concluded that an examination of the relative performance of programming languages on GitHub and StackOverflow yields interesting results, programming language frameworks are an obvious next step. Given the importance of frameworks in leading programming language adoption, understanding better the traction behind individual frameworks would be useful. With GitHub and StackOverflow representing obvious centers of gravity within the development world, they are clearly in a position to provide some insight into framework-related developer activity.

Leftovers

  • SKorea’s secret: Runaway teen prostitution

    South Korea is paying a high price for its rigorous education system – a major reason for its economic success – with teenagers increasingly turning to prostitution after fleeing home to escape academic pressure.

    An estimated 200,000 youths – at least 60 per cent female teenagers – roam the country’s streets. About half have worked as underage prostitutes, according to the latest government figures.

    Many say they initially ran away to be with friends instead of studying, and later ended up selling their bodies to earn money to survive.

    “In high school, I would say that massive academic pressure is the main driver pushing kids onto the streets,” says a professor at a prominent South Korean university, who requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity in the country.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Over Half a Million Dollars Couldn’t Stop Colorado Community From Banning Fracking

      Despite over half a million dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry in Longmont, Colorado, residents voted Tuesday to make the city the first to ban hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” in the state. The city of 87,000, nestled at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, voted 59 to 41 to ban the controversial method of extracting shale oil and gas, as well as to ban the storage of the toxin-laden wastewater in the city limits.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Democrats Lose Control of Wisconsin State Senate, Leaving Republicans With Full Control Again

      Election night was a good night for national Democrats; President Obama won reelection, and Democrats gained two seats in the Senate. The news was not as good for local Democrats in Wisconsin, though, who lost their hard-fought majority in the Wisconsin State Senate, the only thing standing between Governor Scott Walker and Republicans’ full control of the Wisconsin Legislature.

    • Apparently Attacking A Candidate For Being A World Of Warcraft Player Is Not An Effective Campaign Strategy

      Last month, we were among those who reported on an absolutely bizarre strategy by a candidate for the Maine state Senate to demonize his opponent, Colleen Lachowicz, by highlighting her enjoyment of World of Warcraft and then taking some of her statements about the game completely out of context, to imply they were political statements that had relevance beyond inside the game. Even after this was widely mocked, the folks behind the mailer defended it.

  • Censorship

    • Gawker’s Anti-SLAPP Victory Could Be Good For The Web – But Judge Refuses To Publish The Ruling

      A few months ago, Eric Goldman wrote about a good ruling by a California court to knock out a bogus defamation claim against blog site Gawker. There were a few interesting elements to the ruling, including that it used California’s anti-SLAPP law, and that it was willing to look at the context of the use of certain words like “scam.” But, most importantly, it noted the fact that the Gawker piece included numerous links/citations to sources, which meant that anyone could dig deeper to understand the details themselves.

    • Judge Quickly (But Temporarily) Blocks New CA Law That Takes Away Anonymous Speech Rights

      So, we had just written about the unfortunate (if expected) news that voters in California had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure which (among other things) would take away anonymous speech rights from anyone on the state’s sex offender list (which could include things like people arrested for urinating in public, or consensual sexual activity between teenagers). That seemed both extreme and unconstitutional. We noted that we expected the law to be challenged, though I had assumed it might wait until the law was used. Instead, the EFF and ACLU immediately teamed up to challenge the law, arguing that it was unconstitutional…

    • ACLU and EFF Challenge Free Speech Restrictions in California’s Proposition 35

      Today the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a federal class-action lawsuit to block implementation of unconstitutional provisions of Proposition 35 – a ballot measure passed by California voters Tuesday that restricts the legal and constitutionally protected speech of all registered sex offenders in California.

    • Oakland chief filtered out Occupy e-mail

      People who’ve e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn’t get much of a response.

      That’s because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with “Occupy Oakland” in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases “stop the excessive police force,” “respect the press pass” or “police brutality.” Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

    • Oakland Police Chief Only Wants to Read Complimentary Email
    • Police Chief’s Custom Spam Filter Blocks Occupy Protestors, Brutality Complaints And (Oops) Federal Monitors
    • Conroy backs away from internet filter

      THE federal government has abandoned its long-standing commitment to introduce a national internet filter and will instead ban websites related only to child abuse.

      Following years of debate about trying to censor the internet, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the government would no longer proceed with ”mandatory filtering legislation”. It would, however, use powers under the Telecommunications Act to block hundreds of child abuse websites already identified on Interpol’s ”worst of” list.

    • Conroy abandons mandatory ISP filtering

      Tells ISPs to filter child abuse material using INTERPOL block list.

  • Privacy

    • Putting a price on our data

      We’ve previously warned that with free services, consumers are no longer the customer – they are the product, to be monitored, profiled and sold on. With 96% of Google’s $37.9bn revenue in 2011 coming from advertising and Facebook’s advertising revenue in Q3 2012 reaching $1.086bn, the value of our data has been the oil to the digital revolution.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ITU Boss Explains Why He Wants The UN To Start Regulating The Internet

      We’ve written a few times about why we should be worried about the ITU (a part of the UN) and its attempts to regulate the internet, to which some have responded by arguing that the ITU/UN doesn’t really want to regulate the internet. However, the Secretary-General of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure has now taken to the pages of Wired, to explicitly state why he believes the UN needs to regulate the internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pfizer Can’t Keep Its Viagra Patent Up In Canada

      oday, in a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada, Pfizer lost its Canadian patent on Viagra as the result of a long-fought battle with rival pharmaceutical manufacturer Teva, which sought to make a generic version of the popular drug.

    • Trademarks

      • APNewsBreak: Budweiser seeks removal from ‘Flight’

        Denzel Washington’s character in “Flight” drinks a lot throughout the film, but his portrayal of a highly functioning alcoholic pilot isn’t going down well with brewing company Anheuser-Busch or the distributor of Stolichnaya vodka.

    • Copyrights

      • Judge Rejects Fox’s Attempt To Shut Down Dish’s Autohop Feature, But Indicates It May Still Infringe

        Earlier this year, we wrote about the TV networks suing Dish Networks for its new Autohop feature. Dish created a neat bit of innovation, which automatically recorded all prime time shows for people to watch later, and as long as you watched the day after the shows aired, it would auto-skip the commercials. This is the kind of thing that a user could set up themselves, though it’s a bit cumbersome, and too many DVR providers have shied away from automated “commercial skip” features after the TV industry sued ReplayTV over such a feature (despite many VCRs having it already). Ridiculously, the networks, led by Fox, claimed that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement.

      • Video About Fair Use, Remix & Culture Taken Down Over Copyright Claim (Of Course)

        A few years back, we had a post highlighting an absolutely fantastic video by Julian Sanchez about the value of remix culture. The video made a key point that often gets lost in these debates: that remix culture is often more about the culture than the remix, but that copyright law makes that difficult. It focused mainly on a viral remix video that took a song from the band Phoenix, called “Lisztomania,” but which was put to video clips of people dancing in various John Hughes films (mainly from the classic scene in “The Breakfast Club.”) That was interesting enough, but what was even more interesting was how it then followed that lots of others recreated the video in their own image. So groups got together in various hipster locations (Brooklyn, San Francisco) and created their own videos recreating the dance moves on their own to go with the new song. It was really quite interesting, and showed how important remixing and fair use was to culture, and how it could take something and make more with it.

11.08.12

Microsoft Becomes Surveillance Company

Posted in Microsoft at 4:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

An achievement even the NSA would envy

Skynet

Summary: Microsoft, a large shareholder of Facebook, is putting cameras with antifeatures in people’s houses and also uses Skype as a listening device

Inevitably, Vista 8 gets cracked quickly and this is how it goes:

Windows 8 was released late last week, and already this week French security firm VUPEN says it has broken Microsoft’s latest and greatest security features. The company claims it has developed a 0-day exploit for Windows 8 and IE10, by chaining multiple undisclosed flaws together.

Vista 8 has back doors anyway.

A lot of security firms employ crackers, so these practices are not too shocking. In fact, Microsoft Skype feeds them user data against the law. Skype is the latest surveillance/listening device that Microsoft bought. Here comes another. From a pro-Microsoft site (caution for bias):

Xbox team’s ‘consumer detector’ would dis-Kinect freeloading TV viewers

A newly surfaced patent filing from Microsoft’s Xbox Incubation team details one of the new innovations they’ve been thinking about. This one could be very popular among major movie and television studios. But it probably wouldn’t generate much excitement among Xbox users.

It is said that Microsoft will centralise the spying, capitalising on Skype misuse that it makes possible:

The security firm, iSIGHT, was hired by PayPal to investigate the attacks, and an employee of the company reached out to Skype seeking information about one user who he thought might be involved. And Skype coughed up the info — including username, real name, email address and home address — no questions asked. As the article notes, there was no court order or anything like that. Just a guy from a private company asking and Skype said, “sure, here’s all the info.”

This ought to worry everyone who cares about tech rights. It is why we oppose the companies which we do. We have some more detailed posts on Microsoft surveillance through Skype. █

Vista 8 AstroTurfing Not Enough, Other Tactics Used

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 3:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A look at how Microsoft deals with having an unwanted operating system

THE Vista 8 astroturf has been carrying on with limited success. We did not cover it closely, but many examples were mentioned by yours truly in sites like Identi.ca. Many reviewers, probably most, dislike Vista 8, so it is like Vista in a sense. Ed Bott, somewhat of a peripheral PR outpost for Microsoft, calls people who dislike this Vista successor not “normal” (link omitted). He likes to insult people who don't agree with Microsoft.

So people who do not like Vista 8 are not “normal”, insists Microsoft, but what’s not “normal” is bloggers whom Microsoft bribes to write positive articles about Vista 8.

The strategy is doomed. Microsoft tries to change people rather than the OS and it introduces artificial barriers like UEFI, which complicate everything and can in fact discourage Vista 8 installs. See this new post:

The computer I used is the same one I’ve used in the past, a system I assembled using an ASRock motherboard. The board has a UEFI firmware. The process was the same. Install Windows 8 Pro first, then attempt to install Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop alongside it.

Back In 2009 we concentrated on Vista 7 failures, but three years later the landscape is different (Android is dominant), so we need only focus on few bad reviews which stand out. Here is what a Microsoft partner called Dominic Connor says:

Are you an IT pro? It’s no longer safe to bet your career on Microsoft

As an IT worker, you have to gamble on which technology will keep you fed and housed over the coming years. For a really long time that has been Microsoft, but you don’t get paid on the past. Instead you need to peer into an uncertain future.

The Windows 8 launch was remarkably stealthy compared to the good old days when it was an event on an Apple scale. In fact, if you weren’t an IT pro you’d easily assume that Apple was a majority of the world’s IT. In the UK there was so little in the way of launch events that I cornered an Microsoft’s PR to find out if they’d “forgotten” to invite me.

[...]

Dominic Connor is a headhunter who has been a professional developer on every major and most minor MS platforms and is a director of a firm that is a Microsoft Partner.

Borrowing a lesson from OLPC days, Microsoft is targeting children now, trying as characteristically as always to collect revenue from government, i.e. in the public sector, all at the expense of Free software.

Free software advocates should keep their heads up and not carry the baggage of being an underdog; now we have a much more compelling product and philosophy to promote. We need no longer worry about Microsoft; in fact, Apple has become equally burdensome, albeit far less corrupt. Vista 8 will fail on its own, even without much criticism from the likes of FSF (not that this criticism is not welcomed). █

Spain Trashes FRAND (Software Patents Tax), Microsoft Lobby Keeps Promoting FRAND

Posted in Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Flags of EU and Spain

Summary: FRAND wars as fought by politicians and by monopolists with their lobbyists

THE other week in Twitter we saw some claims that Spain had buried FRAND. Some people who can read Spanish said so, but we could not corroborate. Here is just one example:

Open Standard, according to Spanish law http://ur1.ca/atsfv (page 17) Public and freely available, not subject to royalties of any kind

Spain also opposed the unitary patent [1, 2], so for the country to dodge FRAND like the UK did [1, 2] would simply make sense.

The FRAND (e.g. MPEG tax,)lobbyist hired by proprietary software companies is unsurprisingly doing all he can to promote FRAND. After all, he is paid to promote it. Yes, Microsoft Florian, who was hired by patent thugs from Microsoft, is spreading more smears and lies. From a rebuttal:

So far, we are unaware of any credible allegations of ‘extortion’ having been made against any Korean companies, or of any diplomatic repercussions, or indeed of any impact on the US presidential race now drawing to a conclusion!

However, this week we have come into possession of a full English translation of the Media Report issued by the Seoul Court on 24 August in relation to its ruling on the Samsung patents, and we have to say it makes very interesting reading, with none of the hallmarks you might expect of a document issued by a ‘rogue state’.

Nilay Patel, who previously gave a platform to Microsoft Florian, is giving a platform to the patent terrorists at Microsoft — those who pay Florian to plant their spin and lies in the media (they proxify the unethical mass-mailing). To quote Microsoft: “We certainly care. We care a great deal about the ability to have protection on software and software-related patents, and so we certainly see quite a bit of the discussion around software patents. We take that very seriously.”

This is why they are lobbying for software patents (or loopholes like FRAND) all around the world and then using these to tax Linux:

Microsoft has begun the long process of phasing out the FAT (File Allocation Table) filesystem and replacing it with exFAT, signing agreements with five hardware vendors to licence the format for use in peripheral devices.

First introduced in 1977 as an eight-bit storage format for Microsoft’s BASIC language, the format received its last serious upgrade in 1996 with the launch of FAT32 as part of Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2.) Designed to extend the existing FAT16 format, FAT32 expanded the possible size of a partition on a hard drive from 2GB to 16TB but retained a file size limit that meant no single file could be larger than 4GB. While extensions to the format, including the open FAT+ standard, attempted to extend this to 256GB per file, few gained commercial traction in mainstream operating systems.

Tuxera helps this agenda. It is a loophole for software patents, especially where these patents are not allowed. Hopefully the new British and Spanish policies can push back against it.

It sure seems, based on what Dr. Moody is saying, like FRAND is on its way out.

Last week’s big announcement by the UK government was principally about procurement, detailing the new rules that will apply when government departments acquire software. Naturally, then, it concentrated on the details of that approach, and how it would be deployed and enforced. A key part of that was using open standards to create a level playing field for all companies, regardless of whether they offered open source or proprietary code.

As I explained in my post last week, the critical issue then became what exactly “open standards” meant, and, specifically, how standards that might be encumbered by patents would be dealt with. As I’ve noted many times before, the only way open source can implement general interoperability standards is if any claimed patents are licensed under royalty/restriction-free (RF) terms. Although that’s the preferred mode for key Internet organisations like the W3C, it stands in contrast to the older approach, which was based on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” – FRAND.

FRAND is also being used by apple, mainly against Android [1, 2]. We’ll focus on Apple tomorrow. 4 articles about Apple are being drafted. █

Links 8/11/2012: AMD Lays Off Linux Developers, Fedora 18 Delayed Again

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Piwik among winners at open source awards

    Hundreds of people were due to celebrate the achievements of the open source software industry at its biennial awards in Wellington last night.

    Technology awards can resemble a Hairy Maclary book, with lots of repetition as the same familiar names doing the same things crop up on every page.

    But Don Christie, managing director of 150-person open source firm Catalyst IT, one of the award’s top sponsors, said these had again attracted a healthy tally of about 100 entries.

  • CloudStack makes first release from Apache incubator

    The CloudStack project, based on Citrix’s CloudStack code which was contributed to Apache earlier this year, has had its first official release from within the Apache Incubator, where it is currently being mentored and matured into a future top-level Apache project. The Apache CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating release offers a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration system. Apache CloudStack competes with other open source IaaS platforms such as OpenStack, the European OpenNebula and the Amazon AWS-API compatible Eucalyptus.

  • Open Source Awards compared, contrasted with US thinking

    Having the Open Source Awards presentation ceremony last night, on the same night as the US election results were announced, allowed some analogies to be made between the spirit of open source and democracy.

    In both systems, everyone is welcome to make a contribution and the profit motive is absent, said Awards judge and senior advisor at the Inland Revenue Department, Austin Sinclair, introducing the award for Open Source use in government.

  • Events

    • Five Favorite Sessions from LinuxCon Europe 2012

      LinuxCon Europe has been buzzing with energy and lively ideas ever since its kickoff on Monday morning. As day two sessions wound down and everyone was gearing up for the much-anticipated Intel-sponsored reception at Gaudi’s Casa Batillo, we took a few moments to check in with attendees. They told us what’s inspiring them at this year’s conference—and how they’ll funnel that inspiration into action when they return to their workplaces next week.

    • LinuxCon Europe: Growing an Open Source Community

      The OpenStack team, a software community collaborating on a standard open source platform, had to solve this dilemma—and solve it fast—when the tech community became “ludicrously excited” about their new project. “We experienced growing pains … I guess I’m supposed to call them ‘opportunities’,” said Monty Taylor, manager of automation and deployment at Hewlett-Packard, and one of the creators of the project.

      In his Scaling an Open Source Community keynote presentation on Tuesday morning at LinuxCon Europe, Taylor explained how OpenStack overcame early challenges to create a truly non-hierarchical environment focused not only on open source, but also on open design, open development, and an open community.

    • ApacheCon NA, EclipseCon and Northeast Linux Fest calling for papers

      Several open source oriented conferences are calling for the submission of papers to their 2013 events. ApacheCon North America (NA), EclipseCon and the Northeast Linux Fest are all accepting talks from interested community members.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google has released Chrome 23 for Windows, Mac and Linux

        The Chrome team has officially announced the latest update for Chrome, which arrives as Chrome 23 and for Windows, Mac and Linux users. More specifically, Chrome version 23.0.1271.64 has been released. This update will arrive automatically for current Chrome users. Or alternatively, those not using Chrome and those feeling like they simply cannot wait even a second — you can grab the latest version by navigating to google.com/chrome.

      • Google Releases Chrome 23 Stable for Linux
      • New Version of Chrome Adds Do Not Track Privacy and Boosts Batteries

        Google is out with the new Stable Release version 23 of the Chrome browser, which is notable for several reasons. Thanks to the way it handles video decoding, users on portable devices such as laptops who are, say, watching YouTube videos will get longer battery life. And, with this version of Chrome, Google has finally adopted the Do Not Track privacy protection scheme that lets users choose not to be followed when online.

      • Google Chrome Adds Support For Do Not Track

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Announces First Group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

      The Document Foundation has announced the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.

      Other skills and knowledge needed to become a Certified Developer include, researching and developing solutions to new or unknown issues, designing and developing one or more courses of action, evaluating each of them in a test case environment, and implementing the best solution to the problem. Once the solution is verified, it is delivered to the customer and given back to the community.

  • Education

  • Business

  • BSD

    • LLVM’s Clang Is Finally The FreeBSD x86 Compiler

      After talking about FreeBSD’s transition to Clang as the default C/C++ compiler rather than GCC, the move has finally happened where for x86/x86_64 systems the LLVM-based compiler has replaced GCC.

  • Project Releases

    • FreeMedForms project reaches version 0.8.0

      It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations:

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Australian university joins Stanford’s open-source online platform

        Class2Go, developed by a group of Stanford engineers, will be the basis for online courses at the University of Western Australia accessible through mobile devices. The mobile app will then be available for use by Stanford – and anyone else.

        The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.

      • How Stanford plans to teach the world with open-source online classes

        Online classes are nothing new, but the University of Western Australia wants to take the technology one step further with the help of Stanford’s recently launched Class2Go platform. Using an open-source approach to content creation, Class2Go not only allows educators to fine tune their teaching material, but also provides a tool that can be used by anyone regardless of location or enrollment status. As explained by PhysOrg, David Glance, director of the Centre for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia, feels that platform paves way to the new methods of learning used in universities, allowing students to take entire classes using their smartphone or tablet via an app.

      • rSmart to Share Higher Ed Open Source Expertise at the 2012 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference

    • Open Hardware

      • Arduino gets piggyback from Raspberry Pi

        The AlaMode board makes it possible to build a bridge between the Raspberry Pi mini-computer and the Arduino prototyping platform and the many shields available for it. Although the Arduino-compatible board connects to the Pi’s GPIO header, the two boards operate independently, sharing data via the GPIO connectors. The AlaMode board is able to connect standard Arduino shields.

      • Open Source, Soccer-Playing Robots for All!

        What’s cooler than a humanoid robot? Why, a humanoid robot that plays soccer, of course. And you can get one for just 25 grand.

        The robot, developed by researchers at the University of Bonn, is more than just another droid headed for the intensely competitive RoboCup tournament. The little guy features some serious technical upgrades with a simple design and open source code so others can build their own ‘bot. The software and CAD files (.zip) are available on GitHub.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • APIs

      If you’re creating Web apps, you’re designing APIs. Here are some things to keep in mind before you begin.

      The Web was designed for people. When Tim Berners-Lee created the trio of standards that make up the Web—HTTP, HTML and URLs—the intention was for people to browse Web sites, submit information to them and be at the heart of the experience. But for some time now, the notion of the Web as a set of sites that people browse has been somewhat untrue. True, hundreds of millions of people visit an equally large number of sites each day; however, more and more of the visitors to sites aren’t people, but programs.

    • The newsroom’s ally: Ally-Py

      Software architect Gabriel Nistor talks to Trevor Parsons about Ally-Py, the new Free Software framework designed to get the most from web APIs.

Leftovers

11.07.12

Links 7/11/2012: Steam Closed Beta, KDE 4.9.3 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 1:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • The Linux Setup – Brian Proffitt, Writer

      I love Brian Proffitt’s setup for two reasons. First of all, it’s OpenSUSE, my current distro of choice, and I always love to see that represented here. But also, Brian’s setup is shockingly stock. And in more and more of these interviews, we’re seeing people who are able to get an impressive amount of work done without a lot of configuring or manipulating. It makes me appreciate what a great time it is for desktop Linux. And reading some of this week’s Windows 8 reviews, I wonder if a lot of Windows users might be jealous of just how easy Linux has become.

  • Server

    • U.S. panel labels China largest cyberspace threat, report says

      China is increasingly using hackers to infiltrate U.S. military computers and defense contractors, according to a draft of Congressional report obtained by Bloomberg.

    • Brocade Acquires Linux Software Defined Networking Vendor Vyatta
    • Why do super computers use Linux?

      In our last few posts we discussed the fact that over 90% supercomputers (94.2% to be precise) employ Linux as their operating system. In this post, a sequel to our last posts, we shall attempt to investigate the potentials of Linux which make it suitable and perhaps the best choice for supercomputers OS.

    • Brocade to acquire Vyatta

      Brocade has announced that the company is acquiring the privately held Vyatta. Brocade produces a range of data and storage networking products, and considers the acquisition to be a good fit. Vyatta specialises in developing a software defined networking (SDN) and builds that software atop of an open source Debian-based distribution, Vyatta Core, which it commercialises as Vyatta Network OS.

  • Kernel Space

    • New Members Join Linux Foundation

      Componentality Oy is an automotive Research and Development company that builds passenger-oriented devices for public transportation; entertainment and connectivity for cars and road infrastructure; and unique technical solutions for special purposes in the automotive field, focusing on DSRC communications and eCall/ERA GLONASS systems.

      Host Concepts is a software development company specializing in Guest Interaction Experiences. From hotels and restaurants to cruise ships, cars and convention centers, the company designs, develops, supports and hosts custom software solutions. They specialize in universally accessible applications designed and coded for web, mobile and native operating systems.

      Micware is software integrator and is developing Linux-based software stacks for reference hardware systems for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).

      MIRACLE LINUX (an apt name) is a Linux distributor for enterprise and embedded market based on Japan. It is also co-owner of Asianux Co. Ltd. which is based in China . The company has more than 13 years of experience in the field of Linux business.. It is joining to participate in the Long Term Support Initiative and the Automotive Grade Linux workgroup.

    • AMD Closes The Operating System Research Center

      AMD has indeed shutdown its Dresden-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) in the latest round of cost-cutting efforts.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Marek Continues Improving Radeon Performance

        There’s been another improvement to Mesa with the Radeon Gallium3D R600 driver by Marek Olšák that can improve the OpenGL performance in certain situations for this open-source AMD Linux driver while also conserving memory usage.

      • Radeon Driver Is Now KMS-Only, 7.0 Released

        Alex Deucher announced the release of the xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 driver this morning, which is the first open-source ATI Linux graphics driver release that is strictly KMS-only.

      • NVIDIA 304.64 Driver Fixes Performance, New GPUs

        The NVIDIA 304.64 Linux graphics driver was released today with support for new graphics cards, address performance issues related to recent Linux kernels, and provide other fixes for those relying upon this closed-source driver.

      • Clock-For-Clock, Nouveau Can Compete With NVIDIA’s Driver

        Similar to last week’s testing of comparing the open-source vs. closed-source Radeon Linux driver performance from a stock Ubuntu 12.10 installation, the tables have now been turned to look at NVIDIA hardware on this latest Ubuntu Linux release. Benchmarks were done of the stock Nouveau open-source graphics driver, the official NVIDIA proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver when it was underclocked to match the clock frequencies as used by the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.

      • XWayland Gets Updated

        Daniel Stone has updated the XWayland patches for supporting X.Org/X11 applications on Wayland.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 dons “Moondrake” disguise

        The second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 has been released under a new name: “Moondrake GNU/Linux 2012″. In the release announcement, Mandriva Linux Project Leader Per Øyvind Karlsen says that “The name of the distribution used for this release isn’t actually the final name chosen, but only one of the likelier candidates under consideration, which we’re taking out for a test drive to try it on for now and prepare for a rebranding process.” While a possible new name has yet to be chosen for the distribution, last month it was announced that the foundation for the open source project would be called “OpenMandriva”.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Linux Top 3: Fedora 18 Delayed, Tiny Core Advances and a Shot in the ARM

          There are some Linux distributions that hold steadfast to their release schedules no matter what. That’s not the case with Fedora, which is aiming for quality and stability and will often delay a release and its milestone components for that reason.

          Fedora developers decided to push back the Fedora 18 beta release by at week during a go/no go meeting on Thursday November 1st. The decision to delay the beta release was due to a number of blocker bugs as well as issues with the upgrade tool.

          The anaconda installation tool currently has 7 blocker bugs listed for it that will need to be addressed for the release to go forward.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Valve opens Steam for Ubuntu to first wave of beta testers

            After receiving over 60,000 beta applications since last week, Valve has begun sending out the first wave of invites for the Steam for Linux beta today.

            The Linux version of Steam currently only works on Ubuntu 12.04, reflecting what Steam for Linux team member Frank Crockett said in a statement was “an overwhelming majority of beta applicants [reporting] they’re running the Ubuntu distro of Linux.” Other popular Linux distributions will be supported in the future, Valve said. The service will be opened to more beta testers going forward, then expanded to all Linux users “once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems.”

          • Open Source Ubuntu OS Makes Strides in Emerging Markets
          • Steam for Linux Beta Arrives, Only For Ubuntu

            Valve has launched a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client. There was an encouraging excitement around Steam for Linux. Valve received over 60,000 responses to its request for participants in the Steam for Linux Beta within its first week. The company has selected the first round of beta participants from those early adopters.

            The arrival of Steam for Linux owes a lot to Microsoft which has started to turn Windows from a platform for OEMs and developers into a Microsoft only product inspired by Apple’s walled garden.

          • Day 1 of LinuxCon Europe 2012 in Pictures

            The event started with keynotes from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth…

          • Ubuntu 12.10: Unity Just Sort of Grows on You

            The Unity Launcher shows a hefty finessing — this is the icon bar that is hard-wired to the left edge of the screen for launching frequently used applications. Its displayed icons are more appealing visually with their rounded, uniform appearance. The ability to hide the Launcher bar until the mouse pointer touches the left screen edge makes the Unity icon row less annoying.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Here Comes Newebe, A New Kind Of Distributed Social Network

    Diaspora was one such project, which has become a community venture recently. Dispora stores user information in pods, which are servers where information and data of the users are stored. As its open source, user can run a pod in his own server and invite friends and co-workers to use it. Thus he may form a private social network without relying on other third party social site.

  • MIT Develops Open Source Game A Slower Speed of Light

    Are you a science buff who is curious how the world would look like if you travel at the speed of light? Will it twist everything around you as the light from different objects reach you at a different interval as per the special theory of relativity? How will everything look like if the speed of light is slowed down? This is what an open source game developed by MIT Game Lab tried to do.

  • New Open Source data storage solution coming soon
  • Contribute to an open source project no matter your experience level

    Okay, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but when I tweeted out a request for suggestions for an opening line, that was the most interesting response (thank you, @kantrn). I got others that were a lot more helpful (thank you, @justinlilly)—that’s the power of community, right?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Foundation to Pay $1.5 Million to Settle Up with the IRS

        For years now, a lot of people have misunderstood how the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation works. It is, of course, one of the most influential entities in all of open source, but Mozilla gets the vast majority of its revenues from Google, in exchange for favorable search placement in the Firefox browser, which benefits Google. According to the nonprofit law blog, last year the Mozilla Foundation got 88 percent of its revenues from Google.

        The IRS has been investigating the Mozilla Foundation with an eye toward the taxes that it pays, and the good news for Mozilla fans is that Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla is getting off with a very light $1.5 million tax bill.

      • Firefox vs. the Web

        One of the most hotly debated topics in years is now bubbling up in the Mozilla community as people debate the position of Web vs. Firefox.

        There was a time when Firefox was just a browser, the view by which freedom loving people could see and interact with the web. The primary brand was Firefox as an enabler of the Web. That’s now sliding a bit as Mozilla brands Firefox as its own operating system and ecosystem of app.

        “To what extent, if any, are we willing to promote ‘the open web’ or ‘HTML5′ over ‘Firefox’, when the success of one and the success of the other are in tension?” Mozilla staffer Gervase Markham wrote in a mailing list message.

      • Have some Mozilla with that Windows

        The only way I can describe this to you is that it’s the most idiotic ruling ever handed down by any group or judge anywhere. I’m shocked that it’s really come to this. OK, the story is this: The European Commission (EC), whoever they are and whose real purpose and power is questionable, handed down a ruling that stated that Microsoft has to give Windows users in Europe a browser choice. And, the fact that they didn’t in Windows 7 Service Pack 1, means that Mozilla lost millions of downloads of its Firefox browser. Mozilla estimates that loss in the range of six to nine million downloads during the non-compliance timeframe.

  • Education

    • Hampshire College distributes free software bundle to all incoming students

      Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler Development Is Over

      Recently I reported that GCC 4.8 was nearing the end of stage one development — the period during which features and new development work can be merged — and will be moving to stage three. As of this morning, GCC 4.8 / the trunk code-base is now into this next stage where only bug-fixes and new ports not requiring changes to other parts of the compiler can be made. New functionality/features are not allowed during this period that will last for approximately two months until the official release happens.

    • LibreWRT: What we use for wifi at the FSF

      I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the FSF’s office.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK Government finalizes Open Standards Principles: The Bigger Picture

      Last week, the UK Cabinet Office released its Open Standards Principles: For software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT specifications. It became effective November 1, 2012, and applies to IT specifications for software interoperability, data, and document formats for all services delivered by, or on behalf of, central government departments, their agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), and any other bodies for which they are responsible.

      For the open source community and advocates of open standards, the UK’s Open Standards Principles policy is a welcome and positive development. It follows a lengthy, and often tumultuous, consultative process that began in 2011.

Leftovers

  • Looking Past Search

    Can we make search organic again? Or should we look past search completely?

    Searching has become shopping, whether we like it or not. That’s the assumption behind the results, and behind recent changes, at least to Google’s search features and algorithms. I’m sure this isn’t what Google thinks, even though it is a commercial enterprise and makes most of its money from advertising—especially on searches. Credit where due: from the moment it started adding advertising to search results, Google has been careful to distinguish between paid results and what have come to be called “organic”.

  • Science

    • Why Conservatives Turned Against Science

      A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives.

  • Hardware

    • ARM, Imagination Technologies Take Over MIPS

      MIPS Technologies has announced today that their patent portfolio is being bought out by a company largely backed by ARM while Imagination Technologies will be taking over the MIPS company.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Iran Sanctions Take Unexpected Toll on Medical Imports

      Sitting on one of the many crowded benches in the waiting room of the International Red Crescent’s pharmacy in central Tehran, Ali, 26, was working his phone. After nearly six weeks of chasing down batches of Herceptin, an American-made cancer medicine, Ali, an engineer, was wearing out his welcome with friends and relatives in other Iranian cities, who had done all they could to rustle up the increasingly elusive drug.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Human Rights Defender Brutally Attacked by Moroccan Police

      Washington) RFK Human Rights Laureate Aminatou Haidar is the latest victim of systemic violence and police brutality by the Moroccan government against the Sahrawi people. The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (RFK Center) has received multiple reports in the last week that indicate dramatically increased police presence, repression, and assault against civilians in El Ayun, the of capital of Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, coinciding with Ambassador Christopher Ross’s arrival in the area.

    • Israeli soldiers arrest son of detained Palestinian activist at West Bank protest

      The 16-year-old son of Bassem Tamimi, a detained Palestinian rights activist in the occupied West Bank, was himself arrested by Israeli soldiers today during the regular weekly protest against the encroachment of Israeli settlers onto Palestinian land.

      Wa’ed Tamimi was arrested along with four activists during the demonstration on Friday afternoon in the West Bank village of al-Nabi Saleh, 21km northwest of Ramallah.

    • The Kafkaesque World of the No-Fly List

      Is there a good reason that Long is on the no-fly list? I have no idea. There might be. But what’s outrageous about this, aside from the sheer number of people we’ve placed on the no-fly list over the past decade, is the lack of judicial oversight. Someone has put you on the list, but you don’t know who. There’s presumably a reason for being put on the list, but no one will tell you what it is. There’s a procedure that provides you with a “redress control number,” but it often appears to be meaningless. If you go to court, a judge will tell you it’s a national security issue and there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s a cliche to call this kind of system Kafkaesque, but what other word is there for it?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Neil Barofsky on the Need to Tackle Banking Reform

      Between President Obama’s ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney’s loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, joins Bill to discuss the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown.

    • Liberals fear grand bargain betrayal if President Obama wins

      Labor unions and liberal interest groups are going all-out for President Barack Obama’s reelection — but they’re just as ready to turn that firepower back on him if he betrays them with a grand bargain.

  • Censorship

    • Media freedom at home and abroad

      I’m shortly off to Baku for the Internet Governance Forum. Azerbaijan is a country with serious issues of media freedom – where journalists regularly face arrest or imprisonment, and the suppression of very basic human rights. While I’m there I’ll be raising a number of concerns about how protection and promotion of human rights.

    • It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote

      Ninety-three years ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what is perhaps the most well-known — yet misquoted and misused — phrase in Supreme Court history: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

      Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, “the law”–as some have curiously called it–can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes’ quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.

    • Harry Fox Agency Claims Copyright Over Public Domain Work By Johann Strauss

      The Harry Fox Agency (HFA) is the main licensing agency for mechanical licenses (i.e., actual reproductions of recorded works — which is different from things like ASCAP who handle licenses for performances). While it doesn’t get into as many ridiculous copyright scrapes as others, it still has been known to insert itself where it doesn’t belong at times. The latest, courtesy of BoingBoing is that HFA made a copyright claim on a YouTube recording of Thailand’s Youth Orchestra (Siam Sinfonietta) playing the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss. The work is 164 years old and clearly in the public domain. Furthermore, since HFA only covers mechanical licenses, and this is a new performance, not a use of a recorded song that HFA has rights over, the whole thing is completely ridiculous.

    • Oakland chief filtered out Occupy e-mail

      People who’ve e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn’t get much of a response.

      That’s because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with “Occupy Oakland” in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases “stop the excessive police force,” “respect the press pass” or “police brutality.” Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

    • Russia’s secret internet blacklist

      The Russian state has created a blacklist of blocked websites and internet addresses – but the list itself is secret.

      It was drawn up following the enactment of a statute called the “law to protect children from information detrimental to their health and development”, which is ostensibly aimed at protecting minors from harmful content.

  • Privacy

    • FTC to apply pressure on Do Not Track

      The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC ) is planning on increasing the pressure of the participants in the W3C standardisation process for the Do Not Track (DNT) header. “If by the end of the year or early next year, we haven’t seen a real Do Not Track option for consumers, I suspect the commission will go back and think about whether we want to endorse legislation” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz talking to Politico.

    • Why Privacy Is the Future of Competition

      Data protection legislation may protect our data locally, but internationally privacy is not just a personal issue, it lies at the heart of ensuring competitive markets.

    • Why We Need New Rights to Privacy

      Thanks to the real state website Zillow, it’s now super easy to profit from your neighbor’s suffering. With a few easy clicks, you can find out “if a homeowner has defaulted on the mortgage and by how much, whether a house has been taken back by the lender, and what a house might sell for in foreclosure,” as the Los Angeles Times recently reported. After using the service, you can stop by the Johnsons’ to make them a low-ball offer, perhaps sweetening the exploitation with a plate of cookies.

  • Civil Rights/Voting

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • End Of Bogus Trademark Lawsuits Over AdWords In Sight

        For years, we’ve pointed to the series of ridiculous trademark lawsuits filed against Google over Adwords, and wondered when it would finally be settled and understood that advertising on a third party site against a competitor’s trademark is just good marketing, not trademark infringement. To bring up an analogy, many of us are used to supermarkets that display coupons near competing products — or where you get handed competing coupons printed out at checkout. This is the exact same concept. It’s perfectly reasonably that if you’re searching for a certain brand name, a competing company may seek to buy clearly marked advertisements that attempt to offer you a better deal. There’s no confusion by the consumer and no “dilution” of the original brand. It’s just good competition. Even more bizarre is the fact that these lawsuits targeted Google, rather than the advertiser directly. After all, Google just provides the platform. If an ad is actually confusing to users, then the only trademark claim would be against the company who actually created the confusing ad, not the platform that hosts it.

    • Copyrights

      • Epic’s ‘Music First’ Approach: Delay Album Release; Drop Band When They Leak It

        Last month, we wrote about how the band Death Grips, an indie sensation who had signed with Epic Records (owned by Sony Music), had decided to release their latest album for free all over the internet, after some sort of dispute with Epic over the release date. The band was already considered one of the top authorized downloaded bands on BitTorrent due to earlier releases it had put online for free itself. However, with Epic trying to take a standard “slow down and wait” approach, the band posted its new album to various file lockers and started tweeting out links, noting that “the label will be hearing the album for the first time with you.”

      • Will Disney Block Star Wars Fan-Made Content?
      • EU backs away from copyright sanctions in Canada trade deal

        Following a meeting of the European Union member states on 5 October, leaked documents have shown this week that the EU plans to back away from criminal sanctions in its copyright agreement with Canada.

        CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, is currently being negotiated. It initially included many paragraphs lifted directly from the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) pact that was shot down spectacularly by the European Parliament earlier this year. ACTA triggered widespread protests from citizens concerned that it would breach their online civil liberties.

      • Kim Dotcom loses new domain in preemptive strike by government
      • Response to the CMS committee inquiry on the creative economy
      • Kink.com Owner Inoculating Against Piracy By Selling The Scarce

        Usually when I have the godly duty of writing about porn on this site, it has to do with a pornographic company acting (shockingly) nefarious. Maybe they’re reaping millions in a judgment over a handful (unintentional innuendo) of films. Or else they’re attacking speech using IP laws to silence critics of their jack-ass-ery. It might be very easy for readers to assume that pornographers as a whole (still unintentional, I swear) would be aligned against the philosophies and economics that we discuss every day. They’re an easily painted “bad guy” for a host of social reasons.

      • Author Explains The Joy Of Helping Russian ‘Pirate’ Translate His Book

        It was about five years ago that we first wrote about best selling author Paulo Coelho revealing that he was eagerly helping create pirate foreign translations of his books, and noting that sales of legitimate copies always seemed to increase whenever he did this — initially pretending to be someone else, under the username “pirate coelho.” The first time this happened was in Russia, where the Russian translation resulted in his books — which had almost no market previously — suddenly shot up into huge sales (from less than 1,000 to over 100,000). While he’s seen similar success stories elsewhere, it really seems like the Russian ebook market is an interesting one to observe.

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