05.18.13
Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 7:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Warped perspective
Summary: How widespread coverage and talking points from the tiny minority which is patent lawyers have contributed to biased and at times utterly distorted reporting on the subject of software patents around the world
Skewed coverage is not so exceptional. Depending on one’s background and peers one shapes his or her views of the world. A programmer likes to develop software. A patent lawyer loves turning ideas into a formalised description of a process, sometimes acquiring a state-imposed monopoly on these ideas. In certain states (or continents) the patent lawyer may have to cheat a little in order to bypass limitations on the scope of monopoly. Not many places grant a monopoly on the process of computation for instance. It is about as concrete as one’s brain, where the brain is the equivalent of computation machine and the programming the equivalent of neural signals. In recent years patent lawyers have sought to solidify a loophole whereby all programming ‘recipes’ get accompanied by a computation device, even though a computer program can be run in one’s brain, perhaps with the aid of pen and paper. When the law on patenting excludes patents on software “as such” it generally means that patent lawyers just need to disguise software patents as something which they are not. This leaves plenty of room for battle over interpretation and therefore there is a multitude of views, where nobody quite agrees if software is patentable or not. It is the role of real journalists to distinguish between the views of patent lawyers (or their clients who are often managers of large corporations) and the views of software professionals. Since most judges are former solicitors it is expected that the former group will appeal to them, so where does it leave the press? Who is left to listen to the latter group? Certainly not the business press, whose interests are more closely aligned with those of large corporations. This post is a complete (not selective) summary of all the articles we saw generated by key events in 3 continents, showing that: 1) patent lawyers dominate the media on these matters and 2) the views of patent lawyers are very consistently in favour of software patent, as one ought to expect. This reduces certainty over the impact of rulings, bills, and parliamentary actions which clearly limit or altogether ban software patents.
“It is about as concrete as one’s brain, where the brain is the equivalent of computation machine and the programming the equivalent of neural signals.”The EU has much greater problems than patents at the moment, so not many people pay attention to software patents in Europe. These defy the law and they increasingly hurt software developers who are based in Europe. Interestingly, many of these patents are not even granted to European entities.
The government in Germany recently took steps against defiance of common patent law, so patent lawyers’ sites like IAM tried to portray those who reform/uphold the system as “pirates”. This type of characterisation continues, demonstrating to us just how venomous an element patent lawyers can be. They can be rude, not just deceitful for an agenda. Some of IAM’s stuff, as we covered it before, percolates onto other lawyers’ sites, helping to portray NZ’s exclusion [1, 2] of software patents in the relatively small island as some kind of illegitimate move. Other law-themed sites like Lexology asked about the NZ Patents Bill, “how will it effect software patents in NZ?”
The Bill is clear about it. It is not equivocal about it, the loophole that remains in the law set aside. Another article from the same site of patent lawyers helps shed doubt about the CAFC’s criticism of software patents in the US [1, 2, 3].
“The bottom line is, in the EU, NZ, and the US the patent lawyers continue to be instrumental in reality distortion field.”The headline says “Federal Circuit fails to clarify software patent eligibility” and this influences the business press which goes with headlines like “Patent Court Torn on Whether Software Deserve Patents”. Another pro-’IP’ site asks, “How CLS v Alice affects software patents” (the content deviates from the openness of the question).
Other lawyers who lobby for software patents say in their headline that “Federal Circuit deals blow to software patents, but fails to provide cohesive rationale” (criticism for expressing such a view).
A site that calls itself “Law Review” goes further than all the above by rushing ahead with the pretentious, poorly-thought out headline “Massive Growth in Software Usage the Real Reason for More Software Patents, Not Abuse” (very illogical statement of course, something along the lines of “many cockroaches give reason for breeding them,” as if quantity implies desirability).
The bottom line is, in the EU, NZ, and the US the patent lawyers continue to be instrumental in reality distortion field. We should take with a grain of salt what’s the result of seeding disinformation; think afresh based on the actual evidence. Software patents have been dealt a large blow and if this trend continues, patent lawyers’ spin aside, we might see them going away some time in the foreseeable future. Popular view is strongly against them, suggest polls even in the US. █
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Posted in Patents at 7:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some more criticism of the patent system and software patents in particular, courtesy of Eugene Kaspersky
Several rather distinguished scholars have said that patents as a concept — not just software patents — are misguided. They provided evidence for this claim and the evidence was somewhat measurable. It is becoming increasingly accepted by many that the USPTO is a tool for helping large corporations hoard power and wealth at the expense of everyone else. “Innovation” is just a marketing technique, as in practice the USPTO does just about nothing to innovate, it just provides protectionism for those that can afford it (usually the wealthiest companies out there).
“Patent law is now just so far removed from common sense that it’s patently absurd; the whole system right down to its roots needs to be overhauled.”
–Eugene KasperskyEugene Kaspersky [1, 2], possibly the most distinguished security researcher in the world (judging by reputation), cites Techrights in his new post which says patents work against innovation. To quote him on these issues: “Today’s patent law regarding software is…well, it’s a bit like one of those circus mirrors where reality is distorted. Patent law is now just so far removed from common sense that it’s patently absurd; the whole system right down to its roots needs to be overhauled. ASAP! Otherwise innovative patents meant to encourage and protect will simply fail to materialize. (Good job, patent system. Stellar work.)”
He complains more specifically about software patents. He is far from the only security professional who thinks that computer security is compromised by a bunch of monopolies on strategies and methods which correspond to simple mathematics. █
“I would much rather spend my time and money and energy finding ways to make the Internet safer and better than bickering over patents.”
–Dean Drako, Barracuda’s CEO
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05.17.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lock-in, not security
Summary: News and analysis of UEFI ‘secure boot’ (lockdown), including the new role played by the Microsoft-funded SUSE
The UEFI Forum contacted me yesterday, seeking to arrange an interview with UEFI executives. I clarified that my intent is to focus on the impact UEFI has on freedom and choice. It’s not just a Microsoft problem, but Microsoft uses a ‘feature’ in UEFI to impede adoption of GNU/Linux.
Novell, which is close to Microsoft not just due to CPTN (Novell was funded by Microsoft and so is SUSE), has had its former developers help spread UEFI [1, 2], much to Microsoft’s chagrin. They did this inside the Linux Foundation. OBS, another Novell project that got into the Linux Foundation, is helping UEFI restricted boot even further. To quote Mr. Larabel: “OBS, the Open Build Service developed largely by openSUSE, has reached version 2.4. With Open Build Service 2.4 comes support for a new package format, Secure Boot signing, and other features.”
“By refusing to bootstrap a compromised system UEFI would offer neither cure nor prevention.”Therein lies the issue with Microsoft influence. Even Torvalds appears to have complained about this influence.
Microsoft did not need restricted boot for security. It is nonsense. Days ago Microsoft announced 33 more security holes in its software (the real numbers are higher, but Microsoft keeps some holes hidden for vanity purposes). Well, that’s where the real security threat exists, not in boot time. Microsoft essentially calls for setting up an alarm system in premises that have neither walls nor fences. Microsoft is also spying on people in the name of 'security' (Skype), leading to this reminder that software freedom matters (“Skype is following your links – that’s proprietary for you”).
By refusing to bootstrap a compromised system UEFI would offer neither cure nor prevention. All it does is prevent people from having choices, █
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Posted in Site News at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Sites that deal with patents and with FUD as well as their respective ages
Techrights recently (a few days ago) became 6.5 years old, amassing almost 17,000 blog posts and earning respect from past critics who saw our predictions come true. Groklaw, however, is celebrating a much more special anniversary, having just turned 10. Here is some coverage about it:
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One of the amazing things about free software is how it has managed to succeed against all the odds – and against the combined might of some of the world’s biggest and most wealthy companies. That shows two things, I think: the power of a simple idea like open collaboration, and how individuals, weak on their own, collectively can achieve miracles.
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When I started, I thought I’d do a little fiddling around for a couple of months to learn how to blog. But then all you guys showed up and taught me some important things that I didn’t know, and vice versa I hope, and here we are, on our 10th anniversary, still going strong, together on a very different path than I originally imagined. The important moment for me was when I realized the potential we had as a group and decided to try to surf this incredible wave all of you created by contributing your skills and time. I saw we could work as a group, explain technology to the legal world so lawyers and judges could make better decisions, and explain the legal process to techies, so they could avoid troubles and also could be enabled to work effectively to defend Free and Open Source Software from cynical “Intellectual Property” attacks from the proprietary world.
I donated to Groklaw a few times because no site has been nearly as valuable to our causes as Groklaw. It inspired us, too.
I am pretty certain that we too can reach the tenth anniversary and still be an active site (thanks to all who donated; we welcome more donations to help cover hosting fees). The fight for software freedom and against software patents is far from over and the outcome of this fight depends on activism. This site is a purely voluntary activity from yours truly and others in the community. The motivation is idealogical, not financial, but there are operating costs. █
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Posted in America, EFF, Patents at 3:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hostility towards the practice of patenting software is seen in a nonprofit organisation, a corporation, and a government branch responsible for patenting
Dr. Glyn Moody says that “at last [the] EFF contemplates software patents abolition,” citing EFF positions in the essay “What’s At Stake in CLS Bank—Do Software Patents Hold Up The Sky?”
“Remember that i4i is a Canadian company best known for its lawsuit against Microsoft.”The essay comes from Mr. Nazer, whose positions we wrote about in [1, 2]. Earlier on he was targeting just trolls, not software patents. In his latest essay he says: “It is important to realize that software patents and the software industry are not the same thing. As Judge Moore’s own scholarship shows, patent issuance is “a poor measure of innovation value.” And there are straightforward economic reasons why patents and software are a bad fit. Far from being an incentive, software patents tend to operate as a barrier to entry and a tax on innovation.”
In other news cited by Moody, Newegg beat what some call a “corporate troll”. One summary says that “Newegg’s policy of not backing down from patent trolls, even ones as large as Alcatel-Lucent, continues to result in victory. Earlier this year, Overstock and Newegg successfully defended themselves with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent’s main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle. ”
Lastly for this week, Moody points out that there are more pushbacks against software patents, this time in Canada. As a short summary puts it: “The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has recently published two notices for patent examiners relating to patent interpretation, and in particular computer-related/business method type patents saying: ‘for example, what appears on its face to be a claim for an “art” or a “process” may, on a proper construction, be a claim for a mathematical formula and therefore not patentable subject matter.’”
Here is the corresponding article. Remember that i4i is a Canadian company best known for its lawsuit against Microsoft. There are other notable examples of patent parasites in Canada and we covered them before. █
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Corporate AstroTurf versus grassroots FOSS
Summary: Microsoft’s front group which pretends to support Free/Open Source software (FOSS) is using a guest post to entertain the idea of software patents inside Free/Open Source software
WHENEVER we see Open Source and software patents in the same sentence, there is the possibility that there is Microsoft spin-doctoring going on.
There is Microsoft-coordinated AstroTurf (with Microsoft lobbyists like Association for Competitive Technology) which tries to portray Open Source and software patents as symbiotic. Microsoft tries to tear apart the GPLv3 and by calling its lobbyist Florian Müller “FOSS Patents” it contributes to this nonsense. Black Duck and Microsoft-funded events like OSBC (that gave them an opponent’s platform) generally remain part of this problem too, not to mention Microsoft’s surrogates for FOSS groups, where the Microsoft equivalents push Microsoft licences, Microsoft proprietary stacks, and of course software patents. It’s all just a cunning plan to disrupt the opponent.
“Don’t let Microsoft teach the world that software patents inside Free/Open Source software are legitimate.”There is a relative of Matt Asay in the pseudo “Open Source” group of Microsoft. The monopolist has been finding him handy as of late and here again he does a guest post for Microsoft, pushing it into circles that are perceived as FOSS-friendly, such as Slashdot. It is “pushing software patents,” writes iophk, “Clark Asay, isn’t he Matt’s brother?” No, but he is a close relative of his. There seems to be a real issue these days with people whom Microsoft is “schmoozing”. The other day we wrote about Ubuntu getting a top manager from Microsoft; Ubuntu is part of the company where Asay had served as COO. Jono Bacon already responded to my post, but Jono’s first comment did nothing to disprove that post of mine, instead stating that he practices loyalty to his boss who came from Microsoft and telling us that Microsoft has nice people (giving the fake ‘Open Source’ fronts as examples), despite many in the FOSS world knowing otherwise. Jono himself received at least one gift from Microsoft after the company had also tried to hire him (he was strong enough to decline, so I commend him).
See how Microsoft privately describes what it refers to as "schmoozing". It is very telling, it is part of an infiltration strategy which Microsoft specifies in dozens of pages. Don’t let Microsoft teach the world that software patents inside Free/Open Source software are legitimate. █
Update: The Microsoft FUD is already seeding some harmful coverage, such as “Is Patenting Open Source Software The New Normal?”
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Besides well known devices like Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle etc, Linux is powering some of the most amazing devices around the globe and in the sky.
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Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.
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We’ve seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.
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Server
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LONG TIME LINUX SUPPORTER IBM has opened an office in Beijing that will help developers port Linux applications to its Power architecture.
IBM has been pushing its Power architecture for over 20 years, with its RISC chips intended for use in mission critical systems. Now the firm is working with Red Hat and Suse to help Linux developers port applications to the Power architecture by opening an office in Beijing.
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Scale Computing is scaling up its server business with a new HC3x server.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: There’s a critical vulnerability in the kernel. But relax, it’s been fixed. The International Space Station is switching from Windows to Debian. But not Debian 7, which has just been released. The beginner’s programming environment, Scratch 2.0, is out and the Raspberry Pi gets a super-light camera module. As always, hear our discoveries, our reports on the challenge and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Linus, has dived in to save the day. Where did the robot come from? What is it’s purpose? Can the Iron Penguin stand against it?
Find out next time. Same penguin-time, same penguin-channel.
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Applications
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Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.
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So, you have a machine running Linux which is also used by kids. We all know how the Web may be dangerous, especially for youngest of Internet fans. But do you know how to shield your Linux system and control what your kids do online?
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Proprietary
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Since the first free software implementation of the Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC) in Samba 4 became available, the large variety of potential scenarios for updating Samba 3 has made it difficult for Linux distributors to add the full set of features to their installation packages. Usually, they will choose one part or the other – the Samba 4 source code includes two daemons: samba for operating an AD-DC, and the Samba-3-compatible smbd for file server or domain member operation. However, the distribution packages usually only include one daemon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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So as usual behind the scenes I have been doing digging contacting various developers to find out if they have Linux versions planned and here are a few that got back to me! Games including Edge of Space, Battlepaths and more, all of these are currently on Desura.
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The Left 4 Dead 2 Beta for Linux has been released for a few days now, but it seems that players are not swarming it, as expected.
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Akaneiro: Demon Hunters the ARPG that draws from Little Red Riding Hood is now in Open Beta for Linux! Sadly it’s not going very smoothly and I am not impressed so far.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.
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Hi there, while we’ve been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven’t forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.
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The Calligra team has released version 2.6.3, another bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a number of important bug fixes to 2.6.2 and we recommend everybody to update.
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digiKam team is proud to announce the 3.2.0 release of digiKam Software Collection. This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.
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The Qt developers at Digia are moving at a pace – just over a month after releasing the Qt 5.1 alpha, they have announced the first beta of Qt 5.1. Mostly, the beta continues to deliver the features of the alpha – Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Layouts, a serial port module for hardware and virtual serial posts, an updated Qt Creator, support for static Qt builds, and official support for the Qt sensors module. The Android (Qt Quick 1 and 2) and iOS (Qt Quick 1 only) support has been refined in the beta release, though it is still at the level of a technology preview.
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This week I decided to do some research for the Wayland porting of the KDE Plasma workspaces. One of the features we will need in future is a Wayland session compositor which runs nested on a Wayland system compositor. Of course one could think of setups without a system compositor, but overall I think that a nested compositor simplifies the setup and allows to have all the low level technologies in one place without duplication in all the various compositors. +1 for working together.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.8.2 has been officially launched and it features a lot of fixes, documentation and translation updates, not to mention a sleuth of new features.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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New Version of NXTera 6.3 makes it possible for legacy Entera applications to run on Linux Redhat Enterprise 6 with support for SOA integrated JAVA, C, C#, FORTRAN, and COBOL applications.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.
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As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical’s next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.
Discussed just now during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit were bug-fixes and enhancements for the desktop Unity version in Ubuntu 13.10. Unity 7 improvements being planned for the October release include presenting new Unity indicators, more Unity scopes, the in-dash payments method, and selected design bugs will be addressed.
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A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu “community” Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here’s a look at the details.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, “Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named “Olivia”, is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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What does every development team want? New contributors!
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Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot.
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Phones
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Android
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Few of the announcements at Google’s I/O conference have involved open source software, but one announcement did: Android Studio, a new IDE environment for Android application development. Although Android Studio is only an early preview at the moment, Google is looking at it to eventually become the default development environment for Android applications, replacing the current solution of the Eclipse IDE and ADT Plugin.
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The challenge with a conference like Google I/O, where the announcements arrive one after another, is to see both forest and trees. Analysis of individual announcements – such as Google’s new Pandora/Rdio/Spotify competitor All Access, or the granular pricing for its compute infrastructure – is relatively straightforward. What’s more important, however, is perceiving the larger pattern.
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The company also launches new APIs to improve Android apps
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Rumors suggested that a white Nexus 4 might appear at Google IO, and they were right. We obtained the elusive white Nexus 4 and we can confirm it’s a carbon copy of the previous Nexus 4, just with a different color casing. That might not be the most exciting news, but we also learned the white Nexus 4 would hit the Google Play store on June 10th and it would be accompanied with Android 4.3.
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Archos has announced its latest Android tablet, the 80 Xenon, will be available in June with a $199 price tag. The 8-inch tablet is 3G-ready (SIM unlocked HSPA), runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and features the gull Google Play Store experience.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Three weeks ago I mentioned that OLPC Association has been remarkably quiet about the Android-based Walmart XO Tablet which it had introduced at CES 2013 in early January. Since then things have progressed a little bit with the Web site receiving a bit of a facelift.
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Events
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The last year has been a whirlwind of activity for Apache CloudStack. Citrix proposed CloudStack for the Apache Incubator in April of 2012, and just over a year later we’re gearing up for a second collaboration conference – this time in Santa Clara, CA, from June 23-25.
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Web Browsers
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NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE COMPANY Opera has settled the £2.2m lawsuit against ex-employee Trond Werner Hansen.
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Chrome
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At this week’s Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, “to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies.”
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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Ok, I know… the ‘E’ in Firefox ESR does not stand for ‘Enterprise’, but it should. The ESR – Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.
I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it’s a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes – break – with the fast release cycle of Firefox.
The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.
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Business
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Back in April, during SugarCRM’s annual SugarCon Conference, the company announced it would integrate ProcessMaker into it’s suite of cloud-based services, allowing seamless use of business process management tools directly from the Salesforce interface. About the same time the company also announced the new SugarCRM mobile application powered by HTML5 and offering a fast, easy way to access SugarCRM’s powerful features on mobile devices.
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The OpenFlow protocol stands at the center of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, and at the center of OpenFlow stands the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). As the revolution progresses, however, vendors are attempting to look beyond OpenFlow. Where does that leave the ONF?
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend’s data integration platform is being aimed at solving the complexity issues that surround deployment of Apache-Hadoop-based solutions. The developers have been focusing on creating Apache Pig developer tools and creating code in Pig Latin, which is said to remove the need to learn about MapReduce, the fundamental architectural element behind Hadoop. Users work with Talend’s Big Data graphical tools and that generates Pig Latin code which is then run on the Hadoop cluster; to optimise its running, a graphical mapper can be used to rework the data flow and mapping within the cluster.
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Funding
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Canadian venture capital firm Vanedge Capital has made a US$3 million Series A investment in OpenGeo Inc., a New York-based provider of commercial open source geospatial software. At the same time, the company spun out from its incubator
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The OpenGeo Suite is widely used for managing and sharing spatial data. OpenGeo has led the industry shift toward flexible, interoperable geospatial software infrastructures and will use this Series A funding to further enhance its industry-leading product and training offerings and reach a broader array of customers.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Researchers from FOKUS (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems) in Germany have released the Fuzzino data fuzzing library as open source software. The library allows existing test tools to be prepared for fuzzing and aims to make the development of new fuzzing tools unnecessary. Fuzzing is the process of testing a system for hidden weaknesses by presenting the system with random and sometimes erroneous input data.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open (government) data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen open data flourishing all over the world over the last three years. About three hundred open data catalogues have been identified so far.
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The rapid rise in the number of mobile devices has led to a concomitant rise in the amount of location data available. Proprietary services are emerging to take advantage of that data, but open source has a strong foothold in the form of OpenStreetMap.
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Programming
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PHP is the latest addition to the range of languages supported on Google’s App Engine. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) already supports Python, Java and Go and, like the languages before it, PHP is being introduced first as a limited preview experimental feature.
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Standards/Consortia
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VP9 is an open source and royalty free video compression technology under active development by Google with which they hope to replace the popular H.264 standard. The development of VP9 begain in late 2011 with two goals in mind, to provide a 50% reduced bit rate compared to the older VP8 codec while maintaining the video quality, and also optimizing it to the point that it becomes superior to the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (H.264) standard as well. We have to keep in mind that H.264 is pretty old now and the same standard is getting an update to H.265 which as much as doubles the data compression rate compared to the older H.264 standard.
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Google/MPEG-LA deal showed promise, but Google’s requirement for user licenses may bring a backlash
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Health/Nutrition
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Farmers “concerned” for ruling’s implication on upcoming suits against the biotech giant
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Security
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30 million open resolvers in the domain name system and a 200 per cent increase in the number of attacks in 2012 – these alarming figures were discussed by administrators at the 66th meeting of the RIPE IP address registry in Dublin this week. A panel discussion revolved around how to motivate the black sheep to implement long overdue security measures before large-scale attacks call the regulators to action.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Canadian government doubles advertising spend on tar sands
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Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing — quite literally sometimes — with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale’s April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans’ conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to “the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted.”
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Censorship
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Around May Day, we received advance notice that the Swedish Prosecution Authority had filed a petition with the Stockholm District Court requesting the seizure of two domain names, thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se. Now, this comes as no surprise and our General Counsel, Elisabeth, has already blogged about this.
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Prosecutors in Sweden have sued the root domain registry of .SE domains to kill the domain name of The Pirate Bay. The root registry fights back heavily. This case is important to watch, as it can have thoroughly chilling results for the Internet’s domain name system if criminal secondary liability is established at the DNS level.
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Privacy
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The independent review on public data prepared by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board, has just been published. Much of what Shakespeare recommends is very good stuff, and includes things that ORG has been proposing for some time. But we have some disagreements, particularly on the analyses and proposals around privacy.
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Civil Rights
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If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?
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Geneva 16 May 2013 – The world’s leading retail labels commit to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh before the midnight deadline. The Accord now covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories. Implementation starts now!
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Clean Clothes Campaign is calling for immediate action from all international brands following today’s collapse of the Wing Star Shoes factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The collapse of the ceiling cost the lives of at least two people, and injured seven. The workers were stitching sneakers for sportsbrand Asics when the ceiling caved in on top of them.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, addressed a press conference on 16 May 2013 at the WWW Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Berners-Lee used his address to state his support for the Marco Civil da Internet, (Marco Civil) a landmark draft Bill in Brazil that many have called ‘a Constitution for the Internet’.
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Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related.
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DRM
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Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In March, the Ninth Circuit declared that Canada-based BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is not entitled to protection under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA due to its conduct many years ago. IsoHunt filed a petition for a rehearing before a jury, but yesterday a Ninth Circuit panel unanimously rejected it. Isohunt lawyer Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that the right to a jury trial is protected by the constitution and isoHunt is now in the process of requesting a Supreme Court review.
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One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it’s more important to preserve copyright “inviolate” than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the “proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities” for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.
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Send this to a friend
05.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I don’t think the unnamed and unknown blogger who writes under the banner of The VAR Guy would argue with me if I were to say that over at his site it’s all about the money. That’s not a bad thing. The value added resellers, the VARs who are his readers, would expect nothing else.
These are guys and gals to whom hardware and software are all part of the same packet. This is the crowd who couldn’t care less about the usability of, say GNOME, for the average home user and who might even be tempted to look for loopholes in the GPL, because it would be easier to make money with free software if it wasn’t free. In other words, these are folks who’ve traditionally mainly stood firmly in the proprietary camp, where the rules for resellers have been more clearly defined. These are the dudes and dudettes who make RMS very wary whenever he sees them coming our way.
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Desktop
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Malaysia has adopted Google Apps and Chromebooks as part of the country’s plans to integrate Web usage in a bid to reform its education system.
According to a blog post by the search giant on Wednesday, Malaysia adopted Google Apps for 10 million of its students, teachers and parents. In addition, primary and secondary schools will receive Chromebooks.
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Server
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IBM is serious about expanding the footprint of the Linux operating system running on Power servers.
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Rumors are swirling that Intel Hybrid Cloud (a small business server that has cloud and managed services capabilities) has been discontinued. If true, this is the latest setback for resellers that are seeking on-premises alternatives to Windows Small Business Server (SBS), which Microsoft killed in 2012. Still, there are cloud-based alternatives — including Microsoft’s increasingly popular Office 365.
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Google and NASA have teamed up to launch a new laboratory focused on advancing machine learning. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab — hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California — will contain a quantum supercomputer that will be used by researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and all over the world to pioneer breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
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Kernel Space
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Back in April, the Linux kernel developers fixed an incorrectly declared pointer in the Linux kernel. However, it appears that they overlooked the potential security implications of such a bug – particularly the fact that it is possible to gain access to almost any memory area using a suitable event_id. The developers only got into gear and declared the bug as an official security hole (CVE-2013-2094) after an exploit was released that proves that normal, logged-in users can gain root access this way.
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While there isn’t yet a release yet of Ubuntu in the Linux x32 ABI flavor, some packages now found in Ubuntu 13.04 make it easier to setup this binary interface that brings some 64-bit advantages to the 32-bit world.
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A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn’t fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.
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Today we’re talking about our experience with btrfs, the next-gen Linux filesystem. btrfs has been maturing rapidly over the last few years and offers many compelling features for modern systems, so we’ve been putting it through its paces on some of our backup servers.
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It’s been a while since last reporting any improved to Logitech device support on Linux or any other USB gaming mice/keyboards for Linux. However, a Phoronix reader has written in with some news.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted his feature pull requests on Monday morning for the USB, staging, driver core, and TTY/serial areas of the Linux 3.10 kernel that’s just entered development following yesterday’s Linux 3.9 kernel release.
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“Is Linux code the ‘benchmark of quality’? Well, it is very good, no doubt about that,” said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. “The main take-away point from the study should be that open source software, including Linux, is on par with proprietary software from a quality perspective. So, Linux code could be considered a benchmark of quality — it is as good as anything else out there.”
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If you’ve ever dreamed of working directly with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted T’so or any of the other Linux luminaries, you could work your way up through the ranks of kernel developers submitting patches and fixing bugs. Or you could work as a systems administrator on The Linux Foundation’s IT team, managing the servers that they use every day to build the largest collaborative software development project in the world.
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Graphics Stack
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The modern Gallium3D graphics driver for supporting Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ and Ivy Bridge “Gen7″ graphics has been merged into mainline Mesa!
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Benchmarks
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Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.
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Yesterday after publishing the 15-way open-source vs. closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics comparison there were some requests by Phoronix readers to also show how the LLVMpipe software rasterizer performance is in reference. For this article to end out the month are the OpenGL performance results from nine lower-end AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running with their respective Mesa/Gallium3D drivers compared to the LLVMpipe software driver in two configurations.
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Applications
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After more than a year of work, Mixxx 1.11.0 has been released recently, featuring a new beat detector, colored 3-band waveforms and many other new features as well as various bug fixes and performance improvements.
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Proprietary
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IBM is shutting the doors on Lotus 1-2-3, the software program that made the IBM PC and Microsoft household names.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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With only six days left to claim your copies, we go hands-on with every game to help you decide…
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One month after the release of X3: Terran Conflict for Linux, Egosoft has now released X3: Albion Prelude.
Albion Prelude is the latest title in Egosoft’s X3 series. X3: Albion Prelude was originally released for Windows back in 2011 and has now been released for Linux with the whole Steam Linux gaming rush and having their own Linux talent in-house.
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It differs to the usual platform game by including game types from lots of different machines (and more to come too!) and emulates their graphical style so, it makes this actually quite an interesting one!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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OpenMW, the open-source engine re-implementation of Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, has a new version out. OpenMW 0.23 features the initial implementation of NPC movement AI, item repairing, enchanting, levelled items, texture animation, basic particles, and a lot more. This release comes just ahead of Morrowind’s eleventh birthday.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It’s been just a week since KDE 4.10.3 was announced, but 4.11 is already reaching its first milestone freeze. TSDgeos reminded developers today that the 4.11 Soft Feature Freeze happens in just one more week. What does that mean for users?
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KDevelop, the integrated development environment for KDE that’s designed for C++ support and other programming languages, experienced a major release. Several new features are presented by KDevelop 4.5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Its interface design is the reason for its playful name, but Gnome-Pie won’t run you in circles when it comes to launching applications and getting into menus. It’s easy to set up your “pies” on the desktop so that you’ll have no problem finding your desired menu item for launch. Those weary of text-based app launchers will find Gnome-Pie to be a very productive alternative.
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GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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I hope you have enjoyed the first and the second parts of the Linux Screenshot Beauty Contest.
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Gentoo Family
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Let me begin this way, I am a great admirer of Sabayon for quite sometime. This Italian distro is based on Gentoo Linux and provides an enviable ensemble of pre-installed applications which just works out of the box. Those who are scared of Gentoo, Sabayon can be a good starting point. Apart from being based on one of the most popular Linux operating systems, one of the greatest USPs of Sabayon is it’s aesthetics. It comes with a very professional dark blue theme with application interfaces tweaked to match it. I haven’t seen many Linux distros doing it, to be honest.
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Arch Family
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For those of you always looking for — or at least willing to try — the newest Linux distribution on the scene, a pretty fresh candidate is Manjaro Linux, which recently announced some updates that should be appealing to users who aren’t necessarily command-line junkies.
Manjaro is based on Arch, rather than Ubuntu or Debian, which is a version of Linux known for being lightweight, fast, and minimalist in its approach. Arch has been aimed primarily at more intermediate and advanced Linux users in the past, but the Manjaro team has placed an emphasis on the user-friendly aspect of this distro.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software solutions provider Red Hat Inc is strenghtening its presence in Asean region, especially Malaysia, through partnerships.
Its general manager for Asean Damien Wong said Red Hat would invest in partner-specific marketing, sales and technical support to promote sustainability of the channel partner ecosytem.
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Fedora
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As you may know, Ubuntu has the EasyUbuntu app that helps the Ubuntu beginners install additional drivers, with a nice graphical user interface.
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The Fedora Project, an open source collaboration project supported by Red Hat and the developer community, rolled out their first Fedora-powered high-density ARM-based datacenter servers this week in a migration that was the first time they were able to use standard tools, such as Kickstart and PXE on ARM-based datacenter hardware.
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Debian Family
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This is the last week of classes for me. I have turned in all my assignments and a handful of days until finals, so I can take today and tomorrow to write a couple of reviews at my leisure. The first will be #!.
#! should be familiar to many readers here. It is a lightweight Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox. While it is not technically a rolling-release distribution because it is pinned to the stable release, there were tons of preview releases for this version. Now that Debian 7 “Wheezy” is finally stable, so is #! 11 “Waldorf”. Since version 10 “Statler”, the Xfce edition has been dropped, so #! is back to using Openbox exclusively.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu kernel developers plan to provide security fixes and minor improvements for version 3.8 of the Linux kernel until August 2014; version 3.8 was released in February. The announcement by Canonical employee Kamal Mostafa came just days after Greg Kroah-Hartman had discontinued the maintenance of Linux 3.8; Kroah-Hartman oversees the maintenance of the stable and long-term kernels and is currently maintaining stable kernel version 3.9 and long-term kernel versions 3.0 and 3.4.
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Recently the Technical Board made a decision to sunset Brainstorm, the site we have been using for some time to capture a list of what folks would like to see fixed and improved in Ubuntu. Although the site has been in operation for quite some time, it had fallen into something of a state of disrepair. Not only was it looking rather decrepit and old, but the ideas highlighted there were not curated and rendered into the Ubuntu development process. Some time ago the Technical Board took a work item to try to solve this problem by regularly curating the most popular items in brainstorm with a commentary around technical feasibility, but the members of the TB unfortunately didn’t have time to fulfill this. As such, brainstorm turned into a big list of random ideas, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and largely ignored by the Ubuntu development process.
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A while back I started a project called the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit. The goal is simple: create a single downloadable kit that provides all the information and materials you need to go out and help advocate Ubuntu and our flavors to others. The project lives here on Launchpad and is available in this daily PPA. If you want to see the kit in action just run:
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Yesterday, it has been suggested to sunset Ubuntu brainstorm. While the arguments on the surface make a lot of sense, a bigger problem seem to be not as much in the focus of the discussion as it maybe should be.
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There has been much teeth gnashing about the removal of the ‘Community’ link from the top of the ubuntu.com site. As a member of the Ubuntu Community Council I have tried to gather my thoughts before blogging about this. Recently, I read an article that got me rather upset.
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Canonical’s Mir Display Server now has a simple demo shell as well as a multi-window compositing demo.
In continuing to monitor the public Bazaar development repository for Mir, there isn’t too much to report on this week. The only highlights were:
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For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical’s next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.
The default desktop will be Unity 7 and it will be powered by an X.Org Server when running Ubuntu 13.10. However, the Qt5-based Unity 8 in conjunction with Mir will be readily packaged and available for those wishing to give it a go. Meanwhile, for the Ubuntu 13.10 state of the phone/tablet version, that is expected to be Mir-powered in time.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu is moving in all directions lately. They are making sure that they find themselves on tablets, smartphones, and even on televisions. With the high amount of efforts being put in to make Ubuntu the best product in the FOSS community, there have been some polarizing decisions that have managed to alienate a few longtime Ubuntu users. Ever since the decision to switch to Unity was taken, there have been many Linux users who don’t find Ubuntu as user-friendly as they used to back then. There have been forum wars, IRC battles, and a bunch of irksome blog posts about usability–or lack thereof– of Ubuntu. However, as time progressed, Ubuntu has matured quite a lot and has managed to regain its top spot as one of the most user-friendly distributions in the FOSS world.
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Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical’s Mir Display Server from the beginning. He’s now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.
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Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, “Software Sources” and “Driver Manager”, make their first appearance in Linux Mint.
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In development since late last year, the Raspberry Pi camera module is finally available. The module can be purchased from RS Components or Element 14 and is based on an Omnivision 5647 5MPixel sensor which is configured to give a still picture resolution of 2592×1944 or deliver video with 1080p resolution at 30fps. It manages this in a 20x25x10mm package which connects to the Pi over a flat ribbon cable.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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We heard rumours that Samsung had plans to launch Galaxy S4 running stock Android, and it’s true! Google has just unveiled the Samsung flagship phone, Galaxy S4 powered by pure vanilla Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2.
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Android
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NEC has announced an Android smartphone that uses a water-cooling system to keep its quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro system-on-chip (SOC) from overheating. The NEC Medias X 06E integrates a liquid cooling pipe near the SOC to cool off the 4.7-inch phone, which is being marketed at Japanese women.
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At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes.
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A leak tips off security enhancements in the Android update expected to be unveiled at Google I/O.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At the moment, Canonical doesn’t allow users to download Ubuntu for Android (or perhaps it’s still not ready for prime time), and the company is rather looking for OEMs to license the software. I believe that the “perfect vendor” to take advantage of this software is ASUS, which should offer it pre-installed on its Padfone series. This way Padfone users would get an added benefit when they dock their smartphone to the tablet shell, with the ability to use real desktop apps.
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HP has finally entered the Android hybrid market with HP SlateBook X2, the first Tegra 4 powered android convertible. The 10 inch tablet connects to the keyboard directly with a dock connector and also has a touch pad for mouse operations. The screen is a bright 1920 X 1200 full HD IPS display keeping things on screen very crisp and clear.
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Calxeda, maker of ARM server-on-chip (SoC) cards, announced that the Fedora Project, an open-source development community sponsored by Red Hat, has deployed servers with its EnergyCore SoCs inside. The cluster consists of Viridis mircoservers made by a UK company called Boston.
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When I first started to learn how to code and program, as a student and during the pre-internet era, it was common practice to share your source code as you were creating it. My classmates and I assumed that was the best way for us to learn—from each other.
Almost everyone shared, except for a few. I never fully understood why they didn’t, because they would learn from others but not share thier creations afterwards. As I got older and moved into the business world of making money, I began to understand as I was faced with the obscure system of intellectual rights, patents, trademarks, and copyright (and copyleft). Of course, I often think that without these obstacles, technology could go much further and become more ethically correct. But, it seems that the focus on “information is power” is still more important. Luckily, I found out that my feelings towards this are not so weird and actually are shared by many.
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Events
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Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop.
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Web Browsers
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For a few years now, the great debate between Chrome and Firefox has raged on. Which browser is faster? Which is easier to install? In this article, I’ll tackle each of these subjects, in addition to providing some personal insights on each of these topics.
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SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a “sliding drawer” user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript.
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Mozilla
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Why fix something if it’s not broken? If others prefer Chromium well then “sudo apt-get install chromium-browser” and I guess that’s just my two-cents on the topic.
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Version 21 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is out for Windows, the Mac, Linux and Android. You can download the standard browser here, and get Firefox for Android here. If you’re already a Firefox user, you should be automatically upgraded. There are quite a few enhancements in this version, including additional Do Not Track features, a Health report, social APIs and choices on the desktop and open source fonts for the Android version.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It’s no secret that Java has moved to the top of the target list for many attackers. It has all the ingredients they love: ubiquity, cross-platform support and, best of all, lots of vulnerabilities. Malware targeting Java flaws has become a major problem, and new statistics show that this epidemic is following much the same pattern as malware exploiting Microsoft vulnerabilities has for years.
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Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the open source office suite. More than 80% of these downloads have come from Windows users, with the rest of the downloads spread between Mac OS X and Linux. Over time, the percentage of Windows users has slightly increased at the expense of Mac OS X, with Linux usage hovering steady under 5%.
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Business
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As an organization or even individual there always seem to be questions when considering whether or not to make your project or code snippet open source. Many times, it starts with trying to figure out which license to use. But there are many other things to consider. We derived a list for you the next time you ask yourself: Should I open source my code?
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Project Releases
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Version 7.6 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, has been released and with it comes support for new debugging targets and a whole lot more.
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The popular Linux distribution for routers and other wireless/network devices, OpenWrt, has been christened by a new version. OpenWrt 12.09 “Attitude Adjustment” brings with it many new features.
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Public Services/Government
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If you were to list all the reasons why Obama beat Romney in the 2012 presidential race, chances are DevOps, the cloud, and open-source software (OSS) wouldn’t be on your list. They should be. As Harper Reed, the CTO of Obama for America explained in his recent Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) speech, all these technologies played a major role in the campaign. Or, as the New York Times explained after the election: “Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.”
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President of Croatia Ivo Josipović appreciates the creative and innovative spirit of the open source community. “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, he was quoted as saying, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in the country’s capital Zagreb yesterday. “Most importantly, open source brings helps to strengthen democracy.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Kuka announced a 20,000 Euro Kuka Innovation in Mobile Manipulation Award for innovative mobile manipulation applications using its Kuka YouBot service robot. The open source Kuka YouBot is equipped with omnidirectional wheels and one or two 5-DOF manipulator arms, and runs Ubuntu Linux and ROS (Robot Operating System) on an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX board.
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Blender 2.67 was released last week with a 3D printing toolbox. LGW spoke to Dolf Veenvliet, Bart Veldhuizen (Shapeways, Blendernation), and Rich Borrett (Ponoko) about the new tools and the future of 3D printing.
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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The NHS has spent billions of pounds on management consultants in recent years. It was profit-making private management consultancy firms (who shall remain nameless) that explored and reported on ways in which the NHS would make efficiency savings. The £20 billion pounds of ‘savings’ that were identified were built around the concept of what became known as QUIPP “Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention”.
Central to the theories around QUIPP was the idea that much more of our patients should and indeed would be treated in the home. It was argued that the successful triaging of patients would relieve much of the pressure on our NHS. The logic on the face of it appeared reasonably sound. Many patients who arrive at A&E could indeed be treated elsewhere. If a way could be successfully found to divert patients to the most suitable care setting then it was argued that savings could be made in reducing A&E admissions, and that some wards could close as a result.
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To eat these two types of fats in the right ratio, we can either eat more omega-3s or eat fewer omega-6s. Companies like DSM and Monsanto want us to do the former — so we buy their high omega-3 products (and pay top dollar for them, too!). But scientists recommend going by the other route, reducing our omega-6 consumption. One healthy way to do this is by using monounsaturated fats, like those found in olive oil.
Author Susan Allport, who wrote The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them, agrees. “The best way to up the omega-3s in one’s tissues is simply to reduce one’s intake of omega-6s,” she says. “Monsanto will try to persuade us that we can get around this elephant in the room (the large amount of omega-6s in the food supply) with their new soybean but it certainly won’t be any more effective than the advice to eat more fish has been.”
However, Monsanto does not want us to stop eating unhealthy levels of omega-6s, because their patented genes are in most of the soybeans grown in the U.S. And soybean oil is our number one source of omega-6s. (Soybean oil is often sold labeled simply as “vegetable oil.”)
So instead of cutting into their sales by switching to a healthier fat, they’d prefer to keep making you unhealthy with soybean oil. But they are willing to offer you this “band aid” fix of a high omega-3 soybean that they anticipate will be grown on less than five percent of the nation’s soybean acres. Oh, and you’ll probably have to pay extra to get it, too.
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Security
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The developers behind the Rygel home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) for the GNOME desktop environment, announced the immediate availability for download of the second stable release for the 0.18.x branch.
Rygel 0.18.2 is the second and last maintenance release for Rygel 0.18 and it incorporates numerous fixes, all in order to make Rygel a more stable and reliable release.
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Finance
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The controversy surrounding the IRS singling-out Tea Party-inspired groups seeking tax exempt status — while inexcusable — might be attributable, in part, to the agency’s failure to create clearer rules for political activity in the post-Citizens United electoral landscape, and it being inappropriately tasked with enforcing campaign finance law, tax law experts say.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United opened the door for corporations — both for-profit and non-profit — to spend on elections, 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits became the vehicle of choice for wealthy donors seeking to keep their political spending secret.
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Goldman Sachs & Co must pay more than $2.5 million to an investor who alleged the firm recommended an unsuitable investment in a private equity fund, a securities arbitration panel has ruled.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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When big-time reporters decide to try their hands at media criticism, the results are usually disappointing–but they can also be quite revealing.
So when a video of CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley started to making the rounds, the headlines associated with it piqued my interest. Over at the Weekly Standard, it was “CBS Anchor: ‘We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again.’”
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Praise for a conservative president’s breaking the air traffic controllers’ union–that’s what you hear on the liberal cable channel. (The video is below.)
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Censorship
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From Free Press’s helpful explainer of the AP phone records scandal…
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Privacy
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Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox.
[...]
The Strongbox servers themselves are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast in a physically and logically segregated area at a secure datacenter, but they otherwise have no elements in common with Condé Nast, The New Yorker’s publisher. As Amy Davidson, a New Yorker senior editor wrote, “Over the years, it has also become easier to trace [email] senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that. As it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
Aaron would have been proud.
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Civil Rights
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Florida Governor Rick Scott is under pressure from Florida moms to veto a bill that would deliver a “kill-shot” to local efforts to guarantee paid sick days for workers. The legislation, which can be traced back the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is backed by major corporate players with questionable labor records, including Disney.
In April, the Florida legislature passed a corporate-backed bill to preempt local paid sick day laws, largely in response to a small-d democratic effort in Orange County to have residents vote on the issue. More than 50,000 Orange County voters signed petitions to place a paid sick day measure on the ballot, which would be effectively blocked if Governor Scott signs the law.
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The scale and speed of the exodus of those fleeing the violence in Syria has been underlined by UN figures showing that the number of refugees has topped 1.5 million, just 10 weeks after the millionth refugee fled to safety.
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Legalisation, which comes amid rise in attacks on Palestinians and their property, could frustrate US peace efforts
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Last month the world heard the tragic news that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh, were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In an advance that makes history, Vermont’s House of Representatives passed a bill on May 10 requiring foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled. This is the furthest any such legislation has made it through the legislative process in the United States.
Vermont’s legislative session was due to end already, but negotiations over a tax bill have kept lawmakers in the capitol this week. With the Senate’s attention focused fiscally rather than on food, however, H.112 to label GMOs will have to wait to be taken up by the Senate in January 2014.
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Trademarks
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On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was “merely descriptive.”
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