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02.12.13

Advertising and Legitimising Microsoft Control of Linux

Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Former Novell people and others who help normalise anticompetitive behaviour

Recently, boards were made which self-destruct because of Microsoft demands. A lot of journalists were missing the point, which is that UEFI restricted boot is controlled by and imposed by Microsoft, and is generally better off rejected as it doesn't really contribute to security.

Dr. Garrett passes blame to Samsung for a scheme that was Microsoft’s idea, as seen here. One must not forget that without Microsoft pressure, none of it would have happened.

The UEFI saga is being rewritten now as Garrett is generating press coverage to blame Samsung, not Microsoft. To quote a pro-Linux site, “Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who does a lot of research into UEFI topics, writes in a blog post that by storing a large amount of data in UEFI variables, he managed to disrupt a Samsung notebook running Windows to such a degree that it subsequently refused to start. In his post, the developer also points to some sample code of the Windows program that he executed at administrator level to disable the notebook. The developer had previously speculated that some Samsung notebooks with UEFI firmware may be rendered inoperative under Windows in the same way that they were when starting Linux under certain circumstances. The experiment to confirm this was successful.”

Trying to ‘prove’ it can be reproduced with Windows actually helps Microsoft dodge blame. Former Novell staff is meanwhile doing Microsoft’s work, too.

Here is one article that says:

The Linux Foundation proudly announced a few hours ago, February 8, that they have officially unleashed the highly anticipated UEFI secure boot system for all Linux distributions, courtesy of the Microsoft Corporation.

James Bottomley, the Director of The Linux Foundation was happy to announce on his blog the immediate availability for download of the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system.

Here is another article about it. Watch former Novell staff revealing Microsoft’s involvement:

As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today.

SUSE too is organising events, but it is not what it used to be:

Did anybody else notice Novell BrainShare 2013 occurred this week in Salt Lake City? It was a prime opportunity to promote Novell’s progress under Attachmate’s ownership. Plus, SUSE Linux (Novell’s sister business) could have published some updated business milestones of its own. Did Novell and SUSE deliver? Here’s the scorecard.

Alas, the annual Novell user and partner conference generated exactly one Novell press release, no SUSE press releases, one partner release from MessageSolution, one media story in the Salt Lake City Tribune and one on ZDnet.

Now that SUSE depends financially on Microsoft its main goal is to help Microsoft tax GNU/Linux and advance dubious agenda. Some people in the FOSS world do sell out. And we do need to name them, no matter how offensive they may find it. █

“News is something someone doesn’t want printed. All else is advertizing.” –William Randolph Hearst

Honour Aaron by Fighting CISPA

Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Site News at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Aaron

Summary: CISPA rears its ugly head again, so action from the public is needed

TECHRIGHTS has expanded somewhat in terms of scope and focus, as our daily links help reflect. Swartz, who was involved in Wikileaks, i.e. transparency and accountability, fought against SOPA, which is about censorship, just like CISPA, which can help shut down Wikileaks and also harm privacy. A lot of recent press propaganda will serve as pretext for cracking down on the Web with new laws. CISPA is one of them.

Obama signed an executive order for CISPA, kneeling to his bosses in Hollywood, as usual. What will you do? █

02.11.13

Links 11/2/2013: 800 Million Androids This Year, CISPA is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opensource.com announces 2013 community award winners
  • Asylum a new horror game

    Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.1: LLVM/Clang Battling GCC

      With LLVM/Clang having become the default FreeBSD x86 compiler as of last year and the recent FreeBSD 9.1 release shipping not only LLVM/Clang but also the libc++ library, new benchmarks were carried out of FreeBSD 9.1 looking at its two stock compilers.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 3D printing an open source electric car

      What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one “EZ” project.

      It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: “Why aren’t there more electric vehicles on the road?”

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Eric Holder Memo on the “Reasoned Exercise of Prosecutorial Discretion” & the Swartz Affair ~pj

        When Aaron Swartz died, I told you that I’m no expert on criminal law, and I’m not. So I couldn’t really provide a star to guide anyone. But what I could do is research and provide information so you could be fully informed. That’s what journalists are for.

        And now I’ve come across something that I think might be helpful, a May 19, 2010 memo [PDF] by Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. to all federal prosecutors, letting them know that he wanted them to be fair and reasonable in exercising their prosecutorial discretion. He told them that he wanted them to be flexible, too, not necessarily bound by maximum/minimum guidelines, but to look at the individual circumstances of each case, stating that the “reasoned exercise of prosecutorial discretion is essential to the fair, effective, and even-handed administration of the federal criminal laws”. That raises a natural enough question, of course, about whether that policy was followed in the Swartz case, but that isn’t what struck me.

      • Memorials for Aaron Swartz Turn to Discussion of How to Honor His Legacy
      • Software Developer Lobbies For Free Court Documents

        A few years ago, software developer Stephen Schultze helped create a nifty piece of code called “RECAP” that makes some federal court documents free on the Internet.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open-Source Hardware Firewalls

        Open-source hardware firewalls are something of a misnomer. Though these Internet protection appliances are based on open-source operating systems, their programming is often proprietary. Furthermore, security needs have forced many of these product to go beyond mere firewalling to include anti-spam filtering, intrusion protection and more.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Sleazy Sugar Daddies offer to pay tuition fees on dating site

    HUNDREDS of cash-strapped Scots students have signed up to an internet dating site to meet wealthy men offering to pay their tuition.

  • Facebook Connect issue wreaks havoc on the Web
  • Facebook error that hijacks thousands of websites isn’t just an ‘inconvenience’

    Thousands of major — and not-so-major — websites found their traffic redirected to a Facebook error page yesterday, a phenomenon that lasted upward of an hour, according to varying accounts. Although the social networking site dismissed the event as the result of a Facebook error that was “quickly repaired,” it would be imprudent to blithely view the event as a glitch or mere inconvenience. It’s downright concerning, both from a business and a privacy perspective.
    First, here’s what happened: Starting at around 4 p.m. Pacific time Thursday, users attempting to visit an array of disparate websites and services — from CNN to The Sydney-Melboure Herald to Pinterest to Reddit to Hulu — were redirected to Facebook and a message reading, “An error occurred. Please try again later.” Sites were affected anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, according to reports.

  • Security

    • Massive search fraud botnet seized by Microsoft and Symantec

      Thakur said that the Bamital malware was initially delivered by a combination of methods, including in packages over peer-to-peer filesharing networks disguised as other content. But the majority of systems infected were the victim of “driveby downloads” from websites configured with malicious software intended to exploit browser security flaws. “We have evidence of [the botnet operators] polluting search engine results for certain search terms with links to servers with exploits,” he said.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Report: Ex-Cop Christopher Dorner Is Now a Target for Drones
    • Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front
    • Another FBI Patsy Arrested in Fake Bomb Plot to Start a Civil War

      The FBI is at it again, boasting about stopping another contrived terror plot of their own making. This time they nabbed a right-winger working with the Taliban which happen to be an FBI agent provocateur.
      “

    • Julian Assange Bill Maher Interview: WikiLeaks Founder Slams Drones, Targeted Killings
    • Keeping Secrets

      Similarly, when the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up.

      This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent.

      [...]

      Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it.

    • Sullivan: More Light Still Needed on Drone Strikes
    • Drone spotted hovering over West Oakland
    • Sovereignty vs. Intervention: A Review of Haiti’s New Dictatorship

      During the build up to and aftermath of the 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s popular priest-turned-president, the Haitian and international press reported two conflicting narratives. Even in the left-wing media office of ZNet, where Justin Podur was an editor, stories filed from Haiti just “didn’t add up.”

    • Push to Expand U.S. ‘Kill List’
    • What If an Assassination Court Reviewed Placement of US Citizens on the President’s Kill List?

      For months, there have been human rights or civil liberties groups sharply condemning President Barack Obama’s targeted killing program especially because he holds all the power to decide who lives and who dies, however, up until a Justice Department “white paper” on the program was leaked by NBC News, there was little discussion by US news media about the nature of the program.

    • Letters: Targeted death
    • US’ Betrayal of Truth
    • Spying on Law-Abiding Muslims

      He said his handler told him that the department considered “being a religious Muslim a terrorism indicator.”

    • NDAA Lawsuit- Hedges v. Obama -Pt. 5
    • NDAA Lawsuit- Hedges v. Obama -Pt. 6
    • In Search of Monsters

      On 11 January, seemingly out of the blue, François Hollande announced that France would ‘respond to the request of the Malian president’ and send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’. ‘Today, the very existence of this friendly nation is at stake,’ he declared. ‘Military operations will last for as long as required … Terrorists must know that France will always be there when it’s a matter not of its fundamental interests but the right of a population … to live in freedom and democracy.’ In France, though ominous warnings did the rounds, the president’s approval ratings soared from a nadir of 40 per cent to 63 per cent. Hitherto seen as weak, Hollande was suddenly perceived as a strong commander-in-chief (linguistically, it’s a small step from chef d’état to chef de guerre). Abroad, despite offers from Western allies of logistical or humanitarian support (France’s plea for military support from its European allies remains unanswered), many suspected that neocolonial ghosts were haunting Paris yet again. La Françafrique, that infamous amalgam of truncated African sovereignty and French interventionism in sub-Saharan Africa, seemed to have returned.

    • Obama’s Drone Attack on Your Due Process

      The biggest problem with the recently disclosed Obama administration white paper defending the drone killing of radical clerk Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t its secrecy or its creative redefinition of the words “imminent threat.” It is the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of due process.

    • How Obama’s Drone Strike Policy Violates the Original Meaning of the Constitution

      Writing at the Originalism Blog, Michael Ramsey of the University of San Diego Law School examines the Obama administration’s drone policy in light of the original meaning of the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment, which forbids the government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

    • Nick Turse Describes the Real Vietnam War

      Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans — including many accused of war atrocities — and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

    • Article II or AUMF? “A High Level Official” (AKA John Brennan) Says CIA Can Murder You
    • Drones and Our National Religion

      The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.

      The flag’s powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A “Dream Act” that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

    • Dick Cheney blasts Obama’s ‘second-rate’ national security team
    • They Knew the Evidence against Anwar al-Awlaki Was Weak When They Killed Him

      In case you don’t want to read these two long posts, I want to point to two passages from the white paper that show, on two key points, the government wasn’t even claiming Anwar al-Awlaki was the “senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces” they keep saying he was when they killed him.

    • Bill Moyers Essay: When We Kill Without Caring
    • CIA’s Kiriakou expresses doubts about agency, Greek terrorism

      John Kiriakou, the Greek-American CIA analyst who was sentenced last month to more than two years in jail for revealing the identity of a covert operative, has revealed to Kathimerini his thoughts about the possible emergence of new terrorist activity in Greece and his concerns about the future of the US intelligence agency.

      Kiriakou told Sunday’s Kathimerini that he would differentiate the activity of urban guerrilla groups in Greece today and the actions of the November 17 terrorist organization.

    • Obama’s legacy of secrecy

      John Brennan’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was a microcosm of the Obama administration’s approach to counterterrorism: The right assurances, with little transparency.

      Brennan said the United States should publicly disclose when American drone attacks kill civilians. He called waterboarding “reprehensible” and vowed it would never occur under his watch. And he said that countering militancy should be “comprehensive,” not just “kinetic,” and involve diplomatic and development efforts as well.

    • US Air Force Veteran, Finally Allowed to Fly Into US, Now Banned From Flying Back Home

      Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims

    • Three billion dollars a year for this boondoggle?

      How low must the number of Muslim-American ‘terror plots’ go before Congress thinks again about giving the FBI an annual $3 billion of our tax dollars –nearly half the FBI’s budget – just for its counterterrorism work?

      And to what lengths is the FBI prepared to go to manufacture plots and suspects in order to keep those dollars flowing?

      In his fourth annual survey of Muslim-American terrorism, Charles Kurzman, of North Carolina’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, found that the number of Muslim-Americans indicted as terrorists has been in steady decline over the past three years and no deaths or injuries were caused by their actions.

    • Why a “Drone Court” Won’t Work–But (Nominal) Damages Might
    • Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he’s a killer abroad
    • CIA report must be declassified

      …more than 6,000 pages and 35,000 footnotes…

    • CIA contractor due in court for plea hearing

      A former CIA contractor involved in a fatal shootout in Pakistan is due in court in Colorado on Monday over a fight over a parking space.

      A judge will consider a plea agreement for Raymond Allen Davis, who is charged with felony assault and misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the fight outside a suburban Denver bagel shop.

    • Graham moves to delay defense, CIA confirmations
    • Obama And The CIA Must Come Clean On Drones, Killings

      Secret bases, targeted killings, leaked memos and elaborate cover-ups – the latest developments in an ongoing controversy involving the Obama administration and CIA with a question at its core that has been asked for generations: “How far are we willing to go to protect the citizens of the United States?”

    • The CIA Orchestrates a Pre-Election Campaign in Paraguay

      The marked increase in numbers at the US embassy in Asunción over the past year is being necessitated by the need to maintain control over the Paraguayan government. The pre-election campaign is in full swing and in order to «manage it by hand», the intelligence apparatus operating under the roof of the US embassy need staff reinforcements. Political forces potentially hostile to the interests of the United States must not be allowed to come to power. Federico Franco, the acting president of Paraguay who, in June 2012, ensured the CIA-scripted «constitutional removal» of the legally elected president, Fernando Lugo, has fulfilled his mission. His successor needs to be just as reliable and just as manageable.

    • Moscow hopes for completion of probe into CIA secret prisons

      Moscow hopes that an investigation into the CIA’s secret prisons abroad will be completed and all suspects will be brought to court, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

    • Op-ed: The slippery slope of drone warfare

      The release of a Justice Department white paper defending the legality of the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in foreign countries outside areas of active hostilities is an opportunity for every American to reflect on how our government conducts its armed conflict against al-Qaeda and associated forces, especially since the man who is at the center of such targeting decisions, John Brennan, might soon be confirmed as CIA Director.

    • Ajami: Barack Obama and the silence of the U.S. drone war

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Night Sky Over Asia 1992-2010

      As people are coming to understand, Asian economic growth over the past two decades—despite its great adoption of oil—essentially runs on electricity, most of which is supplied by the burning of coal. Here is the night sky over Asia twenty years ago, as captured in a still photograph from a film loop provided by NOAA’s national geophysical data center.

  • Finance

    • Barclays closes controversial tax avoidance unit
    • As the Sussex Uni occupation shows, Government may see education as a market, but students do not

      The Government’s higher education policy is supposedly about cutting red tape, yet it requires a new army of six-figure-salaried bureaucrats to outsource existing jobs.

    • UK inequality rises sharply in 15 years – report

      The UK’s super-rich, the top 1% of earners, now pocket 10 pence in every pound, while the bottom half have seen their share of the nation’s wealth drop in the last 15 years. Middle earners have also seen their earning power stagnate.

    • HuffPo Attacks, then Partners with, Goldman Sachs
    • Barclays misled shareholders about source of £3bn

      Barclays misled shareholders and the public about one of the biggest investments in the bank’s history, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.

    • Austerity, US Style, Exposed

      Austerity policies include various combinations primarily of government spending cuts and secondarily of general tax increases. Republicans and Democrats have endorsed austerity since 2010. Austerity was the result of their deal on taxes last December 31: increasing the payroll tax on wages and salaries from 4.2 to 6.2 percent. Austerity is what they are negotiating now in regard to federal spending cuts.

    • Democracy Realized

      In worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs), workers democratically run the affairs of the enterprise. They make the decisions whose consequences shape their lives. Their job descriptions require them to perform some specific tasks within the enterprise’s division of labor, but their job descriptions also obligate their participation in directing the enterprise.

      To perform their specific tasks, workers in WSDEs must learn how to do the required work, must be trained and educated, first in schools before employment and afterwards on the job as well. The same applies to the other part of their job description that concerns participation in directing their WSDE. School curricula must provide everyone with the broad-based, liberal arts education that builds flexibility and the capacity for creative enterprise adjustments to an ever-changing world. In short, establishing an economy based on widespread WSDEs will exert profound and effective pressures for educational changes. Democratizing the workplace will help democratize education.

    • Greenlight’s Einhorn sues Apple, wants bigger payout for investors

      Apple Inc on Thursday confronted its first major challenge from an activist shareholder in years as hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital filed suit against the company and demanded that it dole out a bigger piece of its $137 billion cash pile to investors.

    • Apple, Big Hedge Fund Stars & The Sell Side/Vaudeville Act To Burn Your Hard Earned Money As A Punchline That’s Just Not Funny

      Einhorn is asking management to sell that call/put option straddle now, and forgo the ability to capitalize on future opportunities while running naked against margin compression at the same time that Apple’s competition has surpassed it in technical ability (product/service wise) while Apple has shown ineptitude in competing in the cloud (see the maps fiasco), the next battle ground for the end user. This option sale will be had for the one time premium of a cash distribution. Wise, eh?

  • Censorship

    • Egypt court orders YouTube blocked for a month

      A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

      Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as “offensive to Islam and the Prophet (Muhammad).” He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital where the first protests against the film erupted last September before spreading to more than 20 countries, killing more than 50 people.

      The ruling however can be appealed, and based on precedent, might not be enforced. A spokeswoman for YouTube’s parent company, Google, said in a statement that the firm had “received nothing from the judge or government related to this matter.”

    • Iran’s Press TV taken off air in N America
    • YouTube banned in Egypt for one month

      This Saturday, a Cairo court ordered to block access to the most popular video-sharing website on the Internet, Youtube, for one month(30 days to be more precise), because on this very website an anti-Islam film was posted, apparently becoming the cause for deadly riots across the globe.

    • Twitter’s dangerous lack of transparency on terrorism

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Apple warns users against jailbreaking following evasi0n hack

      Although unlocking a phone that’s still tied to a contract was recently deemed illegal in the US, jailbreaking isn’t, according to the latest review of exceptions to the DMCA in October. But that doesn’t mean the practice isn’t frowned upon by the likes of Apple, which has issued a warning in response to the Evasi0n unthethered jailbreak for iOS 6.1 devices.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • In the Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer 40K Space Marines

        To engage a lawyer to defend me from this spurious claim would cost more money than I have, certainly more than the book has ever earned me. Rather than earning money for my family, I’d be taking money from them, when previously my writing income paid for my daughter’s schooling. And I’d have to use the little time I have to write novels to fight a protracted legal battle instead.

    • Copyrights

      • Two Famous Journalism Institutions Shame Themselves By Not Standing Up For Basic Fair Use

        Two of the most respected and forward looking schools for journalism are the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the Poynter Institute. I’ve long been a fan of both, but I’m now quite disappointed in both of them too. Last week, we had a few stories concerning a woman named Teri Buhl, who (to put it mildly) had some “unique” (and, by that we mean “totally wrong”) legal theories concerning whether or not someone could quote her public statements on Twitter, as well as basic copyright and fair use rules. By the end of the week, she was threatening to sue us and others as well.

      • Judge denies MPAA attempt to seize profits from copyright infringement

        A high court in the United Kingdom has ruled that a copyright owner does not have the right to claim profits from copyright infringement.
        “A copyright owner does not have a proprietary claim to the fruits of an infringement of copyright. I shall not, therefore, grant proprietary injunctions,” wrote judge Guy Newey of the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, in a ruling published on Tuesday.

      • ‘STELA’: Hollywood’s Next Big Legislative Fight?

        An analyst suggests that the renewal of an obscure satellite-TV law could command the attention of the major broadcasters, big pay-TV distributors and giant tech companies.

      • Copyright vs Freedom of Expression Judgment

        Earlier this month, the Court issued an important judgment, Ashby Donald and others v France (judgment in French), on the tensions between copyright law and the freedom of expression. It is my great pleasure to put online a guest post about this judgment by professor Dirk Voorhoof of Ghent University and Inger Høedt-Rasmussen of Copenhagen Business School. Thanks to both!

02.10.13

Patent Lawyers Love the Status Quo, Hate GPLv3

Posted in FSF, GPL, Microsoft at 8:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Steve Ballmer scared of GPLv3
Microsoft too daemonises GPLv3 because it helps remove restrictions

Summary: Some FUD from patent lawyers and a badge of honour for the GPLv3 (our enemies’ enemy)

The patent lawyers, known for their systematic lying, win another case. They always win, no matter which side gets a favourable ruling. It’s like arms industries during war. So lawyers alone got nearly £10,000,000, enough to buy 100 cheap houses. This is just what we see as the result of one single lawsuit. And yet, with patent debates we usually just see lawyers everywhere. Here, as part of a long-running rigged ‘debate’, is a lawyer at Wired with “It’s Time to Make Vague Software Patents More Clear” (link). Yes, we see calls for more of the same. And no, we oughtn't listen to lawyers when it comes to patent policy and this latest suggestion is definitely not the solution to the problem, it’s a distraction.

Other patent lawyers are currently smearing the GPLv3 for what they call “patentleft” (oh, the horror!), showing to us just how apathetic they are towards software freedom. To quote:

The much publicised patent litigation between Apple and Samsung (reportedly the highest-value claim in patent litigation to date) has served as a reminder that software patents are increasingly important. Thus, it is essential to protect patent portfolios from negative impacts – which could be caused by the ‘patentleft’ effect when dealing with open source software.

Some other patent lawyers cite Kappos, another lawyer, as figure of authority and the UK’s Open Source Consortium responds thusly:

Departing #uspto director shows fine sense of #irony “we need to fix #swpats”

This is the same man who has defended software patents (swpats) while he was heading the USPTO. What we really need right now is GPLv3 in EFI/UEFI restricted boot as it would help eliminate FAT patent threats universally. Intel EFI was released under the BSD license or Eclipse Public License (EPL) as TianoCore. EFI was also used to deter against the use of GPLv3, under the premise that it would be incompatible with restricted boot. █

FAT is Free (Gratis) as Long as You Serve Microsoft’s Agenda

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 8:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Just so you know who’s in control…

Privacy

Summary: What EFI teaches us about Microsoft’s use of software patents

THE emergence of UEFI restricted boot is probably the latest major attack on computing freedom, or merely the denial of users’ control over their computers (booting control is Microsoft’s, not the users’). UEFI restricted boot helps Microsoft control what people are allowed to do with hardware, not just with software. This is a serious antitrust issue, but it was never pursued by those who are affected in this way. UEFI going mainstream (with FAT as part of) helps Microsoft only as long as Microsoft controls and uses it to tax every device formatted with FAT (when it is used widely by Linux-based devices). And we are talking about software patents that should never have been granted in the first place. TomTom‘s mistake is that it used Linux in conjunction with FAT, which is a Microsoft trap. This whole episode helps teach us that, for monopolists, patents have nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with control, i.e. power over others. The OIN’s CEO confirmed to us that FAT is Microsoft's method of taxing just about any Linux vendor which is claims to be paying for Linux. I recently talked about this with Dr. Garrett, who kindly provided some pointers to the role of FAT patents in UEFI. It’s similar to what we saw in Novell with patent traps like Mono, OOXML, etc. and it should be noted that the Linux Foundation — unlike the FSF — serves Microsoft’s agenda by letting former Novell staff prop up Microsoft with UEFI. SUSE does too. James Bottomley is not alone in this, but here he is in a new article from SJVN:

  • Linux Foundation releases Windows Secure Boot fix

    James Bottomley — Parallels’ CTO of server virtualization, well-known Linux kernel maintainer, and the man behind the Linux Foundation’s efforts to create an easy way to install and boot Linux on Windows 8 PCs — announced on February 8 that the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system was finally out.

Please don’t do this. Please file a formal complaint. And as one follower put it in JoinDiaspora.com:

This may come to you as a shock, but I’m not particularly happy with Linux Foundation going that route. Not that I don’t want to have new hardware working with GNU/Linux. It’s just that Linux Foundation is playing Microsoft’s game from now on, and they’re gonna have some pretty tough time playing it later. Once you’re cached you’re actually dead. Never allow yourself to play the game of your enemy. It’s their rules, they know the tricks and they know better than you how to destroy the enemy.

Sad, but true IMHO.

We have studied the UEFI FAT licence and found some information of relevance in Wikipedia

Disk device compatibility

In addition to the standard PC disk partition scheme, which uses a master boot record (MBR), EFI works with a new partitioning scheme: GUID Partition Table (GPT). GPT is free from many of the limitations of MBR. In particular, the MBR limits on the number and size of disk partitions (up to 4 primary partitions per disk, up to 2 TiB (240 bytes) per disk) are relaxed.[19] GPT allows for a maximum disk and partition size of 8 ZiB (270 bytes).[19][20] The UEFI specification explicitly requires support for FAT32 for system partitions, and FAT12/FAT16 for removable media; specific implementations may support other file systems.

[...]

OS loaders are a class of UEFI applications. As such, they are stored as files on a file system that can be accessed by the firmware. Supported file systems include FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12. Supported partition table schemes include MBR and GPT. UEFI does not rely on a boot sector.

There is also a talk about it in Wikipedia:

I’ve also left the information regarding FAT issues on the talk page below. These are certainly an issue for providers of EFI systems and Open Source operating systems, but I don’t think that an article describing EFI needs to get bogged down in a patent discussion: it’s certainly not an issue particularly specific to EFI as compared to any other computer technology. You wouldn’t include a huge patent debate in a digital camera article, even though they use FAT, too…

Tmassey 20:06, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Regarding FAT, many links are included there too:

According to this presentation from WinHec 2004 (page 15), the EFI System Partition (ESP) is FAT-32: EFI And Windows “Longhorn”

And Microsoft just won the case about the FAT patents: Microsoft’s file system patent upheld

So to use FAT you need to license the IP from Microsoft: Microsoft FAT license (Broken link?)

But you can do that for free if you are implementing EFI, here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx

The standard doesn’t say anything about other partitions than the ESP, so that doesn’t rule out MacOS.

So FAT is OK when it puts Microsoft in charge, but it’s a patent trap otherwise. The whole thing is about control, it’s not about innovation, ‘respecting’ patent law, or whatever Microsoft claims it to be. The Linux Foundation must stop being submissive and acknowledge the problem for what it really is. Complicity has no excuses. █

Appeals Court Gets Another Chance to Abolish Software Patents in the United States

Posted in Google, Patents at 8:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Art museum

Summary: The Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) is taking some major steps that can help end software patents and Google plays a role in it

THE corporate/political campaign to change the patent system is gathering more steam. The Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC), which we criticised before, is prepared to re-consider software patents; meanwhile we also learn that Google plays a role in asking for change:

The world’s largest search-engine company contends that too many other software patents hurt innovation more often than they lead to viable businesses. Google, along with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the Yelp Inc. business-review site, say they need to be able to quickly resolve cases in which a patent owner sues a large number of companies over widely used software features.

An appeals court specializing in U.S. patent law will consider the issue tomorrow, in arguments about when software programs represent legitimate innovations and when they simply computerize ideas that couldn’t otherwise be patented. The question is important because challenging an invention’s eligibility for a patent can be quicker and cheaper than contesting a patent’s validity on other grounds.

The issue was considered at the end of last week and coverage of it depended on the messenger. SCOTUS Blog, i.e. lawyers, was bickering over this, whereas Groklaw, a more progressive legal site, had progressive people at the scene. Just being non-conformist does not make one “wrong”. Abolishing software patents is actually quite the norm in the software world, putting aside lawyers, MBAs, etc.

Here is some corporate press coverage and a bit from Rupert Murdoch’s main paper. IDG said that “Appeals court considers software patents,” potentially affecting the USPTO:

U.S. companies shouldn’t be able to get patents on abstract ideas when they combine those ideas with a computer process, a lawyer argued in an appeals court Friday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should invalidate four patents held by electronic marketplace Alice because the process described in the patents can be done in a person’s head or with a paper and pencil, argued Mark Perry, a lawyer representing CLS Bank, which was sued by Alice for infringement.

IDG also had this report which said:

Should an abstract idea written into software and run on a computer be patentable? That’s one question a U.S. appeals court will consider Friday when it hears arguments in a case with broad implications for software patents for companies as diverse as Google and Red Hat.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is unlikely to invalidate all software patents in the CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. case, but it could force tech companies to narrow their claims when applying for software patents, some patent experts said.

Simon Phipps, writing for IDG, called it “turning point in war on software patents” and his summary was as follows: (no ads)

A seemingly unassuming court hearing today could be the beginning of the end of software patents as we know them

At TechDirt, the leading headline was “Key Case About Software Patents May Hinge On How You Define ‘Significantly More’” and it says:

Last year, we wrote about the next important lawsuit concerning software patents, the CLS Bank v. Alice case, which the full Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) heard today. Our last post on the case provided the background, but the short version was that it involves some software concerning doing a “shadow transaction” to see if there are really enough funds to complete a transaction, before completing the actual transaction. The district court found that this was just a representation of an abstract idea, and thus not patentable. CAFC, using a typical three judge panel, reversed that decision, saying that it was patentable subject matter. However, CAFC agreed to rehear “en banc” with the entire 10 judges, because there was some concern about the original ruling (which was split 2 against 1).

[...]

While Sachs was disappointed that there wasn’t a clear attempt to define what constitutes an “abstract idea,” I’m not as sure that’s an issue. In fact, it almost seems oxymoronic to say that you need a strict definition of an abstract idea. The reason an idea is abstract is just that: it’s abstract. But, at the same time, I can understand why patent lawyers would generally prefer a brightline, objective rule that can demarcate what is and what is not patentable. Either way, lots of patent lawyers will be waiting eagerly for this ruling.

Here is another report:

A federal appeals court is set to consider a case closely watched by Google Inc, Facebook Inc and other technology companies that could determine how far the patent system should go in protecting software inventions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent cases, will hear arguments on Friday over whether patents should be granted for business methods whose main innovation is that they require the use of a computer.

Many of our readers have probably read about this news already because it’s everywhere, including major news sites. But it’s worth keeping our own summary/record of this major development; surely it’s not the end of it. In Re Bilski, for instance, lasted years. █

Links 10/2/2013: Ubuntu on Phones This Month, Linux Year on Desktop

Posted in News Roundup at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Shock! Horror! Some People Want To Change The Linux Console

  • Desktop

    • Chromebooks Pick Up Steam with CDW Deal
    • Winning The Desktop Wars

      Chris Hall over at Foss Force wrote an article that I’ve been mulling over writing myself for quite some time. Chris claims that Linux has won the “war for the desktop”, and on top of that, won it a long time ago with Android. However, I’m not quite as enthusiastic about his claims of open source superiority. Did open source really win, or have we been hijacked?

      Let’s take a second and think about the nature of the open source movement for a few minutes. There are several reasons why we would want the software we use to be open to examination: fewer bugs, control of the machines we own, the ability to modify and redistribute programs, the list goes on. However, I believe that the core ideal of open source is not actually freedom per se, but control. We want to be able to control when and how our machines are used, and when and how our data is used, and to ensure that control access to the source code is necessary.

  • Kernel Space

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • Rethinking the office suite

        I’ve spent much of the last week exploring the recent releases of Calligra Suite and LibreOffice, and listening to the unlikely rumors of a Linux version of Microsoft Office. I haven’t concentrated on office suites so intensely for years, and, as I examined Calligra Suite’s and LibreOffice’s very different layouts and approaches to productivity, I found myself thinking: What should a modern office suite consist of?

      • If Office Suites Are Not Broken, Why Change Them?

        He has some reasonable observations but IMHO office suites work well. They are more or less perfected. There’s no reason at all for restructuring or slapping on rafts of new features. That’s M$’s business-plan to force constant updates/new licence-sales. We don’t need that with LibreOffice. Improving its efficiency, fixing bugs and making small changes to UI/features make sense. Rethinking to the extent of adding “the ribbon” or linking to clouds is not needed and not useful. We can run an office suite as a thin client already. What more do we need?

    • Funding

    • BSD

      • BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers

        While there’s plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

    • Project Releases

    • Public Services/Government

    • Openness/Sharing

      • Open Access/Content

        • Aaron Swartz and the Corrupt Practice of Plea Bargaining

          If Ortiz thought Swartz only deserved to spend 6 months in jail, why did she charge him with crimes carrying a maximum penalty of 50 years? It’s a common way of gaining leverage during plea bargaining. Had Swartz chosen to plead not guilty, the offer of six months in jail would have evaporated. Upon conviction, prosecutors likely would have sought the maximum penalty available under the law. And while the judge would have been unlikely to sentence him to the full 50 years, it’s not hard to imagine him being sentenced to 10 years.

          In this hypothetical scenario, those 10 years in prison would, practically speaking, have consisted of six months for his original crime (the sentence Ortiz actually thought he deserved) plus a nine-and-a-half-year prison term for exercising his constitutional right to a trial.

        • The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings

          And how his allies are trying to finish the job by tearing down a big paywall.

    Leftovers

    • Security

    • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Cablegate

    • Finance

      • Governments Save By Paying Down Their Debts

        I think this over-states the case against the US government buying equities, but the deeper problem is that it ignores the government’s $11 trillion in national debt. If a heavily indebted individual wanted to save for the future, a financial advisor would probably tell him the first step is to pay off some of his debts. And the same point applies to the United States. It will be a long, long time before we run out of bonds to retire—so long that it’s silly to worry about what we’d do if we retired the national debt and still had more money we wanted to save.

      • Goldman Sachs hedging its bets: Is more economic pain on the way?

        Investment bankers – can’t live with ‘em, and can’t live without ‘em.

        At least that’s how it seems in these tough economic times. We tend to hang on their every word, as if they truly know how big money intends to manipulate financial markets in the foreseeable future. But we also tend to blame these financial powerhouses for creating the worst recession since the Great Depression.

        [...]

        …1 trillion flowed out of equities during the month of January.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • The Gates Foundation and Coca Cola at Odds or Legitimate Bedfellows?

        Sanjay Basu, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, recently wrote a blog post that caught our eye about public and nonprofit leaders who sit on the corporate boards of major soda companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Using one of the tools that make such information readily available, NNDB Mapper, he argues that there appear to be institutional conflicts of interest occurring. In particular, Basu calls out Cathleen Black, chancellor of New York City Schools, and several key Gates Foundation leaders, for sitting on Coca-Cola’s board. In addition, he notes that the former president of the Ford Foundation and the CEO of Duke Health System sit on the board of Pepsi.

    • Censorship

      • Russia blacklists site hosting blogs of prominent journalists

        The Russian government has blocked access to a blog-hosting site that publishes reports from at least two prominent independent journalists often critical of the Kremlin. The site has been added to the country’s recently established official “internet blacklist.”

        LJRossia.org, also known as InsaneJournal, is “a non-profit project created to support freedom of speech, civil society and encourage the free exchange of ideas.” The site was censored today, reportedly over two posts that contained “child pornography elements.” But instead of blocking or removing the two posts in question, the entire site is inaccessible on at least one Russian ISP, RosTelekom.

    • Civil Rights

    • DRM

      • A Brilliant Parody of DRM

        But this post, in which he defends his decision to disallow cutting and pasting from his website, brings to mind another theory: Quinn is secretly an advocate of copyright reform, and has adopted the cartoonish “IP Watchdog” persona as an act of satire. Disabling cutting and pasting is such a ludicrous idea that it can’t be a serious business decision. But it brilliantly lampoons the fallacies that have caused major content companies to employ similar (and similarly ineffective) copy protection schemes.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

FRAND Still Used by Microsoft and Apple Against Google, FOSS, and Android

Posted in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Chess game

Summary: Updates (mostly from Groklaw) about FRAND lawsuits of Microsoft and Apple

FRAND battles against Android have been waged by Microsoft and Apple, the patent allies (or conspiracy), for quite some time. It’s unfair and unreasonable. There are some updates about it in links shared by Groklaw, which in many of its relevant news picks talks about Apple ‘s fight against Motorola:

Motorola and Apple are currently facing off over patent-related issues in several ongoing judicial proceedings, including multiple appeals before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. One of these Federal Circuit appeals was brought by Apple over Judge Crabb’s dismissal of Apple’s claims that Motorola violated the antitrust laws and breached its contracts with SSOs in conducting its SEP-related licensing and enforcement activities. But on January 25, Motorola filed a motion with the Federal Circuit to dismiss Apple’s appeal (or transfer it to the Seventh Circuit), asserting that the Federal Circuit lacks jurisdiction to hear the case. While at first blush this seems like just a mundane dispute over civil procedure issues, a decision on this motion may have significant consequences for future FRAND-related proceedings.

Pamela Jones alludes to this case but still focuses on Microsoft, which chose its back yard, Seattle, for this biased and hypocritical FRAND plot. Here is the latest:

Judge James Robart in the Microsoft v. Motorola litigation in Seattle has ruled now on Microsoft’s partial summary judgment motion that they held the hearing about last week. He has — surprise, surprise — once again ruled for Microsoft. He has not yet ruled on the other issue the hearing was about, the issue of the Google license agreement with MPEG LA.

Aided by Microsoft boosters (some are Gates-funded) who had flooded the court, Microsoft won those biased trials before. Trial by media much? █

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