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Summary: The first episode of the new season
TechBytes’ message for the new season.
We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █
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Apple’s tribalism backfires
Summary: Apple’s Hubris and reluctance to comply with court orders is costing it not just in bad publicity but also a more severe and stern order
Apple is a nasty company based on its behaviour in recent years. It’s not mere emotion that makes one call Apple “nasty”; this has become a widely-held perception, sometimes about Apple’s most passionate customers too. Watch Apple getting criticised for its aggressive nature again:
Apple is a litigious company, most famously for its multi-billion dollar patent crusade against Samsung. The Cupertino company has a more quixotic legal battle going on against its competitors, however, that has also become a bit of a war against the English language. Since last year, Apple lawyers have been arguing that “App Store” is a trademarked phrase, and it has the right to stop others from using similar phrases. That includes Amazon, which was sued by Apple in March 2011, shortly after it opened the Amazon Appstore for Android.
Now, some of those issues are finally coming to a head in public. At a hearing today in an Oakland federal court, it became clear that while Apple may have a lot of fury and passion behind this lawsuit, it has run into trouble in the form of a very skeptical judge. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton showed great doubt that Apple will be able to prove that consumers were confused or deceived by Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore.” At this point, it’s somewhat remarkable that the company hasn’t dropped this suit, since Hamilton indicated a year ago that she was unimpressed by Apple’s arguments and denied a preliminary injunction.
Good.
Apple‘s arrogant marketing (including the “R and D” nonsense) is not impressing those who see innovators fleeing or getting fired. To quote this one report, “[w]hen Apple forced its mobile software leader Scott Forstall out of the company, it pushed out the most prolific inventor at the company, as measured by recent patent filings.
“Forstall’s name is on 166 pending patent applications. That’s more than anyone at the company, according to data from investment bank MDB Capital.”
Those patents have been used against companies like Samsung, usually in vain. Apple is getting told off by judges who accuse the company of breach of order. To quote: “Apple tried to argue that it would take 14 days to post an updated notice on its website, but the request was shot down. In fact, Judge Jacob made it clear that Apple’s actions are beginning to make him testy.”
Mr. Pogson says that “Apple Needs to Learn Humility” and in a post by Mike Masnick we learn about the background:
Last week we noted that Apple had put up a rather petulant non-apology apology in response to the UK court order requiring it to advertise to the world that Samsung didn’t copy Apple in making its devices. Many people wondered how the court would react to Apple’s attempt… and the answer is that the court is not pleased (and is further displeased by Apple’s claim that it needs two weeks to come up with something better)…
Pamela Jones says that Apple must go further than before:
There are consequences now that are worse than before. Apple tried to argue that they followed the letter of the law in the original notice, as does Patently Apple. But there is something called the spirit of the law too, and if you follow one and thumb your nose at the other, things can go wrong, because people notice. Judges are not stupid. Not that I believe what Apple did obeyed the letter of the law either. Nor did the judge in the UK.
It’s never all right to show disrespect to a court of law, and lawyers above all others should take the lead in demonstrating that respect. The rule of law actually depends on it, which is another way of saying that civilization itself depends on it. Otherwise, it’s back to pistols at dawn, or worse.
We wrote about the fake apology several times before [1, 2, 3]. Here is the best report we found in the sense that it’s not shy to slam Apple:
Apple Has To Readmit That Samsung Did Not Copy iPad Design: Reprimanded By Court
[...]
Judge Jacob said, “I’m at a loss that a company such as Apple would do this. That is a plain breach of the order.”
Apple’s arrogance doesn’t end here. The company requested 14 days to make the changes. Wow. Why would a company need 14 days to make changes to it’s own site? Typical Apple.
Judge Jacob did not buy this and rejected the request stating, “I just can’t believe the instructions you’ve been given. This is Apple. They cannot put something on their website?”
Here is the Apple-friendly BBC:
Apple has 48 hours to re-write a statement on its website relating to its design rights dispute with Samsung, UK judges have ruled.
[...]
Lord Justice Longmore told Mr Beloff: “We are just amazed that you cannot put the right notice up at the same time as you take the other one down.”
Sir Robin Jacob added: “I would like to see the head of Apple [Tim Cook] make an affidavit about why that is such a technical difficulty for the Apple company.”
Now, that would be entertaining. Apple got itself deeper in the PR blunder. Its arrogance sure works against its intentions and brings no benefit. █
Reality distortion by Apple and Microsoft
Summary: An inane attack on the leading Linux-base operating system, including a lobbying battle in the United States
The abjectly pro-protectionism and pro-corporations/multi-nationalism USPTO continues to grant software patents like they’re as valid as anything.
Companies like Kodak, in the mean time, put many software patents on sale. As one blogger put it the other day:
Kodak went bankrupt after over 130 years, but not because the company failed to innovate. It owned over 1,000 digital imaging patents, part of a portfolio valued in the billions of dollars, but the company failed to realize any commercial gains from its innovations. The company was too focused on trying to save its film business.
Now it is suing and may reportedly feed Android-hostile trolls, not bodies like OIN, which continue to boast growth but hardly do anything.
According to recent reports, Apple may be trying to buy more Android-hostile patents while trying to pretend that it's the victim. Lobbying from Apple and Microsoft finally pays off:
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should sue Google Inc. (GOOG) for trying to block competitors’ access to key smartphone-technology patents in violation of antitrust law, the agency’s staff told commissioners in a formal recommendation, according to four people familiar with the matter.
A majority of the agency’s five commissioners are inclined to sue, according to the people, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public. A final decision on the staff recommendation, made last month, isn’t likely until after the Nov. 6 presidential election, they said.
This is ridiculous because Google has been the victim all along. How can the regulators be blind to Apple’s and Microsoft’s behaviour? We reported the unethical Microsoft/Apple lobby to the FTC; instead of going after the aggressor it goes after the defender. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. █
Summary: The British government says no to “FRAND”-washed software patents traps, at least in the public sector
It is with great pleasure that we read this news about standards winning in the UK. Real standards:
Whitehall has launched its long-awaited response to the open standards consultation, which will force government bodies to comply with its list of “Open Standards Principles” when purchasing technology.
Departments must use the principles for all software interoperability and data and document formats. If they do not use the principles they will have to apply for an exemption, according to a Cabinet Office statement. As of today the principles will be embedded in the Cabinet Office’s spend control process.
Over at IDG, never mind London-based sites, Simon Phipps, the OSI’s President (from the UK), celebrates on the news:
Government procurements now prefer open standards – and that means no patent restrictions in the standards.
Here is something about getting it right:
A little over five years ago I was speaking at a conference for the CIOs of various Canadian ministries. Speaking just before me was a consultant from Accenture who was presenting on their most recent Global Report on Government Service Delivery. In it, Canada had just slipped from first to second in the world, after Singapore. While slightly disappointed, the audience remained content that among 30 or so leading countries in the world, Canada remained second.
The FSFE’s response was noted by some:
The new policy does not cover open-source software, which is part of a different policy document.
“This is a major step forward,” said the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) of the Open Standards Principles.
Here is the original statement in full, courtesy of Karsten:
Today, the UK took a long-awaited, important step towards fixing this problem. (FSFE press release) It published a set of “Open Standards principles” (pdf). They’re effective immediately, and all central government bodies will have to abide by them. It also put out a response to the public Open Standards consultation that it had run up to June 2012. (See FSFE’s response to the consultation.) In this post, I’m covering only the Open Standards principles.
This news is important for British SMBs which capitalise on standards, unlike giant multinationals. █
Summary: The father of Free software tells mainstream publications to recommend banning of lawsuits over software patents
hen we last published Richard Stallman's idea for software patents reform he spoke about it over the phone. We now see it summarised as “Legislate That Using Software On General Purpose Computers Is Not Infringing,” as put by Mike Masnick. For a little bit of background: “Wired is running a series of opinion pieces concerning ways to “fix” problems with the patent system today (we’ve made our own suggestions in the past if anyone’s interested). It started with a suggestion from Mark Lemley that was similar to his other recent statements about fixing the problems of software patents by actually applying existing law to stop functional claiming (i.e., claiming around general concepts rather than specific implementations).”
This series in Wired was mentioned here the other day an here is its latest part. It starts as follows:
Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents.
The patents that threaten us are often called “software patents,” but that term is misleading. Such patents are not about any specific program. Rather, each patent describes some practical idea, and says that anyone carrying out the idea can be sued. So it’s clearer to call them “computational idea patents.”
Computer-implemented inventions, or CII, is another common term for them. Nothing physical is being patented except the arrangement of electrons and bits on general-purpose machines. This needs to stop. It’s a perversion of the patent system and its intended purpose. Read Stallman’s ideas in the links above. █
Fines don’t achieve compliance
Summary: Exploration around the toll of Microsoft not complying with the law
Microsoft is said to be facing a multi-billion-dollar fine for antitrust-related issues followed by reluctance to accept a punishment. Mozilla says that this may have cost a lot:
Microsoft’s omission of the legally-required Browser Choice screen in Windows 7 SP 1 lost Mozilla approximately 6 to 9 million downloads of its open source Firefox web browser, according to a blog posting by Harvey Anderson, VP of Business Affairs and General Counsel at Mozilla.
In 2009, Microsoft was ordered by the European Commission (EC) to present a Browser Choice screen to users as part of an antitrust case against the company. The Microsoft Browser Ballot screen rolled out in early 2010 to provide users of its Windows operating system (XP, Vista and Windows 7) a choice of web browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and, of course, its own Internet Explorer browser. By agreeing to the deal with the EC, Microsoft was to avoid having to pay millions in further anti-trust fines.
The solution should be simple. Ban Internet Explorer. It is made by a company which breaks the law repeatedly, for decades. Avoidance of the law helps the company make more money than by complying. So the last resort is the blacklist.
Remember that many people — honest people — lost their job as a result of Microsoft’s criminal behaviour. These are not victimless crimes where only computer users suffer. True justice will never be restored (e.g. reparations or jail time for the perpetrators), but one can strive to it. █
“Where are we on this Jihad?”
Defeating barriers to GNU/Linux booting
Summary: The FSF posts an update on Ubuntu and its decision to keep GRUB
Ubuntu decided to provide details on partitioning new (GPT) hard disks when using UEFI firmware. Canonical did this after it had helped legitimise the anticompetitive scheme.
Stallman et al. have been critical of UEFI support and the FSF has this update which says:
Ubuntu has decided to stick with GRUB 2 after all; 48 organizations and over 37,000 people have signed the statement opposing Restricted Boot, but Microsoft’s new tablet is hitting stores.
Think twice before purchasing Microsoft’s new ARM-based tablet, especially if you are hoping to replace the new Windows RT operating system, with a free software operating system such as GNU/Linux or Android. These new devices ship with Restricted Boot, which prevents you from installing free software on the device.
If it wasn’t for public pressure, Ubuntu would not have kept its original bootloader which is licensed under the GPLv3. We must therefore continue to pressure Canonical to remove the antifeature which is Amazon spyware in desktop (local disk) search. Canonical does respond to pressure, even if it never admits this (Yahoo search is one example, but Mono may be another). █
“Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.”
–Richard Stallman
I use LibreOffice for writing and spreadsheets and either Rhythmbox or XBMC to listen to music. I’m afraid I don’t do anything exotic.
My fiance started a new class this week – an MIS (Management Information Systems) class. While we were having dinner tonight she brought up the fact there are some – lets say – colorful definitions of Linux in her wonderful “Experiencing MIS” text book.
It’s no secret that many here in the Linux blogosphere greeted Windows 8 with jubilation — not because they had any intention of using it, but because of the opportunity they think it represents for Linux to capture a greater proportion of mainstream users.
That, indeed, was the hot topic du jour last week, but this week — now that the Win 8 dust has begun to settle — the conversation has shifted slightly. Specifically, bloggers are pondering the growing assortment of PCs that are coming with Linux already preloaded.
In the November 2012 survey we received responses from 625,329,303 sites, a modest increase of 4.8 million sites since last month’s survey.
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, October 31, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
For those not yet familiar with GEM, the Graphics Execution Manager, that Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver uses for in-kernel memory management, here’s a brief guide.
Following yesterday’s article comparing the AMD Radeon Linux drivers on Ubuntu 12.10, Marek Olšák looked into some of the cases where the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver was much slower than the proprietary Catalyst driver. Already with one patch that touches only two dozen lines of code, Marek was able to quadruple the open-source driver frame-rate for at least one game.
For those pulling down the Git master of the xf86-video-ati X.Org graphics driver this week, 2D color tiling is finally enabled by default for Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000/6000 series graphics cards, from R6xx through the “Cayman” GPUs.
Few desktop environments have benefited from the recent diversity of interfaces more than Mate and Xfce.
A year ago, Mate hadn’t even reached general release. However, since then, it has been influential in making Linux Mint the distribution of choice among experienced users. Similarly, after years of being the third most popular desktop environment, Xfce has become one of the major alternatives.
However, despite their similarities, which one is likely to appeal to you depends on what you are looking for in an interface.
KDE office and productivity suite Calligra has been updated to a new beta version. Among tons of bug fixes, this version also includes some new features and stability enhancements. As the 2.6 branch has been merged, no more new features will be added to this release, and only some major bugs will be fixed.
Just two weeks after the alpha arrived, a beta for version 2.6 of the Calligra project’s set of open source productivity applications has been released with additional enhancements and new features that were not ready in time for the alpha. The beta is aimed at testers and includes general improvements to Open Document format handling, such as support for loading and saving 3D shapes and annotations; this should, the developers say, provide better interoperability with other office programs.
Advent of Ubuntu actually spurned up quite a few Linux distro releases, giving users plenty of options as well as some very interesting flavors to play with. For example, you think Unity is buggy, you can either try out gnome fallback or have all the goodness of Ubuntu and lightness of XFCE or LXDE in Xubuntu or Lubuntu. A cross with E17 and you have a Bodhi! And who can forget Linux Mint – right now the God of Linux!
Oh, it’s karma. Damn. Yes. Well, exactly one year after testing version 2011.09, I have decided to take Chakra for another round of testing. Please note I have purposefully made an ambiguous title so as not to disclose my satisfaction with the distribution, giving you only a sweet taste of bad humor.
I was quite pleased with Chakra, so much in fact I added it to my annual best distro list as one of the top five candidates. While not everything was perfect, and the GTK integration on this otherwise pure KDE distro needed some polish, Chakra offered a fresh, unique and elegant experience. Let us whether we can get the same level of satisfaction this time around, and maybe even enhance it, because that’s the goal.
Investors buy or sell stocks based on short-term time horizons. We measure earnings against expectations. We turn thumbs up-or-down on acquisitions and management changes. We follow the drama of the action like spectators at a sporting event.
Yeaney: I’ve been asked that question several times over the years. First, let me say that I am incredibly grateful that my first real job out of college was serving our country. I learned more about leadership, trust, and respect than I could ever imagine. I also learned that one of my gifts in life was the ability to orchestrate lots of complex activities towards a vision. I had always thought I was going to get my Ph.D in electrical engineering, but being a captain in the US Air Force taught me that business may indeed be a far better path for my skills. So I chose MIT’s business school instead of its engineering school.
The release of Fedora 18 has already been delayed five times and it’s still uncertain when this next Fedora Linux release will actually ship.
We had posted earlier about ChrUbuntu, a Ubuntu derivate specially designed to run on Chromebooks. Developer Christopher Hewitt has now successfully run Fedora 17 ARM with Xfce desktop on a $249 Chromebook. He as also posted instructions on Google+ for you to follow and try out.
The Fedora ARM team has announced the release of Fedora 18 Alpha for ARM class CPUs. This announcement comes after the announcement of OpenSuse 12.2 release candidate for ARM. Fedora 18 is codenamed Spherical Cow. While there is a delay of over 5 weeks, the beta for x86 and x64 CPUs are not ready yet.
A few minutes ago, November 1, the Fedora development team proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha version of the upcoming Fedora 18 operating system for the ARM architecture.
An important item discussed in Copenhagen this Monday, regarding app development, was the emergence of an Ubuntu SDK at some point in the not too distant future.
Right now it’s looking like the Linux 3.8 kernel will be used for Ubuntu 13.04 since it will be released likely in mid-March, just one month ahead of the 13.04 release. With Ubuntu 13.04 not being a Long Term Support cycle, this is what the Ubuntu kernel developers believe will be their best bet. In terms of other fundamental kernel changes or new flavors, there aren’t likely to be any except for PowerPC possibly coming back to Ubuntu.
At the Ubuntu Development Summit (UDS-R) in Copenhagen, the Ubuntu community has decided plans to create a more streamlined, continuous development for future versions of Ubuntu Linux – but this will see the end of all alpha releases and only one beta release. The current development summit is discussing plans for the development of Ubuntu 13.04, aka “Raring Ringtail”.
Now, don’t let the post title fool you. I have nothing really bad to say about this podcast. I listen to plenty of stupid podcasts regularly. 40-Year Old Boy and Jordan Jesse Go come to mind here. But this one takes the cake. Why? Because it has nearly nothing to do with Ubuntu… Instead it just seems to be like what it might be to hang out with a handful of dudes that simply enjoy Ubuntu. Actually, it’s more like a handful of Canadian dudes with vivid imaginations talking about Ubuntu. Just imagine if you will The Kids In The Hall crashing a C64 convention. Yeah, I think that pretty much sums things up.
With Ubuntu 13.04 there will likely be an AArch64 (64-bit ARM) spin of the popular Linux distribution.
Aside from the Ubuntu 13.04 talk, on a similar note were discussions about an Ubuntu 13.04 AArch64 spin / AArch64 package archive for this next-generation ARM architecture.
Now that Ubuntu’s been ported to the Google Nexus 7 and there’s other interesting Ubuntu work going into the tablet/mobile-space, developers want more open-source games ported to using OpenGL ES rather than the full OpenGL stack.
Privacy activists have taken Canonical to task for exposing users’ web searches and searches of their local hard drives to sites such as Amazon, Facebook and the BBC.
While the date hasnt been announced yet, you can get your questions ready, and let them answered by Mark Shuttleworth himself. Mark Shuttleworth earlier has done several sessions of question answer round, mostly about, Ubuntu, Canonical and free software culture. However, in this session, you can “Ask him anything.”
Notebooks with “hybrid graphics” — two GPUs that come down to a low-power integrated graphics processor and a high-performance discrete graphics processor with being able to dynamically switch between GPUs based upon performance/power needs — has long been a problem for Linux. It wasn’t until recently that the Linux stack has had rudimentary hybrid graphics support via PRIME / DRI2 offloading, but still it doesn’t handle the dynamic power management at the moment, there isn’t any easy-to-use configuration interface, and all bugs have yet to be ironed out.
If you liked yesterday’s post by Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center that covered going over the Graphics Execution Manager for memory management, today he’s around with a second part that details command submission handling for the Intel open-source Linux driver.
While Fedora has been using XZ-compressed packages for their RPMs for a while now with having a greater compression ratio than Gzip, Ubuntu developers remain unsure of switching to using XZ compression for the Ubuntu 13.04 release.
At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen today, developers discussed audio latency for gaming on the premise that “audio latency is relatively high on Linux and we need to be competitive with other platforms.”
It’s not unusual for Linux distributions to have somewhat offbeat names — Ubuntu (named after an Africa-originated philosophy), Red Hat (the creator of the original distro, Marc Ewing, had a red lacrosse hat given to him by his grandfather), and the wonderful CrunchBang Linux (named after the characters usually used at the start of a script — #!). In the case of Fuduntu, the origins of the name are quite simple: It’s a combination of Unbuntu and Fedora, the Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution.
Hello from Peppermint headquarters in western North Carolina! As a project, Peppermint continues to grow and grow, and we are at the tipping point where we could use some immediate assistance. Are you willing to bring your talents and skill set to an established and trusted open source project? Do you get as fired up about Linux based systems as we do? Would you like to join Team Peppermint? If you’re ready to join our ranks, we are about to dive into development of Peppermint Four which is slated for release in June 2013. Please examine the following team spots we are looking to fill.
The developers are also planning to release a SDK by the end of this year so that game developers can get started with their development. Since Ouya comes with only a console with a few keys, game devs will need to modify existing Android games so that it becomes compatible with Ouya.
This screenshot tour was created in preparation for DeviceGuru’s upcoming in-depth review of Lenovo’s IdeaPad 2110 10-inch Android tablet. The comprehensive tour includes over 500 images showcasing numerous aspects of the tablet’s Android 4.0-based user interface, home screens, customization, and apps.
Sony’s alleged next flagship droid has leaked anew this time with an official photo. The Sony Xperia C650X Odin official photo is a render, which looks pretty close to the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 and slightly resembles a Motorola RAZR with its beveled edges and use of metal in the frame.
Sales of Google Inc. ’s Nexus 7, made by Taiwan’s Asustek Computer Inc. , are closing in on 1 million units a month, the Taiwanese maker revealed.
The 7-inch tablet has created a big buzz this year with its low starting price of US$199, but both Google and Asustek have been cagey about revealing actual sales figures.
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
People in several states in the Eastern United States are still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, and there are many kinds of disaster relief efforts going on. At the same time, many event organizers are working overtime to ensure that some normalcy is preserved. As evidenced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, technology–including open source technology–can help organize disaster relief efforts and coordinate people. Here are just a few examples of tools that can make a difference.
One framework in particular has taken the world of Web development by storm during the past year: Twitter Bootstrap. Bootstrap first was released in summer 2011, and it was written by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, both of whom work at Twitter. Bootstrap, which was released under an open-source license on GitHub, has become an almost-overnight sensation. Indeed, it is currently the most-watched open-source project on GitHub, surpassing even Ruby on Rails.
South Africa may be up to five years behind the rest of the world in terms of vendor-supported open source software adoption, but the old misconceptions are falling away and adoption is picking up.
This is according to Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, who says certain sectors are leading the way in terms of increasing adoption, such as telecommunications and certain technologically advanced banks, such as FNB. The public sector, which has long had an open source policy, has been slow in meeting its own adoption targets, but is now taking steps to remedy this.
It’s interesting to note that amidst all the hullaballoo about OpenStack and open source cloud computing, Amazon Web Services remains the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, and even less talked about platforms such as the commercial arm of Citrix’s CloudStack strategy have surprisingly strong user bases. The open source cloud has enormous promise, but many people still need to be convinced that necessary support offerings and other aspects of reliable infrastructure are in place. Recently, HP’s Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, SVP Converged Cloud and HP Cloud Services, spoke with InternetNews on these topics and had interesting things to say. Above all, he expressed commitment to open source in the cloud.
Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, unveiled Asterisk 11 at its annual AstriCon users’ conference meeting, a new release that features multiple contributions from the Asterisk developer community. Asterisk 11 includes a number of new features, including support for WebRTC over SIP and native integration with Digium’s line of VoIP telephones. It is also a new Long Term Support (LTS) version of Asterisk, the world’s most widely adopted open source communications engine.
Although crowdsourcing is all the rage at the moment, there has to be a worry that this is just the latest fad in the world of technology, and will soon follow portals and the blink tag into justified oblivion. Occasionally, though, an application of crowdsourcing appears that seems to address a real problem in a way that would be otherwise intractable.
It makes little sense for any Internet business to be dependent on a single data center. With server virtualization it is possible to put images of your server here and there to cover almost any failover problem. Not just multiple servers but multiple servers on multiple backbones in multiple cities supported by multiple power companies and backed by multiple generators. We do that even here at I, Cringely and we’re known to be idiots.
The big five health insurance companies have begun reporting their third quarter 2012 earnings and so far, they are pleasing their shareholders with profits that are better than Wall Street expected, in large part because they are doing especially well in one key area: Medicare.
[...]
A Romney-Ryan victory likely would be the equivalent of winning the lottery for the big institutional investors that own the majority of health insurance company stock. Citigroup analyst Carl McDonald predicts that should Romney win and the GOP take the Senate, the value of health insurers’ shares would rise 10 to 20 percent.
The US Food and Drug Administration is notorious for bowing to food-industry interests at the expense of public health. Consider the case of trans fats—whose damaging effects the FDA ignored for decades under industry pressure before finally taking action in 2006, a story I told here. Then there’s the barrage of added sweeteners that have entered the US diet over the last two decades, while the FDA whistled. This week, Cristin Kearns Couzens and Gary Taubes, who has been writing hard-hitting pieces on the dangers of excess sweetener consumption for a while, have a blockbuster Mother Jones story documenting how the FDA rolled over for the food industry on added sweeteners.
“Open-source software, developed by multiple programmers in collaborative environments, underpins much of the information technology we rely on every day-from communication networks to the databases that manage our personal records,” says Livny. “By its very nature, open-source software allows for rapid progress. Yet, the collaborative environments that facilitate open-source innovation have offered limited access to tools and resources for continuous cybersecurity assurance.”
The energy industry tries to sell us ‘ethical oil’, ‘clean coal’ and ‘natural gas’, but this extreme weather is mobilising people to act
This column discusses one of the more subtle issues raised by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) civil fraud action against Bank of America (B of A). The issue was so subtle that of the three articles about the lawsuit that I choose to review the night after the suit was filed, only the NYT article mentioned one of the most important aspects of the suit – the key role that the whistleblower played in making the action possible. The AP and the WSJ articles ignored the fact.
The lawsuit threatens to impose steep fines on the bank. The Justice Department filed the case under the False Claims Act, which could provide for triple the damages suffered by Fannie and Freddie, a penalty that could reach more than $3 billion.
The act also provides an avenue for a Countrywide whistle-blower, Edward J. O’Donnell, to cash in. Under the act, the government can piggyback on accusations he filed in a lawsuit that was kept under seal until now.
Mr. O’Donnell, who lives in Pennsylvania, was an executive vice president for Countrywide before leaving the company in 2009. The government’s case in part hinges on the credibility of his claims.
Decrease in government spending set to leave low income families with a stark choice: buy less food or move out
It’s useful to note that Westminster Hall debates aren’t particularly formal interventions or statements of the Government’s policy. They are secured by MPs who want to discuss something important to them, and can indicate MPs feelings and signal to the Government what Parliamenarians’ priorities might be.
But even though it’s just a Westminster Hall debate, it seemed important to note that I spotted Claire Perry MP citing a statistic that I haven’t seen before, and which got my spidey senses tingling. She suggests that the number of parents installing network filters at home has dropped ten percent over the past three years, standing now at 39%.
A U.S. company that makes Internet-blocking gear acknowledges that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there—an admission that comes as the Syrian government cracks down on its citizens and silences their online activities.
Defamation is only supposed to apply to cases where there’s a factually false statement made about someone. It shouldn’t apply to cases where the facts are accurate, or the statements are opinions. But while the US’s defamation laws generally deal pretty well with this, it’s not as clear elsewhere. The UK, unfortunately, is somewhat famous for its bad defamation laws, where the burden is generally on the accused to prove they didn’t defame someone — which can be an expensive process. Over the past week or so, video gaming journalists and industry watchers have been dealing with a bit of controversy. Eurogamer columnist Rab Florence wrote a column questioning the close relationship between some gaming journalists and the companies they cover, where it sometimes seems like the journalists are pitch people, rather than objective journalists. This is not a new concern, especially in video game journalism, where such accusations tend to show up pretty regularly (sometimes more accurately than others).
A Shawnee County District Court judge has ordered The Topeka Capital-Journal to relinquish identifying information of a CJOnline.com commenter claiming to be a juror in a high-profile murder trial.
District Judge Steven Ebberts on Friday denied the newspaper’s request to quash the district attorney’s subpoena for the information. As a result, CJOnline will have to release the poster’s name, address and Internet Protocol address to the district attorney.
Under draft plans, service providers will have to store details of all internet use in the UK for a year.
Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian free/open source developer and Creative Commons activist, has been in prison in Syria since June, and his colleagues around the world have been agitating for his release
Rosetta Stone Inc. (RST), a maker of language-learning software, agreed to drop a lawsuit it brought against Google Inc. (GOOG) for selling its trademarks to other companies for search-engine advertising.
The companies agreed that all claims in the infringement case will be dismissed, according to a filing today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. No terms were given with the stipulation of voluntary dismissal. Rosetta Stone had claimed the keywords were being sold to competitors and counterfeiters.
The Hollywood Reporter recently had an article which is pretty much all doom and gloom about the movie industry, based on a conference at USC about the “Entertainment Law and Business.” Seeing as it’s an LA event, it’s not surprising that much of the story took the typical Hollywood line about how terrible things are these days. But what’s amazing is that it seems to treat the success stories as if they’re failures. It quotes YouTube star Sam Tsui, who points out that “you can’t become complacent as a content creator — you need to do new, exciting stuff” and turns that into the complaint that artists have to spend all their time running “to keep in the same place.” Most of us call that “a job.”
Jepsen and her two bandmates recognized it was best to strike when the iron was still tepid and ventured into the studio with enough co-producers and songwriters to choke a “Tribute to Lou Perlman” compilation. Jepsen’s debut album was released and promptly fell off the public radar, failing to surpass 100,000 sales. This sort of situation is hardly unique. Plenty of big hits have been followed by a loud sucking noise as fans rush off to examine the Next Big Thing, creating a temporary vacuum in their wake.
By seizing the servers of Megaupload, the U.S. Government also confiscated the personal belongings of many innocent users. One entrepreneur has asked the court to return his data but this request is meeting resistance from the authorities. The U.S. Government points out that the Megaupload user in question may not technically be the owner of his uploaded files. In addition they accuse him of hosting pirated copies of popular music.
We’ve written about John Mellencamp’s anti-internet rants before, but this latest one doesn’t just take the cake, it takes the whole bakery and turns it into a reality show on the Learning Channel, but with more melodrama and an even looser definition of learning.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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