03.19.14
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 2:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Linux, Google and GNU the target of some new type of FUD, where people whom Microsoft is promoting shamelessly target particular GNU/Linux-based products
Microsoft is losing its identity very fast. There is poor coordination in general and strategy in areas like servers and mobile is very much deficient or defunct. Top-level staff is leaving (Muktware covered that also) and the new CEO is joined by an AstroTurfing guy. Muktware has been good at covering these sorts of things (AstroTurfing and trolling as a priority) and its founder now remarks on Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux ads (Chromebook is GNU/Linux by another brand). To quote his new post about one of the most infamous “ads” (using entertainment media to implant FUD): “I have never been into the ‘idiot box’; I mostly watch documentaries. However we were on vacation at Myrtle Beach last month and it was snowing so we were stuck in the hotel room, that’s when I got hooked to DirectTV’s shows. I have become addicted to the Pawn Stars and do enjoy it a lot. I admire the owner of the shop Rick Harrison who has immense knowledge and great skills to spot fake. Unfortunately, for him, I was surfing the net I came across Microsoft’s propaganda website (something similar to Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today) Scroogled News and there was an ad by Microsoft featuring the Pawn Stars team.
“I learned that’s the much criticized ad. Companies run such ads all the time, but Microsoft goes to that extra mile of pissing off their competitor without showing any sign of ethics or morality. I knew that was a propaganda ad, as Microsoft now has someone on team who has helped US/UK politicians so we can expect more below-the-belt ‘religious’ kind of attacks from this 30-year-old dinosaur.”
FUD against GNU/Linux can take all sorts of angles, targets, etc. But it remains what it is. On the Web, and even in niche forums [1], there seems to be a phenomenon that’s manufactured. Almost nobody would normally have an incentive to smear Free software 24/7, or to launch ad hominem attacks against people like Richard Stallman. In politics it’s common for such attacks to be funded directly or indirectly by those who stand to gain.
A lot of GNU/Linux is build by volunteers with a passion. Even Fedora’s packagers, despite the project being Red Hat’s, are often volunteers [2]. There is no lack of people who are willing, sometimes for a fee, to slam volunteers, journalists, activists. Corporations hire them through proxies every now and then. We exposed a few of them (e.g. people whom Microsoft bribed to smear Microsoft’s competition) and we saw many talking points repeated as though they were sourced from Microsoft (the lobbyists of Microsoft habitually repeat the same ‘manuals’).
FUD sometimes comes also from within.
One of our readers goes further by alleging that [3] is just some “spin used to slam perl.”
“The real problem,” he explains, “which should have been in the closing, is not to mix installation methods. Stick purely with one method or the other.”
The article, “Package Management and Perl”, is unlikely to be anything that’s paid for by Perl foes/, but this same reader of ours showed us many provocatives articles about Perl spreading myths that by extension make Free software look “difficult”.
What needs to be done is simple. Rebuttals are needed. We should aspire to correct false or inaccurate messages, or point out where these are coming from. █
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This article has been inspired somewhat by a group of people who for many years (for reasons unknown) have targeted Linux newsgroups and forums with the sole purpose of disrupting the advocacy that occurs. These “people” will use any means necessary in order to do that and looking at the amount of posts they make all day every day, one has to conclude that either they have a financial interest in free software being hobbled in the eyes of the mainstream, or worse, they merely have nothing else to do but post all day. One chap in particular who I believe falls into the later category has recently (on top of thousands of words in posts daily) taken to making videos to highlight these “major issues” with Linux. Now just what an allegedly married man with kids and a computer business is thinking of spending so much time in this way is anyone’s guess but it did help to inspire this article.
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The people behind the scenes who work tirelessly to make your Linux distribution run smoothly are the packagers. The vast majority of Linux packagers are volunteers who dedicate their evenings and weekends to create and maintain the gears of the Linux distributions they love.
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Anyone who lived through the bad old days of compiling software from source on Linux remembers well the frustration of upgrading one package only to find that it breaks another. I like to think that those days are behind us; and, for the most part, they are. Unfortunately, I found myself in an eerily similar situation after patching a CentOS 6 server, and then trying to run a scheduled Perl job.
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03.17.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 4:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A lesson about Microsoft deals, this time courtesy of Barnes and Noble, the hero which turned into zero after a manipulative Microsoft bribe
Barnes and Noble (B & N) provided a fascinating example which reminded us of Novell. Back in the days Novell took Microsoft to court, but many years later, as Novell had more things to sue over (e.g. Samba, not just WordPerfect) Microsoft passed a large bribe to Novell and said goodbye to litigation, undermining Samba’s case in Europe. Similarly, Microsoft basically bribed B & N to drop the legal case that was challenging extortion of Android. Barnes & Noble is now in trouble. Like, who didn’t see that coming? See some of the details in [1]. Making Windows pledges is a very bad strategy these days.
For some background and context see our posts as follows (chronological):
So, just as a recap, Microsoft extorts B & N, B & N takes Microsoft to court, B & N nearly ends Microsoft’s patent shakedown against Linux/Android, and then Microsoft pays a lot of money to B & N, the case gets dropped, B & N is pushed into using Windows and then has financial problems. Classic Microsoft routine! █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Redmond pumped $300m into Nook back in 2012, in a deal that gave it a 17.5 per cent stake in B&N’s underperforming e-book subsidiary. In exchange, Nook agreed to develop a branded reader app for Windows 8 – which it did – and another for Windows Phone, although the latter has yet to appear.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another story about the pains of restricted boot and why it matters a lot right now
TECHRIGHTS is actively and ferociously against UEFI for various reasons including security (bad security), patents, and anti-competitive aspects. The technical merits (positives) of UEFI are outweighed by the negatives and for most people there are no positives at all because they don’t access servers directly. They don’t need to worry about remote booting and other such advanced features, which are commonly needed when one runs Windows (it gets sort of jammed or refuses to shut down).
There is this new article from Jamie, the UEFI explorer (whom UEFI Forum approached to appease). “My UEFI experience so far has been limited to only two laptop OEMs,” he explains, “HP/Compaq and Acer. I found the former to be relatively difficult to work with (see the recent Compaq and earlier HP Pavilion posts), but the latter to be reasonably easy (see Aspire One 725 post), especially after installing the latest BIOS updates.”
When it comes to ASUS, see just what he is having to go through: “I tried a variety of them, including Esc, F9, F10 and F12, all to no avail. I checked the BIOS configuration (at least that was on F2) to see if there was something I needed to enable there to get Boot Select, ala the Acer Aspire One, but I didn’t find anything like that.
“However, in the process of getting into the BIOS setup I did notice that the ASUS POST sequence seems very quick, so there is really a very small time slot in which you can press F2 before it is too late, and you are doomed to boot Windows and then shut down and try again.
“Armed with this knowledge, I tried again to get into Boot Select and this time found that if I was fast enough, Esc would get me there.
“Also while blundering around in the BIOS setup I saw that there is an option to Enable/Disable Secure Boot, but I did not see anything about Legacy Boot there: I wonder if this system doesn’t support Legacy Boot.”
This would be enough to discourage the majority of people from even exploring GNU/Linux. They would essentially give up on it without really trying it. They would blame “Linux”.
Now that some large companies migrate their computers from Windows XP to GNU/Linux (I know of a few who don’t publicly announce it) the issue is very sensitive. It is bad enough that some media monopolies and oligopolies make life miserable for GNU/Linux users (see new examples in [1]), we don’t need hardware and software companies doing the same (Intel and Microsoft for the most part). People want to move away from Windows (many options exist [2]) and if we don’t pursue this at antitrust level, then computing will enter a dark age, like that of DRM. It’s wasteful and unfair. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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I know for an absolute fact that Time Warner’s backbone is made up of Linux and Unix servers. And they want to tell me that I need a Windows system to access their online chat support?
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Microsoft will soon end official support for Windows XP, and OMG! Ubuntu! thinks that Lubuntu could be the perfect replacement. Lubuntu is a lightweight spin of Ubuntu that provides a more traditional desktop environment and might work well for Windows XP users.
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03.14.14
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The FUD machine of the Microsoft lobbyist is interjecting itself into the media again, despite clear warnings that were published for years
KNOWING THAT Microsoft Florian is a liar and ‘spammer’ (flooding journalists with identical E-mails) that’s employed for the smearing of Android, most journalists now ignore him and we rarely hear anything from him. A few months ago I visited his blog just to see if he was still ‘alive’ online as I had not heard of him for almost a year.
Joe Mullin, who is usually excellent when it comes to reporting on patents, perhaps fails to grasp Microsoft Florian’s poor record when it comes to covering events. He is a spinner, a deceiver, and he has been proven to be only an agenda pusher for several years now. He pretends to be things that he is not. That’s what he is good at, other than mass-mailing journalists so that they link to his nonsense. Pamela Jones would be tempted to reach out for her keyboard and log into Groklaw if she saw this.
No journalist — and it’s worth repeating — NO JOURNALIST should be taking it at face value what Microsoft Florian says, not without remembering who he works for. Microsoft Florian played a major role in the “Android is expenseive” PR campaign, making up or propping up fictitious figures. HTC already refuted the FUD from this lobbyist, who is paid by Android foes including Microsoft (they seem to be passing him material to publish, too).
“Yesterday,” writes Mullin, “Mueller published a hearing transcript from February 10 which featured each side’s lawyers arguing to limit or throw out the other side’s expert report.”
So this is just an argument, it’s not actually anything factual. It’s a wet dream of some lawyer. Mullin turned it into an incredible headline which then invited many comments. This is the manufacturing of “news” out of gossip. Mullin says: “New demand dwarfs licensing fees charged by Microsoft, and it will go to the jury.”
But wait, why assume that there are “fees charged by Microsoft”? Well, guess it’s Microsoft Florian again. As Mullin later mentions: “Microsoft patent licenses to Android phone makers have reportedly been in the $7.50 to $15 per phone range, with lower estimates hanging around $5 per phone. As Mueller points out in his post on the royalty demands, those fees are for a license to a wide portfolio of patents, not just five patents being hotly litigated in court.”
The key word here is “reportedly”. But reported by who? Microsoft Florian and some Microsoft-friendly analysts. We covered this before.
Mullin concludes as follows, prepetuating an ubsubtanitated myth: “It’s also possible to earn a lot of money by convincing Android OEMs to pay patent royalties, as Microsoft has shown. One analyst estimates Microsoft is getting $2 billion per year in patent payments over Android.”
Microsoft might not be paid anything, but people like Microsoft Florian, paid by Microsoft itself, helped create this fairy tail and given it some legs. So all that Mullin’s article does is basically reiterating speculations and making them look like facts.
Well done, Microsoft, for an effective deception and PR campaign. It is the “Android is expensive” strategy. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Fedora 21, the next version of Red Hat’s Fedora distribution of Linux, just received a slew of new feature approvals courtesy of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
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Among the Fedora 21 changes that were approved at today’s FESCo meeting for Fedora 21 features include:
- Migrating cron jobs to native systemd timer units and changing Fedora package dependencies that currently depend on crontab.
- A system-wide crypto policy of unifying cryptography policies by different applications/libraries so there is a consistent security level for all applications running on a Fedora system.
- Access control for PC/SC smart cards to prevent unauthorized access to data on smart cards and also from unauthorized erasing of smart cards or even communicating with the smart card’s firmware.
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So Ojuba project manage many projects that make changes, Ojuba contribute in Fedora itself and in many big open source projects as KDE,MATE,VLC,Wine and others.
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03.13.14
Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta 1 (Trusty Tahr) has been released by its developers, and comes with a long list of improvements, much more than what has been made available with the previous Alpha versions.
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03.07.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Security at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Shifted focus (diversion towards non-issues like the GnuTLS flaw) and what we really need to watch out for when it comes to surveillance on GNU/Linux users
Cryptology is a funny thing. It’s an instrument of control (through predictive information. espionage, blackmail and so on). That’s more or less the thesis of a popular book from Wikileaks folks, titled “Cypherpunks”. Held in the hands of ordinary citizens, cryptology gives citizens power. Abused in the hands of freelance thugs [1] or state-sanctioned thugs like the NSA, cryptology helps guard the thugs (secrecy) and expose citizens who are only ever ‘enjoying’ fake cryptology, such as Microsoft’s and RSA’s. Now that Apple is receiving horrible publicity for breaking cryptology around the same time Apple joined PRISM there is some dodgy attempt to divert attention towards GNU/Linux, even if GnuTLS flaws are already patched and GnuTLS is not so widely adopted, not to mention the fact that is not used for very sensitive transactions such as banking [2]. The Linux Foundation was also quick to rebut the FUD [3], stating that “some were quick to point out that Linux distributions were not vulnerable to this particular issue” (contrary to corporate media reports).
What remains much bigger an issue, other than weak passwords (human error), is closed-sourced and proprietary hardware that may or may not incorporate Linux [4], such as my Home Hub from BT (which is rumoured to have back doors, based on some British press). A lot of what we’ve learned from the NSA leaks is that secret deals and collusion with companies is what’s responsible for back doors, not something which is visible at source code level. It is also what makes Red Hat, an NSA partner, difficult to trust these days [1, 2, 3]. The NSA reportedly asked Torvalds for back doors in Linux [1, 2, 3, 4]. Social engineering, bribes from the CIA in exchange for access (as reported in mainstream media) and even cracking is how spies get their way. They need not rely on programmers’ errors. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Researchers from the University of Kent quizzed a total of 48 people who had been affected by CryptoLocker. Of the sample, 17 said they paid the ransom and 31 said they did not.
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It seems that it’s only been a few weeks since we all heard of a nasty certificate validation error in Apple’s software, a.k.a. the infamous “double goto fail” bug. While some were quick to point out that Linux distributions were not vulnerable to this particular issue, wiser heads cautioned that a similar bug could be potentially lurking in software used on Linux.
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Team Cymru, the US-based security outfit which published the report, said that the network of hacked routers is one of the biggest of its kind that has been discovered, with most of the hacked routers in Columbia, India, Italy, Thailand, and Vietnam.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Red Hat’s Fedora 21 will come out in the middle of October, according to a newly-published schedule
AFTER much anticipation and speculation [1] it turns out that the next release of Fedora will be in late autumn, some time in the middle of October [2]. Phoronix, which recently wrote some in-depth analysis (with a lot of links) about Fedora, also explained how Mesa 10 packages were made available for Fedora 20 [3].
The nice thing about the Fedora project, as we pointed out before, is not only its insistence on free/libre graphics drivers but also extensive work on such drivers. Without Fedora we would all be losing a lot.
Fedora does not need to look ‘ugly’ or ‘not polished’ (it got this reputation some years ago when poor releases were made). Fedora has no consistent ‘face’ because it’s highly customisable and unlike Ubuntu (which demotes “alternative” desktops/themes) it comes in several very different ‘flavours’ [4] which are all managed and distributed (as equal) by Red Hat. Fedora 20 looks like a solid option and half a year from now we will see another fine release of Fedora, which is always getting better. I have used many release of Fedora over the years and I was always mostly satisfied. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Fedora.Next is bringing lots of changes as the longstanding distribution seeks to effectively remake itself and move forward with greater vigor. When it comes to this next major distribution update, Fedora 21 already has lined up support for non-KMS drivers to be abandoned, other old GPU support removal, out of the box OpenCL support, Wayland support improvements, Hawkey usage, and many other changes, besides simply having updated upstream open-source Linux packages.
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The next Fedora Linux release is being postponed until October since if shipping in August they are left midway between GNOME 3.12 and 3.14. GNOME 3.14 will be released by late September and thus if shipping in mid-to-late October would allow time for a fresh GNOME 3.14 desktop to be incorporated into the release. October/November release targets have also been what’s long been sought after by Fedora (among other distributions) for nailing close to the GNOME release time-frame and other software projects.
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While Fedora 20 is looking to land GNOME 3.12 as a stable release upgrade, the developers normally shipping a bleeding-edge Linux graphics stack haven’t sent down any stable release updates for the much-improved Mesa 10 drivers. Fortunately, there’s some unofficial choices.
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Lifehacker reader Royale with Cheese has a sharp-looking flat desktop that looks like OS X at first glance. It’s actually Fedora 20, and it’s smooth as butter. Here’s how he set it up.
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