05.23.13
Posted in America, Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kim Dotcom (Schmitz) gets smeared even when he does the right thing
Image by Andreas Bohnenstengel
Summary: Analysis of a sceptical kind of corporate press coverage regarding software patents in the US; great examples of how Microsoft- and Gates-funded press outlets tend to get it all wrong on the facts, smearing digital freedom fighters
Ugly distortion by patent lawyers
The CAFC recently tabled an equivocal decision [1, 2] which will probably, based on reasonably wide consensus, be escalated to the SCOTUS and perhaps end software patents in the US once and for all. Sites of lawyers strongly deny that CAFC had an effect on patent policy and practice (legal sites and Gene Quinn’s arrogant blog deny it strongly), but it is important to them only because in the USPTO about 20% of the patents granted now are on software, hence a lot of their income. Over at Slashdot, the headline says Judges Debate Patents and If New Software Makes a Computer a “New Machine” and Tiller is cited for his take on the subject. One patent lawyers’ site had a response which is quite inflammatory, akin to flaming by IAM ‘magazine’ (mostly an offensive, agenda-filled blog these days).
“Calling today’s The Guardian “guardian” is like calling Fox News “news” and History Channel “history”.”So where are we now? Well, it depends on who you ask really, but the problem is that 90% or more of those who analyse this decision are lawyers. They are in this business. It’s like asking the CIA if terrorism is defeated and over. They have vested interests (budget).
Press gets even uglier
Watch this report about Kim Dotom (a German who lives in New Zealand, having dodged the rogue and corrupting influence of Hollywood et al.) and patents being taken out of context by Britain’s worst paper, which uses tweet gossip to discredit Dotcom (the whole ‘news’ is “let’s analyse some tweets”). Truthfully, “the attention has been selective,” adds iophk. “The Guardian also dusted off Microsoft Jack and trotted him out.”
Well, so much for ‘retirement’ (he can't help returning to prop Microsoft up when it’s failing to receive positive coverage). iophk shows us Jack “Shilling a dead device that’s not quite a tablet nor quite a netbook but an unholy mix of the worst of both” (here is Jack’s latest Microsoft advert). The Guardian is appealing to Microsoft boosters (“fans”) and high-fiving antisemites, still. Calling today’s The Guardian “guardian” is like calling Fox News “news” and History Channel “history”. The Guardian, unsurprisingly, is plutocrats-funded (e.g. Bill Gates-funded, hitherto undisclosed amount) agenda. Even if Dotcom gave a patent to Google or Twitter, they would not be able to use it aggressively (more on the reasons in the next post), so why smear the freedom fighter? Guardian is no guardian. Not ours anyway, maybe Microsoft’s.
“CNET has Microsoft PR/lobbying built right into it.”It should be added that the Paul Allen-funded (Allen is a patent troll now) tabloid of CBS, the lousy and amateur CNET (long history of failed and fake* reporting), completely distorted what he had said and also ignored the patent policy of Google and Twitter. We will cover this in the next post; in short, they can only ever use patents defensively.
AFP, a lesser lousy reporting rag, cannot even tell the difference between copyrights and patents, so it chooses to demonise and incite people against Dotcom. It was actually the Russian press that got the news right. It’s sad when Kremlin-funded press does better than Western tabloids which call themselves “news”. █
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*CNET has Microsoft PR/lobbying built right into it. Watch, for instance, how Mary Jo Foley advertises potentially-illegal Microsoft tying in CNET today.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In spite of distraction attempts, the debate over software patents continues to stress that there is a real danger
Generally speaking, software patents in New Zealand are far from gone. It’s the same loophole as in the EU that lets software patents be acquired there and a new post makes this point. The author/s paid to post this as a press release, as seen here, going under the headline “Software Patents: the Difference between Excluding Computer Programs as Such and Excluding Computer Programs as Such”.
“At the USPTO, patent trolls as focus has been a good strategy for dodging reform of patent scope.”At the USPTO, patent trolls as focus has been a good strategy for dodging reform of patent scope. Brian Kahin brings back the real controversy to the agenda by writing: “In a digitally enabled economy, software is of great and growing importance. Getting the right legal, regulatory, and trade framework in place is, or should be, a priority of the highest order.
“However, questions about whether software should be patentable were raised early on (e.g. the 1966 Report of the President’s Commission on the Patent System) and have never gone away. The debate has intensified with the emergence of patent aggregators and trolls as a growing force in the market, along with high-profile global-scale litigation between major technology companies as seen in the “smartphone wars.”
“Paradoxically, software patents are both increasingly entrenched and increasingly controversial. The arguments on software patents range from precedent-based legal reasoning to the heterogeneous nature of the technology, the evolution of the market products and services, and the practical considerations of navigating and managing the patent system.”
Excellent article by Kahin. Not much is being said about Europe in this context as of late, which is rather sad. Passivity lets the patent lawyers get their way along with their clients, the mega-corporations. █
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Posted in Google, OSI at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Nelson Mandela would not have been proud
Summary: Why Google needs to fix the licence of VP9, or simply stop pretending that it should be the only de facto standard for multimedia
IT HAS become rather evident that WebM has a licensing issue due to MPEG-LA, a Microsoft- and Apple-backed troll. There is finally a good press report about it, citing Mr. Phipps (OSI President). It says: “When Google announced that it was signing a patent agreement with the MPEG LA patent pool, the company said that it would ensure that a licence agreement for third parties using WebM/VP8 would be put in place that would let them make use of the protection within the agreement. After the publication of a draft of the cross-licence agreement, Simon Phipps, open source advocate, has voiced doubts about the agreement saying it “closes the door on software freedom”.”
“The problems with such licences are that they make it hard to include support in FOSS applications and they have an international impact, even where software patents are not legal.”The problems with such licences are that they make it hard to include support in FOSS applications and they have an international impact, even where software patents are not legal. But as this tweet reminds us, work on globalising the policy may be underway. “Will the unitary patent give NPEs more leverage and should patent owners opt out? Panelists from HGF and ZTE discuss at #mipbeijing,” says a pro-patents account. Remember that MPEG-LA is NPE acting as a proxy for companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia. We’ll write about software patents in the next few posts. █
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Posted in Google, Microsoft at 4:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The champion of ‘IP’ and licensing (extortion) is not much of a champion after all, based on new reports, not just a lot of old ones
Earlier this week we found this interesting report about the company which extorts Android using patents and tries to block Android imports. The report says “Wired has obtained a copy of a cease and desist letter sent by Google to Microsoft today, demanding Microsoft immediately remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone Store and disable existing copies on consumers’ devices by May 22.”
And from the letter: “These features directly harm our content creators and clearly violate our Terms of Service. We request that you immediately withdraw this application from the Windows Phone Store and disable existing downloads of the application by Wednesday, May 22, 2013.”
“Don’t let Microsoft use the letter above to chastise Google.”Well done, Microsoft? Champion of copyright? Not so much…
I was never a fan of Google myself (not even in the early days when I was suspicious of Google’s motives and business model), but Google is far less malignant than Microsoft in every single way, including privacy. Moreover, Google has helped promote Free/Open Source software and GNU/Linux, especially in its later years. Google’s recruiters approached me thrice over the years, but I can’t see myself ever working there (the company I work for is dedicated solely to Free/Open Source software). Remember that just because YouTube censors more than it should and spies on all users (more and more over time) is not enough to chastise Google over; in fact, the player itself is growingly liberal, with WebM being used by default in many cases (there is an issue with it still, as will be covered in the next post). Don’t let Microsoft use the letter above to chastise Google. Microsoft is the bad guy here, not Google, although a bit of spinmeistering can help warp the logical conclusion. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 3:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
If Skype flagrantly disregards your rights, why not other Microsoft software?
Summary: The broader implications of Microsoft adding spying ‘features’ to Skype
An interesting observation regarding the latest Skype hoopla [1, 2] makes these valid points: “I think the spooks have been watching “Person of Interest” too much to think such things are cricket. How far does this go? Do people need to worry about microsoft IIS web servers with SSL, exchange servers?
“Windows too spies on the users.”“You do have to wonder if apple backdoored their IM client, below the OTR, or silent circle, or the OS – I mean how far does this go? Jon Callas said not apple, that wouldnt be cool, and apple aims for coolness for users; maybe he should dig a little more. It seems to be getting to you cant trust anything without compiling it from source, and having a good PGP WoT network with developers. A distro binary possibly isnt enough in such an environment.”
Free software, except Ubuntu, protects your privacy. Microsoft software protects Microsoft’s interests. Do not rely on Microsoft anything unless you accept the assumption that you are being spied on. Yes. Windows too spies on the users. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Hard on the heels of the news that Dell’s “Project Ophelia” thumb PC is expected to ship this summer, thin client vendor Devon IT on Tuesday rolled out a similar contender of its own called the Ceptor.
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CCE, a leader in advanced interoperabilitytechnology, announced that in response to a growing demand from customers in the CAEspace, it has successfully completed porting of its 3D CAD interoperability technology toLinux platforms.
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This is a wise choice for the space station, and a high-profile victory for software freedom. It brings good publicity for free software, demonstrating its respected position in the world of science and technology.
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If you’ve been in the market for a portable computer, you may very well have considered buying a Chromebook. And, if you favor a particular Linux distro, perhaps Ubuntu or Mint, you may be interested in buying a $200 or $250 Chromebook only to put your favorite flavor of Linux on your new system. (The Acer system shown here sells for $199.) As we’ve reported, many OStatic readers have expressed interest in buying a Chromebook to run Linux. Now, there are very simple instructions for doing so online and a growing body of evidence that people are having good experiences with their Linux Chromebooks.
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In many scientific disciplines, the research you may be doing is completely new. It may be so new that there isn’t even any instrumentation available to make your experimental measurements. In those cases, you have no choice but to design and build your own measuring devices. Although you could build them using trial and error, having a way to model them first to see how they will behave is a much better choice—in steps oregano. With oregano, you can design your circuitry ahead of time and run simulations on it to iron out any problems you may encounter.
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Peter Hofmann, the leader of Munich’s Linux migration project, has denied rumours that the LiMux clientGerman language link will be “decommissioned” when the initiative runs out at the end of the year. “The City of Munich has no intention to switch”, he said at the LinuxTag conference in Berlin on Wednesday. The basic instruction given by Munich’s City Council in 2003 was to create more independence and autonomy for Munich’s IT, said Hofmann. This task won’t be completed when the project runs out in October, he explained, adding that further adjustments will be needed in the specialised application and server areas.
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With its Distrowatch ranking falling faster than Man Utd now that Sir Alex Ferguson has departed, Ubuntu is no longer the all-conquering force that it was. So what’s happened? Has it, in fact, lost it, or is there a more subtle game afoot? We answer this conundrum (sort of) in the latest Linux Format.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linux Developers Can Now Leverage Industry-Leading DepthSense Camera Technology from SoftKinetic
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A couple of days ago, on May 11, Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing that Linux kernel 3.0.78 LTS (Long Term Support) is available for download and upgrade.
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Graphics Stack
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For those that were turned on by the recent Radeon Gallium3D performance improvements found in Mesa 9.2 but are Intel Linux graphics users rather than AMD, there’s good news too. Here’s some benchmarks showing off nice Intel OpenGL performance improvements found with Mesa 9.2 for an ASUS Ultrabook with HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” graphics.
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Besides a new Raspberry Pi renderer for Weston, another interesting set of Wayland patches today is for providing output scaling support with Weston when using the X11 and DRM back-ends.
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Applications
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There’s no school like the old school. Midnight Commander still brings text-based file management goodness to your computer in a non-flashy but very functional way. There’s a strong, easy-to-navigate menu layout that works across various environments. Don’t let the lack of bells and whistles fool you — there are a lot of features hidden behind MC’s terminal display.
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For most people, the issue with iTunes is how big it is. Opening it can often feel like a huge, resource-intensive commitment (that and it always seems to require an update — even after you’ve just updated it). The beauty of Clementine is that it’s light and responsive. You open it and can play music right away. It does one thing well.
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Just because Bradley M. Kuhn is executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy doesn’t mean he is exempt from grunt work. As one of only three permanent staff members, Kuhn is used to doing all sorts of unexpected tasks – including keeping the Conservancy’s books.
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In Windows, there is the popular CPU-Z application that allows you to view information about your CPU and hardware. But what if you are using Linux? CPU-Z doesn’t work in Linux, so how can you obtain the same CPU info in Linux? Here are two apps that can help you out.
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Nowadays, our personal computer is not only a work tool, it is also our private space where we store our little secrets. Protecting our personal data from praying eyes should be one of our top priorities. People use cryptography or encryption to hide their data, but they forget that cryptography does not hide data from a third party, its goal is to make your data unreadable by a third pa
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Proprietary
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The Norwegian browser maker’s lawsuit alleging that former employee Trond Werner Hansen gave company secrets to Mozilla is at an end.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wargaming will offer financial backing to three companies providing the open source development technology powering the company’s games: the Linux, Django and Wikimedia Foundations, the company announced today.
Wargaming uses open source tools to power its games, which include free-to-play massively multiplayer online titles World of Tanks and World of Warships. According to a press statement, Wargaming supports companies it “regularly leverages” and aims to assists in their technological growth and bolster development.
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Wargaming, the leading free-to-play developer and publisher, today announced that the company will be financially supporting three key open-source development foundations, including the Linux Software Foundation, the Django Software Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Another thing to notice is that a compatibility layer on the device allows the user to even run Android apps on the phone.
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One of the most exciting things about this direction is that our distribution and packaging partners will be able to have a version that will see releases which focus exclusively on stabilization for at least two years. There will be no new features added after 4.11.0 to Plasma Desktop and Netbook, though the code will be adjusted as needed to maintain and improve existing functionality. This should make Plasma Desktop 4.11 an excellent candidate for inclusion in distributions that have a longer shelf-life.
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It was just last week we looked at some of the proposed features for upcoming KDE 4.11 as it neared soft feature freeze. Well, today some new information about KDE 4.11 came to light. Aaron Seigo said today that 4.11 would be a “long term release.”
A long term release means a particular version will be kept up to date with stabilization and security updates for an extended period of time; in this case, two years. This will give distributions that skate safely in the well-worn groove of stability a chance to have a longer term plan and more stable offerings. Seigo said, “no new features [will be] added after 4.11.0 to Plasma Desktop and Netbook, though the code will be adjusted as needed to maintain and improve existing functionality.” He believes this will help developers and distribution developers a chance to focus on polishing.
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Digia launched a technology preview of Boot to Qt, a commercial offering that provides “a fully-integrated solution for the creation of slick user interfaces on embedded devices.” The current version of Boot to Qt is built on top of an Android kernel base layer, and includes support for the Nexus 7, BeagleBoard-xM, SABRE Lite, and x86 hardware.
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It’s been just a little over a year since the mystical Blue Systems started sponsoring development of ReKonq. Blue Systems is second only to the KDE e.V. in platform investment, sponsoring not only numerous core applications, but multiple distributions as well. ReKonq has come a long way since 0.9.2 (May 2012) and with the help of Blue Systems developer Adjam, it is taking baby-steps towards Chrome Extension support.
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We conducted a large study about strength and weakness of file managers in may 2013. In this article we present first results, discuss issues and questions that occur during the study, and present the schedule for the statistical analysis.
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Today, I am happy to announce the release of Homerun 1.0.0. This new version comes with a few new features.
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“A distribution I never heard of has changed its default desktop, stopped supporting Cinnamon — though it is still included — and changed its name,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “To me, it really is of little significance. No offense meant to the development team — I am sure it is a fine distribution — it is just that it is floating in a sea of fine distributions.”
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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This is the fastest fully-blown install that I have performed. I used the Mageia 3 x86_64 install DVD and, in 1:30 minutes, my system was up and running. This might seem excessive, but the time includes what I used for my personal configurations, printer, scanner, tweaks for multimedia playback, and favorite programs.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.
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RAR is somewhat of a legacy format in terms of compression ability but RAR remains popular in many places especially for its split archive feature. Current Fedora users are used to installing unrar command line utility from RPM Fusion to get the ability to extract RAR files and unrar is supported by the GNOME (File Roller) and Ark (KDE) archive managers however it is a proprietary utility and unavailable for other architectures like ARM which are getting popular in Fedora as well.
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I’ve spent just about a month with this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8. That means UEFI and Secure Boot.
And new hardware. We all know how difficult Linux can be with new hardware.
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While Fedora 18 has been out for months and so has Fedora 18 for ARM, an ARMv6 spin of Fedora 18 targeting the popular Raspberry Pi development platform has finally been released.
Fedora 19 isn’t too far out now, but Fedora 18 for ARMv6 to cater towards the very low-end Raspberry Pi hardware has been spun. This release is being falled “Pidora 18″ and was announced on Wednesday,
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Debian Family
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The GNU/Hurd development team at the Debian project has released a version of the Distribution based on Debian 7 “Wheezy” and the GNU Hurd kernel. Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 is the first major release of the distribution after years of development work, even though it is not an official Debian release. The Hurd kernel is a Unix-like microkernel design based on the Mach kernel and has itself been under development since 1990.
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CrunchBang 11 has been released so it’s time for a review. I last looked at CrunchBang back in 2009. Wow! Has it been that long? I’m pleased to report that CrunchBang 11 didn’t disappoint in any way.
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Derivatives
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Siduction 2013.1 is shipped with 5 Desktop-Environments: KDE SC, XFCE, LXDE, GNOME, and Razor-qt, all in 32- and 64-bit variants. From the shipped DEs only LXDE and Razor-Qt fit on a CD with 700 MegaByte. But as CDs become more irrelevant with every day, we are not too worried about this and recommend to use USB-Sticks for installation.
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ZevenOS-Neptune, a Linux operating system fully based upon Debian Stable, except for a newer kernel and some drivers, has just reached version 3.1.
ZevenOS-Neptune 3.1 has been dubbed “Brotkasten” and it’s considered to be the first service release of the 3.0 branch.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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He’s the founder of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical, and serves as the creative force behind not only the Unity desktop but its expansion to phones, tablets and TVs.
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With Linux, it is easy to customize many settings and features including appearance. Unity (one of many desktop interfaces) is no exception. Unity is the desktop interface that is maintained and developed by Canonical. Canonical uses Unity as the default interface for their popular operating system – Ubuntu. Users can easily change the theme, cursor, icons, and fonts used in Unity.
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Flavours and Variants
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Mint isn’t just an outstanding Linux desktop, it’s the best new desktop operating system of any kind available now.
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MEN Mikro announced a compact, rugged single-board computer based on Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom E600-series embedded processors. The Linux-friendly SC27 SBC is aimed at driver displays and in-seat infotainment systems in trains, buses, and airplanes, where wide-temperature operation and resistance to shock, vibration, and dust are critical.
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After working on the Raspberry Pi support for Wayland/Weston, Pekka Paalanen has announced a new “rpi-renderer” for the low-cost ARM development board.
The rpi-renderer is better than the current gl-renderer and should be better for the hardware although it’s not as flexible.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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As with any API that is under active development, sometimes as an Android developer you’ll come across a really neat feature which, it turns out, doesn’t exist in earlier versions of the API and isn’t backwards-compatible. There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is simply to insist that users must have a given version, and to limit your app to that version. However, that can also limit the reach of your app – there are still plenty of people out there using older versions of Android. Another option, for certain features, is to make use of the Android Support Library.
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Yesterday, eighteen technology decision-makers from the Singapore Government gathered at the FutureGov lunch briefing — conducted in partnership with Red Hat — to discuss how Open Source technology can drive openness and innovation in the public sector.
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If you remember the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, then you know exactly what someone means when they use the expression “the Star Trek Computer”. On TNG, “the computer” had abilities which were so far ahead of real-world tech of the time, that it took on an almost mythological status. And even to this day, people reference “The Star Trek Computer” as a sort of short-hand for the goal of advances in computing technology. We are mesmerized by the idea of a computer which can communicate with us in natural, spoken language, answering questions, locating data and calculating probabilities in a conversational manner, and – seemingly – with access to all of the data in the known Universe.
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Cascading creator Concurrent has developed a new open source tool called Pattern for running machine learning models on Hadoop clusters. When combined with its SQL tool called Lingual, users can move data from one stage to another easily.
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Events
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SaltStack, the full systems and configuration management stack for any cloud, today announced several presentations, workshops, meetups and tutorials at upcoming Linux conferences in Berlin, Germany and Austin, Texas.
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Web Browsers
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We use Windows 7 and RHEL when working, Windows 8 on the desktop PC for gaming at home, along with Ubuntu and OS X on the MacBook Air, Debian on a small server at home and for casual web surfing ChromeBook.
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Chrome
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Google unveiled Chrome version 27 on Tuesday, bringing faster page loads,FileSystem API for syncing data to Drive, prediction tweaks, and more
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Google has announced the release of their Chrome 27 web-browser, which most notably provides faster load times of web-pages.
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Google Chrome features shown at I/O 2013 have begun their deployment into the browser, as Google Chrome now comes with better predictions
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Mozilla
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With all the fuss about the world going mobile, you might think no one sits in front of a desktop computer anymore. You’d be wrong. Or perhaps you’re not one of those who’s bought into the whole death-of-the-PC thing because you’re using one now. If so, you might be particularly interested in our picks of top Firefox tools to enhance the PC user’s social networking experience.
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With this new improved start-up speed, your browsing experience will be greatly enhance, since you won’t be sitting around waiting for your browser to start.
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After announcing that it would soon start blocking cookies from third-party advertisers by default in Firefox, Mozilla has walked back on its plans while it continues to test the system. In a blog post, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich said that the patch needed more testing and data in order to refine it for release. “The idea is that if you have not visited a site (including the one to which you are navigating currently) and it wants to put a cookie on your computer, the site is likely not one you have heard of or have any relationship with,” he said. “But this is only likely, not always true.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) has killed its OpenStack public cloud plan. Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) is not growing as quickly as planned, despite betting the company on OpenStack. Some pundits now wonder if a giant like IBM can save OpenStack. Should cloud integrators be concerned about the open source platform? Absolutely not. Here’s why.
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Databases
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tumblrYahoo recently purchased Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. Tumblr pushes some surprisingly high numbers through their service, so aninside look at the architecture that Yahoo bought is well worth the read. The portion I found most interesting are the details on the MySQL database setup, and how Tumblr uses MySQL to scale massively, and keep the service available.
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SQLite, the ubiquitous, lightweight, C-based SQL engine, which is embedded in many applications, has been updated to SQLite version 3.7.17 with support for memory-mapped I/O which could potentially double performance and use less RAM. The new functionality adds xFetch() and xUnfetch() methods which are automatically called if memory-mapped I/O is activated, to map the data into memory. The developers point out that there are disadvantages to the technique that require coders using the functions be more robust in how they handle pointers and errors and that it is possible to not see performance boosted in certain test cases. Therefore, by default, memory-mapped I/O is turned off. Programmers wishing to exploit the functionality should consult the documentation.
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CMS
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Moodle, the Popular Open-Source Learning Platform, Announces Integration of Open Badges and Adopts Twitter Bootstrap in Version 2.5
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In the growing world of online learning, Moodle has carved out a niche for itself. Moodle is a free, open source course management and webinar-production platform that we’ve written about many times on the OStatic blog. It provides a reat way to reach large online audiences for interactive events on topics ranging from marketing to tutorials, and there is a mobile app for it. Now, the Moodle community has announced version 2.5, adding hundreds of improvements that may be of special interest to teachers, students and administrators.
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Drupal cloud services provider Acquia has reported its revenue more than doubled in 2012, a sign open source implementations are reaching an all time high in popularity.
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Business
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Public Services/Government
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For those of you that may not have read the memorandum in its entirety it directs federal agencies to make all data open and machine readable by default. Obviously there are caveats to that. Agencies can redact data that does not meet disclosure standards regarding security and privacy. The excitement centers around the language of open by default.
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Licensing
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One of the hot topics of commentary on open source development at the moment is the licensing situation on GitHub. When code is committed to GitHub, the copyright owner (usually the author or their employer) retains all rights to the code, and anyone wishing to re-use the code (by downloading it, or by “forking” and modifying it) is bound by the terms of the license the code is published under. The point of discussion in this case, is that many (indeed, the majority) of repositories on GitHub contain no license file at all.
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It’s difficult to be critical of open source software. Often, it’s created by volunteers who are motivated purely by the challenge and the desire to do something good. This attitude is why we’ve got such a thriving ecosystem of distributions and software, and why the GPL has become such a disruptive idea. It has also enabled many companies to build a viable business model supporting, extending and distributing this software in ways that would never occur if they were shipping their own proprietary software. This is what causes the occasional friction in the community, and it’s completely understandable. On the one hand you have communities working together in a way that I think is similar to the Swedish ‘Law of Jante’ – the idea that individual success is downplayed in favour of the achievements made by the groups. On the other hand you have traditional company values, bigging up its individual success and vitality in order to compete with other (non-open source) businesses doing the same.
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Openness/Sharing
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The flipside of having to resolve such issues, though, is the incredible power of transparency in the research process which openness offers. Any researcher that has hammered away at a piece of published research for months in a futile attempt to recreate its findings will understand the feeling of extreme frustration when the scientific literature falls short of reproducibility. If so much of our research isn’t repeatable, aren’t we building houses upon rather sandy foundations?
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Google has announced that it will in future not allow direct file downloads from its Google Code hosting service. The company says that “increasing misuse” of the service has forced it to take the step in the interest of keeping the platform’s community “safe and secure”.
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Standards/Consortia
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A member of the Geospatial Engineering team at Newcastle, David Alderson, recently attended a GovNet series conference in London, entitled “Open Source, Open Standards”. This was held at the America Square Conference Centre, and more information about the conference can be found here.
The conference delegates were largely comprised of various government agencies including the Department for Transport, Office of National Statistics, representation from emergency services, Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Education, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) as well as representation from many local councils from around the UK. From within these various organisations the delegates were largely found to be based within some part of their specific IT operations.
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A motorist is being investigated by police after she boasted on Twitter that she had knocked a cyclist off his bike.
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The Pentagon cleared Apple Inc. (AAPL) devices for use on its networks, setting the stage for the maker of iPhones and iPads to compete with Samsung Electronics Co. and BlackBerry for military sales.
The Defense Department said in a statement today that it has approved the use of Cupertino, California-based Apple’s products running a version of the iOS 6 mobile platform.
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A lot of journalists have embraced the idea. But I believe that journalists should say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Tempting as it might be, a federal shield law is a bad idea for journalists. We do not need it, and we may ultimately regret it. The relevant part of the First Amendment to the Constitution says: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. That powerful simple phrase “no law” means just that – no law, period. It means Congress simply cannot legislate in this area.
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Health/Nutrition
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Farmer Vernon Hershberger’s trial started May 20 in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and will most likely continue until May 24 at the earliest. Hershberger is a raw milk producer. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, he is charged with four misdemeanor offenses: operating a retail food establishment without a license, operating a dairy farm as a milk producer without a license, operating as a dairy plant without a license, and violating a holding order. If convicted, the Amish father of ten children faces up to 30 months in county jail and fines of over $10,000.
Supporters suspect that he is being singled out to make a cautionary example threatening other raw milk producers in Wisconsin (Wisconsin’s law allows “incidental sales” of raw milk on the farm, but its interpretation has been increasingly strict in the last few years).
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Security
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US security blogger Brian Krebs writes about a service that is relatively new, at least to the general public: DDoS attacks. Apparently, one enterprising “stress tester” discovered by Krebs even told the blogger that he was working for the FBI.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Hundreds of youths have set fire to cars and attacked police and rescue services in poor immigrant suburbs in three nights of rioting in Stockholm, Sweden’s worst disorder in years.
On Tuesday night, a police station in the Jakobsberg area in the northwest of the city was attacked, two schools were damaged and an arts and crafts center was set ablaze, despite a call for calm from Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.
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In an extraordinary admission, Attorney General Eric Holder has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes since 2009 have killed four Americans — three of whom were “not specifically targeted.”
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Initially, fusion centers were intended to be intelligence sharing partnerships between municipal, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement/”counter terrorism” agencies, dedicated solely to the dissemination/sharing of “terrorism”-related intelligence. However, shortly following the creation of fusion centers, their focus shifted from this exclusive interest in “terrorism,” to one of “all hazards”– an umbrella term used to describe virtually anything (including “terrorism”) that may be deemed a “hazard” to the public, or to certain private sector interests. And, as has been mandated through a series of federal legislative actions and presidential executive orders, fusion centers (and the “counter terrorism” entities that they are comprised of) work– in ever closer proximity– with private corporations, with the stated aim of protecting items deemed to be “critical infrastructure/key resources.”
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The rationale for granting anonymity–a privilege that outlets are supposed to extend only rarely–is curious; it’s not clear why the government would need to say things anonymously in order “to preview a strategy session” about Syria.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.
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Finance
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Chanel Preston knows not everyone approves of her chosen profession.
That’s one of the risks that go with being one of the biggest stars in porn.
But she never thought it would affect her ability to open a bank account.
Preston recently opened a business account with City National Bank in Los Angeles.
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The managers of the fund have already selected a number of hedge funds — Ares Capital Management, Brigade Capital Management, GAM International Management, Karsch Capital Management and Lateef Investment Management as the initial run of hedgie managers.
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Censorship
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To mark the occasion of 20 million URL takedown notices sent to Google by RIAA member companies, the organization has complained that search engines still aren’t doing enough to reduce the piracy problem. The RIAA says it is using a bucket to deal with “an ocean of illegal downloading”, one in which content is replaced and re-indexed in a never-ending loop. Notice and takedown procedures aren’t fit for today’s reality and must be revised, the music group argues.
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Privacy
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When you are browsing the web, can you say who collects information about you, what is the nature of that information and who may access it? Can you control who may know what about you? The European Commission intended to give you the power to do so, but European Parliament may vote otherwise, under pressure by corporate lobbies.
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Civil Rights
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A jailed member of Russian punk band Pussy Riot told a court she is on a hunger strike after being barred from attending a parole appeal hearing in person, Russian state news agency Ria Novosti reported Wednesday.
Maria Alyokhina was sentenced in August to two years in prison for performing a song critical of then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a prominent Orthodox cathedral last year.
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In an effort to unmask a leaker who fed a reporter classified information about North Korea, FBI investigators tracked the journalist’s movements in and out of a government building, obtained copies of e-mails from his personal account and also took the unprecedented step of alleging that the reporter engaged in a criminal conspiracy simply for doing his job.
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Yesterday’s events in Woolwich were appalling, but Lord Carlile and John Reid wasted no time in attempting to use this atrocity in justifying a return to reductions in personal privacy and other human rights.
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Today, the country begins the process of coming to terms with the horrific attack in Woolwich yesterday.
We know little about those who have committed this brutal terror attack. Videos and photographs have brought the chilling savagery of the perpetrators into our homes.
As the Prime Minister said:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands’ End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls.
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The draft European Parliament resolution on EU trade and investment negotiations with the United States of America aims for fake openness. Paragraph 21 of the draft resolution recalls the need for continuous and transparent engagement by the Commission with a wide range of stakeholders. I have visited some Civil Society Dialogues organised by the Commission. The Commission just states there are no problems and, sorry, as trade negotiations are secret, they can give no details. A masochist may find such meetings rewarding.
Civil society organisations want access to draft negotiation texts, at least for regulatory aspects. Companies have access, the Commission discriminates against citizens, while access is a human right. See the FFII letter to European Parliament Trade committee; see also KEI comments.
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Sometimes, more medical information is a bad thing. The influential United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends against most women getting genetic screenings for their susceptibility to breast cancer. Why? Because the tests are imperfect: for every woman who gets tested for genes associated with onset breast cancer, even more will falsely test positive, leading spooked patients into needless surgery or psychological trauma. Super cheap genetic testing from enterprising health startups, such as 23andMe, have complicated cancer detection for us all by increasing the accessibility of imperfect medical information.
After discovering a mutated BRCA1 gene, known to increase the likelihood of breast cancer 60 to 80 percent, actress Angelina Jolie underwent a radical preventive double mastectomy. Her brave confession in the New York Times brought much needed attention to breast cancer awareness, but it’s dangerous in the hands of a statistically illiterate population.
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Copyrights
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Kim Dotcom has announced that he is the inventor of the so-called two-step authentication system and has a patent to prove it. The Megaupload founder says the security mechanism, which has just been introduced by Twitter, is being used by U.S. companies more than a billion times every week without permission. Dotcom says he doesn’t want to sue, but might if the likes of Google and Facebook don’t help fund his legal battle with the U.S. Government.
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For the final post in my copyright series, I want to focus on another example in my series of discussions about formalism vs. policy in copyright. Today’s case is WNET v. Aereo, which allowed continued operation of a creative television streaming service. As I’ll discuss below, the case pretty clearly complies with the statutory scheme, much to the relief of those who believe content is overprotected and that new digital distribution methods should be allowed. This time, the policy opposition is best demonstrated by Judge Chin’s dissent in the case.
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In a plenary vote, the European Parliament just adopted a mandate to the European Commission explicitly allowing it to “include strong protection of intellectual property rights (IPR)” in the proposed EU-US trade agreement negociations, the “Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement” (TAFTA), also know as “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP).
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