Posted in Site News at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A call for the community to become more actively involved in Techrights
DUE to me doubling my working hours and owing to personal reasons, I have not been able to keep up with the news recently, let alone record TechBytes. Patent news items are accumulating in my box, Novell news I have not kept up with in over a month, and Gates watching is very badly curtailed. Right now the priorities have changed to focus on GNU/Linux first, not only in blog posts/wiki but also in our daily links. If anyone is willing to help with news coverage and can contribute posts, please come to the IRC channels to discuss. We still attract thousands of hundreds of hits per day and can’t fulfill the potential of this high reach. █
PATENT TROLL Touchscreen Gestures has claimed that Apple’s Iphone and Ipad infringe its touchscreen patents.
Touchscreen Gestures seems to be nothing more than a shell company that has ownership of a number of patents that cover screen tapping and dragging gestures. The firm has also claimed that Samsung and Research in Motion (RIM) infringe its patents with their respective tablets.
Apple needed to get a taste of its own medicine. The Wall Street Journal reports that a regional court in Mannheim (Germany) has upheld its ruling to ban Apple’s iCloud and MobileMe services. Motorola had accused Apple of infringing upon its patent EP0847654. The ban was enforced after the February ruling. Apple had appealed the courts decision challenging the validity of Motorola patent.
Apple and Android don’t get along because the spiritual leader of Appledeclared war, but both share some similar problems. They really should work together against software patenting. What we meanwhile are left with is a system which is unfriendly to competition and innovation. Intellectual monopolies are of no benefit to society. They help some of the biggest corporations gain more power over society. █
Moving back to Europe appears to have made a difference. Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager, SUSE, said: “We have a lot to celebrate in 2012. SUSE is a recognised market leader that is well positioned to take advantage of growing demand for commercial Linux and open source technologies.
No, all it does is add a Microsoft tax. The same numbers that we criticised before are quoted again, perhaps in exchange for this interview with Mantal. It says: “Last year, SUSE, since 2004 a part of Novell, was moved back to Nuremberg as a separate unit after Attachmate Corporation bought Novell and took the company private.
“One of the original SUSE hackers, Mantel, rejoined the company a few years back and now has a chance to help the company re-cultivate some of that original culture which made it so well-known.”
Well, if helping Microsoft tax GNU/Linux is what made SUSE “well-known”, then perhaps Mantel is at the right place. In order to avert the threat of Microsoft extortion we must continue to boycott SUSE. █
Posted in Deception at 4:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another reminder of why Gartner Group should be ignored for the most part
TECHRIGHTS spent a considerable amount of time showing what the likes of Gartner are really all about. Those firms sell recommendations, just like some financial firms which do exactly that. Those who are unwilling rate the bond the way the prospective client wishes will simply lose the business, which a corruptible firm will then get instead (Moody's for instance) and thrive as a reward for this gross misconduct. Here is a timely reminder of Gartner’s incompetence:
The upshot: Gartner completely misread the netbook market and failed to spot a disruptive technology — tablets — that would reshape the market.
How come some people still cite Gartner? It is grossly overrated and it is funded by the same companies Gartner recommends. The so-called 'analyst tax' is a form of bribe and these practices should generally be investigated. █
There’s something about late spring that seems to bring the corporate asstroturf out of the woodwork (oops, I made a “Freudian typo” there!). College graduation is coming up after all, with all those fresh new students hitting the market and becoming truly adult consumers for the first time. Gotta get ready for them. Today’s front page of Slashdot brings us not one, not two, but three examples.
The first is rather telling: An unnamed company employee posts about how their company asked them to asstroturf, posing the ethical question to the hivemind. The comments are surprising in their lack of condemnation, kind of “Meh, if you want to, everyone else does.” Most of them say to go ahead if they feel the social marketing hype is warranted. Almost nobody raises the ethical issue of an employee posing as a customer giving fake reviews of their company’s product. Certainly nobody brings up the potential violation of FCC law.
I always get the blankest looks when I bring up that 2009 FCC ruling. You can hear the fact bounce off the skull with an audible “thud”.
Next, a story posts alleging that the media is unfairly biased against poor widdle Microsoft, while all the other tech companies “seem to get away from missteps unscathed”. The Slashdot crowd barely has time to shovel themselves out from under this mountain of manure when one AC posts pointing out that in fact, the piece author is a paid Microsoft evangelist, a fact not immediately evident from the bald story.
Slashdot is quite rotten these days. The managers allowed it to be this way. From “news for geeks” it became noise for geeks. Microsoft is now trying to pollute FOSS in the same way, hijacking its opposition. █
Summary: The lesser-known story about Microsoft’s actions against Windows botnets
ACCORDING TO Pogson, Microsoft betrays yet more companies. To quote these quick remarks, “It turns out they were a bull in a china shop breaking all kinds of legitimate sites and blocking the work of real security businesses.”
A little over 2 weeks ago Microsoft announced operation B71. It was being brought as the biggest blow to ZeuS botnets in history, and was picked up in the media globally
This is just a Microsoft PR campaign, a bit of reputation laundering. The reality is this:
Apart from trust there is one more thing, and that is due diligence, there is no other explanation than Microsoft not having done any due diligence in their actions and verification of data and sources in this case. They wanted to have a quick win, they might have gotten their quick win, but in the process sacrificed a lot. The advice is, check where the data is coming from, check it with your sources, get the confirmation that you can use it. Do not proceed until you are sure everyone has agreed and everything has been verified as much as can be possibly expected from you. Listing and seizing sinkholes and legitimate domains should be limited to a few and not dozens as was the case here.
This whole thing started when Microsoft’s incompetence led to trouble and Microsoft wanted to claim credit for ending a mess that it itself should have been made liable to. Sites like Slashdot were always happy to help this kind of reputation laundering and a case of distraction from the real problem: Microsoft. █
Summary: The first episode in a long time discusses changes in form factors and the stronger points of Linux
Today we spoke about Nokia, Linux, proprietary software on GNU/Linux, and finally something about LibreOffice. We didn’t prepare topics in advance, but it should be an entertaining episode nonetheless. The show closes with “Ceiling Of Plankton” (a song by Givers).
Given the vast numbers of Macs that are apparently infected with the Flashback Trojan malware, it’s not at all surprising to see that sales of Mac security software are now skyrocketing.
The Government of Malaysia has long used GNU/Linux internally. In their country, many consumers are unaware of GNU/Linux and replace FreeDOS on PCs with illegal copies of that other OS. A program is under way to persuade OEMs and retailers to use GNU/Linux on PCs instead.
With an eye on an unseen, distant future the ‘pseudo-modern’ desktops are adopting the single windowed approach. Whether it be Microsoft’s Metro, Ubuntu’s Unity or Gnome’s new shell, they all think PC is nothing more than a smartphone with a touch screen.
I am one of those who are not big fans of this approach. The ‘pseudo-modern’ desktop Uis are focused on smartphone/tablet like devices where you use one window (one app) at a time. What’s the point of buying expensive CPUs and GPUs (minimum system requirements for modern operating systems) and 27″ multiple monitors when all I can do is run one app at a time?
You are not your car. You can be a hacker and ride a sedan, you can ride a muscle car being a writer and you can go to school in a BMW. For some, the car is important or even has philosophical signifant but for most, the goal is ‘what I’m going with my car’.
While HANA and its in-memory capabilities is a key platform for SAP’s database strategy, so too is the Sybase database. SAP acquired Sybase in 2010 for $5.8 billion. Sikka said that Sybase is now able to run the entire SAP business suite.
The open-source ARM Mali graphics driver, known as the the Lima project, has achieved a major milestone.
Since delivering the exclusive news of the Lima project as an open-source reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics driver for Linux back in January, there hasn’t been too much else to report on about this driver that’s still early in its development life. This driver is called Lima since it doesn’t have the official blessing of ARM Holdings and right now has been only running simple demos with Limare. The code is available and is running on the KDE Plasma Active Tablet as was talked about and shown at FOSDEM 2012.
Fortunately this morning I’ve heard some news from the Lima developers about hitting a major milestone. Joining Luc Verhaegen, the lead developer of the Lima project, have been Ben Brewer (another employee of Codethink) and Connor Abbot have been the latest developers joining the Belgian on this open-source driver project.
A set of Direct Rendering Manager patches have appeared to ease the development of targeting DRM drivers for embedded systems. There’s also two new DRM drivers using this SDRM layer.
These patches for DRM on embedded systems provide “helpers” to take care of the DRM device and introduce an “SDRM” layer. The helpers can setup the CRTCs, encoders, connectors, and other components as separate devices rather than having the current monolithic design to a DRM driver. This work is based upon some of the Exynos driver patches by Samsung but was written by Sascha Hauer of the German-based Pengutronix.
Synfig Studio is intended to be professional 2D animation software and is available to download for free. It has been around for quite some time now and seems to have had a fairly checkered history in terms of development, as noted in TildeHash’s blog last year, Potential for Free Animation Software dead? Not overly surprising for free, open source software.
In light of Adobe killing Flash for Linux, there’s a new release of the open-source Lightspark Flash Player. Lightspark 0.5.6 is the new release with a number of noteworthy improvements.
When Linux enthusiasts think about software on the Linux desktop, they’re likely thinking about applications that are available under various open source software licenses. Yet what about the other side of the software world – proprietary software for the Linux platform?
Despite the fact that proprietary applications do exist for the Linux desktop, I’ve found that most people tend to avoid them.
In this article, I’ll explore some of the challenges proprietary software faces in gaining traction with Linux enthusiasts, in addition to providing some software titles that I think are worth looking into.
When it comes to the number of quality paid applications available for download, Ubuntu has always lagged behind Windows and Mac. Despite some great choices in the Software Center, the Canonical-made distro has a long way to go in order to go head-to-head with other operating systems.
That said, not everything is so sullen and gloomy in the Canonical world. Slowly and steadily, Ubuntu is catching up with its competitors by offering some great paid applications that many users have started appreciating. And though you won’t find Adobe Photoshop or MS Office here, you’ll find an assortment of some fantastic games and software that put Ubuntu way ahead of any other Linux-based distribution.
One of the most active Ubuntu developers Jo-Erlend Schinstad is also a pro-active defender of Ubuntu Unity and HUD. He tries his best to clarify doubts of users and educate them about the features of Ubuntu Unity. Muktware has published quite a lot of his articles on various topics related to Ubuntu. We recently interviewed him to understand his approach towards Ubuntu and its users. He has now posted a video to compare Ubuntu Unity with Gnome Panel, as people seem to keep saying that they are more efficient with Gnome Panel than with Ubuntu Unity.
The Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204 operating system has been announced by Clement Lefebvre on April 11th, 2012.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204 RC comes in two editions: the first one features the MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 desktop environments, and the second one features the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment.
After a long developmental period, Calligra 2.4.0, the first stable version of Calligra, has been released. Calligra is a Qt-based graphic and office suite forked from KOffice in 2010. Note: In some quarters, Calligra is said to be a continuation of KOffice, rather than a fork.
Being discussed following the Ubuntu 12.04 Desktops Impact Performance, Power Consumption was the impact that KDE’s KWin compositing window manager (and others that don’t redirect fullscreen windows by default) has on the OpenGL gaming performance.
Depending upon the driver it can potentially cause a hit as shown in Wednesday’s comparison of Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox. All of the desktop environments were tested in their “out of the box” / stock configurations on Ubuntu 12.04. The KDE aspect is being discussed in this forum thread where the usual items are brought up.
A student has discovered a critical vulnerability in BackTrack, a flavour of Linux that’s a favourite among security pros.
The previously undiscovered (hence zero-day) privilege escalation bug in the network penetration-testing distro was discovered during an ethical hacking class organised by the InfoSec Institute.
Jack Koziol, security programme manager at the institute, explained that the bug in Backtrack 5 R2 (the latest version) allowed the student to overwrite settings to gain a root shell. The flaw was found in wicd (the Wireless Interface Connection Daemon), which has not been tested for “potential remote exploitation vectors” according to Koziol.
Clement Lefebvre announced last evening, April 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Release Candidate version of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 201204.
Last fall Mageia put out the call for artists to participate in their Mageia 2 artwork contest. It’s been eight long months, but the choices have now been made. The new Mageia 2 default and alternative backgrounds have been chosen.
Submitted by Luiz Fernando, the winning image is a lovely deep blue base with wisps of royal blue cutting across the primary focal lines.
After roughly two years of development, the Arquillian team has released version 1.0 of the open source platform for testing middleware applications. Arquillian gives Java developers the ability to write unit tests that work at run-time within Red Hat’s JBoss application server.
Red Hat has announced the availability of a beta version of Red Hat Storage 2.0, the second version of the company’s integrated storage appliance, version 1.0 of which was launched in December. Red Hat Storage is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and GlusterFS, which the company acquired last year.
A recent job listing has revealed that an Ubuntu Phone OS is currently under development. Canonical, the major developer behind the Ubuntu OS, is seeking a Business Development Manager for its Ubuntu Phone OS project that will be responsible for establishing relationships with phone vendors and telecommunications companies to promote the platform.
Support for ubuntu 10.10 maverick meerkat end on April 10, 2012. This date was established when Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was released in october of 2010.
Sony’s new SmartWatch puts various functions of the user’s Android smartphone on his or her wrist, connecting with the handset — which can be left in a pocket or bag — via BlueTooth. Its various functions include access to email, events, SMS, music player controls, and the camera’s shutter. It’s compatible with Sony and Sony Ericsson phones as well as a variety of phones from other makers.
An image of what is purported to be Samsung’s unannounced Galaxy S III smartphone — the vendor’s flagship mobile device for 2012 — has been published by a Polish blog. Claiming to have received the photograph from an anonymous source who said he was testing the device, oPDA.pl on Thursday posted the image to its site, stating that it received no details about the handset or its specifications. While the authenticity of the image is anything but certain, a few things can be gleaned from the image if the device is in fact real.
With the availability of Android 4.0 platform, white-box makers have rolled out tablets in 7-, 8-, 9.7- and 10.1-inch sizes with specifications catered to customer’s demand, said the sources, adding that the models target markets in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Google’s total investment in Android/Linux is just pocket-change (cash = $49.3billion) for them and they are making the market for its search and app business grow by shipping more smart thingies and encouraging other suppliers to do the same. Even if users of smart thingies are not replacing their PC with a smart thing, they are increasing the hours of the day they can access Google’s services by mobility. There is no downside for Google. There would be a serious downside if they stuck with the stagnant Wintel platform. Google would not have 24% growth staying with Wintel only.
Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood’s ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile’s case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications.
Charges against Hotfile that alleged direct copyright infringement were thrown out last year by a federal court judge. The remaining charges allege that the company is liable for inducing its users to infringe copyright. The answer to that question will hinge on whether the courts find that Hotfile has substantial non-infringing uses.
Overall as I developer, I find the ability to instantly push out updates highly desirable. As a consumer I appreciate the fact that submissions are tested and verified to at least technically work and not crash. Is there a perfect system? Not that I know of. What is the perfect system? I don’t know. If there was a way for developers to be able to reach their users quickly with bugfixes and even new features that allow for consumers to not have to wade through extremely low quality and exact duplicate apps, then I would be one happy developer.
We are happy to announce the release of PhoneGap 1.6! The PhoneGap/Apache Cordova Community has worked hard to fix many bugs (including the nasty local storage bug caused by the iOS 5.1 update) and added some new features.
The Linux Foundation has opened up reservations for the Enterprise End User Summit. The conference, now in its fourth year, is being held at the New York Stock Exchange on the 30th April and the 1st May, and will include keynotes by Scott Crenshaw of Red Hat, and Antony Liguori of IBM.
Nineteen companies have formed the OpenStack Foundation, vowing to invest millions of dollars into an open source cloud initiative. It sounds like the OpenStack Foundation will seek to raise at least $4 million annually for OpenStack’s development as a public cloud and private cloud solution.
Offering a glimpse of the new features some database administrators will be working with before too long, Oracle has posted a preview version of the next MySQL relational database management system.
The Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.6 comes with a number of new and still experimental features for the open source database system, including improved replication and the ability to bypass the SQL framework for faster data access.
10gen, the company behind MongoDB, has announced the general availability of a connector for its open source NoSQL database and Apache Hadoop, the MapReduce framework and distributed computing platform. According to its developers, version 1.0 of the connector is the “culmination of over a year of work to bring our users a solid integration layer between their MongoDB deployments and Hadoop clusters for data processing”.
Version 5.5.23 of MariaDB, a drop-in replacement for MySQL, has been published by the developers at Monty Program. The first stable release in the 5.5 series of the open source database includes performance improvements and “a few added features” over MySQL 5.5.23, which it is based upon.
When reviewers look at LibreOffice and its ancestor OpenOffice.org, they inevitably assume that it’s inferior to Microsoft Office. At the very most, they may grudgingly find it acceptable for undemanding users.
However, when you examine LibreOffice and MS Office without assumptions, the comparison changes dramatically. That’s especially true when looking at the word processors, LibreOffice’s Writer and MS Office’s Word.
For one thing, features frequently have different names in Writer and Word. Although LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have a history of conforming to MS Office’s name-choices — for example, in the spreadsheets, data pilots were recently renamed pivot tables to match Excel’s usage — holdouts remain. For example, the equivalent of Word’s AutoSummary in Writer remains AutoAbstract.
Well it’s been a disconcerting kind of week here in the Linux blogosphere, not least because of all the darn construction going on down at the Google+ Grill.
First it was the hammering giving Linux Girl a headache. Then, on Wednesday, she walked in after lunch and could barely recognize the place. What is this interface sorcery, she wants to know?
Then, of course, there was the retirement of Linux Girl’s old friend, Maverick Meerkat, in the past few days as well. Alas, dear distro — we hardly knew ye!
Charles Mangin, a web developer and consultant based in Raleigh, NC, hoped to recreate the drawing-tablet experience (such as that with a Wacom device) on what we today think of as tablets (like iPads and Android tablets)–and to do it as open hardware. The result is now on Kickstarter: the PressurePen.
Tablets are the perfect form-factor for on-the-go digital art. But very, very few of them come with a stylus, and the earliest third-party styluses made for them couldn’t adjust performance to pressure.
Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will end support for the Windows XP operating system in two years signals the end of an era for the company, and potentially the beginning of a nightmare for everyone else.
When Microsoft cuts the chord on XP in two years it will effectively leave millions of existing Windows-based computers vulnerable to continued and undeterred cyberattacks, many of which hold the potential to find their way into consumer, enterprise and even industrial systems running the latest software.
In a process internally referred to as a “denial sweep,” Litton’s computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton’s records, hadn’t sent their documents. But untold numbers of those documents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.
Under US law, violation of copyright is not a crime unless commercial use is made of the copy or the value is more than $1K. Even when it is a crime, illegal copying is limited to 1, 5 or 10 years for different levels of severity and this guy was likely in the 1 year category.
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