01.06.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 8:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Only OEM inertia and brand awareness keep driving Windows ‘sales’ (rentals)
Summary: The era of Windows monopoly is ending or has ended because Microsoft can no longer compete with the better-priced Linux-powered rivals
FOR A MERE 250 pounds we recently bought a laptop plus tablet bundle (both HP-made and of high build quality). The laptop runs GNU/Linux and the tablet uses Android (i.e. Linux-powered). No Windows required. Microsoft cannot compete with such pricing, it can only pretend to.
According to a media site that received money from Microsoft (not disclosed), HP’s attempts to make a Windows-based Chromebook competitor is terrible. This isn’t the first time this year that we see sources close to Microsoft speaking of the rise of Chromebook and the problem of the relatively bloated Windows. Vista 8 was terrible not just because of bloat. The article states: “Setting up a Chromebook and getting to work with the most up-to-date software takes about three minutes, maybe five if you’re slow. That’s not the case with the HP Stream 13, although it’s much improved over computers from just a few years ago.
“It took me about 10 minutes before I could use the Windows laptop since it was going though various setup processes. Ah, but the updates.”
And that’s just the beginning. The headline says that “the $229 HP Stream 13 isn’t a Chromebook killer” and it’s easy to see why. This is how Simon Phipps put it: “It’s a mistake to try to squeeze Windows into hardware designed for ChromeOS. You end up with a laptop that’s so under-powered it’s best for cloud-hosted applications (as the HP/Microsoft TV advertising in the UK implies). But you still have to maintain anti-malware software, apply updates, manage drivers, buy upgrades and so on.
“So you have sbought yourself the functionality of a Chromebook but with the upkeep of Windows. Why on earth would anyone think that was a good deal?”
GNU/Linux in its classic form (e.g. with GNOME or KDE desktop) may not be gaining in terms of installed base fast enough, but with operating systems like ChromeOS, Android, SteamOS, FirefoxOS, webOS, Tizen, Sailfish OS etc. Linux sure is taking over the digital world, not only in the back end (servers, routers, ‘dumb’ embedded devices, and supercomputers). CES 2015 shows plenty of evidence of that right now, even if the “L” word isn’t always mentioned/advertised.
Microsoft says it ‘loves’ Linux not because it really loves GNU/Linux but because GNU/Linux inevitably became a dominant, undefeatable force. Even Microsoft’s biggest customers use GNU/Linux. Microsoft loves Linux like Russians love Putin. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A glimpse at the dissent against the current EPO management — dissent that’s directed at the very top executives and comes from EPO staff
EPO and the so-called ‘Administrative Council’ are not independent and they have basically eliminated oversight and now protect one another. Then there is the so-called investigation unit, which simply retaliates against anyone who does not toe the line of EPO management, as we saw several times last month. “There is a lot going on at the moment,” told us someone from the EPO. “We are almost waiting for the next collegue to be suspended and escorted from the premises. This is starting to become worrying not only for persons working at the EPO but also for everybody and every company depending on good EPO services. In particular the patenting of software is a disputed issue also amongst the examiners.“
Another source sent us document which he or she found in the canteen at the beginning of the year. Our source had to scan it and we have it shown above. “The quality is not very good,” said the source, “but it illustrates the work sphere.” The EPO’s management has lost the loyalty and support of staff at all levels. Even the Enlarged Board of Appeal is complaining.█
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Posted in America, Patents at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: No US patent reform last year, but there are improvements nonetheless, especially in the area of patents on algorithms
THE USPTO has amended its examination guidelines following an important ruling from SCOTUS, which at the very least limited the scope of software patents. Change came not from politics (driven dominantly and excessively by corporate money, especially in the US) but from a courtroom and The Hill continues the corporate media’s obsession with patent trolls, who are not the same as software patents (despite some correlations).
“Heading into the year,” writes The Hill, “few issues seemed to be as well-supported as reforming the nation’s patent laws to prevent “trolls” from harassing companies with scores of lawsuits.
“A patent reform bill cruised through the House last December, and President Obama highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address as one of his 2014 priorities for Capitol Hill.
“Yet despite months of work from some of the Senate’s most senior lawmakers in both parties, the reform push was killed just before completion, at the request of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).”
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t stop large aggressors like Microsoft and Apple from suing small companies using software patents. This approach is basically what large corporations are lobbying for. They have done it for years. This elusive pursuit of so-called ‘reforms’ that only affect small trolls isn’t the thing to root for. Scope itself is the issue (scope of patents, not scale of the litigant).
Incidentally, there is a decent new article about patents on genetics in the US. “Last month in Silicon Valley,” writes Technology Review, “biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed up in black gowns to receive the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a glitzy award put on by Internet billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg. They’d won for developing CRISPR-Cas9, a “powerful and general technology” for editing genomes that’s been hailed as a biotechnology breakthrough.” (further interpreted by Glyn Moody)
This is about patents. As Moody put it, “Whether obvious or not, it looks like the patent granted may complicate turning the undoubtedly important CRISPR technique into products. That, in its turn, will mean delays for life-changing and even life-saving therapies: for example, CRISPR could potentially allow the defective gene that causes serious problems for those with cystic fibrosis to be edited to produce normal proteins, thus eliminating those problems. ”
Speaking of patents on genes, IP Troll Tracker correctly stresses that Monsanto deserves to be hated for its (ab)use of patents for monopoly. The post is titled “People Hate Monsanto For Reasons Other Than Their Patent Litigation Policies?” One clear issue with this post is that it conveniently overlooks many other issues with Monsanto, including genocide in Vietnam (Agent Orange), the impact of toxins in pesticides, and the unknown impact of genetically-modified foods on one’s health (several studies show a correlation to cancer, among other detriments).
Patents are inherently a monopoly and if monopolies are allowed to enter the field of software, where many people code with simple tools like a keyboard, then we limit expression. Code can be like prose and patenting prose (not the same as copyright) would be disastrous. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux systems are evolving all the time and the users are always looking for ways to enhance their experience. Right now, the trend indicates that more and more desktops are being adorned with circle icons.
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The backstory: the Cup of Linux YouTube channel handles all things Linux, including coverage of distributions and how-to guides for new users. One Linux developer, Antoni Norman, is the main force behind the Pinguy OS Linux/Ubuntu hybrid. Over the years, he’s been a valuable contributor to the Linux community, including the one centered around Cup of Linux. Also, over the years, Shawn Patrick Ryan (“Spatry”) has covered Pinguy OS releases in a number of YouTube videos. So far, so good.
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Desktop
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So if you have a slow XP computer. You can turn off the internet to Windows for safety and run your attachable Linux device on your laptop.
Here you have a safe way to upgrade your laptop system and an easy way to run Linux on your laptop. Just attach a USB stick.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.19-rc3 kernel on Monday following a one-day delay — not due to bugs/regressions but rather due to spending his weekend tiling a bathroom.
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It’s a day delayed – not because of any particular development issues, but simply because I was tiling a bathroom yesterday. But rc3 is out there now, and things have stayed reasonably calm. I really hope that implies that 3.19 is looking good, but it’s equally likely that it’s just that people are still recovering from the holiday season.
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Microchip Technology Inc. is announcing Tuesday it has joined the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux to develop software for the connected car, the Phoenix Business Journal has discovered exclusively.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that IIX Inc., Micron Technology, Inc., and Planisys are joining the organization.
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Graphics Stack
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With last week having delivered fresh benchmarks of AMD’s Catalyst Linux vs. Windows drivers (and before that an updated Intel Linux vs. Windows OpenGL comparison to end out 2014), here’s some updated NVIDIA Linux vs. Windows benchmarks to compare the GeForce graphics drivers at the end of 2014. Three different graphics cards were used in benchmarking the latest NVIDIA Linux vs. Windows performance with the proprietary graphics drivers followed by also having the latest open-source NVIDIA/Nouveau driver results.
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Landing in Mesa Git over the night were a set of patches by Ilia Mirkin, Tobias Klausmann, and Roy Spliet for improving this open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.
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For the better part of the year I’ve been using a NVIDIA Tegra K1 that sports four Cortex-A15 CPU cores and a Kepler class GPU, which yields incredible ARM performance and is all-around a great SoC. Kicking off CES week though is NVIDIA announcing the Tegra X1, which enters the 64-bit ARM world and is using a Maxwell GPU.
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Applications
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EncFS is a FUSE-based cryptographic filesystem which encrypts individual files. As some of you might know, an EncFS security audit that was conducted in February 2014, revealed some potential vulnerabilities:
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Gloobus Preview is a quick file previewer which supports images, documents (pdf, odf, ods, etc.), source files, audio (mp3, wav, ogg and more), video (avi, ogg, mkv, flv, etc.), folders, archives, fonts, plain text files and more.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The first monthly alpha update to 2015 is now available for the open-source, Daemon-powered Unvanquished first person shooter.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The beta for the upcoming Plasma 5.2 desktop shell is being tagged on Thursday.
Plasma 5.2 Beta is being tagged on Thursday so this is the last chance for merging any features or artwork ahead of this quarterly update to Plasma 5. As long as the tagging is done on Thursday, KDE Plasma 5.2 Beta (v5.195) should be officially released on 13 January. The plan is to then tag the official 5.2.0 release on 22 January and to officially release Plasma 5.2 on 27 January, per the Plasma 5 schedule.
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One of our long-standing contributors, Timothée Giet, is working on some new training material as part of his work teaching Krita at Activ Design!
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The Plamsa 5.2 beta will be tagged on Thursday this week. If you have any pending features or changes that are going to affect artwork or strings that should be in the release please make sure they get merged ASAP.
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The last feature I did for Krita was to implement a Cumulative Undo/Redo feature. Since its been almost 3 months since my last contribution to Krita — I thought this was the one of the very first things I had to do from a rather clogged pipeline.
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Sven Langkamp recently mentiond that Krita had crept up to second place in the list of projects with most new bugs opened in bugzilla in a year. So I decided play around a litte, while Krita is building.
Bugzilla has a nice little report that can show the top X projects with open bugs for certain periods. Krita never is in the default top 20, because other KDE projects always have more open bugs. But let’s take the top 100 of KDE projects with open bugs sort the data a bit and then make top 10 lists from the other columns.
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GNOvktop/GTK
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Linus Torvalds is not one to shy away from saying what he thinks and he apparently doesn’t have a too good opinion on what the terminal app looks like by default in the latest Fedora 21.
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If you were reading my GSoC 2014 reports, you surely remember that I was working on integrating GNOME Maps with social networks, so you can share the place you are in Facebook and Foursquare (and Twitter if you enable an option in Maps!). This surely is not going to be an everyday feature, but I learned a lot during its development (and during the whole GSoC).
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ZevenOS, a Linux operating system with software optimized for slower computers and with elements of BeOS based on Xubuntu, has just reached version 6.0.
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Today in Linux news, ZevenOS has decided to rest on Ubuntu’s laurels. Jamie Watson says Makulu 7 Xfce is the most beautiful distro he’s ever seen and Dedoimedo says Elementary 0.3 is “purrty.” The Korora project released version 21 Beta and Derrik Diener highlights the top five Arch derivatives. And finally today, we have a year-end Linux recap and another Linus quote is ruffling feathers.
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2014 was a unique year for Linux in that Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu all had Enterprise (or Long Term Support/LTS releases as Ubuntu refers to them) releases. There will be no major enterprise Linux platform milestones in 2015, but there will be plenty of updates for enterprise and community Linux.
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Particularly strong for enterprise Linux, 2014 offered a rare confluence of release timing calendars. The three major enterprise Linux vendors delivered milestone updates in 2014. On April 17, Ubuntu 14.04, code-named Trusty Tahr, was released as a long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. (Ubuntu issues new LTS releases every two years; each LTS has up to five years of support.) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) came out June 10, marking the first major RHEL update for Red Hat since 2010. Red Hat supports its enterprise releases for 10 years. On Oct. 27, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 was released, marking the first major update to SUSE’s flagship enterprise Linux platform since 2009. Big enterprise Linux releases were not the only updates during the year, Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution delivered Fedora 21 Dec. 9, providing server-, cloud- and workstation-focused editions. Ubuntu 14.10, code-named the Utopic Unicorn, which debuted Oct. 23, provides new big data capabilities. Also out in 2014, Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) 1.0 Linux distribution provides a new privacy-focused OS choice. In this slide show, eWEEK looks back at key Linux events of 2014.
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There is a very, very large number of Linux distributions. Each distribution is built using the same basic building blocks but the end results are always different. The choices made by the distribution developers turn the building blocks into finished structures designed to meet a variety of needs—desktop, server, or some other specialized usage.
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If I had my way, I would never deploy or administer a linux server that isn’t running NixOS.
I’m not exactly a prolific sysadmin – in my time, I’ve set up and administered servers numbering in the low tens. And yet every single time, it’s awful.
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Reviews
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This happens to be one of them distros what mystifies me, good and bad. On one hand, it seems to be very popular, if you look at the Distrowatch rank listing, or consult my best distro of the year vote readers’ choice section, where a rather handsome portion of the audience chose elementary as their favorite spin. It’s only officially at version 0.2, the last stable release was unleashed unto the nerdy crowds some 16 months back, and the latest beta is still only at version 0.3, and taking its time.
Neither the first nor the second dot oh something release managed to impress me. The desktop environment was pretty and cool, but the overall composition was quite buggy. And this brings me to the other hand of the argument. I kind of want to review it again, despite all of the above. Testing 0.3 Freya, beta. Here we go.
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New Releases
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This release of Clonezilla live (2.3.1-18) includes major enhancements and bug fixes.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS 2014.12 has been released, so it’s time for another screenshot tour. I toyed with the idea of doing a full review on Desktop Linux Reviews, but the next release of PCLinuxOS should have some major changes so I’m holding off until that is available to review. In the meantime, you can get a good look at PCLinuxOS 2014.12 MATE in the screenshots below.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro 0.8.11 was made available only a month ago and its makers have already released four upgrade packs. Even if this seems like they have a lot to fix, that’s not actually true. In fact, these packs bring some important upgrades for a number of important components, like the Linux kernel for example.
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Arch Linux is very unique. Unlike most Linux distributions, it does not have an official live disc. When you boot it up, you’ll be greeted with a terminal. For some people this is fine. In fact, they prefer it. Arch gives you the freedom to sit down and make a Linux install yourself, one that you’ve made with your own two hands. It’s a good time, and that’s great, if you like that sort of thing.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has multiple products within its Infrastructure division, including the CloudForms management solution and the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service product. McLoughlin noted that OpenStack is a key part of a broader portfolio but still stands on its own as well.
“You can build a cloud with the individual projects, but if you build a cloud with the entire portfolio, you get a whole lot more value out of it,” McLoughlin said.
In terms of the continued development and expansion of OpenStack services, there are a number of new capabilities that are underway, including the Manila shared filed system service. Work is also ongoing for the Zaqar messaging service.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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2014 has been a very interesting year with a ton of major releases, but one in particular really stands out, Ubuntu Touch. It’s not yet available in stores and it’s not “really” ready, but it’s the one that registered the most progress.
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The CES 2015 conference is in full swing and most of the bigger companies have already made their announcements, including NVIDIA. Some of their presentations have been done using an Ubuntu system, as you can see in the video below.
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Ubuntu Make, formerly known as Ubuntu Developer Tools Center, has been updated to version 0.4, bringing Go support as well as a new game category.
For those not familiar with Ubuntu Make, this is a command line tool created by Canonical, which allows developers to install various development tools / IDEs. Initially, the tool targeted Android developers, making it easy to install Android Studio in Ubuntu. Later, Ubuntu Make also got support for Pycharm, Eclipse and intellij IDEA.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pearl Linux was released a couple of months ago as a natural successor of the much more famous Pear OS, which disappeared mysteriously. Now, the 64-bit edition has been released as well.
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This happens to be one of them distros what mystifies me, good and bad. On one hand, it seems to be very popular, if you look at the Distrowatch rank listing, or consult my best distro of the year vote readers’ choice section, where a rather handsome portion of the audience chose elementary as their favorite spin. It’s only officially at version 0.2, the last stable release was unleashed unto the nerdy crowds some 16 months back, and the latest beta is still only at version 0.3, and taking its time.
Neither the first nor the second dot oh something release managed to impress me. The desktop environment was pretty and cool, but the overall composition was quite buggy. And this brings me to the other hand of the argument. I kind of want to review it again, despite all of the above. Testing 0.3 Freya, beta. Here we go.
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Nvidia debuted a car-focused, octa-core Tegra X1 SoC with a 256-core Maxwell GPU and 15W consumption, and demoed Tegra X1-based autopilot and IVI hardware.
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Linux fans will be happy to tell how Linux is the most popular end-user operating system, thanks to Android, how Tux the penguin, Linux’s mascot, rules supercomputers, and how even Microsoft loves Linux now because of its power in the cloud. What even they might not know, but has become crystal-clear at CES, is that Linux also now dominates Smart and 4K TV.
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What some users will really, really like about the WRT1200AC isn’t the hardware but the firmware working with it. In partnership with Marvel, Linksys is happy to announce that the open-source Wi-Fi driver for the WRT1900AC chipset has been released to OpenWrt, the makers of one of the most popular embedded Linux firmwares.
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Phones
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Well, that theory suggests quite a massive milestone on December 2014. Those specs should now be available on some smartphone for the first time for well under $100. The theory says we should be able to buy those specs on some smartphone for 75 dollars. Lets see if there is such a marvel somewhere.
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Android
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As a father of three girls, I have piles and piles of Disney DVDs and Blu-rays. I occasionally look at the “Digital Copy” information and roll my eyes, because it requires some odd Windows DRM software or some other convoluted watching method that usually isn’t possible or even interesting for me.
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Parrot tipped two Android IVI boxes: an aftermarket “RNB6″ with Android Auto support, and a “SOCA Simple Box” that uses your own Android tablet for display.
Parrot, the French company known for its AR.Drone and BeBop drones, was one of the first companies to deliver an Android-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system with its aftermarket Asteroid, two years ago. A more recent Asteroid design was used in the McClaren IRIS IVI system for its MP4-12C sports car.
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The next big Android update, Android Lollipop 5.1, is reportedly scheduled for a February launch ahead of a summer release for all major devices, reports Android Pit.
The update will hit Nexus devices first, as is the norm, and will hopefully remedy some of the ongoing problems with the operating system being experienced by users.
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Tonino Lamborghini is really good at making expensive things. For decades, that’s mostly meant cars—beautiful, beautiful cars that 99 percent of people will never even get the chance to sit in, let alone drive. But where these overly luxurious autos can inspire car envy, the Lambo smartphone, called the 88 Tauri, really doesn’t.
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Car buyers look for the best deals, not the best in-vehicle operating systems. At CES, though, show goers will be able to view a concept Cadillac car loaded with Android 5.0 and technological bells and whistles that could make driving safer and more fun.
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Ten years ago we started with the (immodest?) goal of bringing open source to enterprise software. Today, there are even greater opportunities for open source — not just in software, but as a fundamental force for positive change in the world.
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Open Source is a key framework to enable the prolonged development and delivery of ARTIST tools to help companies transition to modern platforms, like the cloud. We support businesses on this journey from the start, in assessment and reducing risk, to implementation and reducing cost. ARTIST tools are developed following open standards and in many cases reusing existing open source components. Therefore, all project results are delivered under an open source license, with the exception of a few consultancy tools whose source code is not provided, but which are nonetheless free to use. Links to the source code, licensing information, supporting documentation and demonstration videos are included for each entry.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The two main reasons for switching over to Clang as the default Linux compiler for Chrome came down to many Chromium developers already were using Clang on Linux and they wanted to use modern C++ features in Chromium. Google found it easier on Linux systems to switch to Clang for tapping newer C++ features rather than upgrading GCC on their systems from GCC 4.6 to GCC 4.8~4.9.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, the mission-based organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, today announced new developments that show the power and flexibility of Firefox OS and the Web platform across device categories and user experiences.
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Panasonic today tore the wraps off Firefox OS-powered 4K TVs, high-def 4K camcorders, and home surveillance cameras, at CES in Las Vegas.
Julie Bauer, the appliance giant’s consumer electronics president, said her conference keynote that the new gear will go on sale in 2015.
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SaaS/Big Data
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In case you were wondering about recent reports of the demise of CloudStack, the folks at Citrix are remaining adamant that the cloud computing platform is healthy and in use at lots of notable organizations. In fact, at the recent CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Budapest, Autodesk, China Telecom, Dell, Walt Disney, and Huawei were all reported among active users of the platform.
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Databases
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Storage vendor FoundationDB is working on a new document database to enhance adoption of its ACID-compliant NoSQL database technology.
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Funding
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Blue Box, which offers private cloud services based on OpenStack to big companies including Viacom has just announced a new round of $4 million in funding on top of the $10 million the company raised late last year. And, as Silicon Angle notes, some of the funding comes from an unnamed telco: “The latest $4 million leg saw an unnamed US telco come aboard as the second strategic investor in the startup, triggering speculation about which carrier would throw its weight behind an OpenStack hosting provider.”
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Private cloud hosting provider Blue Box Inc. has completed its second financing round three months after securing the first infusion to bump its net funding past the $33 million mark. The latest $4 million leg saw an unnamed US telco come aboard as the second strategic investor in the startup, triggering speculation about which carrier would throw its weight behind an OpenStack hosting provider.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Nineteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of December 22, 2014).
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If you thought LLVM/Clang with just under four million lines was a huge code-base for a compiler as the entire Linux kernel is over 19 million lines, just wait until you see the current size of GCC.
In 2014, GCC soared past 14.5 million lines of code.
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We are pleased to announce the GNU Automake 1.15 minor release.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of the Canadian province of Quebec is finalising three open source licences to make it easier for provincial public administrations to share software solutions. The licences should be available in the coming weeks.
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Licensing
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Bill Fitzgerald runs FunnyMonkey to help educators and students improve accessibility to educational materials. He is an educator, open source developer, and entrepreneur, and I was able to speak with him recently about his work and why it matters. And most importantly, how open source methodology makes all the difference.
Bill grew up in Connecticut and attended Boston College where he completed undergraduate studies before enrolling at the University of San Francisco where he earned a masters degree in writing. He then taught English and history at public and private schools. And he’s been both a school administrator and a technology director. What you can tell from talking to Bill is that he loves education.
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Openness/Sharing
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Do you trust Facebook to do the right thing with Oculus Rift? Would you trust any multi-billion dollar company to so thoroughly dominate a new technology that there’s no room for competitors to maneuver?
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Standards/Consortia
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ISO TS 18822 is based on the Boost file-system library for offering common functions to perform on file-systems. There’s various functions relating to the reading and manipulation of paths, files, and directories.
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Health/Nutrition
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One of the first things House Republicans plan to do after Congress reconvenes Tuesday is vote on a bill that would gut Obamacare—and could deprive up to 1.5 million Americans of their employer-sponsored health insurance. After the GOP-controlled House passes the bill, the newly Republican Senate is likely to pass the measure too. What’s more, President Barack Obama may be forced to sign this legislation if it is attached to a must-pass budget bill later this year.
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Security
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Canonical revealed details about a strongSwan vulnerability its Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems that has been found and corrected. It’s not a major issue, but it’s advisable to upgrade nonetheless.
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Finance
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Progressive unrest over free trade policies is shaping up to be a major issue in the contest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, if a strongly worded letter from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the top Obama administration trade official is any sign.
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Privacy
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THE SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has invested in another company, adding a voice recognition software outfit called Wit.ai to its roster.
No financial details have been revealed, but there is a good chunk of gushing, glowing comment from Wit.ai.
We learn that Wit.ai does a good thing, has a number of happy users, and expects to carry on doing what it is doing even when under the wing of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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Last Friday, on my way home from 31c3, a funny thing happened on my way through Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris: I was required by a security agent to not only power up, but also type in my password to unlock my laptop in order to board my flight.
One tweet, and about 12 hours of no Wi-Fi later, I landed to find that a lot of people interested in privacy and security had questions about the details of my adventure, so here it is.
First of all, HackerOne employees don’t ever have access to our customers’ vulnerability reports, therefore there are no exploits stored on my devices, so no customer data was at risk. For more about how we protect vulnerability data, see our own bounty and security page.
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Civil Rights
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In response to growing tensions between the New York Police Department and the city, police unions encouraged officers last week to not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary,” resulting in a 66 percent drop from the same period last year. While the protests have drawn scrutiny for “squandering the department’s credibility” and leaving the city’s streets virtually unattended, they have also had the unintended effect of benefitting New York’s low income residents who are usually the target of the city’s tough-on-crime practices.
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To date, one serious proposal for reform has emerged. On December 8th, Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, proposed that Governor Andrew Cuomo name him, Schneiderman, as an independent special prosecutor to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute police officers in any situation where they cause the death of a civilian. As Schneiderman noted in his letter to the governor, the proposal seeks to address a real problem. When local district attorneys investigate local police officers, there is an inherent conflict of interest. In virtually all usual circumstances, police and prosecutors are partners, working together to build cases against defendants. This is especially true in a place like Staten Island, where the elected district attorney, Dan Donovan, both works closely with the police and answers to many of them as his constituents. As Schneinderman noted, on the rare occasions when prosecutors investigate the police, even when all parties act with the best of intentions, “the question is whether there is public confidence that justice has been served, especially in cases where homicide or other serious charges against the accused officer are not pursued or are dismissed prior to a jury trial.” Cases, in other words, like those of the officers who killed Brown and Garner. (Cuomo has hedged in response to Schneiderman’s idea, saying that he wants to weigh a full package of reforms.)
[...]
Schneiderman’s idea has considerable appeal; his judgment in the Eric Garner case would surely have had more credibility than the one rendered by Donovan. Still, special prosecutors are not necessarily good or bad. Like the locals they replace, they are only as good as the cases they bring, or refrain from bringing. That, ultimately, will rest on the good judgment of the individuals involved, and no one has yet figured out a way of putting the right person in place all the time.
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In December 1998, Lott denied any personal knowledge of the CCC, falsely claiming through a spokesperson that his links to the group amounted to a single speech made over a decade before he’d entered the Senate. In 1992, Sen. Lott praised the CCC as keynote speaker at its national convention; in 1997, he met with top CCC leaders in his Senate office; his column appeared throughout the 1990s in the group’s newsletter, which once published a cheerful photo of Lott and CCC members who were also his close relatives. Lott was also the guest of honor at a 1982 banquet hosted by a Mississippi chapter of the old white Citizens Councils (Extra!, 3-4/99).
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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According to a study from Freedom House, the decline of internet freedom kicked into high-gear in 2014 and is expected to suffer further this year because of opinions derived from 65 nations who have access to the World Wide Web.
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The Federal Communications Commission is planning to vote on new network neutrality rules in February, and one of the viable options on the table is re-classifying broadband internet as a type of public utility, like telephone companies. President Obama openly supports that plan, and congressional Republicans are signaling that they will do everything in their power to thwart the FCC if it goes this route, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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The debate on the upcoming net neutrality vote should first address the overarching issue it creates: are we, as Americans, consumers first or citizens first? What are our true values and priorities?
The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on rules to regulate internet traffic in February. At stake is whether the internet (or, as George W Bush called it, “the internets”) should become a multi-tiered system in which the highest payers get preferential treatment, or whether all users should be treated equally.
Preferential treatment for the highest bidders would mean priority lanes for faster transmissions and slower lanes for others.
Yes, we can argue about whether equal access will spur more innovation or whether preferential access for the highest bidders will deliver more and better content, and thus spark innovations of its own.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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If we want a Europe where treaties like ACTA and TPP are the democratic norm, scrap the European parliament. If we want all the change that happens to be done in whatever the post-tobacco equivalent of smoke-filled rooms is, scrap the European Parliament. And, for the benefit of the raving right in the UK, if you want the UK’s primary trading market to be controlled invisibly via undocumented and unaccountable negotiations between the political lackeys of plutocrats, vote for the UK to “leave” the EU.
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Copyrights
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Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 345,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in 2014. The staggering number is an increase of 75% compared to the year before. While Google has taken some steps to downrank pirate sites, the rate at which takedown notices are sent continues to rise.
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01.05.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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While I have long believed thin client computing is the way to go for most of us, Android/Linux took off on small cheap computers before GNU/Linux.
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A student help desk was spun up at the same time. Laptops are prepared by a group of students for the whole school; one senior even created an imaging program that is now up on GitHub.
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Good news for users of Chromebooks, the notebooks that run Google’s net-centric Chrome OS: you can now run Linux right within a window instead of having to switch back and forth between the two operating systems.
François Beaufort, a Google employee, said this is possible through the downloadable Crouton extension for Chrome.
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Acer kicked off its CES yesterday by announcing the $249 Chromebook 15, a new Chromebook laptop that — for now at least — is the biggest one you can buy. We just got our hands on it here in Las Vegas, and even at a glance it looks like there’s fierce new competitor in the Chromebook market.
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Kernel Space
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The advancement of the Linux kernel in 2014 was nothing short of fantastic! The kernel added so many new features and is now more than 19.1 million lines of code.
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If the change gets merged into Kernel 3.20, the future Linux systems will not need to be rebooted after a kernel upgrade. This may not seem important for the regular users but due to the fact that the Linux powered servers are common widespread, this change would be quite an exciting and useful feature.
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Graphics Stack
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Going along with yesterday’s X.Org Server Saw More Code In 2014 Than 2013, But Its Heydays Are Over article looking at X.Org development statistics for 2014, here’s a look at the Wayland’s development for last year.
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For those getting back into Mesa/Gallium3D driver testing from Git following the holidays, Marek Olšák published another big set of patches this weekend.
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Applications
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MRescueKit is a free, live, bootable, minimal, fast, portable and open source computer operating system that brings you all the tools that you need to rescue a broken OS, recover lost files from damaged drives, as well as to backup your files or clean your system from malware and nasty viruses.
The distribution is derived from the latest version of the well-known 4MLinux operating system and comprises of four standalone distributions that are also based on the 4MLinux, including Antivirus Live CD, BakAndImgCD, 4MParted, as well as 4MRecover.
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I failed to make a note of who submitted btag as a console-environment audio file tagger, and I apologize for that. I do try to give credit where and when it is due.
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Instructionals/Technical
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It seems that everyone has their little magic transcoding line for having Plex and Chromecast to play nice, as everyone runs an underpowered server that cannot do live transcoding.
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I came across Salt while searching for an alternative to Puppet. I like puppet, but I am falling in love with Salt :). This maybe a personal opinion but I found Salt easier to configure and get started with as compared to Puppet. Another reason I like Salt is that it let’s you manage your server configurations from the command line, for example:
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Games
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This will be really useful for testing out games on Linux and seeing exactly how good/bad they perform. Especially Unity games to see exactly how poor they can be on Linux.
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I’ve played a little bit of it, and it seemed to work perfectly fine on Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Nowadays, I try to use as many FOSS as possible. I have recently fully migrated to Linux which gives me an amazing work environment.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME Internet Radio Locator (GIRL) version 1.0.0 (“Fenchurch”) was released on January 3rd, 2015.
The first major 1.0.0 release is dedicated to the writings of the English writer, humorist and dramatist Douglas Adams.
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Reviews
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The latest release of Makulu Linux has two major things going for it: first, it is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than Debian, and second, it uses the Xfce desktop. Makulu seems to be doing a tour or rotation of desktops so perhaps having Xfce shouldn’t be a surprise, anyway.
The Release Announcement / Release Notes give some interesting insight into the background and development of this release, as well as the major features of this release. As always with Makulu Linux, aesthetics was a major focus, and it includes loads of beautiful wallpapers, themes, icons and fonts. The other major focus was speed, thus the choice of Xfce for the desktop, and Firefox rather than Chrome, the synapse launcher rather than slingscold, and the inclusion or omission of various other packages.
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New Releases
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Well, it’s that fabulous time of year again. The time where we all have a few days in a row off work so we can concentrate on the things we really care about, like spending time with family. But after about an hour we all get pretty tired of that and get to work on Pentoo 
[...]
In addition to all the boot loader changes and the standard updates, we have switched metasploit live to using ruby 2.1. This change was not only important because ruby 1.9 support is ending soon, but because it was a near 600% increase in speed. Remember waiting 30+ seconds for msfconsole to load? Well, those days are gone.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Korora, an unofficial Fedora Remix distribution with tweaks and extras to make the system work out of the box and that aims to provide an improved user experience, has been upgraded to version 21 Beta.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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It has been just over a year since I last reviewed Xubuntu, so this review is well overdue.
Xubuntu has been one of my favourite distributions for a long time and for a number of very good reasons.
Xubuntu comes with the XFCE desktop environment which means that it is lightweight and highly customisable.
What I also like about Xubuntu over some of the other XFCE based distributions is that it doesn’t overload you with applications. You get just enough to cover the bases but it is then up to you to install what is important for your needs.
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Drive CX, the display one, is powered by Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture and supports “every major OS in the world” — which for the world of cars includes QNX, Linux, and Android. Basically, it’s a small computer inside your car capable of processing 16.6 megapixels across multiple screens. In Huang’s automotive vision, everything can be a display. Smart mirrors? Check. Displays in the car’s pillars? Check. Head rests? Of course — put a screen on it!
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Phones
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Tizen
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If you look at Samsung’s marketing, they are definitely ready to do battle at CES next week over their Smart TVs or should I proudly say Tizen Smart TVs. The are introducing their new S’UHD TVs (S for Samsung?) as the “Most Seductive TV of all time. PERIOD“. This is a bold statement to make indeed as we know that there are some highly seductive TVs already from the world of LG and Sony, to name a couple.
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Android
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By buying a stake in Vuzix, however, Intel is also getting involved in the enterprise side of wearables — an area where functionality trumps stylishness. Vuzix’s flagship M100 smart glasses may have been fairly rudimentary when we tried them out last year, but that hasn’t stopped the company securing a deal with Lenovo to sell the devices to industrial and commercial markets in China. Vuzix says it’s also targeting the medical, retail, and materials management sectors, claiming that companies can use the M100’s internet-connected display to give workers “unprecedented access to information, data collection and more.” Google is trying to crack the same markets with its Glass at Work scheme, developing the software that will help Glass connect to real workplace scenarios.
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Nokia recently unveiled a snazzy new Android tablet that looked suspiciously like the iPad mini. Now, Chinese company Onda has done one better with a dual-booting iPad Air knockoff that offers high-end specs at competitive price.
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2014 has drawn to a close, or just about, but 2015 has yet to get going. In fact, as of writing, nobody has announced their next latest and greatest. We’re still waiting for Mobile World Congress, which won’t be until a little later in the year to see what Sony, Samsung and HTC have to offer. Right now though, we have a list of smartphones that many of you might have picked up towards the end of 2014, perhaps in Black Friday sales, perhaps through upgrades. Either way, here’s our pick of the best Android smartphones for January 2015.
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CES 2015 is just about here. It’s the first big trade show of the new year. While the actual show floor opens up on Tuesday January 6th, we’ll start seeing announcements flooding in as early as tomorrow. Yep, companies are always looking to get their products announced ahead of their competitors, and every year it happens earlier and earlier. We will be at CES this year, we’re sending Nick to cover the entire thing by himself. And no that’s not a punishment.
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It’s entirely possible to find the nearest pizza restaurant using Google Maps. Or Yelp. Or even just searching in the browser of your choice. But why would you go to all that trouble when something like Pizza Compass exists? It’s both a compass that uses pizza as its needle, and a compass that points you to pizza. It’s deep, man. So deep it’s overflowing with pepperoni and onions like a Chicago pie. I really wish I hadn’t eaten before I started writing this post.
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While Apple CarPlay and Android Auto promise to make your car’s in-dash system infinitely more bearable in the not so distant future, you’re still stuck in the unfortunate position of having to choose between one or the other. Not so Parrot’s whimsically named RNB6, which lets you go both ways. Oh, and it has a dash cam built right in.
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In November 2014, Google rolled out Android 5.0 Lollipop to Nexus users but it created several bugs. The bug fix updates Android 5.0.1 and Android 5.0.2 Lollipop resolved some issues but there are still errors that remain that can be addressed manually.
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At the end of the last year, Google released an Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update to Nexus 7 2012 users. That update delivers some crucial fixes though the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update situation is still extremely murky. Here, we breakdown what we know about the situation and take a look at what Nexus users in general need to know about the most current version of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
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XDA developer, HolyAngel has released an update to his SkyDragon Google Play Edition ROM to version 4.2.1, which is based on stock Android 5.0.1 update, base firmware 3.11.1700.2 and updated to kernel version 3.0.4.
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The Samsung Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update continues to make significant progress and the highly anticipated update is now available in two brand new regions ahead of the U.S. Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop release that appears set to begin sometime this month.
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Getting exposure right when using ND filters can be tricky, unless you enlist the help of NDFilter. This open source app for Android makes it possible to calculate the correct shutter speed for the given ND filter with consummate ease.
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Large projects such as Linux and GIMP demand constant development, to keep up with the ever changing face of technology if for no other reason. If the decision were made tomorrow to pause development on Linux for a few years and just fix bugs and work on security issues, in rapid time Linux would begin to lose its dominance in the enterprise. After two years sans development, the operating system would already be well down the road to obsolescence and almost hopelessly behind. The same would be true of GIMP, even as it continues to gain ground on Photoshop.
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You’ve been using open source software for a while, and now you want to give back to the community. Even with solid advice, you’re probably finding that it’s difficult to sift through all of the projects out there to find one that’s right for you.
To help, I’ve put together a list of five open source projects that you should consider joining in 2015. Many of them may not be the highest profile projects out there, but they do offer some interesting challenges. And helping them is a great way to give back to the community.
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Studios today are remaking everything, slapping on a new coat of paint and reselling you the same experience – but better – for largely the original price. Resident Evil has had how many remakes already? But, for some fans, the studios aren’t focusing on the correct titles and they remake the game themselves.
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Google’s Duncan Laurie converted “WTM2″ motherboard in Coreboot to having Broadwell SoC support. WTM2 is short for Whitetip Mountain 2 and is Intel’s codename for one of their consumer reference board (CRB) designs, which is what’s sampled and tested by Intel’s partners such as Google.
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Prior to 2014, Docker was not well-known, but that all changed over the course of the year. The open-source Docker container virtualization project got its start in March 2013, and in 2014 hit its full stride, achieving its 1.0 release milestone and the embrace of many of the world’s leading IT vendors.
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By leveraging open source software and establishing best practices to protect this data at an ongoing rate, these agencies can take a cue from the private sector and enjoy a sense of trust in the way they store and collaborate on private data.
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Today, it is almost impossible to name a major player in IT that has not embraced open source. Only a few short years ago, many would have argued we would never see that day. Many of us remember the now infamous “Halloween Documents,” the classic quote from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer describing Linux as a “cancer,” and comments made by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, saying, “So certainly we think of [Linux] as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market. But I really do not think in the commercial market, we’ll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way.”
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Producing the barcode itself is trivial in Inkscape — the leading Free/Open Source Software vector drawing application — ever since the extension became part of the standard distribution, with version 0.46. The current version supports several kinds of barcodes, including the UPC and EAN types.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With its Firefox browser rapidly losing share, and its financial ties to Google finished, the Mozilla Foundation finds itself facing the most pivotal moment in its history since its founding more than a decade ago.
“We’re utterly confident in our stability and viability going forward,” Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in a recent interview with Stephen Shankland of Cnet.
But just because the foundation can continue, does that mean it should?
I think there is still an essential role on the web for a non-profit organization that can develop services that may not generate big profits, but where it would be valuable to have a more neutral player.
But at the same time, at this moment, it’s difficult to say what Mozilla is doing that is so essential to the world.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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At a steady clip, database-as-a-service functionality has been emerging as an important component of the evolution of the OpenStack cloud computing platform. When the OpenStack Icehouse version arrived in April of last year, the Trove database-as-a-service project was one of the under-the-hood offerings. And since then, OpenStack releases have featured significatnly improved versions of Trove.
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As 2014 ended, there were many eloquent summaries of the state of open source and the state of cloud computing, but one of the most focused ones came from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. In an online post that was fresh on the heels of a knockout financial quarter for Red Hat, Whitehurst lauded the fact that open source technology is now pervasive, and provided glimpses of how his company is gaining momentum with its cloud efforts.
“Today, it is almost impossible to name a major player in IT that has not embraced open source,” Whitehurst said. “Only a few short years ago, many would have argued we would never see that day.”
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Databases
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The firm already has a prototype that’s in the hands of early customers with plans to go public in 2015, The Register has learned.
The move follows delivery of an ACID-compliant graph database for use with FoundationDB’s existing NoSQL engine.
The document database, like FoundationDB’s graph store, would run on top of the company’s recently upgraded key-value store engine. If it is successful, FoundationDB could succeed in throwing up another bridge between the once-separate worlds of NoSQL and relational databases.
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BSD
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The LLVM project had a great 2014 with a ton of new developers and contributions to the compiler infrastructure and its Clang C/C++ compiler front-end.
In 2014 there were the releases of LLVM 3.4 in January of last year, LLVM 3.5 mid-year, and now LLVM 3.6 is being readied for release in the weeks ahead.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I am glad to announce the release of version 6.2.0 of GNU Chess. GNU Chess is a chess-playing program. It can be used to play chess against the computer on a terminal or, more commonly, as a chess engine for graphical chess frontends.
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Before getting too excited over this latest GNU project, it will likely only be relevant to a few Phoronix readers as it’s a highly scientific. The GNU Nano-Archimedes project page describes the software, “GNU nano-archimedes is a Technology Computer Aided Design tool (TCAD) for the simulation of various technology relevant situtations involving the dynamics of electrons such as the transport in nanometer scale semiconductor devices (nanodevices) and time-dependent many-body problems coming from, for example, quantum chemistry and/or atomic physics. It is based on the Wigner equation, a convenient formulation of quantum mechanics in terms of a phase-space (completely equivalent to the Schroedinger equation), and the density functional theory (DFT). It is also able to deal with time-dependent ab-initio many-body simulations.”
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If you’re not into all of the modern, resource-intensive Linux games or just prefer something more skillful, GNU Chess has been updated for some terminal gaming action.
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Openness/Sharing
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Hardware
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A number of new monitors that support AMD FreeSync are being shown off this week at CES. FreeSync is AMD’s method of matching the monitor’s variable refresh rate to that of the graphics card that is similar to the now VESA-approved DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync.
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Security
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OP Pohjola customers outside Finland are still facing difficulties logging in to the company’s online banking platform, as a cyber attack stretched into a sixth day. Danske Bank’s services were also down on Monday, but it was unclear whether or not that was due to a denial of service attack.
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That North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack is the most improbable bit of US propaganda of 2014. There is ample forensic evidence that the hack was an inside job, while the evidence that it was North Korea is … secret. Not one of my myriad contacts who are present or retired security service officers believe it. But geek stuff aside, there are many adjectives that apply to the North Korean regime, most of them unpleasant. Sophisticated is not one of them.
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Transparency Reporting
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Policing the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over two years in order to prevent a possible Julian Assange escape has already cost the British taxpayers over £9 million, and the bill keeps growing.
The estimated direct cost of policing outside the Knightsbridge building for WikiLeaks founder that took asylum there in June 2012 runs to £11,000 per day.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Of all the problems Sir David Attenborough has witnessed throughout the natural world, he sees none so pressing as the one facing our own species, which he believes could die out if we don’t tackle booming populations.
Himself a patron of Population Matters, a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations, Attenborough believes more women around the world urgently need to be given political control of their bodies.
“It’s desperately difficult, the dangers are apparent to anybody,” he told The Independent.
“We can’t go on increasing at the rate human beings are increasing forever because the Earth is finite and you can’t put infinity into something that is finite.
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The battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us. Once we desanctify animals we desanctify all life. And once life is desanctified the industrial machines of death, and the drone-like bureaucrats, sadists and profiteers who operate them, carry out human carnage as easily as animal carnage. There is a direct link between our industrial slaughterhouses for animals and our industrial weapons used on the battlefields in the Middle East.
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Finance
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The recent passage by Congress of new legislation favourable to loosening controls on risky Wall Street trading is just the most recent example of the consolidation of plutocratic power in Washington. The new rules, written largely by Citibank lobbyists and embraced by the Obama administration, allow large banks to continue using depositors’ money for high-risk investments, the very pattern that helped create the 2008 financial crisis.
This move was supported largely by the establishment in each party. Opposition came from two very different groups: the Tea Party Republicans, who largely represent the views of Main Street businesses, and a residue of old-line progressive social democrats, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Conservative media personalities have long ignored the public’s overwhelming support for wider access to birth control, instead pushing long debunked myths that birth control is cheap and easy to access, is only about preventing pregnancies, and can cause abortion.
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“Selma,” the new biopic of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., offers a snapshot into the civil rights leader’s time in Selma, Alabama, as he led a march through hostile territory to pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson into promoting the Voting Rights Act.
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On New Year’s Eve, Christian Jose Gomez allegedly attacked his mother with an ax. Angry that she had been “nagging” him about moving some boxes up to the attic, Gomez beheaded Maria Suarez-Cassagne in the family’s garage and tried to stuff her headless body into a garbage can, according to investigators. When he couldn’t do that, he fled the home on his bike and was soon captured by local deputies in Oldsmar, Florida. Gomez calmly confessed to the crime and said he’d been planning it for days.
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Privacy
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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, is an organization that saves lives in war-torn and underdeveloped regions, providing health care and training in over 70 different countries. MSF saves lives. Yet, nobody thinks that doctors can “solve” healthcare. It’s widely understood that healthcare is a social issue, and universal health care can not be achieved by either the voluntary work of Doctors or by way of donations and charity alone.
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Late 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced a small software utility called “Let’s Encrypt”, aimed at website administrators. It reduces the time and skill required to encrypt a website from three hours and much Googling to twenty seconds and one command. That initiative is more important than just being another random utility.
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Civil Rights
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Still reeling from combat injuries, Mike Helms opened the letter from the Pentagon, afraid of more bad news.
Military doctors had already told him he couldn’t get treatment for a head injury he’d sustained in a blast in Iraq. After the intelligence officer complained to Congress, he was fired.
But reading the notice, Helms realized it was the best outcome he could have hoped for: Investigators had concluded the military had illegally retaliated against him for blowing the whistle.
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A rapist and murderer is to be put to death in Belgium this week, despite Europe’s ban on the death penalty, after a court granted him the right to euthanasia.
Frank Van Den Bleeken, 52, is not physically ill but claims his “psychological suffering” is unbearable and that he would prefer to die than spend more of his life behind bars.
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Airport security is a farce. And yes, we laughed at your nude body scans.
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The shadowy Court of Protection’s treatment of a 72-year-old grandmother is a national scandal, says Christopher Booker
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DRM
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TELLY ON DEMAND OUTFIT Netflix has been accused of jumping when the copyright cartels say ‘jump’ and of blocking overseas users from watching international content via a virtual private network (VPN).
Torrentfreak is first with the news about the Netflix action, reporting that the subscription streamer is acting because the industry that feeds it, the entertainment business, wants total control over who sees and views its content and where.
We asked Netflix to comment and it told us that it has not recently made any new efforts in the direction of VPNs.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The marble façade of the U.S. Supreme Court building proclaims a high ideal: “Equal Justice Under Law.”
But inside, an elite cadre of lawyers has emerged as first among equals, giving their clients a disproportionate chance to influence the law of the land.
A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.
The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.
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Copyrights
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All around the world today people are celebrating the works that enter the public domain. But there’s not much to celebrate in Australia, where nothing will enter the public domain for another 10 years.
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Strangely unreported by mainstream media, there is a major revision of the copyright monopoly underway in the European Union. And the person in charge, Julia Reda, is a Pirate Party representative. The tide is turning.
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A controversial ruling would give trade courts new power over the web, and a frightening new weapon against piracy
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Windows at 4:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Spiral of death” clings onto Microsoft for a change
Summary: The demise of Windows is demonstrated by various data sources and Microsoft now makes its bread and butter available to Windows rivals before even bothering with Windows itself, showing Microsoft’s own recognition of this trend
IT was Vista 8 that really killed the Windows franchise, following the already-terrible Vista. Is Microsoft saving the other cash cow, Office, now that Windows is quickly becoming irrelevant, thanks to a large degree to Android and other mobile operating systems? It is evident that Google — not just Free software office suites — gives a big challenge not just in operating systems but also in office suites, especially now that it is embracing OpenDocument Format (ODF).
The demise of Windows is measurable. The other day we showed a Windows- and Microsoft-friendly firm, Net Applications, demonstrating quick demise of Vista 8. It’s not just Net Applications indicating this. “StatCounter reports that 8.* has peaked and is in decline,” notes Robert Pogson today. He has followed StatCounter closely for several years now and produced perhaps hundreds of graphs based on StatCounter. “I have some influence in my family’s choices,” he writes, “but I was teaching up north most of the year when my family was growing up, starting professional careers and making choices in IT. Most of them use GNU/Linux. Most of them use Android/Linux, but none use that other OS, not one.” The same is true in our house.
“There is no denying that Microsoft is in serious trouble.”Windows is becoming such a fringe player that even Microsoft starts to ignore it. According to this new report:
Range of Office and Windows Phone announcements coming soon following iOS and Android launch
A senior Microsoft Office spokesperson has reassured Windows Phone fans that, despite a dearth of new products recently, the company is still very much behind its mobile platform.
What it basically says is that Microsoft brings Office first to Google’s and Apple’s platforms. There is not yet a version for Windows (Phone)! Over the past few weeks I have been speaking a lot with a Microsoft developer who told me that Microsoft was silently shrinking, cutting ties with external workforce (does not count as layoffs) and squeezing about a dozen people in a single office (they used to all have an office of their own). The company even moves into smaller buildings. There is no denying that Microsoft is in serious trouble. The common carriers — and hence the cash cows — are dying. The company’s friends at IDG now badmouth a move [1] from Windows XP (a lot of people still use it) to GNU/Linux for the most ridiculous reasons, showing the company’s great reliance on propaganda and non-technical brainwash. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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While VDI, Linux and BYOD might look like an attractive alternative to trudging down the Windows Client path once again, they all come with considerable baggage.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance at 4:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
CC BY-SA 4.0
Summary: Piketty is approached by Bill Gates, who bemoans the idea that the plutocrats too should pay tax like the rest of us
BEST-SELLING author Piketty reveals some interesting details about the mindset of Bill Gates, the man who created — using criminal activity — software monopolies and is now preoccupied with monopolies in education (public sector), a GMO monopoly, etc.
“This relates to the whole “job creator” myth — a myth more harmful that that of the “free market”.”As mentioned the other day, Gates is increasing his personal wealth very quickly. He is not giving away or back, except in the form of media distortion and spin (he bribes a lot of publications and channels for this distortion and spin). The money he acquires is not earned through hard work; some of it is essentially stolen from taxpayers (through bamboozled politicians), taken by force from poor and exploited people, and on top of this Gates evades tax using the Gates Foundation.
A reader sent us this article about two of the most famous people for supposed ‘charity’ (actually investing tax-free in large corporations that exceptionally harm society and the planet). The article says that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett became $21.1 billion richer in just one year (last year). To quote: “The fact that wealth begets more wealth was illustrated once again last year by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, currently the two richest people on Earth. According to Bloomberg, the pair finished 2014 a combined $21.1 billion richer than when the year began. (Gates’ fortune rose $8.1 billion to a total of $86.6 billion. Buffett’s rose $13 billion; he’s now worth $73.8 billion.)”
A lot of gullible people think that Gates is feeding the world with wealth rather than hoarding at the world’s expense (this money comes or is generated by other people’s labour), so to them the idea of Gates dodging tax may seem appealing. This relates to the whole “job creator” myth — a myth more harmful that that of the “free market”. Gates and Buffett happily let their bribed papers tell us they are “givers” and the Wall Street press (Bloomberg), owned itself by a plutocratic billionaire, reveals what Gates thinks about paying tax:
“I had this discussion with Bill Gates a couple of weeks ago,” Piketty, the author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” said today at an economics conference in Boston. “He told me, ‘I love everything that’s in your book, but I don’t want to pay more tax.” A tax on wealth is one of Piketty’s key recommendations for addressing inequality.
The famous thief Bill Gates literally tells Piketty: “I don’t want to pay more tax”. what a ‘generous’ guy, eh?
“Minor Gates apology going on there,” wrote to us a reader, “and emphasized in articles based on the Bloomberg post.”
Never expect balanced coverage of Gates from Wall Street papers that are themselves owned by famous billionaires. This includes the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. These newspapers exist to serve power and depreciate privileges of all except the super-rich. █
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01.04.15
Posted in Europe at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Željko Topić is called a “corrupt Balkans gangster” amid many corruption charges against him in Croatia
The only EPO manager who can challenge his boss when it comes to corruption is Mr. Topić, who faces many corruption charges. In a new interview published by dnevno.hr [PDF] we are beginning to see what we were about to show in the coming weeks. Topić is a thug and probably a serious white-collar criminal; the fact that he managed to become EPO Vice-President says a lot about the EPO itself. For Topić this is just one among many battles. He earned notoriety and many enemies in his home country for legitimate reasons.
“The Croatian news portal dnevno.hr,” informs us a source, “recently had a big interview with the Croatian entrepreneur Rikard Frgacic who is involved in various lawsuits against the Croatian SIPO and Mr. Topić. and Lufthansa concerning the allegedly corrupt reassignment of a trademark (“Airplus”) to Lufthansa.
“The interview takes place against the background of the current Presidential election campaign in Croatia and it includes a mention of Mr. Topić.
“Here is the commentary that was forwarded from Croatia:
Enclosed you can find Mr. Frgacic’ interview for portal “Dnevno.hr” where, among other things, he mentioned T.:
“… Nadam se da ce tog korumpiranog balkanskog gangstera uskoro Njemacka policija uhititi i transferirati u Hrvatsku na suđenje zbog enormne štete i protuzakonitih radnji koje je pocinio na mjestu ravnatelja DZIV-a.”
Translation:
“I hope that German police will arrest this corrupt Balkans gangster and transfer him to Croatia for trial soon, because of the huge damage and unlawful actions which he did in the post of Director General of the SIPO.”
“It seems that dnevno.hr is currently being blocked by hackers,” [crackers] we are told, “but the interview is accessible on another portal, oko.hr.
The original Croatian text of the section of the interview where Topic is mentioned is as follows:
Kolika je procijenjena vrijednost brenda AirPlus?
To je dobro pitanje za dr. Ivu Josipovića i za njegovog prijatelja magistra Željka Topića, nekadašnjeg ravnatelja DZIV-a RH, trenutno zaposlenog u minhenskom EPO-u.
Nadam se da će tog korumpiranog balkanskog gangstera uskoro Njemačka policija uhititi i transferirati u Hrvatsku na suđenje zbog enorme štete i protuzakonitih radnji koje je počinio na mjestu ravnatelja DZIVa.
Kako neslužbeno saznajem, jedan od predmeta protiv nekadašnjeg ravnatelja DZIV-a istražuje i ŽDO u Zagrebu gdje jedan od tragova vodi prema Pantovčaku. Međutim, istražiteljica šokira svojim neinteligentnim ili protuzakonitim zaključcima, među kojima svakako fascinira jedna njena izjava kako naš muzikalni predsjednik ne bi bio izabran od strane naroda da nije pošten.
Dalje zaključite sami…
Uostalom, u dosadašnjem sudskom postupku protiv “Luftike” pristupile su mi dvije zločinačke organizacije s ponudom za preuzimanje spora, od kojih jedna vodi do suca Vrhovnog suda RH i njemačkog veleposlanstva u Zagrebu.
Zanimljivo pitanje koje bi se moglo otvoriti u tom kaznenom postupku bit će protuzakonita zapošljavanja osoba i u DZIV-u na poticaj gospodina Josipovića. Gotovo tri četvrtine zaposlenika DZIV-a čine polufabricirani kadrovi iz HDS-ZAMP-a. Zanimljivo je i to da se i sam predsjednik kitio tuđim perjem kada je u pitanju intelektualno vlasništvo i spominjanje imena Air-Plus.
This is not pure gossip. We are going to say more about Topić in weeks to come. █
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