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05.11.13

While New Zealand (NZ) Stomps on Software Patents High US Court Helps Legitimise Them, Again

Posted in America, Patents at 2:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Corporations-run nation cannot listen to the wisdom of citizens-run nation

Statue of wisdom

Summary: In disappointing news from CAFC, which helped make software patents the monster they have become in the United States (and only in the United States, deviating from much of the world), there is further legitimisation of this root problem, whereas NZ does the very opposite

WHETHER software patents in New Zealand have officially been destroyed may definitely be a subject of active debate (we wrote about it twice already), but de-legitimisation of software patents is certainly achieved and the NZ press still plays along [1, 2, 3], making software patents look very bad. Patent lawyers are hardly quoted in NZ articles and multinational corporations like IBM and Microsoft seem to have fled from the scene, having lobbied heavily to legitimise software patents in NZ (unbelievable overreach not just by corporations but by foreign corporations). As Alan Lord put it the other day, “Sanity in #NewZealand. Gov says NO to #swpats [software patents] … When is the USA going to wake up and smell the coffee?”

“Patent lawyers are hardly quoted in NZ articles and multinational corporations like IBM and Microsoft seem to have fled from the scene, having lobbied heavily to legitimise software patents in NZ (unbelievable overreach not just by corporations but by foreign corporations).”The rude patent boosting site (patent lawyers) say “New Zealand has not abolished software patents”, but this is more spin than truth. Being IAM ‘magazine’, they always try to discredit software patents-hostile sources and instead push the pro-software patents line.

Meanwhile, teaches us Reuters in some breaking news (overnight), the United States has done nothing like NZ, in spite of having another opportunity. The headline says that the “U.S. appeals court issues divided ruling in software patent case” and the opening paragraph names the Australian company Alice Corp: “A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that Australia’s Alice Corp does not hold valid patents on a computerized trading platform, but it remained unclear how the decision would affect other software patents.

“The software industry had been watching the case for a clue to legal protection of intellectual property rights that generate much of the sector’s profits. But the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals failed to reach a consensus on how to determine what software is patentable.”

As TechDirt put it, “10 Judges, 135 Pages Of Ruling About Software Patents… And Zero Clarification”. It says that CAFC “has quite the reputation for mucking up rulings concerning patents over the years. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that CAFC is a key reason that our patent system is so screwed up today. So, leave it to CAFC to issue one of the most bizarre and useless rulings ever concerning software patents. The specific case is CLS Bank v. Alice Corp, and we had noted this was a chance for CAFC to actually fix the software patents problem, though the oral hearings suggested a very conflicted court, and that’s certainly what came out in the ruling. Or, rather, I should say: rulings.”

“There are seven (count ‘em) different opinions issued in the document,” the site says, “none of them meaning anything, because none of them — other than that one paragraph above, have more than the majority in agreement.”

Masnick notes that “basically, all of this means nothing. It doesn’t help to wipe out or clarify software patents at all. It doesn’t really help anyone. It probably doesn’t make anyone on any side of this issue happy. It just leads to more confusion.

“However, as Julie Samuels at the EFF notes, hopefully this will help make it clear to the Supreme Court that it finally needs to issue a clear ruling on software patents, after completely punting the last time it had a chance.”

“We wrote about CAFC before and we also wrote about SCOTUS, noting its role in perpetuating software patents in the US. Both rule favourably towards software patents, perhaps due to influence from large corporations.”Julie Samuels says “It’s Time [for SCOTUS] to Take Up Software Patents (Again)”

We wrote about CAFC before and we also wrote about SCOTUS, noting its role in perpetuating software patents in the US. Both rule favourably towards software patents, perhaps due to influence from large corporations. Just look who the administration appoints to run the patent system and the courts.

Surprisingly (or not), it was a law professor who actually said the ruling was favourable to weakening of software patents. This contradicts somewhat other reports we can locate at this stage (this is fresh news). █

05.10.13

Yahoo ‘Search’ is Still a Microsoft Front End, Its Real Search Engine Destroyed by Microsoft Entryism

Posted in Microsoft, Search at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Man glance

Summary: Yahoo is left with no real capacity to provide search results of its own; Microsoft elongates the pain with another one-way (self-serving) deal

Yahoo is an excellent example of the toll of Microsoft’s behaviour. Many people lost their job, as I explained yesterday morning in a one-hour interview with a technology journalist. According to the news, Yahoo fell deeper into Microsoft’s trap, which will probably result in yet more cuts, affecting customers too (will Flicker be next to get shut down?). To quote: “Yahoo signed a deal with Microsoft in 2009 that came into force the following year and effectively turned Yahoo from an internet search engine provider into an advertising broker, with Microsoft’s Bing providing Yahoo’s internet search engine. The two firms signed a 10 year deal with exclusivity clauses that can be exited during the term, however Microsoft has signed a deal to continue being Yahoo’s exclusive search engine provider.

“There are other such search engines which use Microsoft results without it appearing so to the user.”“Tucked into Yahoo’s 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft’s decision to renew also revealed some interesting terms of the deal. For example, Microsoft gets just 12 percent of revenue generated by its search results, an amount that could decrease to seven percent if Microsoft doesn’t renew what Yahoo calls its “sales exclusivity for premium search advertisers”.”

There are other such search engines which use Microsoft results without it appearing so to the user. It is an effective strategy for Microsoft. Facebook is another example because Facebook shares its data with Microsoft, one of the most influential shareholders.

Yahoo is hijacked to very high a degree. iophk says “Yahoo is mostly a shell of a company now. It’s a bit like Nokia” (see our Nokia pages).

“Wait until the revisionists tell us that Yahoo killed itself.”Google’s Mayer made a last attempt to rescue Yahoo after Yahoo nearly signed a Google deal (Microsoft used AstroTurfers to covertly prevent this). Here is another report, stating that “Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer has attempted unsuccessfully to unravel a 10-year search-advertising pact with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in favor of a deal with Google Inc. (GOOG), according to people familiar with the matter.”

Nokia is going down the same road as Yahoo. Microsoft killed it. What went wrong with MeeGo? Microsoft bribed Nokia, put a mole in it, then ‘lost interest’ in MeeGo (the Microsoft alter-ego). Now it’s a patent trolls feeder for Microsoft. Watch this revisionism from TechRadar (often a source of FUD and bait headlines that hurt Linux). That’s not how most of us remember it. In fact, Nokia’s Linux-based handsets continued to outsell the Windows ones long after the Microsoft deal had been signed. Wait until the revisionists tell us that Yahoo killed itself. Revisionists did that to Netscape. █

Microsoft Still Sabotaging GNU/Linux Adoption by Infecting More Hardware With Windows-only Components

Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Windows at 8:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hard drive

Summary: Western Digital and other hardware companies help turn general-purpose machinery into Windows-expecting machinery

Our criticism of UEFI Restricted Boot is not just to do with GNU/Linux and BSD. It’s to do with a troubling trend where hardware gets closely tied to software. It’s an artificial limitation which is dangerous and costly. Tech tabloid ZDNet has this post which says “ARM now recommends UEFI as the preferred boot loader for its 64-bit processors that are based on the ARMv8 AArch64 architecture, silicon that is finding its way into all sorts of devices, from smartphones to servers and introduced a new raft of features, including a larger register file, enhanced addressing range and support for cryptography instructions.”

“With FAT preinstalled, Microsoft comes knocking to demand payments, even if support for FAT is implemented by Linux.”This is not good. And not just because of Microsoft. On devices there is no option for disabling Restricted Boot. Microsoft can exploit that for unfair advantage, or an antitrust violation. Moreover, says Claudio in D*, “First it was Winmodems, and now it’s Windrives? WTF?!? This is 2013, guys.”

To quote the article he references: “PC makers using the Black SSHD will be able to choose between WD’s proprietary driver and one provided by Intel. The drivers behave similarly, according to Rutledge, but they’re not identical. The WD driver was developed in-house and works with both Windows 7 and 8. In an interesting twist, that driver also employs system memory as part of the caching scheme. We’ll probably have to wait until the Haswell launch next month to find out exactly what Intel is bringing to the table.” (source)

As TomTom found out, there is another problem with storage devices. With FAT preinstalled, Microsoft comes knocking to demand payments, even if support for FAT is implemented by Linux. There is also preinstalled NTFS on Seagate, which makes it no better than Western Digital with built-in DRM (all magnetic drives seem to be Microsoft-infected). These are issues we need to protest against. It’s the beginning of the slippery slope. Hardware, unlike software. cannot be re-imaged (like replacing Windows with GNU/Linux). █

New Zealand Bill Which Denounces Software Patents Still Permits Them, Just the Beginning of a Solution But Not the End

Posted in Patents at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

New Zealand’s geographical landscape still far better than its patent landscape

New Zealand landscape

Summary: Reservations against excessive optimism that lead to passiveness and apathy; a loophole for software patenting in NZ (same as in EU) remains in tact and the Bill is not yet passed, leaving time for further amendments

The debate over software patents in New Zealand will not be finished by a Craig Foss admission that has was wrong. For one thing, the new Bill has not been signed yet; moreover, loopholes remain for patenting software in the island. One report sarcastically says that NZ had to ban software patents twice, not just once. To quote: “The software patentability row in New Zealand, which broke out last August over the wording of new patent legislation, seems to have been settled with the release of new legislation by the government.

“For one thing, the new Bill has not been signed yet; moreover, loopholes remain for patenting software in the island.”“In a move that’s been welcomed locally by the IT industry, the government has clarified the original intention of the legislation, that software alone should not be patentable.”

This other report gives not the full story, but being Forbes, we don’t have high expectations to begin with. It says: “In a bill passed earlier today, the Government of New Zealand announced that software in the country will no longer be patentable. New Zealand’s largest IT representative body, the Institute of IT Professionals, expressed relief and said the decision removed a major barrier to software-led innovation.”

Here is the Supplementary Order Paper, which InternetNZ welcomes. To quote: “InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) welcomes today’s tabling of a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that makes it clear that computer software is not patentable in New Zealand.”

This is tabled, not passed. Moreover, explains Glyn Moody, the "as such" loophole remains and to use his own words: “Given all the problems with the phrase “as such”, it would have been easier to omit it completely, rather than resort to well-meaning but necessarily limited attempts to clarify it through examples.”

Here is IDG’s report and another from a local competitor with no US ties. There are many reports which emphasise the bill has not passed yet (the corporate press got it wrong). Here is a particulary good report from a very bright reporter.

Is the US next? Unlikely, not any time soon! The USPTO still enjoys the consent from large corporations that run the nation, so trolls (small entities) are the only element primed for abolition. But a group of VCs, including Brad Feld, is still working on real reform — a reform which tar gets software patents. To quote Feld: “Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Jason Mendelson, and I have been talking about the problem of software patents for a long time and Fred brought it up again today on his blog in a post titled Piecemeal Patent Reform. It’s nice to see Senator Chuck Schumer proposing a simple yet powerful solution to part of the software patent problem.”

Schumer, whom we mentioned the other day, is one of the few who actually do this correctly this time around (not like his last time [1, 2], this time he is not running just after trolls). Let’s support his endeavour. █

Bribing Companies That Expose Microsoft Extortion, Preventing Them From Showing What It Really is That Microsoft Does (RICO Act Violation)

Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Barnes and Noble: From hero to zero; Legitimising Microsoft FUD rather than challenging it, eventually selling out

Barnes and Noble

Summary: The Barnes and Noble (B & N) saga continues following disclosure of a typically-NDA’d nastygram and a formal complaint to the government

There have been little concrete exhibits which show how much Microsoft profits from Android patent extortion. The figures may be negligible, but the goal of Microsoft is to discourage use of Android, not just to tax it. FUD has been a tool of choice. It’s effective to a degree, but it has hardly stopped Android’s explosive growth.

“Barnes & Noble was essentially passed a large bribe after it litigated against Microsoft’s extortion of Android (reverse-SLAPP by Microsoft).”There is this new post which attempts to quantity the cost of extortion. “Microsoft has had trouble getting people to use its Windows Phone operating systems, however, it might make as much as $3.4 billion on Android phones,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes.

This is based on conjectures and speculations. We oughtn’t help legitimise those. Remember the FUD about royalties allegedly paid by HTC [1, 2].

One should generally avoid certain companies not for paying Microsoft for Linux but for legitimising the claim that Linux has a debt to Microsoft. It’s a crucial point to grasp.

There is an interesting twist in the business of B & N, which we coincidentally wrote about earlier this week. “Shares of Barnes & Noble skyrocketed in early trading on Thursday after a report said Microsoft was offering $1 billion for the digital assets of the bookseller’s e-reader business.” That is what the trend-setting media says. Recall that “Microsoft already owns about 17.6 percent of the Nook division, having paid $300 million last year. According to TechCrunch, the company would seek to take over the unit’s e-books and devices operations.”

Barnes & Noble was essentially passed a large bribe after it litigated against Microsoft's extortion of Android (reverse-SLAPP by Microsoft). This was a threat to the perceived legitimacy of the extortion, so Microsoft paid up for the silence. Corruption indeed. Followed by coverup. There is not much for B & N to gain except money and in fact it continues to sell Android devices, not Windows. We showed it earlier in the week. Microsoft may already be extorting those devices through complicated-to-analyse extortion deals which target the manufacturer.

Swapnil Bhartiya, writing about AstroTurfing by Microsoft (“perception management”), has this to say: “The amount of resources Microsoft is investing in PR stunts – whether it be bogus patent signing deals with Android players (which could be about things like FAT partitions – B&N case already showed that all of Microsoft’s accusations were bogus and bluff and that’s why the company settled out side the court just before it moved forward and ‘paid’ B&N in the name of ‘investment) or these ad campaigns. The amount of experience Microsoft is gaining in smear campaigns Microsoft may actually have a better career as a video ad company than a software maker.”

Fortunately, the three Android tablets that my parents and I use are not part of the patent extortion blanket of Microsoft. Vote with your wallet and never buy anything at all from Barnes and Noble. it’s the only way for your voice to count. █

New Wave of ‘FOSS is Dangerous’ Articles and the Microsoft Connection

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Microsoft at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Skulls

Summary: Misinformation and selective reporting on software risks sometimes come from Microsoft-tied firms

There seems to have been a growing level of deception/reality distortion field, seeking to establish a consensus that FOSS is dangerous to adopt (security and compliance are the two strands). This distortion of the truth, or accentuation of perceived pitfalls, is nothing new. The recent growth, however, is noteworthy. Maybe it is proportional to the growth of FOSS, which is viewed as an opportunity for proprietary software houses like Black Duck to cash in on. Not just Microsoft-connected entities are part of this (Black Duck is Microsoft-connected in several ways). Lesser known firms, White Source and others, are starting to show up. We do not know the professional background of the managers there, but none of these firms can be described as FOSS-oriented.

“This distortion of the truth, or accentuation of perceived pitfalls, is nothing new.”Univa and Sonatype are some of the examples we named more recently because they helped generate FOSS-hostile coverage using the ‘risk’ theme. I saw about 4 such articles in the past 2 weeks (omitting stories about the same topic), which is far more than the average. I’ve watched this closely for almost a decade.

IDG repeatedly posted (in several sites) some article which cites/references/promotes OpenLogic, a company run by a Microsoft veteran who started it. It also quotes him and describes his ventures as follows: “Steven Grandchamp has seen companies face serious problems because of lax oversight of open-source software.”

“A lot of information about FOSS these days is being manufactured by proprietary entities, some of which are founded and run by people from Microsoft.”So he worked for Microsoft and then decided to change careers to focus on proprietary software which makes FOSS look bad. The proprietary code analysers are being openwashed by stating that they are being used on FOSS and one report about it says: “The service, which began as the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity, was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006 and is now managed by Coverity.”

Coverity is not a foe of FOSS and much of its output has been favourable to FOSS. However, let us not lose sight of motives, which are quite independent from truth. A lot of information about FOSS these days is being manufactured by proprietary entities, some of which are founded and run by people from Microsoft. Opportunism? That might be an understatement. They mostly legitimise the fiction that proprietary software comes with no risk (e.g. licenses expiration, projects dying, going the wrong way), whereas it’s FOSS — only FOSS — that involves high risk. █

After Paying CFOs to Shut Up About Financial Conduct at Microsoft, Goldman Sachs Person Becomes Next Microsoft CFO

Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers.”

–The Economist, 1999

Summary: Fraudulent firm Goldman Sachs is where Microsoft gets its next CFO from (C*O-level master of accounting at the relative young age of 41); reminder of the dark (but censored) history of accounting practices at Microsoft

T

here have been shades of Enron at Microsoft, with whistleblowers already alleging financial fraud at the abusive, dishonest monopolist which employed them. Microsoft paid millions of dollars for such whistleblowers to shut up after they had complained and later Microsoft settled with the prosecutors (another bribe). This has not the hallmark of a company that does remarkably well. In the US, quite famously, large corporations including oil giants are receiving government subsidies (taxpayers’ money or deeper national debt). It is marketed as necessary to protect “national interests” or “national security” (the latter usually applies to surveillance and military force). Remember how Goldman Sachs and other rogue financial firms got bailed out by taxpayers’ money that those taxpayers don’t even have (thus contributing to national debt rather than corporate debt). It’s debt-shifting. Anyway, the point to be made here that a lot of institutionalised corruption is going on, and it is going on unpunished. It’s a systemic issue. The existence of this issue need not be met with disbelief.

“In the US, quite famously, large corporations including oil giants are receiving government subsidies (taxpayers’ money or deeper national debt).”“Microsoft on Wednesday named Amy Hood its new chief financial officer, effective immediately,” says IDG. Watch the urgency: “Hood was promoted from CFO of the Microsoft Business Division (MBD). She replaces outgoing CFO Peter Klein, whom Microsoft would stay at the company through the end of June “to ensure a smooth transition.””

Where did Hood come from? Well, here goes IDG again: “Hood, 41, joined Microsoft’s investor relations team in 2002 after working as an investment banker and capital markets analyst at Goldman Sachs.”

We wrote about Goldman Sachs‘s connections with Microsoft several times before. Remember that Microsoft already bribed Klein and his predecessor [1, 2] (the last two CFOs) to keep silent about what they had seen. iophk, who is older than the new Microsoft CFO, says that Microsoft “ran a loss recently in spite of Enron accounting. Seems to have been going on since 1998″ (he cites The Economist for support).

“It’s noteworthy that Microsoft ran a loss in 1998, but then changed it’s accounting to cover the loss.”
      –iophkBe sceptical of Microsoft financial figures because we know damn well (it is easily provable) that it lies about software ‘sales’ all the time. Insiders from Microsoft already told the world that Microsoft cheats in its financial reports. Microsoft bribed to silence them all. It’s the usual financial distortion of Microsoft profit reports and information about profits. When it comes to Vista 8, the real numbers are estimated to be just half what Microsoft claims them to be.

“It’s noteworthy that Microsoft ran a loss in 1998, but then changed it’s accounting to cover the loss. Now, even with the new accounting, it’s running a loss that it can’t cover up,” concludes iophk. Yes, Microsoft reported losses. █

05.09.13

Links 9/5/2013: Facebook Exploitation of Android, Copyright and Privacy Legal Threats

Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source for software taxation

    Finance Act 2012 introduced several retrospective amendments, purportedly ‘clarificatory’, to the Income-tax Act, 1961, with respect to non-resident taxpayers. A key amendment was the extension of ‘royalty’ to include payment toward shrink-wrapped software, connectivity charges, transponder hire charges and so on. Another significant amendment related to “indirect transfer” of capital assets located in India, thereby overcoming the Supreme Court decision in the case of Vodafone.

  • Continuent Tungsten Replicator Is Now 100% Open Source
  • Using open source to build sustainable communities

    A forthcoming documentary from Filament Features will feature the work of the Open Source Ecology project, which aims to produce a set of open source tools capable of building environmentally sustainable communities.

  • Open-source goes RF

    Radio frequency (RF) signals run from about 3kHz to 300GHz. As a test and measurement designer, some of my data acquisition rates will get into the 100s of kHz, or perhaps up to 10s of MHz with a digital oscilloscope, but usually that’s all. I also typically try to use existing protocols for as much of the communication as I can, typically USB, Serial, GPIB, SPI, I2C or occasionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi or radio.

  • Advantages of open source for SMEs

    More and more SMEs are turning to open source IT and telephony solutions for a variety of reasons, among them cost savings and the flexibility to manage systems such as scaling up or down, according to business needs.

  • Open Source Homomorphic Cryptography

    How fast things move from theoretical, through experimental to implementation. It was only recently that a semi-practical scheme for homomorphic encryption was invented and we already have an open source implementation in C++.

  • Open Source Geospatial Laboratory established at the University of Southampton, UK

    We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Open Source Geospatial Laboratory at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

  • Gluu Provides Toshiba Open Source Authorization and Authentication Platform for New Cloud TV Services

    Gluu’s open source authorization and authentication platform, OX, will enable the next generation of Toshiba Cloud TV Services to authenticate consumers and integrate with popular Internet apps.

  • MapR releases M7, its commercial HBase distro
  • “Open Source Technology Will Bring In A Services-Based Model With A Reasonable Opex, Zero Capex”

    OSS facilitates the preservation of a wide range of information for future developments and it comes with considerable financial savings. Government institutes and PSUs are looking forward to more adoption and implementation of OSS in their IT infrastructure. The increasing awareness of open source in the public and government sector has been one of the significant developments in IT technology.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Packaged apps now available in Chrome Web Store

        Chrome users can have enhanced experience with what Google calls the packaged apps which are now available throuh the Chrome Web Store. Google had announced the developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher a few months ago. Google enabled developers to upload their packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test them, but there was no way for users to find those apps an install them.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • MySQL storage engine TokuDB goes open source

      Version 7 of TokuDB, Tokutek’s high performance MySQL Database storage engine, has been released as an open source community edition and as a new supported TokuDB Enterprise Edition. TokuDB has previously been a proprietary storage engine for MySQL which has specialised in handling write-intensive workloads. Developed orignally by researchers at MIT, Rutgers and the State University of New York, the storage engine uses Fractal Tree indexing, a technique based on cache-oblivious algorithms.

    • Another Open-Source Win with Tokutek’s MySQL Storage Engine

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • New Project to Create the First Java Open Source Office Suite

      At the moment most of the office suite are developed in C++ or in JavaScript. Joeffice is the first open source office suite in Java. Japplis has chosen the Apache license 2.0 which makes it possible to change the code without the need to share the modified code.

  • CMS

    • The Four Worst Myths about Open Source CMS

      4. There is no training or support if you choose open source.

      Um, no. Any developer who has spent time honing his open source craft can tell you that this is untrue. Just because some well-funded proprietary CMS hosts an annual conference doesn’t mean that the open source users lacks support. Open source users can find online help, forums, paid classes, local meet ups, YouTube how-tos, expensive manuals, more expensive consultants, and whizz-bang contract developers. The support and training are there; they just don’t get packaged into some monthly fee along with the CMS itself.

    • Victoria Legal aid taps Drupal for website redesign

      Victoria Legal Aid has gone live with a new Web presence based on Drupal. Previously the organisation, which provides legal aid to disadvantaged Victorians, used the proprietary RedDot content management system.

    • Arlington Board OKs Sharing Website Code with Open-Source Community

      With a nod to the open government movement, the Arlington County Board this weekend unanimously approved making portions of the programming behind the county website publicly available.

    • Joomla! 3.1 Released; Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Adds Tags to Its Core

      Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system that allows dynamic tagging across content-types. Tags hasn’t been created for articles only, but rather Joomla integrated tagging into other areas of its core that made sense (e.g. contacts, feeds, etc). For example, Tags allow end-users to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles with other content types any way they like. These tags can be dynamically created from the content, without having to navigate to the Tags component, thus bringing both power and simplicity.

    • Joomla finally gets built-in tagging

      Administrators of the Joomla blogging platform and content management system can now tag their content so it will be better indexed and automatically routed to the correct locations on their websites.

    • Alert: What’s Coming Up for Open Source CMS in May 2013

  • Education

  • Healthcare

  • Business

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Blender 2.67 renders cartoons

      For about 2 years, the Blender open source 3D modelling package has included Cycles, a render engine that uses path tracing. This engine can be used to produce photorealistic images with little effort. Until now, those who wanted to render a graphical or cartoon-like image for a 3D model had to use Blender’s internal render engine for such Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR). However, this engine is quite old and doesn’t always produce convincing results. The new version 2.67 of Blender closes the gap by offering the Freestyle cartoon render engine. Freestyle uses 3D geometry to calculate lines that can either be used on their own or combined with the surface rendering results from other engines.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Just how secure is open source software?

      The US government is also a vocal supporter of open source software. Examples of recent initiatives include whitehouse.gov, the Federal Register and data.gov. Much of the internet is run using open source tools such as Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, while a plethora of companies have found good business cases for using open source software. Don Smith, director of technology at Dell SecureWorks, says the main reason businesses would pick free and open source software (FOSS) over proprietary technology is to save money. He also suggests that open source software frequently offers greater innovation than proprietary systems.

      [...]

      So, good reasons to go for open source software, but what about security? Many people view open source software as something that can be changed or edited by anybody, much like a Wikipedia entry. That generally isn’t the case, however, as open source communities usually have mechanisms in place to prevent such random tinkering – for example, submitting new code to a peer review before it is entered into a particular project. Furthermore, Smith says one of the most common misconceptions about FOSS is the belief that it is written by amateur coders – again, typically untrue.

      “The vast majority of FOSS is written by software professionals, very often employed by a company that is making money from that same software, either through subscriptions, support or professional services. It is obviously in the interest of these businesses to ensure their software works well and their coding is of high quality,” he says.

    • Government can reap benefits of IT commoditisation by embracing open source

      Government departments can improve competitiveness in procurement by increasing use of open source software in an increasingly commoditised IT market, according to Tariq Rashid , head of IT reform at the Cabinet Office.

    • Second Open Gov Summit hosted by Zaizi challenges UK public sector to put users at the centre of the IT universe

      The second Open Gov Summit took place yesterday April 25th at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, in the heart of Westminster. London-based open source consultancy Zaizi hosted the fully-booked Summit, which attracted IT professionals from central and local government and third sector organisations. The Summit revealed encouraging progress for open source in the public sector, helped by the government’s decision to adopt open standards last November. This year’s debate also emphasised the growing relevance of Cloud as organisations migrate to more open, flexible architectures and deliver applications through a wider range of devices.

    • Study: Greek authorities need education on open source and its procurement

      Public administrations in Greece would benefit from a campaign to increase their knowledge on open source, including how to best procure such solutions, recommends a study published on Joinup yesterday. In procurement, public administrations should request experience in managing open source projects.

    • Open source software quality floated

      Pham Hong Quang, Chair of the Vietnam Free and Open Source Software Association (VFOSSA) has confirmed that the quality of products is the greatest concern of the agencies and enterprises planning to use open source software.

    • Spanish region saves a fortune by moving to open source

      In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.

    • Open Gov Summit: Bristol aspires to match New York’s smart use of data

      We caught up with Gavin Beckett, chief enterprise architect at Bristol city council, to discuss open data and designing smart cities

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • EU retailers pledge support for Brazilian non-GMO soy

      Today (8 May 2013) major European retailers from five countries, including Germany’s REWE Group, EDEKA and LIDL have released the Brussels Soy Declaration in which they have pledged support for the non-GMO soy production system of Brazil.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jehovah’s Witnesses could face civil service duty

      Jehovah’s Witnesses’ current exemption from military service could extend to other groups with strong convictions, if one proposal in a new report on the matter is accepted. Alternatively, they could be required to perform civil, rather than military, service.

    • Deputy to NSA Donilon: a sweet stepping stone

      Others in the Donilon-Deputy Alumni Club include Denis McDonough, who’s now Obama’s chief of staff, and CIA Director John Brennan, who was Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. (And it’s worth noting that Donilon himself was the Deputy NSA before becoming the head honcho.)

    • Pakistan’s court declares US drone strikes as illegal

      A Pakistani court on Thursday declared that US drone strikes in the country’s lawless tribal belt were illegal and directed the Foreign Ministry to move a resolution against the attacks in the United Nations.

    • PHC orders govt to move resolution against drone attacks in UN

      PESHAWAR: Branding drone attacks on Pakistani territory as war crimes, the Peshawar High Court on Thursday ordered the foreign ministry to move a resolution in the United Nations against the strikes.

    • Dealing remote-control drone death, the US has lost its moral compass

      The armed drone is being heralded as the next generation of American military technology. It can fly overheard with its unblinking eye, almost invisible to its targets below. Without warning, its missiles will strike, bringing certain death and destruction on the ground. All the while, the military pilot, sitting in a cushioned recliner in an air-conditioned room halfway across the world, is immune from the violence wrought from his or her single keystroke.

    • Yemeni anti-Qaeda cleric killed in US drone strike

      Yemen has quickly become one of the most active theaters of operations for America’s drone fleet, though the killing of a local anti Al-Qaeda cleric underscores the rising collateral damage of the unmanned attacks.

      Sheik Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a prominent cleric within his small village in Yemen, was known for preaching of the evils of the al-Qaida network, warning villagers to stay out of the group and renounce their military ideology.

    • Drone Strikes Fuelling Fear in the Middle East

      Drone Strikes Fuelling Anti-U.S Hatred as Fear Spreads in Middle East

    • RAF’s role in US drone attacks that killed hundreds of Iraqis: MoD admits for first time that Britain helped pilot the aircraft from American bases
    • Armed drones in Afghanistan flown from UK for first time
    • UK Is Using Drones In Afghanistan, Ministry Of Defence Confirms

      After the Ministry of Defence confirmed the UK’s use of armed drones in Afghanistan, anti-war protestors are set to gather outside an RAF base in Lincolnshire.

      The RAF began remotely operating its Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles deployed to Afghanistan from the Lincolnshire airbase earlier this week.

    • Israel Drone Strikes: There’s Another Drone War You’re Not Paying Attention To, and It’s Not Obama’s

      While the lethal drone strikes carried out by the U.S. in Afghanistan (where Britain is also operating armed drones), Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, get the vast majority of media attention, and rightly so, when it comes to the issue of drones being used to carry out extrajudicial killings, other countries are also engaged in the practice. On Tuesday an Israeli drone attack on Gaza City killed 29-year-old Haitham al-Mishal and wounded another Palestinian man. The attack was the “the first targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip since an Egyptian-brokered truce went into effect on Nov. 22, 2012.”

    • Afghanistan: Karzai says CIA funding will continue

      Afghan president Hamid Karzai says the director of the CIA has assured him that regular funding his government receives from the agency will not be cut off.

    • Failing At Its Job Is The Best Thing the CIA Has Ever Done

      No organization in U.S. history has amassed a reputation quite like that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Often referred to by its acronym, CIA, or simply just “the Agency,” it is often regarded as the long and shadowy arm of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. It can be tempting to see the agency as force for good in the world, or at the very least a necessary evil, especially when publicly vaunted heroes like Mike Spann join because in doing so they believed they “would be able to make the world a better place to live in.” The problem is that the CIA really does not do that. In fact, most of the agency’s activities are underhanded and dishonest when they are not misguided or simply futile. Even with a poor reputation at home and abroad, the CIA has done some things that actually resulted in long-term benefits to the rest of the world, mainly by publicly failing to carry out an operation to its intended end and exposing its misdeeds to the rest of the world.

    • ’67 Interview With Famous Spook About US Coup In Syria Could Easily Apply Today

      Western diplomats, politicians and analysts have combined to float quite a few options to supposedly resolve the two-year civil war engulfing much of Syria right now.

      Talk of everything from a no-fly zone to an all-out intervention has flown around the digital media and political sphere, and yet, it seems a very few have stated the obvious option: do nothing.

    • The CIA, the FCPA and the double standard on policing corruption

      It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Justice Department’s versatile and hard-working anti-bribery law. On April 22, Ralph Lauren paid an $882,000 penalty in a non-prosecution agreement that resolved FCPA allegations of bribing a customs official in Argentina to permit the import of Ralph Lauren products. On May 7, prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a criminal complaint accusing two Florida brokers of paying kickbacks to a Venezuelan state bank official who directed the bank’s financial trading business to them. The FCPA has taken some recent lumps from judges, and last year prosecutions fell off slightly from their blistering pace in 2009, 2010 and 2011. But as Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher noted in its January report on FCPA enforcement, bribery prosecution has become routine. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” the report said, warning businesses not to let down their guard.

    • FBI, CIA, and DOD Experts Share Information Security Secrets with San Diego Companies at a Two Day Conference in La Jolla

  • Cablegate

    • Listen: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange

      In these audio excerpts from their extended conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Chris Hedges asks Julian Assange about legal strategy and the WikiLeaks founder’s thoughts on Pfc. Bradley Manning.

    • An Interview With Julian Assange
    • Julian Assange: The Internet threatens civilization

      However disappointing, the Wikileaks founder’s new book offers a fascinating — and discomfiting — thesis

    • Julian Assange plans to develop new crypto system
    • Special: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Open’s Up … On George Bush’s Library and Bradley Manning’s Trial
    • WikiLeaks Threat: Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

      But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how differently would politicians and pundits in the United States have viewed him? Were a string of whistle-blowing websites dedicated to exposing abuses within those countries to appear, surely the tone of the Western political class would shift. Taking into account the precedent President Barack Obama set in his first term in office— a clear “zero tolerance” approach toward unauthorized leaks of classified information from U.S. officials— we would expect that future Western governments would ultimately adopt a dissonant posture toward digital disclosures, encouraging them abroad in adversarial countries, but prosecuting them ferociously at home.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Sonora, Mex. Bans Bullfighting, a First for the Country

      Sonora has become the first Mexican state to ban bullfighting, recently passing the long-awaited Animal Protection Law addressing cruelty to animals.

      In a statement on Formato 21 radio, Perez Rubio hailed the unanimous vote on May 2 by the legislature of Mexico’s northwestern border state.

      “It has caused quite a stir because we are the first state of the republic to pass this law. I really didn’t expect–I say this with all the honesty in the world–I didn’t expect the repercussion this would have, nationally and internationally,” said local lawmaker of the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico, or PVEM, Vernon Perez Rubio, the Global Post reports.

  • Finance

    • Between Two Economists Lies the American Center

      Where media define the “center” or the “middle” tells you a lot about the worldview they are promoting. The “center” doesn’t usually indicate where most of the public is, but rather where elites have determined an appropriate middle between opposing arguments. Confusing the two concepts is common (and not an accident).

    • Goldman Sachs must face fraud claims from insurer – New York court

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc must face fraud claims brought by CIFG Assurance North America over insurance it provided for $275 million (177 million pounds) in mortgage-backed securities, a New York state appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

    • Social Security’s Explosive Injustices

      People over 65, a growing share of the US population, are suffering a crisis-ridden capitalist system. High unemployment, reduced private pensions, fewer job benefits, less job security, high personal debt levels, and falling real wages make Social Security payments more important than ever. Yet President Obama and Congress recently agreed to bargain over how much to reduce Social Security payments from current levels. That would not only hurt seniors – but also the children who help them.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

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