02.02.15
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Raspberry Pi offers help or extends an olive branch to Microsoft despite the long-known pattern of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish (EEE)
Raspberry Pi is an exciting British project that resembles OLPC in many ways. It targets young people (albeit not exclusively) and it is very affordable. Coupled with the UK-based ARM it enables students to learn and build real computers as opposed to memorisation of menu items in proprietary software or purchasing of ‘i’ devices which are so rigid that they are virtually useless for education. Many people here in Britain purchase Raspberry Pi in order to improve their technical skills, to experiment, to learn. These values are almost antithetical to proprietary software. Moreover, proprietary software tends to be expensive (especially in the long term), so it is too prohibitive for public sectors. Unless the goal of the public sector, especially education, is to create customers for corporate clients, it makes absolutely no sense to spread Windows, Office, etc. That’s why OLPC antagonised both Apple and Microsoft (offers of ‘gratis’ operating systems) until it gave up, removed these defenses, and died quickly thereafter (downward spiral and mass resignations).
Raspberry Pi should be careful not to repeat OLPC’s mistakes by associating in any way with Microsoft. It follows a similar and highly reminiscent direction right now, choosing a disturbing mode of operation that neglects core values and goals of the project. Raspberry Pi compromises where it oughtn’t and Eben Upton wastes time speaking with Microsoft right now, repeating the mistakes of OLPC as if OLPC never happened.
Most of the news [1-12] has been about the latest hardware from Raspberry Pi, but some sites play along with the Microsoft angle [13,14] (some look more like Microsoft press releases). What’s with all this Vista 10 propaganda in relation to Raspberry Pi? First, Vista 10 is not out; second, it’s hype; third, it lacks hardware support. Raspberry Pi is not strong enough for a bloated system from Microsoft; the same happened with OLPC and it wasted effort/focus of the project. OLPC and Raspberry Pi were supposed to be about education, programming/hacking etc. Clearly enough, and few can refute this, the proprietary spyware from Microsoft is not compatible.
Linux Veda wrote an article in response, starting with focus on the hardware. To quote: “Raspberry Pi needs no introduction. It’s a credit card size computer which can do a lot of things that your quad core desktop would do. The device is extremely popular among enthusiasts and developers. And the foundation that develops the device has announced the version 2 of the devices – Raspberry Pi 2.”
The article also says that Raspberry Pi “had been working with Microsoft for the last six months”. Embrace, Extend and Extinguish in action. It makes no sense unless Microsoft paid money for this distortion of the project. We would like to know how much money flow came from Microsoft and proxies like “Microsoft Open Technologies” to the Foundation (Raspberry Pi) because given the effort that went into Windows, it is possible that there were also monetary arrangements of some kind. We need transparency here.
Based on the reactions we see in social networks right now, Raspberry Pi faces a real risk as it may alienate the community and distract from important efforts that focus on education, not indoctrination for Microsoft’s profit and lock-in.
That Cyanogen is becoming a Microsoft tool is not shocking because Cyanogen has always been Free software-apathetic if not Free software-hostile. But we expected better from Raspberry Pi. 20+ years of dead companies due to “deals” and “partnerships” with Microsoft are apparently no strong and compelling enough a warning sign to Raspberry Pi. This is the time for Microsoft to dust off the “how we killed OLPC” files and pick them off the shelves. Raspberry Pi should have known better, having witnessed what Microsoft did to Nokia in recent years.
Gordon Fletcher from the University of Salford (just a couple of miles from our house) cited Techrights earlier today, writing that “Microsoft’s embrace of open source is driven by commercial practicality not principle”. To give some background: “Raymond’s “cathedral” is a thinly veiled reference to Microsoft’s absolute commitment to proprietary software development – a technocratic priesthood that kept the secrets within the temple. In 1999 a closed, proprietary approach was seen as the primary – if not the only way – to profit from software. This software business model followed the lead of computer hardware manufacturers, who would strive to “lock in” buyers to the firm’s ecosystem of products – compatible with each other but more often than not incompatible with those of other manufacturers.”
He ends by relating this to the Cyanogen move: “Open-source activists are correct to wonder whether Microsoft has more of the same planned: most of its current open-source manoeuvres such as investing in Cyanogen follow the same approach of previous acquisitions. The key difference is that software developed in the bazaar has developers and users who are passionate about the project. For them open-source software is not just a commodity to be bought and sold; whether there is any place for the cathedral in the bazaar is yet to be seen.”
As we wrote today and yesterday, this is not about embracing FOSS but about attacking Google with proprietary software (e.g. Office on top of Android). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Raspberry Pi 2 is a new mini PC from the Raspberry Pi Foundation that follows in the footsteps on the previous devices, which has managed to take the world by storm.
-
-
The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B moves up to a 900MHz, quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU with 1GB RAM, and offers backward compatibility and the same $35 price.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a much faster new version of the world’s leading community-backed, hacker-friendly Linux SBC. The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B moves from Broadcom’s 700MHz, ARM11 based Broadcom BCM2835 system-on-chip to a new quad-core Broadcom BCM2836 SoC clocked at 900MHz, and doubles RAM to 1GB.
-
We’ll be honest, when the Raspberry Pi 2 hit our desk in mid- January we were very excited to crack it open and try it out. From what we had been told this was basically the Raspberry Pi everyone had ever wanted, at least in terms of power. It was a bit of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it moment though, as we hooked up the board that was essentially a Model B+ and began using a very familiar Raspbian layout.
-
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced “Raspberry Pi 2″ today, a new powerful Pi which has the same form-factor and price ($35) as the old Model B+.
-
-
-
-
-
With the launch of the new Raspberry Pi 2 today now equipped with a quad-core processor Microsoft has already announced that it will be making a version of its Windows 10 operating system available for free to the maker community.
-
Three years after the launch of the first Raspberry Pi, second generation hardware will go on sale today for the same $35 price while offering a lot more power.
-
Raspberry Pi was originally meant as a small, credit card-sized PC that students could use at school to learn device programming and engineering.
-
-
A major update to the credit card sized Raspberry Pi board is introduced, with a boost to the CPU and memory expected to help it run as a general-purpose PC.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Some people don’t like any changes made to Linux user space which makes the operating system easier to use or configure for casual users. They would rather the user be befuddled and helpless, because according to them, people who don’t know how to open a terminal and edit a configuration file in Emacs have no business sitting at a computer keyboard for any purpose.
-
Many Linux and open source leaders gave presentations at LinuxConf.Au 2015 a few weeks ago, including Linux Creator Linus Torvalds. All of the conference videos are available on YouTube, and there were many excellent presentations — so many it would be impossible to watch them all. The range of topics covered everything from open source governance and community management, to inspiring uses of Linux and open source technologies, to technical talks and tutorials. Here are ten interesting technical talks focused on Linux and the kernel. (Disclaimer: I have not watched every single minute of all of these videos. I’ll leave it to you to decide how captivating they are.)
-
Over the years, the debate over the best Linux desktop environment has raged on. KDE, Gnome, one of the lighter weight Linux desktops – there are so many options to choose from. In this article, I’ll examine the variety of desktops available and compare them accordingly.
-
I think it was in the late 1990s, possibly into the 2000s, when it was common to put a cutesy graphic on the bottom of your Web page letting everyone know your site wasn’t finished. Generally the graphic was an animated GIF file of a little construction guy shoveling a pile of gravel. Mind you, this was before animated GIF files were the most annoying thing on the Internet, and long before they started getting cool again. The thing that makes me smile isn’t how clever we were to make such graphics, it’s the naiveté of the concept that a Web site might ever be truly finished.
-
Desktop
-
A year ago, I reported that GNU/Linux was making a move in the Czech Republic. It got even better. Half the loss of share of page-views of that other OS was going to GNU/Linux.
-
-
Introduced earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the new Dell XPS 13 laptop (shown above) is once again making headlines. Dell is positioning the XPS 13 as well as the new XPS 15 as high-end laptops for business users, with a focus on top-quality graphics and a longer battery life that’s especially critical for road warriors and workers on the go.
-
Penn Manor School District in Pennsylvania gives each student a laptop powered with Linux and configured with root access. The experiment provides a soup-to-nuts education where students handle the laptops from box to classroom.
-
Kernel Space
-
Linux kernel 3.19 RC7 was announced by Linus Torvalds and it’s probably the last release in this development cycle before the branch becomes stable, most likely next week.
-
The seventh and likely last release candidate to the Linux 3.19 kernel is now available.
-
For those who are familiar with the Unix system, you will also be familiar with the cron application that allows you to schedule and automate tasks to run on their own. We even have tutorials that show you how to get started with cron and crontabs. However, cron is not perfect, as it requires your system to be running 24 hours a day. If you have a habit of turning off your computer at night, and a cron job is scheduled in the sleeping hours, the task won’t be executed. Luckily, there are several cron alternatives that can do a better job than cron. Let’s check them out.
-
The newest feature being worked on for systemd? A boot loader, of course! It was revealed this weekend that systemd developers are looking at integrating Gummiboot into systemd.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Rob Clark has sent in his main pull request of the Freedreno’s MSM DRM driver with changes intended for the Linux 3.20 kernel.
-
Benchmarks
-
The latest Linux benchmarks I have to share from the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Intel Broadwell processor are some openSUSE Tumbleweed tests with the results compared to Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.10/15.04.
-
Applications
-
PPSSPP is a powerful PSP emulator that is capable of running games for that platform and enhance the original experience with a series of features that are only available for PC users.
-
Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub formerly known as XBMC, has just received its first major upgrade and the developers have fixed quite a few issues.
-
Version 14.1 of Kodi — the open-source multimedia software formerly known as XBMC — has been released as primarily a bug-fix to the “Helix” series.
-
After almost four years and a half of development, Inkscape 0.91 (an open-source vector graphics editor) was finally released a few days ago. The new version includes over 700 bug fixes, a new Cairo-based renderer, OpenMP multithreading for all filters, major improvements for the Text tool, a new Measurement tool and more.
-
Proprietary
-
To celebrate ITEXPO® this week, we’re back in the gift-giving mood. So today we’re pleased to introduce the first of several new turnkey VoIP solutions for the Asterisk® platform. Incredible PBX™ for Asterisk-GUI provides virtually the same feature set of applications for Asterisk as our previous releases. But this time around, you get a Gotcha-Free PBX with pure and honest open source GPL code. No patent, trademark, or copyright minefields to trip you up. Just abide by the clear GPL licensing terms and copy, embellish, and redistribute to your heart’s content. Incredible PBX for Asterisk-GUI is truly a lean, mean implementation designed to be frugal with memory and extremely versatile in terms of configuration.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Want to work as a Linux systems administrator? The Linux Foundation has added a way to gain the requisite knowledge and certification through a training course, Essentials of System Administration, that covers the key skills required for managing servers, clouds and other systems based on the open source OS.
-
-
-
Learning to code still remains a buzz. The problem facing any budding new programmer is how to start. Questions abound. What’s the best programming language for a beginner? What’s the best way to learn? A beginner might be tempted by reading books titled ‘teach yourself [insert programming language] in 24 hours’. But don’t be in such a rush. In my opinion, it is best to first get interested in programming, then seek out some experienced coders and discuss and discuss, and learn programming by doing, practising with lots of practical examples and the aid of an excellent introductory book.
-
Games
-
You have to hand it to the Unvanquished team, as they do put in a lot of effort to make a great game. Alpha 36 has been released, and it features some brand new models.
-
Stardock, the company behind Galactic Civilizations, CEO Brad Wardell replied to a user on twitter about Linux interest, and Brad had an interesting reply you might like to see.
-
Unvanquished, a free, open source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has managed to get to version Alpha 36, registering great progress towards a stable release.
-
After the initial 2014 estimate slipped and it became clear that the outsourced port contained lots of bugs and a whole level missing, the developer, Black Forest Games, has now decided to finish up the Linux version themselves. Last week they also shared some screenshots on Dropbox of the game running on SteamOS.
-
From the developer of Mutant Gangland comes RogueSweeper! It’s a pretty simple game, but it’s an interesting idea to see, and it seems to be executed well. I always liked Minesweeper, so having a more interesting version of it is a fun idea, and it managed to keep me entertained!
-
Techland’s Dying Light is off to a very bad start, but the developers look like they will do everything they can to fix it, and this includes re-allowing modding. The Linux version should be polished up too from their latest reply to me.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
I think Krita is doing great and I really like the direction it’s going, the software it seems to be made for artists, at least I have this impression when I use the tools to work on the creation and painting of textures. I don’t hate anything in Krita, and I don’t use all the tools, but I think usability could always be improved.
-
Did you know that you can assign categories to albums in digiKam? To do this, right-click on an album, choose Properties from the context menu, and the desired category from the Category drop-down list.
-
Theme designing for pairs is my Season of KDE project, mentored by Heena Mahour. In this project i created new themes for KDE-Edu project “Game Pairs”.
-
-
New Releases
-
Black Lab Linux, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS “Trusty Tahr” that is using a customized GNOME desktop, has just received a new upgrade pack and numerous packages have been upgraded.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
-
Yesterday, I was using my daughter’s desktop computer, which is a Mageia 4/PicarOS dual-boot, when I noticed something that has happended before: after running an update of packages, Mageia changes GRUB2 and erases the entry to boot PicarOS.
I am not very GRUB2 literate. Last time that it happened, I solved the problem with GRUB Customizer, but it wouldn’t help this time.
I tried the Mageia GRUB tool in the Control Center to no avail.
Then I installed the KDE package that lets one configure GRUB2… and that’s when I messed up: trying to recover the PicarOS boot entry, I seemed to have installed a useless boot entry on the MBR and the computer, logically, could neither boot PicarOS not Mageia.
I looked for the Mageia 4 install DVD to run the rescue tool but, since I could not find it, I ran the rescue tools from the Mageia 3 install DVD instead. It did not work; GRUB2 could not be rescued.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
-
Because they spend most of their days looking at them, most sysadmins and developers are pretty choosy when it comes to choosing a monospaced type face for use in there terminal emulator or text editor. Here are five great monospace fonts that can be easily installed from the official Fedora repositories to make your text editor or terminal emulator look and function just that little bit nicer.
-
Debian Family
-
Today I tried to boot it in a cafe, off-line and without the extra disk. It was not possible. Systemd would just wait indefinitely for some start-up jobs (it was waiting for the missing disk to come on-line among some other things). Fortunately, I had the extra disk with me, so I attached it and tried again. Still for no use. Systemd now waited for the network interfaces. So I had to actually connect an ethernet cable to a router just to get the crap to boot, and then unplug it and walk back to my table.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Next week we will finally get to see the first commercially available Ubuntu smartphone when the BQ Aquaris e4.5 rolls out of its incubation unit. It feels like years since the Ubuntu Edge’s doomed for failure crowdfunding campaign…failed, yet there is still a whole lotta love for the mobile OS that some genuinely think has a chance at rivalling Android. Why is it so popular though?
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu OS, has spent a couple of years stripping down Android to the bare bones and replacing it with technology that allows it to keep the OS constantly updated at a level not enjoyed by Android users. The OS back end is divided into a trio of partitions that are comprised of three separate sections of code: one each for the device, manufacturer or carrier, and Ubuntu. It means that each one can deliver bug fixes as-and-when they are needed, and customisation specific to the carrier or manufacturer will be far easier to implement. Basically if you’re an Android user constantly bemoaning the time it takes for your update to arrive, we think you’ll have a lot of joy here.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Upgrading your computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 is not guaranteed to be a seamless experience whereby you click a few buttons and hey presto it works.
To prove this point I took a Windows 7 computer and installed Windows 8.1 in two different ways to see what would happen. In both cases the result was the same.
The computer that I used for this experiment was a Dell Inspiron 3521. After upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 the video drivers were lost and I was left with a fuzzy low resolution screen. The network drivers were also a bit ropey. The same thing happened when I installed Windows 8.1 straight from disk as a clean installation.
To fix the problems all I had to do was download the correct drivers and install them but that meant navigating the Dell website (which isn’t a particularly easy affair) and download the correct drivers and install them in the correct order.
Whilst the task in hand was fairly straight forward it clearly shows that Windows doesn’t just work in the same way that when you install Linux for the first time you might have to install extra drivers and codecs as well.
-
-
Phones
-
Its part of the Police App that they have here, which will for example let you do an accident report if you had a fender-bender type accident, and post it in 3 minutes, so for example for insurance claims etc. You take a few pictures of the car and register the accident report with your Driver’s Licence number and your car licence plate, plus the other car’s licence plate, and thats it. The police will review both sides of the story, the pictures from both cars, and issue the official police report for your insurance agency. If the police department has to send an officer to come see the accident, that costs about 2,000 dollars per visit in the time the police have to allocate. Now everything is done electronically and you get your official police accident report by the next day – straight to your mobile phone haha. Brilliant.
-
Delaware is aiming to be the first state to offer virtual driver’s licenses accessed through a secure smartphone app.
-
Android
-
The Android 5.0 Lollipop update for Samsung Galaxy Note 4 has been delayed by Oculus. Samsung already started rolling out the software update for various handsets such as the Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4. However, the Android 5.0 Lollipop is yet to arrive on the South Korean tech giant’s latest phablets, the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge.
-
Remember when folks were telling us that GNU/Linux wouldn’t fly because it lacked applications? Consider Android/Linux. It had zero applications a while back but now it’s on fire. 2 billion applications downloaded a day. Amazing.
-
There have been more than one million free and chargeable applications at Google Play, with two billion downloads a day on average from about 190 countries. Google paid a total of US$5 billion to developers of Google Play applications during June 2013-June 2014.
-
The Paranoid Android team just announced the release of the first alpha version of the Lollipop-based Paranoid Android 5.
-
It’s easy to be negative about Android’s outlook these days. Apple just posted the most profitable quarter of any company ever, largely on the back of runaway iPhone sales. And Google faces an unprecedented threat from “forked” versions of Android — independently developed offshoots out of Google’s control.
-
Amidst the problems and issues surrounding the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop OS, its alleged major update Android 5.1 is finally taking shape. Latest whispers say that the OS update will be rolled out near the end of February.
-
Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform-as-a-Service offering, just clocked the largest first-year financial bonanza in open source history: spun out of EMC and VMware in 2013 and trading since February 2014 Pivotal pulled in $40m during three quarters of active selling it said last week. As good as this is for Pivotal, it’s perhaps even better for would-be open source entrepreneurs, who may finally have a blueprint for large-scale financial success.
-
Open source projects and protocols have huge potential for networking. Initiatives such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight have attracted the attention both of end-users, as evidenced by the Open Networking User Group (ONUG), major vendors participating in OpenDaylight, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and telecoms creating their own open source efforts like the Open Networking Lab.
-
The open source market landscape is growing by leaps and bounds, and it’s at a time like this that it’s important for Zimbra, a provider of collaboration software, to reinvigorate its open source roots. Here’s how we plan to encourage increased participation in community open source projects in 2015.
-
The design of everyday things is an important cultural movement. Of that, most of us have no doubt. We want our tools to work flawlessly and naturally. And open source projects are catching up on this too.
Like, Elementary OS, an open source operating system that hopes to make the Linux desktop accessible for everyone. And many other open source web applications, like Ghost, Taiga, and the upcoming Flarum. Also, BeautifulOpen is a collection of open source projects with great websites and a great source for inspiration. They all have designers on their core team.
-
Events
-
Open source media center solutions have really taken off in the past few years, and there are now many more approaches to using both open source software and open hardware to power entertainment on your television. If you’re consuming media with the help of open source, we’re curious: how are you doing it? Are you running Kodi (formerly XBMC), MythTV, MediaPortal, or something similar on a custom-built machine? Or are you going slim and using a specialized Linux build on top of the Raspberry Pi? Or are you doing something else entirely?
-
I had a chat with the Diaspora folks at the booth next to us and greatly look forward to the upcoming release. They had a nice flyer-y paper which also included some development stats with the number of active contributors and such, a very useful thing to have so you can quickly see how a project is doing. Diaspora had a hard time since the crazy start, but things are picking up again and 66 people contributed to this important project over the last year.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Capgemini, a consulting and technology services company, has announced the findings of a global survey into the use of Big Data in corporate decision-making. An Economist Intelligence Unit report “The Deciding Factor: Big Data & Decision making”, commissioned by Capgemini, shows that nine out of ten business leaders believe data is now the fourth factor of production, as fundamental to business as land, labor and capital.
-
All the way back in early 2008, OStatic broke the news about Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicated the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools. The project resided at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was driven and overseen by Rich Wolski, a professer there (shown here).
-
BSD
-
Version 10.1.1 of PC-BSD is now available with a variety of notable improvements to this FreeBSD-based desktop-focused distribution.
-
The new version of PC-BSD is out. There are lots of improved features so check out the release notes below!
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Openness/Sharing
-
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.
-
Programming
-
It was revealed this weekend at FOSDEM in Brussels that the plan is to hopefully release Perl 6.0 by this Christmas.
Larry Wall is hoping to finally see the Perl 6.0 release out this year, with version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 by Christmas. It’s not yet certain Perl 6.0 will make it out this year but that’s the goal.
Perl 6 has been in development since 2000 as a big update over Perl 5. Perl 6 seeks to significantly improve the programming language and will break compatibility with Perl 5 though a compatibility mode is expected. Going back a while now have been multiple Perl 6 implementations albeit none complete; a basic overview of Perl 6 can be found via Wikipedia.
-
I never have enough screen real-estate. I sometimes keep six files open at the same time in split-screens, but that requires my Vim windows to be maximized, and then I don’t see the terminal. So I can not see the results of auto-tests (for example), and the relevant code at the same time.
-
Web designing and developing is one of the trending sectors in the recent times, where more and more peoples started to search for their career opportunities. But, Getting the right opportunity as a web developer or graphic designer is not just a piece of cake for everyone, It certainly requires a strong mind presence as well as right skills to find the find the right job. There are a lot of websites available today which can help you to get the right job description according to your knowledge. But still if you want to achieve something in this sector you must have some excellent skills like working with different platforms, IDEs and various other tools too.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Norway reported its first ever case of mad cow disease on Thursday, saying the instance was an isolated one and telling consumers it was still safe to eat beef and drink milk.
Tests at a British laboratory confirmed the disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in a 15-year-old cow, which had been slaughtered, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority said.
-
Security
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
A toddler in Albuquerque, New Mexico, shot both his parents with just one bullet on Saturday, after apparently reaching in to his mother’s handbag to get her iPad and coming across a loaded gun instead.
The 3-year-old and his 2-year-old sister were taken into the care of local authorities.
-
A video that appears to catch a New Rochelle police officer pointing a gun at a group of teenagers who were having a snowball fight — and went viral on the Internet — is not what it appears to be, cops said.
“There was no snowball fight,” New Rochelle Deputy Police Commissioner Anthony Murphy told the Daily News, calling the video a piece of “clever mischief.”
He said police were responding to a 911 call around 4 p.m. Friday that a teenager standing in a group of six near the Heritage Houses had pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at another person.
-
British military experts were asked to draw up guidance at the height of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa late last year on the feasibility and potential impact of terrorists ‘weaponising’ the virus.
The Ministry of Defence has released a heavily redacted report, prepared in October, that identified three different scenarios regarding the exploitation of Ebola for bioterrorism.
-
In tiny bunkers in the United States, young pilots are operating unmanned drones targeting ‘bad people’ in Pakistan. Recruited at video game fairs by military leaders who know the value of games that glamourise ‘militainment’, drone pilots are left traumatised by the civilian casualties – or ‘collateral damage’ – their strikes cause. Psychologically distanced from the enemy, are drones the future of warfare?
-
With Russia-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, General Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, US officials said Sunday.
-
Separatist leader says rebels plan to boost fighting force to 100,000 men; shells continue to fall in Donetsk, killing 15 over the weekend; Russian official: If U.S. government decides to go forward, it will lead to irreversible results.
-
The United States is mulling over supplying Ukrainian forces with defensive weapons and equipment as tensions have escalated in the region after peace talks aimed at ending the fight in eastern Ukraine failed on Saturday.
-
In the wake of Israel’s seemingly miraculous triumph in the Six-Day War in 1967, the country’s victorious soldiers were lionized as heroes.
But in private, even just one week after the conflict, many of them didn’t feel that way. One describes feeling sick to his stomach in battle and collapsing into a trench.
“I wanted to be left alone,” he says. “I didn’t think of the war.”
Another talks about watching an old Arab man evacuated from his house.
“I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil,” the soldier says.
-
Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest scrap with Hizbollah has given his Likud bloc a boost in Israeli opinion polls, placing the Likud at the top of the line-up for the first time since the Labour and Hatnua parties merged on December 10 to form the Zionist Union.
-
SUSPENDED national police chief Alan Purisima and US troops used Marwan’s wife as a “tracer” to pinpoint the precise location of the world’s most wanted terrorist, a police general privy to the ongoing probe of the Mamasapano massacre said Sunday.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
In 2006 and 2008, the Bureau of Prisons quietly created new restrictive units for terrorists or other inmates they feared might coordinate crimes from behind bars. The Communication Management Units (CMUs) were designed to more tightly monitor and restrict inmates’ communication with the outside world. The units, at Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois, operated largely in secret, without any formal policies or procedures in place — until last week.
-
Finance
-
Six of the world’s biggest companies paid just 0.3 per cent of their UK earnings in corporation tax last year, a Sunday Mirror probe has found.
We have examined the UK accounts of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Ebay and Starbucks and found the six firms have reported a total of £2.6billion of revenue in the last year.
-
Barack Obama will propose a major clampdown on US corporations with a one-off levy on an estimated $2tn of untaxed earnings being stashed overseas, using the windfall to rescue America’s crumbling road infrastructure.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Warfare is a constantly changing landscape, from the weapons that are used to the battlefields they’re fought on. Amidst mountains of Snowden leaks from the NSA and GCHQ, it’s no longer a mystery that the digital warfare is advancing quickly, and the British Army just upped its digital artillery.
-
Privacy
-
Verizon says it will soon offer customers a way to opt out from having their smartphone and tablet browsing tracked via a hidden un-killable tracking identifier.
The decision came after a ProPublica article revealed that an online advertiser, Turn, was exploiting the Verizon identifier to respawn tracking cookies that users had deleted.
-
Revelations this week that Verizon Wireless secretly used “supercookies” to track customers’ browsing habits underlines a less-talked about benefit of the FCC’s potential reclassification of broadband as a Title II public utility — consumer privacy protection.
-
Nearly six years ago, two federal law enforcement agencies considered using license plate readers (LPRs) at gun shows—at least in the Phoenix, Arizona area.
LPRs scan plates at a very high speed—often 60 plates per second—and record the date, time, and precise location that a given plate was seen. Typically, on a patrol car, that plate is then immediately compared to a list of wanted or stolen cars, and if a match is found, the software alerts the officer. But all scans are routinely kept by various law enforcement agencies for long periods of time, sometimes as long as years or more.
-
In 2011, 1 in 25 Americans was arrested. In a few years, if the FBI has its way, the federal government will possess the DNA of all of those people and more. Under the radar of most lawmakers and journalists, the Bureau—with private industry and congress’ help—is pushing the most massive expansion of biometric state surveillance since the invention of the fingerprint.
-
On Capitol Hill, attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch will return today for day two of her confirmation hearing. If confirmed, Lynch will become the first African-American woman to serve as attorney general. During Wednesday’s hearing, Lynch described the National Security Agency’s spying programs as “constitutional and effective” and defended the government’s surveillance operations.
-
A federal privacy watchdog tasked with reviewing the National Security Agency’s controversial spy programs said Thursday the White House has agreed to many of its suggested reforms but taken little action.
-
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has just released its assessment [pdf link] of the NSA’s ability to follow instructions. One year ago, it assessed the Section 215 bulk records collection. Six months later, it assessed the Section 702 program, which hoovers up email communications. Now, it has followed up on its recommendations and found the NSA surprisingly cooperative.
-
The recent hack against Sony Pictures is likely to have made companies of all sizes consider upping their cybersecurity measures. Perhaps, though, it’s also a different kind of wake-up call: a reason to think less about security, and more about privacy.
That’s the belief of Phil Zimmermann – the creator of email encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and now president and co-founder of secure communications company Silent Circle – initially expressed in a blog post, and expanded on in an interview with the Guardian.
“Sony had all kinds of things: intrusion detection, firewalls, antivirus … But they got hacked anyway. The security measures that enterprises do frequently get breached. People break in anyway: they overcome them,” says Zimmermann.
-
Mr. Assad was also the victim of cyberattacks, but of a far more advanced nature.
A National Security Agency document dated June 2010, written by the agency’s chief of “Access and Target Development,” describes how the shipment of “computer network devices (servers, routers, etc.) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted” by the agency. The document, published recently by Der Spiegel, the German magazine, came from the huge trove taken by Edward J. Snowden; this one shows a photograph of N.S.A. workers slicing open a box of equipment from Cisco Systems, a major manufacturer of network equipment.
-
Credit card data Relevant Products/Services isn’t quite as anonymous as promised, a new study says. Scientists showed they can identify you with more than 90 percent accuracy by looking at just four purchases, three if the price is included — and this is after companies “anonymized” the transaction records, saying they wiped away names and other personal details. The study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published Thursday in the journal Science, examined three months of credit card records for 1.1 million people.
-
It’s less than one month into the 2015 state legislative season and the Tenth Amendment Center counts more than 200 bills seeking to block or limit federal power.
-
Ever feel like you’re being watched? Well, chances are, you’re probably right. If you’ve ever wondered about modern surveillance but have been too creeped out to pursue your curiosity, it might be time to face your fears and check out the “PRISM” exhibit this week. A solo exhibition by Vancouver-based David Spriggs, “PRISM” is a series of works that explore modern surveillance and its uncanny omnipresence in our daily lives. The name of the exhibit alludes in part to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program, which was exposed by Edward Snowden in 2009. Looking at different modes of surveillance, from cameras to digital scanners, Spriggs’ large-scale works are bound to inform and probably also intimidate. If you really want to know how closely Big Brother is watching, “PRISM” may offer some creative insight.
-
Civil Rights
-
During World War Two, a young Swedish diplomat saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. But in January 1945 Soviet troops arrested him – he was never seen in public again.
-
More than 200 journalists are imprisoned for their work for the third consecutive year, reflecting a global surge in authoritarianism. China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists in 2014.
-
The family of Australian journalist Peter Greste has thanked everyone who helped secure his release from an Egyptian jail after 400 days.
‘Peter Greste is a free man,’ brother Andrew Greste said, with his delighted parents Lois and Juris by his side, in Brisbane on Monday.
-
Australian journalist Peter Greste has been deported from Egypt after 400 days behind bars, and has flown to Cyprus on his way home to Australia.
Greste was set free by order of Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi under a new law allowing foreign prisoners to be deported.
-
There is a window of hope, thanks to a U.N. human rights body, for a solution to the diplomatic asylum of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, holed up in the embassy of Ecuador in London for the past two and a half years.
-
John B. Geer stood with his hands on top of the storm door of his Springfield, Va., townhouse and calmly said to four Fairfax County police officers with guns pointed at him: “I don’t want anybody to get shot . . . . And I don’t wanna get shot, ’cause I don’t want to die today.”
-
I’ve read a lot of criticism recently about the sentencing of Barrett Brown. The online commentary mostly portrays Brown’s sentence as a disturbing example of prosecutorial abuse, in which the Obama Administration’s war on journalists and war on hackers came together to shred First Amendment freedoms. I wondered, is that true? What really happened in the case, and was Brown’s sentence troublesome or not?
-
Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan told a caller who said she suffered from bipolar disorder that her illness is “something made up by the mental health business” and just “the latest fad.” When the caller told Sullivan that she “would not be alive today” if she hadn’t received mental health treatment, Sullivan wondered if “maybe somebody’s talked you into feeling and thinking this way.”
-
While precision medicine is indeed a powerful tool in fighting disease and repairing injury – in fact, truly the future of medicine – those appointing themselves as its arbiter in the US have already demonstrated they cannot be trusted with such a responsibility.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
In our Petition for Investigation of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast, we point out that TWC’s High-Speed Internet service has a 97% profit margin and a number of people asked how that statistic was derived. Simple. Time Warner Cable provides the information, (with some caveats).
Below is the actual financial information excerpted from the Time Warner Cable, 2013 SEC-filed annual report. (Please note that this same mathematics is also used by Comcast and probably Verizon and AT&T, though they do not explicitly detail their financials in this way.)
Moreover, we need to put this financial information in context to what customers are paying, and more specifically with the Time Warner Cable Triple Play bill that’s been featured in previous articles.
-
As we again set policies that define core power relationships for a new medium, we might look to our past to discern lessons for charting our future. For the media system we’ve inherited—one dominated by a small number of corporations, lightly regulated in terms of public interest protections, and offset by weak public alternatives—was not inevitable or natural; it resulted from the outcomes of specific policy battles, and from specific logics and values triumphing over others.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
Turkey’s top religious body has handed down a fatwa in response to a question raised on the issue of illegal downloading. Obtaining content without permission from creators is forbidden, the Diyanet said. Meanwhile, a Catholic Church debate on the same topic raised an interesting dilemma.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 6:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image credit: Linux Veda
Summary: Now that Cyanogen acts more like a Microsoft attack dog than a real independent entity there is backlash from many and OnePlus dumps CyanogenMod
Cyanogen is not about privacy, not about software freedom, not even about choice. It’s about “anti-Google”. It has been like this for a while and it got a lot worse once Microsoft paid Cyanogen, almost as though Microsoft rewards Cyanogen for the "Scroogled"-type rhetoric and seeks to use Cyanogen as a Trojan horse or carrier of Microsoft's proprietary and privacy-hostile 'apps' for Android.
MS-CM, or the Microsoft-backed fork and FUD source against Android, is having issues. Partners leave. Maybe that alone is a reason for leaning on Microsoft. Maybe the “anti-Google” angle is becoming the business model. Days ago Linux Veda wrote: “Today’s announcement may now mean that OnePlus devices will now longer ship with Cyanogen OS at all, if it turns out that they have made their own ROM.”
Only two days later a followup said that “OnePlus kicks Cyanogenmod out, announces two new ROMs”. As the article puts it: “After a disappointing spat with Cyanogen, OnePlus have decided to ditch the once community driven, now Microsoft-back custom ROM – CyanogenMOD – and bring their own ROMs to the market.”
So at this stage it was known that Microsoft had become a backer of CyanogenMod and prior to it there was a decent response from Swapnil Bhartiya. The way Bhartiya put it, “I find Google Android to be the most open platforms out there; if it was not ‘open’, Cyanogen wouldn’t even exist in the first place. Try building an iOS or Windows clone.”
As Bhartiya put it: “This is the same CEO who broke a contract with OnePlus, over an email sent from his iPad (and not an Android device) in India just because they got a bigger player Micromax.
“The community was deeply disappointed with what CM did to OnePlus. Now the move to shake hands with Microsoft may further rip the community.
“So how is this going to work for Microsoft? A hypothesis. Enemy of an enemy is a friend. Microsoft will invest in Cyanogen to ensure they have regular stream of revenue and can continue to become a Google rival. The more market Google loses, the more Microsoft gains. Then Microsoft may push their services to be integrated with Cyanogen.
“Are we going to see the triple ‘e’ again: Embrace, extend and extinguish?”
There are quite a few Linux-based mobile OSes that are proprietary, either entirely or partly (e.g. Sailfish OS). Thankfully, Android has been largely FOSS (AOSP), except many of the apps (especially not those that Google makes), and it’s this platform that really took off, not webOS for example (although webOS too is being further liberated over time). In automotive telematics and other areas it’s common to see platforms that are proprietary and built on top of Linux.
A lot of the “Google controls Android with an iron fist” type of characterisations came from Microsoft-friendly sites like The Verge (I first spotted this and wrote about it in 2013). It’s not that it’s 100% untrue, but they have accentuated this to incite against Google and then tried to use it to poison the minds of OEMs while Microsoft (and proxies like Nokia) attempted an antitrust angle, not only in the US but in Europe too.
Microsoft is, as usual, playing dirty. This is the latest example of it and those who give CM the benefit of the doubt do so at their own peril. MS-CM (maybe CMS, as in Cyanogen MicroSoft) is definitely trying to just commit suicide by aligning itself with Microsoft, like many other dead ‘partners’ (or convenience). █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The front page of The Verge today
Summary: Bill Gates’ $300,000,000 per annum ‘investment’ in the media is paying off as The Verge too becomes a Microsoft mouthpiece
A COUPLE of years ago one The Verge journalist who had approached me out of the blue conducted a one-hour interview with me about abuses by Bill Gates (specifically the use of his personal money to shamelessly derail GNU/Linux adoption, which had been spread through OLPC), but the piece never saw the light of day, almost as if the piece got spiked by the editor/publisher. As I clarified during the interview, I had already expressed concerns about the founder of The Verge because of his attacks on Android, facilitation/grooming of paid Microsoft lobbyists as “experts” (giving them a platform), etc. There was already some “bad blood” there. Over time, albeit very gradually, The Verge became more of a Microsoft propaganda network and source of Android FUD, as we noted last year on numerous occasions. They have distorted some facts and portrayed Android in a way that Microsoft sought to portray it. It also demonised Google over its role as Android/AOSP patron (more on that in our next post). All in all, we repeatedly urged readers to be wary and sceptical of The Verge.
According to this new analysis from Swapnil Bhartiya (titled “Microsoft’s iOS Outlook app is pure evil; don’t use it”), the Microsoft-friendly The Verge has been advertising Microsoft Outlook (with NSA PRISM, Microsoft being the first PRISM joiner) in quite a shameful fashion, despite Outlook app being horribly dangerous (as we noted yesterday). “A few days ago,” wrote Bhartiya, “The Verge wrote an exciting piece about the Outlook app for iOS, which was full or praise. I don’t know how many Gmail users became the Outlook user after reading the post.”
We have had our longtime suspicion that The Verge was in Microsoft’s pocket (not literally) reaffirmed when we found out last week that Bill Gates is the editor this month. That explains a lot, doesn’t it? Yet another publication infiltrated by Microsoft. █
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Patents at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: “January’s Stupid Patent of the Month” shows how low a standard the United States patent office has adopted
WRITING about software patents from the USPTO, the EFF has this good article about “January’s Stupid Patent of the Month”, which serves as a reminder of what it means to have patents on software. Here are some key portions: “What does White Knuckle claim to have invented? The patent covers a computer “configured” to “provide a sports video game” with “parameters” that can be updated over the Internet. Of course, White Knuckle didn’t actually invent computers, sports video games, or the Internet.”
“The SCOTUS ruling in favour of the defendant in the Alice case helps bring us closer to a world where software patents are verboten.”As they put it in short, “This is insane. You wouldn’t consider a “car that can drive in San Francisco” to be a different invention from “a car that can drive in Los Angeles.” It’s just a car. But the Patent Office lets applicants draw technologically irrelevant distinctions like this all the time. In essence, White Knuckle’s patent is just a claim to remotely updating software. There’s nothing technologically special about updating a video game (at least, no such problems are discussed and solved by this patent).”
Hopefully we can live in a world free from software patents, not only in Europe but also in the US and east Asia (where such patents exist to some degree). The SCOTUS ruling in favour of the defendant in the Alice case helps bring us closer to a world where software patents are verboten. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Trying the bogeyman theory again
Jesper Kongstad. Photo from the Nordic Patent Institute.
Summary: A protest over perceived Battistelli-Kongstad collusion against staff rights and against oversight culminates in press coverage
Following the Techrights articles about an EPO protest in front of the Danish Consulate in Munich we would like to share a news report about the protest.
“Kongstad from Denmark must have become somewhat of a liability (embarrassment) not just for European authorities but also for Danish diplomats in Germany.”Kongstad from Denmark must have become somewhat of a liability (embarrassment) not just for European authorities but also for Danish diplomats in Germany. See photos from the protest and also our coverage of this protest. Our earliest coverage about Kongstad supplies some context and serves as background for those who don’t yet know what is wrong about Kongstad.
In trying to bypassing the paywall, we have managed to get the full text in Danish. We decided to use an automated translation tool and work around the results in order to avoid copyright-related issues and to improve the English, too.
Notice the statements from Benoît Battistelli and Jesper Kongstad at the bottom. Here is the article:
The powerful European organisation European Patent Office (EPO) is plagued by a poisonous dispute between employees and their management.
Employees have repeatedly carried out strike over changes to working conditions and on Wednesday SUEPO demonstrated in front of the Danish Consulate in Munich, the city where the EPO has its headquarters.
The reason for the Danish role is that the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office in Denmark, Jesper Kongstad, is President of the EPO Board.
The flyers attacked the chairman for failing to ensure adequate monitoring of the EPO’s French President, Benoît Battistelli.
___________
Benoît Battistelli is President of the European Patent Office (EPO); Photo: EPO
___________
The Frenchman is viewed by the disgruntled employees as the real problem.
He is accused of driving “management by fear” and of overriding fundamental employee rights, including the right to organise and the right to strike.
Conversely, Management maintains that there is a need to reform conditions by bringing them more in line with the general European labour market.
“We are dealing with an organisation where employees have been running the show for many years, and where the union has provided effective management. It hurts them when it is changed, and then so they are screaming, but we must move on,” says Jesper Kongstad.
___________
Jesper Kongstad is the director of the Patent and Trademark Office Photo: Mikkel Berg Pedersen
___________
Among the new initiatives are, among other things, options that employees should stay at home for a certain period of time if they are off sick, so that EPO can choose to send a doctor to visit. Another new rule is for when employees can conduct strikes.
The relationship between the President and the disgruntled employees has been bad for several years, and already, last year, SUEPO declared that people no longer trust Battistelli.
Facts
Benoît Battistelli says in an email to [us] that he has always been in favour of respectful dialogue, but that SUEPO systematically opposes the organisation. He also noted that the reforms have had a significant positive impact on the organisation’s effectiveness.
We have not managed to get a comment from the employees’ union, SUEPO.
Of course they try to blame it all on SUEPO or “disgruntled employees”. It’s the same old storyline and it is often proving to be effective because journalists are reluctant to make a story out of “rotten apples” (even if a third of EPO, i.e. thousands of insiders, walk out to revolt). Never mind if judges, stakeholders and many others are complaining. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Content is available under CC-BY-SA