03.14.14
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The FUD machine of the Microsoft lobbyist is interjecting itself into the media again, despite clear warnings that were published for years
KNOWING THAT Microsoft Florian is a liar and ‘spammer’ (flooding journalists with identical E-mails) that’s employed for the smearing of Android, most journalists now ignore him and we rarely hear anything from him. A few months ago I visited his blog just to see if he was still ‘alive’ online as I had not heard of him for almost a year.
Joe Mullin, who is usually excellent when it comes to reporting on patents, perhaps fails to grasp Microsoft Florian’s poor record when it comes to covering events. He is a spinner, a deceiver, and he has been proven to be only an agenda pusher for several years now. He pretends to be things that he is not. That’s what he is good at, other than mass-mailing journalists so that they link to his nonsense. Pamela Jones would be tempted to reach out for her keyboard and log into Groklaw if she saw this.
No journalist — and it’s worth repeating — NO JOURNALIST should be taking it at face value what Microsoft Florian says, not without remembering who he works for. Microsoft Florian played a major role in the “Android is expenseive” PR campaign, making up or propping up fictitious figures. HTC already refuted the FUD from this lobbyist, who is paid by Android foes including Microsoft (they seem to be passing him material to publish, too).
“Yesterday,” writes Mullin, “Mueller published a hearing transcript from February 10 which featured each side’s lawyers arguing to limit or throw out the other side’s expert report.”
So this is just an argument, it’s not actually anything factual. It’s a wet dream of some lawyer. Mullin turned it into an incredible headline which then invited many comments. This is the manufacturing of “news” out of gossip. Mullin says: “New demand dwarfs licensing fees charged by Microsoft, and it will go to the jury.”
But wait, why assume that there are “fees charged by Microsoft”? Well, guess it’s Microsoft Florian again. As Mullin later mentions: “Microsoft patent licenses to Android phone makers have reportedly been in the $7.50 to $15 per phone range, with lower estimates hanging around $5 per phone. As Mueller points out in his post on the royalty demands, those fees are for a license to a wide portfolio of patents, not just five patents being hotly litigated in court.”
The key word here is “reportedly”. But reported by who? Microsoft Florian and some Microsoft-friendly analysts. We covered this before.
Mullin concludes as follows, prepetuating an ubsubtanitated myth: “It’s also possible to earn a lot of money by convincing Android OEMs to pay patent royalties, as Microsoft has shown. One analyst estimates Microsoft is getting $2 billion per year in patent payments over Android.”
Microsoft might not be paid anything, but people like Microsoft Florian, paid by Microsoft itself, helped create this fairy tail and given it some legs. So all that Mullin’s article does is basically reiterating speculations and making them look like facts.
Well done, Microsoft, for an effective deception and PR campaign. It is the “Android is expensive” strategy. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
NSA/GCHQ
-
Geneva panel share deep concerns over US record on host of different subjects, including racial inequality and Guantánamo
-
Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg has called president Barack Obama to express his frustration over what he says is long-lasting damage caused by the US government’s surveillance programmes.
-
Facebook’s CEO says he called President Obama to express his ‘frustration’ at repeated revelations of NSA snooping
-
…how US spy hive the NSA today branded claims that it “has infected millions of computers around the world with malware,” and that it “is impersonating US social media or other websites” to eavesdrop on people.
-
Human oversight is being made redundant by an automated hacking system called TURBINE setup by the NSA — with help from GCHQ — which uses fake Facebook servers to infect users’ systems. Former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald has released detailed information on the network, which had already come to light last year, and the workings behind it on his site The Intercept.
-
-
The EU threatens the abolition of its trade agreement with the US, and other deals, if blanket surveillance by the NSA on EU citizens doesn’t stop. MEPs announced a resolution that wraps up a six-month inquiry into America’s violation of data privacy.
Drones
-
Prosecuting the drone protesters in the town of DeWitt has cost taxpayers $42,786 so far, and more trials are expected to take place in the near future.
DeWitt officials said the upcoming trials of the activists charged in connection with drone protests at Hancock Air Base could double that cost, The recent trial of protesters resulted in 12 people being sent to jail. DeWitt Town Justice David Gideon found them guilty of disorderly conduct in connection with the October 2012 protest. They were given a 15-day sentence.
-
-
-
-
Firefighters were still unloading debris from the scene of Wednesday’s explosion in East Harlem that killed seven people and injured dozens when a three-pound DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone began buzzing above the wreckage.
CIA
-
It seems that President Obama has chosen sides in the fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over a report describing the agency’s torture program under President George W. Bush. The executive branch is standing with the CIA, standing behind its director, and even reportedly withholding documents from the Senate investigation.
-
Imagine you commit a heinous crime. Then imagine that, once facing charges in court, you’re allowed to withhold incriminating evidence brought forth by the prosecutors, keeping the jury in the dark about the details of your lawbreaking. Further, imagine you commit more crimes while on trial and imagine the judge enables and covers up these additional offenses.
-
The White House is refusing to hand over top-secret documents to a Senate investigation into CIA torture and rendition of terrorism suspects, claiming it needs to ensure that “executive branch confidentiality” is respected.
In the latest development in the spiralling clash between Congress and the administration over oversight of the intelligence agencies, Barack Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that certain material from the George W Bush presidency was being withheld for fear of weakening Oval Office privacy.
-
A fight between the Senate and the CIA over whether crimes were committed in the handling of sensitive classified material appears unlikely to be resolved in the courts, legal experts say.
-
Congress needs to get to the bottom of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s astonishing allegations of a CIA attempt to intimidate congressional staffers investigating the spy agency’s past actions.
Feinstein, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, can have no partisan motive in roiling these waters. And she has been a firm supporter of the agency, even defending the CIA’s controversial use of armed drones to kill terrorists overseas.
-
-
The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the nomination of Caroline Krass to serve as the CIA’s top lawyer amid a snooping fight pitting the spy agency against Congress and ensnaring the CIA’s acting general counsel.
-
-
Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative “re-interpretation” of the law that she hasn’t applauded as being lawful and “needed” to “keep people safe.”
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
Fedora 21, the next version of Red Hat’s Fedora distribution of Linux, just received a slew of new feature approvals courtesy of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
-
Among the Fedora 21 changes that were approved at today’s FESCo meeting for Fedora 21 features include:
- Migrating cron jobs to native systemd timer units and changing Fedora package dependencies that currently depend on crontab.
- A system-wide crypto policy of unifying cryptography policies by different applications/libraries so there is a consistent security level for all applications running on a Fedora system.
- Access control for PC/SC smart cards to prevent unauthorized access to data on smart cards and also from unauthorized erasing of smart cards or even communicating with the smart card’s firmware.
-
-
-
-
So Ojuba project manage many projects that make changes, Ojuba contribute in Fedora itself and in many big open source projects as KDE,MATE,VLC,Wine and others.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Content is available under CC-BY-SA