03.04.12
Posted in Patents at 9:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An update on Intellectual Ventures and a few other trolling examples
THE biggest patent troll in the world came from Microsoft and it is extorting some more large companies. Then it covers things up. “This article is by Kenneth Lustig, the vice president and head of strategic acquisitions at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and patent firm that helps clients bridge the gap between the rights they own and the rights they need,” says the opening of this piece. What utter nonsense. In this passage, “patent firm” means “patent troll”.
Intellectual Ventures needs some PR because no longer does it operate just behind closed doors and via proxies:
After years of not suing anyone (but always threatening that it might, someday), Intellectual Ventures has become more and more aggressive of late in suing lots of companies. A few weeks ago it sued AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile over a bunch of patents that (of course) involved some of IV’s favorite shell companies. Just as it was preparing this lawsuit, a VP from IV went public with an attempt to argue that all this litigation is a sign of innovation at work. The article is rather shocking in how it presents its argument. It mainly relies on false claims that correlation means causation, concerning historical periods of innovation and lawsuits over patents. Of course, what it ignores is that the patent fights often come right after the innovation, not before. In other words, the patent battles aren’t a sign that innovation is working. Rather it’s a sign of patent holders freaking out that others are innovating. It’s entirely about hindering innovation, not helping move it forward.
Not so long ago it was suggested that the government should look into these activities. “By the way,” adds Masnick in the above piece, “you may have noticed that Verizon is conspicuously absent from the list of mobile operators being sued here. That’s because Verizon paid the entrance fee and is a “member” in the IV club… which apparently only cost the company $350 million. Oh yeah… and it then became an enabler. One of the patents in the new lawsuit… once was owned by Verizon.”
Needless to say, those costs are being passed to the customers, who pay to enrich trolls like the ones from Microsoft and their thuggish friends who work as patent lawyers.
There is this other new report about the impact of troll lawsuits on games and applications:
Over the last few years, wide swathes of the game industry, and the downloadable app industry in general, have been revolutionized by a single idea: letting people play for free while charging some of those players for in-game items. Now, it seems, a shell company is claiming that it has sole ownership of that idea, and is going to court to stop a wide range of game companies from using it.
In more positive news, patent lawyers too are being sued, albeit for other reasons: [via]
John Wiley, Physicists Sue Patent Lawyers Over Journals
In a sign the country’s intellectual property laws may be getting out of hand, copyright lawyers are suing patent lawyers for using scientific journals to prepare patent applications.
In lawsuits filed this week, publisher John Wiley & Sons and the American Institute of Physicists claimed that lawyers and their firms in Chicago and Minnesota wrongfully copied journal articles.
Patent lawyers — so who’s the real “thief”? Many patent applications can be characterised as a plot to “steal” what is already public knowledge, in essence privatising the Commons. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Aitech said its new board is “ideal for a number of other embedded and harsh environment military and defense applications” and can be coupled with industry-standard real0time operating systems or Linux.
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Open source and Linux will, for the fourth year in a row, have a presence at this year’s CeBIT trade show. Free and open source software (FOSS) projects and organisations from around the world will be represented in Hall 2 at the upcoming event, taking place next week from 6 to 10 March on the world’s largest fairground in Hanover, Germany. Open Source CeBIT 2012 is organised into three areas: the Open Source Park, the Open Source Project Lounge and the Open Source Forum.
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Desktop
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But ‘‘curation’’ covers a broad spectrum of activities and practices. At one end, you have Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux that offers ‘‘repositories’’ of programs that are understood to be well-made and trustworthy. Ubuntu updates its repositories regularly with new versions of programs that correct defects as they are discovered. Theoretically, an Ubuntu repository could remove a program that has been found to be malicious, and while this hasn’t happened to date, a recent controversy on the proposed removal of a program due to a patent claim confirmed the possibility. Ubuntu builds its repositories by drawing on still other repositories from other GNU/Linux flavors, making it a curator of other curators, and it doesn’t pretend that it’s the only game in town. A few seconds’ easy work is all it takes to enable other repositories of software maintained by other curators, or to install software directly, without a repository. Ubuntu warns you when you do this that you’d better be sure you can trust the people whose software you’re installing, because they could be assuming total control over your system.
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The Migration of the city of Munich to GNU/Linux matters because it was the flagship of European migrations. It was not a bunch of school labs like Extremadura or a small operation like random individuals but a whole large complex organization doing it in public. As it was Ballmer himself tried to intercept the ship and FUDsters have kept firing at it for years, but now it is almost complete.
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Kernel Space
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Linux filesystems have a long and checkered history behind them and every now and then there is much excitement as a new filesystem is about to become mainstream and production ready. This is especially true when they are not merely a incremental improvement as with the case of Ext4 over Ext3 but take a giant leap forward as Btrfs has been promising for a number of years. So now is a good time to review what has been going on and this article does just that.
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An interesting mailing list question was posed yesterday to DRM developers, which raises the question there might be a new Linux DRM kernel driver being hacked.
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Graphics Stack
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Besides X Input 2.2 multi-touch, within the X.Org / Linux input world, one of the recent patch-sets going through several revisions with comments has been for introducing ClickPad support in the Synaptics driver.
The patch-set, which is comprised of ten patches, was originally authored by Chase Douglas at Canonical (yes, an upstream contribution from Canonical! Albeit, it’s already found in Ubuntu 12.04′s package). These patches enable support within the xf86-input-synaptics X.Org driver for supporting ClickPad.
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Applications
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With the advent of Internet TV and YouTube, the popularity of the traditional podcast is currently on the decline. Also, the huge fan following and dominance of iTunes and iPods has restricted the popular medium only to the classes. That said, it’s not as if podcasts are obscure; in fact, notable celebrities like Stephen Fry, Jeremy Clarkson, and Ricky Gervais have gained huge popularity through this then-evolving medium. Moreover, the vogue of this format was such that even the German Chancellor Angela Merkel once launched her own video podcasts.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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I have been thinking about why Red Hat purchased the Gluster parallel file system in October 2011. Back in December 2003 Red Hat purchased the GFS file system. GFS did not work out that well for Red Hat. It never added many features and it did not provide scaling. GFS is a totally different type of parallel file system than Gluster. Gluster does not support multiple threads opening and writing to the same file, often called N to 1 (1 file with N threads writing).
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Oracle has announced last evening, March 2nd, the immediate availability for download of the Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.8 operating system.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Light-Theme is the package which includes the default themes “Ambiance” and “Radiance” used in Ubuntu. Any update to this package would essential mean new visual changes which are always nice as you notice them immediately. This update brings a change to the appearance of the Nautilus sidebar as you can see in the screenshot below.
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Canonical has released Beta 1 of Ubunti 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” which offers a new HUD and a new set of images for the ARMv7 “hard float” ABI (armhf),
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Flavours and Variants
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Canonical informed users on March 1st that the first Beta release of the upcoming Xubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) operating system is available for download.
The first Beta of Xubuntu 12.04 uses the Ubiquity installer, and various new shortcuts have been added, and others changed. Moreover, Alacarte is seeded by default and it shows all Xfce-related menu items.
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The tiny, $35, Linux-based Raspberry Pi computer has drawn a lot of attention in the last few months, and though it was originally developed to teach computer programming to young students, Internet activists have taken notice as well. A recent BBC interview with developer Nadim Kobeissi, creator of a web-based secure communications program called Cryptocat, shows off just one potential use of the low-cost hardware and free software system. Kobeissi says he’s looking forward to the arrival of Raspberry Pi as a way to bring extra-secure communication to web chat, especially in places where conversations might be watched.
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Phones
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Events
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Nigeria will host the 5th African Conference on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) later this month, Mr Dele Ajisomo, the President, Open Source Foundation for Nigeria (OSFON), has said.
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SaaS
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In 2011 ‘Big Data’ was, next to ‘Cloud’, the most dropped buzzword of the year. In 2012 Big Data is set to become a serious issue that many IT organisations across the public and private sectors will need to come to grips with.
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One of the things I love most about the software industry is the way new technologies can materialize from unlikely places and get applied in unexpected ways. Hadoop is a great example of this. Conceived by the open source community, Google, Yahoo and others, this programming framework has emerged as a promising solution to the big data problem.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Organizations looking to deploy Windows 8 on ARM-based (WOA) devices will have to do so without being able to manage them, according to a Microsoft advisory outlining the business benefits of the new operating system.
While WOA scrimps on battery life, it falls short in management and compatibility with legacy applications, making it less than ideal for business.
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Finance
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The Economist sees financial innovation as positive; regarding it in the same sense as charity and goodwill to one’s fellow creatures. The reader is told that: “Finance has a very good record of solving big problems, from enabling people to realise the value of future income through products like mortgages to protecting borrowers from the risk of interest-rate fluctuations.” The definition of the “big problems” of our time is obviously subjective.
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Censorship
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We’ve been writing about German music collection society GEMA’s bizarre fight against YouTube for a few years now, in which all major music videos are blocked from YouTube in Germany because GEMA is suing YouTube and refuses to even discuss a potential license until the lawsuit is over.
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Civil Rights
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The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.
Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.
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A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional.
The law makes it a felony offense to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.
Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes “wholly innocent conduct.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Apparently there was some tension at the Mobile World Congress—the world’s largest mobile phone trade show—as the growing battle over text messaging took center stage. As you may know, SMS text-messaging is a rip-off, and a huge cash-cow for the mobile telecoms, who charge premium rates for a service that has an effective cost of zero (SMS messages are encoded into regular signals that cell towers have to send anyway).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Apparently it’s a week of paywalls for a bunch of big newspaper websites. Newspaper giant Gannett announced that all of its newspaper websites with the exception of USA Today, will go paywall by the end of the year. The system will allow between 5 and 15 article views before you’re locked out. And then, the news broke that next week, the LA Times will be launching its own paywall. Again, it will allow 15 “free” article views per month, but then require payment — with the price being a rather astounding $3.99/week.
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Copyrights
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In the past we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of claiming that the internet is some sort of “wild west” without laws just because some people don’t like the laws covering the internet. Clearly, there are plenty of laws that deal with the internet. What people really mean when they call the internet “the wild west” is that they simply don’t like the laws — and specifically that those laws don’t fit into the analogy they have crafted for the internet.
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It was obviously a moment of some embarrassment for the US Department of Commerce and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Hardly two weeks after more than 100 NGOs and a few individuals, mostly located in the global South, requested that these two agencies postpone the upcoming Africa IP Summit, this is exactly what has happened to the session originally scheduled for Cape Town, South Africa in early April. But what about their substantive criticisms of the ideology, themes and speakers for this conference which were made in a 7 February open letter to WIPO Secretary General Francis Gurry? According to the NGOs, the original Cape Town event was promoting ‘an unbalanced IP agenda’ and they instead wanted a ‘balanced forum’ that would endorse a ‘balanced’ intellectual property agenda across the world. This article takes up the question: is balance the answer?
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Generally speaking, if you’re facing criminal charges, it’s probably not a wise idea to give public interviews to the press, and I don’t see how doing this helps him in any way. He more or less lays out his expected argument concerning the copyright infringement claims, which are pretty much what you’d expect: that they followed the DMCA, took stuff down on request, and even gave copyright holders special access by which they could take links down themselves. Dotcom is clearly very well versed in the legal issues here, and he’s choosing his words extremely carefully, but it still seems a bit silly to reveal such arguments outside of court, and it could come back to haunt him later (you can bet US prosecutors are pouring over every word to figure out what they can hang him on.
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One of the most insidious aspects of recent Internet policy-making is that much of it is taking place behind closed doors, with little or no consultation — think of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. But there’s another dangerous trend: the rise of “informal” agreements between the copyright industries and Internet service providers.
With the implicit threat that tough legislation will be brought in if voluntary agreements aren’t drawn up promptly enough, governments are using this technique to avoid even the minimal scrutiny that consultations on proposed new laws would permit. This allows all kinds of bad ideas to be forced through without any evidence that they will help and without the chance for those affected to present their viewpoints.
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The TV networks hate, hate, hate this because they’ve been raking in oodles of cash from carriage fees from the cable and satellite guys. That’s how much cable and satellite has to pay to “retransmit” the local broadcast channels, and it’s become a huge, multi-billion dollar business that the TV guys have no interest in giving up in any way, shape or form. It’s the reason why you probably hear stories on a regular basis about some cable or satellite network will no longer carry a certain broadcast channel… leading to a lot of posturing and such before one side eventually backs down (often after a short blackout period).
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In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.
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US Copyright Group was the first of the US-based copyright trolls, suing thousands of individuals in a single lawsuit, trying to get them to pay up (rather than going through an actual trial). US Copyright Group is really a front for a DC law firm, Dunlapp, Grubb & Weaver. One of its very first “big” lawsuits was against about 5,000 people for supposedly partaking in the sharing of Uwe Boll’s Far Cry. Of course, as we had noted, there was a pretty big problem in the Far Cry lawsuit, in that the US copyright registration was filed too late for many of the accusations of infringement.
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ACTA
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Even though the European Commission has referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament continues to examine the treaty in its various committees. Earlier this week, the one dealing with International Trade met for a preliminary discussion. One of the key speakers was the Commissioner responsible for ACTA, Karel De Gucht, who naturally tried to make light of the many problems that have been raised in recent weeks.
But as the text of his speech makes clear, he did a poor job. For example, in an apparent attempt to distract attention from the real issues, he brought up the irrelevant and widely-condemned DDoS attacks on the European Parliament, perhaps hoping to spread around a little guilt by association.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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bution of GNU/Linux and ran with it. They got all the benefits of FLOSS at a low price. They got all the benefits of a standard desktop across their whole system. Extremadura had previously used a local GNU/Linux for their schools and some offices. It worked so well they are migrating everything to Debian GNU/Linux spreading the joy their department of health has enjoyed for years.
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The imminent death of NT4 prompted Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, to migrate from that other OS to GNU/Linux (Google Translate of http://www.schwaebischhall.de/buergerstadt/rathaus/linux.html) over several years starting in 1997 for servers and 2001 for desktops. They found GNU/Linux was solid on servers and wanted and obtained that performance on desktops.
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Server
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Meet Marek Mahut. He’s a system administrator in Brno, Czech republic, works for Red Hat, and has an interest in the public sector—particularly in how it can be more open and transparent. Marek has contributed several articles on public policy and transparency in government, including Open source is illegal? This very popular post generated thousands of page views and some interesting conversation. Marek also contributes reports on several open source events that he attends.
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Kernel Space
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It’s that time of the Linux kernel development cycle again… Here are benchmarks of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems with the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.3 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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It looks like X Input 2.2 with proper multi-touch support is ready to be shipped in the soon-to-be-released X.Org Server 1.12.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The BackTrack developers have announced the arrival of the second update to version 5 of their Linux distribution for penetration testing. Based on a custom-built 3.2.6 Linux kernel with improved wireless support, BackTrack 5 R2 upgrades a number of the existing tools and adds more than 40 new tools.
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Bridge Linux seems to be a fairly new player on the field. Its website is quite sparse; there is not even an “About” section describing the purpose of this distribution. But it has editions with GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, so I am trying each of those now.
I tested each of the three editions using a multiboot live USB made with MultiSystem. Only one of the editions will get the full barrage of testing; the other two will get basically an overview of what is included, what works, and what does not work. I tested the installation of one of the editions in a VirtualBox VM in a Xubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” host with 1024 MB of RAM, 128 MB of video memory, and 3D graphics acceleration allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see whether Bridge Linux can bridge the divide between new users and Arch Linux, as it claims.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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In a lively discussion at the RedHat offices two weeks ago in Brno, a number of well respected individuals were discussing how logging in general, and Linux logging in particular could be improved. As you may have guessed I was invited because of syslog-ng, but representatives of other logging related projects were also in nice numbers: Steve Gibbs (auditd), Lennart Poettering (systemd, journald), Rainer Gerhards (rsyslog), William Heinbockel (CEE, Mitre) and a number of nice people from the RedHat team.
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So it’s easy to forget that there’s a fourth player, in the form of Red Hat, its KVM hypervisor, and its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform. RHEV has been coming on quite nicely in terms of development since its launch in 2009, and RHEV 3 was officially released in January of this year.
But despite the introduction of heavyweight features, including Live Migration and the ability to support up to 160 cores and up to 2TB of RAM on each host, RHEV has so far achieved a tiny market share — fewer than 2 percent of companies use RHEV as their primary virtualization platform, according to the V-Index.
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The event was a soft launch of trianglewiki.org, an effort to document the Triangle region and increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the area. The wiki uses open-source software LocalWiki as a content management platform that includes wiki pages, images and mapping.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.04 will hit its first beta release today in a few hours. We will be reviewing the beta release in detail when it is officially out. But what can we expect from this beta? Well, all the features planned at the Ubuntu Summit should already be in place and only hunting and fixing bugs is left. This part is important and requires the help of the entire Ubuntu community.
So the million dollar question is “How can I contribute to pixel perfecting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ?” At this stage it is not possible to introduce new strings or make changes to the user interface since we are past the feature and user interface freeze. However, we can test out Ubuntu 12.04 and report any other bugs that we might experience. In this article, I will go over how do you install Ubuntu 12.04 without affecting your existing installation, how to report useful bug reports and contributing back to Ubuntu.
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This is the fourth major Long Term Support (LTS) release and the first featuring the Unity desktop: LTS.
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The first beta of Ubuntu 12.04 is officially released. Ubuntu 12.04′s goals were to achieve precision, stability and polish. With the beta release, it is time to see if it achieves just that. It is also time for the Ubuntu community to come forward and test the new beta release and submit bug reports to polish it further. We are almost in the final stages. No major features are to land anymore with focus solely on fixing bugs.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Kubuntu Council announced a few hours ago, March 1st, that the upcoming Kubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system will be supported for 5 years.
We already knew from January 2012 that the Ubuntu Technical Board approved both Kubuntu and Edubuntu as LTS (Long Term Support) releases, keeping the distributions alive, with security updates and bugfixes, for 5 years.
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Nicholas Negroponte is always ahead of his time. When he envisioned One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the average price for a PC was still hundreds of dollars. The industry rallied around his vision for a low-cost PC that anyone could use but couldn’t fathom innovative technology at the $100 price point he claimed he could hit.
But a little bit of time goes a long way: In the case of the newest low-cost computer, the Raspberry Pi, his vision is not only alive and well but selling out (Raspberry Pi Computers Sell Out On Launch).
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A new supply of the US$25 Raspberry Pi Linux PC, which sold out minutes after going on sale Wednesday, should be available in a month to six weeks, the nonprofit Raspberry Pi organization said Thursday.
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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer designed to get you writing programs. Here’s a tiny computer designed to get things done in your home and out of it without writing a single line of code.
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Having set a funding goal of $24,000 to get the Ninja off the ground, as of 1 March its creators were approaching almost $80,000 in total pledges, with the cut-off set for 10 March.
The Ninja Block is a small box containing a number of ‘if this then that’ (IFTTT) input/output sensors running Linux firmware, controlled through a cloud layer that also interacts with popular apps.
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Phones
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Android
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Mobile World Congress 2012 was clearly dominated by Android — one may even call it Android World Congress. We were greeted by a human sized robot at the Barcelona airports, and then you can see Android buses running in the city.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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A while back, the headlines from Computerworld arrived in my mailbox and one topic jumped out at me: Ultrabooks, expected to be hot at CES, could be boon for enterprise IT. Over the past weekend I actually saw two of them at my local big box electronics store.
My first reaction was to shake my head and assume this was the latest mid cycle hardware term to convince folks to rush out and buy new gear. On further reading, I am beginning to wonder if anyone does any work anymore or if they just consume data?
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Students in India will have more options to choose from as far as low-cost tablets go with a global education company launching an android tablet costing Rs 5,000. International education company AcrossWorld along with Delhi-based Go-Tech would launch a tablet, called ATabin, in the second week of March.
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SpringSource, the VMware division that is the home of the Spring framework for Java, has announced Spring Hadoop; this brings support for Spring, Spring Batch and Spring Integration to Apache Hadoop applications. This will allow Spring application developers to make use of data and computing capabilities of Hadoop compute clusters as an analytical tool. The project has been developed over the last few months, according to developer Costin Leau, who introduced this first release.
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Right this very second, you are looking at a Web browser. At least, those are the odds. But while that’s mildly interesting to me, detailed data on where users look (and for how long) is mission-critical. Web designers want to know if visitors are distracted from the contents of the page. Application developers want to know if users have trouble finding the important tools and functions on screen. Plus, for the accessibility community, being able to track eye motion lets you provide text input and cursor control to people who can’t operate standard IO devices. Let’s take a look at what open source software is out there to track eyes and turn it into useful data.
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Los Angeles-based hosting provider DreamHost, the provider of web hosting and managed hosting services, is planning a new, open source software spinout, the firm revealed this week, as it looks to leverage its work on the Ceph open source project for distributed storage.
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As the global community and technology architect, Harish Pillay is a part of the community architecture group, which comprises a core group of Red Hatters who interface between Red Hat and the Open Source community. Harish joined Red Hat from Maringo Tree Technologies, an open source consultancy, training and services company, he co-founded in 2002. He was also the Founder/CTO of Inquisitive Mind – an e-learning services company – founded in 1999. Excerpts from an interview:
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, the non-profit organization, demoed their Boot to Gecko at the Mobile World Congress. The outfit also announced the Mozilla Marketplace which will be similar to Apple’s AppStore and Android Market. However, there is a huge difference between Boot to Gecko and iOS or Android. Boot to Gecko changes couple of chemistries in the mobile segment. We met the Mozilla team at the Mobile World Congress to get a hands-on preview of Boot to Gecko and also understand the future plans. Keep an eye on Muktware’s Google+ page as we will be posting updates there.
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SaaS
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At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–was an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are looking into tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more. Cloudera and Hortonworks are leading the pack among these Hadoop-focused companies.
Front ends for working with Hadoop, which make it easier to sift large data sets, are also appearing. Talend, which offers a number of open source middleware solutions, is out with a new one, and Microsoft is making it easier to work with Hadoop from the Excel spreadsheet.
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Databases
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If you are an application developer or a database administrator, you already know the importance of Relational Database Management Systems. RDMSs store data in a reliable and flexible manner and facilitate its easy retrieval – and of course, they can be manipulated using Structured Query Language (SQL).
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Formed out of Oracle’s neglect of the OpenOffice.org project by a community uprising in 2010, LibreOffice quickly gathered a critical mass of developers to work on it, drawn from a diverse set of backgrounds and motivations. They hunkered down on the tasks that had been hard to address while the project was in the hands of Sun Microsystems (where I was once employed), such as removing unused code from the project’s two-decade legacy or making it possible for a beginner to get involved through Easy Hacks. A year and a half later, there’s much to show for their efforts, yet so much more to do.
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat announced the release this morning of GCC 4.6.3. Over GCC 4.6.2 there’s over 70 bug-fixes and other work. However, all of the exciting work meanwhile is going into what will become GCC 4.7.
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Project Releases
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Version 3.1.2 of GlassFish, the Java application and web server, has been released by Oracle, one year after the release of GlassFish 3.1 and seven months since the release of the Java 7 compatible GlassFish 3.1.1. The updated server is described as the successor to the earlier 3.0 releases and is recommended as an update for all current GlassFish users.
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The FreeNAS Project has announced the availability of a new stable release, version 8.0.4, of its open source FreeBSD-based network-attached-storage operating system. The maintenance update to the 8.0.x branch of FreeNAS includes a new version of the Firefly media server (1696_6), which adds compatibility for iTunes 10.5.2 or later, and updates the Transmission BitTorrent client to version 2.42. Samba has been upgraded to version 3.6.3, fixing several bugs and addressing a security vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS).
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Igor Sysoev, the developer of NGINX has released version 1.1.16 of his web server software. The project aims to provide a stable, high performance alternative to more traditional competitors such as Apache HTTP Server or Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services).
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PHP 5.4.0 was officially released today as a major advancement over the PHP 5.3 code-base.
Among the many improvements to PHP 5.4 is support for language traits, a shortened array syntax, a built-in web-server, compatibility changes, and many other improvements.
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Public Services/Government
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The government’s Big Society initiative has much in common with the philosophy that underpins the open-source community, which has delivered innovative solutions through collaborative working.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Internet’s enemies have proven vocal, organized, and effective, while the vast majority of consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs it has enriched have proven anything but, and the fight over SOPA must be understood in this larger context.
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On February 16, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake announced private beta testing for Pinwheel, an online “Flickr for Places” type of service. Fake sent me an invitation to try out Pinwheel and answered a few questions about her new project, which is built and powered by Linux and open source solutions.
First, I should clear up some potential confusion about the Pinwheel name. Another photo-sharing service, Pinweel, also launched in February, and the nearly identical names are bound to cause confusion with users. Pinwheel’s service focuses on sharing photos, location, and notes, whereas Pinweel specializes in group photo sharing.
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Brussels, 1 March 2012 – The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether The MathWorks Inc., a U.S.-based software company, has distorted competition in the market for the design of commercial control systems by preventing competitors from achieving interoperability with its products. The Commission will investigate whether by allegedly refusing to provide a competitor with end-user licences and interoperability information, the company has breached EU antitrust rules that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position. The opening of proceedings means that the Commission will examine the case as a matter of priority. It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.
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At the heart of the matter is the power that a dominant player can wield once it becomes the center of an environment of products and services that grow up around its technology. Regulators recognize that the evolution of such ecosystems can have favorable market effects, such as the rapid proliferation of clone computers and tools developed by independent software vendors (ISVs) that occurred once the “WinTel” PC operating system/processor platform became ubiquitous.
On the other hand, US and EU regulators, as well as Microsoft competitors, took Microsoft to task for over-exploiting the dominance it achieved through its control of the MS-DOS, and then Windows operating systems. One way in which Microsoft was alleged to have exploited its position was by dragging its feet in sharing interoperability information with Lotus and Apple when it introduced new versions of application software, such as its Excel spreadsheet application.
More recently, Apple swept the marketplace almost clean of competition in the portable music device space, while allowing a host of third party docking stations and other products to be produced in connection with iPods. While the iPhone no longer enjoys comparable dominance in the smart phone category, its early success gave rise to a similar explosion of synergistic third party goods and services.
In each case, while many other vendors enjoyed success in selling products and services for use in connection with these new Apple products, some ISVs complained that Apple’s App store rules and processes were overly restrictive and not always consistently applied. For their part, some customers chaffed at the control that Apple has tried to assert over what software can be used on its devices, voiding the warranties of customers that insisted on “jailbreaking” their iPhones to run whatever software they wished on the devices they had bought and paid for.
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Security
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At the RSA Conference 2012, McAfee’s Chief Technology Officer, Stuart McClure, and several of his colleagues, have demonstrated a whole range of different attacks on mobile devices. For example, they demonstrated an attack on an NFC (Near Field Communication)-enabled smartphone: the attacker simply attaches a modified NFC tag to a legitimate surface such as an advertising poster. For their live demo, the researchers used a Red Cross donations appeal such as those seen at bus stops in various cities across Europe.
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Finance
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The chief executive of the biggest bank in the United States says journalists are ridiculously overpaid.
At the company’s annual investor day, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called the percentage of newspaper company revenue paid out to employees “just damned outrageous,” according to Bloomberg News. “Worse than that, you [the media] don’t even make any money!”
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Doc Zone has traveled the world – from Wall Street to Dubai to China – to investigate The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse. Meltdown is the story of the bankers who crashed the world, the leaders who struggled to save it and the ordinary families who got crushed.
September 2008 launched an extraordinary chain of events: General Motors, the world’s largest company, went bust. Washington Mutual became the world’s largest bank failure. Lehman Brothers became the world’s largest bankruptcy ever – The damage quickly spread around the world, shattering global confidence in the fundamental structures of the international economy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College has selected the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) for its annual “Izzy Award,” which recognizes outstanding achievement in independent media. CMD was recognized for its ALEC Exposed project, and shares this year’s award with Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who was recognized for his exceptional reporting from Tahir Square. The award is named for the legendary I.F. Stone, the maverick investigative journalist who challenged Joe McCarthy’s scare campaign and was the first to question the Gulf of Tonkin hoax.
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Nine months before tens of thousands flocked to a popular music festival in Austin, Texas, the concert park grounds were spread with sewage sludge. It was autumn of 2009, and sewage sludge was used as a “fertilizer” to make the grass — parched from prior dry seasons — green. But it rained the weekend of the festival, turning the grounds into a huge mud pit, with a stench that one concert-goer described as the smell of “pig manure,” with the consistency of pudding.
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Censorship
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That last paragraph underlines one of the key problems with image rights. Like the UK’s infamous libel laws, such rights might enable the world’s rich and powerful to censor stories that presented them in an unflattering light, by invoking their “image rights”.
The same article quoted above talks about how the “legislation will define the rights of an individual to protect their own image and balance those against the freedom of news reporting and the public interest.” But a new law — especially in completely uncharted areas as here — is likely to require a number of detailed court cases to establish its contours. That’s going to be expensive, and not something that news organizations can lightly undertake, to say nothing of lone bloggers, which gives those with deep pockets a powerful weapon against the media.
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JUNIOR MINISTER SEÁN Sherlock has this afternoon confirmed that the controversial statutory instrument that reinforces online copyright laws in Ireland has been signed into law.
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Creating parodies goes to the heart of comedy and is one of the most effective ways to highlight social issues.
But parodies of films and music aren’t allowed under UK copyright law, unless you have explicit permission of the copyright owner. I didn’t know this either until this week.
Below is a satirical video leaked to Liberal Conspiracy that parodies the London 2012 Olympics using 3D animation. It is a political video that may have infringed copyright.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Two weeks ago at a hearing on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which is being championed by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., aired a laundry list of concerns about that bill.
“If the legislation before us today were enacted into law, unelected bureaucrats at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses – which own roughly 90 percent of critical cyber infrastructure,” McCain said of Lieberman’s bill. “The fundamental difference in our alternative approach is that we aim to enter into a cooperative relationship with the entire private sector through information sharing, rather than an adversarial one with prescriptive regulations.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In 2005 then-AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week that because people use Google, Google should help pay for AT&T’s network deployment (or as Ed put it, Google “ain’t usin’ his pipes for free”). ISP executives have long tried to offload upgrade expenses on to others, adding a new content toll despite the fact both content companies and consumers already pay a considerable sum for bandwidth. Whitacre’s comment triggered years of ugly network neutrality debate, and now AT&T is back with another idea.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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For a while now, we’ve been covering the gradual legal assault on the First Sale doctrine and beyond. The First Sale doctrine, of course, is what lets you resell a legally purchased book without having to first obtain permission from the copyright holder. Of course, copyright holders generally hate the First Sale doctrine, because it often means that their products have to compete against “used” versions of their own products as well. Of course, this view is very shortsighted and economically ignorant. A healthy used or resale market has been shown to increase the amount people will pay for new items — because they recognize that there’s a secondary market and they can recoup some of what they paid for the original. Thus a healthy secondary market, contrary to what some believe, can often improve the health of the primary market.
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Copyrights
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One of the key points in the SOPA/PIPA debate involved Hollywood — and the MPAA’s Chris Dodd and Michael O’Leary in particular — dismissing the worries of folks in the tech industry about the rather fundamental changes that these laws would make to both the technological and legal frameworks of the internet. Anytime such a thing was brought up, it was dismissed out of hand. This was most noticeable during the original SOPA hearings in November, where a number of experts were pointing out their concerns with how SOPA would undermine basic internet security principles… and O’Leary dismissed them with a simple statement about how he just didn’t believe those concerns to be true.
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One of our most vocal (yet anonymous) critics posted an off-topic comment on a totally unrelated story mocking us for not having covered the story of how Hollywood has been saved (saved!) thanks to the shutdown of Megaupload. Of course, the reason we hadn’t covered the story was because we didn’t know about it. He referenced a couple of French news reports, which I hadn’t seen until I had some time just now to catch up on some old comments. He could have submitted the stories, but he insisted that it would be a total waste of time because we ignore any story that we disagree with. That’s pretty funny, considering many, many of the stories here are ones that challenge our views. And, I’m especially interested in reports of actual data, even if it conflicts with other data we’ve seen in the past. In fact, I’m especially interested in such stories, because my focus is figuring out what’s really happening and understanding what’s actually best for culture and society. So data that actually challenges my assumptions is some of the most useful data around.
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ACTA
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Today the ACTA workshop turned out to be a catastrophy for ACTA proponents. Not because issues raised by MEP or participants were very tough, they weren’t. A toxic mix of clear cut academics speakers Geist/Geiger and then Sander and the Maastricht study butchering the agreement. We witness a slow “rottification” of ACTA.
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One of the striking features of the demonstrations against ACTA that took place across Europe over the last few weeks was the youth of the participants. That’s not to say that only young people are concerned about ACTA, but it’s an indication that they take its assault on the Internet very personally — unlike, perhaps, older and more dispassionate critics.
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03.01.12
Posted in Site News at 8:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Techrights has over 15,000 blog posts now
We have just crossed the 15,000 milestone and we still serve about a quarter of a million hits per day at the back end (not cache), owing primarily to our extensive archives. Thanks to all those who follow the site and provide input. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 7:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bill Gates’ ambitions of world domination are met by resistance from yet more influential people
IT IS serious enough when teachers are dismissed for standing up against Gates Foundation‘s bullying (with money and influence). “There are some brave principals with principles who will not get with the Gates Foundation programme,” notes Gates Keepers, who links to this article (paywall warning) which says:
Through the years there have been many bitter teacher strikes and too many student protests to count. But a principals’ revolt?
Teachers across Seattle continue to complain about Gates’ lobbying against their occupation and one warns about Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation:
16. Her close association with controversial education reformist Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation.
For a number of years, Susan Enfield has had a close affiliation with the controversial ed reformist Vicki Phillips, now of the Gates Foundation’s education department. Cronyism, the overuse of costly outside consultants and other issues apparently cropped up for Phillips in both Portland, OR and PA, where both women worked together, according to this article: Calls of cronyism add to concerns over core curriculum (http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=117339349292820000) Enfield worked for Phillips at multiple locations, following her from Pennsylvania to Oregon and now to Seattle (via Vancouver, WA). Is Enfield influenced by this association? Will the Gates Foundation, which embraces a controversial education reform agenda, have even more access to the superintendent and influence district policy?
Here is another one about the superintendent:
We are aware of the tremendous pressure being directed at the Board by the small but monied business interests represented by the Alliance for Education, Stand for Children, the League of Education Voters, and, behind all of them, the Gates Foundation. We remind the Board that while these interests have the money to employ full-time operatives to pester the Board with emails, phone calls, and personal contacts, they are UNELECTED. They represent only a small constituency and the Board has other constituencies to whom it owes some small consideration: communities, parents, students, and teachers.
And finally, a video:
The unholy trinity of Stand for Children (SFC), the League of Education Voters (LEV) and the Washington State PTA (WSPTA) will be lobbying for a charter school bill starting in January with the backing of Microsoft, Boeing and Bill Gates. They will be in the House and Senate halls in Olympia in front of our representatives saying that they stand for the rest of us when in actuality they are representing only a wealthy few.
Gates is also mentioned a couple of times here. Everywhere that we hear about education reform one or more of Gates’ proxies appear at the scene. The Gates Foundation has many proxies (funded by Gates) to work through and hide its negativity from the public. █
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