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10.24.15

RoboVM Takeover of Interest to Microsoft and Its Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (E.E.E.) Strategy Against Android, Which It Says It Wants to Fork

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It sure looks like E.E.E.

Miguel de Icaza and other Microsoft MVPs
Miguel de Icaza with his friends from Microsoft

Summary: Further analysis of the news about RoboVM, which got taken over by a Microsoft-connected company (one might say offshoot or proxy), funded in part by Microsoft money

MICROSOFT’S WAR against the Linux-powered Android platform is well under way, currently descending into the 'extend' phase in E.E.E. against Free/libre software and against GNU/Linux. Readers of Microsoft puff pieces don’t agree with what Microsoft is saying and people at LXer recognise this strategy even from a great distance (see for example “Microsoft’s Death Embrace”). Recall what Microsoft did to Nokia and do not assume that a top contributor to Linux (which Nokia once was) will stay this way after Microsoft moles somehow manage to enter. Elop had destroyed companies before he entered Nokia and Miguel de Icaza had derailed Novell before he became a lot more closely connected to Microsoft, even working for Microsoft.

Yesterday we wrote about Xamarin‘s takeover of RoboVM (with money that came in part from Microsoft veterans). Tim Anderson oddly enough suggests that:

It may not be so welcome to Microsoft, if in the long term it dilutes the focus on C#, which has made Xamarin a key partner.

That’s assuming that the RoboVM-derived/produced work (including users of RoboVM’s products) won’t be diverted away to .NET, rather than be preserved in its current (and formerly independent) form. Perhaps it remains to be seen what Xamarin makes of RoboVM, but judging by the track record of de Icaza, the folks at RoboVM, living across the border from Nokia, may have just let in an ‘Elop’.

“It has happened before, so it can happen again; Microsoft takes great in the strategy of befriending the competition in an effort to betray and eventually kill it.”The news of the buyout (copies of the press release aside [1, 2, 3]) was covered mostly by Microsoft boosters, Microsoft-connected ‘news’ sites (multiple copies even), Microsoft apologists, and RoboVM itself. It’s almost as though the only parties interested in this are Microsoft, the acquiring party (with some funds from Microsoft veterans), and the acquired party. These are all the articles I was able to find when searching the Web. The interested parties are clear to see here. Google has absolutely nothing to gain from this.

In Xamarin’s forums Joseph Hill has said in relation to this takeover that “C# is a beautiful, advanced language with an incredibly large and passionate developer base that is continuing to adopt Xamarin in large and growing numbers.” My instinct tells me that this is part of Microsoft’s E.E.E. against Android and other mobile platforms. It has happened before, so it can happen again; Microsoft takes great in the strategy of befriending the competition in an effort to betray and eventually kill it. █

“We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.”

–Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Platform Group Vice President

Microsoft is Gradually Dying, So Patent Blackmail and Mass Surveillance (for Snitches) the Remaining Two Business Strategies

Posted in Finance, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 11:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Remember these words from Microsoft itself (click for source PDF):

Microsoft dirty tactics

Summary: Analysis of Microsoft’s abysmal state and what it has been trying to do as a result of its inability to compete fairly with Free (as in freedom) software such as GNU/Linux, Android, Java, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc.

TECHRIGHTS has been a critic of Microsoft for a very long time; never before have we seen Microsoft in such poor form. The attempts to derail GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source software from the inside are part of a fight for the company’s very survival. Its cash cows are losing their luster and the only way to keep their momentum/inertia is to force companies to bundle them; Microsoft now does this forcing (or blackmail) using software patents (Samsung, Kyocera, ASUS and Dell are the main examples of this strategy, so far).

Microsoft’s history of cooking the books and avoiding taxes has led to the perception that Microsoft is very rich, but after the losses announced in the last quarter (in the billions of dollars) comes another poor quarter and the signs are on the wall. As Robert Pogson put it:

The monopoly is not dead yet, unfortunately, but it is on its death-bed.

Parts of the monopoly are already dead and formats lock-in too is being loosened, in spite of Microsoft’s OOXML crimes. Several countries recognised what Microsoft had done and moved to ODF, sometimes to Free/libre software as well. See last week’s example from the British government.

“Parts of the monopoly are already dead and formats lock-in too is being loosened, in spite of Microsoft’s OOXML crimes.”Microsoft cannot sell hardware (potentially a profitable business) and finds ‘creative’ accounting tricks to hide it [1]. This huge failure, which has become a massive embarrassment for the abusive monopolist, shows no signs of reversal because products keep dying and are not at all recognised by the public [2,3]. Putting speech recognition, which does not even work properly [4,5], on devices such as phones won’t work, primarily because Microsoft has no presence in mobile and not even in cars, despite tall ambitions [6] (where poor speech recognition can result in fatalities).

With internal cultural problems and costs associated with litigation (e.g. sexism lawsuits [7]) Microsoft falls back on an evil business model similar to that of Facebook (as Vista 10 serves to show), namely turning users into “products”, then selling their private data to many companies or malicious entities such as GCHQ, NSA etc. Microsoft continues to be a leading proponent of the NSA while working for the military and war complex [8] (they call it “information-sharing partnership”, but what it means is mass surveillance plus data-passing). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Windows, Surface and phones post revenue declines as Microsoft’s MPC segment falls 17%

    The inclusion of the typically very profitable Windows in the MPC division offsets and hides the profitability, or lack thereof, of Microsoft’s hardware endeavors, Dawson added.

  2. NFL Fumbles Microsoft’s $400 Million Surface Ad Deal (Again), Still Gets Called An iPad

    In one of the most highly anticipated games of the season, quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers last Thursday to kick off the National Football League (NFL) season. The first game of the season is always popular, though this particular match-up drew interest from fans wondering how Brady would fare after being dogged in the media for the past seven months over something known as Deflategate. With all that attention, Microsoft can’t be pleased that on-air commentators are still referring to its sponsored Surface tablet as an iPad.

  3. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) To Shut Down Zune Services In November

    Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has possibly the most outstanding reputation for its products and services. The company is synonymous with quality, and it is hard to think about the technology sector without Microsoft. However, Zune is another story altogether. The music service, which was started to counter the growing popularity of online music streaming services, has always played second fiddle to the more established players in the market.

  4. Watch: Cortana embarrasses Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during keynote address

    Satya Nadella was delivering a keynote address at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference. The Microsoft CEO was in the midst of demoing some productivity tools and also also occasionally showing off Windows 10 capabilities when he attempted to showcase Microsoft virtual assistant Cortana’s ability to understand voice commands and to deliver relevant results.

  5. Satya Nadella endures a classic Microsoft demo fail moment

    Nadella could immediately see that Cortana was not getting it. “Come on,” he implored, the annoyance showing in his voice.

    Finally he gave up and said, “No, this is not going to work.”

  6. Microsoft Cortana may be headed to your car

    A Microsoft-connected car, reportedly in trial mode, would let you issue commands using the Cortana voice assistant.

  7. Microsoft Corporation Faces Gender Discrimination Lawsuit

    Microsoft has been hit by a gender discrimination lawsuit by one of its ex-technician

  8. Microsoft renews information-sharing partnership with NATO

    Microsoft and NATO have agreed to renew a longstanding partnership that will see the tech giant provide the intergovernmental treaty group’s Communications and Information Agency with details of Microsoft products and services, as well as new information about cybersecurity threats.

10.23.15

Links 23/10/2015: New Verifone POS Suite Runs Linux, BlackBerry to Ship Linux November 6th

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source design is ugly, here’s why

    In particular, Braithwaite said open source projects need design help in three key areas: User Experience, Branding, and Visual User Interface. But recruiting them isn’t going to be easy, Braithwaite said, because open source developers haven’t created an atmosphere where designers can feel like they’re part of a community. Open source communities can feel “highly ­exclusive,” Braithwaite said, adding: “It feels like a cool kids’ club that (designers) are not a part of ­ or maybe a really nerdy kids’ club.” Developers need to help motivate designers, he said.

  • Open source lessons for synthetic biology

    However, there are significant differences between the acceptance of open source software and open source biology, primarily boiling down to regulation and safety issues (after all, a badly written program can crash your computer, but a badly formed bacteria can kill you). The number of regulations that need to be followed when legally producing a transgenic organism are immense, particularly in ensuring that they are both non-harmful and unlikely to spread throughout the wild. These regulatory — and thus financial — burdens severely limit the degree to which any individual biohacker can take their ideas and develop them. Note, however, that this is individual biohackers — larger firms can naturally afford to bring developments through this stage to market. Can a larger firm thus make money from open source biology? We believe so, provided the company uses a method similar to Red Hat, Google, or Tesla, in using the open source component to drive customers toward their own market strength — for example, by releasing blueprints and software for lab automation, then selling that equipment and support.

  • TastyIgniter: An Open Source Platform to Manage a Restaurant

    Say you own a restaurant and you are ready to expand the reach of your services. You are thinking about incorporating online table reservations and ordering into your services but you have no idea what it entails. You like the idea but you don’t know how to code a website. There’s software you can install that will take care of all of that.

    What’s more? The software has features to aid kitchen management, customer and staff management, store management and internationalisation already built in.

    And it is free.

  • Swarm v. Fleet v. Kubernetes v. Mesos

    Most software systems evolve over time. New features are added and old ones pruned. Fluctuating user demand means an efficient system must be able to quickly scale resources up and down. Demands for near zero-downtime require automatic fail-over to pre-provisioned back-up systems, normally in a separate data centre or region.

  • Events

    • IoT and open source contributions keynote at All Things Open 2015

      One of my favorite things about the keynotes at All Things Open this year was that attendees didn’t have just one great speaker to listen to each morning—we had a few. I enjoyed hearing multiple stories and many insights from dynamic speakers all in one sitting.

    • FSF Blogs: Videos and photos from the FSF30 celebrations now available

      First, watch this video of FSF general counsel and Software Freedom Law Center President and Executive Director Eben Moglen’s talk, “FSF from 30 to 45,” given at the User Freedom Summit held at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Moglen looks ahead to the crucial issues facing the free software movement in its next fifteen years.

      At the 30th anniversary party held in Boston, we had two recorded greetings from friends of the FSF who were unable to attend in person. One was by FSF member, BoingBoing co-editor, and EFF fellow Cory Doctorow. The other greeting was from computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge.

      Check out the video of the performance of the Free Software Song and the Bulgarian folk song that inspired it, Sadi Moma Bela Loza, by members of the Boston Bulgarian singing groups Divi Zheni and Zornitsa. We will have more videos of other guest toasts and RMS’s address soon.

    • Ubucon Slated for SCALE 14X, Bassel Offered MIT Job & More…

      I don’t say enough good things about Ubuntu, so when they give me reason to, I’m on it. I also don’t talk enough about openSUSE either; good, bad or indifferent.

      [...]

      But Wait, There’s More: Speaking of SCALE 14x, you still have a week to submit a talk for the first-of-the-year Linux/FOSS show in the world (now before linux.conf.au and FOSDEM in 2016, by some stroke of scheduling luck). SCALE 14x is four days of Peace, Love and Linux at the Pasadena Convention Center from Jan. 21-24, 2016…Getting the computers to the kids is no easy feat, even when the truck is working: My good friend and FOSS Force colleague (not to mention Houston Astros fan) Ken Starks has an Indiegogo campaign to replace the now-deceased delivery vehicle for Reglue (Recycled Electronics and GNU/Linux Used for Education). Throw in a few bucks if you can.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla commits $1M to support free open-source software projects

        Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, announced today that it has allocated $1 million to dole out grants to support free and open-source software projects around the world.

      • Mozilla Launches Open Source Support Program

        Today Mozilla is launching an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. Our initial allocation for this program is $1,000,000. We are inviting people already deeply connected to Mozilla to participate in our first set of awards.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • How CERN uses OpenStack to drive their scientific mission

      One of the world’s largest scientific organization is using OpenStack to understand what makes up everything in our universe. CERN runs one of the most collaborative scientific projects on Earth, responsible for producing enormous amounts of data on a routine basis to make Nobel prize winning discoveries such as the Higgs boson has some pretty unique computing requirements.

    • OpenStack Security Groups using OVN ACLs

      It’s worth looking at how this has been implemented with OVS in the past for OpenStack. OpenStack’s existing OVS integration (ML2+OVS) makes use of iptables to implement security groups. Unfortunately, to make that work, we have to connect the VM to a tap device, put that on a linux bridge, and then connect the linux bridge to the OVS bridge using a veth pair so that we have a place to implement the iptables rules. It’s great that this works, but the extra layers are not ideal.

    • Oracle Puts OpenStack into Docker Containers

      There is a misconception among some people that Docker containers and OpenStack are competitive technologies. The truth is the exact opposite, and in fact, Oracle is now providing the best proof yet by using Docker images as a mechanism to actually install an OpenStack cloud.

    • OpenStack Addresses Network Orchestration Layer

      While the OpenStack community likes to present a unified front to the outside world, inside the various projects that make up the OpenStack framework, there is a lot of frustration with the Neutron networking component of OpenStack. Much of that frustration stems from the fact that after five years of effort Neutron still doesn’t scale particularly well. As such, many of the organizations that have embraced OpenStack wind up swapping in a commercial network layer of software to replace Neutron.

    • Exposing the Truth About OpenStack Cloud Deployments

      Lured by the siren song of better business agility and accelerated innovation, an increasing number of companies are considering or have already deployed private clouds as part of their IT strategy. Since emerging in 2010 as an open-source initiative to help organizations build cloud services on industry-standard hardware, OpenStack has garnered much attention, but its adoption in production environments has been tempered by an assortment of perceived limitations, both real and imagined.

    • Mapr Adds Apache Drill 1.2 to Its Hadoop Distro

      MapR announced it has added Apache Drill 1.2 to its Apache Hadoop distribution for additional analytics support.

    • MapR Delivers Apache Drill 1.2 in its Hadoop Distribution

      MapR Technologies which offers a popular distribution of Apache Hadoop that integrates web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database capabilities, has announced the availability of Apache Drill 1.2 in its Distribution as well as a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution. The addition of Drill 1.2 comes right on the heels of MapR adding Apache Spark to its distribution.

  • Databases

    • Oracle MySQL 5.7 Database Nears General Availability

      Ahead of Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in 2013, the company first began to talk about a major new release of its open-source MySQL database. Now two years later, development on MySQL 5.7 is compete and general availability is set for October 26.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Template Management in LibreOffice 5

      If you’re a LibreOffice power user, you’ve probably ventured into the realm of templates. But, if you’ve upgraded to LibreOffice 5, you’ve probably noticed a few minor changes to the way this feature is managed. It’s not a profound or game-changing shift, but a shift nonetheless.

      Because many people overlook the template feature in LibreOffice, I thought it would be a good idea to approach template management for LibreOffice 5 as if it were a new feature…and one that should be considered a must-have for all types of users. So, sit back and prepare to discover that feature which will make your time with LibreOffice exponentially easier.

    • LibreOffice Developers Working on a New Toolbar Layout

      The LibreOffice developers are working on a new interface that aims to unify all the different toolbars. This is still under development, and it will be provided as an option and not as default.

    • UK licence deal to boost use of open source office

      Public administrations in the UK can get professional support for using LibreOffice, the open source office alternative, thanks to a licence deal by the UK’s central procuring agency Crown Commercial Service with Collabora, a UK-based ICT service provider.

    • First bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.1

      Those who cannot join during the bug hunting session are always welcome to help chasing bugs and regressions when they have time. There will be a second bug hunting session in December, to test LibreOffice 5.1 Release Candidate 1.

    • LibreOffice 5.1 Is Working On New Features For A February Debut

      LibreOffice 5.1 is planned for release in early February while to catch some bugs early they’re organizing the first bug hunt from 30 October to 1 November. Builds of LibreOffice 5.1 Alpha 1 are already available for testing. More details via The Document Foundation’s blog.

    • finding UI crashes by fuzzing input events with american fuzzy lop

      As mentioned previously I’ve been experimenting using afl as a fuzzing engine to fuzz a stream of serialized keyboard events which LibreOffice reads and dispatches.

  • BSD

    • Deweloperzy OpenBSD: Dmitrij D. Czarkoff

      In 2005 I tried OpenBSD for the first time. I still recall how I was impressed by the fact that I only needed ifconfig (as opposed to ifconfig, iwconfig and wpa_supplicant on Linux) to configure my wireless network card.

    • Deweloperzy OpenBSD: Marc Espie

      Funny story actually. It was about 20 years ago, and I didn’t have any Internet access at home. I wanted to play with some Unix on my home Amiga, as I didn’t have root access on the suns at University. Getting anything on my Amiga was complicated, as I had to transfer everything through floppies. Turned out OpenBSD was the only OS with sane and clear instructions. NetBSD gave you so many different choices, I couldn’t figure out which one to follow, and Linux was a jungle of patches.

    • W^X enabled in Firefox port

      After recent discussions of revisiting W^X support in Mozilla Firefox, David Coppa (dcoppa@) has flipped the switch to enable it for OpenBSD users running -current.

    • Google Continues Working On CUDA Compiler Optimizations In LLVM

      While it will offend some that Google continues to be investing in NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU language rather than an open standard like OpenCL, the Google engineers continue making progress on a speedy, open-source CUDA with LLVM.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • What Is the Most Dangerous Gang in Prison?
  • Mythbusters hosts say 14th season will be last, announce farewell tour

    In 2016, Mythbusters hosts and stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage will warn viewers not to try this at home for the last time. The duo announced on Wednesday that the Discovery Channel TV series’ 14th season, which begins airing January 9, will be its last.

  • Angry Birds’ Rovio Cuts 213 Jobs, Axes Learning To Refocus On Games And Video

    After announcing in August that it would cut up to 260 jobs, Rovio — maker of the Angry Birds games — today released details of the final number: the Finland-based company is letting go of 213 employees, around 25% of staff, as it continues to restructure and cut away unprofitable parts of its business. The whole of the company is being affected, with the exception of those working on the production of The Angry Birds Movie in the U.S. and Canada.

  • The Chinese Internet Wants To Know About David Cameron And Pigs

    The state visit to the UK by president Xi Jinping has been seen as a success in China, although ordinary people on Weibo keep asking David Cameron about pigs.

  • Security

    • Fitbit can allegedly be hacked in 10 seconds

      Fitness-tracking wristband Fitbit, which has sold more than 20 million devices worldwide, and tracks your calorie count, heart rate and other highly personal information, can be remotely hacked, according to research by Fortinet. This gives hackers access to the computer to which you sync your Fitbit.

    • Adobe releases emergency patch for Flash zero-day flaw
    • Adobe confirms major Flash vulnerability, and the only way to protect yourself is to uninstall Flash

      Just one day after Adobe released its monthly security patches for various software including Flash Player, the company confirmed a major security vulnerability that affects all versions of Flash for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. You read that correctly… all versions. Adobe said it has been made aware that this vulnerability is being used by hackers to attack users, though it says the attacks are limited and targeted. Using the exploit, an attacker can crash a target PC or even take complete control of the computer.

    • Western Digital self-encrypting hard drives riddled with security flaws

      Several versions of self-encrypting hard drives from Western Digital are riddled with so many security flaws that attackers with physical access can retrieve the data with little effort, and in some cases, without even knowing the decryption password, a team of academics said.

      The paper, titled got HW crypto? On the (in)security of a Self-Encrypting Drive series, recited a litany of weaknesses in the multiple versions of the My Passport and My Book brands of external hard drives. The flaws make it possible for people who steal a vulnerable drive to decrypt its contents, even when they’re locked down with a long, randomly generated password. The devices are designed to self-encrypt all stored data, a feature that saves users the time and expense of using full-disk encryption software.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • WikiLeaks publishes e-mail from CIA director’s hacked AOL account

      WikiLeaks has released a cache of e-mails which the site says were retrieved from CIA Director John Brennan’s AOL account.

      The e-mails include Brennan’s SF86, a form that he had to fill out to get his current position and security clearance. The form, from 2008, “reveals a quite comprehensive social graph of the current Director of the CIA with a lot of additional non-governmental and professional/military career details,” according to WikiLeaks’ description of the document.

    • WikiLeaks Is Publishing the CIA Director’s Hacked Emails

      WikiLeaks may describe itself as an outlet for whistleblowers, but it’s never hesitated to publish stolen documents offered up by a helpful hacker, either. So it’s no surprise that it’s now leaked the pilfered files of the CIA’s director, John Brennan.

      On Wednesday, the secret-spilling group published a series of selected messages and attachments from a trove of emails taken from Brennan’s AOL account. Though WikiLeaks hasn’t revealed its source, there’s little doubt the files were handed off by the self-described teen hackers calling themselves CWA or “Crackas With Attitude,” who claim to have hacked Brennan’s AOL account through a series of “social engineering” tricks.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Even corporate America wants campaign finance reform to stop crony capitalism

      Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can’t be easily disentangled. As it diminishes our public sphere and drowns out the myriad of citizen voices, it also sucks the energy and vitality from our economy. This causes pain to business owners.

      According to a recent report from the Committee on Economic Development, an old, white-shoe non-partisan organization that came out of the aftermath of World War II (and was a booster for the Marshall Plan), the United States economy is increasingly represented by crony capitalism, not competitive capitalism.

    • Fox Guest: Black Lives Matter Is A “Terrorist Group”

  • Privacy

    • Facebook Is The Borg

      For days, I had mysterious annoying bell dings on my Mac. It turns out that Facebook turned on sound notifications — entirely without my doing — for when people comment on posts.

    • Why Vietnam’s Communists Are Learning to Like Facebook

      Vietnam’s Communist government, which once blocked Facebook Inc., is now embracing the online tools of capitalism by establishing its own page on the social media website in order to reach young Internet-savvy users who turn to it for news and discourse.

    • The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword

      In many countries, it’s against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it – whether it’s a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists – or institutions – who subscribe to journals.

      But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they’re using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers.

    • EFF’s Let’s Encrypt has support from super browser brothers

      A SECURITY CERTIFICATE EFFORT involving the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust and the University of Michigan has lived up to promises to be in order by 2015.

    • Proposed German law: telecoms must store customer data on airgapped servers

      The German Bundestag (parliament) has passed a controversial law requiring telecoms and Internet companies to store customers’ metadata and to make it available to law enforcement agencies investigating “severe crimes.” Specifically, “phone providers will now have to retain phone numbers, the date and time of phone calls and text messages, and, in the case of mobile phones, location (approximated through the identification of cell phone towers).” In addition, “Internet providers are required to save the IP addresses of users as well as the date and time of connections made,” a post on the Lawfare blog explains.

    • DHS now needs warrant for stingray use, but not when protecting president

      As expected, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released its own stingray requirements. Agents must now obtain a warrant prior to deploying the secretive surveillance tool as part of criminal investigations. This new policy comes over a month after the Department of Justice released its own similarly policy.

      The new rules will apply to DHS, as well as agencies that fall under its umbrella, such as the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    • CISA Moves Forward: These 83 Senators Just Voted To Expand Surveillance

      Well, it’s not a huge surprise that it moved forward, but the faux “cybersecurity” bill, which is actually a surveillance bill in disguise, CISA, has moved forward in the Senate via an overwhelming 83 to 14 vote. As we’ve discussed at length, while CISA is positioned as just a “voluntary” cybersecurity information sharing bill, it’s really none of those things. It’s not voluntary and it’s not really about cybersecurity. Instead, it’s a surveillance bill, that effectively gives the NSA greater access to information from companies in order to do deeper snooping through its upstream collection points. Even the attempts to supposedly “clarify” the language to protect data from being used for surveillance shows that the language is deliberately written to look like it does one thing, while really opening up the ability of the NSA and FBI to get much more information.

  • Civil Rights

    • Critics say air marshals, much wanted after 9/11, have become ‘bored cops’ flying first class

      At a price tag of $9 billion over the past 10 years, Duncan called the program “ineffective” and “irrelevant.”

      [...]

      Duncan acknowledged at an oversight committee last month that the program “has come to be a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the DHS, when 4,000 bored cops fly around the country First Class, committing more crimes than they stop.”

    • New ‘Car Safety Bill’ Would Make Us Less Safe, Block Security Research And Hinder FTC And Others

      The House Energy and Commerce Committee is pushing an absolutely terrible draft bill that is supposedly about improving “car safety.” This morning there were hearings on the bill, and the thing looks like a complete dud. In an era when we’re already concerned about the ridiculousness of how copyright law is blocking security research on automobiles (just as we’re learning about automakers hiding secret software in their cars to avoid emissions testing), as well as questions about automobile vulnerabilities and the ability to criminalize security research under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), this bill makes basically all of it worse.

    • Sheldon Whitehouse Freaks Out, Blames ‘Pro-Botnet Lobby’ For Rejecting His Terrible CFAA Amendment

      As we mentioned yesterday, one of the (many) bad things involved in the new Senate attempt to push the CISA “cybersecurity” bill forward was that they were including a bad amendment added by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that would expand the terrible Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that should actually be significantly cut back. Senator Ron Wyden protested this amendment specifically in his speech against CISA. And, for whatever reason, Whitehouse’s amendment has been pulled from consideration and Whitehouse is seriously pissed off about it.

    • Why Internet Users Should be Very Angry about the TPP

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) exploded onto the Canadian media landscape last week, when negotiators from the 12 participating countries finally agreed on a deal. Even if you were paying attention, you might not have heard about the impacts on the Internet, since much of the focus was on the farming and auto sectors. But the TPP is about a lot more than dairy and cars – it’s also about our fundamental right to free expression.

    • Eritrean mistakenly killed opens old wounds in Israel

      Images of an Eritrean asylum seeker lying in a pool of blood as an angry mob kicks him has renewed debate in Israel over alleged racism and how to respond to violence.

      Habtom Zarhum, 29, was shot by a security guard this week at a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba after being mistaken for an assailant in an attack that killed an Israeli soldier.

      He later died of his injuries.

      Footage of Zarhum bleeding as an angry mob rains blows on his head and torso has spread rapidly on social media, prompting soul searching among Israelis over their response to a wave of attacks as well as their treatment of African migrants.

      One photo posted on Facebook shows Zarhum smiling with colleagues at a nursery where he worked.

    • Chase Madar on Prosecuting Police

      This week on CounterSpin: Nearly a year after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a Cleveland police officer, the county prosecutor is giving signs that he won’t be strenuously encouraging indictments, deflating the hopes of many that the officer, Timothy Loehmann, will face any punishment at all for the killing.

    • Rush Limbaugh Applauds Himself For Coining The Term “Feminazi”

  • YouTube/Internet

    • You Can Now Pay to Watch YouTube Without Ads

      Dubbed YouTube Red, the new service will offer ad-free versions of all current YouTube videos, as well as access to music streaming and additional exclusive content from some of the site’s top creators. It will cost $9.99 per month and launch on Oct. 28.

    • YouTube Red Doesn’t Want to Be Compared to Netflix

      YouTube believes its content, stable of talent and audience makes it an entirely new player in paid streaming.

    • Red Dawn

      An inside look at YouTube’s new ad-free subscription service

    • Europe’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Could Allow Torrent and VPN Throttling

      Next week the European Parliament will vote on Europe’s new telecoms regulation which includes net neutrality rules. While the legislation is a step forward for many countries, experts and activists warn that it may leave the door open for BitTorrent and VPN throttling if key amendments fail to pass.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Google Opposes Whole-Site Removal of “Pirate” Domains

        Google is rejecting calls from copyright holders to remove entire domain names from Google search based on copyright infringements. In a letter to the U.S. Government the company points out that this would prove counterproductive and lead to overbroad censorship.

Microsoft Massively Distributes Lies About Its Commitment to Privacy While Aiding NSA and Building Back Doors

Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft’s business model of snitching on customers has proven too costly

“Microsoft should put its own house in order on privacy rather than waving about a discredited blueprint as a model for others… This attempt to portray itself as a leader in consumer privacy is as preposterous as the notion that it has treated its competitors with high standards of business ethics.”

–Junkbusters President Jason Catlett

Summary: Amid losses of very large customers (and outright bans in some governments) Microsoft admits a collapse in revenue and proceeds to pretending — sometimes successfully — that it cares about privacy rather than a snitching operation (which it truly is, as Edward Snowden’s revelations serve to illustrate)

NOT a day goes by without Microsoft executives moving their mouths, i.e. lying. This post will quickly tackle some of the lastest lies.

“There is a Microsoft publicity stunt case going on, and journalists continue to quote the Microsoft executive who put together Microsoft’s patent war on Linux and recently got a promotion.”There is a Microsoft publicity stunt case going on, and journalists continue [1] to quote the Microsoft executive who put together Microsoft’s patent war on Linux and recently got a promotion. His goal is to portray Microsoft as a company that fights for people’s privacy when in fact Microsoft fought against people’s privacy like no other company, in collusion with the NSA. At the same time Microsoft is hypocritically using politicians and other companies to complain about and pressure Google [2], usually using the ‘privacy’ card.

IDG gave us a good laugh today. Microsoft’s shameless publicity stunt (lie) was promoted by Bill Snyder, who said he was a Microsoft shareholder while writing for IDG, and painted Microsoft as “activist” for privacy (seriously, don’t laugh). Here he goes:

Guess who’s leading the charge to replace the now-defunct Safe Harbor agreement with a new international framework to protect privacy? None other than Microsoft. Sounding more like an activist than the president and chief legal officer of the world’s largest software company, Brad Smith this week laid out a sweeping, four-point program in a blog post that explicitly values privacy over business and national security concerns.

If Microsoft is an “activist”, then Bill Gates is a “charity”, not a greedy profiteer who is marketing-conscious.

IDG has sadly been filled with a lot of Microsoft nonsense lately. Microsoft must have paid them a lot of money for Vista 10 advertising because this piece of malicious spyware sure needs a lot of advertising for people to foolishly adopt. 4 days ago we showed how yet another Microsoft MVP, Adam Bertram, had entered IDG. IDG’s tendency to hire Microsoft-connected people (sometimes existing employees, despite a conflict of interest) is not exactly news to us and here we see more Microsoft advertising from Bertram (one of our readers called it “spam”).

So anyway, Microsoft is now conveniently spreading (probably through its many PR agencies) the myth that Microsoft is fighting for people’s privacy. The matter of fact is, many businesses and even some of the world’s largest governments have been banning Microsoft software because of privacy violations. They adopt Free software and GNU/Linux instead, to the point where Microsoft’s revenue nosedives. Watch Microsoft Peter trying to spin very bad Microsoft results as “acceptable” (due to GNU/Linux and Free software growth, probably Android too), accentuating only positives and foolishly believing whatever Microsoft says despite its history of financial fraud. Accounting tricks are only to be assumed; that’s how Microsoft pretends to still be wealthy, e.g. when buying startups, using bogus figures, which is business as usual at Microsoft.

The Microsoft-led campaign to paint itself crusader for privacy really ought to stop or be stopped. Microsoft is trying to bamboozle overspending governments into deals that seriously compromise privacy and turn citizens into ‘products’ [3], with pretense that storing data locally somehow protects privacy. It doesn’t. Thankfully, over here in the UK, the British government ain’t buying it. It moves to real standards and real privacy (working from one’s own desktop with Free software, no so-called ‘cloud’) [4].

Microsoft claiming to fight for privacy is as ludicrous as claims that it “loves Linux”. People often believe that it’s acceptable to lie for one’s survival. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Microsoft wants US government to obey EU privacy laws

    The fact that Microsoft is espousing what are quite radical ideas for a US company shows the depth of concern over the collapse of the Safe Harbour framework. Smith’s post appears at a time when the US and EU authorities are urgently trying to come up with a replacement for Safe Harbour, which must be in place by the end of January 2016, when enforcement actions by European data protection authorities will begin if nothing has been agreed. Yesterday, the US House of Representatives approved the Judicial Redress Act, which would extend certain US privacy protection rights to citizens of European countries. However, on its own that approach is probably insufficient to satisfy the CJEU’s stringent requirements for protections that are “essentially equivalent” to those under EU law.

  2. Microsoft Corporation Enlists Allies To Battle Alphabet Inc In Russia and China

    To enhance its regional strength, Microsoft recently partnered with Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Russian search engine Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX). In each market, the respective search engine will become the default homepage and search engine for the new Edge browser in Windows 10. Both companies will also launch “universal” Windows 10 apps for services like search, maps, and cloud storage.

  3. Microsoft strikes major deal with NSW Government

    The agreement, which Microsoft says is one of the largest of its kind in Australia, means NSW departments will be able to access a range of cloud and mobility services, including Microsoft Office 365, which are hosted in Microsoft’s local data centres.

  4. UK government deals blow to Microsoft with LibreOffice love-in

    THE UK GOVERNMENT has dealt a blow to Microsoft with the announcement that it will adopt open source LibreOffice software across the public sector.

    The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) announced this week that the government has entered into a deal with open source software company Collabora Productivity to equip public sector organisations with its GovOffice software, based on LibreOffice, given its “considerable cost savings” compared with the likes of Microsoft Office.

US Patent ‘Industry’ (Parasites) Defends Patently Broken System That It Profits From, Pushes for UPC in Europe

Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Patents at 9:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Promoting a swindle. Whose patent system is it anyway?

Big wheel

Summary: The USPTO, patent lawyers and the rest of the patents ‘industry’ carry on pushing for even more radical a system where parasites (like themselves) rather than inventors are financially rewarded, discouraging and retarding innovation in the process

THE USPTO has created a toxic environment for small businesses (and to a lesser degree medium- and large-sized businesses too) in the United States. In this new letter/column, published only yesterday, the author bemoans the current state of affairs:

Businesses large and small are unexpectedly receiving letters demanding money for alleged patent infringement.

“It leads to a false consensus, shaped for the most part by patent lawyers and other people who profit from the broken status quo.”This is not a bad interpretation/opinion, even though it focuses on patent trolls rather than patent scope (software patents for instance). There is clearly dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, but people from the USPTO shut their ears and pretend that everything is great. Last month we showed how David Kappos, the former head of the USPTO, became rather delusional because he is stuck in the echo chamber of patent lawyers and is now profiting from it (directly). Now we see the lobbyists’ favourite newspaper, The Hill, saying that “Attacks on patent system are unfounded” (that is the headline). Guess who wrote it… someone from an “intellectual property group” and the USPTO’s “former commissioner for patents”. No conflict of interests there? He pretends all fine and dandy at the USPTO and generally resists change. Quoting his own disclosure in full: “Stoll is a partner and co-chair of the intellectual property group at Drinker Biddle & Reath and a former commissioner for patents at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.”

Why are so many voices weighing in on these matters not scientists and people who actually apply for patents? Or people who actually create stuff (without necessarily applying for patents)? It leads to a false consensus, shaped for the most part by patent lawyers and other people who profit from the broken status quo.

“If readers thought witnessing the Unified Patent Court legislative package wheedle its way through European legislation was fun…”
      –AmeriKatHere in Europe we are seeing more or less the same thing. “We are currently witnessing some patent owners enforcing their patent rights exclusively using the European courts,” wrote some US patent lawyers (this is a site of patent lawyers and vocal software patents proponents), referring to patent trolls that attack Europe as just “patent owners”. These people also want the UPC, as one can imagine, because it can help patent lawyers make more money, also from the US (they can sue or issue cross-continental injunctions). “Now with the Unified Patent Court on the horizon,” the author wrote, as if it is inevitable. Well, the EPO sure wants and lobbies for the UPC, which means more money and power to the EPO (at the expense of ordinary European citizens). It often seems like Europe allows itself to be the vassal not just of other countries but mostly corporations (not just European), with passage of TPP, potentially UPC, and perhaps yet more secret deals and laws that serve nobody except big businesses.

“If readers thought witnessing the Unified Patent Court legislative package wheedle its way through European legislation was fun,” wrote this longtime proponent of the UPC (so-called ‘IP’ lawyer, going by the pseudonym AmeriKat) just hours ago, “they will equally enjoy the saga of the draft EU Trade Secrets Directive proposed by the European Commission.”

It would be “fun” to “enjoy” only if one is sadistic, or an ‘IP’ lawyer perhaps.

Yes, well, at least we now know where we are heading if we continue to allow this whole ‘public’ debate to be managed by supposedly benevolent wolves, promising to guard misinformed or uninformed sheep. Practitioners in software and other disciplines need to rise up and speak up, or else things will only get worse. Patent examiners too needs to examine the impact of their work on society; who is ultimately being helped when large monopolists get the fast lane at the EPO? Who is this whole system really for? █

With New Xamarin Buyout, Microsoft Now a Step Further in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Strategy Against Android

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Mono at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Android and Microsoft

Image from Android Beat

Summary: Our interpretation of the Xamarin-RoboVM news, especially in light of reports that Microsoft is trying to fork (wrest control of) Android

SOMETHING disappointing but nonetheless expected is happening these days. More and more media reports about Microsoft's intrusive and subversive strategy against Android (see [1] below for the latest on it) serve to suggest that our concerns are becoming ever more justified. There are many articles alluding to “forking” of Android by Microsoft (for example, “Is Microsoft Creating Its Own Android Fork?”). This is a subject that we wrote nearly a dozen articles about (especially during summer when Microsoft partnered with Cyanogen), but what about Xamarin? Half a decade ago we used to write many articles about Mono’s assault on Android (trying to shove .NET down this bot’s throat). With its strong Java roots (Oracle’s fury notwithstanding), hence the popularisation of Microsoft’s and .NET’s archenemy, Java (or Google’s derived APIs that upset Oracle so much), Android must be a real pain and an existential danger to the Microsoft monoculture.

“…Java, which sort of runs on Android in the form of Dalvik (on top of Linux), will be more tightly controlled by a company connected to Microsoft.”Miguel de Icaza‘s Xamarin, which is partly funded by Microsoft veterans and now strives to spread .NET in the form of Mono to Android (the world’s most dominant operating system at the moment), has reportedly bought RoboVM. As Phoronix put it the other day:

RoboVM specializes in creating native iOS apps within Java as a way to share apps/projects between iOS and Android while having a native user experience and performance. Xamarin has bought out RoboVM to better position themselves as a cross-platform mobile development company for C# and Java, per today’s press release. RoboVM is basically to Java for mobile as Xamarin is to C# with Mono.

In other words, Java, which sort of runs on Android in the form of Dalvik (on top of Linux), will be more tightly controlled by a company connected to Microsoft. “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” springs to mind. How will the frameworks be bridged? Either way, this gives Microsoft a lot more leverage over Android. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Is Microsoft Creating Its Own Android Fork? Signs Point To Satya Nadella’s Plan B

    Microsoft chief experience officer Julie Larson Green recently made a statement that got some people thinking that the company, once known as a hulking titan that likes to crush out the competition instead of working with them as partners, is looking to develop its own version of Android. Although Green did not exactly share details of Microsoft’s plans, she did not categorically deny it either.

10.22.15

Links 22/10/2015: *buntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Free Software in UK and French Government

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • When my open source intern project went global

    Sure, I may have only contributed a couple hundred lines of code. In the long run, however, I know that my CI efforts will soon pull together better software that’s tested thoroughly, beginning with the community of developers themselves. I see that as indirectly contributing millions of lines of better code. I had an idea on how to do something better and took action on it, a freedom you won’t find in other types of organizations.

  • Why Southeast Asia should embrace the open source movement

    In the last five years, Southeast Asia has grown to become a big consumer of modern web technologies to create digital products and services. More and more tech companies from the US are opening offices here and many with the goal to build engineering and development offices for their regional needs.

  • How open source took me from a beginner coder to a credited contributor

    I’d like to share my experiences with Free Software Melbourne, its free software workshop, and, more importantly, what has happened since then because it’s kinda cool—it’s not what I expected.

    I consider myself a beginner programmer. Most of the time I have no idea what I am doing and no idea what the documentation is trying to convey. Lost is perhaps my most common emotion.

  • Orbbec Releases Open Source SDK to GitHub for Their Astra 3D Camera Technology

    The Orbbec Persee is basically a less expensive XBox Kinect on steroids, and the developers are committed to making sure that their technology is available for everyone to develop and improve. They say that they want to foster a culture of open source innovation where the developers and the creative coding community play an irreplaceable role in the evolution of gesture controls and the Persee hardware. To that end they have released an open source software development kit (SDK) on GitHub so anyone can download and develop software using the versatile and powerful smart 3D camera-computer.

  • Going Gonzo at ‘All Things Open’

    “Footballs in a basketball state,” I said wryly, looking down on a guy who was sitting across the table, absently playing with some small swag footballs imprinted with a company logo.

  • LookingGlass Simplifies Threat Intel with Contribution to Open Source Community
  • LookingGlass Open-Sources Threat Intel Engine

    LookingGlass Cyber Solutions has announced OpenTPX, a contribution to the open-source community to enable threat intelligence providers and security operations to integrate full context across their security portfolios.

  • SA firms wins international BOSSIE open source award

    Dev2, a software developer based in Hillcrest, has been awarded the prestigious 2015 BOSSIE open source aware.

  • Introducing TastyIgniter – Open source Restaurant Ordering & Reservation System

    I’m looking to release a stable version sometime this month after adding new features from user feedback. I’ve recently completed the user acceptance testing.

  • Coinprism releases an open source ‘transaction chain’

    The open source system is now used by companies such as NASDAQ…

  • Open Standards developer Coinprism releases enterprise blockchain
  • Coinprism Launches Open-Source Permissioned Ledger With Bitcoin ‘Anchors’
  • Coinprism Launches OpenChain, an Open-Source Distributed Ledger
  • Orbbec Releases SDK to GitHub for Open Sourced 3D Application Development
  • Orbbec Releases Open Source Version Of Astra SDK For Persee 3D Camera
  • Open source opens world of growth for startup companies

    The open source community holds dear the concepts of open exchange, participation, rapid prototyping, meritocracy, transparency, participation and collaboration, values emphasized among startups.

  • Open source leads the future of Cloud

    When looking to provide Cloud deployments, channel players are faced with a vast array of offerings from vendors all claiming to offer the ideal solution to a client’s needs. Being spoilt for choice, it has become increasingly difficult for partners to differentiate from competitors.

    As the model for Cloud providers expands to include private Cloud build-outs, container-based infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, partners need additional flexibility to better meet customer needs for Cloud-based technologies.

    As such, a complete set of unique Cloud services can help partners plan, build and manage a private or hybrid Cloud while still using a multi-vendor infrastructure.

  • Oceanography for Everyone: Empowering researchers, educators, and citizen scientists through open-source hardware

    Three years ago, Kersey Sturdivant and myself launched an ambitious crowdfunding project–the OpenCTD–with the plan to produce a low-cost, open-source CTD for thousands of dollars less than the commercial alternative. That campaign fizzled, bringing in barely 60% of our target goal. After taxes and fees, that amounted to about $3500 available to us to play around with. The OpenCTD wasn’t dead, but it was on life support.

  • Zepheira Upgrades Its Open Source Tools

    Zepheira updated Linksmith and Scribe, its open source linked data management tools, to have better scalability, linkability, and internal and external linking. Scribe is publicly available on GitHub. Students and alumni of the Zepheira Practical Practitioner Training class have exclusive access to Linksmith, but the results of their work with the tool may be publicly shared.

  • How do we keep track of ephemeral containers?

    Cloud-native computing relies on ephemeral containers instead of pinned servers. Executing applications within ephemeral containers solves resource scarcity challenges, but also creates a dynamic environment that requires new practices and tooling. To address these concerns, Ian Lewis of Google is giving a talk at this month’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan entitled “In a world of ephemeral containers, how do we keep track of things?”

  • Freescale and KDDI R&D Labs Join Open Source NFV Project

    The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Freescale and KDDI R&D Labs have joined as Silver members while Morgan Richomme of Orange has been appointed to the Board of Directors as the first technical community representative. Launched just one year ago, the OPNFV project is supported by 19 Platinum and 36 Silver member companies committed to advancing the creation of a flexible, open source framework for NFV.

  • How Trade Agreements Harm Open Access and Open Source

    Mistakes like these are inevitable in a negotiation process that is closed to public review and which structurally excludes input from all affected stakeholders. We should therefore hardly be surprised that trade agreements are bad news for open access and open source. But neither should we accept it. These captured, undemocratic negotiations are a relic of a pre-Internet age, that no longer have any legitimate place in public policy making for the 21st century.

  • Rogue Wave releases open-source support survey

    As for making decisions about using open-source packages, availability of support, licensing flexibility and code security were the top three factors. Among reasons cited for seeking support were a lack of expertise regarding particular open-source packages, as well as integration and performance issues.

  • Deep into Drupal, Cisco starts to give back to open source community

    Cisco’s Jamal Haider acknowledged during a presentation this week that his team that works on the company’s open source-based customer support portal hasn’t given much back to the wider Drupal community yet, but he said this talk at the sold-out Acquia Engage conference in Boston is part of an effort to change that.

    And why not? Cisco has plenty of reasons – more than $400 million of them, in fact – to be grateful for Drupal since migrating its Support Community portal to the open source content management system early last year. Cisco started working on project requirements in 2013 with Acquia, a SaaS provider that has commercialized Drupal offerings.

  • Saying Goodbye to ‘All Things Open’ Until Next Year

    We knew going in there would be a record number of speakers this year — 131 according to a count on the ATO website — and we learned on our way out — at the closing ceremonies — that this year’s attendance topped 1,700, much more than last year and nearly doubling the attendance from the first ATO in 2013. Todd Lewis, the master of ceremonies for the event — his official title, chairperson, doesn’t begin to describe what he does — said that next year they’re aiming for 2,500, a number they probably have a good chance of hitting.

  • Walmart goes to war with Amazon over open source

    Sigh. Another day, another useless open source project.

    This time it’s Walmart, open sourcing its cloud technology to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). But, as David Linthicum writes, it’s open source for all the wrong reasons.

    More pertinently, it’s open source in all the wrong ways.

  • Bringing open source to Pentaho

    In any end-to-end proprietary platform, there’s fear in the community about support, accessibility and cost. However, thanks to acquisitions, Pentaho Corp. has showed it is ready to embrace a more open world.

  • Rogue Wave Software releases 2015 Open Source Support Report

    Rogue Wave Software released their 2015 Open Source Support Report, solidifying the company as a leader in the open source software (OSS) community and providing information on OSS package use that could only be gathered from their own database. Taking data from over 8,000 OSS packages, surveys, experiences, and experts from across different industries, this report brings a new level of visibility into OSS support reporting that has been lacking until now.

  • Non-free software can mean unexpected surprises

    I went to a night sky photography talk on Tuesday. The presenter talked a bit about tips on camera lenses, exposures; then showed a raw image and prepared to demonstrate how to process it to bring out the details.

    His slides disappeared, the screen went blank, and then … nothing. He wrestled with his laptop for a while. Finally he said “Looks like I’m going to need a network connection”, left the podium and headed out the door to find someone to help him with that.

    I’m not sure what the networking issue was: the nature center has open wi-fi, but you know how it is during talks: if anything can possibly go wrong with networking, it will, which is why a good speaker tries not to rely on it. And I’m not blaming this speaker, who had clearly done plenty of preparation and thought he had everything lined up.

    Eventually they got the network connection, and he connected to Adobe. It turns out the problem was that Adobe Photoshop is now cloud-based. Even if you have a local copy of the software, it insists on checking in with Adobe at least every 30 days. At least, that’s the theory. But he had used the software on that laptop earlier that same day, and thought he was safe. But that wasn’t good enough, and Photoshop picked the worst possible time — a talk in front of a large audience — to decide it needed to check in before letting him do anything.

  • Neo4j’s graph query language launches under standalone open-source license

    Neo Technology Inc. made a lot of new friends in the open-source ecosystem this morning after releasing the query language powering its hugely popular graph store under an open-source license. The move officially clears the way for other vendors to implement the syntax in their own systems.

    The openCypher project, as the startup refers to the free standalone implementation, already has several big-name supporters lined up on launch. The list includes providers such as Tableau Inc. and Tom Sawyer Software Inc. that have offered connectors for Neo4j long before the announcement of initiative as well as newcomers hoping to secure a seat on the graph bandwagon.

  • Notes from Flink Forward

    I was in Berlin last week for Flink Forward, the inaugural Apache Flink conference. I’m still learning about Flink, and Flink Forward was a great place to learn more. In this post, I’ll share some of what I consider its coolest features and highlight some of the talks I especially enjoyed. Videos of the talks should all be online soon, so you’ll be able to check them out as well.

  • IoT

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Lands GTK3 Touch Event Support In Firefox

        Mozilla developers continue moving along with their support for the GTK3 tool-kit inside the Firefox web-browser.

        Firefox Nightlies/Aurora are built with GTK3+ on Linux. While there’s been the basic GTK+ 3 support, other items relating to this new tool-kit support still need to be finished up. One of the items now complete is handling touch events of this latest GTK+ version.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Celebrating diversity in the OpenStack community

      Egle Sigler, Kavit Munshi, and Carol Barrett are organizers and active members of OpenStack’s Diversity Working Group. The OpenStack Foundation has a deep commitment to fostering the diversity and inclusivity of the OpenStack community. The foundation’s Board of Directors created the group to formulate, deliver, and monitor programs to help increase the diversity of the community.

    • Oracle offers second release of OpenStack
    • Oracle offers up new OpenStack release as Docker instances

      Oracle has updated its Oracle OpenStack platform, almost a year to the day after it first released its own flavor of the open-source cloud-building fabric.

    • How the Big Tent conversation changed OpenStack

      Because “cloud” means different things to different people, and because OpenStack tries to be all those things, individual OpenStack deployments can look very different from one another depending on many criteria. The “big tent” conversation, which has been ongoing in the OpenStack community for some time, strives to provide all of the answers for all of OpenStack’s large audience.

    • How the hybrid cloud and open-source tech are changing IT

      The cloud is well on its way to becoming the standard model for IT, just sixteen years after it first formed. It couples flexibility, scale, and reliability to user-friendliness and ubiquity. It has created some of the world’s largest companies, as well as empowering some of the smallest. The cloud has changed the economics of providing and using services, bringing many new opportunities—and also a few teething problems, of course.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice, Leaping Lizards, and Liquid Lemurs

      Personal reports from the recent LibreOffice conference were few, but today Rajesh Ranjan shared his experience. Bruce Byfield today said, “Sometimes, losing a Linux desktop is the best way to appreciate it” as he muddles through the absence of KDE. Ubuntu celebrates its 11 year path to convergence as eWeek.com looks at upcoming 15.10 features. Elsewhere, Scott Gilbertson reviews openSUSE 42.1 and Jack Germain said Liquid Lemur Linux has promise.

    • Celebrating the success of LibreOffice in Denmark

      In late September, I attended my first LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, Denmark. There were 150 participants from more than 30 countries present, and it was an incredible experience.

      Though the conference didn’t officially start until September 23, my work started the day before at what we called the “Community Day.” After a general get together, Native Language Project (NLP) community members met to discuss relevant processes, tools, resources, development, and marketing. In the evening, we rejoined the rest of the contributors for dinner.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Open Source Software and Regulatory Compliance

      The argument for open source in both cases rests on the belief that exposing the code to millions of eyeballs will ultimately make it more secure and just plain better overall. In the VW case, anti-copyright groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing for open source and an end to DMCA anti-circumvention provisions.

    • Still waiting on you, Apple…

      Back in July Apple promised to open source Swift. :) Well, Apple? What’s going on? Is this still the plan, Apple?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Puri touts open-source innovation in the workplace

      Puri’s open approach to evolving her career has led her to report for Fortune, serve as an assistant solicitor general for the New York State Attorney General, work as a senior advisor to the president of the Empire State Development Corporation, run the nonprofit Scientists Without Borders, and help lead the Nike Foundation as its executive director for global innovation.

    • Thomson Reuters raises stakes in financial desktop software

      The firm suggests that the financial industry is increasingly turning to open technology standards to spur the innovation and flexibility institutions need to remain competitive in an increasingly complex business landscape.

    • Open Data

      • Christopher Allan Webber: Hitchhiker’s guide to data formats

        Of course, there’s more data formats than that. Heck, even on top of these data formats there’s a lot more out there (these days I spend a lot of time working on ActivityStreams 2.0 related tooling, which is just JSON with a specific structure, until you want to get fancier, add extensions, or jump into linked data land, in which case you can process it as json-ld).

    • Open Access/Content

      • Letter: Open source textbooks can combat rising prices

        My name is Meghan Healey. I’m an undeclared freshman. Being on this exploratory track, most of my textbooks were relatively cheap, but they were still more expensive than they should be. If all textbooks were as “cheap” as my American Politics class, students would still have to pay at least $150 in order to have a proper education. This $150 could have been spent toward my tuition, my meal plan, or a plentiful amount of other academic expenses. Geology Textbook: $50. Environmental Science Packet: $30. Sustainability Book: $10. Freshman Seminar: $20. iClicker 2 for American Politics: $60. American Politics Textbook: $90 My total? $260. What should it be? Priceless.

      • Affordable College Textbook Act Provides Major Impact on Future of America’s Higher Education

        new Congress legislation is advancing to seek the cost-effective reduction of university textbooks through appropriate grant programs that aim to promote the utilization of Open Education Resources (OER).

      • A Change to Textbooks Could Mark a Shift in America’s Future

        Two ideas are being proposed by Democratic Senators this week that if instituted would have a major impact on America.

        Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois are co-sponsoring the Affordable College Textbook Act. This act would have college institutions apply for government cash to fund the creation of a textbook that could be shareable online.

      • Survey: ND college professors know ‘open source materials,’ but some have questions

        A survey of North Dakota faculty shows most have heard of “open source educational materials” – textbooks and other things available on line at little or no charge.

        “Open source” could save students a lot of money in textbooks.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Toolkit: Hardware

        PLOS Collections joined forces with Andre Maia Chagas and Tom Baden of University of Tübingen, TReND in Africa and Openeuroscience to create a collection of Open Source Hardware projects with application in a laboratory setting. Open Source Toolkit: Hardware will be updated on a regular basis.

      • Open Source Organelle Synthesiser Unveiled By Critter & Guitari

        The Organelle is equipped with a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor and a range of intuitive controls together with a powerful and flexible sound engine that provides a limitless music machine that is capable of creating a huge variety of different sounds and tunes.

        [...]

        The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level.

      • Ultimaker releases open-source files for Ultimaker 2 Go and 2 Extended 3D printers

        The rise of 3D printing technology owes a lot to the open-source movement, whereby the source code for software and hardware blueprints are made available to be used or modified at absolutely no cost. It’s a movement that recognizes the power of the people, of collective minds working towards diverse goals, yet all with the same intentions of technological advancement, innovation and improvement. Honouring their commitment to the open-source movement as well as their long-standing tradition of releasing the blueprints for their 3D printers six months after going to market, Ultimaker today released the open-source files for their Ultimaker 2 Go and Ultimaker 2 Extended 3D printers. Files for the Ultimaker 2, Ultimaker Original, Original + and Heated Bed Upgrade as well as their Cura software are already available on their GitHub repository completely free of cost.

      • Latest Ultimaker 3D Printer Designs Released As Open Source Files
      • Ultimaker Releases Open-Source Files ff Their 3D Printers
      • Ultimaker releases open-source files for Ultimaker 2 GO and Extended 3D printers

  • Programming

    • Highlights of CppCon 2015
    • Top 4 Java web frameworks built for scalability

      If you’re writing a web application from scratch, you’ll want to select a framework to make your life easier and reduce development time. Java, one of the most popular programming languages out there, offers plenty of options.

      Traditional Java applications, particularly web-facing apps, are built on top of a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, which follows the MVC software architectural pattern. Starting with Apache Struts, MVC frameworks have been a staple of Java development including such popular frameworks as WebWork, Spring MVC, Wicket, and GWT. Typically these applications host the view code on the server, where it is rendered and delivered to the client (web browser). Click a link or submit a form in your browser and it submits a request to the server, which does the requested work and builds a new view, refreshing the entire display in your client.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Happy 30th Birthday, NES!

      The Nintendo Entertainment System or NES is one of the most famous video game consoles ever made, and it has just turned 30. Why are we celebrating NES 30 years later? The answer is simple: because it’s still relevant.

    • Western Digital to acquire SanDisk for $19 billion

      If Dell-EMC merger was not enough for the tech world to digest, Western Digital shook the world with the largest acquisition in the storage space. The hard drive major is acquiring flash-based storage device player SanDisk for $19 billion.

    • Michael Dell berates Microsoft’s Nadella about high price of Surface tablet

      MICHAEL DELL has taken a sly dig at Microsoft, saying to CEO Satya Nadella that the prices of its hardware, such as the Surface, are “pretty high”.

      Speaking on stage during an interview with Nadella at Dell World 2015, Dell’s comments came in response to a question regarding whether Microsoft and Dell now see one another as rivals as both have expanded to offer products that they were not first renowned for.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Private Military Companies in Service to the Transnational Capitalist Class

      Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

    • Assad flies to Moscow to thank Putin for Syria air strikes

      Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew to Moscow on Tuesday evening to thank Russia’s Vladimir Putin personally for his military support, in a surprise visit that underlined how Russia has become a major player in the Middle East.

      It was Assad’s first foreign visit since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, and came three weeks after Russia launched a campaign of air strikes against Islamist militants in Syria that has also bolstered Assad’s forces.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Diesel cars emit up to four times more toxic pollution than a bus, data reveals

      A modern diesel car pumps out more toxic pollution than a bus or heavy truck, according to new data, a situation described as a “disgrace” by one MEP.

      The revelation shows that effective technology to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution exists, but that car manufacturers are not implementing it in realistic driving conditions.

      Diesel cars tested in Norway produced quadruple the NOx emissions of large buses and lorries in city driving conditions, according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. A separate study for Transport for London showed that a small car in the “supermini” class emitted several times more NOx than most HGVs and the same amount as a 40-tonne vehicle.

    • The Great Kowtow

      The Chinese are the imperial masters now. Cameron begs them to build a nuclear power station for which the British state guarantees it will pay double the market price for electricity produced, for twenty years. And a government which has just announced the extension of thought crime to the expression of non-violent or anti-violent thought deemed “extreme”, has no locus to talk about human rights, a concept at least as alien to Teresa May as it is to the Chinese Communist Party. Britain has its own war criminals like Blair and Straw running around, immune and very wealthy.

  • Finance

    • Fox Guest Pushes Back Against Bill O’Reilly’s Shaming Of Poor Parents

      JOHNSON-HUSTON: You are confusing an economic status of someone with their character, and people make mistakes in life, but you know what? My mother loved me and what you put forth was that people who are in these situations, that they’re abusing their children. I know people who have been abused. I was not abused and my mother did the right thing by me which was to put me in a more stable environment–

    • Wall Street Journal Column Pushes Myth That Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves To Attack Bernie Sanders

      Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley attacked Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for supporting progressive income tax rates to fund government investments, falsely claiming that additional tax cuts for the wealthy are a better method of increasing tax revenue.

    • The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Stephen Harper’s legacy for trade lawyers

      According to Boscariol, Canada has been signing a “spaghetti bowl of trade agreements” and joining trading blocks for the simple reason that lots of other countries seem to be doing it. “If we don’t, we will lose preferential market access that other countries are getting by way of these deals. So we’ve got to be at the party,” Boscariol says.

    • Hypocrisy Alert: Speaker Vos and Rep. Craig Use Private Email, Too

      Wisconsin Republicans have been caught in the spin cycle with their latest attack on the state’s independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Board (GAB), which oversees elections and ethics.

      The GAB, which is led by a board of retired judges appointed by the governor, has been widely regarded as a national model for nonpartisan election administration. But this week the Republican-led legislature seeks to dismantle it as payback for investigating Governor Scott Walker.

      “Political payback” doesn’t poll well, so Republicans have tried advancing a series of disingenuous arguments to justify the attack on the GAB: they say the GAB accepted “Mickey Mouse” on recall petitions (it didn’t), that the Walker probe had no legal basis (it did), that the board wasn’t informed of the staff’s work on the John Doe (it was), and an array of other false assertions.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Fox’s Bill O’Reilly Instructs The Benghazi Committee On How To Question Hillary Clinton
    • George Will’s Freedom to Be Unequal Depends a Lot on Government Coercion

      Got that? Bill Gates is incredibly rich because of his aptitude and attitude; the government’s willingness to arrest anyone who infringes on the patent and copyright monopolies it gave him has nothing to do with his wealth. We’re supposed to also ignore all the other millionaires and billionaires whose wealth depends on these government-granted monopolies.

      And we should ignore the Wall Street boys who depend on their banks’ too-big-to-fail insurance, or on the fact that the financial sector largely escapes the sort of taxation applied to the rest of the economy. And we shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that Jeff Bezos got very rich in large part from avoiding the requirement to collect sales taxes that was imposed on his brick-and-mortar competitors. And we need not pay attention to the tax scams that allow for much of the wealth of the private-equity crew.

    • The Kochs Want to End WI’s Era of Clean Government

      Following the bipartisan “John Doe” investigation into campaign finance violations by Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin Republicans are out for revenge. And the Kochs have their back.

      This week, the Wisconsin state legislature will take up a trifecta of bills that will undermine the state’s long traditions of clean and transparent government.

      One bill will gut the state’s campaign finance laws and retroactively decriminalize the secretive campaign finance schemes that Walker engaged in during the recall elections, opening the doors to new levels of dark money in state elections.

      Another bill will cripple the the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board–considered a model for other states–and turn it into a toothless, partisan agency. The board of nonpartisan retired judges will be replaced with partisan appointees that are guaranteed to gridlock (like the broken Federal Elections Commission), and gives the legislature power to cut funding for an investigation that it doesn’t like.

    • Voters in WI Want Money Out of Politics; Politicians Don’t Care

      Sixty one communities in Wisconsin, including some in the most conservative pockets of the state, have passed referendums expressing opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and declaring money is not speech. Poll after poll has shown that both Republican and Democratic voters want less money in elections and stronger donor disclosure laws.

      Wisconsin politicians, though, are opening the floodgates to an unlimited flow of secret money.

    • Fox, Daily Beast Stories on Cubans in Syria Lack One Thing: Evidence of Cubans in Syria

      Fox News (10/14/15) reported last week that Cuba has sent Gen. Leopoldo Cintra Frias and hundreds of troops to Syria to assist the Russian and Assad governments in “operating Russian tanks.” This explosive claim was soon echoed by James Bloodworth in the Daily Beast (10/16/15) and subsequently spread widely on social media.

      A Cuban troop presence in Syria would be a blockbuster story indeed—undermining the easing of tensions between Cuba and the United States while serving as a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration, which has spent much political capital restoring relations with the socialist island nation. There’s only one problem: The story is looking increasingly bunk.

  • Censorship

    • Letter to MEPs of LIBE Committee: Do Not Jeopardize Our Freedom of Speech!

      On Monday afternoon, members of the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee will vote on the Dati report on the “prevention of radicalisation and recruitment of European citizens by terrorist organisations”. This report contains dangerous provisions, which aim to make online platforms and hosts responsible for the distribution of messages glorifying terrorism, creating a high risk of pre-emptive censorship. Such provisions severely threaten European citizens’ freedom of speech.

  • Civil Rights

    • A Nazi Welcomed by the British Establishment

      This is the party symbol of Paribiy’s Social National Party, in case anybody doubts me. It is perfectly clear what Mr Paribiy stands for. That the Royal United Services Institute invites him to spread his views in the heart of Whitehall, says a great deal about the position of the right wing British establishment. Today, the British government proposes new legislation to close down mosques and bookshops deemed extreme, even if they advocate against violence and do not break the law. These are dangerous times – and the danger is from the right.

    • British activist Jacky Sutton found dead in Istanbul airport

      A British woman who was working as the Iraq director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) has died in an Istanbul airport, the Foreign Office has confirmed.

      Former BBC journalist Jacky Sutton, 50, is understood to have been found dead in a toilet at the city’s main airport. The circumstances of her death are as yet unknown. Local media reported it appeared that Sutton, who was travelling to Irbil, northern Iraq, had killed herself after missing a flight connection, a claim colleagues said was unlikely.

    • IWPR

      The fact that IWPR accesses direct first hand knowledge of what really happens during conflicts, almost certainly holds the key to the death of Jackie Sutton. She was killed for something she knew. The official Turkish story that she killed herself in the airport in despair at missing a connecting flight, is risible.

    • The NRA Is Promoting An Article Suggesting “Radical” Democrats Will Be Hanged After Starting A Civil War Over Gun Rights

      The National Rifle Association is promoting an article that suggested “radical” Democrats will attempt to confiscate firearms in the United States and trigger a civil war where “the survivors of the Democrat rebellion” are ultimately hanged.

      In an October 17 post, conservative gun blogger Bob Owens claimed that if the “radical left” attempts to “impose their ideas on the American people” — which Owens claims includes gun confiscation — “it would end poorly and quickly” for them after they are confronted by “armed free citizens.”

    • Two Weeks After It Sued the CIA, Data Is Stolen from the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights

      Earlier this month, I wrote about a landmark lawsuit filed by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) against the Central Intelligence Agency seeking information about possible war crimes committed in El Salvador during that country’s civil war. Over the weekend, someone broke into the office of Angelina Godoy, the center’s director.

      “Her desktop computer was stolen, as well as a hard drive containing about 90 percent of the information relating to our research in El Salvador,” the center said in a statement today.

    • ‘There’s a Conversation Happening About the Inequities of the Criminal Justice System’

      JJ: I think it’s interesting that California law enforcement, who will now have to record race/ ethnicity data on stops and what happens after that, are sort of complaining–well, some of them, anyway–“This will cause us to racially profile. We didn’t do it in the past, but now if we have to actually report race and ethnicity of the people we arrest, that will lead us to think about it in a way we weren’t thinking about it before.” There’s always a kind of push back on the collection of information, but it seems to me that from reporters’ perspective, and policy advocates’ perspective, more information ought to be non-controversial, in a way. We ought to all be able to be behind more sunlight.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality in Europe: Now or Never!

      The European Parliament will vote next Tuesday the text on Net Neutrality. Following months of trialogue negotiations, during which the Council has sought to undermine all the provisions in favour of Net neutrality, an unsatisfying compromise has been reached. The final vote on 27 October during the plenary session shall set out the rules that will be applied in France and in all other Member States. In April 2014, the European Parliament had voted a text with very strong provisions in favour of Net Neutrality. Such a vote had been possible only thanks to the important mobilisation of European citizens.

Microsoft is Already at ‘Extend’ Phase in E.E.E. Against Free/Libre Software, Security at Jeopardy

Posted in BSD, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, Security, Servers, Standard at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“What we are trying to do is use our server control to do new protocols and lock out Sun and Oracle specifically”

–Bill Gates

Manchester studies

Summary: Microsoft’s war against POSIX/UNIX/Linux APIs culminates with the .NET push and the ‘bastardisation’ of OpenSSH, a Swiss army knife in BSD/UNIX and GNU/Linux secure channels

MICROSOFT will not rest until it regains its once dominant position in computing. It’s not just because of pressure from shareholders but also because of clevery-marketed sociopaths, such as Bill Gates, who are back at the helm and are very thirsty for power.

Microsoft is now pushing .NET into GNU/Linux, having failed to do so with Mono and Xamarin because regular people (end users) and sometimes developers pushed back. How can Microsoft still convince people to embrace the Microsoft APIs (which are heavily patented and not secure)? Openwashing and propaganda.

Jordan Novet, who writes a lot of pro-Microsoft or marketing pieces for Microsoft (for many months now), is formerly a writer of Gigaom, which had received money from Microsoft to embed Microsoft marketing inside articles (without disclosure, i.e. corrupted journalism). Now he acts as a courier of Microsoft marketing, repeating a delusion which we spent a lot of time debunking here (.NET is NOT “Open Source” [1, 2, 3]). To quote Novet:

Microsoft today announced the beginning of a new bug bounty to pay researchers to find security holes in some of the tech giant’s recently open-sourced web development tools.

“How can Microsoft still convince people to embrace the Microsoft APIs (which are heavily patented and not secure)? Openwashing and propaganda.”When Microsoft alludedwto “Open Source” in relation to .NET it sometimes merely piggybacks the reputation of projects it exploits. See the article “Microsoft’s .NET Team Continues Making Progress On An LLVM Compiler” (not GPL). To quote Phoronix: “Earlier this year Microsoft announced an LLVM-based .NET compiler was entering development, LLILC. Six months later, LLILC continues making progress.

“The .NET team has published a six month retrospective of LLILC. It’s a very lengthy read for those interested in low-level compiler details.”

“Microsoft is still working on implementing support for Windows’ crypto APIs rather than OpenSSL/LibreSSL and to address POSIX compatibility concerns along with other issues.”
      –Michael Larabel, PhoronixThis is a potential example of the infamous “embrace, extend, extinguish” approach. As we have shown here before, platform discrimination remains and it is even being extended to existing Free software projects, such as OpenSSH, as we explained yesterday (expect Windows-only ‘features’ and antifeatures). Microsoft APIs are already being phased in — the “extend” phase in E.E.E. (embrace, extend, extinguish). We warned about this months ago [1, 2] and we are now proven right. Even Michael Larabel noticed this and wrote: “Microsoft is still working on implementing support for Windows’ crypto APIs rather than OpenSSL/LibreSSL and to address POSIX compatibility concerns along with other issues.”

So now we have Windows- and Microsoft-specific code right there inside OpenSSH, in spite of Microsoft support of back doors for the NSA et al. Does this inspire much confidence? Repelling Microsoft isn’t about intolerance but about self defence. █

“I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”

–Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée

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