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08.04.10

Links 4/8/2010: MeeGo ‘Leak’, GNU/Linux Skills High in Demand

Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Google Search in Firefox Bar Alone Is Bigger Than Bing, Yahoo; Bidding War Coming Soon

        That little search bar at the top right of your Firefox browser is driving 9.18% of searches, according to research by advertising network Chitika, Inc.

        That’s a huge chunk in a market where Google handles more than 80% of searches and its competitors Bing and Yahoo! handle just 8.56% and 6.69%, respectively – suggesting a huge bidding war may be brewing for November 2011 when Google’s contract with Mozilla is up.

      • Fresh Candy for Firefox: Tab Candy Makes Tabs Managable

        I’m writing this column about Tab Candy while I also have my Webmail open, Twitter and Identi.ca, a page showing flight information and travel plans, and the Linux Magazine backend open. That’s a light load, because I’m traveling. In my home office I usually work on three or four writing projects at a time, plus social media sites, mail, and so on.

  • SaaS

Leftovers

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Ecuador pledges no oil drilling in Amazon reserve

      Ecuador has agreed to refrain from drilling for oil in a pristine Amazon rainforest reserve in return for up to $3.6bn (£2.26bn) in payments from rich countries.

      Under a pioneering agreement signed with the United Nations, the oilfields under the Yasuni reserve will remain untapped for at least a decade.

      The money is about half of what Ecuador would make by selling the oil.

  • Finance

    • Beyond State Capitalism

      Although peopleʼs rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller
      communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of
      popular legitimacy and authority. The world community is rapidly evolving a sense of
      social interconnectivity, shared responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign
      rights of people to the global commons have not been fully articulated. In declaring our
      planetary rights for these commons, we shall be confronting many decisive questions:

      (1) Are modern societies prepared to create a framework in which the incentives
      behind production and governance are not private capital and debt-based
      growth, but human solidarity, quality of life and ecological sustainability?

      (2) How soon — and how peacefully — will the subsystems of the Market State
      integrate their structures of value-creation and sovereign governance with the
      greater biophysical system of ecological and social interdependence?

      (3) Can the global public organize effectively as a third power to develop checks
      and balances on the private and public sectors and establish the resource
      sovereignty and preservation value needed for a commons economy?

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • DRM and Other Forces Overriding the Three Laws of Robotics

      Globally, consumer rights and even human rights are eroding as some vendors infect their consumer electronics with Digital Restrictions Management mechanisms and as DMCA — the law that tries to protect DRM — is being secretly negotiated by a few strong countries and to be forced upon the rest of the world as treaties (ACTA 1, 2). These strong forces are overriding the three laws of robotics (if there ever will be at all) with something else.

      As Asimov pictures it, a robot should give highest priority to (L1) protecting human beings (L2) obeying human orders (L3) protecting itself, in that order, above anything else. Any robot in Asimov’s Sci-Fi is equipped with a positronic brain that will go nuts, so to speak, if it ever breaks these laws. This is to a society heavily dependent on robots what a fuse is to an electronic device. Imagine the threat one faces living in a world full of robots without these laws.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Digital Economy (UK)

        • A Guide to the Digital Economy Act – Part 5

          Summary

          * The measures on copyright infringement will not come into effect until January 2011 at the earliest.
          * All these measures will involve (initially) is sending letter to those accused of infringing.
          * ISPs are under no obligation to monitor their subscribers’ Internet use.
          * Technical measures cannot come into force until further consultation has been done and the regulations have been approved by Parliament.
          * It is up to the copyright owner to prove the infringement happened and an IP address was used.
          * It is up the the accused to prove that they did not commit the infringement if “their” IP address was allegedly used.
          * The government could put in place a method whereby websites and content could be blocked by ISPs due to alleged copyright infringement.

Clip of the Day

Android Multi-Touch Pinch-To-Zoom


08.03.10

Microsoft Entryism Claimed at Python

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Python

Summary: Earlier today Microsoft products were advertised in a Python users distribution list, but the message has since then been moderated, i.e. deleted

“Jimmy has an idea for The #DCPython Meetup,” warned us a reader who titled this warning “ENTRYISM – Net – Mono”. Watch the following message carefully:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Meetup <info@meetup.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 03 at 11:27 AM (GMT+4)
Subject: Jimmy has an idea for The #DCPython Meetup

Jimmy’s idea:

“Learn New Programming Languages”
Ever thought of broadening your horizon and increase your value and sell-ability by also learning other programming languages? Well, here’s your chance. There is an idea “Introduction Courses for Beginners” at the The Baltimore/Washington .NET Developers Meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/developers/ideas/

This course is designed to introduce anyone interested in .NET programming to courses like C#, ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Azure, etc. Join the group free and cast your vote so we can all take part in professional development and enrichment.

To vote for this idea, follow the link below:

http://meetup.zpugdc.org/ideas/355902/

To stop receiving this email, click here:

http://meetup.zpugdc.org/optout/?email=samEmail

– Add info@meetup.com to your address book to receive all Meetup emails To manage your email settings for this group, go to: http://meetup.zpugdc.org/settings/ Meetup, PO Box 4668 #37895 New York, New York 10163-4668 Meetup HQ in NYC is hiring! http://www.meetup.com/jobs/

Our reader called it “sickening” and added that it “looks like .NET operatives are trying to infiltrate the DC python group” (it is not the first time).

What the reader called “good news” is the fact that “they’re not buying it:

“On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Alex Clark wrote: > > Actually, I asked him to send an email vs. using the “ideas” page (because > this is clearly not an idea for our meetup).”

“Jimmy, You also posted this as an “idea” on the meetup. Please stop spamming. -kpd On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Jimmy wrote: > Ever thought of broadening your horizon and increase your value and > sell-ability by also”

The slanted fonts are quotes inside a quote, “but you gotta love the msft spammers trying to sell non-free to python user groups,” concluded our reader who also sent the following message:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Fred Drake <fdrake@acm.org>
Date: Tue, Aug 03 at 02:25 PM (GMT+4)
Subject: Re: [DCPython] Learn New Programming Languages
To: DCPython-list@meetup.com

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Alex Clark <aclark@aclark.net> wrote:
> > Actually, I asked him to send an email vs. using the “ideas” page (because
> > this is clearly not an idea for our meetup).
Ours wasn’t the only area meetup that received this “idea”; I received it from at least two meetups.

-Fred

–
Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at gmail.com>
“A storm broke loose in my mind.” –Albert Einstein

–
Please Note: If you hit “REPLY”, your message will be sent to everyone on this mailing list (DCPython-list@meetup.com)

http://meetup.zpugdc.org/

This message was sent by Fred Drake (fdrake@acm.org) from The #DCPython Meetup.
To learn more about Fred Drake, visit his/her member profile: http://meetup.zpugdc.org/members/11004115/
To unsubscribe or to update your mailing list settings, click here: http://meetup.zpugdc.org/settings/
Meetup, PO Box 4668 #37895 New York, New York 10163-4668 | support@meetup.com

“I was going to link you to the idea (spam) itself,” said our reader, but “they’ve moderated (removed) it now, but the link is in one of the previous fwd’s anyway.” We have already seen similar Microsoft advertisements in Free software-oriented mailing lists. █

Microsoft Laughs at — Then Deceives on — Interoperability

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, UNIX at 8:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Don't cheat

Summary: Microsoft continues to discriminate against rival platforms, office suites, and the monopolist prefers to withhold information required to make technology work across platforms

A WEEK and a half ago we debunked Microsoft's "interoperability" claims, only shortly afterwards to discover that Microsoft’s Jean Paoli carries on with the same talking points. For Microsoft to claim respect for interoperability would be a good stand-up comedy show. Here we have a company which is buying another company that worked with GNU/Linux and demonstrated its software on GNU/Linux; then, Microsoft made it Windows-only. We’re talking about Photosynth here.

Microsoft has a habit of talking other UNIX/Linux-based products and making them Windows-only. Where is the interoperability? Going back to Photosynth, consider this new “sponsored by Microsoft” project which claims to be the world’s largest digital photograph. It’s Silver Lie-only. Wonderful, right? Try this.

Truth be told, Microsoft continues to deliberately decrease interoperability. Even Microsoft’s friends at the Burton Group [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24] (now part of Gartner) admit this:

Microsoft is essentially bolting Office to SharePoint to prevent customers from moving to other office products, Creese said.

That’s nice, isn’t it? Paoli, whom we named for his role in the OOXML corruptions circus, has just received belated coverage from the Microsoft booster at The Register. It says:

While open sourcers, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and others lined up to establish the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official standard, Microsoft predictably went its own way.

Rather than open Office to ODF, Microsoft instead proposed Office Open XML (OOXML) in a standards battle that saw accusations flying that Microsoft had loaded the local standards voting processes to force through OOXML so it wouldn’t have to fully open up.

Then there were the real-world battles, as government bodies began to mandate they’d only accept documents using ODF. Things came to a head in the cradle of the American revolution, Massachusetts, which declared for ODF but then also accepted OOXML following intense political lobbying by Microsoft, while the IT exec who’d made the call for ODF resigned his post.

The sour grapes of ODF ratification, followed by the bitter pills of local politics, left people feeling Microsoft had deliberately fragmented data openness to keep a grip through Office.

Paoli was once one of Microsoft’s XML architects who designed the XML capabilities of Office 2003, the first version of Office to implement OOXML. Today he leads a team of around 80 individuals who work with other Microsoft product groups on interoperability from strategy to coding.

What lessons did Microsoft lean from OOXML that it can apply to pushing data portability in the cloud?

“I think collaboration is important in general and communication,” Paoli said

“If MS’s lesson from the OOXML debacle is the need to communicate better then they haven’t really learned,” responded IBM’s Rob Weir. Yes, this is not the first time that Microsoft blames poor communication for blunders. Novell said so too, regarding its 2006 deal with Microsoft. It goes along the lines of, “there is nothing wrong with what we did, people just didn’t understand it.” That’s an insult to people’s intelligence, but the target audience might actually buy it because it’s insufficiently informed. █

flickr:2400034217

Patents Roundup: Patents on Business Methods, Bilski, the Troll Problem, and Patent Fatalities

Posted in America, Patents at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Waste paper

Summary: Piles of invaluable patents are being used to harm, to extort, and to stifle the industry, especially in the United States

What’s so bad about ‘business method’ patents? Small PR firms ‘goosed’ by a patent on press releases ((huge legal bills, a part which is only good for lawyers)

Kennedy’s business proposition is simple: For a one-time fee of $399, eReleases distributes press releases generated by his small business clients to thousands of members of the media and to the PR Newswire wire service. For an additional fee, Kennedy will write a release.

Bilski: Perhaps Not Much Of A Game Changer After All

Editor: Where does that put software programs?

Kiklis: Software remains patentable subject matter. So, for any new computer technology, if you have a method in which there is transformation or if it’s occurring within a machine and has sufficient ties to the machine, you should be safe. Software programs in the abstract – a program that is not tied to a machine – might not be patentable, but you should be safe if it’s tied to a computer.

Patent Litigation Weekly: Data Shows That Troll Problem Persists

Patent defense schemes seem to be everywhere these days. There’s Allied Security Trust (AST), a coalition of frequently sued companies that aims to pool resources to buy up patents that could be wielded in infringement suits. There’s Article One Partners, a company who goal is to “crowd source” the search for prior art and make money while eliminating bad patents. And there’s the more controversial RPX, whose CEO John Amster has ambitious plans to end the “NPE problem” altogether.

Less flashy, but in many ways more interesting, is PatentFreedom. For $25,000 a year—a small fraction of what the average patent litigation can cost–PatentFreedom offers operating companies access to exclusive research about the non-practicing entities using patents against them. PatentFreedom’s database contains information about more than 330 NPEs, which between them hold more than 23,000 U.S. patents and applications and are involved in more than 3,000 lawsuits–many of them sprawling multi-defendant affairs.

Patents Getting In The Way Of Saving Lives; Fabry Disease Sufferers Petition US Gov’t To Step In (life and death at stake again)

Genzyme is a pharma firm that has a patent on a drug, Fabrazyme, which is used to treat Fabry disease, an enzyme deficiency that can create very serious problems in those who have it — including kidney failure and heart attacks. The problem? Genzyme apparently can’t produce the supply needed by patients. Now, in a true free market, when supply was less than demand, a competitor would step up production, but (oh wait!) there can’t be any competitor, because the patent means that Genzyme is currently the only one legally allowed to make the drug. Now a group of patients who have been forced to ration their dosage at one-third the usual amounts, leading to serious health problems and at least one death, has petitioned the government for the right to break the patent.

“The tiny device I have here in the palm of my hand is the sort of product that could emerge if the information required by the Commission were available, Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold over the world’s networks.”

–Andrew Tridgell

Reader’s Post: Steve Ballmer Threatens Apple and All Tablet Makers

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Steve Ballmer, Windows at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Dirt and letter

Summary: A reader’s contribution sent to us by mail

Anonymous submits: “From the CEO who publically humiliated a rank and file employee by stomping his iPhone and the company that once offered all employees an “iPod” amnesty and fired another employee for blogging about a shipment of Macs:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/…

“[Apple has] sold more than I’d like them to sell. We think about that. So it’s our job to say, we have got to make things happen. Just like we made things happen with netbooks, we have to do that with Slates.”

While there’s nothing new about Microsoft’s market failures and anti-competitive methods, it is unusual for them to admit in public that their way of “competing” is to block the sales of their competitors. What Microsoft tried to do to GNU/Linux netbooks by crushing Asus, Xandros, the One Laptop Per Child project and other netbook makers is something no one should forget. GNU/Linux is unmentioned, as usual, but everyone knows what the bully is talking about. Boycott Novell covered the story extensively from the co-option of other companies to the sad financial results of their compliance. Many might also remember similar things done to the Sharp Zaurus, Palm and the handheld market almost a decade ago. Microsoft has deprived people of cheap and useful hardware but they have been unable to protect their own profits because the technology just gets better and more successful with each iteration. If Microsoft does not go bankrupt beforehand, there is no way they will be able to block $35 computers from India.

Equally remarkable is how pathetic Ballmer and Microsoft have become. He actually brags about getting a “Bing App” on the iPhone, and Microsoft’s skills as an iPhone developer. This is a claim that might impress friends and parents of young developers but is it really a mark of prowess and income for Microsoft? Vaporware is trotted out over news of layoffs, Zune, Kin, Xbox and Vista/Windows 7 failure, ‘We’ve got to push with our hardware partners…as soon as they are ready.’” Wow.” █

Rumour: Canonical Interested in Buying OpenSUSE

Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE, Novell, OpenSUSE, Rumour, Ubuntu at 7:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A secret

Summary: Canonical employee is claimed to have blurted out something about Canonical buying OpenSUSE from Novell

A SOURCE of ours, who claims to have spoken with a Canonical developer, said that Canonical might be considering an OpenSUSE acquisition (Novell is still up for sale, and selling in pieces is a possibility). This rumour did get some responses but no other source has yet been able to verify. Has anybody else heard something similar? Mark Shuttleworth was looking to hire SUSE developers about four years ago.

Either way, Novell recently hired KDE's Jos Poortvliet to manage OpenSUSE's community and Poortvliet already lays out a KDE strategy for OpenSUSE. From his good blog:

I’d be willing to write such a proposal (yes, short notice, I know) if ppl think we should have it. I’m NOT saying here that that’s the direction we, as in openSUSE, should choose – personally I like the poweruser proposal as well as the developer proposal. Oh and the cloudy one as well… Besides, I’ve been involved only so short, my vote doesn’t count as I’m not even an openSUSE Member right now. So the openSUSE community should vote – not me. I’m just here to help!

Novell has also just hired another developer for SUSE. From the blog:

I guess most people who discussed with me there knew already and Michael already let the cat out of the bag: I’ve joined Novell, to work on SUSE MeeGo.

There are some other new posts about OpenSUSE. One says that Fedora is losing to OpenSUSE and another offers “quick impressions” of OpenSUSE 11.3:

About two weeks ago, the openSUSE Project released version 11.3 of its popular Linux distribution, and after putting it off for quite a while, I decided to give the latest version a download and see what SUSE has been up to. After all, the last time I took a serious look at SUSE (over four years ago!), it still went by “SuSE”… yes, it’s been quite a while. So far, my initial impressions of the latest version are quite good.

Novell claims to have made its SUSE business profitable a couple of quarters ago. Is it true that it considers selling it now? We hope that someone else has heard something through the grapevine. Novell is super-silent these days as it quietly negotiates with bidders. █

British Computer Society (BCS) Distances Itself From Controversial Article Belittling Free/Libre Software Security

Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Escape key

Summary: BCS escapes bad publicity by clarifying that an article it (re)posted does not represent its views; Katherine Noyes explains what makes GNU/Linux particularly secure

LAST WEEK we responded to FUD from the British Computer Society (BCS) Web site. David Evans from BCS replied to our post and politely explained the situation. It turns out that many other sites — not just Techrights — were upset by the article which BCS had published. The article basically claimed that Free/open source software is fundamentally less secure than non-Free software. This whole thing started a “flame war” and The Register (UK) explains how so:

BCS Linux-baiting sparks flame war

[...]

Meanwhile, other readers criticised the article as being a “disappointing and unnecessarily biased article, to the point of being misleading” and worse. Part of the problem is that the article was not properly distinguished from being either an analysis or an opinion piece.

[...]

Mark Elkins, chair of the OSSG confirmed it had not been contacted and expressed regret at this oversight. Elkins told The Register that his main regret was that BCS members might go away from the article in the mistaken belief it ought to be read as the professional organisation’s considered view on the subject of open source security, instead of an opinion.

There are complaints there about the BCS deleting opinions. If true, that’s truly shameful.

Speaking of Free software and GNU/Linux security, Katherine Noyes began writing some nice articles for IDG rather than ECT. One of her very latest is an article titled “Why Linux Is More Secure Than Windows” (this extends to Free software in general). One line of argument goes like this:

“Linus’ Law”–named for Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux–holds that, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” What that means is that the larger the group of developers and testers working on a set of code, the more likely any flaws will be caught and fixed quickly. This, in other words, is essentially the polar opposite of the “security through obscurity” argument.

With Windows, it’s a limited set of paid developers who are trying to find problems in the code. They adhere to their own set timetables, and they don’t generally tell anyone about the problems until they’ve already created a solution, leaving the door open to exploits until that happens. Not a very comforting thought for the businesses that depend on that technology.

In the Linux world, on the other hand, countless users can see the code at any time, making it more likely that someone will find a flaw sooner rather than later. Not only that, but users can even fix problems themselves. Microsoft may tout its large team of paid developers, but it’s unlikely that team can compare with a global base of Linux user-developers around the globe. Security can only benefit through all those extra “eyeballs.”

Visibility does make code more secure. To suggest otherwise is to assume that obfuscation trumps peer review. The BCS ought to understand the importance of peer review, as well as having research be published along with open data for replication/verification by independent parties. GNU/Linux development follows the scientific paradigm, which usually makes it more fault tolerant. █

IRC Proceedings: August 3rd, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Enter the IRC channel now

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