Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

09.13.10

The Difference Between Florian Müller and Hugo Lueders (Pro-Microsoft Lobbyists)

Posted in ECMA, FSF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Standard at 3:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EU flag

Summary: Microsoft Florian resorts to name-calling (Moglen compared to “Fidel Castro”) and demotes standards and Free software while claiming to do the opposite

HERE WE GO again. Since people are being cursed and the FFII is being smeared, it becomes less than reasonable to merely ignore Microsoft Florian, a troublemaking .NET developer and proponent of RAND (incompatible with Free software) who has begun promoting .NET in Twitter (he develops exclusively in .NET) and actively dividing FOSS communities. Pretence time is over perhaps. It just didn’t take long before he started passing around Miguel’s pro-Mono/.NET messages. Under pressure he also elaborated on his career (paid-for campaigning) and his usual defence is that he believes in the cause he is paid to support. If Microsoft paid him to campaign, then surely it would fit this description. He did the same for a football team until recently. In his defence he said: “I supported them in the stadium in Munich against Bayern on several occasions, and later in Brussels in one strategic context.”

Whether Microsoft pays him or not right now (he says that the lobbying “register is not only about affiliation. I haven’t done any non-exempt work in more than three years. If/when, I’ll register.”), some of his strategy is particularly distasteful. He constantly compares Professor Eben Moglen to Fidel Castro, e.g. with the following Twitter tweets:

- “Fidel most recently said the Cuban system doesn’t work. Such wisdom sets him apart from someone defending the OIN over and over.”
- “In Q&A at LinuxCon Fidel Moglen called IBM a “continuing friend”. Why didn’t he just tell the real nature of the relationship?”
- “Fidel Moglen called GPLv3 largely successful http://bit.ly/adH7TX If this is success, I’d like to see what he deems failure.”
- “IBM Foundation released video of Fidel Moglen’s speech praising OIN the week before Oracle sued Google http://bit.ly/adH7TX “
- “One way *not* to defeat software patents is with Fidel Castro-like speeches such as http://tinyvid.tv/show/2xrglw9dap138 “

We are not especially surprised by this because Microsoft Florian did such things before, implying that Moglen was a communist in Techrights comments.

He is also attacking the FFII right now, trying a divide-and-conquer approach (causing infighting, in vain) by mass-mailing people like he always does. Real classy. Over at LWN (a site of Linux proponents, not .NET developers), Microsoft Florian incites people against the FSF.

“Florian Müller seems like the type of person who would pretend to support the very opposite policy which he actively works to achieve.”Is there any group at all in the GNU/Linux world that Florian has not smeared yet? He also smears the Linux Foundation by the way. The only company he ever defends is Microsoft, whose extortions he describes as “cooperative”.

“Don’t blame your own weaknesses on others, then you’d enjoy your life more and make good friends,” the FFII told him. He not only lobbies against Free software but also against open standards on the face of it. “Thanks for unmasking that you lobby against open standards,” the FFII told him at a later stage, “EIFv2 is not released yet and not about excluding RAND standards.” Here is the response.

“Bowing in to lobbyists of your kind,” the FFII explained, “the Commission would refrain to define it. Last year the ministers didn’t accept it.”

Florian Müller seems like the type of person who would pretend to support the very opposite policy which he actively works to achieve. His track record in that regard is extremely poor and well documented.

“For the past decade FFII has been defending “open standards” against lobby attempts to redefine the professional term” the FFII said. Yes, we have all seen this as Microsoft lobbyists pretend to support openness and standards whilst actually doing the exact opposite. It is important to guard definitions and expose imposters.

As an exercise in logic, the FFII asked, “What’s the difference between open standard re-definitions of @fosspatents and Hugo Lueders”? (see [1, 2, 3, 4] for background about Lueders)

“A: Müller claims not to represent industry” █

AstroTurfer Against Google Wants to Buy Google Real Estate, Old Anti-Google AstroTurfers (Hired by Microsoft) Recalled

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search at 2:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The shades - portait

Summary: AstroTurfing group ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ tries to throw slime at Google’s CEO on his own platform and whines when blocked from doing so; LawMedia Group, an AstroTurfing group which helped Microsoft crush both Yahoo! and Google, helps show how far Microsoft would go

‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ is subject that we covered several times over the past 2 years and we have a wiki page about it. As a quick introduction, here we have a group which is hosted by Edelman’s AstroTurfing platform (it admits this) and hammers on Google’s reputation non-stop, calling Google “criminals”, calling for the company to be split, and comparing the company’s CEO to a child molester. Google does give new reasons for vigilance, but this does not justify rude AstroTurfing by Google’s competitors. Google is a threat to privacy, but Microsoft funds proxies that help exaggerate it and Microsoft is also a hypocrite because it’s a threat to privacy too, more so than Google in some ways (Windows is spyware, going by the definition of this term).

According to this report, ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ (it is neither for consumers nor a watchdog) has the nerve to buy ads from Google that attack the company’s CEO in the aforementioned way.

Last week Consumer Watchdog–an intense and sometimes disingenuous Google critic–submitted three text ads to Google designed to promote the over-the-top video it created of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in order to criticize Google on privacy issues. The ads targeting keywords such as “Google CEO Eric Schmidt” were purchased on September 2, the same day Consumer Watchdog released the video, but Google rejected them the next day citing its policy on trademarks in the text of ads, according to John Simpson, a spokesman for the group.

On Thursday, Consumer Watchdog complained about the ad rejection in an open letter published on its site, and a Google representative confirmed Friday that Google had overturned the original decision but did not admit making any error.

Google should not only block ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ but also file a lawsuit for it pretending to be a charity (calling for donations even) and not an AstroTurfer. Lora Bentley calls it “Consumer Group” (in the headline even), but then again she is also one among many who did not mention the Microsoft factor in all of this. Where is the real investigative reporting? Raw Story at least mentions Microsoft’s very apparent role in Texas:

Harrison suggested Google rival Microsoft was behind the various complaints.

He said Foundem was backed by an organization funded largely by Microsoft and that both TradeComet and myTriggers were represented by Microsoft antitrust attorneys.

The Google counsel also noted that a federal judge earlier this year dismissed a private antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by TradeComet.

Microsoft and Yahoo! teamed up last year in a bid to rival Google in search but have made only slight inroads against the Mountain View, California-based company which controls around 65 percent of the US search market.

Incidentally, some reports are mixing the legal action with the AstroTurf, probably not by coincidence with the timing and everything. The AstroTurfer is the provocateur which gets public support for legal action against Google and most if not all of it is traceable to Microsoft and its partners.

According to this report, Microsoft is involved in another case against Google right now. Joseph Tartakoff says that “Microsoft, Expedia and Kayak have told the Justice Department they are concerned about Google’s buy of ITA” and the Wall Street Journal says:

ITA software is used by flight-comparison sites including Kayak.com, SideStep.com and Hotwire.com, among others, as well as by Bing, the Internet-search engine owned by Microsoft Corp. ITA also powers the ticket-search and booking sites of numerous airlines, including American and Continental, giving it insight into how airlines price their seats.

The Register has more details.

“It put former managers inside the company, as usually happens when Microsoft wants to take over another company from the inside (watch out, Nokia).”Who can ever forget how Microsoft hired AstroTurfers to block a Yahoo!-Google deal? This led to Yahoo hijack by Microsoft. It put former managers inside the company, as usually happens when Microsoft wants to take over another company from the inside (watch out, Nokia). Yahoo saw many of its former executives flee and products/services cancelled. Few new services are created (e.g. [1
2] last week) whilst another manager calls it a day:

Yahoo Finance has long been a top property in its field, beating everything even giants like Google and Microsoft could come up with. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Steve Schultz, the head of Yahoo Finance, found another job this week.

Without needing to ever buy the company called Yahoo!, Microsoft turned the company’s crown jewel (search, not portal) into its own department, instantly increasing its market share to about double the old levels (only accounting for the US, though). If it were not for Microsoft hiring an AstroTurfing group (LawMedia Group) and engaging in other types of corruption of the system, Yahoo! would be happily working with Google now right and Yang would still be its CEO, still operating alongside the old management with services like GeoCities (which got axed after Microsoft had killed Yahoo’s soul). Microsoft likes to break stuff. That’s how it does business. █

09.12.10

WIPO and WTO Are Not International

Posted in Africa, Asia, Europe, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 7:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Francis Gurry from WIPO
Photo by dkpto @ Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Summary: China’s monopolies office (SIPO) and the EPO sign a new deal and Africa is hurt by moves made with WIPO endorsement

WIPO (wipo.int, where “int” means “international” and the “w” stands for world) is about as international as the World Bank. WTO, where the “w” also stands for world, is about as international as the IMF. Both bodies cover an international scope but their representation is not. Their main function is to ensure the gap is maintained between those already in power and those which are exploited (given barrier obstructions, sanctions, or debt). Glyn Moody suggested quite correctly that intellectual monopolies are “a neo-colonialist plot to ensure the continuing dominance of Western nations” and we covered this several times before, e.g. in WIPO criticisms [1, 2]. WIPO is philosophically if not fundamentally against Free software and thanks to some pointers from the FFII, last week we found further evidence that WIPO is not working for the world, it’s working for its founding/funding sources which are concentrated in the Western world.

A few days ago the FFII found evidence of further language symbiosis involving Europe and China, with software patents being a possibility if patent offices overlap more. Last week we saw Russia doing something similar with the USPTO.

Anyway, from the EPO’s Web site:

The EPO and the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) have taken a step further towards making China’s prior art documentation more easily available for patent searching. Signing an agreement related to lexical and terminological data for building English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries to be used for machine translation on 4 September 2010 in Shanghai, EPO President Benoît Battistelli and SIPO Commissioner Tian Lipu also addressed the need to further strengthen IP relations in the partnership between Europe and China.

China is typically a victim of such moves, which also include the “unconstitutional” ACTA [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. ACTA covers more than just patents; it is primarily about copyrights as far as monopolies are concerned and IP Watch, a site critical of such monopolies, writes about injustice in Africa right now. Watch what WIPO is doing to Africans:

African Traditional Knowledge And Folklore Given IP Protection Despite Warning Of TK Commodification

Some African nations signed a protocol on the protection of traditional knowledge and folklore at the beginning of August gaining the praise of the World Intellectual Property Organization. However, a United Nations report launched in January warned against the application of western legal and economic principles to collectively owned knowledge in traditional communities.

At the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) diplomatic conference on 9-10 August in Swakopmund, Namibia, the protocol on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Folklore was signed by nine states.

ARIPO currently has 17 member states. Nine states signed the protocol and “the remaining eight states, including Somalia, will have to accede to the protocol,” Emmanuel Sackey, head of Search and Examination at ARIPO told Intellectual Property Watch. Sackey, who coordinates ARIPO’s activities on the protection of TK, genetic resources and expressions of folklore, said the nine states “will be required to deposit instruments of ratification.” Some states “have initiated the process for the ratification and accession,” he added.

The last thing Africa needs to endorse are monopolies on ideas and on art. It’s bad enough that the Gates Foundation forces these upon Africans, whether they actually like it or not (gullibility and brainwash from Western media helps build support for it). █

IRC Proceedings: September 12th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

Links 12/9/2010: KDE Coverage, Salix Review, Other Free Software/Open Source News Items

Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Thanks, [Microsoft]

      15 years ago you produced a product so bad that it drove me to use GNU/Linux. Thanks.

      In 2000 I was using Lose 3.1 on my personal PC, a 486DX with some RAM. It would crash on me when I tried to print. I gave that up by then. At work I was using five Pentium Pros in class. Lose ’95 would freeze hourly on one of the other just running a browser or word-processor in 72 MB.

    • The Life of the PC

      Conclusion? We should see PCs sticking around a lot longer. After all the average PC in business is now about six years old and still doing well. It is a waste to change when not necessary. The result could be PCs lasting until ten years of age. Guess what OS works well on older machines? GNU/Linux. Thin clients often use it for puny 300 MHz processors. A 2 gHz machine is a wondrous thing in comparison.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Demystifying OpenGL Desktop Effects

        12. KWin will require OpenGL 3 in 4.6:
        No, please see my blog post where I wrote that I want to have OpenGL 3 support in 4.7.

        13. KWin will require OpenGL 3 in 4.7:
        No, this will also be only an additional feature. KWin supports multiple backends and it does not make any sense to remove a working backend which is required for all mesa users and users of graphic cards which cannot handle OpenGL 3.

      • Watch out KDE! MS now owns Qt by proxy…

        He will be transferring over later in the month. What does this mean for KDE, Qt and Nokia’s part in open source technologies such as MeeGo? It could mean that they slowly pull themselves out of open source due to Microsoft’s influence. They could also decide to stop investing money into it while pretending to contribute.

      • Manage your digital camera in Linux with DigiKam

        For those of you who thought managing external devices like digital cameras in Linux was a challenge, I give you DigiKam. DigiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac. DigiKam allows the user to view, manage, edit, enhance, organize, tag, and share photographs easily in the Linux operating system. It boasts tons of features that rival and/or exceed those of similar applications on other operating systems.

      • David Solbach

        This week the behindkde.org interview is with one of the unknown powers behind the sysadmin team. It’s David Solbach. Click on the image to see where David was during the “Fjällraven Classic”.

        He is the maintainer of reviewboard.kde.org. He not only knows his way around reviewing code, but also knows how to design and develop diagnostic blood analyzers and was hit when the dot com bubble bursted. Enjoy an entertaining and interesting interview with David!

      • Amarok 2.3.2 Beta 1 Review

        The version tested is the 2.3.2 Beta 1 release, put out earlier this year, running on top of Kubuntu 10.10 Beta. Amarok improved a lot since I last took a look at it (I’m still using KDE 3.5 with the old – but stable – Debian Lenny).

      • Burner (Fire Edition) – Bring Some Heat To Your Favorite KDE Media Burner

        I recently had occasion to be perusing KDE-Look.org for some nice new wallpapers the other day when I glanced over to the left at all the site’s category selections and was curious when I saw the category for K3b. With interest getting the best of me I clicked on the K3b category and right up at the top of the results list I found this killer K3b Theme. Although I’m not one to be overly concerned with tweaking all aspects of my Mint KDE setup, one look and I knew I had to install this theme pronto. It just screamed “cool”.

      • Nepomuk+strigi as desktop search

        In the last weeks I – once again – got fed-up with strigi/nepomuk being of no use to me. Since KDE 4.0 I long for a desktop search, i.e. some way of finding files and getting a result list such as google etc. has it, i.e. including some context around the string found in the document and not just a file list. Anything else would just be a faster version of kfind for that task. And since I do not use tags, it is the only desktop search task for me.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • REVIEW: Salix 13.1-rc1 (Live LXDE)

        As I say, Ive deployed Linux quite extensively, from friends and family to friends of friends and our local computer club. Most of these people have no clue what an operating system is or how to install one and merely want an escape from their Windows desktop. When looking at a distro for OpenBytes, I consider two things – would I want this on my main rig? and; How easy will this be to deploy and provide support for to a user who may not have any experience of Linux. In both cases Salix received a favorable answer. Little things like a package that installs the multimedia codecs is very welcome as if I am around a friend’s house installing it on their desktop, I want things handed on a plate, so that I spend as little time as possible.

        The speedy install times, make this a very attractive distro for me to deploy to others too and with the one click installation of all the codecs I could wish for also appeals greatly to me (although is not unique to Salix and Sabayon 5.3 (currently on my main rig, offers the same feature at install time)

        The installation itself was simple and I think shows just how far Linux on the desktop has come. Not so long ago, there were only a handful of distro’s that truly offered a user friendly installation, now it seems a “minimum standard” of any new release.

        Salix (thanks to its LXDE flavour) is very fast. Whilst some will find LXDE too simple looking and would probably migrate towards KDE or Gnome, LXDE affords even the lowest of specs a very fast, functional performance and a great introduction to a Slackware distro. If you are after a Slack distro that spares a thought for the new or inexperienced user, give Salix a go. Either way, seasoned Linux expert or Linux newbie, Salix LXDE is a great release and very worthy of a look.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2010 Spring (Gnome Desktop version)

        Mandriva is a pretty cool Linux Distribution (distro) which I have been using since it’s installation borked my Linux Mint partition. The graphical install was very simple but the installer did not recognise my Mint partition and add it to the Boot Menu. I was disappointed with this because my experience with Debian based distros is that they always recognise other Linux partitions and add them to the boot menu. I had created dual boot and triple booting systems before yet I could not get this to work with Mandriva

    • Red Hat Family

      • Ideas get greased at NCSU’s ‘Garage’

        N.C. State graduate student Andrew Misenheimer studies at The Garage, a 2,000-square-foot incubator for student entrepreneurs. It was sponsored by Raleigh-based Linux software company Red Hat.

        [...]

        Miller didn’t have to put on the hard sell to convince Red Hat to sponsor TheGarage.

      • Fedora

        • OLF 2010, day 0.

          I’m writing this from the Red Hat booth at Ohio Linux Fest 2010, which is bustling with visitors, so sorry if this is a little brief. For me Day 0 was yesterday (Friday). Some people, like Mel Chua, Ruth Suehle, and Robyn Bergeron, were here yesterday doing some awesome talks and generally spreading open source gospel here in Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, I drove about 2 hours to Baltimore, Maryland to catch my flight to the event. When I landed I met Brian Pepple at the world famous Cup O Joe stand, Spot landed soon after, and Brian took us to the hotel.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The road not taken

          I am not an Ubuntu old-timer. I remember as far back as 5.10, but certainly there is a smaller circle of true Ubuntu veterans.

          And I am definitely not a Linux old-timer. I am a mere babe in the woods, comparatively speaking, and I try my best to remind myself of that fact regularly. There is always someone who knows more than you.

          It has been almost five years since I started out with Ubuntu though, and things have changed dramatically since then.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Triteq designs open source 3D imaging software

      Triteq has completed an open source design for a medical 3D imaging system capable of taking eight 5Mpixel images a second.

      [...]

      For hardware, Triteq chose an i.MX515 microprocessor from Freescale built into a Wi-MX51 module from Digi International, running Linux from Timesys.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Fall to bring Google TV, just in time for Apple TV faceoff

          Google announced Google TV in May of this year during its own developer conference, touting the device as a more open alternative to the closed set-top boxes out there (particularly the Apple TV). Because it will be Android-based and search-driven, third-party developers are expected to hop on board with a plethora of TV offerings—companies like Netflix and Amazon have already created native apps to run on Google TV.

        • Open thread: Will Google TV change your viewing habits?
        • Garmin’s Android Powered Navigation Phone

          The Garmin-Asus A50 is a sleek, full-touch 3G smartphone with a large 3.5-inch screen integrated with Garmin’s robust navigation experience for fast and reliable, on-board navigation. The company claims that A50 has everything users need to stay connected to the people important to them.

        • How to build the perfect Android tablet, part 4: Resolution and aspect ratio

          For this installment I want to return to the display and discuss a different, um, aspect with you. My pick for the 4th most important feature of the perfect tablet is:

          #4: A high resolution display that is wide but not *too* wide

        • STFU about Android and “open” [OPINION]

          Android users and media personnel frequently complain that carriers and manufacturers change the Android experience and that’s not “in the spirit” of open, which is a false statement. The changes those companies make is a direct reflection of open. Google wrote the code, made it available to the OHA, and the OHA members made their tweaks.

          That is why we have to refocus the discussion into the proper terms. If you embrace Android because it is open, then address the negative impacts of that openness appropriately. Don’t rail against companies for changing Android and claim that it violates the spirit of openness. Rail against those companies because those changes don’t meet your tastes or needs. You can’t have it both ways and extol open source as a virtue then complain when companies rightfully change the source to create a product they think consumers want.

          So, everybody, focus on the end results and address them accordingly. Do us all a favor and STFU about open source.

        • Dell Streak Android tablet source code now available

          Dell has released the source code for its Streak and Aero devices. The Streak is a 5 inch Android tablet or smartphone, depending on how you look at it, while the Aero is pretty inarguably a phone.

          Google Android is built on open source software and uses a version of the Linux kernel at its core. While Google keeps some source closed when it’s developing new versions of the operating system, it tends to release them as open source upon launch, allowing smartphone makers and wireless carriers to make core changes to the operating system to meet their needs.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Killed on a Technicality

    In 1994 Eddie Lee Howard was convicted of raping and murdering 84-year-old Georgia Kemp. Kemp was found dead in her Columbus, Mississippi, home by firefighters after a neighbor noticed smoke coming from the house. Investigators determined the fire was set intentionally.

    Kemp’s body was taken to controversial Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne, who would later lose his lucrative niche as the state’s go-to guy for autopsies after years of criticism for sloppy work that rarely failed to confirm prosecutors’ suspicions. Hayne concluded that Kemp died of knife wounds and said he found signs of rape, although the rape kit taken from Kemp turned up no biological evidence that the technology available at the time could test for DNA.

  • Wikileaks: Three Digital Myths
  • So people spend a fortune on office chairs?

    On the one hand I accept that you spend a lot of time sitting in chairs when you’re working upon a computer. On the left I find the idea of spending £750+ on a chair a little insane.

    For the past few years I’ve had a kneeling chair over time this has gotten pretty “squished” and “flat”. (Specifically the part where my knees go.)

    So I decided to get a new chair. What did I buy? a large rubber ball!

  • Security/Aggression

    • Internet Scammer Gets Nearly 13 Years for $1.3M Fraud

      A Nigerian man gets sentenced to 151 months in prison for a scam that stole $1.3 million from victims.

    • DHS Cybersecurity Watchdogs Miss Hundreds of Vulnerabilities on Their Own Network

      The federal agency in charge of protecting other agencies from computer intruders was found riddled with hundreds of high-risk security holes on its own systems, according to the results of an audit released Wednesday.

      The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, monitors the Einstein intrusion-detection sensors on nonmilitary government networks, and helps other civil agencies respond to hack attacks. It also issues alerts on the latest software security holes, so that everyone from the White House to the FAA can react quickly to install workarounds and patches.

    • Do Mummies Have a Right to Privacy?

      The traditionally held assumption that ancient corpses are “fair game” for scientists to dissect and investigate is wilting under new pressure from leading academics. And The New Scientist’s Jo Marchant is on the scene to suss out the moral debate on what can or can’t be probed when dealing with ancient human remains.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Tea Party Suicide – Why Closing The United States Environmental Protection Agency Is Part Of The Platform

      One of the agencies most often mentioned for closure is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Unlike the other agencies that are often cited as not needed, the EPA doesn’t have a direct connection with the public. Compare that to the Department of Education which has a direct connection to anyone who has children, or have attended school themselves! So why is the EPA on the Tea Party’s hit list?

      Several investigations of the Tea Party have indicated that while it claims to be a non-partisan, grass roots group, it is heavily funded by corporate backers. The New Yorker recently ran an article titled Covert Operations – The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. Other media outlets who have carried out investigations have confirmed the connection.

      Koch Industries is heavily involved in the oil and coal industries. The brothers who own the firm are rich by anyone’s standard. They pay a lot of taxes, and produce materials which are either regulated by the EPA, or have effects that are regulated by the EPA.. They have a vested interest in reducing the impact of government regulation, and government costs on themselves and their company. Curiously the very things that the Tea Party is concerned with.

      [...]

      Fake grass roots campaigns have a nasty habit of back firing. Take the Tea Party’s support for closing the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been responsible for cleaning up some truly horrible pollution.

      [...]

      Koch’s funding of the Tea Party is an attempt to evade responsibility, an attempt that the Tea Party members will not stand for when the connections become clear to them. They don’t like being taken advantage of, and this is what Koch is doing.

      Koch will continue to try and hide the funding connections, and the policy connections. But in the long term they will fail. Too many people are curious now. Too many people are looking at what is happening. Too many people know that many of the Tea Party policies disadvantage Tea Party members. When a group is disadvantaged by it’s policies, there is solid evidence that someone hiding behind the scenes is attempting to use them for his or her own advantage.

  • Finance

    • £32,000 a day for council website as 26,000 face job cuts

      Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits.

    • Not Enough Labor Day

      Today, many Americans will be enjoying a respite from the incessant demands of their jobs. But many Americans will be wishing desperately they could trade the holiday for the incessant demands of a job. This year, given the state of the economy, Labor Day should be called Not Enough Labor Day.

    • Resignation cake sender has invoice cake delivered to People.com
    • Reclaiming Rights

      The U.S. is in an economic, fiscal, and public policy crisis with no end in sight. Indeed, it looks almost certain to get far worse. We can and will talk about what rights need to be reasserted, what programs need to be cut, what sectors of this American life need to be left the hell alone. But until we make a dent in the widespread notion that there always has to be some type of government structure or some taxpayer-financed watchdog to police every imaginable peaceable transaction, any contemplated fix to the mess we’re in will be temporary at best.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Tea Party multi-level marketing scheme

      The mellifluously named TeaPartyBizOpp.info (presumably the .com was taken?) is a pyramid scheme that recruits disgruntled wingnuts to “Get Paid To Stop Liberal Tyranny!” by “helping raise funds to defend our freedom.”

    • BCE-CTV deal remakes media landscape

      BCE Inc. BCE-T has agreed to acquire full ownership of CTV Inc. in a $1.3-billion deal that dramatically reshapes the landscape of Canadian media and telecommunications, and changes the ownership structure of The Globe and Mail.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • O’Brien: Campaign against Craigslist reaches absurd heights

      In the end, Craigslist did the only sensible thing it could do to end the controversy over its adult services ads by shutting them down, as critics demanded. And even that turned out not to be enough to silence the opportunistic campaign against the online classifieds site.

    • US government can demand your cellphone data

      A US federal appeals court said that government agencies do not need a warrant showing probable cause under the Fourth Amendment to demand the mobile phone location records from carriers.

    • ACLU sues over warrantless border laptop searches

      Citing the government’s own figures, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers claim about 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border since October 2008. In one instance, according to the lawsuit filed in New York, a computer laptop was seized from a New York man at the Canadian border and not returned for 11 days. The lawsuit seeks no monetary damages, but asks the court to order an end to the searches.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Playstation 3 Jailbreaking an Open Source of Controversy

      A little over a month ago a fellow IP Brief blogger reported on a very interesting decision handed down by the Librarian of Congress granting exemptions to the DCMA. The decision was triumphantly lauded by fair use advocates and not so happily received by certain others.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Clip of the Day

‘Free Software and Free Media’


Credit: TinyOgg

Microsoft Would Have Helped Stalin, Too

Posted in Asia, Fraud, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 4:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Commonality found in intolerance or hatred of opposing views, competition

Medvedev and Windows
Credit: kremlin.ru, modified with permission.

Summary: Microsoft is “enabling tyranny” in Russia (to borrow words from the US Senate) by crushing political dissent and other humanitarian movements in the great country

DR. GLYN MOODY has just found a rather shocking new article from The New York Times, which is unlikely to sensationalise or exaggerate because it’s subjected to a lot of scrutiny. Moody labels Microsoft “Enemy of Human Rights in Russia” because of this article.

As a little bit of background, consider the relationship between Microsoft and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian spy fiasco which we mentioned many times in July [1, 2], Microsoft’s handing out of Windows source code to the KGB equivalent, and the fact that Microsoft is attacking GNU/Linux adoption in Russian schools [1, 2] (more links at the bottom of this post show the nefarious means used).

For quite a few years now there have been known stories of Russian authorities selecting politically-active victims (usually journalists) and using Microsoft to crack down on them, eventually locking them up in some prison. Microsoft also did this in Kyrgyzstan [1, 2], as reported earlier this year.

Watch what Microsoft is doing in Russia:

Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.

Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.

As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.

[...]

Given the suspicions that these investigations are politically motivated, the police and prosecutors have turned to Microsoft to lend weight to their cases. In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun “based on an application” from a lawyer for Microsoft.

In another city, Samara, the police seized computers from two opposition newspapers, with the support of a different Microsoft lawyer. “Without the participation of Microsoft, these criminal cases against human rights defenders and journalists would simply not be able to occur,” said the editor of the newspapers, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev.

They are even framing them if they do everything in the most prudent of ways. They use Microsoft as a weapon of criminalisation regardless of reality and Microsoft is by all means an active collaborator:

They said they told the officers that they were mistaken, pulling out receipts and original Microsoft packaging to prove that the software was not pirated. The police did not appear to take that into consideration. A supervising officer issued a report on the spot saying that illegal software had been uncovered.

Before the raid, the environmentalists said their computers were affixed with Microsoft’s “Certificate of Authenticity” stickers that attested to the software’s legality. But as the computers were being hauled away, they noticed something odd: the stickers were gone.

In all, 12 computers were confiscated. The group’s Web site was disabled, its finances left in disarray, its plans disclosed to the authorities.

As Moody stresses, this helps show that Free software is crucial to one’s national freedom, not just individual freedom:

Of course, there’s a simple solution to all this: use free software. With that, no stickers are needed, and so there’s no way the authorities can frame you for using it. Indeed, given free software’s greater security, I can’t really understand why human rights groups aren’t routinely installing it anyway. Let’s hope they learn from these awful experiences and switch soon – not least for Lake Baikal’s sake.

Microsoft was recently accused in the US senate of “enabling tyranny” in China [1, 2]. Add Russia and Kyrgyzstan to this list. █

Related posts:

Microsoft Forces Linux Phone Users to Use Bong [sic] Just Like it Forces Linux Users to Buy Windows With a New PC

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft’s strategy against rivals like Google and GNU/Linux is removal of choice, patent extortion, and public ridicule

CHEATING by limiting choice is the modus operandi at Microsoft. If users are left with no choice but to become clients of Microsoft, how can Microsoft possibly lose? It ‘wins’ by default.

It is common knowledge that Microsoft is losing in the mobile arena (market share low and steadily declining), so Microsoft is busy making threats with software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] in order to make profit from Linux phones, which Microsoft wrote not a single line of code for.

One company that pays Microsoft for Linux phones is Samsung, which gives buyers no choice but to pay Microsoft for Android. Moreover, Samsung sells out again, this time by forcing buyers to use Microsoft’s Bong [sic]. The source of this claim is this review which was analysed further by Android Guys. It’s being compared to Verizon’s half-a-billion-dollars deal with Microsoft [1, 2, 3]:

Samsung Fascinate Uses Bing Instead of Google Search (Updated)

[...]

I’m severely disappointed in Verizon and Samsung. The Samsung Fascinate, Big Red’s version of the Galaxy S, has been reviewed by the folks over at Engadget. They were quick to point out that the search widget is BING, not Google Search.

[...]

UPDATE: More bad news. According to Engadget, there is no way to change the search engine to Google. You are stuck with Bing. Hopefully we will have something in the market. We will have to wait and see on this.

In a later post from Android Guys the author talks about the Verizon-Microsoft arrangement: “My guess is that this comes from some form of licensing or exclusive deal between Microsoft and Verizon. If I were to throw a dart, I’d say that there will be probably be a few months of releases like this. I really hope this doesn’t become the norm for Verizon or any other carriers. Paying for Striking a deal to grow your market share is shady stuff and this only angers people.”

He ends with a question: “I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter. What do you think of Verizon and Microsoft climbing into bed over the Fascinate? Is this a deal breaker for you?”

“My guess is that this comes from some form of licensing or exclusive deal between Microsoft and Verizon.”
      –Android GuysMore from the same author comes later. He is clearly unhappy about it (the title says “Verizon’s Bing Deal Could be a Very Big Deal”).

The Bong deals are actually not such a big deal compared to the extortion Microsoft has got going with Asian distributors of Android. ‘Microsoft tax’ on Linux in phones affects not only Japanese and Korean companies but also HTC, which remains a Google Android front runner. In fact, many of the top Android phones are now taxed by Microsoft for their use of Linux. That’s just inexcusable and the problem ought to be addressed, preferably by buying phones only from companies that do not pay Microsoft for Linux.

In his recent talks (e.g. [1, 2]) Professor Eben Moglen explained that Microsoft’s products were not very good anymore and therefore Microsoft sought to make money from other people’s products, using software patents of course.

Another disturbing trend we’ve noticed is that Microsoft is busy just attacking its competitors’ products and publicly ridiculing them. How about making better products instead? Microsoft has launched a shameful publicity stunt and Engadget helps them by covering it. Basically, Microsoft is just mocking the competition, mocking a funeral as though their to-be phone with 0.00% market share is already burying phones which sell over 100,000 units per day. That’s just ridiculous and it makes Microsoft look petty. OpenBytes responds as follows:

It is being reported that there’s been a “parade” (and I use that term loosely) to “celebrate” Windows Mobile 7 hitting RTM. Now normally parades are something to be celebrated, but remember this is a Microsoft product which is being celebrated, so you know it will go wrong. The organisers of this Windows Mobile 7 parade decided not to go down the boring, silly normal route and instead seem to believe that people would want to see a fake “funeral” of Apple and Blackberry in light of Windows Mobile 7.

[...]

Now it could be said that this is some clever PR stunt by Microsoft in order to get Windows Mobile 7 talked about, after all how many people do you know that have even heard of it, let alone want one? So I thought I would remind everyone of Microsoft’s previous phones and efforts just so you can keep it in the back of your mind if someone tries to sell you one of these devices later. These links can be found at the end of the article.

Earlier this year Chris Pirillo covered a video interview with Microsoft, “showcasing” Windows Mobile 7, and from what I saw the misfitting menu system that tries to copy Android’s slide feature with the titles of the menu not seeming to fit comfortably on the page, the “innovations” which we’ve seen for a long while with Android merely rebadged under a different name and the Microsoft salesman trying to say “people I care about” ten times a minute in relation to contacts on the phone to try and convince people that the “friendly”Microsoft wants people to enjoy its “friendly” phone. Side note: Microsoft, get yourself a new salesman, this ones more transparent than one of Steve Ballmer’s sweaty shirts. But none of this obvious selling could prepare anyone for the horror when the phones menu pans down and I see the two icons ”Internet Explorer” and “Zune”.

Watch Chris Pirillo serving Microsoft again. A lot of coverage about Vista Phone 7 is fake (made up, paid for through ‘compensation’), for reasons we named last week. Microsoft is said to be spending half a billion dollars just seeding blogs, seeding the press, and probably manipulating social networking sites too. It’s no secret that this is where marketing money goes at Microsoft.

As for that mock funeral, the one to eventually have real a funeral is Vista Phone 7. Several years ago Microsoft put an “amnesty bin” in campus, advising staff to “bury” their hypePods in there (very few employees did). A number of years later we discovered that all the “KIN” units ever sold can comfortably fit one such bin (or coffin). So who had the last laugh? █

Amnesty bin
From fimoculous

The Man Who Brought Software Patents to the US “Nicely Demonstrates Why We Shouldn’t Allow *Hardware* Patents Either”

Posted in America, Hardware, Law, Patents at 2:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Martin Goetz

Summary: Martin Goetz thinks that those who oppose software patents are “diehards” and that all software patents are about machines rather than about “mathematics, or a mathematical formula, or an algorithm, or an abstract idea”

LAST YEAR we saw the man who’s said to be responsible for software patents in the US (in the sense that he received the first one) getting ridiculed for defending the practice. This man, Martin Goetz, is having another go at it right now. He dismisses his critics, calling them “diehards” (even if they represent majority opinion among developers) and his post “nicely demonstrates why we shouldn’t allow *hardware* patents either,” says Dr. Glyn Moody, formerly a mathematician and now a journalist. Here is Goetz’s ending which says a mouthful:

In my previous article there were many comments from diehards that continued to believe that software companies are trying to patent a computer program. Whether those diehards still believe that a computer program is mathematics, or a mathematical formula, or an algorithm, or an abstract idea, so be it. Computer software programs are not what software companies are trying to patent. A software patent invention is on a unique machine process —- nothing more and nothing less. And the criteria should be 1. Innovation 2. A proper disclosure and 3. Usefulness — the same requirement that is the criteria for all patentable subject matter.

Well, actually, this is pure spin. Companies that patent an algorithm or a simple idea that’s implemented digitally rarely claim in their defence that it’s a “software patent invention [...] on a unique machine process” (they don’t even mention “machine”). That’s just Goetz looking to cover his own tracks. In the process he helps readers show why hardware patents too are unsound and unjust. A few days ago I had a face-to-face chat with an Intel engineer and he too acknowledged that patents are monopolies; they were “good” monopolies, however, because they belonged to the company which paid him a wage. The only defensible thing about these monopolies is that the process required to construct chips (including design) is far more expensive than the process of studying patents. An analysis of patents by a one-man (or women) software development team is simply impractical. It makes no economic sense and it simply impedes innovation. █

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

Further Recent Posts

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts