12.28.11

Cablegate Comes Back to Techrights

Posted in Cablegate at 4:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Cablegate returns to Techrights in the interest of spreading the truth

OVER the next few days we are going to make an effort to catch up with cables that we know we missed — notably ones that relate to Free/open source software.

Going a few months back, Alan gave one example from Vietnam and another from Thailand:

I had a bit of a poke about in the newly released Wikileaks diplomatic cables archive looking for interesting stuff and came across a cable from the Chiang Mai Consulate that contains an allegation that the Microsoft Thailand Corporate Affairs Director was explicitly bad mouthing Open Source and being critical of Thailands Creative Economy policy of promoting the use of legal Open Source software instead of using unauthorised copies of proprietary software. The open source community generally doesn’t have this level of access into the heart of government, which is one thing that we have been working to fix in the UK with our friends at Open Forum Europe (who I work for part time). It really is important for the community to support organisations and individuals that can provide a credible voice at a high level and advocate for Open Standards, Free Software (yeah, approximately synonymous with Open Source) and a level playing field through the interoperability of systems and a lack of vendor lock in.

These cables are important because the media probably did not cover this at the time. We are trying to build a decent wiki page on the subject. █

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Attachmate Hardly Embraces Novell’s Products

Posted in Novell at 3:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Based on news we can find, Attachmate is doing just about nothing with Novell’s portfolio

NOVELL’S new identity will gradually change and some products will get abandoned altogether. This is the inevitable outcome of the company’s sale.

Attachmate, Novell’s buyer, is looking to expand in India:

Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. bought Novell for USD 2.2 billion. But that isn’t the only reason why the company has been in the limelight for quite sometime.

Based on some other articles that mention this company, there is no real sign of Novell products being part of the plan. As we stressed before, Attachmate is too passive and with the exception of articles like this one we hardly see anything of Novell mentioned. “According to a recent survey,” says the latter, “Risk of Insider Fraud, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Attachmate Corp., more organizations are paying attention to the risks posed by insiders.”

That’s a Novell thing rebranded “Attachmate”. That’s just about everything we found about this company in the news in the month of December. █

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Bill Gates Keeps Getting Richer and Gaining More Lobbying Power

Posted in Asia, Bill Gates at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A roundup of Gates stories and what they teach us about the Gates Foundation

THE WORLD’S top lobbyist might in fact be Bill Gates, who operates under the umbrella of a foundation. He does not run a company per se, but he is making money in other ways without having to pay tax.

The Korean president is visiting him like he is a political figure (which he is, but the public never elected him), leaving the president susceptible to lobbying for patents and for power. As the Korean press put it a few months ago:

President Lee Myung-bak returned home Saturday from a trip to New York and Seattle that included speeches at the U.N. General Assembly and a high-level nuclear safety meeting, bilateral summits and a meeting with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

And as Gates Keepers put it: “One wonders what Le Myung-bak’s electoral constituents think of him taking ‘global advice’ from a nonKorean college drop out code developer?”

This is “all irrelevant and say nothing,” claims Toby, “what he is, fundamentally, is a criminal sociopath.” Well, behind the scenes he is bullying employees, acts impolitely, and using the F word. Here is another example of it:

BE: I’d have to say they are Planners, top down. And it surprises me because Bill Gates is an entrepreneurial businessman and they tend to be Searchers. The one and only time I met Gates was at Davos several years ago. I figured he’d be friendly to my ideas but he seemed quite hostile. He came up to me and said, “What’s all this searching crap?” (chuckles)

It it is not Bill’s idea, then it is “crap”. This is how and why we see monopolisation in health science, for example. And for those who think that he is giving away his wealth (that’s the PR nonsense), here is a new reminder:

Bill Gates’ wealth increased by $5 billion to bring his net worth to $59 billion

And best of all, he does not pay tax because he is, one would believe, “giving away” money. The above article is very silly by the way and it confused correlation and causation” as Gates Keepers explains. Mr. Gates and his minions keep seeking celebrity endorsements for their campaigns (we provided many examples in the past). This PR effort recently hit a jackpot:

Moonshots and Mandela. Can’t lose with those images. Here is a talking head of Melinda from the Social Good Summit where hundreds of people were put in a room to listen to people talk about how good their programmes were. The audience was expected to tweet about it – manufactured consent for the networked generation.

In summary, the PR operation works. Bill Gates gets richer, the press says he is giving away, and he continues to receive access to the ears of world leaders, to whom he pushes an agenda for his investment. What a cruel trap. The media keeps playing along:

Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. It’s endorsement of market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public, charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education.

Where has the watchdog media gone? Need we rely on blogs for a sobering perspective? NBC should be recalled in the context of MSNBC, where MS is Microsoft. █

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Links – Microsoft, Big Publishers in decline, and Fools keep pushing for SOPA.

Posted in Site News at 3:10 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Android Approved By Pentagon For DoD Usage, Major Setback For iPhone

  This article makes some great points but only software freedom will guard the user against Malware and there might not be any US cell phones that are free. It goes without saying that Blackberry should not be used either.

• American corporate software can no longer be trusted for anything

  The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policymaking — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy. … Free software is not a matter of money anymore, if it ever was. It’s a matter of freedom and sovereignty.

  No one should trust non free software but idiotic US laws can ruin intentional trust in US made free software as well. Free software has always been about sovereignty but the non free software companies have been more abusive and obvious lately and people are noticing. The USA Patriot act is a similar liability for US service providers. The author even doubts Android.

  Techrights covered US government abuse of trade policy for Microsoft’s benefit in leaked diplomatic cables. This should outrage other US software companies such as Red Hat, IBM and Google.

• Debian GNU/Linux Testing

  The next release of Debian GNU/Linux is shaping up beautifully. … At the rate they are going, Wheezy could be released before “8″.

• Google market cap is set to pass Microsoft’s soon.

• Hardware

  • Android drivers to be sucked back into Linux kernel.

    Greg Kroah-Hartman himself will include the Android drivers into his development branch for the upcoming Linux kernel 3.3, making it boot on Android devices without being patched.

• Anti-Trust

  • Microsoft monopoly in retreat everywhere:
    

    Walmart Sells Linux Online

    This marks the return of desktop gnu/linux to Walmart. Microsoft had bullied every piece of the supply chain back in 2006 to remove this competition and pulled similar tricks against netbooks everywhere. Back in April, GNU/Linux came back to Walmart as a tablet in April. Other stores, like Best Buy, are trying to sell $1,000 Windows laptops as if it were 1995 again.

  • Amazon messes with Android

    Just days ago we reported and confirmed that Amazon’s Kindle Fire prevented owners from visiting the Android Market in the Silk browser. The 7-inch tablet reportedly contains a hidden utility app called “MarketIntentProxy.apk” which can detect when the end-user is hunting for an app, and will force a re-direct to the Amazon Appstore installed on the device — literally hijacking the browser. Now days later, Kindle Fire customers are reporting that they suddenly have access to the Android Market via the Silk browser.

    No matter how good software is, the owners have unjust power over you if you are not using free software. When you do have software freedom, you need to be careful to use a good, community curated distribution. Companies with ties to big publishers will sell you out.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • People in Glasshouses (With Windows) Shouldn’t Throw Stones

    Microsoft’s call for “droidrage” stories on Android comes across not just as a rather feeble attempt to divert people’s attention from Windows Phone’s abysmal showing in the smartphone market, but also as deeply hypocritical: if there is any platform that deserves a “rage” tag, it’s Windows, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars of harm it has inflicted on its users

    Most people love their Android phones and tablets, so Microsoft will have to write the rage stories themselves.

• Censorship

  • Microsoft’s shameful, continued support of SOPA

  • Harvard Researchers Explain That SOPA Supporters Are Misusing Their Research To Support SOPA

    Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content. … in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism.

  • An interesting video on how big publishers used P2P services to push their “lame” TV shows and music and then used the sharing for propaganda purposes to gain more power over internet based competition.

    Forbes dismisses the thesis by intentionally misunderstanding it. The “internet radio” story and the shutdown of competitors like mp3.com show that goal of the war against sharing has always been control of competition. Anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and Tivized hardware show that big publishers demand complete control of all computers as well as the internet. It is hard for me to imagine the Forbes author being unaware of these efforts.

• Why “Safe Harbor” Laws Are Disastrous For Free Speech

  the “safe harbor” provisions have gradually shifted the environment to suppress free speech and expression in favor of the suppressing industries: the copyright industries. … The DMCA was, and is, an abomination. So is the habit of letting corporations guard our right to free speech. It must be unconditional, and it isn’t when there is any kind of intermediary liability. … corporations would rather err on the side of caution, preferring to throw a thousand users to the wolves in error than becoming liable for one shielded in error.

• The lawmakers who brought you SOPA and other censorship bills

  anyone running against these folks would be missing out on a huge opportunity not to make the incumbent’s support of censoring the internet into a campaign issue.

  Many of the names are familiar from other legislative disasters.

• The GoDaddy boycott was effective, so people should boycott other companies too.

  GoDaddy capitulating is a huge win, because it’s the first stone to come out of the wall. Now that GoDaddy has demonstrated that they were taking too much damage to continue with their support of SOPA, it empowers people to exert similar pressure on other companies, and it demonstrates to those companies that there are enough angry people out there that you need to listen up and pay attention.

  Keep migrating your domains and avoid things from the other bullies who would waste your money ruining the internet to preserve their position in the world.

• Civil Rights

  • OWS Fights Back Against Police Surveillance by Launching “Occucopter” Citizen Drone

    police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”. This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering. Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • People say a lot of ill-informed things about Chrome, and mostly they don’t deserve a response, but …

    It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. … Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. … the whole “You’re funding a competitor!!!” angle is misguided. Google is funding a partner.

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Links 28/12/2011: Quad Core Linux Devices, Darrell Steinberg for Open Access

Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Commissioner Barnier: Enemy of European Development

Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Naming the leading culprit among European politicians that let Europe be contaminated by foreign monopolies

TECHRIGHT wrote quite a lot about Commissioner Barnier because he took a leading role in the push for unitary patent, which ushers in software patents. Currently, Barnier is the main politician threatening to indirectly bring software patents to Europe. He is an enemy of science and technology, but then again, he is neither a scientist nor a technologist. Almost no politician is really aware of those disciplines. Watch Michel Barnier saying: “A few more days needed to cross the finishing line. 22nd December: I am confident we’ll be able to sign final agreement then.”

What a clown. This is the ‘gift’ he wishes to give people for Christmas? The loss of their sovereignty? The patent lawyers love him and quote him: “#Barnier: Spain and Italy still don’t support #unitarypatent”

Utter nonsense. We wrote about this before. He says what he wants to be true, not what is true.

The president of the FFII says:

a central patent court means EU software patents. Patent judges will do the job, as they did in the UK and DE.

Later he wrote that the “Unitary Patent gives a free ride to the patent microcosm, it will die on its own once it will be tested in front of the ECJ”

“EU Patent policy is cursed. Always the same stupid mistakes,” writes the FFII and the “European Patent Court – Disaster before Christmas” is one suitable headline. The president of the FFII rants that:

When it comes to patents, the EU finds itself a way not to respect the Fundamental Rights written in the Lisbon Treaty

Here is what lawyers are saying and what ceptics are saying: “FICPI Says “Go Slowly” on Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court”

“Software patents are not even for the “one percent”; those benefiting from them are far fewer than one percent of the population.”Sooner or later we might see some US-based patent trolls coming to Europe, assuming we cannot hold back the tide of corporate power. People who help companies gain patents do not seem to care if they end up abused even by patent trolls/lawyers. As Masnick puts it: “There was a recent post on the Patent Examiner blog about yet another patent troll who’s been suing a ton of companies with a variety of patents. Among recent lawsuits there was one against General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, BMW of North America, Rolls-Royce, Hyundai, KIA and ATX Group for using GPS systems to track cars, and two more against AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, MetroPCS, T-Mobile and others over patents 7,852,995 and 7,860,225, titled “Method and apparatus for selectively providing messages in telecommunications systems.”

At stake when it comes to the unitary patents are not just software patents but also patent trolls. There is absolutely no reason for European citizens to support this thing, unless they are patent lawyers or CEOs at one of the multinationals. Software patents are not even for the “one percent”; those benefiting from them are far fewer than one percent of the population. █

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Unitary Patent is Not a Done Deal

Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Response to erroneous claims that the back door to software patents has been successfully set up

ATTEMPTS were made to pass the unitary patents before Christmas. Did that succeed? Well, let us see what people are saying.

A critic calls it an undone “done deal” because:

Unitary patent: an undone “done deal”

On December 1st 2011, the Committee on Legal affairs of the European Parliament has published a press release welcoming with pride that negotiations about the unitary patent have succeeded in reaching a « final agreement » between the Council of the European Union and rapporteurs of the European Parliament. However, issues already raised by April, including questions on the legality of the adopted solution1, are not solved yet. Concerns about powers left to the European Patent Office, which is well-known for its attempts to legalise software patents2, have neither been addressed.

April wrote a press release on the subject (English version). To quote:

Members of the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) of the European Parliament have given a rubber stamp1 on an agreement, negotiated behind close doors2 with the Council, about the introduction of a unitary patent and a unified patent jurisdiction. Unfortunately, today’s vote has failed to address major legal issues surrounding this project, which are likely to make the regulation voided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Moreover, the architecture of the unitary patent as voted today betrays the withdrawal from European Union (EU) legislators in deciding about EU policy on innovation for the profit of the European Patent Office, a self-governed non-EU agency, which is notably known to favour software patents against the letter and the spirit of European Patent Law.

This is thus far failing to materialise and JURI vote is all they have. There is silly talk about “green light”, but do not be confused by it. To quote:

The EU came a step closer to getting a single patent system on Tuesday, when a deal struck by European Parliament representatives and the Polish Presidency of the Council was backed by the Legal Affairs Committee. The new EU patent would be substantially cheaper and thus more competitive than current ones. Parliament succeeded in adapting the proposed regime to small firms’ needs.

As the FFII’s president noted at the time, “JURI or EP can give as many green lights as they want, their legal construction is unstable…”

Gérald Sédrati-Dinet says: “gonna love this council doc on compatibility of #upc with opinion 1/09″

Well, the results of the JURI vote on the unitary patent can be seen here and reactions are telling:

I got a depression after reading the results of the JURI vote on unitary patent

“If Unipat was getting as attention as ACTA, it would be dead already,” he wrote later. But this is far from a “done deal” and we shall keep an eye on it. Now more than ever we need to fight back and pressure politicians. █

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Patent Lawyers Push for Software Patents, Poorly

Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Continuation of this post, this post, and this post

Summary: A deeper look at the lobbying for software patents in Europe and more from Marty Goetz

THE unitary patent is the back door for software patents in Europe, so patent lawyers are rallying for this extra business in their blogs, using dogma and drama (“Are EU ministers driving us towards a European patent disaster?”). This one blog post says: “The AmeriKat encourages all members of our very large “interest group” (a.k.a patent litigators, attorneys, users, academics, judges, etc) to keep up the pressure on and conversations with their national governments and MEPs. Its not too late to change this for the better and to work to achieve the original aim of creating a user-friendly and efficient unitary patent system.”

How shameful. These are just a parasitical element of society. One tweeter user says that the “patent microcosm unhappy with #unitary #patent: they do not want not-patent judge to put her nose into patent law” (source: Gérald Sédrati-Dinet)

The lawyers say that the “Polish Presidency hopes to obtain agreement today on the location of the Unified Patent Court.”

” These are just a parasitical element of society.”Yes, the money-grabbing patent lawyers will cling onto anything to pass laws that harm European citizens, just so that they — the lawyers — can extract another tax from the population. Those who grow a meta-industry at the expense of producers rely on continued expansion of their taxing mechanism, which requires litigation, paperwork, and legal complications that necessitate advice. “Chairman W Pawlak (PL) said EU Council has reached an agreement on EU patent package but didn’t disclose any details,” Oh, really? That smells wrong. As put by some like Rui Seabra over at Twitter, the “panel is filled with filthy people, straight from the patent regimes. So sick…”

Here is an alternative view from a different type of lawyers, ones like Carlo Piana who recognise that software patents need to go.

The president of the FFII points out “Yet another patent lawyer spamming programmers with patent claims, talks about “certainty”, but for who?”

Patently-O keeps pushing its pro-software patents agenda as one would expect and contrariwise, in a magazine with Microsoft connections there is a more balanced coverage with counterparts doing the same. Now that we see new patents on geometry/math we must really decide on whether laws of nature should be patentable. Software patents booster Marty Goetz is back to his boosting, only to be tackled by weakness of his arguments, such as: “Goetz mentions the software industry being an industry, so is the music industry, that’s why music is patentable”

“On objective grounds of reason and also based on economic studies, software patents haven’t a place in society.”Here is another very inane statement from the mouths of proponents of software patents: “Dirk Elias from Fraunhofer told me that “MP3 patents were possible to obtain because they’re algorithms, not software, which is allowed”.”

Hilarious.

On objective grounds of reason and also based on economic studies, software patents haven’t a place in society. But can we beat the interests of greed? Can we push back against the parasitical element which made up the lobby for software patents? Can its expansion into Europe be impeded? It’s up to us because passivity will ensure the parasites get politicians’ ears and eventually get their way. At stake: the software industry. █

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