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10.05.10

Links 5/10/2010: Marvell Gives OLPC $5.6 Million

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Some Statistics about My Linux Box

    So, in conclusion I must say I am very satisfied with my migration. It was much less painful than I expected and much more rewarding, too. Of course, there’s still a lot to learn, but I’m going one step at a time.

  • Warning Themes – Interesting Concept to Make “Being Root Scary” for Newbie Linux Users
  • Linux Gazette October 2010 (#179)

    # Mailbag
    # 2-Cent Tips
    # Talkback
    # News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
    # Henry’s Techno-Musings: User Interfaces, by Henry Grebler
    # Away Mission – PayPal Innovate, by Howard Dyckoff
    # A Nightmare on Tape Drive, by Henry Grebler
    # Making Your Network Transparent, by Ben Okopnik

    [...]

  • 5 Operating Systems Making Big Waves This Week

    Fedora 14 “Laughlin” beta was released last week, introducing Red Hat’s SPICE virtual desktop infrastructure, ipmiutil — which adds features including Serial-over-LAN and identity LED management, and a preview of systemd, a replacement for SysVinit that acts as a system and session manager and that will ultimately allow faster boot times.

  • LPI and My First International Proctoring “Job”

    One of the contributions that I have lent to LPI, and of which I am very proud, is the constant drum beat about making LPI multinational. From the very beginning I remember talking about the issues in various countries around the world in terms of language, costs of certification and ease of finding and taking the tests.

    As in other interactions with LPI, I acknowledge that others also spoke and were concerned about these issues, but for me they were the heart-blood. Either LPI was going to be an international organization with an international certification, or it would be ineffective for the needs of Linux and FOSS.

    [...]

    I had been to Brazil before 2002, and even before 1999. Two years after I had met Linus Torvalds and a few months after Red Hat Software’s Alpha Linux distribution was first distributed, I was flown to Sao Paulo in 1996 to speak at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), and saw my first Beowulf high-performance computing system running Linux at that university. USP had 160 PCs hooked together to do real-time computer graphics of “Toy Story” quality. While others were using Beowulf clusters to render animation frames over time, USP was doing it in real time. USP was also using their Beowulf to shorten the time needed to analyze a mammogram for cancer from close to a day to a few minutes. And finally they were using Linux to help manage remote Windows systems. “When the windows systems do not boot we tell the user to boot Linux, then we FTP a new copy of Windows onto their system. Is this a legitimate use of Linux?” asked the school’s president. I told him that every use of Linux was a legitimate use of Linux.

  • Desktop

Free Software/Open Source

  • Subsonic – OpenSource Web Based Media Streamer for Windows, Mac and Linux

    Subsonic is a free, opensource, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Listen to your favorite music where ever you are and you can even share your songs with friends and family usnig Subsonic online media streaming service.

  • ★ Rehost And Carry On

    The community around OpenESB is actually fairly active, and they (or, as it includes ForgeRock where I now work, perhaps I should say “we”) want OpenESB to stay around. But what do you do if the project is hosted somewhere under the control of a disinterested party? There’s no huge crime or disagreement to “justify” a fork, but on the other hand any new plans really will need the source and the community presence hosted in a way that allows the interested parties can change and improve things without having to wait for weeks to get replies to requests and risk having them declined if they are deemed inconvenient.

  • An open source of inspiration

    “The creative lot at agencies have a different lifestyle and attitude. They used to come into the office at 5 pm and start their work. I could not digest that but I learned quite a bit from that experience.” That was the time IBM was looking for talent from outside the IT framework. The Big Blue was scouting for personnel from varied backdrops. “I felt like giving it a shot and I did. I got selected and was made to undergo training for three months. I distinctly remember me wanting to drop out that training. Something inside me told me that this was not my scene. A lot of jargon was thrown at me and I felt I was not able to comprehend them. The I remembered my advertising days. Advertising has a few jargons and I could master them with time. So I decided to stay back and complete the training.”

    The training did wonders to him as a professional and he realised the importance of working in an organised, process oriented environment. “The 10 years at IBM were great. It taught me everything. I found the work place challenging my abilities everyday. It is at IBM that he developed the reputation of a business leader with demonstrated ability to tackle tough business and management challenges. People around Sandeep say that he has an innate ability to inspire people, and lead through vision and logic.

    At IBM, he transformed an ailing Unix business, while aiding the development of the Linux market across Asean markets, and led significant business transformation for IBM…

  • 10 great free desktop productivity tools that aren’t OpenOffice.org

    But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts.

  • Simon Phipps unbound

    After 10 years at Sun, half of them as the company’s chief voice on open source, he was one of the first out the door when Oracle’s tentacles closed in. This has liberated him to say what he feels, rather than just what he is allowed to say. It has given him the fire of a good Baptist preacher.

  • Contributing to an open source project

    You don’t have to be a software developer to contribute to an open source project – there are all sorts of ways you can get involved, whether you are experienced or a newcomer, technically minded or otherwise inclined.

  • October Project of the Month: jEdit

    When it comes to open source text editors, it’s hard to find a programmer who hasn’t heard of jEdit. Under development for more than 10 years, it’s a perennial favorite of developers, writers, bloggers, and casual users alike. As Project Leader Björn “Vampire” Kautler succinctly puts it, “It is simply is the best text editor out there, that can be easily customized and extended to eternity and is cross-platform. It supports syntax highlighting of over 200 languages.”

  • Events

    • #possesa – day 2 – patching, translating, concentration

      So what did we do? I kicked off the day with explaining the galaxy that is Open Source and Free Software. the multitude of projects, the different governance models, how to find out about maturity and sustainability. I showed gource in action -. I love the visualization of open source projects over time that it generates.

      We then went to our first round of checkount – build – modify – commit using git, which was fun and rewarding. People could actually learn how stuff works with immediate results.

    • Web Browsers

      • Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples

        Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples
        Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.

      • Internet Explorer Falls Below 50% Global Market Share. Chrome on the rise

        In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. While in North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

  • SaaS

    • ABC “Unofficially” Partners with Twitter-Alternative StatusNet

      ABC News Radio and StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, have “unofficially” partnered to unveil a newswire for the radio service.

      While the partnership may not be “official”, it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.

      According to Dan Patterson, the digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, the partnership is not yet official because the two companies haven’t done the “lawyerly dance”, among other things. In his explanation of why ABC chose to work with StatusNet, Patterson writes a mini-treatise for an open, distributed Internet.

  • Oracle/OOo/Java

    • Oracle ready to go solo with OpenOffice
    • The future of OpenOffice.org
    • Your Office is Saved — OpenOffice.org Forked!
    • OpenOffice is dead, long live LibreOffice

      So excuse the headline on this blog, but OpenOffice is not dead per se. It will continue to live out its existence breathing in the air on planet Oracle. The suite itself is mature, stable and works cross-platform, so there should be no major reason to worry about its future growth and well-being.

    • The OpenOffice fork is officially here

      It’s not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn’t going to be having anything to do with it.

      When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu.

    • Google asks court to dismiss Oracle’s Android lawsuit
    • Java: The Unipolar Moment
    • Mixed reactions from attendees about JavaOne

      JavaOne seemed to be near extinction last year, but Oracle’s acquisition of Sun revived it. We talked with some notable attendees to see how the conference went.

    • ☆ New ventures: OpenDJ, FossAlliance

      If it sounds familiar, it may be becuase it is based on the OpenDS project Sun used to work on. My old colleague Ludovic Poitou has joined ForgeRock to look after it for us, and I am keen to see a co-developer community grow around it in addition to the substantial deployer community that is now free to migrate from OpenDS to OpenDJ. There’s plenty more about it in the press release and FAQ.

    • ZFS gains data encryption

      Seven years after developers started working on ZFS, crypto functions have been added to the file system. The functions will probably be part of the forthcoming Solaris Express 2010. While no implementation details are available so far, a blog post talks about “support for encrypted ZFS datasets,” which points towards an encryption of the entire file system. The ZFS crypto project’s web site lists targets such as a per-dataset policy for enabling algorithms and key lengths as well as an encrypted swap area.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The black perl -Sabayon 5.4 is released! Screenshot Tour

      As can be seen in today’s announcement, today is my first day as full-time Executive Director at the Software Freedom Conservancy. For four years, I have worked part-time on nights, weekends, and lunch times to keep Conservancy running and to implement and administer the services that Conservancy provides to its member projects. It’s actual quite a relief to now have full-time attention available to carry out this important work.

    • GNU Telephony Statement on new Internet Surveillance Laws

      Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.

      Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Author Don Tapscott on the growing influence of public participation

      Watching television at his Boston home in January this year, Patrick Meier, a director of the crowdsourcing internet platform Ushahidi saw early reports that a devastating earthquake had caused massive damage to Haiti. Within 40 minutes, he was working with a colleague to set up a dedicated Haiti-focused website, and in less than an hour the site was gathering intelligence from people on the ground.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Despite Rumors, MIT OpenCourseWare Insists “No Paywall”

        With both private and public schools facing budget issues in tough economic times, it’s no surprise perhaps to hear a university employee say that the school is re-evaluating distance learning opportunities. But when an MIT employee made a statement to that effect at the OECD’s Institutional Management in Higher Education earlier last month, some media outlets erroneously reported it as an indication that MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was considering implementing a paywall.

  • Programming

    • JQuery set to tackle mobile Web development

      Countless developers use jQuery software tools today to provide advanced Web sites and to ease the difficulties of spanning multiple browsers.

      Starting in about two weeks, though, they will start being able to extend their reach to the fast-growing world of the mobile Web as well. That’s when Mozilla plans to release the alpha version of jQuery Mobile, jQuery founder John Resig told attendees of the Future of Web Apps conference here Tuesday.

Leftovers

  • JPEGs with Alpha Channels?!?

    I wanted a reasonably sized photographic image with a 24-bit alpha channel. So I used a JPEG for what JPEGs are good for and a PNG for what PNGs are good for…

    I combined them using an HTML5 canvas element and then inserted into the DOM. The results look the same as using a normal 24-bit PNG but are one-half to one-sixth the size. In one case we got a 573KB 24-bit PNG down to a 49KB JPEG with a 4KB PNG alpha-mask!

  • The real cost of free

    Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (including me) “charge hefty fees to speak at events”.

    Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called “Free” (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall’s view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don’t practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.

    It’s unfortunate that Lindvall didn’t bother to check her facts. I haven’t been represented by the agency she referenced for several years, and in any event, no one has ever paid me $25,000 to appear at any event. Indeed, the vast majority of lectures I give are free (see here for the past six months’ talks and their associated fees – out of approximately 95 talks I’ve given in the past six months, only 11 were paid, and the highest paid of those was £300). Furthermore, I don’t use an agency for the majority of my bookings (mostly I book myself – I’ve only had one agency booking in the past two years). I’m not sure who the unfortunate conference organiser Lindvall spoke to was – Lindvall has not identified her source – but I’m astonished that this person managed to dig up the old agency, since it’s not in the first 400 Google results for “Cory Doctorow”.

  • 911: Can you hear me now?
  • Cell Phone Service Coming to NYC Subway Stations by End of 2011

    Looks like NYC subway stations are getting cell phone service earlier than expected: Six stations—Along 14th St., and at 23rd St. and 8th Ave.—should be wired by the end of 2011. It will be both convenient and annoying.

  • Google Apps Now In A New York State Of Mind

    Google sees the adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges as vital to the growth of the productivity suite; an outlook that Microsoft also seems to emulate as well. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps and other productivity suites, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, New York is the fifth U.S. state to adopt “Google Apps,” joining Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, and Maryland.

  • Science

    • Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF

      The 2010 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine goes to British researcher Robert Edwards for pioneering in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a process that has led to roughly 4 million births since it was first successfully done in 1978.

    • Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

      A pair of new studies — one in the United States, another in Germany — reports strong evidence that diabetes rates climb with increasing air pollution in the form of of tiny airborne particles.

      “Although previous studies had hinted at this possibility, the data were mostly from small studies or from animals exposed to high levels of particulate matter,” notes Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who did not take part in either study. He says the new data provide important and more rigorous evidence that real-world pollution may be tampering with blood sugar control in a large and growing number of people.

    • Breaking the noise barrier: Enter the phonon computer

      In 2001, Pat Gelsinger, then the chief technology officer of Intel, made a striking prediction about the future of microchips. If current design trends continue, he said, microchips will be running at 30 gigahertz by the end of the decade. However, he added, at this speed they will be generating more heat per cubic centimetre than a nuclear reactor.

      Sure enough, by 2003, Intel and other chip-makers had found that their plans for faster processors were running into trouble. For a chip to speed up, its transistors need to be shrunk, but smaller transistors must consume less power or they overheat. With chip-makers unable to keep to the reduced heat budget, the race for faster chips hit a wall (see diagram).

    • Meet RatCar, a Japanese Robot Car Controlled By a Rat’s Brain

      Robots are a major part of the cultural fabric of Japan; they’re performing weddings, buying groceries and keeping people company. A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo is taking this robotic cultural immersion a step further — they’re making animal-robot hybrids. Sort of.

      RatCar is a brain-machine interface that uses a rat’s brain signals to control a motorized robot. The rat hangs in the air, and the robot does what the rat’s limbs would do. It’s far from the only brain-robot locomotion contraption, but it’s arguably one of the strangest.

    • Nobel Honors Work on Ultra-Thin Carbon Film

      Two Russian-born scientists working in Britain won the prize for investigating the strange properties of graphene, a form of carbon one atom thick.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Hull man guilty of snooping on hundreds of medical records

      A Hull man has been given a suspended sentence for looking at hundreds of women’s medical records.

      Dale Trever, 22, was working for Hull Primary Care Trust as a “care data quality facilitator” when he accessed medical records of 413 female patients. The court was told he accessed records 597 times.

      He started his snooping when a female work colleague turned him down for a date, the East Riding Mail reports.

    • France arrests nine in anti-terror raids

      A French official told AFP that police had seized weapons “including a Kalashnikov (rifle) and a pump-action shotgun, as well as ammunition” in Tuesday’s raids.

    • Even Mahatma Gandhi was against ID cards

      About a century ago, Gandhiji started the world famous ‘Satyagraha’ in order to oppose the identification scheme of the government in South Africa. Hundred years later, India is repeating a similar programme under the pretext of unique ID numbers

      As the old saying goes, ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’. It seems that both the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and ultimately the Indian government have overlooked history and even the Mahatma’s views while going ahead with the ambitious and expensive unique identification number (UIDN) programme.

    • The perils of ‘Aadhaar’

      An elaborate charade has begun with the rolling out of the first Aadhaar unique identity (UID) numbers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi in a tribal district of Maharashtra. The 12-digit number for each citizen is supposed to achieve pilferage-free delivery of services to the underprivileged.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Cuccinelli attempts to criminalize all of climate science — with Post Normal logic & fervor

      The Tea-Party crowd, the hardcore anti-science extremists, can’t stomach the scientific reality that mutiple independent studies back Mann’s core finding Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause. And so Cuccinelli goes after Mann and the University of Virginia once again. His new case is infinitely weaker but his fervor has reached OCD levels.

    • [stop climate change]

      It’s called the “10/10/10 Global Work Party.” The goal of the day is to send a message to our political leaders: If we can get to work, you can get to work too — on the legislation and the treaties that will protect this planet for our children and grandchildren.

    • One in five plant species face extinction

      One in five of the world’s plant species – the basis of all life on earth – are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study published today.

      At first glance, the 20% figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.

    • Oil: Can Ecuador see past the black stuff?

      One of the most extraordinary people I have met in 10 days of travelling around Peru and Ecuador has been Alberto Acosta. He’s head of Ecuador’s leading research group now, but until 2007 was the second most powerful man in the country after the president, Rafael Correa. He was not only charged with masterminding the new constitution but was head of the assembly, or parliament, a founder of the ruling political party and minister of energy of the country that depends on oil.

      But Acosta will go down in my memory as the world’s only serving oil minister to have ever proposed leaving some of a country’s black stuff in the ground. That’s like Dracula renouncing blood, or a sports minister saying it’s better to play hide and seek than football. It just does not happen.

    • Greenpeace banned from intercepting oil-drilling ship

      Greenpeace has been banned from intercepting a deep sea oil-drilling ship after the protest group sent “wave after wave” of swimmers into the north Atlantic to stop the vessel from reaching its drilling site.

      The US oil giant Chevron was granted a wide-ranging interdict, or injunction, by judges in Edinburgh today, ordering Greenpeace to stop any further direct action preventing the Stena Carron from reaching its destination or impeding its “lawful business”.

    • Modern-day slavery: horrific conditions on board ships catching fish for Europe

      When environmental campaigners began tracking a hi-tech South Korean trawler off the coast of West Africa, they were looking for proof of illegal fishing of dwindling African stocks. What they uncovered was an altogether different kind of travesty: human degradation so extreme it echoed the slavery they thought had been abolished more than a century ago.

      “It was horrendous,” said Duncan Copeland, a senior campaigner at the Environmental Justice Foundation, who boarded the South Korean-flagged trawler at the end of 2008 with naval forces from Sierra Leone.

    • Prop 23 battle heats up in California as Schwarzenegger comes out fighting

      California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has come out fighting for his green legacy, going on the attack against the oil companies and rightwing groups bankrolling a campaign to suspend AB32, a landmark environmental law.

  • Finance

    • Fear and Favor

      I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

      Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

      And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

    • How Fake Money Saved Brazil

      This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked.

      Twenty years ago, Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, if eggs cost $1 one day, they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost $1,000.

    • Do You Understand Taxation?

      California, if you didn’t know, has one of the highest tax rates in the nation. On top of federal rates that can reach 39% of each additional dollar, California takes up to 11% of each additional dollar. This means that top earners pay half of their marginal income (the part above a certain amount) in income taxes. At 50% of each additional dollar going to taxes, it is no wonder that people devote such tremendous effort to tax avoidance schemes. To do anything else wouldn’t be sensible.

    • Anglo Irish bank bailout to hit €30bn

      The full cost of the 2008 banking crisis in Ireland will be laid bare tomorrow when the republic’s government is expected to admit that bailing out Anglo Irish Bank will cost at least €30bn (£25.9bn) – equivalent to a fifth of the country’s national output.

    • Foreclosure funny business

      Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.

      That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.

    • Money transfers could face anti-terrorism scrutiny

      The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • DRM and us

      Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.

    • ISPs begin fighting IP lookup requests in wake of data leak

      UK Internet providers have now banded together to challenge anti-P2P law firms who try to turn thousands of IP addresses into customer names—and a London court will hear their objections to the entire process.

      The ISPs were burned last month when a massive e-mail leak from the top anti-P2P firm in the UK, ACS Law, exposed their own spreadsheets of customer names matched to the pornographic films they allegedly downloaded. The revelation of this embarrassing (and unproven) behavior was compounded by the fact that several of the ISPs were taking no security precautions, instead e-mailing their Excel spreadsheets unencrypted and without passwords.

    • BSkyB to challenge requests for customer information from ACS:Law

      BSkyB, one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors’ firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.

    • Should ISPs cut off bot-infected users?

      Contractually, the ISP would be reasonably justified in cutting off a user from the internet, as bot infection would be contrary to the terms of the ISP’s acceptable-use policy.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • BT seeks moratorium on internet piracy cases

      BT is seeking a moratorium on legal applications to obtain details of its customers who are alleged to have illegally shared files online.

      The firm outlined its stance following a high-profile data breach at London law firm ACS:Law last week.

      The leak saw thousands of customers’ details from various ISPs – including BT-owned PlusNet – published online.

    • ISPs set to fight future IP data disclosure in the UK

      On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO, named after the case in which it was first established). This order allows a potential claimant to ask for a third party to disclose the identity of an unidentified defendant.

    • UK ISPs Successfully Resist File-Sharing Data Handover

      In the High Court today, UK ISPs BT and Plusnet refused to hand over subscriber data to lawyers acting for independent record label, Ministry of Sound. Their objections followed the catastrophic subscriber data leak from ACS:Law two weeks ago. The hearing was adjourned until January 2011.

    • Copyrights

      • Find and Reuse Images: Painless Attribution

        Finding CC licensed images and using them properly is something many people seem to struggle with: finding them can be straight-forward, but many sites don’t provide copy and paste reuse code that complies with the license. Xpert, a project of University of Nottingham, has launched an image search tool that helps with this. Xpert Attribution tool searches Wikimedia Commons and Flickr and provides an easy way to get the image with the attribution information overlaid, or (even better, in my opinion) with RDFa suitable for embedding. I’ve combined the two below (downloading the image with attribution, and adding the structured-data enriched embed code below it).

      • IMDb Relents And Allows BitTorrent Movie The Tunnel a Listing

        The creators of the BitTorrent-only movie The Tunnel are celebrating today. After being refused an IMDb listing on several occasions, the makers wrote an open letter to the Amazon-owned company which was featured in dozens of news articles. Today, the horror movie, which was funded by people buying individual frames of the production, has been accepted into the IMDb databases.

      • Well Covered

        When we rolled out Hudson for CC code last month, I already knew that I wanted to have test coverage reporting. There’s simply no reason not to: it provides a way to understand how complete your tests are, and when combined with branch testing, gives you an easy way to figure out what tests need to be written (or where to target your test writing efforts).

      • Join the Legion of CC Superheroes!

        A legion of Creative Commons (CC) Superheroes is already at work, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing all over the planet. GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, recently released its entire malarial data set using CC tools, speeding the urgent search for new medicines to tackle the devastating disease. Online communities at Flickr, SoundCloud, and Vimeo are making creative works available for anyone in the world to use freely and legally through license adoption. Publisher Pratham Books has begun to CC license more and more of the textbooks it provides to 14 million children in India, lifting them from a future of poverty and miseducation. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Google and Wired used CC tools to keep information widely available to relief workers, journalists, and governments worldwide.

      • Minecraft’s Developer Making $350,000 Per Day

        Now Jay sends in some news that continues to build on the legend of Minecraft, pointing to a story claiming that Persson is making $350,000 per day. With alpha software, and without going after “pirates” who are supposedly destroying the industry. Yeah. Apparently, he’s selling a copy every 3 seconds. And he’s done all this with no distribution. No retail deals. Just creating a really good game, getting people interested in it, not treating them like criminals, and giving them a reason to buy.

      • US Seeks Comments on Internet Access and Copyright

        The Internet Policy Task Force of the United States Commerce Department today issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking comment from any interested stakeholders – including rights holders, internet service providers, and consumers – on the “protection of copyrighted works online and the relationship between copyright law and innovation in the internet economy.”

      • Neeru Khosla

        Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That’s why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons licenses.

      • Open Source Animated Movie Shows What Can Be Done Today

        For years, one of the points we’ve raised in answering the movie industry’s $200 million challenge to us (i.e., “how do you keep making $200 million movies?”) is that, in part, it’s asking the wrong question. No one asks “how do we keep making $10,000 computers?” Instead, they look for ways to make them cheaper (and better, at the same time). But in the world of Hollywood accounting, there’s little incentive to make cheaper movies (sometimes the incentive goes the other way). And, we keep showing how the world is reaching a place where it’s cheaper and cheaper to make good movies. We’ve pointed out nice examples of people making high quality movies for next to nothing. The idea is not that movies should be made for nothing, but that the technology is making it so that movies can be made for less. In fact, with two of the examples of cheap movie making we’ve highlighted, the makers later went on to score deals to do higher end movies for more reasonable budgets.

        [...]

        The technology keeps getting better and the cost to do such high quality work keeps decreasing. This movie did cost $550,000 to make — involving a 14-person team. But, that’s a hell of a lot less than it would have cost not so long ago for anything of this level of quality.

      • ACTA

        • US, EU settle food fight in anti-counterfeit pact

          The United States and European Union have reached a compromise over the use of prestigious geographical food names like Champagne and Parma, clearing one of the last obstacles to an international pact to battle the growing trade in counterfeit goods.

        • Lawmakers call for halt to ACTA deal

          Reports that negotiations on the controversial agreement have ended alarmed MEPs, who have called on the Commission to explain the matter as soon as possible.

        • ACTA: Sorting Through The Spin

          The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has always been the exception to the general rule for international negotiations – closed participation rather than open, secretive rather than transparent – so it should come as no surprise that the negotiations have come to an end in an unusual manner. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that there will be no further rounds of negotiation as the latest round in Japan is being described as the final round of talks. Other than that, the conclusion seems open to considerable speculation and spin.

          From the U.S. perspective, the negotiations are done and ACTA is nearly a reality. USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk has been quoted as saying that there are solutions to even the toughest issues and that nearly all parties have agreed to them. Another U.S. official admitted that there were still as many as six issues without agreement, including two on border measures and another from the Internet chapter. The EU has been even less supportive, with an official quoted as saying “we’ve come a long way but we must still close the remaining gaps without which there will be no agreement.” Moreover, several European Parliament Members are already calling for a halt to the deal. Meanwhile, Japanese officials have acknowledged that there are issues that require further discussion back home and that “in that sense we haven’t gotten agreement.”

        • EU Parliamentarians move to block anti-counterfeiting pact

          Four members of the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the international anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to be halted.

          The news comes after reports that the controversial accord had been “concluded” in Japan on Friday. The MEPs, Greek Socialist Stavros Lambrinidis, French Socialist Francoise Castex, Czech center-right Zuzana Roithova and German Socialist Alexander Alvaro, have long argued for the negotiations to be more transparent and were outraged that the U.S. prevented the E.U. from publishing the proposed agreement earlier this year.

Clip of the Day

Andy Wingo – “GNU in the Cloud”


Credit: TinyOgg

IRC Proceedings: October 5th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

Patent System Gone Crazy: Patents on Paris Hilton’s Hair, Thanks to Maximalists

Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Paris Hilton patented hair

Summary: New evidence which shows increased opposition to some software patents and bizarre turns taken by the patent system when lawyers are put in charge

THE FFII’s president shares what he labelled “EFF letter to the US Supreme Court [PDF] about software patents and binaries as prior art” (the latter is humour).

For those who missed the context of it, the EFF supports an attempt by Microsoft to simplify re-examination/invalidation of software patents. Microsoft wants this not because it’s suddenly against software patents but because just like Apple it is being hit by some of them (i4i in this case is a key driver).

“Patent Lawsuit Fight Over Who Has The Right To Sell Paris Hilton Hair Extensions” was en eye-catching headline from TechDirt, which says that even parts of people’s body (or imitations of those) can not be ‘protected’ by patent monopolies, or at least asserted as such.

So, when another firm came along, named HairTech Int’l, and started selling hair extensions to make your hair look like Paris Hilton’s, Celebrity Signatures got angry and threatened to sue. After being told that HairTech was no longer making the product, it backed off, but upon learning that the Paris Hilton extensions were back on the market, it called up the patent attorneys and filed a lawsuit.

Additional patent propaganda and revisionism are now being used to pretend that patents are a crucial part of one’s business; not surprisingly, the source of this claim is a patent licensing firm, whose argument TechDirt has just debunked:

Hank Northhaft is the CEO of a patent licensing firm. He likes to claim that he’s the CEO of a technology miniaturization firm, but the majority of the company’s actual revenue comes from patent licensing, not actual product sales. He’s got a book coming out next year that’s all about making it even easier and cheaper to get patents, which he insists will create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new jobs, and has been making the rounds writing opinion pieces for various publications pitching this plan. Unfortunately, each of his opinion pieces seems to rewrite history or misinterpret studies to make his argument. Frankly, that’s pretty sad.

The patent system is broken and evidence is abundant. █

Opera Rejects Software Patents and Vincent Van Quickenborne (Minister of Economy) Quick to Push Them Into Europe

Posted in Apple, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Europe’s leading Web browser rejects the patent trolls who sell H.264 licences and Vincent Van Quickenborne gets accused of lying “about open source and software patents”

THE Norway-based Opera is as smart as Mozilla when it comes to video/audio codecs. Opera was one of the early pushers for Ogg support in Web browsers and eventually it got its way, despite resistance from Nokia, Apple, and the likes of them. Opera and Mozilla support Ogg right now and WebM support is coming soon. “Opera still won’t support H.264 video,” says this new article and it must be due to MPEG-LA patents (H.264 is still not free for Web usage and it’s handled by an active patent troll).

Despite H.264 announcing it would go royalty free, Opera says the standard isn’t open enough for them to support it

In late August this year the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), a body which licenses pools of patents for various standards, announced that it wouldn’t charge royalty fees for Internet video that streams to end users for free.

Previously MPEG LA had said they wouldn’t charge royalties for such video until after 31 December 2015, but now it appears that this will be extended into perpetuity.

This move by the MPEG LA wasn’t welcomed by everyone however, with Mozilla speaking out against the move and questioning the relevance of the H.264 standard beyond 2014.

Mr. Quickenborne, whom we wrote about back in July, is still on the side of the likes of MPEG-LA considering the fact that he wilfully (perhaps knowingly) opens the door to software patents in Europe and, according to this new video, he also “lies about open source and software patents”. From the video’s summary:

Belgian EU Presidency lies about open source and software patents

Belgian Minister of Economy, Vincent Van Quickenborne, was interviewed about software patents in the Radio show “RTBF Matin Premiere”, lying about the current situation in Europe about software patents. In fact, the central EU patent court he is pushing has great chances to validate the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant software patents.

Can anyone provide us with a translation? █

Google Has Already Paid Microsoft for ActiveSync, So What’s the Problem?

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, Protocol at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

ActiveSync logo joke

Summary: Microsoft’s patent tolls — which almost always rely on Microsoft APIs/protocols like ActiveSync, FAT, and C#/Mono — do not make much sense in relation to the Motorola lawsuit

MICROSOFT’S lawsuit against Motorola (see our new Motorola Wiki page for background) has been discussed quite a lot in our IRC channels recently. FAT patents in the lawsuit mean that Linux too is being targeted, but everyone seems to be paying attention just to ActiveSync, which baffled us because Google appears to have resolved ‘licensing’ of ActiveSync a long time ago [1, 2]. We haven’t researched this deeply enough just yet.

Jason Perlow, an IBM person, says about Microsoft that “if you can’t compete with it, litigate it” and he has a decent article about this case:

In doing so it lost several of its traditional OEM partners, such as Hewlett-Packard, who decided it was best to build and market phones its own OS with its purchase of Palm (Which has an ActiveSync license for WebOS, so HP won’t be getting sued by Microsoft anytime soon) rather than continue on with its Windows Mobile-powered iPAQ line of PDAs and phones, most of which were outsourced to HTC.

All of this Windows Mobile decline happened years before Android became a valid player in the smartphone ecosystem.

So what were Microsoft’s options? It could compete legitimately on its own merits, and aggressively market products that people actually wanted to buy. Or it could try to throw as many legal roadblocks against its competitors as they could. It sounds like they are going to try a little bit of both.

[...]

With their previous generation of Windows Mobile phones, Microsoft clearly failed and lost sight of what products the industry demanded. Instead, Google, RIM and Apple managed to figure out what customers wanted. Notwithstanding ActiveSync licensing by any of these companies, that’s really the bottom line.

One of our readers wonders if LG, which already pays Microsoft for Android, has just dropped plans to develop an Android tablet as a result of the lawsuit from Microsoft. The Source has this new post which it titled “Microsoft’s “anti-Linux” tactic” (quoting Microsoft apologists whom we mentioned before):

What I would like to draw attention to is how silent Team Apologista gets every time Microsoft pulls out the patent card against Linux, in stark comparison to how vocal they are whenever someone suggets Microsoft might pull out a patent card against Linux.

Dare to mention one may have patent-related concerns about Mono or Moonlight, and watch Team Apologista come storming in with tired half-truths and the same old debunked defenses – but see reported news of Microsoft using patents aggressively yet again and it’s nothing but crickets chirping from Waltham’s Warriors.

I’d also like to note that despite Team Apologista’s desperate and transparent attempts to paint people as “zealots”, “freetards” and so on, that anyone even casually following Microsoft with a shred of integrity must acknowledge that Microsoft has in the past and continues to this very day to use FUD — including patent-based FUD — against Linux. I suppose Seattle Times and the article’s author, Mr. Brier Dudley, are “unreliable sources” or “zealots”? Or, perhaps – just perhaps – they are simply reporting the facts?

Even the Seattle press seems to have become rather critical of Microsoft’s adaptation and leaning towards SCO-esque tactics. That ought to say something. █

“My message to the patent world is: Either get back to the doctrines of forces of nature or face the elimination of your system.” —Hartmut Pilch, Paraflows 06

Apple Gets Its Software Patents Lesson in Texas

Posted in Apple, Courtroom, Patents at 2:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Apple in Texas

Summary: Apple gets slapped quite hard for patent violations, helping to show that it would possibly be better for Apple to just end software patents

THE following new verdict will hopefully teach Apple that software patents are against everyone’s interest (except patent lawyers and patent trolls, who always benefit from them, and unlike monopolists who benefit from them just most of the time) and that it’s time for Apple too to call for their abolishment. From A. Marsh:

i. Apple Challenges $625.5 Million Mirror Worlds Patent Verdict

Apple Inc. is challenging a jury verdict last week in which the computer maker was ordered to pay as much as $625.5 million to Mirror Worlds LLC for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed digitally.

Apple asked U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for an emergency stay of the Oct. 1 verdict, saying there are outstanding issues on two of the three patents. Apple said patent owner Mirror Worlds would also be “triple dipping” if it were able to collect $208.5 million on each of the patents.

ii. Cover Flow may cost Apple $208.5 million in damages

Apple has been ordered to pay more than $200 million to Mirror Worlds, LLC after having lost a patent infringement case brought by the company. Apple was found to be in violation of Mirror Worlds’ “document streaming” patents, which Apple allegedly used in its implementation of Cover Flow and Time Machine.

There’s also:

iii. Ouch! Apple dinged for $208.5 million in patent infringement case

iv. Why Have So Many Companies Settled Over Ridiculous Patent For ‘Online Music Distribution’?

A company going by the name Sharing Sound LLC, which of course does not appear to do anything, got hold of some exceptionally broad and absolutely ridiculous patents on “distributing musical products by a website over the internet” (6,247,130 and 6,233,682). Go ahead and read the claims on both of those, and realize they were filed in 2000, well after online sales of digital goods was available (I should know, I worked for a company focused on selling software online through nearly identical means described in the patents — in 1998).

Earlier this year, however, Sharing Sound sued a whole bunch of companies over these patents. Included was Apple, Microsoft, Napster, Rhapsody, BDE (Kazaa), Sony, Sony/Ericsson, Amazon, Netflix, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and Gamestop. Late last week, the news came out that Apple had settled and paid up. Along with that, people noted that most of the other companies had already settled.

In other news about Apple, “EU Drops Apple Antitrust Inquiry,” says IT Business Edge:

According to The Wall Street Journal, European regulators are satisfied that the changes Apple made to the developer agreement are adequate to dispel antitrust concerns.

European regulators ought to look at Apple’s abuse of its competition (including Linux) using software patents. Apple — just like Microsoft — finds comfort in software patenting because it’s a monopolist in some areas and patents are a counter-productive, protectionist measure. █

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” — Siddhārtha Gautama

Bill Gates-Funded Guardian ‘Writers’ Are Again Whitewashing Gates and Attacking Microsoft Rivals

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Finance, IBM, Marketing, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Patents at 2:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft Jack

Summary: The Microsoft/Gates-funded articles from the Guardian clearly begin to look like whitewash and The Guardian has turned into a PR front for hire if this trend is not stopped; Microsoft Jack (Schofield) from The Guardian is ridiculing ODF and those who support it

THE Guardian used to have many people’s respect before it accepted a lot of money from Bill and Melinda Gates and then started glorifying them very shamelessly. That’s the impression other people (e.g. in IRC) have been getting. We wrote about this subject in [1, 2, 3] and since it was made official it became easier to view The Guardian more like another PR front. If it sold its integrity away to Gates, the who else has it sold its integrity to? Well, The Guardian quit pretending that it reports fairly on some issues that matter a lot. Consider some of our more recent postings about Gates’ relationship with Monsanto, e.g.:

This has nothing to do with so-called ‘charity’, it is merely an investment, it’s all about business. And then comes the Gates-funded Guardian to help guard the Gates family’s image, which this family already spends billions of dollars guarding and constantly embellishing (by hiring external PR agencies).

“Gates becomes richer over the past year (including this past year), despite his widely-publicised claims that he gives away his wealth (via his tax-exempt bank account).”This brings us to the The Guardian and its Gates-funded new section. What does it do right now? Whitewashing versus critics. They write about Gates’ relationship with Monsanto and they don’t mention anything that people do not already know (it’s all over the Web); they pretend that it’s an innocent mistake from Gates.

The Guardian makes no definitive statement. In a cowardly way the headline only asks the question, “Why is the Gates foundation investing in GM giant Monsanto?”

Quick answer: profit. Gates becomes richer over the past year (including this past year), despite his widely-publicised claims that he gives away his wealth (via his tax-exempt bank account). But that’s not what the article can say. Here is what part of the Gates-funded article says (and that’s one of the most daring parts):

The fact is that Cargill is a faceless agri-giant that controls most of the world’s food commodities and Monsanto has been blundering around poor Asian countries for a decade giving itself and the US a lousy name for corporate bullying. Does Gates know it is in danger of being caught up in their reputations, or does the foundation actually share their corporate vision of farming and intend to work with them more in future?

Well, as expected, the Gates-funded Guardian and Gates-funded Monsanto get no bad reputation here. Almost nothing is said about the criminal nature of Monsanto’s operations (the authorities have had to step in) and Gates is receiving just softball criticisms. They are being too gentle on him (it’s almost like apologism) because they are funded by him to write those articles and detract from similar articles that address the same questions without being funded by Gates. That’s just PR, dressed up as “news” by The Guardian. They pretend to cover this issue fairly, which is even more dangerous because they deliberately leave out a lot of the gory details and some context. It’s like “controlled opposition”, i.e. Gates pretending to be his own critic and phrasing the argument in particular ways. For instance, they are not showing how Gates insulted GMO critics (dismissing them as “environmentalists”). At The Guardian, people who are reading about it for the first time may leave the page believing that it was all just an accident from Gates. The comments fill some gaps, but even though the comments could make up for a poorly-researched/biased article, very few people would read comments and the editors are deleting comments they do not like (deletion is indicated clearly). Here are some of the negative comments that survived censorship:

Why is anybody surprised? Bill Gates and Microsoft pretty much wrote the book on modern corporate bullying, why would he be worried about it now?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

Also:

Come on John – have the Gates $$ infected your judgement?

Or:

‘Naïve’, right. Not enough for Gates to take with one hand and give with the other. It seems taking comes so naturally to the guy that he’s going to turn out to be ambidextrous at it.’

Another one among many:

Bill Gates has been very pro-GM for years, what are you talking about!?

Yes, none of this was accidental and the foundation has been asked many times before to withdraw support of GMO/Monsanto. It just won’t listen because it has a notorious patronisation complex. The foundation already knows how it wants the world to be run and only very bad publicity that billions in PR budgets cannot challenge may ultimately alter this plan.

Over at Twitter/Identi.ca, Glyn Moody (occasional contributor to The Guardian) told me: “they certainly don’t look good on this…”

“[T]hey certainly don’t look good on this…”
      –Glyn MoodyLater on I wrote in Identi.ca that “The Guardian should be pressured to reveal just how many millions of pounds the Gates Foundation has just injected into its bank account” and “NPR should be pressured to reveal how many millions of dollars the Gates Foundation paid it. Taxpayers pay for bandwidth, Bill pays for the bias.”

There are many other examples of media outlets which Bill Gates simply ‘bought’ so that they cover issues the way which makes him happy.

“Richard Stallman does not pay NPR and The Guardian millions of dollars to glorify himself,” I wrote, “so on Gates’ budget they help vilify his types.”

The likes of Gates are even resorting to propaganda films right now, as we covered just days ago. To quote one of our regulars on a similar subject last night (titled “The anti-social billionaire’s network”):

Without actually mentioning Zuckerberg’s ethical model, Gates, the review evokes him in several ways:

— The mention of Michael Corleone. Gates updated the Mafia playbook to build tech’s most personally lucrative criminal organisation;

— The smug, Teflon court appearances. You can see Gates’ sociopathic agenda in his insolent Albuquerque mug shot: “You arrested me today, but I am going to beat your system.”

— The reference to Rovian “if you don’t like the rules, ignore them”. That’s the key to Gates’ (and Rove’s) successes: The chutzpah of hacking immunity from the rules.

— Zuckerberg’s ambition is the same as Gates’: To corrupt the open, free web and put his paywall in front of it. Gates failed to achieve this, and Zuckerberg will also eventually fail. But, as in the case of the impossible global American Empire dreamed of by Rove and his clients, it’s important to recognise the dangerous megalomania and hubris in believing it possible, let alone right.

Some hero.

One of Gates’ whitewashers, Microsoft Jack (Schofield), is still loyal to the company which had him widely recognised as “Microsoft Jack” (the name is not our invention).

“[Microsoft] Jack, if you feel like making a coherent argument yourself, rather than just name calling, I’ll link you.”
      –Rob Weir, IBMIBM’s Rob Weir was having a rough time on Monday. He ended up arguing with Microsoft Jack from The Guardian (he is hardly there anymore and sometimes he is seen in ZDNet UK) after Glyn Moody had dented Weir’s new post about ODF. Microsoft Jack decided to insult Weir’s intelligence and he then responded to me too (all I said was: “It looks like Jack Schofield (aka “Microsoft Jack”) is cursing ODF/IBM’s Weir for not being nice to OOXML”).

To quote Weir: “@jackschofield Sorry you missed the postscript with the OOXML data. ODF still smaller by 18%. Calling names is boorish and unprofessional.” Source

Weir: “@jackschofield Jack, if you feel like making a coherent argument yourself, rather than just name calling, I’ll link you. #ODF ” Source

Weir: “@jackschofield @glynmoody ODF docs were 18% smaller than the equivalent OOXML ones. I focused on the better format not the 2nd best.” Source

Microsoft Jack: “@rcweir Well, the “argument” was about the incompetence of your article, not the result. That’s why you’re so confused…” Source

Microsoft Jack: “rcweir Sorry. As I said to Glynn: not including docx in the comparison is either incompetent, stupid or biased. #ODF” Source

Microsoft Jack: “@rcweir I assume you are not a journalist. If you were, it would look to me either like an incompetent job or silly ODF-promoting bias.” Source

Microsoft Jack: “@glynmoody If the article compared docx and ODF that might be useful. As it is, the only debate is how stupid or deceptive the original is.” Source

Microsoft Jack: “@glynmoody Or confirmation of the view that ODF supporters are very partial in their choice of facts. Should you really puff this crap?” Source

Weir: “@jackschofield Nothing wrong with leaving out data that supports your argument. Leaving out data that contradicts it is something else.” Source

Weir: “@jackschofield OK. I suspected that you did not have an argument, but I did not want to presume. Thanks for the confirmation.” Source

Microsoft Jack makes The Guardian look a lot less trustworthy and about an hour ago I messages him back: “a year ago you said Windows 7 “looks like Vista. Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say.” Still true? … when you are “not supposed” to say the truth, what does that tell about your journalistic integrity?” I am still waiting for his reply. █

Windows Users Still Under Attack From Stuxnet, Halo, and Zeus

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 12:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Would you trust Microsoft Windows in nuclear programmes?

Nuclear artillery
GRABLE EVENT – Part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, was a 15-kiloton test fired from a 280-mm cannon on May 25, 1953 at the Nevada Proving Grounds. Frenchman’s Flat, Nevada – Atomic Cannon TestHistory’s first atomic artillery shell fired from the Army’s new 280-mm artillery gun. Hundreds of high ranking Armed Forces officers and members of Congress are present. The fireball ascending. (source: Wikipedia)

Summary: Stuxnet — perhaps best known for its effects on Microsoft Windows-dependent nuclear programmes — is now a Chinese concern as well; Windows users are still under heavy artillery from malware

ALL WE have been saying about Stuxnet so far can be found in the following posts (this epidemic is still out of control):

  1. Ralph Langner Says Windows Malware Possibly Designed to Derail Iran’s Nuclear Programme
  2. Windows Viruses Can be Politically Motivated Sometimes
  3. Who Needs Windows Back Doors When It’s So Insecure?
  4. Windows Insecurity Becomes a Political Issue
  5. Windows, Stuxnet, and Public Stoning
  6. Stuxnet Grows Beyond Siemens-Windows Infections
  7. Has BP Already Abandoned Windows?
  8. Reports: Apple to Charge for (Security) Updates
  9. Windows Viruses Can be Politically Motivated Sometimes
  10. New Flaw in Windows Facilitates More DDOS Attacks
  11. Siemens is Bad for Industry, Partly Due to Microsoft
  12. Microsoft Security Issues in The British Press, Vista and Vista 7 No Panacea
  13. Microsoft’s Negligence in Patching (Worst Amongst All Companies) to Blame for Stuxnet
  14. Microsoft Software: a Darwin Test for Incompetence
  15. Bad September for Microsoft Security, Symantec Buyout Rumours
  16. Microsoft Claims Credit for Failing in Security
  17. Many Windows Servers Being Abandoned; Minnesota Goes the Opposite Direction by Giving Microsoft Its Data

The risk of accidental nuclear exchanges is said to be on par with if not greater than that of a man-triggered nuclear war. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine was just seconds away from launching nuclear missiles into US targets (the report was unsealed only decades later) and just over a decade ago antiquated Russian equipment almost fired automatically at false alarms of nuclear war (it was manually prevented before an accidental nuclear war could be started). The danger of Microsoft Windows in such sensitive operations ought to become apparent. Other than man-made global warming/peak oil/famine, the greatest threat to human survival is said to be those 50,000+ nuclear warheads which are kept under control by one operating system or another.

“Iran arrests Stuxnet ‘nuclear spies’,” reports IDG.

Iran says it has detained a number of ‘nuclear spies’ in connection with the Stuxnet malware attacks on its nuclear programme computer systems last week.

Who has been arrested and on what evidence has not yet been explained, but the country’s Intelligence Minister, Heidar Moslehi, adopted a triumphant tone in reported comments made to the Iranian Mehr News agency and domestic TV sources.

The fear finally spreads to China, which is another country the West loves to fear. “Nationwide holiday ups China’s risk to Stuxnet,” says this new headline.

Computer hackers have warned that the week-long National Day holiday in China that began Friday could leave the country vulnerable to further attacks from Stuxnet, according to a report by news agency AFP.

It turns out that Stuxnet has been out there for quite some time:

Sophisticated stuxnet malware is approaching 18 months old

[...]

The report reveals that Stuxnet is a complex piece of code that generates no less than 32 payload exports and can spread in multiple environments, including in local area networks using a vulnerability in the Windows print spooler, as well as tapping Windows Server to hit smaller enterprises.

When it’s estimated that one in two Windows PCs is a zombie PC and reporters still fail to call out Windows, how will anyone ever wisen up? Even a Microsoft console game, Halo [1, 2], has become a vector for infecting Windows based on this news:

Gamers looking to get the Recon Armor in the latest iteration of the Halo franchise (Halo: Reach) should think twice about using “alternative” methods.

Microsoft is warning fans of the game to steer clear of some code generators which promise to deliver the rare armor, but instead infect their computers with malware.

The Windows-only Zeus, which we wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is targeting Linkedin users who are running Windows at the moment:

Nevertheless, if anyone is affected with the spam mail, Cisco recommends that that person should reset his passwords since the Zeus Trojan attack seizes login credentials and passwords.

Why go through all this complexity/trouble? If my parents use GNU/Linux on the desktop, everyone can too. It’s not that hard (in certain ways it’s easier) and it is a lot safer. █

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