12.14.11
Posted in Microsoft at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Precision in targeting
Summary: Out-of-control machines (or otherwise vandals) from Microsoft Corporations target a Web site critical of Microsoft
A LOT of visitors come to this site having searched for or browsed for Comes vs Microsoft material. But there are other sites that host this type of material.
Slated.org, which famously hosts all the Comes vs Microsoft stash, has been hit by what seems like zombies from Microsoft. To use its own explanation:
Now, as regular readers will already know, Slated is a site dedicated to GNU/Linux, Free Software, Free Standards, civil and human rights, business ethics, altruism and, generally, the cause of social liberalism. This upsets certain types of people and companies, no doubt including Microsoft. So it doesn’t really surprise me when they attack Slated, although I find it rather disturbing that a global corporation like Microsoft should do it so openly.
Perhaps this “hack” is nothing more than yet another compromised Windows PC inside Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, or maybe it’s something more sinister, but either way someone or something on Microsoft’s network just attacked Slated.
Good to know I have their full attention.
There were also DDOS attacks on other Microsoft-hostile sites. The botnets sometimes come from Microsoft. Claiming and also proving that there was malicious intent bringing those attacks from Microsoft is nearly impossible because of the structural nature of botnets, but it does need to be highlighted. We have already caught some pro-Microsoft trolls in blog comments who later turned out to be Microsoft employees. Novell did the same thing and so did SCO. It is not unusual. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 10:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Kaspersky is one of the latest members of the BSA to leave and IDC dares not to shower Windows with the usual paid-for compliments
LAST year we saw the BSA losing some key members after it had gotten worse than terrible. Techrights made it into some mainstream news sites for breaking this story at the time.
The BSA recently fronted and promoted SOPA, which led to yet more of an exodus. Can the BSA become defunct like other Microsoft front groups, let’s say within a decade? We shall wait and see. What we already find in the news is that FUD spreader Al Gillen and his colleagues lose blind faith in Windows as IDC expresses concerns about Vista 8. How times have changed… █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I tossed Windows into the snow bank several years ago. Elegant on the outside, but ugly on the inside. The world of Blue Screens of Death, malware and viruses were really beginning to tick me off. I sought salvation in Linux. Over time I have flirted with several species of Linux. And like many people Ubuntu has become my weapon of choice. I gave up ‘geekery’ a while ago, I just want tools that I can use. Simple tools, a glorified IBM Selectric typewriter, email, and a Web Browser, and pretty much I am a happy guy.
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GNU/Linux will arrive on retail shelves everywhere in every format. This is inevitable and we saw a few more devices available in 2011. 2012 will open the floodgates. M$ blinked by going to ARM. The world noticed and GNU/Linux will be able to rush in through the opened door. Retailers and OEMs will take the opportunity to make more money selling products running on FLOSS. The x86 OEMs are hungry and wanting to feed at the same trough the ARMed OEMs have been feeding at, both Android/Linux and GNU/Linux.
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A federal judge has dismissed all of the counts brought against Sony in a class action suit over the disabling of PlayStation 3′s “Other OS” feature last year.
The feature was primarily used to install versions of the open source Linux operating system on the console, allowing home users to tap into the PlayStation 3 for homemade applications.
In April 2010, Sony released a PS3 firmware upgrade removing the console’s Other OS functions as a response to hacker exploits enabling users to run unauthorized software and pirated games by using the feature.
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The year was 2011. The world’s economy was still in the tank, the publishing industry was in full-on meltdown mode, the tablet was finally accepted, smartphones were catching up to PCs in power, Steve Jobs passed away, the Indianapolis Colts were running down the perfectly imperfect season, and Linux had some major ups and downs.
It’s been a strange, strange year that might well go down as one of “those” years in my book of books. It seemed for every step forward there was one or two steps backwards to be taken — no matter what your focus or industry. Naturally I only want to address Linux, this being an open source blog and all.
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2011 is coming to its end. It is time to make final roundups and see what happened in our life in this year.
I have written about three greatest failures in Linux world 2011 just now.
Now let’s have a look at greatest successes in 2011 from my point of view.
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There will continue to be discussions and debates about Linux on the desktop, including popularity, vitality, usability, commercial connections and more, which is good for users and vendors. However, based on trends in cloud, mobile and consumer computing, Linux should and will move to these areas, leaving its longstanding low use on the desktop as it is.
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Whether you are a home user or a business owner, Linux is a great choice for an operating system. I entered the Linux world pretty recently, after spending a long time with various Microsoft Windows versions. Now, there’s no looking back!
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Desktop
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It’s not a zero-sum game. FLOSS doesn’t get used up somehow because it’s successful in the cloud, and mobile. FLOSS gets excited, drawing in new talent and more users sharing the joy. FLOSS is on fire and it will grow as long as there is fuel and oxygen.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Besides finishing up the Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal release this weekend, on Saturday I began running some new Intel CPU benchmarks. In building the Linux 3.1 kernel for x86_64 in a default configuration (make defconfig), I’ve now managed to trim down the compile time to less than sixty seconds on a single-socket desktop system. Similar speeds can be achieved out of multi-socket servers and other configurations, but this is the first time I’m seeing such kernel build speeds out of a single processor — the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer doesn’t come close.
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Graphics Stack
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Patches have been published for Wayland today for an idle animation interface and implementation within its demo compositor. In other words, you can now have a working screensaver in Wayland.
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While this package doesn’t mark the release of any new software, Intel defines the 2011Q4 graphics package as being the Linux 3.1 kernel, Mesa 7.112, xf86-video-intel 2.17.0, libdrm 2.4.27, libva 1.0.15, and vaapi-driver-intel 1.0.15. This is the configuration they recommend for Linux end-users and distributors. They tested these components against X.Org Server 1.11.1.
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While AMD still hasn’t published Radeon HDMI audio patches for their open-source Linux driver to enable the audio support on their Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, the reverse-engineered community patches have quickly evolved.
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Applications
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Tonight something incredible happened: I asked Emacs to solve my physics homework and it couldn’t. If you think Emacs can do everything, think again: there is no (require ‘physics). Go solve assignments yourself.
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In this article I’ll do a roundup over a collection of software that can be very useful for all people who have the hobby of photography.
They can be really useful if you have a collection of photo and you want to organize them in albums, by date or tags.
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Totem’s new Vegas browser plugin provides you with a way to watch Flash based videos, without using Flash, using libquvi’s growing collection of supported sites.
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Boot one of over a hundred Linux distros from a USB disk. With Live USB, software you can run on both Windows and Linux computers, it only takes a couple of clicks to make your USB disk a bootable Linux disk. The live CD just might be the most useful tool in any geek’s arsenal – we’ve pointed out 50 uses for live CDs in the past and plan on showing you many more. As time goes on, however, CD drives become less common. That’s why booting from a USB drive is useful: it works on notebooks and other devices without optical drives.
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CAD or Computer Aided Drawing is now a predominant force in any form of industry that involves extensive use of design modelling or prototyping of graphical architectural depictions. Here is a list of some of the most popular CAD apps available for Ubuntu.Linux.
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Bisigi Project has released 15 well designed and beautiful GTK2 themes. However, the project was concluded recently after the team announced that there will be no support for GTK3.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.34 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Bytecode support in JavaScript.
* Support for gradients in the DIB engine.
* A number of Uniscribe improvements.
* Fixes for DirectDraw mode switching.
* A few more MSVC runtime functions.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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I don’t know anything about video game development, so I am hoping that this project succeeds so that he releases the full game source code. I don’t want to give all of the details here, so I encourage to watch his video explanation. If you like his proposal, offer him a donation.
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In a recent post, Gaslamp games revealed new screens and trailer of ‘Realm of the Diggle Gods’, a new expansion pack for Dungeons of Dredmor.
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For anyone wondering whether the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers will work with the Humble Introversion Bundle titles (or are thinking about buying the collection at the last minute), here are the results from some quick tests using different hardware and drivers.
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One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from people about Linux is its lack of support for any decent games. I’d like to illustrate today how woefully wrong this myth is. I’ve been using Linux on my personal system for over four years now, and have picked out a number of fantastic games that have full Linux support, done by big name studios.
I’ll start out with three big FOSS games, because I’m all about the free.
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Desktop Environments
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e17 Impressions
* Appears to take very few resources, which appeals to my GUI minimalist mind.
* Seems a bit rough around the edges in a few places.
o Auto-hide of the shelves stops working sometimes. Have to open the settings dialog for a shelf and save it again to “fix” this.
o At times the Taskbar gadget running in a shelf mishandles / overlaps / truncates the items that it shows running on a desktop. Opening the shelf settings dialog and saving again “fixes” this.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Yes, KMail is maintained, It even has a new maintainer since a few months. Laurent Montel now takes care of KMail2 and already made an awesome work.
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The digiKam development team has released version 2.4.0 of its open source digital photo management application for KDE. According to the developers, the maintenance update introduces improvements to the histogram view in the right sidebar aimed at making it easier for users to analyse their images.
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We’ve already touched upon some of the best plasma widgets that are out there for KDE. While those may be enough to make your GNOME-loving friends jealous, it sounds much more fun when you get to brag about them on social media and IM. And, even though there are many apps that let you do that, nothing beats updating your social networks right from your main desktop. So, if you’re looking to add a social twist to KDE, read on as we list some social plasma widgets ( or plasmoids ) you can fill your desktop with.
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So what is KIO? It is a technology that makes arbitrary resources available in form of files (if it makes sense to be files) which any KDE application can seamlessly access and use. Let’s have FTP server as an example. It’s a remote server somewhere on the other side of the country. How would you normally access it? Install some FTP client, create new connection, enter your credentials, connect, browse the server in the client, do some work. With KDE KIO all this is not needed.
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GNOME Desktop
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So to no one’s surprise, I made the switch to OpenSUSE 12.1 on my main laptop, a Lenovo T420i.
The main reason? I fell in love with GNOME shell. Sabayon LXDE was nice, but tiny things kept creeping up, like clamz not working to unpack Amazon music. It was nothing that impacted the usability of the machine, but it was just enough to make me open to switching distros.
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Among the users of desktop environments, I’m probably not a typical user. In 2009 my setup drifted from a more or less standard GNOME 2.3 to a combination of GNOME and a tiling window manager, which I called Gnomad, as a logical continuation of something I’ve done for a long time since using computers: Simplifying tasks, which are not my main business.
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Gnome 3 extensions have breathed a new life in those disgruntled Ubuntu users who were looking elsewhere due to the lack of customisation of Unity.
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Good day, people who visit my site! It is with great pleasure that I invite you to yet another pleasant reading break. The theme? As always, my latest visit into the open source awesomeness that is GNU/Linux. I discovered Semplice while reading Distrowatch’s Weekly and I was drawn by its purple background. Yep, I am not ashamed to admit it! Staaaaart wearing purple, wearing purpleee. And it’s not even Ubuntu’s kind of purple, it’s the cool purple, lilla, mauve even. Yes, I like mauve. Let’s call it mauve. Mauve Linux. Mauve OS. Score!
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If you have been wanting to dabble with Arch Linux but don’t want to jump directly into this leading rolling-release Linux distribution, you may want to give KahelOS a shot.
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Puppy Linux Puppy Linux is a fascinating little distribution which regularly thinks outside the box. The little Linux distro, which typically finds a home on low-end hardware, tries to strike a balance between being small and being complete, being efficient and being user-friendly. There are many different flavours of Puppy Linux and it’s a flexible distribution, able to take on many roles, which has endeared it to a large community. This week I decided to take the latest version, Puppy Linux 5.3 “Slacko”, for a test run.
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gOS was a green-coloured Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that made a splash during early 2008 when it became the default OS on a line of PCs, laptops and netbooks from computer manufacturer Everex. Much of the lesser-known gOS hardware was exclusive to the American Walmart chain – such as its ‘mac mini’ style gPC.
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Before we get ahead of ourselves — and I get flamed for spreading FUD — let’s state the obvious: Linux still can be plenty friendly to old or otherwise “slow” computers. The Damn Small Linux distribution, for example, can be installed in full on as little as 50MB of disk space, and run perfectly well on a 486 processor — with a graphical user interface. It’s not the Linux kernel that’s become resource-hungry, but the distributions that are built on top of it.
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The Internet is a great place to scratch the itch of curiosity. I’d heard some interesting things about Arch Linux so I Googled it. I wanted to know what the Distro was all about and a bit of it’s history.
I accidentally discovered The GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline which informed me where Arch Linux was derived from (Crux) and what had branched off from it (7 current branches)
It charted the Galaxy of GNU/Linux Distributions. Organized the mess that Linux Distros have become into an understandable chart. A huge svg graphic measuring 2,120 x 8,330 pixels
A chart that is very detailed. Remember that Distro of Linux meant to be a replacement for Windows, “Lindows”, that first appeared in 2001? It had it’s security dumbed down to about the Windows 95 level.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva 2011 is a very decent and innovating Linux distribution but is sadly let down by a few fixable quirks. The biggest show stopper occurs when trying to update Mandriva 2011 for the first time. Unfortunately many newbies are struggling with this pain in the backside so let me tell you what to do in easy to follow steps.
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Red Hat Family
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Don’t think of Red Hat (RHT) as a Linux company, an open source company or an operating system vendor. Think of it as a cloud software leader.
If you want to build a reliable cloud, one that can hold your enterprise applications, you are probably doing business with Red Hat, and will only do more in the future.
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Fedora
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HP is hoping to model the WebOS open source government model after Red Hat’s Fedora project. Apache, CDDL and MPL are license possibilities.
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As you may have seen if you are on the fedora announce list, we had an outage the other day of our main build system NFS storage. This meant that no builds could be made and also data could not be downloaded from koji (rpms, build info, etc). I thought I would share here what happened so we can learn from and try and prevent or mitigate this happening again.
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There was a FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) meeting held today where several new features were approved for the Fedora 17 feature list.
The features that were approved today for Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, include:
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Debian Family
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This time we bring you an interview with Michael Hanke and Yaroslav O. Halchenko, leaders of the NeuroDebian project. NeuroDebian is a turnkey platform (using Debian as its foundation) that offers a huge bundle of FLOSS software for neuroscientists. Enjoy the interview!
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Ben Hutchings is a rather unassuming guy… but hiding behind his hat, there’s a real kernel hacker who backports new drivers for the kernel in Debian stable so that our flagship release supports very recent hardware.
Read on to learn more about Ben and the kernel team’s projects for Debian Wheezy!
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The Debian security team, through Moritz Muehlenhoff, announced on December 6th that the Debian 5.0 (Lenny) operating system will no longer be supported started with February 6th, 2012.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu being an Open Source OS is a perfect place for developers worldwide to showcase their skills. Deriving contributions from millions of programmers worldwide, Ubuntu is rich in features and is loaded with apps that will perform any task. In fact you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues as those existing in premium operating systems. So let us take a close peek into the world of Ubuntu and list down some of the hottest apps that you must have on your Ubuntu PC.
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In the following months we are going to invite inspiring artists to talk about their amazing work and the role that Ubuntu and free software cover, or could cover, in their creative lives.
Today I invited a special Ubuntu friend to talk about his journey in creative coding.
He is well known in the web community and he is recently blowing it away with cutting edge online real-time music videos using open web technologies.
The Canonical Design blog is happy to welcome Ricardo Cabello, aka Mr.doob.
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With Mac OS X Lion on the prowl and Windows 8 just around the corner, now more than ever is the time for Linux to show it can keep up with the times.
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In March I got tired of KDE4 and switched to XFCE which served me quite well during Ubuntu 11.04 ‘natty’ cycle. But then I had a feeling that it becomes more and more second citizen in Ubuntu world. All those transitions from GTK+2 to GTK+3 which made some applications look ugly etc.
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We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Canonical may have all but given up the fight to ship Ubuntu on consumer PCs in the United States, at least for now, but it remains staunchly committed to forging strong relationships with hardware manufacturers. The company’s latest effort in this vein is a new Web portal catered to that group — which is also a significant example of how Canonical is reconfiguring the way people find information about Ubuntu. Read on for details.
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The Ubuntu Technical Board met yesterday and they decided on the future of non-PAE Linux kernels within Ubuntu, a decision that affects 32-bit users on older hardware.
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A couple of months ago, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s benevolent dictator, announced on his blog that by 14.04 (April 2014), he plans to bring Ubuntu to tablets, mobiles, and TVs. The announcement was met with surprise, shock, and some criticism.
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Sonia Ouarti from Canonical announced a couple of days ago, December 2nd, that the Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and devops expert Clint Byrum will hold a webinar about Juju, this Thursday, December 8th at 3pm GMT.
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Flavours and Variants
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Also sprach Dedoimedo: Linux Mint Lisa is the best Gnome 3 incarnation now, but that’s not something to be proud of. While the Mint developers are trying their best to deliver a consistent and friendly experience for years and pretty much succeeding, the last release is a setback. You’ve seen all this and more in my namesake review, just a few days back. This was done on an ancient T60p laptop.
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Out of the box, Linux Mint 12, the latest edition of Linux Mint, a desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, comes with a choice of two desktop environments – GNOME 3 with Mint GNOME Shell Extension (MGSE), and MATE, a fork of GNOME 2.
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Well, it’s not exactly brand new, but I am taking my first real look at Ubuntu Studio 11.04 (based on Ubuntu “Natty Narwhal”). This is what we decided to put on our “guest” computer when Debian “Wheezy” proved not to be so easy, and it gives us an opportunity to step out of our rut and look at a new GNU/Linux distribution.
If you read my column a lot, you probably know I’m a long-term Debian loyalist. Or maybe I should say “lazy-ist”, because my loyalty to Debian is not so much a matter of ideology as a simple case of me not wanting to have to learn a new system. I like computer technology, but mostly because of what I can do with it, not for its own sake. So I tend to find one system I’m comfortable with, and stick with it — especially when it comes to the computer I use every day.
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Is it melodramatic to say that Linux Mint 12 has been the most anticipated distribution of the year? Maybe, maybe not. Probably. But I was certainly looking forward to it: even more so when I learned about Mint’s proposed reworking of the GNOME Shell. So I installed the release candidate on three computers, and I have the final on two of them.
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Finally! Ultimate Edition 3.0 is here, officially released today, December 6th, and based on the Linux Mint 11 (Katya) and Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating systems.
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Linux Mint 12 is the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution. Not to be confused with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), the version of Linux Mint that is based on Debian, Linux Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu Desktop.
This release, code-named Lisa, comes with more desktop options than you would normally find on a Ubuntu-based distribution. That of course has much to do with the distribution’s developers attempt to find a compromise desktop for the mess that has become the GNOME line of desktop environments.
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Two Player Home Arcade Game Controller
Does the thought of building your own retro arcade game seem a bit daunting?
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Phones
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Android
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Fujitsu-Toshiba announced an Android 2.3 smartphone for Japan’s KDDI network that features IPX5/8 waterproofing, an ultra-thin 6.7mm (0.26 inch) profile, and a low, 3.7-ounce weight. Built around on a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the Fujitsu Arrows-ES IS12F offers a five-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, infrared, NFC, and even a TV tuner.
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Ever want to know exactly why it takes so long to push the latest Android operating system release to your phone? Motorola and Sony Ericsson attempted to explain it on Wednesday.
On Nov. 14, Google released the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” code base to the general public, including manufacturers, which immediately began implementing it into their phones.
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The matter has been a unhealed wound for more than six months, but this week the problem that C|Net’s Download.Com website has been perpetrating leapt into high profile with a complaint from the developers of NMap and others. The download.com site is one of the oldest software download sites, running since the nineties to offer downloads of free-of-charge software of all kinds – shareware, trialware and other proprietary software with loss-leader business models as well as true open source software.
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By 2013, experts estimate that e-mail users will send 507 billion messages every day. Currently, the average person receives about 419 e-mails per day, with a little less than half of them related to work.
When you add up the time it takes to read and manage all that e-mail, plus time spent instant messaging, reading and writing blogs, and viewing and creating Web content, it’s clear that digital communication is one of the primary uses for technology.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome offers more protection against online attacks than any other mainstream browser, according to an evaluation that compares exploit mitigations, malicious link detection, and other safety features offered in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.
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Mozilla
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A couple of weeks ago, a blogger at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the demise of Mozilla and Firefox, claiming that the loss of market share and lack of availability on mobile devices — and the departure of Google sponsorship — could lead to Mozilla’s downfall.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Competitive grammar checking would be a nice improvement for LibreOffice. Supported by FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary, I have made two sentence checking patches to the English and Hungarian dictionary extensions of LibreOffice, based on the Lightproof Python UNO environment: see the related issue, the description and the standalone extensions.
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BM Lotus Symphony is a free Office Suite available on Windows, Mac and Linux. The project began in 2007 and is basically a modified version of Openoffice.org. Though active, it still uses Openoffice 3.0 as its base. The developers seem to be focusing on stability and have released 3 “fix-packs” for Symphony 3.0 last year instead of newer versions. After the Libreoffice/Openoffice split, Symphony will continue to be based on the “official” version of Openoffice maintained by Apache.
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CMS
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Big news! The world’s most visited art museum in the world is now using Drupal for its website: http://louvre.fr. Très cool!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are happy to announce the new release of GNU Fdisk.
As reported in the previous release, the software has been rewritten from scratch with a new design. With this release we include a first backend.
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The maybe last development release in the 2.7 series of GIMP has just been made available for testing purpose.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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Of late I’ve become the “build guy” in GNOME it seems. One thing I want to clear up is I do not actually care about building just because I think it’s fun or interesting in and of itself. No, the reason I care about building is because if software doesn’t build, then clearly it’s not being run. And if it’s not being run, then it’s not being tested. And if it’s not tested, then it will be crap. In other words, a competent build system is necessary for not producing crap (but not sufficient, obviously).
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.
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Open Data
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As 2011 comes to an end, there are 28 international open data platforms in the open government community. By the end of 2012, code from new “Data.gov-in-a-box” may help many more countries to stand up their own platforms. A partnership between the United States and India on open government has borne fruit: progress on making the open data platform Data.gov open source.
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Programming
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It’s obvious that the MPAA has their greasy hands all over this decision, and there is probably little doubt that any licensing agreement between LoveFilms and the content owners was contingent upon them switching over to Silverlight.
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Security
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DRM
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Chances are you’ve heard of music streaming service Spotify.
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Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Vista 8 at 2:11 am by Guest Editorial Team
A Doomed Microsoft Again Spins Legal Compliance into Something it’s Not.
A Tivoized PC will look like an ugly TV.
The Windows press is doing damage control to quell a rising realization that the Microsoft demands and will have complete practical control of the next generation of Windows devices. Microsoft cleverly divulged key details over the past months to prevent people from understanding the implications. Free software advocates immediately understood the implications of signed code and some adopted a wait and see attitude believing OEMs would not be foolish enough to make all of their hardware Windows 8 logo compliant. Microsoft’s App Store rules made the intentions clear for Windows users, so Microsoft boosters are Open Washing the program to keep users from bolting. Boosters celebrate a Microsoft limited choice of free software and Microsoft’s cynical license compliance as a “Big win for Open Source.” Microsoft’s demands should trigger anti-trust investigation. Free software developers who still concern themselves with Windows should think carefully about the implications for their code. Windows users should migrate immediately because the PC ecosystem they grew up with is long gone.
A spokesman for Microsoft lead Business Insider to believe the revocation feature may only be for “Metro”
The Windows Store will be the exclusive distribution channel for apps that use the Windows 8 “Metro” interface, which is designed for tablets and smartphones, but will also contain some traditional desktop apps. Microsoft wouldn’t confirm if the kill switch applies only to Metro-style apps or if it covers any app in the store. “It’s really the early days yet,” said a spokesperson. “The terms of use applies to apps that people are creating now. More info will be shared as we get closer to release.”
Microsoft’s claim, of course, is ridiculous hair splitting. If Microsoft succeeds in Tivoizing all x86 and ARM hardware, only Microsoft signed code will run on Windows 8. Stopping any program from running will be as easy as revoking the keys no matter how they are installed.
Extreme Tech claims compliance terms in the App Store documentation are a “big win for Open Source.” The article is titled, “Windows 8 Store will allow open source apps, unlike iOS and Mac App Stores” and says:
There may be another win for the open source movement today, as there has been some interesting legalese found in the recent publication of the Windows Store Application Developer Agreement. … The section in question states that apps released under a license from the Open Source Initiative (GPL, Apache, etc.) can be distributed in the Windows Store. Further, it says that the OSI license will trump the Microsoft Standard Application License Terms, namely the the restriction on sharing applications.
The article offers some explanations that glorify Microsoft and belittle competitors but fail to make the common sense observation that Microsoft is forced to comply with the licenses used. They sink as low as to compare Microsoft’s long running patent extortion[2] to a friendly game of chess. Here’s another article that makes some of the same silly claims.
“Choice” and “Open” code are poor substitutes for software freedom and Tivoizing hardware defeats meaningful software freedom. Microsoft will be able to comfort their users with free software like browsers, image and audio editors. They will dutifully provide users with source code if the license requires as much but it is of no real value to the user because they can never run a modified version. The user gains none of the security, privacy or control of real software freedom from a single free program on top of a malicious OS. Users of Windows 8 will never have the tools to guard themselves.
Both articles are filled with Microsoft’s language about “security” and “legal” reasons for revocation of code. This is a smoke screen. The only security signed code provides is financial security for Microsoft from a lock out of competition.
In the past, I’ve often warned free software developers that porting to Windows is a waste of time and energy better spent making gnu/linux and other really free software better. It was easy enough to point to all of the companies Microsoft ruined by technical sabotage and ask people why they would bother with such an anti-social company. People who ignored that warning should be asking themselves some serious questions about what extra efforts they will now be forced to go through. What process will Microsoft demand for approval? Will a partial distribution be worthwhile? Can they trust Microsoft to distribute code free of modification beyond selection?
Microsoft’s attempt to Tivoize the computing world is far from assured. Vista and Windows 7 were both dismal failures [2] mostly because of Microsoft’s insane anti-competitive and digital restrictions plans. Windows 8 is more of the same with even less to offer the user. Plans to lock out competition by signed code is a sign of desperation born of complete failure to compete on merit. The only real question is how many of their partners they will ruin before they fail. Apple, IBM and Google each have more to offer those partners.
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12.13.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Here’s a cool illustration from the Linux Foundation, which aims to promote the open source operating system by highlighting the number of jobs there are for Linux professionals.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Linux Mint 12 has been released and it includes an innovative new take on Gnome Shell. Also, lots of smartphones could be running a rootkit-like piece of software and we discover things, read your views and discuss whether a Computer Science degree is worth the investment.
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Kernel Space
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Optimised assembler code paths accelerate SHA1 and speed up the Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms. The next scheduled Linux kernel release avoids a cache problem found in AMD’s latest processors and includes new and extended drivers for Intel CPUs.
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Linus Torvalds is known to make a few colorful remarks from time to time. Today he’s become frustrated once again with the Linux DRM layer and has rejected a pull request for the Linux 3.2 kernel.
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If there’s one thing which must really piss off Bill Gates to no end, it must be the enduring popularity of Linux and other free software, as it undercuts his “if you want good software, you have to pay for it” attitude. As Linux has shown, it is indeed possible to produce good software and a good operating system, then give it away for nothing to anyone that wants to use it.
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Graphics Stack
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What’s the big deal? There are a couple of things really. First, GPUs tend to be really different beasts from other devices. There are huge variations from generation to generation within a single vendor, and even more when considering the disparate architectures from different vendors. They have all the complexity and more of CPUs, but with none of the convenient compatibilities. If you are programming for an x86 CPU, you target the same set of instructions regardless of the supplying vendor or underlying microarchitecture. With GPUs, it is precisely the microarchitecture that gets exposed. In addition, as part of the system software rather than application software, GPU drivers – as well as those for other devices – are expected to be “trusted”. They should follow the principle of “first, do no harm”. Graphics is possibly the subsystem in which this principle has been violated the most. With graphics, the principle is more one of “first, do not be slow”; the pixel might be “blue enough” if its value can be computed in three-quarters of the time of the correct value. The issue is where the speed-ups come from. One possibility is an algorithmic shortcut, but drivers also play fast and loose with buffer mappings, granting direct access to potentially protected device memory in order to ensure that the fastest path to pixels is taken. There is potential here for real evil, particularly if that device memory is adjacent to, say, a piece of your file system. The advent of hardware memory management units has alleviated much of this sort of concern, but it is certainly possible for a poorly written driver stack to trash a perfectly good system.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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To The Moon is the latest project from Freebird Games, an indie studio headed by Canadian designer and composer Kan “Reives” Gao. Its resemblance to SNES-era role-playing games (Final Fantasy VI, in particular) and unique plot—about a medical procedure that allows a dying man to relive his life and fulfill a single wish—have generated it a bit of buzz recently.
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It’s only been a few weeks since id Software released the Doom 3 source-code (id Tech 4 engine) and the ioDoom 3 project was established, but there’s already some interesting work going on for this newly opened GPL game engine.
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Signal Ops is an upcoming Linux game featuring innovative multi view point gameplay. The game draws inspiration from classic games such as Commandos, Syndicate, and Deus Ex.
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Linux game The Platform Shooter has been updated to version 0.2.0 alpha. The Platform Shooter is a platformer style third person shooter with built-in level editor. It features a classic platformer style single player game where you must collect power cells and make your way to exit as well as multiplayer mode where can you fight against you friends online.
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3D real time strategy game MegaGlest has been updated to new version bringing in new features, fixes and performance improvements.
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If you were hoping to play Frozenbyte’s new game, Trine 2, under Linux this year, you’re out of luck. Frozenbyte has announced that the Linux client of Trine 2 has been pushed back into 2012 while the Mac OS X and Windows versions will ship today and the console ports before year’s end.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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My main grievance against GNOME 3 and Unity is the elimination of all except a few applets. Both grudgingly allow some basic applets, such as a clock, but each lacks the ecosystem of applets that made GNOME so configurable.
You only have to look at the rich assortment of applets in KDE — which calls them widgets — to see what GNOME and Unity are missing. If anything, KDE’s widgets are even richer than GNOME 2′s applets, with dozens of small pieces of functionality that range from the serious to the trivial and the basic to the expert and obscure, including everything from hardware indicators and system configuration tools to desktop enhancements and toys and educational software.
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The Kickoff application launcher is your main source for action when using the KDE desktop environment. Kickoff is designed to give quick access to everything your system has to offer. All of your applications and important locations on your system are stored in the Kickoff menu. As of the release of version 4.7 of the Plasma desktop a breadcrumbs feature has also been added. This allows you to track your movement in the menu, and quickly move to previous menus.
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GNOME Desktop
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As you might have heard in many other places a bunch of GNOME and WebKit hackers have met in rainy Coruña for the 3rd WebKitGTK+ hackfest. Many things have been discussed, but today I’m going to give a sneak preview of the new design for Epiphany and its rebirth as the core GNOME Web application.
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GNOME 3 continues to improve. One impressive step forward is the GNOME 3 Extension site. Jack Wallen happened upon this and was quite impressed. See if you are equally impressed with what Jack saw.
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The GNOME Montréal Summit was held a month ago now, and not only was it lots of fun, but also a very productive time. Marina held a session about the outreach in GNOME, and we spent time discussing different ways to improve welcoming and attracting people in GNOME. Let me share some of the points we raised, supplemented by my own personnal opinions, that do not reflect those of my employer, when I’ll have a job.
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I’m still getting acclimated to the changes in Gnome 3. So far, some things that initially irritated me ended up being easy to get used to. Others, still bug me on a daily basis. I still want to take more time to collect my thoughts on the matter, but one thing really stood out today: Gnome System Settings has some rather drastic feature regressions compared to the system-config-* applications that Fedora used to ship.
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If you are using Gnome 3 you should find out how to get the most out of your activities menu. The activities window is where all of your applications and open windows can be found. Though totally re-designed, things are still relatively easy to figure out. After logging in you will have a pretty empty desktop with only one panel at the top of the screen. In the top left corner of the panel you will find the activities menu. The currently highlighted window will also be displayed in the top panel as well menus for that window will also be found in the top panel. Here are a few other ways of launching applications using the new Gnome shell.
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“Never buy low serial numbers.” Easy advice to give, but hard to follow. Witness the modern-day genius of pre-marketing: every time a neat new hi-tech gadget gets announced, a virtual army of unsuspecting consumers turns out to pay for the privilege of becoming beta-testers. Egging them on are “reviewers” (possibly hired shills), who write glowing reviews of the as-yet unmanufactured product in question. Occasionally, we are treated to videos of consumers camping out overnight in front of an electronics store for the privilege of being first in line to purchase a shiny new experimental gizmo that the manufacturer needs to get rid of before a greatly-improved version 2.0 is launched a few months later.
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When I test drive (or do more) with a new Linux distro, I’m usually exposed to some software that might not normally look at. And that’s what happened when I recently switched back to Xubuntu. I started using four small applications that I probably wouldn’t have normally taken a look at otherwise.
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The holiday season is here again and so are the distros.The top Linux Distro releases that you should be looking forward to this month are…
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Up on the PCLinuxOS forums, a member shared with everyone a recent Windows computer repair expereince. Dragynn (His forum name) allowed me to share his comments.
“Just had a horrible run in with windoze 7. And it was truly a moment where I realized how grateful I should be.
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The JDLL took place in Lyon, France on the 18th and 19th of November. Mageia was there.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new technologies designed to cut the cost and improve performance of enterprise storage, the company announced Tuesday.
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The enterprise distribution’s second update of its sixth edition offers numerous optimisations for virtualisation, resource management and filesystems. New and improved drivers and a major X Server update enhance the distribution’s hardware support.
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Fedora
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I’m uploading a first approach of Bitcoin software for Fedora (15) v0.5.0. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic crypto-currency cash system.
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The members of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), who decide on the technical development aspects of Fedora, have accepted a range of new features proposed by developers for version 17 of the Linux distribution. As things currently stand, the project plans to make another attempt to switch to using Btrfs as its default file system in this version, scheduled for release in May 2012. Such a move had been discussed for Fedora 16, but was later postponed because the file system didn’t meet several criteria essential to allow the switch. For example, an improved tool is needed for checking and repairing Btrfs drives; such a tool continues to be a requirement, and its unavailability may cause Fedora to further postpone the switch.
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In my last post, I talked about not being happy with the new Ubuntu. Short term, I rolled that desktop down to Mint 11. Mint is now more popular than Ubuntu, so I am not the only one unhappy with the Ubuntu design and attitude. More on that in a bit.
Mint 11 is a great version of Linux. If it were not for the fact that I want a more current version of Evolution, I would just stay there. However, upstream in Evolution there is something called Evolution-EWS, and that is a plug-in to the more upstream version of Evolution that can access MS Exchange without a DavMail proxy.
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This release cycle I am the Test Day Coordinator. That means it is my job to help you, my fellow Fedorians, to set up test days for your packages/projects. We have about two and a half months until Alpha release (1). The sooner I receive test day proposals, the easier my life will be, and we all know that making my life easier is a Good Thing. The test day schedule can be found here.
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Debian Family
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In a post on its security announce mailing list, the Debian Project development team has reminded users that version 5.0 of its Debian Linux distribution, also known as “Lenny”, will reach its end of life (EOL) on 6 February 2012. From that date, no further updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be released.
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Derivatives
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Just a few years ago, I watched as a growing number of new Linux distributions were being built around Debian. It made sense at the time, as Debian does have a lot going for it, both with its available packages and the option of choosing from a stable code base down to the code that’s still considered “testing.”
During this time, a new distribution came about, backed by a founder with more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes. The result of this was a new distribution known as Ubuntu.
But where does this leave those distributions that chose to embrace a pure Debian base instead? In this article, I will explore two very different distributions that decided to look to Debian for the future and did so with immense style.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new picture was posted recently on Reddit showing one of the displays at HMV store in UK using Ubuntu. The interactive touchscreen display was being used to give information about Wii.
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The One Hundred Paper Cuts project is back for the Ubuntu 12.04 development cycle, to make 12.04 LTS the most bug-free, precise and pixel-perfect Ubuntu release ever!
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Last week I delivered a keynote at the Qt Developer Days 2011 event in San Francisco. I have not seen a video of the keynote online yet, but I am assured it should be online soon. Rick Spencer gave a keynote at the Munich event shortly before UDS in October.
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The latest buzz around Canonical may be about extending the Ubuntu Linux platform to TVs, phones and other mobile devices and selling PCs in Asia and Europe. But that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing to market Ubuntu aggressively as a solution for corporate desktops. Here’s a look at its latest effort — an ebook recently released — and what it says about Canonical’s strategy for the big-business market going forward.
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Mint, which just released its latest version (Linux Mint 12 Lisa), has become the most popular Linux distribution on DistroWatch. Seizing the top spot from Ubuntu, the GNOME 3-based distro has evolved from a mere spin to a serious competitor to Canonical’s flagship product. As Mint continues to dominate DistroWatch, some journalists have already come to a conclusion that Ubuntu is no longer the most popular distro around. How true is that claim? Is Ubuntu’s popularity really declining? The answer to both these questions is Yes and No.
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Remember the good old days of Ubuntu, way before Unity and Gnome 3 were the norm? Everything seemed to work just fine in those days. I finally did it. I took a major step back. I am now using Ubuntu 10.04 as my default Ubuntu Desktop.
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As promised in my previous post about my Unity Phone Mockups, here’s a look at the TV mockups I’ve been playing with over the last week, along with the reasons behind some of the designs. Links to the source files for these mockups, as well as the mockups by other community contributors, can be found on this wiki page.
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Although it’s not without passionate supporters, Unity, Ubuntu 11.10′s new default user interface, has generated lots of controversy and consternation among faithful Ubuntu users. For those who prefer a traditional Gnome desktop, this post provides a straightforward method of setting up and configuring a Ubuntu 11.10 desktop based on Gnome 3′s “Fallback” mode.
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Flavours and Variants
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I really am a BIG FAN of Linux Mint. For the most part, this system has been a breath of fresh air compared to Windows. I’ve had few problems with Mint EXCEPT in one case: when I go to upgrade it from one version to the next. At that point, all hell breaks loose!!
The last time I did an upgrade, I lost all my data and files because — for unknown reasons — the new versions simply couldn’t read any of the backed up files. It was maddening.
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Though it isn’t the recommended approach, I have ended up upgrading to Linux Mint 12 from Linux Mint 11 using an in situ route. Having attempted this before with a VirtualBox hosted installation, I am well aware of the possibility of things going wrong. Then, a full re-installation was needed to remedy the situation. With that in mind, I made a number of backups in the case of an emergency fresh installation of the latest release of Linux Mint. Apache and VirtualBox configuration files together with MySQL backups were put where they could be retrieved should that be required. The same applied to the list of installed packages on my system. So far, I haven’t needed to use these but there is no point in taking too many chances.
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I lied. I said I would never again test another Gnome 3 distro, and here I am, testing another Gnome 3 distro. What more, I will do the same thing I did with openSUSE, I will write two separate reviews, performed on two ends of the computing modernity spectrum, with an olden but golden T60p 32-bit machine on the low end and a shiny new HP with an i5 processor and Nvidia 320M GT card on the high end. Today, we will begin with the weak machine.
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Glenn Cady proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 6th, that the highly anticipated Ultimate Edition 3.0 operating system has been released and it’s available for download on mirrors worldwide.
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This is not surprising, considering that most people who move to GNU/Linux are Windows refugees. And one needs some points of similarity in order to ease the transition.
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So I’ve been running Linux Mint LXDE on my laptop at home for eight months or so. Having posted a review/opinion piece previously I wanted to add a few words – a warning if you will.
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eBay’s Ql.io could make e-commerce web applications faster to develop – and use
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The Ada Initiative isn’t quite one year old, but with the project embarking on a new fundraiser and as 2011 draws to a close, it seems like a good time to check in on the project. Much of the focus in 2011 has been on bootstrapping, but 2012 is looking like a very good year for the Ada Initiative.
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Well, here we are, another year almost done for. Time to look back and take stock of the year that was. You know what? It turns out that 2011 was a banner year for open source projects. So much so, that picking the 10 most important was pretty difficult.
So what do I mean by “important,” anyway? Clearly, it’s not just projects that are widely used. That list would be just too long to even contemplate. You’d have to include Apache, GCC, X.org, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Linux Mint, not to mention a bazillion and one libraries and utilities that we depend on every day.
So to judge importance, I looked at projects that are influential, gaining in popularity, and/or technical standouts in new areas. In other words, projects that are even more noteworthy than the other noteworthy projects. This means that many projects that are crucial didn’t make the list. And now, in no particular order, the 10 most important projects of 2011.
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Its core business products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system and JBoss middleware remain key components of Red Hat’s growth strategy, as the open source vendor looks to strengthen its presence in Asia-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, even as it makes “exploratory moves into cloud”.
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DARPA is looking to solve the problem of runaway defense systems projects by reinventing how complex systems are developed and manufactured. They aim to do this by borrowing from the playbooks of integrated circuit developers and open-source software projects. And in the process, the agency’s Adaptive Vehicle Make project may reinvent manufacturing itself, and seed the workforce with a new generation of engineers who can “compile” innovations into new inventions without having to be tied to a manufacturing plant.
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Open source has opened minds and provided a great amount of freedom of choice not just to organisations but to our government as well. In my view, open source has brought about a change in the way we view and adapt to technology. We are seeing a paradigm shift from packaged software to open source standards not just within organisations, but also at the government level. A significant amount of government administration processes have been simplified by employing various open source tools. In the last five years, there has been a sudden rise in open source developers being hired. There is a huge untapped potential for developers in the open source domain. However, it remains to be seen what measures the government is taking at the central and the state levels to implement this technology and how it is addressing the challenges associated with migrating to open source.
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The connection between a user and his or her DNS service can now be locked down with an encrypted session to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofing, or sniffing: OpenDNS has written an open-source tool to secure that traditionally exposed link.
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I’ve noticed recently how badly disorganised some organisations seem to be when it comes to making their artwork easy accessible to people who wish to promote their work. Organisations, projects and groups all want their newest release covered, or what they’ve just announced is going to happen, unfortunately it’s hard to write about something when you’re missing their logo.
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Free riders, people who contribute nothing to the software they use, are to free and open source software (FOSS) what illegal downloaders are to the Recording Industry Association of America. They’re people who are perceived as getting away with something, and are the subject of periodic rants. Really, though, I don’t see what the fuss is about.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is making an emotional appeal to Firefox users amid declining market share and potential lost revenue thanks to Google.
Mozilla has released a video, called “The Mozilla Story,” which explains the organization’s roots as a community project and the importance of Firefox as an open-source Web browser backed by a non-profit organization. The video avoids technical nitty-gritty in favor of general statements about putting users’ interests first.
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Mozilla’s Firefox browser has had something of a rough year in 2011, but the past week or so has been particularly unkind.
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As pundits ponder the future of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the non-profit group’s chairwoman is banking on some pretty abstract gambles to help regain the platform’s edge over its rivals.
By one researcher’s count, Firefox last month lost its position as the second most-used browser to Google’s Chrome offering while Microsoft Internet Explorer held it’s lion’s share, although this continues to shrink.
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As I stumbled over a note from Mozilla’s developer staff today, I wondered how much impact feature delays in a rapid release process really have and whether delays in a 6-week release cycle matter or not? Firefox could use some good news, but there is not much that could cause some optimism in the near future. Nearly every major feature the browser could use today is delayed and the browser that Mozilla would need today won’t be available until the end of April.
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BSD
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There are not many times when I get my sight out of Linux and look into other free Operating System. Most often these are BSD-based operating systems.
Today is such a case. Even more, today I will tell you about two twin brothers from BSD family.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Stow, the GNU utility for managing the installation of software packages, gets its first official release since 2002 after a complete refresh of the code. Stow allows users to manage multiple software packages, keeping their files in separate directories while at the same time presenting the user with a single run-time directory, created using symlinks into those separate directories. Stow is a simpler, database-less version of its inspiration, the Carnegie Mellon Depot application.
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Public Services/Government
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The Department of Defense is taking a closer look at open source software, hinting at the potential for new acquisition regulations.
Specifically, DOD will host a public meeting Jan. 12 to “initiate a dialogue with industry regarding the use of open source software in DOD contracts,” according to a notice published in the Federal Register Monday.
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Licensing
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The Software Freedom Law Center submitted comments yesterday to the U.S. Copyright Office proposing an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions. If granted, the exemption would ensure that owners of personal computing devices have the right to install whatever software they choose on their devices.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Whether or not you voted for President Obama, it can’t be said that he hasn’t made intelligent moves in bringing the US government fully into the information age. In fact, his first executive order that he ever signed created a new information portal on the web, Data.gov, to allow web users access to information made available by the Freedom of Information act. Accessing that before was difficult because of the bureaucratic hoops people had to jump through to get the data they sought. Coming fully online in 2009, Data.gov allows web users to access a range of information, such as who has visited the White House, and be able to represent that data using visual charts. This toolset makes it much easier for US citizens to hold their government accountable for its actions.
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Programming
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A few months ago, I became “Director of Engineering” for SourceForge.net. It’s a big job that includes being “Product Owner” for the two development teams, managing support, and helping everybody do what we can to improve the site. We have over a decade of accumulated features, many of which are out of date, and little used. We have lots of technical debt. We have younger competitors with a lot of online buzz.
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In this time of magic, who needs to know what an OS is let alone how to code one?
Our College IT has disappeared. I knew this would happen, it’s become invisible to my students. Maybe it simply faded away when we weren’t looking properly. We use computers in class every day, many times a day; my course now utterly relies on Moodle to keep in touch, store our stuff and mark our tests; the World Wide Web is our constant companion whether on the whiteboard, laptop or phone … but we don’t ‘see’ it anymore.
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With the pending release of PHP version 5.4, due early next year, the creators behind the popular Web scripting language are including the best parts of the now-abandoned PHP 6.0 project.
“I guess you could say [PHP 6] was too ambitious,” said Zeev Suraski, one of the principal contributors to PHP as well as the chief technology officer and co-founder of PHP software vendor Zend Technologies.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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According to new data from The Linux Foundation, Linux jobs are pretty much evenly divided between administrator and developer jobs. But, you won’t go wrong if you focus on Android programming work.
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Desktop
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Old Computer? No Problem! Linux Saves The Day.
Posted on December 4, 2011, 4:31 am, by devnet.
[Translate]
Want to know what utilizes 54.3 MB of RAM idle at 1% CPU utilization on a Gateway M250 laptop? CrunchBang Linux, that’s what!
It’s always a breath of fresh air when you are able to resurrect older hardware that most people would throw right into the trash with a dash of Linux.
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Server
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Apache experienced the largest increase with a gain of nearly 1.5M sites.
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Applications
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Finally there is light at the end of the GIMP development tunnel for 2.8! As we’ve heard there shall be one last development version (2.7.4) very soon – also GIMP 2.8 will follow on this pretty quickly. There is only one (rather big) bug that that concerns the text tool.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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When it comes to using GNU/Linux, there are two well-known desktop environments – GNOME and KDE. Most users opt for one or the other and make do with their choice.
Both GNOME and KDE are environments that are full of features and, hence, quite memory-hungry. For most people, given the configurations which are present on modern-day PCs or laptops, that is not a problem.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Over the weekend of 19 and 20 November, KDE contributors met in Berlin for the KDE e.V. Sprint—the first ever. KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that represents KDE in legal and financial matters and provides funding to assist KDE development and promotion.
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The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce its second release. KDE Telepathy is a suite of applications that form an instant-messaging client for Jabber, Gmail, Facebook, MSN and more. KDE Telepathy stands out from previous instant messaging solutions by being able to integrate into the Plasma Workspaces, and can also be used like a traditional application.
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Today, KDE makes available two new releases of its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. 4.7.4 provides bugfix updates, new translations and performance improvments on top of the stable 4.7 series, while 4.8 Beta2 gives a glimpse at what is coming in 4.8, to be released next month.
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GNOME Desktop
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Well the last ruckus over operating systems had barely settled down here in the Linux blogosphere when another one started up anew.
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The GNOME 2011 User Survey is about to end (the survey period was extended as I was out of the office the past two weeks), but here’s the latest batch of one-thousand responses about the GNOME desktop. The survey responses in full from the other questions will be published soon.
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Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you’re moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection.
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I was going to write about how I finally dumped Firefox for Opera, but Firefox 8 does not seem too bad and for the first time appears a bit nippier at start up. Like Dedoimedo has found, this does not look like a completely arbitrary decision to pump up the version number but actually has some small benefits, so I’m going to give Firefox another chance before it is relegated.
The slow scrolling though remains a major annoyance, and although several supposed solutions and hacks can be found around the interwebs none of them seem to work. In any case, this should not require a hack when Chromium and Opera can do it, but traditionally Mozilla based browsers have been bad at scrolling.
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New Releases
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Traditionally, the last few months of the year are filled with new Linux releases. This year is no exception and here we take a look at recent releases and some planned for early 2012.
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Red Hat Family
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US Linux operating systems provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) expects to see double-digit growth in Latin America during its fiscal 2012, ending in February, the company’s marketing director for Latin America, Alejandro Raffaele, told BNamericas.
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We spoke to Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc. Here’s the interview that sheds light on the cloud, apps and other trends in the enterprise market that’s relevant to developers.
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Red Hat revised its enterprise-focused Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, claiming greater performance and scalability on multicore platforms. RHEL 6.2 offers enhancements to resource management, high availability, storage and file system performance, and identity management, and it scored an all-time-high 22,000 users on the SAP SD benchmark, the company says.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 (RHEL) has been launched week with a benchmark score which its developers insist proves the operating system’s validity for mission-critical enterprise computing environments.
RHEL has achieved the “largest multi-core Linux configuration results certified to-date” on the memorably named two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution standard application benchmark.
But what does that really mean?
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Wake County commissioners have just approved economic incentives for Red Hat, Inc., the software development company, which is poised to move its headquarters to downtown.
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CentOS 6.1 has arrived to bring the features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 to those who can live without a Red Hat subscription. CentOS 6.1 offers almost all the non-proprietary portions of RHEL 6.1, including virtualization performance optimizations, enhanced development and monitoring tools, and YUM package management enhancements.
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One of the reasons why Red Hat will be the first billion dollar open-source company is that the company has also looked beyond just Linux to what you can do with Linux on the cloud and thin-client desktops; Java Enterprise Edition and now, with the release of Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, big data.
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Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT) continues to gain market share against Microsoft, Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), SUSE Linux and Oracle Solaris in the cloud computing space, according to a Wall Street analyst.
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Fedora
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My main workhorse station — my ThinkPad x220 — has been on Fedora 16 since before the Beta release. But today since I have a calendar free of meetings, I thought I would move my gigantic workstation to F16 as well. However, the workstation has a gigantic hard disk and contains a partial Fedora mirror. I didn’t want to move all that stuff to another station for purposes of installation, and I wanted to do a faster installation than the network would allow (even with a 10-15 Mbps and a relatively fast local Fedora mirror on the Internet at UVa or Virginia Tech), so I decided to see if I could use its own storage from which to do the installation.
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Okay, this post comes at a time when December is already upon us, Fedora 16 has been released for a month now and that also means that Fedora Scientific has seen the light of the day for a month now. I felt this might be a good time to describe the current state of the project and my plans for the next release(s).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu users who dislike the Unity desktop environment have other alternatives besides sticking with “Maverick Meerkat” or jumping ship to another distro. An illustrated DeviceGuru tutorial shows how to load the GNOME Fallback mode on Ubuntu 11.10 and configure it to provide a GNOME 2.x-like experience.
The last two Ubuntu releases — 11.04 and 11.10 (“Oneiric Ocelot”) have generated controversy among the Ubuntu faithful for pushing the Unity desktop environment and user interface in place of GNOME. Even more so than with the similarly controversial GNOME 3.x, the radically different Unity desktop is oriented toward smaller, touchscreen devices — just one of several complaints from traditional desktop PC users.
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Flavours and Variants
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As well as being one of the first Linux distributions you could conceivably install for your Luddite parents without worrying too much, Ubuntu Linux has proved to be a great platform to build other operating systems off.
This is a key strength of free software, and it means that there is a stack of Ubuntu derivatives, including the ‘official’ ones you can find on the Ubuntu website. There are distributions designed to offer a different user experience, such as the KDE-based Kubuntu, and distros such as Lubuntu and Xubuntu, which offer lightweight desktop systems.
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The Linux community is setting the itinerary for what could become the biggest leap yet toward achieving a fully connected, software-enhanced car. Two significant events are already in motion. One is the creation of the Genivi Alliance. The other event is the first gathering of Linux movers and shakers to rally ideas and products for Linux-based automotive devices.
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Phones
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We even had a brief shot at Linux-on-the-mobile, Android – even I was excited about it once – and look how that turned out. Is FOSS on the mobile really that great an advantage? It’s still closed, controlled, and proprietary on all sides, from the service provider on one end and the hardware on the other. And given Google’s laissez-faire approach to FOSS use and how everybody seems pretty much content to let them get away with it – how much better can it even get? Imagine that! On the mobile platform, we finally had our “year of Linux on the desktop” and nobody cared.
Angry nerds don’t seem like such a great ally when the they aren’t angry about the thing that concerns you, do they, Mr. Zittrain?
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Android
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While the previous two Android phones in the Nexus line have been generally well-regarded by critics, their sales numbers were far from enormous. Could that change with the Galaxy Nexus? Buzz is building for the phone, which will make its U.S. debut soon and will usher in the next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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WebOS won a reprieve from technological limbo Friday as HP announced it intends to contribute the software to the open source community. So begins a new chapter in the strange life of an OS that nobody seemed to know what to do with. Built by Palm, bought by one HP CEO, dropped by another, then picked up and dusted off by a third, webOS now heads to the land of open source.
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Company officials told ZDNet that open sourcing WebOS was the best move after the company reviewed the various possibilities for the mobile operating system. There are two reads on the WebOS news: HP couldn’t find a reasonable buyer or the company is betting it can take off on its own.
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So what now? Well, Motorola has recast its Xoom: it’s made it faster, slimmer and lighter.
They’ve beefed up the disappointing screen found on the original, it’s now a Gorilla Glass-coated IPS screen that promises 178-degree viewing angles. But Motorola has also cut more corners than the four you see before you — ones that it hopes customers won’t miss.
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The beauty of FLOSS for entrepreneurs is that you can come to market with a product rapidly and cheaply. This Christmas, it’s a small cheap tablet that’s first out of the gate with Android/Linux 4.0 / Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s a beautiful 7 inch tablet using a low-powered (250mW) MIPS chip that can do 7 hours of browsing on a charge.
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Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called “A Brief History of Microsoft FUD”. This ran through successive attempts by Microsoft to dismiss GNU/Linux in various ways. One of the better-known was a series of “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) studies. By an amazing coincidence, these all showed that Microsoft Windows was cheaper than that supposedly cheap GNU/Linux.
Fortunately, people soon cottoned on to the fact that these studies, paid for by Microsoft, were pretty worthless (here, for example, is a great debunking of the kind of FUD that was being put out in 2005.) However, one knock-on consequence of that episode is that TCO studies rather fell from favour.
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A few days ago I was surprised to learn that LibreOffice was to get a brand new interface called Citrus. The series of mock-ups called Citrus are not a surprise, they are the result of the enthusiastic work of Mirek M. with the feedback of our Design team. However, the fact that a OMGUbuntu could write an article claiming that Citrus was going to become LibreOffice’s user interface got me thinking.
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If you need a desktop solution for your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, OpenOffice.org is the leading open source software of free solutions. OpenOffice.org can read or write files from other common software platforms, save and share files in a variety of formats, including .doc, .xls and .odt, and best of all, the software suite is compatible with all common computers. Unless there are very complex features that can only be accomplished by current Microsoft Office products or similar paid software, OpenOffice.org will save money for a non-profit even as the organization grows and more computers are added.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Printers that can be reprogrammed by malicious print jobs are a security risk. So are printers that only run code signed by the manufacturer. For real security, printers should be running free software controlled by its owners.
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Public Services/Government
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City officials in Helsinki, Finland, are overwhelmingly satisfied after trying out the Free Software office suite OpenOffice.org on their laptops. 75% of 600 officials have been using OpenOffice.org exclusively since February, as part of a pilot project where the city installed the program on 22,500 workstations.
In the spring of 2011, the city installed the Free Software office suite OpenOffice on 22,500 desktops. On the laptops of 600 officials, it was deployed as the only office suite. Even though these latter users only received a written manual and no actual training, still 75 % of the users where satisfied. The pilot project is based on an initiative by Helsinki city council member Johanna Sumuvuori.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Already out there, many institutions have freed up their public data; and many people are making use of them. The UK, France and Denmark are leading the way in Europe; while all together, public sector information generates over 30 billion euros per year in economic activity, with services from geo-location services to weather forecasts.
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Programming
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“I suspect that in some areas of software development, a CS degree is extremely helpful, but I don’t think it is ever required,” said Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “One thing the open source community is very good at doing is encouraging people to learn by both doing and by talking to those with a great deal of formal training or knowledge.” Such transfers of knowledge “can be compared to apprenticeships in the old guild system.”
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You might think of the dynamic language Rexx with nostalgia, but without a sense of urgency to program in it. René Vincent Jansen offers several convincing reasons that it ought to be in your programming toolbox.
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It has become fashionable to say it’s always about applications and not the platform when someone chooses in IT. I don’t buy that for a minute, otherwise you would find all OS’s represented fairly on retail shelves. That said, it is interesting to look at platforms used to download software from servers.
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The term “Enterprise 2.0″ is thrown around a lot these days. It refers to a class of companies that are taking ideas from companies like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to workplace software.
It’s led to the rise of a whole new batch of startups with red-hot valuations. Jive, an enterprise social network, filed to go public earlier this year and is valued at $573 million, while Box.net turned down a $500 million buyout offer earlier this year.
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Most folks outside of technology fields and the software freedom movement can’t grok why I’m not on Facebook. Facebook’s marketing has reached most of the USA’s non-technical Internet users. On the upside, Facebook gave the masses access to something akin to blogging. But, as with most technology controlled by for-profit companies, Facebook is proprietary software. Facebook, as a software application, is written in a mix of server-side software that no one besides Facebook employees can study, modify and share. On the client-side, Facebook is an obfuscated, proprietary software Javascript application, which is distributed to the user’s browser when they access facebook.com. Thus, in my view, using Facebook is no different than installing a proprietary binary program on my GNU/Linux desktop.
Most of the press critical of Facebook has focused on privacy, data mining of users’ data on behalf of advertisers, and other types of data autonomy concerns. Such concerns remain incredibly important too. Nevertheless, since the advent of the software freedom community’s concerns about network services a few years ago, I’ve maintained this simple principle, that I still find correct: While I can agree that merely liberating all software for an online application is not a sufficient condition to treat the online users well, the liberation of the software is certainly a necessary condition for the freedom of the users. Releasing freely all code for the online application the first step for freedom, autonomy, and privacy of the users. Therefore, I certainly don’t give in myself to running proprietary software on my FaiF desktops. I simply refuse to use Facebook.
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The blogosphere has been buzzing about revelations that CNET’s Download.com site has been embedding adware into the install process for all kinds of software, including open source software like NMAP. For the unwary, some of the ads could have been read to suggest accepting the advertised service (e.g., the Babylon translation tool bar) was part of the installation process. Users who weren’t paying attention may also have clicked “accept” simply by accident. In either event, after their next restart, they would have been surprised to find their settings had been changed, new tool bars installed, etc. Gordon Lyon, the developer who first called public attention to Download.com’s practices, found a particularly egregious example last night: a bundled ad for “Drop Down Deals,” an app that, once installed, spies on your web traffic and pops up ads when you visit some sites. It’s hard to imagine that many users would choose that app on purpose.
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Incredible – 800,000 signatures in a few days, Congress is dithering and a senator will vote to block the reading of our petition for a few hours! Let’s get 1 million – sign the petition…
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I think by the time “8″ will be released, it will already be obsolete. Likely Android will release a couple more times between now and then. M$ is sunk up to its axles in bloat while the world scampers along on small cheap computers.
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Health/Nutrition
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If you wonder why the health insurance industry has to set up front groups and secretly funnel cash to industry-funded coalitions to influence public policy, take a look at the most recent results of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (KFF) monthly Health Tracking Poll.
In its November poll, KFF added a few new survey questions to find out exactly which parts of the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare are the most popular and which are the least popular. Insurers were no doubt annoyed to see that the provision of the law they want most — the requirement that all of us will have to buy coverage from them if we’re not eligible for a public program like Medicare — continues to be the single most hated part of the law. More than 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of that mandate.
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Last week, Dr. Michael C. Burgess, tweeted this directive: “Mark your calendars: Rick Perry will join Health Caucus’ Thought Leaders Series next Wednesday, December 7 @ 5 p.m.”
Eager to hear what thought leadership the Texas governor and presidential candidate would be imparting, I marked my calendar as Dr. Burgess prescribed. Imagine my dismay when I learned yesterday morning that Perry would be sharing his thoughts behind closed doors. The media and public, it turns out, had been disinvited.
Burgess, a Texas Republican, chairs the Congressional Health Care Caucus, which, according to its Web site, “is committed to advancing reforms that reduce costs, increase patient control, expand choice, and promote cures.”
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But Brown, far from operating a mega-dairy or even distributing milk to retailers, milks one cow. After he and his family provide for their own needs, the remaining milk is sold from their farm stand. Brown said in a speech to supporters, “I’m not a milk distributor. I’m a farmer. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be, it’s all I’ve ever done.”
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Security
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Yesterday WikiLeaks released 287 documents in what it calls The Spy Files, which describes as descriptions of the relationship between national intelligence agencies and the commercial software, security and surveillance companies they hired to provide technology that allows them to secretly listen in on cell phone conversations, text messages, email and other Internet traffic and location data.
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Gwinnett Medical Center on Friday confirmed it has instructed ambulances to take patients to other area hospitals when possible after discovering a system-wide computer virus that slowed patient registration and other operations at its campuses in Lawrenceville and Duluth.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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That’s what millions of readers are asking after seeing a piece that asserted:
“The vast Marcellus and Utica shale formations are already paying off in thousands of wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, bringing great wealth to landowners and jobs throughout the region.”
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From CarbonTracker.org comes this very useful accounting of global fossil fuel reserves, by market listing on stock exchanges. The risk identified in their report, Unburnable Carbon – Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble?, is that markets have accorded value to energy resources which may never be extracted. The reason? A rather hopeful one. According to the group: “the threat of fossil fuel assets becoming stranded, as the shift to a low-carbon economy accelerates.” The report pays particular attention to the value of London listings, a country which itself has dwindling fossil fuel resources.
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Finance
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With one month to go in the data series, US Total Non-Farm Payrolls have averaged 131.08 million in 2011. The problem is that the US is a Very Large System, and needs growth to support its array of future obligations, primarily Social Security and the debt it incurs to run its military budget, and other entitlements. If you had told someone ten years ago that Total Non-Farm Payrolls would be at similar levels in 2011, that likely would have sounded impossible, or extreme. But the fact is, US Total Non-Farm Payrolls averaged 131.83 million ten years ago, in 2001. The implications for this lack of growth are quite dire. | see: United States Total Non-Farm Payrolls in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2001-2011.
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Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) of Jacksonville, Florida — one of the most notorious processors of fraudulent home foreclosure documents in the country — has donated 1,000 tickets for a professional football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the San Diego Chargers to Jacksonville Area USO.
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Scanning the horizon for someone to blame for the latest attack on Germany’s largest bank, FOX news pundit Dan Gainor worked “the Internets.” Did he detail Deutsche Bank’s track record of making friends by ripping off consumers and foreclosing on their homes? Did he mention that Deutsche Bank stirred public ire when it was bailed out by multiple governments, including two billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve? Did he even bother to notice that it was widely reported that an Italian anarchist group had already claimed responsibility for the attack?
No. In his piece on FOX News, “Left, Obama Escalate War on Banks Into Dangerous Territory,” Gainor decided to go after the bank-busting activists at the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically our BanksterUSA.org site, because the Bankster masthead is riddled with bullet holes.
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The NYT continues its policy of affirmative action for people ignorant of the world by allowing Thomas Friedman to write two columns a week on whatever he chooses. Today he talks about the job crisis.
He does get some things right in pointing out that we have a huge shortage of jobs. He also notes the growing crisis posed by long-term unemployment in which millions of people are losing their connections to the labor market and risk being permanently unemployed.
However he strikes out in his dismissal of manufacturing as a source of jobs and calling for more high tech centers like Austin, Silicon Valley and Raleigh-Durham. When the dollar falls to a sustainable level it will have an enormous impact in improving the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. We stand to gain more than 4 million manufacturing jobs once we get the dollar down to a sustainable level.
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The Federal Reserve Board is a perverse animal. While ostensibly a public institution, the banking industry has the extraordinary privilege of being able to pick 5 of the 12 members of its most important governing body, the Open Market Committee (FOMC). The banks also get to have 7 other representatives sit in on the FOMC’s secret meetings. Given this structure, it is not surprising that people who do not believe that the banks necessarily place the interest of the general public first are suspicious of the Fed.
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Typically, I try to tie the beginning of Wonkbook to the news. But today, the most important sentence isn’t a report on something that just happened, but a fresh look at something that’s been happening for the last three years. In particular, it’s this sentence by the Financial Times’ Ed Luce, who writes, “According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”
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David Frias works two minimum-wage jobs to squeak by in one of the most expensive cities in America.
Come New Year’s Day, he’ll have a few more coins in his pocket as San Francisco makes history by becoming the first city in the nation to scale a $10 minimum wage. The city’s hourly wage for its lowest-paid workers will hit $10.24, more than $2 above the California minimum wage and nearly $3 more than the working wage set by the federal government.
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The government and the big banks deceived the public about their $7 trillion secret loan program. They should be punished.
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While we are not completely shy of saying we-told-you-so, in the case of the players in Solyndra’s fantastic rise and fall, we are more than happy to. Back in September we highlighted Goldman Sachs’ key role in the financing rounds of the now bankrupt solar company and this evening MarketWatch (and DowJones VentureWire) delves deeper and highlights how the squid has largely stayed out of the headlines (what’s the opposite of lime-light?) in this case despite its seemingly critical assistance and support from inception to pre-destruction.
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I don’t want to sound alarmist but it looks like Goldman Sachs has taken over Europe. The continent has succumbed to the dictates of global finance, there was no choice. The bankers are holding us all to ransom and have done since the beginning of the GFC in 2008.
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The accusations are as outrageous as they are plentiful: Hundreds of “robocalls” — in one case, 800 to a single person — to collect auto loan debts; illegal repossession of cars from active duty military deployed overseas; late fees assessed three years after the fact and then compounded into $2,000 or $3,000 bills; harassing calls to friends, neighbors, co-workers — even children — on cell phones. And now, a flurry of lawsuits filed around the country, and lawyers fighting over potential clients.
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A solicitor at HM Revenue & Customs who turned whistleblower to disclose that senior managers had quietly let off Goldman Sachs from paying millions of pounds in tax penalties is facing disciplinary procedures and possible prosecution for speaking out.
Osita Mba has worked within the Revenue for at least four years and claimed to have personal knowledge of the deal that allowed the bank to write off a £10m bill.
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60 Minutes has been doing a lot of reporting on the financial crisis in order to find out why no bankers or mortgage servicers have been criminally prosecuted for fraudulent practices. When Obama was asked (see videos below) why no one was prosecuted for causing the financial crisis, his reply was that the actions of the banks were not illegal. What he is saying is that it is legal for the banks to take down the financial system by using sub-prime mortgages to create securities that were meant to fail and to sell those same securities to investors, like pension funds and municipalities, and at the same time bet against the whole mortgage market in order to make billions in profits.
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A strange thing happened in Chicago on Thursday, December 8. An audience of well-heeled professionals, a mixture of Democrats and Republicans, packed a room at the Drake Hotel to hear Robert Shiller, a Yale professor, give a presentation on the housing market. A few members of the audience were in the top 1%, and the balance of the audience was probably in the top 2%-5%. At the end of the presentation, there was a bi-partisan revolt.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The money that patients’ rights advocates have to spend trying to convince the Obama administration that Americans should have decent health care benefits pales in comparison to the boatloads of cash insurers and their corporate allies have on hand to do largely the opposite. But at least the advocates are now in the game.
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Censorship
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There’s been a huge amount of interest in my announcement of a “no disconnect” strategy, to improve internet freedom around the world. In particular, there has been a lot of interest in my choice to invite Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to assist me with this work.
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Privacy
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The latest example of what you do on the Internet is no where near as “private” as you think it is comes from a new Russian site, YouHaveDownloaded. This site claims to track 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads… and tell the world who they’ve found downloading what. So, that final episode of Dexter? The DVD rip of Cowboys & Aliens? That copy of Call of Duty Modern Warfare? And, that illicit video of Smoking Hot Grannies that you really, really don’t want to talk about? Yeah, your permanent record of what you’ve been downloading off BitTorrent sites may all be available for the amusement of your friends, neighbors, and, oh yes, the copyright owners.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Paris, November 30th, 2011 – La Quadrature du Net met with European body of telecommunications regulators, BEREC, which is currently listing Internet access restrictions imposed by telecoms operators across the EU, as requested by the EU Commission. Thanks to the RespectMyNet.eu platform and thanks to the participation of citizens from all over Europe in unveiling these harmful practices, BEREC cannot ignore any longer the widespread access restrictions which undermine freedom of communication, privacy, as well as competition and innovation online. By further contributing to RespectMyNet, citizens can help increase pressure on the Commission to legislate on Net neutrality.
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The Netherlands are convening a high-profile conference to discuss freedoms online. As the United States and Europe pose as defenders of freedom online, La Quadrature recalls that their Internet policy is going in the other direction by supporting censorship, through the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) and other initiatives.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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12.12.11
Posted in America, Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[written in 05/12/2011]
Summary: A view on the arena where Android is targeted by Apple, Microsoft, and trolls who are associated with them
THE patent situation affects GNU/Linux more than it affects most operating systems because of the cost and distribution aspects. We have stressed this point for years.
Over at Groklaw, an analysis was published this month to keep track of Lodsys, which had sued Android developers among others. It used patents from Microsoft’s patent troll, Intellectual Ventures.
“Things continue to progress slowly on the Lodsys front,” explains Prof. Webbink, “At this time all of the declaratory judgment actions brought in the Northern District of Illnois against Lodsys have been closed, with several of them having transferred to the Eastern District of Wisconsin. In addition, DriveTime has dismissed its declaratory judgment action against Lodsys in Arizona. With those changes all of the pending cases are now in either the Eastern District of Texas (the infringement actions brought by Lodsys) or the Eastern District of Wisconsin (the declaratory judgment actions brought against Lodsys) with the one outlier being the declaratory judgment action brought by ESET against Lodsys in the Southern District of California.”
There have already been stories of companies that pay Lodsys to go away, pretty much as a Microsoft lobbyist foolishly advised. if the patent troll gets fed, it will never go away.
It ought to be noted once again that iOS (Apple) developers are among those which Lodsys was suing. Apple did not explain to those developers that some of the patents came from a troll which Apple had helped fund. Apple does not seem to mind patent trolls and Apple itself “Demands Recognition As A Patent Troll,” to use Pogson’s headline. He showed this article about Apple’s war to embargo Linux/Android devices. To quote: “Some fools still have this delusion that software patent and product design wars have something to do with some mythological real value of intellectual property (IP). While there are indeed cases involving a better mouse-trap, most such cases are about nothing but extorting cash from people who create real products, or, in the case of Apple vs. Samsung, Apple trying to preserve its market share against a would-be competitor.
“Apple makes great products, but you wouldn’t know it from the way it’s attacking Samsung. Rather than let the marketplace decide whose products are better, Apple wants the courts to decide. Specifically, Apple is slugging it out with Samsung in a minimum of 19 lawsuits in 12 courts in nine countries on four continents.
“Let that sink in for a minute. Apple is trying to use intellectual property law as a bludgeon around the world to protect its sales.”
Techrights was never a friend of Apple because nobody ought to be a friend of a company that disrespects fair competition, presents fake ‘evidence’ to the court (in an attempt to block sales of Linux-powered devices), and generally disregards the law whenever something does not comply with its cult doctrine.
Not so long ago we found Apple firing an employee for ‘daring’ not to fancy Apple’s products and in an update on the resultant saga we discover that “Apple has been upheld for sacking one of its employees after he posted negative comments about the firm and its products on Facebook. Apple specialist Samuel Crisp was fired from his job for writing a series of posts on Facebook about the company and its products. An employment tribunal ruled in favour of Apple after Crisp appealed what he alleged was an unfair dismissal.”
What a nice company, eh? But let’s not forget Microsoft, either. Microsoft’s extortion of Android hit the brick wall when B&N fought back. Based on some articles, “Barnes & Noble has hired David Boies to join its legal team in a fight with Microsoft at the US International Trade Commission over alleged Android patent infringements.
“Boies, chairman of the Boies, Schiller & Flexner law firm, represented the US Department of Justice back at the turn of the millennium in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft, and his sustained questioning of senior executives such as Bill Gates was regarded by many as significantly damaging to Redmond’s cause.”
Gates was bobbing back and forth like a demented child the last time this man did his thing. When people commit crimes and think they can get away with it (racketeering is one of them) it takes a bold group of people in an insular room (no PR and press) for truth to come out under pressure. Gates is busy buying himself a new image, but the legacy he puts in patent lobbying and trolls should also come out for all to see. Sooner or later justice might be served. Groklaw has some analysis related to the news:
Google’s filing is eye-opening. It seems Microsoft is trying to compel Google to respond to a very broad subpoena. Google is not a party to this ITC matter or the litigation. Microsoft’s motion “goes far beyond the threshold for reasonable third-party discovery in Section 337 investigations,” Google says. What is it that Microsoft is asking for? — information concerning Google’s “strategies for responding to Microsoft’s patents and patent infringement claims.”
It is good to see Google and others finally fighting against Microsoft’s behaviour. The European regulators are meanwhile investigating Apple’s behaviour, so there’s a glimmer of hope. More up-to-date information will be posted this week. █
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