02.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy/Surveillance
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More than 4,000 groups and websites have signed on to support a day of protest against U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, scheduled for Tuesday.
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Due to the overwhelming concern and outrage regarding all of the N.S.A. surveillance that has come to light in recent months, internet users and groups are taking a strong arm “internet approach”, and plan to fight back. February 11th has been designated as The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance from the N.S.A.
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The eccentric chief executive officer of Swatch Group, one of the world’s top watchmakers, was so incensed by recent allegations of mass U.S. spying that he chastised a top New York official over the matter in a letter late last year.
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The premise of Offnow is local legislation in states, counties, and universities to make it policy to dis-invest in mass surveillance. Twelve state legislatures have introduced versions of the 4th Amendment Act (Alaska, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington). The big target is Utah, home of the huge Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, where the provision of 1.7 million gallons of water by the state every day cools the huge supercomputers.
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In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency”, with double the CIA’s annual budget and snooping the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).
So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine?
They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command just like Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed “only in the next century” we would be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation, and MIT on another system identifying words spoken by different people, while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.
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A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information…
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The digital magazine’s “initial focus will be in-depth reporting on the classified documents previously provided” by Snowden, according to Omidyar and former Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates, who posted a brief item about the launch on the First Look Media Web site today. Bates had been previously announced as a First Look team member, along with a handful of others.
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Got that? Because there are some limitations on all the spying they do on Americans, and it’s too complicated to understand those limitations, so it’s okay to lie and say they don’t spy on Americans. Of course, in the very next paragraph, Wittes tries to effectively brush away the massive amount of surveillance done on Americans.
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History is by some marvels of anti-institutional warriors. Now, the names of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden tend to find copy and coverage, leakers and soldiers against tight lipped secrecy. But last month, when former New York Congressman Otis G. Pike died, there was barely a murmur. Obituaries proved few in number. Most were colourless and unreflective.
As Mark Ames of Pando Daily (Feb 4) quite rightly pointed out, the barely reported, and unremarked death of that great challenger of the national security complex was stunning, a “teachable moment” even as the Snowden snowstorm continues its effects. Such a moment was “probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.” Wither, sadly, the denizens of genuine reform.
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Dutch government ministers have admitted that it was not the American National Security Agency (NSA) that intercepted data from millions of Dutch phone calls in late 2012/early 2013, as was reported in October 2013.
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Co-founder of German company Protonet, Ali Jelveh, poses with a server at their headquarters in Hamburg, January 30. Protonet and many other start-ups in the country offer data security “made in Germany” after former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden alleged the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage and put software in almost 100,000 computers around the world. Picture taken January 30.
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Founded over thirty years ago in Berlin, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an institution in Europe. The CCC is Europe’s largest association of hackers, known for its annual shindig, the Chaos Communication Congress, as well as its involvement in numerous campaigns to raise awareness of digital security gaps, be these lapses in corporate software development or government-controlled spyware. Always imbued with a strong pro-privacy and anti-censorship orientation (previous members include Wau Holland and former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg), Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance in Germany have unsurprisingly proven of pivotal interest to the CCC’s membership.
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The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The disclosure contradicts popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data. It is also likely to raise questions about the efficacy of a program that is premised on its breadth and depth, on collecting as close to a complete universe of data as possible in order to make sure that clues aren’t missed in counterterrorism investigations.
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There are three broad ways that these software companies collaborate with the state: a National Security Agency program called “Bullrun” through which that agency is alleged to pay off developers like RSA, a software security firm, to build “backdoors” into our computers; the use of “bounty hunters” like Endgame and Vupen that find exploitable flaws in existing software like Microsoft Office and our smartphones; and finally the use of data brokers like Millennial Media to harvest personal data on everybody on the Internet, especially when they go shopping or play games like Angry Birds, Farmville, or Call of Duty.
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If you’re headed to Sochi for the Winter Olympics, it might be best to stay off the grid.
The State Department has already warned travelers that they should have no expectation of privacy while in Russia. And now, NBC’s Richard Engel has demonstrated just how easy it is to get hacked while at the games.
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The microblogging service released new statistics Thursday on the amount of information it hands over to governments and the number of posts it removes at their request. (Governments worldwide are asking for more data, and Twitter removes relatively few, though some, posts in certain countries.)
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Censorship
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Social media was one of the first refuges for Syria’s non-violent activists. Now they’re getting kicked off.
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This week Quentin Tarantino decided to sue Gawker after the site published a link to the filmmaker’s leaked ‘The Hateful Eight’ script. In an attempt to make the screenplay harder to find the filmmaker also asked Google to remove several websites that linked to or wrote about it. Thus far, however, the search engine is refusing to comply.
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On January 17, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, as a matter of first impression, that First Amendment defamation rules apply equally to both the institutional press and individual speakers and writers, such as bloggers.
Because this was the core issue in the case, I’ll focus on this issue, rather than on the underlying factual dispute between the parties (a blogger named Crystal Cox, and several companies that Cox had criticized publicly.)
Police
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The wrongly convicted activist John Jordan claims the Met helped plan serious civil disorder. An independent public inquiry is now vital
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The Obama Administration recommends a uniform federal standard requiring businesses to quickly report data breaches and thefts of electronic personal information, acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
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He looked at a future where technology went unchecked by humanity, and he didn’t like what he saw.
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There’s been less discussion over the TSA’s full body scanners recently, especially since the TSA’s brief but insanely expensive (with YOUR money!) experiment with the “nudie scanners” went away. However, Politico has a fascinating story from a former TSA agent revealing that much of what you suspect about the TSA is true: they were able to see you naked even as the scanners had little actual value. They do target attractive women and have a rather long list of official sounding “code names” for good looking women so they can alert each other to them while appearing professional.
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The EU is developing a secret plan to give the police the power to control cars by switching the engine off remotely
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A few months back, we wrote about the horrific treatment by Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol agents of On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and her friends and family at the border. They were all US citizens and yet were detained for many hours for no reason, had their electronics seized and were generally treated terribly. Homeland Security has refused to explain why it stopped them — though, the obvious answer is that they were Muslim. There is now a similar story from Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, the Emmy-nominated producer and host of Huffpost Live (full disclosure: he once had me on his show), discussing how he gets detained every time he returns to the country. This time, he was just coming back from the World Economic Forum at Davos, and he was given a document with a big X over his face and sent to a “special” line:
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This Sunday, BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem was arrested at JFK airport for money laundering. Allegedly, he has sold $1M worth of bitcoin, which has later been used to buy illegal drugs. But that’s not what money laundering is. Not at all. This can only be described as a harassment arrest.
TPP
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Yesterday, a diverse network of organizations opposing Fast Track legislation, including the Free Software Foundation, announced they are extending their ten days of activism following massive and widespread public action. Since its inception on January 22nd, more than a hundred new groups have joined the effort at StopFastTrack.com, including Coalition for a Prosperous America, Ben & Jerry’s, SumOfUs, Democracy for America, Friends of the Earth, Namecheap, and CREDO — adding to an already impressive, and unlikely, list of groups like reddit, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, MoveOn, LabelGMOs, and Fight for the Future.
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The European Union will offer to lift tariffs on nearly all goods imported from the United States as part of negotiations towards the world’s largest free-trade deal, people familiar with the proposal have told Reuters.
The offer will be made on Monday, a week ahead of face-to-face talks between EU trade chief Karel De Gucht and his U.S. counterpart Michael Froman in Washington, they said.
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“This is one of those issues that 90 percent of the left and 90 percent of the right agree on,” Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, said.
Obama dismayed union allies last week when he called for Congress to pass trade promotion authority legislation in his State of the Union address.
The authority, which was last given to former President George W. Bush, would prevent Congress from amending trade deals in exchange for the administration achieving specific negotiating objectives. It also would impose time limits on congressional consideration of trade agreements.
The authority is thought to make it much easier to negotiate trade deals, because foreign partners have more certainty that the deals will become U.S. law.
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Tonight President Obama is expected to address two linked subjects in his State of the Union address: the historic rise in U.S. income inequality and a trade policy agenda that threatens to exacerbate inequality. As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Obama cannot have it both ways: he cannot propose to close the yawning income gap while pushing to Fast Track through Congress a controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” deal that would widen the gap. The TPP would expand the status quo “free trade” model that study after study has found to be an increasingly significant contributor to U.S. income inequality.
Copyrights
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In the U.S. roughly half a million people have been sued for sharing copyrighted files in recent years, but filing of mass-lawsuits is not getting easier. A federal judge in Iowa has just issued a key order which makes mass-BitTorrent piracy lawsuits virtually impossible. The judge ruled that copyright holders can’t join multiple defendants in one suit, since there is no proof that they shared files with each other.
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The European Commission is planning an overhaul of the copyright monopoly laws in Europe, and is asking the public for input. The deadline for such input is February 5, one week from now. Activists have made it as easy as possible for you to submit meaningful input.
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We’ve written plenty of times about the importance of the public domain around here, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain has been Disney, a company which has regularly mined the public domain for the stories it then recreates and copyrights. Of course, somewhat depressingly, Disney also has been one of the most extreme players in keeping anything new out of the public domain, as pointed out by Tom Bell’s excellent “mickey mouse curve” showing how Disney has sought to push out the term of copyrights every time Mickey Mouse gets near the public domain.
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Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm had his custody extended for four more weeks during a behind-closed-doors court hearing today. The investigation into Gottfrid’s alleged hacking activities is still ongoing, with the prosecution today revealing that police records obtained during the hack may have been transferred to servers abroad.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Linux, accumulated and sorted over the past days for easier digestion
Linux 3.14
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With yesterday’s release of the Linux 3.14-rc1, here’s a look at the top features that were merged for introduction in the Linux 3.14 kernel.
The mentioned features are what I’ve found most interesting about this next major kernel release to date based upon the dozens of articles I’ve already authored on Phoronix about Linux 3.14, my testing already of 3.14 development code on multiple systems, analytics via Anzwix, etc.
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In a fixes pull request sent in by Red Hat’s David Airlie last night, a handful of DRM driver bugs were corrected. Additionally, there’s an update to the command submission (CS) parser for the R600 and R700 generation GPUs (the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 4000 series hardware) to support setting up the OpenGL Geometry Shader rings. The Evergreen GPUs and newer already has this GS support within their CS parser.
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“I realize that as a number, 3.14 looks familiar to people, and I had naming requests related to that. But that’s simply not how the nonsense kernel names work,” Torvalds wrote. “You can console yourself with the fact that the name doesn’t actually show up anywhere, and nobody really cares. So any pi-related name you make up will be *quite* as relevant as the one in the main Makefile, so don’t get depressed.”
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Linux kernel 3.14 RC1 includes updated drivers, architecture updates (ARM mostly, x86, PowerPC, s390, mips, and ia64), core kernel improvements, networking, mm, tooling, etc.
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While the EXT4 changes and XFS alterations for the Linux 3.14 kernel weren’t too exciting, the Btrfs file-system update was submitted today for Linux 3.14 and it’s definitely exciting.
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These latest MIPS designs, which were announced back in 2012, are described as “the interAptiv is a power-efficient multi-core microprocessor for use in system-on-chip (SoC) applications. The interAptiv combines a multi-threading pipeline with a coherence manager to deliver improved computational throughput and power efficiency. The interAptiv can contain one to four MIPS32R3 interAptiv cores, system level coherence manager with L2 cache, optional coherent I/O port, and optional floating point unit.”
Linux 3.13
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After the recent tests of AMD’s Kaveri APU with DDR3-800MHz to DDR3-2133MHz Linux memory testing and following up with AMD Kaveri DDR3-2400MHz testing on Ubuntu Linux, many Phoronix readers followed up with a request of new memory testing done on the Intel side. In this article are benchmarks of a Core i5 Haswell CPU looking at the CPU and graphics performance impact with memory frequency scaling on Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
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The first update for the stable Linux kernel 3.13 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman just a few minutes ago, starting the maintenance cycle for this new branch.
LLVM/Clang
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After a few days ago showing LLVM Clang 3.4 running very well on AMD’s Kaveri APU, here are some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.2, the latest GCC 4.9 development snapshot, and LLVM Clang 3.4 from an Intel Core i5 “Haswell” system running Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
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A group of developers remain hard at work on the LLVMLinux project to build the mainline Linux kernel on x86 and ARM with the Clang compiler.
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Thanks to Jakob’s work on Sparcv9 ABI in Clang and recent changes to Sparc code generator, I am happy to announce that Clang can self host itself on Linux/Sparc64 and on FreeBSD/Sparc64.
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Graphics Stack
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Rob Clark has landed a new shader compiler into his Freedreno Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno A3xx hardware.
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AMD is doing another large and important open-source graphics driver code drop this morning. This morning AMD is publishing their VCE code that allows for hardware-based video encoding.
Since last year AMD has provided open-source UVD support for video decoding on modern Radeon GPUs. There still isn’t any open-source UVD1 support (only UVD 2.0 and newer), but now AMD has turned its focus to open-source hardware-accelerated video encoding.
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The new compiler generates a dependency graph of instructions, including a few meta-instructions to handle PHI and preserve some extra information needed for register assignment, etc.
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Many people where worried about some Steam Machines using AMD graphics, I was too, but considering they are applying direct fixes for SteamOS as detailed below I don’t think we will have to worry too much.
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Benchmarks
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The latest Linux distribution benchmarks to share at Phoronix are a comparison of Manjaro Linux 0.8.8, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development state, openSUSE 13.1, and Fedora 20. All tests were done from an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell system to look at the current state of various Linux distributions when it comes to various areas of open-source performance.
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The latest kernel benchmarking that happened at Phoronix was testing every major Linux kernel release from Linux 3.3 through the latest stable Linux 3.13 release from an Intel Sandy Bridge system to see how the kernel performance has evolved during the hardware’s lifetime for key subsystems.
Misc.
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Daniel Phillips, a lead Tux3 developer, wrote to the kernel mailing list on Monday and acknowledged that it’s been a long time coming for Tux3… We covered Tux3 back in 2008 as the Tux2 successor that was never merged due to licensing issues and then it had been quite some time without any news on Tux3, until it was resurrected in early 2013.
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I reached out to Tip4Commit to find out just how many people were not collecting tips. One of its creators, Arsen Gasparyan, got back to me with some data. He shared with me that, as of last week, Tip4Commit supported 337 GitHub projects, for which 9,076 tips have been earned (a tip is earned when a pull request for a commit on a supported project is accepted), totaling about 3.34 Ƀ (worth about $2,650 at today’s Bitcoin exchange rate of $793.20). However, only 1.956 Ƀ has been received by 67 users, meaning 1.384 Ƀ, a little under $1,100 or about 40% of the value of all tips, has gone unclaimed.
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Posted in Law at 10:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
RIP Internet?
By Вени Марковски
Summary: The crisis of the Internet deepens as another form of censorship is added to a Net already riddled with censorship, surveillance, and prospectively DRM
OVER THE past few months we have stressed the importance of Net Neutrality in Europe [1, 2, 3]. The Web was invented in Europe (in Switzerland by a British scientist), unlike the Internet, which was a military project in the US.
This British scientist now sounds like somewhat of a puppet for Hollywood when he promotes DRM for the likes of Netflix. Many people on the Web are berating this founder of the Web over his outrageous DRM policy [1, 2], but he just doesn’t seem to care. He presses on with calls to re-decentralize the Web [1], pretending that censorship and authority have nothing to do with DRM (in that respect, he is hypocritical at best).
The Web in Europe faces issues other than DRM because there is also censorship (very widespread in the UK right now) and ‘soft’ censorship, which Net Neutrality is intended to tackle. It is reported [2], albeit denied by Verizon [3], that the war on Netflix is waged with tiered Web, and there is expectation of reaction from Netflix [4] although we are not seeing any. In fact, the US government seems to have almost given up on Net Neutrality and the EU Parliament will soon vote on the fate of Net Neutrality in Europe [5]. Given what some European politicians have been saying and doing, we oughtn’t assume that they are not going to follow the US model/precedence (laws in the US tend to spread through Europe to the rest of the world, e.g. patent law and copyright law). We cannot trust Internet service providers which are lobbying the government against our collective interest [6] and US politicians are still divided on the matter of Net Neutrality [7] (one would expect to see bipartisanship here). A site funded by Netscape’s founder says that 2014 is “The Year America Broke The Internet” [8]. One million people call on FCC to “save net neutrality” [9], but the lobbyist who runs the FCC (Wheeler) can hardly be bothered [10] (too weak a statement, seemingly just lip service).
The EU Parliament is still said to be “divided” on the issue of Net Neutrality [11]. Shouldn’t it be a non-controversial issue, where all politicians actually do what’s good for all voters? Apparently not. Companies like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T have the largest army of lobbyists (top ranked for budget), corrupting Congress and authorities outside the United States too. “AT&T Develops Credits System to Limit File-Sharing Bandwidth,” says one very recent headline [12] (already capitalising with caps after the Net Neutrality ruling). Scientists [13,14] and human rights advocates [15] explain the importance of the issue at stake as the Internet moves forward [16]. What seems to be happening here is gradual death of the Internet as we know it. Some traffic gets blocked or throttled, bizarre censorship rules are being imposed in the Web (ISPs conspire and collude), and DRM becomes part of the ‘standard’ (for Hollywood, or the copyright cartel), not to mention deep packet inspection (DPI) among other means of surveillance (by governments and corporations). Some “freedom”, eh? We need an alternative to the Internet, unless we can save what we already have… █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Twenty-five years after the Web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to reengage with its original design: a decentralized Internet that remains open to all.
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On January 17, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, as a matter of first impression, that First Amendment defamation rules apply equally to both the institutional press and individual speakers and writers, such as bloggers.
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Have U.S. Internet users’ worst fears just been realized? A new report from iScan Online programmer David Raphael claims to confirm that Verizon, which you might recall helped lead the charge against net neutrality regulations, has begun limiting the bandwidth utilized by certain websites for its FiOS Internet subscribers. In a blog post on Wednesday, Raphael shared a troubling account of issues that his company had been experiencing with service slowdowns. After digging into the problem he finally contacted Verizon customer support, which seemingly confirmed that the ISP is throttling bandwidth used by some cloud service providers including Amazon AWS, which supports huge services including Netflix and countless others. As BGR has learned, however, this is in fact not the case.
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If the war over net neutrality is going to be fought in the court of public opinion, as Netflix suggested last week, then the company could learn a lot from one of its most pernicious rivals: BitTorrent.
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In the coming days, committees of the European Parliament will decide the fate of Net neutrality in Europe. Ahead of European elections, our representatives cannot miss this opportunity to truly defend EU citizens’ rights, protect communications online and thus guarantee freedom of expression and information throughout Europe.
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Imagine going to netflix.com and picking a movie to watch on their instant streaming catalogue. After a few seconds of buffering, the movie starts playing and you sit back to enjoy your fifth viewing of “The Princess Diaries 2: The Royal Engagement.” The video starts stuttering again and a message pops-up: “Would you like to subscribe to the Super-Netflix plan that will allow you to view the thousands of movies in their catalogue in the highest quality possible?”
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Democrats in the House and Senate today introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act, a bill that would reinstate now-defunct net neutrality rules that were shot down last month.
Net neutrality, in its most basic form, is the idea that ISPs must treat all Internet data the same. Under its regime, ISPs are not allowed to selectively speed up or slow down information requested by their customers due to their selective gatekeeping of the services impacted. Or, more simply, Comcast can’t decide that a site you want to load, or a video you want to watch, should be slowed, and content that it prefers, accelerated.
With last month’s striking of the FCC’s net neutrality ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has changed the landscape of the Internet.
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A recent decision by a US Appeals court ended the regulation of the internet as we know it. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was deemed to have created a framework for ensuring the concept of “net neutrality” out-with the remit for the organisation it created itself. Now, a former FCC chairman has called for a “nuclear option” to reclassify Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as common carriers.
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Resurrect net neutrality rules by declaring ISPs common carriers, petition says.
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The pressure is mounting on the Federal Communications Commission to revisit how it will regulate net neutrality in the wake of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision that tossed the rules back in the regulator’s lap.
On Thursday, Free Press and more than 80 other organizations, including ACLU, Common Cause, ColorofChange, Demand Progress, and even the Harry Potter Alliance, delivered a petition to the FCC at the conclusion of the agency’s monthly meeting.
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The proposal of the European Commission on Net neutrality is currently discussed within the European Parliament. Committees appointed for opinion have already expressed their point of view on this text – except the Civil liberties (LIBE) committee, whose report will be voted on February 12th.
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A patent application by telecoms giant AT&T details a traffic management system set to add a little more heat to the net neutrality debate. Rather than customers using their Internet connections to freely access any kind of data, the telecoms giant envisions a system in which subscribers engaged in “non-permissible” transfers, such as file-sharing and movie downloading, can be sanctioned or marked for increased billing.
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IS THIS the end of the internet as we know it? On 14 January, the guiding principle of internet freedom, known as net neutrality, was demolished in a US appeals court in Washington DC. Pro-neutrality activists say it is the harbinger of dark times for our connected world. Information will no longer be free, but governed by the whims of big business. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Verizon and AT&T argue that since they built the physical backbone of the net they should be able to charge people to use it.
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I have just signed a petition on Net Neutrality; written to the MEP/Rapporteur for the ITRE process; and written to my MEPs. Ten years ago that would have taken me all day. Now it takes under half an hour.
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Net neutrality – the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must treat all data on the Internet equally – is vital to free speech. But earlier this month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the FCC’s net neutrality rules, jeopardizing the openness of the Internet that we have come to take for granted.
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Making HTTP/2 succeed means that it has to work with the existing Web. So, this effort is about getting the HTTP we know on the wire in a better way, not changing what the protocol means.
This means HTTP/2 isn’t introducing new methods, changing headers or switching around status codes. In fact, the library that you use for HTTP/1 can be updated to support HTTP/2 without changing any application code.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Virtualisation at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Distortion of the field of virtualisation even inside the Linux Foundation, which allowed Microsoft to step right in
AS we briefly noted yesterday, OpenDaylight is having an event (summit) and some Linux journalists attend. This is interesting because through OpenDaylight there is now somewhat of a proprietary software mole inside the Linux Foundation, acting as a manager.
Recall the time Red Hat hired from Microsoft for virtualisation, repeating the mistake of some other GNU/Linux vendors. Red Hat is complaining about the USPTO [1] and Microsoft’s patent extortion, so what was it thinking when it hired from Microsoft? The same mistake was made by the Linux Foundation when it hired a former Microsoft employee to head OpenDaylight after Microsoft had paid a lot of money. To quote a new article, “Microsoft is invested in OpenDaylight” (as in, bought it off to a degree, just like it did with Novell). We spent year covering the distortion of virtualisation, especially by Microsoft. Lots of Microsoft executives took over VMware, a Microsoft ally bought Xen, and generally speaking the Novell deal enabled Microsoft to turn GNU/Linux into a guest under Windows hosts. It also allowed Microsoft to promote Hyper-V right inside Linux (initially a GPL infringement), essentially making Linux dependent on proprietary spyware with NSA back doors.
“As a platinum member, Microsoft is paying half-a-million a year to the consortium and devoted ten full-time developers to OpenDaylight. That may be small change for Microsoft, but it’s not chicken feed either. The company has already demonstrated the first release of OpenDaylight, Hydrogen, on Azure” writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Azure to GNU/Linux is surveillance and patent tax. Is this where Linux is going? Hosting by Microsoft, which engages in extortion and racketeering? This is worrisome and we’re not the only ones claiming so. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A recent post on the top events ahead in 2014 for reforming abusive patent litigation focused on efforts by State Attorneys General, the Federal Trade Commission, and US Congress. Let’s now take a look to another field involved in the multi-prong strategy to address patent abuse: the Supreme Court, which is considering a number of important cases.
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest lies from Canalys are basically Microsoft promotion disguised as “just statistics”
WE HAVE REPEATEDLY seen and reported dubious claims of Microsoft “success” in mobile because it always turns out to be baseless propaganda, often from Microsoft-paid entities.
We are again seeing all sorts of ridiculous claims about Microsoft mobile “success” (tiny gains) — claims that are mostly thrown around for promotion by Microsoft booster and shameless (at times AstroTurfing) PR agencies. The Microsoft boosters really need some source to cite if they sell an illusion and ZDNet (part of ) is a popular source because there’s lots of Microsoft staff and boosters there, masquerading as “journalists” (Microsoft Zack, for example, plays the Microsoft “privacy” card at ZDNet these days, omitting his employment at Microsoft). ZDNet‘s worst writer, Rachel King (we covered her for propaganda and PR before), writes that “Windows Mobile is coming on the strongest, poised to be the biggest disruptor in 2014.” [1]
Oh, really?
This reminds us of familiar deception from Microsoft- and Apple-funded firms like Net Applications (no longer cited anymore; maybe after a while they stop funding disgraced entities and move on to another, just as they do with their lobbyists).
Canalys and its shameless lies are already debunked thoroughly by Tomi Ahonen [2]. “On Mythbusters today,” he wrote, “did Windows Phone really grow more last year than Android and iOS? We put Canalys to the test. And also in today’s program the Microsoft way to cook your books. Mythbusters team tires to turn a yes into a no. How can you tell the opposite of the truth through the magic of statistics.”
Remember when IDC was paid by Microsoft to make fake market share studies and also to push out to the press (not just IDG) bogus claims? Microsoft did the same with Gartner. So the question remains, what is the relationship (if any) between Canalys and Microsoft? We might never know. It took a long while to discover that Microsoft had paid Net Applications and also had former staff there (prolonging the myths around market share). It was not an isolated incident or example. We covered many more. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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For quite awhile now, there has been no question about which operating system dominates the smartphone market, domestic or worldwide. Android’s reach is not slowing down either, based on a new report from global market research firm Canalys.
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Mark Twain quoted Benjamin Disraeli saying that there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is the mythbusters edition about Canalys the supposedly professional mobile industry analyst house who would like to sell you their expensive reports. its been a while since we’ve had to do some work as the industry’s stats police but unfortunately for the supposedly trustworthy Canalys, this is already the second time they are on our agenda.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Revisiting the important role of Linux in devices, based on some of the latest news
THANKS to news sites like Linux Gizmos, it has been fairly easy to keep track of the growth of Linux (often with GNU) in embedded systems and devices. There are news updates about in-vehicle infotainment systems [1,2], embeddable Web servers [3], rugged scanners [4], systems with improve real-time support [5], Intel devices [6-8], and Raspberry Pi [9-13] among other single board computers [14-17].
It is interesting that devices where the operating system is less visible (if visible at all) have been scarcely explored by the press. This helped people belittle Linux, denying its important role not just in server rooms but also in devices that people are using every day around their houses and offices. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The new Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) for Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system development is now available and aimed at automotive tier-one suppliers for better graphics and optimized functionality. It’s the latest innovation to aid in the development of more responsive user interfaces.
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Mako Server was announced last June. Based on Barracuda and Lua, the embeddable webserver is sufficiently compact to run on a Raspberry Pi. Like the other RTL technologies, it’s cross-platform, but is focused primarily on Linux.
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SDG Systems announced today that the company has been approved to be a Yocto Project Participant. SDG Systems also announced the availability of the Janam XG series rugged, gun-type scanner running a Linux implementation built using the Yocto Project.
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Like Enea Linux 3.0, the new Enea LWRT focuses on real-time Linux support. Enea LWRT is primarily aimed at cellular base stations and media gateways that require real-time features like determinism, minimal interrupt latency, and high throughput, says the company. The solution is said to be optimized for integrating Linux with Enea’s OSEck.
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“Galileo” is software compatible with Arduino’s IDE, the operating system is a GNU/Linux distribution, which “runs” on the board only processor. The Arduino sketches are run as processes in the user space of the GNU/Linux operating system. The available IDE compiles the sketches in “.elf” format, an executable binary format, originally developed by UNIX System Laboratories and commonly used in GNU/Linux.
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Adlink has launched a compact, rugged industrial PC, featuring a 4th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, dual MiniPCIe slots, a uSIM socket, and Linux support.
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So far, Linux is the only supported OS Intel has mentioned for either the original single-core Quark or the dual-core model.
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SD cards are said to have a finite life. If you are planning on running a Raspberry Pi 24x7x365, there are some steps that you can take with GNU/Linux to extend the life of the card: here are some ideas.
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The brains live in a model B Raspberry Pi. I installed the GNU/Linux distribution Raspbian using the easy NOOBS on an SD card, then installed RasPBX — FreePBX and Asterisk — using the Pi Store via the desktop as that was easiest.
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Home automation is a hot topic at the moment but it isn’t an easy area to work in. Can a book on Linux and Raspberry Pi sort it all out?
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As the Raspberry Pi Foundation rockets towards producing its Pi-millionth board, it’s bringing with it an eager and innovative new generation of computer scientists. If educating an entire generation of children isn’t exciting enough, Linux just so happens to be the software smarts that underpins the whole venture.
But it can’t all be Pi for tea; we still have a huge main helping of desktop Linux goodness to tuck in to. We’re very excited about our roundup of VoIP clients, to embrace a world of fully-digital communication. From the now oddly Microsoft- owned Skype to the fantastic Jitsi, instant text, voice and video messaging is a slick and fast Linux affair.
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Back in 2006, Italian embedded Linux manufacturer Acme Systems shipped a penguin-shaped Tux Case for its original Fox single board computer (SBC). The new Arietta G25 computer-on-module (COM) is equipped with the same Atmel AT91SAM9G20 processor used by an updated Fox G20 SBC, as well as a newer 24-Euro Aria G25 COM that is more closely related to the Arietta G25 (see farther below). The Tux Case is still available, as well.
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The Kickstarter-backed “Rex” is a $99 robotics SBC with a DSP-enabled Cortex-A8 SoC, camera and audio I/O, dual I2C ports, and an Arduino-friendly “Alphalem OS” Linux distro.
A recent Georgia Tech study found that Kickstarter projects often find success thanks to the use of effective marketing buzzwords like “guaranteed.” That word never shows up the Rex project’s Kickstarter page, which is perhaps one reason why this promising project has yet to reach a third of its $90,000 funding goal, with less than two weeks to go. We think Rex is worth a closer look. (Satisfaction guaranteed!)
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Growing all around the world, in every continent
Summary: Geeksphone, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS, Tizen, Ubuntu, COS and WebOS show that Linux is not a one-horse race in mobile
NOBODY can say with a straight face that Linux is a failure. It has grown dominant in servers, phones, and increasingly in desktops too. It is a decent platform for gaming and it is a popular platform for development.
Other than Android there are several strong contenders that can gain significant market share. A few days ago we learned about Geeksphone, which boasts Firefox OS [1,2] among other operating systems. It’s not just about Android anymore [3]. Sailfish OS too looks promising [4]. Jolla staff claims it will run Android apps. Sailfish OS now runs on Android devices [5] and makes headlines [6-7] because it sells very well in countries like Finland. Then there’s Tizen [8-9], Ubuntu [10,11], and COS [12], making it seem like Linux domination in mobile is quite secure [13]. Even if Android ever faltered, there would be several competitors that are based on Linux (and are Free/libre software) ready to fill the gap. Even WebOS is no longer proprietary. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Currently the Geeksphone is referring to the Firefox OS option using the original “Boot2Gecko by Mozilla” name, since Geeksphone isn’t licensed to use the Firefox brand or logo.
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Of the many mobile operating systems in the marketplace, Android has the largest share of users, and Android is based on Linux. It’s not surprising then to know that Linux is also the basis for several new (if slow-moving) operating systems for mobile devices (phone, tablet, phablet). Some are in production today, but most are still in the development stages. Then again, this is the rule for most products in mobility today.
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Jolla’s Linux-based Sailfish project released its first handset in Finland this past November to favorable reviews. Since then the Meego-derived mobile operating system has publicized a few small, but interesting updates, including a new IRC client and a demo of the OS running on a Nexus 4 (watch the videos, below.)
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Hello Linux Geeksters. About an hour ago, a video of Sailfish OS running on a Google Nexus 4 smartphone has been uploaded on Youtube.
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It is known that Samsung has been working on Tizen-based smartphones since a long time now, but we have not seen any device emerge from that project yet. We might see the first Tizen smartphone launch at MWC this year. However before the official launch, a Korean website has already managed to publish an alleged picture of the Tizen-based Samsung ZEQ 9000 smartphone.
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Here is some good news for Tizen fans! Samsung has sent out invites for a February 23 event just ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) at Barcelona. The invitation promises a sneak preview of the latest Tizen devices.
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Will anyone ever be able to break Android and iOS’s stranglehold on the mobile landscape? Last year we saw signs that ‘someone’ might just be able to threaten them, with the first demonstrations of phones running Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch. But just when we were hoping that 2014 might be the breakthrough year, those hopes have quickly been dashed.
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Linux is a free and opensource operating system built by thousands of contributors across the world. The Linux kernel was developed by Linus Trovalds in 1991. Linux gained good traction after its release and in the years has become one of the most secure operating systems in the world. Linux is used by almost every organisation in the world at some point. Linux runs on mobile phones, tablets, servers, desktops, supercomputers and in embedded systems such as network routers, building automation controls, televisions and video game consoles. Linux was originally developed for Intel x86-based personal computers. Over the years, Linux been ported to other hardware platforms such as Arm, x86_64. It is a leading operating system on servers, mainframe computers and supercomputers.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Time is running out as Apple’s share slides
Summary: A lot of Android news from the past week, focusing to some degree on the effect on Apple and Microsoft
WOZ (Steve Wozniak), who is best known for his technical role in the early days of Apple (he is not a marketing charlatan like Steve Jobs), has just made headlines [1,2] because he wants an Android phone from Apple. This is not the first time that Wozniak is publicly endorsing Android. Apple must not like it.
It is evident that Android is taking over many areas, some of which Apple really craved (television, watches and so on). Now that there is Android consolidation [3,4] and some old FUD becomes obsolete, there is increased focus on Android at LG [5] (which Apple imitated when it made its first iPhone) and the Nexus 5 runs on LG hardware too [6,7], making a highly affordable phone like much of the Nexus series (subsidised to a degree). At MWC 2014 almost everything was Android based [8] and the growth of Android benefits/improves greatly the presence of Linux on the Web (client side [9]). It’s not just about tablets and smartphones anymore. Android is now growing on desktops and all sorts of devices [10,11], including embedded ones [12]. Replicant is maturing [13], providing a freer and more privacy-respecting version of Android, perhaps obviating the need for a Linux-based Android counterpart [14]. Android has so many powerful apps [15,16] and such a huge developers base that other OSes try to latch onto (Sailfish for sure, maybe even Firefox OS and Tizen). Even Nokia, led by Microsoft, is trying to lean Android’s way [17] (going further than what Wozniak suggested). The reality of the matter is, Android is doing huge financial damage to Apple [18] and to Microsoft’s operating systems monopoly [19].
It oughtn’t be too shocking that Microsoft and Apple increasingly turn to the USPTO and ITC, trying to simply ban Android devices or at least tax them. Recently, a patent troll which Microsoft passed patents to did some serious damage to Google and as TechDirt put it, “Company That Does Nothing May Get Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars From Google” (it should be noted that the one thing this company did was get patents from Microsoft).
To quote the article: “The patent system is completely broken. Towards the end of 2012, we wrote about how a patent troll named Vringo, using some patents (6,314,420 and 6,775,664), had won a lawsuit against Google. Vringo was a failed ringtone company that had bought those highly questionable patents from the failed search engine Lycos and then sued basically everyone who ran a search engine. Microsoft agreed to settle (with a bizarre stipulation promising to pay 5% of whatever Google finally had to pay), while Google agreed to indemnify a bunch of the others that were all using Google’s search under their own. The jury found that Google’s AdWords product infringed, and gave an award much lower than what Vringo had asked for.”
What’s missing from this analysis is the passage of patents from Microsoft to Vringo. There is a world war against Android, which has pretty much taken over the world. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Now, Wozniak wants Apple to work with Google and make Android iPhones. He says,“We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.”
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Yes, folks, this is real life. In an interview with Wired, at the Apps World North America conference, Steve Wozniak revealed his belief that Apple should create a phone using Google’s Android operating system. According to him, “There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market … We could play in two arenas at the same time.” As Wired’s Mat Honan notes, the idea of such a handset wouldn’t be technically impossible, but anyone who’s familiar with the Apple of today knows that the chances of this actually happening are slim to none.
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Analyzing Google Play data from the seven days ending Tuesday, Google’s Android developer dashboard pegged Jelly Bean’s collective reach at about 60.5 percent. Breaking down those beans, 4.1.x held the highest share with 35.5 percent, followed by 4.2.x with 16.3 percent and Android 4.3 with 8.9 percent
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On the contrary, fully 62.5 per cent of all Android devices are now running any of the three “Jelly Bean” iterations or “KitKat,” the brand-new version of the OS that launched last Halloween.
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Sprint’s mobile data is typically not the first, or the second, or even the third to come to mind when looking for a zippy connection in the US, but the company is looking to change this impression with its new tri-band LTE network, more memorably known as Sprint Spark. Unfortunately, only a limited number of the carrier’s phones are able to take advantage of this new capability, with some of them requiring an OTA before they’re ready. Today Sprint has announced that the LG G2′s update is on its way.
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In a released a statement, LG stated; “The Nexus line has always been about doing things differently and consumers who share this philosophy have been among our most loyal fans,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “We’re carrying this thinking over to the red Nexus 5, which we think will catch the eye of consumers who want to make an even bolder statement.”
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The Nexus line, which evolved from a developer’s device to a premium phone, is now a serious threat to iPhone. But, the consumers don’t care about the smartphone wars as much as we do. For them, it’s a lingering question as to which phone to invest their hard-earned money into given that both devices offer spectacular features. So, if you’re confused as to which smartphone to buy, here’s a quick comparison between the two giants.
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After launching the super slim Huawei Ascend P6 all the way back in June 2013, the Chinese company may use MWC to showcase the Ascend P6S.
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Cambodia is an emerging market and that other OS is sinking into oblivion pretty rapidly. “8″ is already swamped by Android/Linux, XP too, and “7″ is sliding rapidly. There is just no way for Wintel to keep up with sales of small cheap computers. In January 2013, the entire share of page-views counting desktops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones was 64.4% Wintel. Now, it’s 51.7%. That’s a 20% per annum decline. The tax is too prohibitive. Bundling the OS with the hardware doesn’t hide anything when there’s competitive hardware and software in the market. The positive feedback that locked the world into Wintel is now pushing the world away from M$. A similar pattern is emerging in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and many other regions although less dramatic. It’s all good.
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Next week, the price of the MOTA returns to $80, which, considering the prices of other smart watches, is still a steal of a deal. At the moment, the MOTA does not support third party apps like the Pebble or the Gear but it will pair with your Android or iOS device over bluetooth, which is more than we can say for the Gear (the Gear only pairs with certain Samsung devices at the moment). The watch vibrates to notify users of incoming calls and can display the caller’s ID or the incoming number. As is expected, one may control media playback on a phone or tablet using the watch.
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Auris, which already sells an $80 “Skye” WiFi music receiver and a $50 “FreeDa” Bluetooth receiver, is now prepping an Android 4.2.2-based portable combination speaker and media-streamer called Wily. The Wily device is launching today on Kickstarter with pledges set at $149 for the 8GB version and $168 for the 16GB model, and will eventually move to a retail price of $239 and $269, respectively, once the funding round is over. The devices are set to ship in June.
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A line should be drawn between true embedded Linux distros and Android’s solitary distro adapted for embedded consumer functions, said Suse’s Matthias Eckermann. He does not see Android going into enterprise areas involving integrated systems. “With flexibility, Android is one stack and one purpose. That is not the case with a full-fledged embedded Linux used for multiple purposes.”
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The Replicant project, which builds open source Android ROMs, has reached a major milestone in releasing its first Android 4.2 (“Jelly Bean”) version. Replicant 4.2 adds support for the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and improves security, among other enhancements. Replicant is part of a larger movement to develop more open source smartphones, including the SHR mobile Linux OS project and the Fairphone and Neo900 hardware/software projects.
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There are several traits that set My Expenses apart from the myriad of other expense tracking apps for Android. Firstly, My Expenses is an open source app, and it’s available on both Google Play Store and F-Droid. More importantly, though, the app strikes a perfect balance between functionality and ease-of-use.
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We have been hearing rumours about an alleged Android-powered Nokia device for a long while. Until now we just had few random pics of the device codenamed Nokia Normandy. Our trusted source @evleaks has however managed to provide us with some idea about the internal specifications we can expect.
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Ok then we have Apple (Samsung released Q4 numbers on Friday but as usual, they didnt’ give us their smartphone number other than the total smartphone shipments were up.. I am projecting over 90M but lets see what the big analyst houses count for our number in early February)
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Android is going to become popular with home and SOHO users. It’s going to enable all those users who love Android on their tablets and smartphones to enjoy the same apps on their desktops.
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