01.21.11
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Siim Kallas with George Bush
Summary: Why the European Commission continues to disappoint freedom proponents following staff changes and perhaps a little entryism
BELATED criticism of the second version of EIF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] is coming all at once. The Red Hat-run site, opensource.com, has just posted yet another interpretation of the EIFv2, this time not Red Hat’s official response. It starts with:
In December, the long awaited version 2.0 of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) was released by the European Commission. Version 1.0 had defined “open standard” as royalty-free, a definition of enormous impact on standards policy because it focused on the user perspective rather than the perspective of standards development organizations. Some standards organizations claim that “open standards” refers only to the way the standard was developed – not the terms of availability. In addition, some argue that “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing (FRAND or simply RAND – without the “fair,” as it is known in the U.S.) should be the baseline for openness, not “royalty-free” (RF).
EIF v2 takes the broader perspective on “openness” – that it pertains to the terms of availability, not just the process under which the standard is developed. However, it drops the requirement that “open” = royalty-free. In fact, even “fully open” does not mean royalty-free. The key section reads:
If the openness principle is applied in full…. Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software.
This seems to say that RF is no more open than (F)RAND, although RF is in fact an especially open subset of (F)RAND. Unless there are unusual special requirements, anything licensed royalty-free is commonly considered to be available under “free, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory” terms.
To save people the trouble of reading it all, in conclusion states the author:
PCAST is not the government but it is the highest private sector advisory body on science and technology. Its views are taken seriously, especially on something as fundamental as de facto definitions. The European Commission is a government agency and in this case is dealing with procurement and interoperation within government agencies. In the new version of the European Interoperability Framework, it has backtracked, offering guidance that defies common understanding. It muddles the policy framework by introducing new ambiguities and perpetuating debate about fundamental definitions.
considered to be available under “free, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory” terms.
It turns out that we also missed the announcement from APRIL, which said: “EU Commission moving away from interoperability for European public services.”
The European Commission released on December 16th, 2010 its communication relative to its “Interoperability Strategy and Framework for public services”. This document is carrying on an unacceptable reversal on interoperability issues, and ratifies the disappearance of open standards, which were already threatened by the Digital Agenda for Europe.
[...]
April is therefore staying alert in order to ensure that Free Software players will not be excluded from the actions that will be set forth following this communication.
The FFII’s president notes that Europe drops the ball even with its own software:
For technical reasons, the GPF editor has been designed as a Windows application.
Around the same time, the FFII folks saw some worrying material regarding the European Commission. As noted the other day, there is an inexplicable rush to advance the EU patent, which this document from December in Brussels helps elucidate by stating: “On 1 August 2000, the Commission adopted a proposal for a Council Regulation on the Community patent[1]. The Commission proposed the creation of a unitary Community patent which would co-exist with national patents granted by national patent offices of the Member States and European patents granted under the European Patent Convention (EPC) by the European Patent Office (EPO). As a well functioning centralised patent granting system had already been set up in Europe by the EPC in the 1970s, it was envisaged that the Community patent would also be granted by the EPO. Users of the patent system would be free to choose which type of patent protection best suited their needs.
“The Commission proposal aimed at the creation of a Community patent that would be attractive to the users of the patent system in Europe, in particular by proposing simplified and cost-effective translation arrangements. In particular, the Commission proposed that after grant of the Community patent by the EPO in one of the official languages of the EPO (English, French or German) and publication in that language together with a translation of the claims into the other two official languages of the EPO, the Community patent would have taken effect in the entire Union.”
It has been demonstrated before that the European Commission was changed from the inside (staff changes). It no longer seems as Free/open source software-friendly as it used to be, so its response to CPTN does not surprise us. █
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Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 10:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The West loses its advantage to the East by increasing grounds for litigation without much cross-continent/country leverage
A little while ago we wrote about the impact of excessive patenting, especially when it comes to the rising power of China (post available in Spanish). China is not going to sit back and let itself be abused by the West. In fact, based on this report, “China Patent Grants up 40%, Filings Up 25% in 2010″:
Not long after the announcement came out that the USPTO granted a record number of patents in 2010, China’s SIPO officially announced today that the number of patents granted in China in 2010 was 40 percent higher than in 2009, receiving over 1.2 million patent applications and approving 814,825 requests among them last year. The application number was over 25 percent more than that in 2009.
Over in the US, a “Patent Troll Takes Twitter To Court For Creating Virtual Community of Celebs” and China may be laughing at this self-nuking act that only shuts down innovation rather than promote any. It can lead companies to expansion in China where it’s safer for a corporation (less litigation, less regulation).
You read that right – someone is apparently suing Twitter because it lets celebs interact online. The popular micro-blogging service partly owes its popularity to celebrities like P Diddy, Ellen Degeneres, 50 Cent, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore who command millions of Twitter followers. It’s exactly this aspect of the service that’s now under fire from little-known VS Technologies, LLC that doesn’t even have a website. This company apparently holds rights to a 2002 patent entitled “Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people” and they’re seeking an unspecified amount of damages to be paid that “cannot be less than would constitute a reasonable royalty for the use of the patented technology, together with interest and costs as fixed by this Court,” as they’ve put it.
In Europe too we have been seeing some discouraging news recently (Court of Justice ruling on Czech GUIs) and Falk Metzler, a lawyer, writes about it in his blog. What he says in the first part is a bit of an introduction:
Even though up to now this blog predominantly reported on patent issues and IP politics, it is nevertheless intended to cover other types of software-related intellectual property as well.
I thus feel that I have to mention at least briefly the recent decision of the European Court of Justice in case C-393/09 (BSA vs. Ministry of Culture of the CR), which is dealing with copyright protection of graphical user interfaces (GUI).
How are people supposed to code these days? In the past, all one had to do was ensure that his/her code was written by oneself. These days, people are expected to read and understand hundreds of thousands of patents and now be familiar with loads of GUI designs/layouts that are ‘protected’ by copyright? Metzler shows the KDE4 desktop in his blog posts. Is he trying imply something? What type of future does the West offer to developers if restrictions that they are not interested in are put in place to impede them? I write this as a concerned developer myself. Programming jobs are being eliminated in order to give way to lawyers and monopolies they sometimes represent. █
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Posted in Mono, Quote at 9:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
…So spread the word about Monofree and Mononono. Impede entryism by Mono and Moonlight.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Patents at 9:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google’s new CEO Larry Page would be wise to protect his company from attacks by eliminating the real source of this problem
THE current debate about Chrome and WebM became a broader debate about proprietary/patents-encumbered codecs versus free ones. We covered this a couple of days ago because Microsoft boosters are lying.
One of our readers noticed this MPEG LA announcement which everyone appears to have overlooked. MPEG LA is calling for even more patents.
MPEG LA invites any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the MVC Standard to submit them by February 18, 2011 for evaluation of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators in order to participate in the creation of, and determine licensing terms for, a joint MVC patent license.
Steve Jobs, who has just vanished again, warned that his mates at MPEG LA (run by a patent troll) will fight against free codecs using patents. This one person seems to agree if not corroborate too. The opening says:
People say I am a troll, a hater of Open Source, an H.264 fan boy, a dozen other things, but I am just a realist. (And was on the SMPTE VC1 Ratification committee).
The title by the way is “Google Will Have To Pony Up To Mpeg LA: Why WebM Is NOT Going To Be Royalty Free”.
As one person put it in Twitter, it is better to have a free format/codec which may later come under dispute for Google to resolve than to go straight into the codec Hell offered by the MPEG LA cartel.
“Help those who actively support abolishing software patents.”Google would be wise to lobby for shutdown of software patents, but as we noted before, Google’s patents database for the US shows that it is part of the problem (see this ludicrous patent). Google says: “Because of our long-term interests in open source, we may not have adequate patent protection for certain innovations” [via Benjamin Henrion].
Fine, Google. Then get rid of patents already. Help those who actively support abolishing software patents. The wrath of MPEG LA is only relevant to the United Stated and Japan, where software patents are formally acknowledged as valid. Changing this is not an impossible task. SJVN said last night that “[w]hen [he] spoke with Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source program manager, a few years back when Google was big but not yet Google, DiBona told [him], that Page was “passionate about open source.” DiBona added, that Google also supported its engineers working on “open-source and Linux,” and that “many of them use part of their time to work on open-source projects.”” Unlike Page, Eric Schmidt defended intellectual property (“fundamental to how we operate”).
Someone should pressure Mr. Page to start rebelling against the US patent system, which also harms Android. Software patents are neither Google’s friend nor society’s friend. Do no evil, Google, and help us get rid of those evil software patents. █
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Posted in Australia, Novell, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 9:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s OOXML is proving to be more of a farce now that people in Australia respond to absurd suggestions; Novell influence in LibreOffice is poisonous (promotes OOXML); some businesses may choose hosted spreadsheets that can render the formats debate less relevant
SOME days ago we wrote about Australia making a fatal mistake (post available in Spanish too) by assuming that Microsoft’s proprietary formats will help ensure compatibility. The stupidity surrounding this assertion has been noted just about everywhere by now. Rob Weir from IBM wrote:
Australia has rejected the ISO version of OOXML and gone with the Ecma version that ISO rejected. Is everything upside down there?
Later he added:
@homembit It is a slap in the face for the OOXML efforts in SC34. With PDF they specified the ISO version, for example.
Microsoft’s 'fox' Alex Brown already spins it in Twitter and in his blog. How appalling. And other OOXML drones like Jesper Lund Stocholm are there as well, as expected. But anyway, the subject has been covered extensively by now (if not here then elsewhere) and we are a lot more concerned about Novell’s influence inside LibreOffice. It continues to cause problems, based on this LWN report which has just been made publicly available. It says:
Just before the end of the year, Larry Gusaas called on the LibreOffice community to refuse to support the writing of OOXML files. Standard OpenOffice.org is able to read such files, but will not write them; that is, according to Larry, how things should be. But LibreOffice is based on the Go-oo project, which is the version of OpenOffice.org which has actually been shipped by most Linux distributions. This version does have the ability to write OOXML files; thus, LibreOffice does as well.
Quite a few people supported Larry’s desire for read-only OOXML support in LibreOffice; one could easily peruse the thread and come to the conclusion that the LibreOffice community is overwhelming opposed to the idea of writing in that format. Even so, a number of LibreOffice developers have made it clear (repeatedly) that they have no intention of removing the ability to write OOXML files. There is, thus, no need to worry that we might have to go on using Go-oo after all.
We wrote about this before [1, 2]. Just a day or so ago it was a Novell employee who announced the latest release/build of LibreOffice, so there is room for concern. Novell was paid by Microsoft to support OOXML and LibreOffice should stay true to its promise of avoiding OOXML.
As one last bit of news, consider as food for thought the fact that more companies choose collaboration with SaaS, including wikis for example. Google Apps is one example of it, but there are more. The IDG article “Why some companies are ditching their spreadsheets” sheds some more light about what may become a trend, especially now that spreadsheets become ever more massive and sometimes require compute clusters to work with.
Cohen’s frustration with spreadsheets is not unique. As decision-making becomes more collaborative and workforces grow more distributed and global, the days of compiling a spreadsheet, mailing or e-mailing it to colleagues, then manually inputting updates and re-sending it seem antiquated.
A transition to the back end (server) for large operations on massive databases may lead to further distancing from Microsoft Office/OOXML. Maybe it is time to rethink the relevance of interchange formats that mostly apply to desktop computing. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft mobbyists and people whom the company feeds material for attacks on the competition are especially afraid of OIN and Android
WE OFTEN state that objects and entities which Microsoft proponents target the most are those which worry Microsoft the most. This general rule usually proves to be applicable in a wide range of debates, including the recent one about codecs (more on that in a later post).
For those who have not been paying attention, Microsoft has been patenting a lot recently. A lot. New products hardly come from the company, but staff is very busy filling out paperwork and coming up with some of the most ludicrous ideas (if they can even be called that) and try to gain a monopoly on those, in order to scare competitors and have them pass ‘protection money’ to Microsoft. This is not business, it’s racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
One resistor which piqued Microsoft’s curiosity is the OIN, where many companies pool their patents strictly for defensive purposes. Some make the claim that the OIN would render the patent system obsolete, but this is truly a stretch.
Techrights continues to stress that Microsoft has begun playing a reactionary game (or a reaction to OIN’s reaction) by setting up all sorts of entities, including CPTN [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], which puts a large lump of OIN’s patents in Microsoft’s own pool. Needless to say, it’s a cold war; it is unlikely that a war will erupt as it’s more like a bunch of lawyers flexing their muscles papers and seeing who can be extorted in order to “maximise shareholders’ value” or whatever.
“Microsoft mobbyists even brag about the number of lawsuits against Android.”There is no need to hide the fact that Google uses Linux to win the mobile/smartphones war. Android has begun moving up the food chain (greater scale), so at stake here we have not just phones anymore. Microsoft understands this, which is why Microsoft and its shells or allies are suing Google — a trend we have been tracking and showing for many months. Microsoft mobbyists even brag about the number of lawsuits against Android. This mirrors exactly what Steve Ballmer et al. tell journalists. Google is a member of the OIN, which is still trying to find new ways to ‘hack’ the patent system and defend Linux from it.
There are all sorts of theories about CPTN and its purpose. The mobbyists try to spin it and mass-mailing journalists is one of their tools. As Gordon puts it in relation to an observation made here yesterday, “apparently in [Microsoft Florian's] world Microsoft are innovators, so there are other worlds than this it seems… lol, just noticed the “he’s been writing it since Jan 2010″ so a whopping ONE YEAR adventure then…”
The presence of Microsoft Florian in The Guardian also came under fire by Satipera, who wrote: “The Guardian is repeating Florian Mueller’s paid for propaganda word for word. #swpats #Guardiantechfail”
One line of propaganda is that Android is “risky” because of patents. Another line of propaganda from this mobbyist is that despite complaints from both Free software and open source entities, there is nothing wrong with the CPTN patents cartel (the mobbyist uses the European Commission’s response, which was mentioned initially by him, but later by the press and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols [1, 2]). When there is some insider material about Microsoft (especially if it’s favourable to Microsoft), the mobbyist usually gets it first and leaked/exclusive documents from the past show us that Microsoft tends to feed those. How about those TurboHercules letters (Microsoft Florian got the “scoop”) which smeared IBM before it turned out that Microsoft owned part of TurboHercules? Someone is probably being briefed for lobbying purposes. Groklaw responds to it all as follows:
It also means that the EU Commission’s answer to a question on January 17 that “on the basis of the information currently available at this stage” it seemed unlikely the deal “requires a notification to the Commission under the Merger Regulation” or that “the mere acquisition of the patents in question by CPTN Holdings would lead to an infringement of EU competition rules” came prior to this renewed filing, which was filed not with the EU Commission anyhow but with the German Federal Cartel Office. That is who will decide the matter there, and the US DOJ will consider the matter in the US. No one has filed a complaint with the EU Commission that I know of, not that it couldn’t happen. There is a lot of subtle FUD in the air from the usual suspects, if I might say so.
Hopefully other companies and entities will express their concerns as well.
For those who insist that Microsoft Florian still deserves the benefit of some doubt, bear in mind that this week too the mobbyist links to Maureen O’Gara repeatedly (vice versa too) and still chats with Rob Enderle. These are some of the vilest, most dishonest and ethically-corrupt people who have attacked Linux for a long time. Microsoft Florian attaches himself to these people, amongst others of their type. He links to Mary Jo Foley, who links back to him. It’s like Club Microsoft. As we showed before, the mobbyist has been defending CPTN and smearing OIN; he talks to pro-Microsoft reporters and anti-Free software Internet trolls. People can draw their own conclusions and also realise that the attacks on OIN and Android do confirm that they are major threats to Microsoft. █
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Posted in Australia, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
(ODF | PDF | English/original)
Resumen: Australia decreta el propietario Microsoft Office Open XML como formato de documentos officiales, los reportes informan.
El Gobierno de Australia ha reforzado el monopolio de Microsoft al decidir que los ciudadanos deben usar productos caros, propietarios, y con errores de Microsoft para comunicarse con los servidores públicos. Aquí el crítico informe de Australia [http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245276,australia-mandates-microsofts-open-office-xml.aspx](un ejemplo de buen periodismo):
La particular OOXML norma fue rechazada por la Organización Internacional de Normalización (ISO) por que estaba llena de dependencias de la plataforma Windows, de acuerdo a sus oponentes.
La Alianza del Formato de Documentos Abierto ODF, respaldado por IBM y Google, ha advertido sobre la adopción del estándar ECMA-376 por los gobiernos.
“El uso de ECMA-376, esencialmente ENCADENA al adoptante a Microsoft Office”, advirtió el grupo de presión en octubre del año pasado en un documento titulado “¿Qué necesitan los Gobiernos Saber?”
Esa norma, señaló, “contiene dependencias de la plataforma Windows” que Microsoft se vio obligado a “eliminar” en el marco del proceso de la ISO con el fin de conseguir su aprobación como norma ISO-29500 – una norma que hasta la fecha el Microsoft Office 2010 ha incumplido.
Para citar el resumen de Slashdot[http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=11/01/19/0059209]:
“El Gobierno de Australia ha lanzado un entorno común de operación política de escritorio – Entre los controles de “seguridad”, destinadas a “reducir” el potencial de fugas de datos del Gobierno – los mandatos de la ECMA-376 versión de Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) estándar y suites de productividad que pueden “leer y escribir” el formato docx., efectivamente esclavizando a los servidores públicos del país al uso de Microsoft Office. La política [PDF] Cung parece limitar los sistemas operativos de escritorio a las ofertas de grandes, comerciales disponibles en el mercado a expensas de las pequeñas distribuciones”.
Para repetir algunas historias acerca de Australia y OOXML (hay más):
* Si Usted Vive en Australia, la Justicia Necesita su Ayuda [http://techrights.org/2008/02/20/australia-geneva-brm-ooxml/]
* OOXML: Exclusión de Apilamiento, y Snubbing en los EE.UU., Australia y Nueva Zelanda [http://techrights.org/2008/03/10/moox-stacking-exclusion-snubbing/]
* Australia Potencialmente Dañada por Microsoft (OOXML “Sí” Voto) [http://techrights.org/2008/02/15/rick-jelliffe-for-aussie/]
Vamos a recordar a la gente en Australia que Microsoft pagó a ejercer presión para OOXML y a escondidas editar Wikipedia [1[http://techrights.org/2008/03/22/ooxml-spec-mess-custom/], 2[http://techrights.org/2008/02/26/standards-australia-rick-jelliffe/], 3[http://techrights.org/2010/04/06/ibm-on-withdrawing-microsofts-ooxml/]]. █
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* Lock-in – Tiene no directa traduccion al Español. -Consideremoslo un Anglicanismo del finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI- Sonaría muy tonto e incomprensible algo como “candado”, pero mucho mas claro como “PRISION”.
-Esta palabra viene a significar literalmente la forzosa sumisión a formatos electrónicos que hacen muy difícil escaparse de ellos.
-Por ejemplo una persona u organización que ha usado Microsoft Office durante mucho tiempo. Cuando sale una nueva versión es FORZADO a PAGA
R por ella por que Microsoft SIEMPRE ha creado y creará incompatibilidades artificiales, y echarle la culpa a la competencia. -Lease los Co
mes vs Microsoft para ver como esto ha sido, es, y será una de sus tácticas para crear dependencia en sus productos. Por ello viene a ser un instrumento de dominación. El Colonialismo Digital, del que debemos romper cadenas AHORA para bienestar de las nuestro y las fúturas generaciones.
Many thanks to Eduardo Landaveri of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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But it’s looking like there is some light at the end of the tunnel, at least in the industry in which we all work and play. According to Dice.com, a career website for IT and engineering professionals, job postings on its site are up 40 percent year-over-year. What’s better? Dice.com says that postings asking for Linux knowledge are up 47 percent over last year, while Windows-related postings are only up 40 percent.
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Ballnux
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Looks like it’s not just the iPhone 4 that’s capable of making professionally-made movies. Korean director Kim Dae-Woo is poised to show off his filmmaking skills by shooting an entire movie using a Samsung Galaxy S, the first ever, titled “Age of Milk.”
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Mobile news site PocketNow has secured an EARTH-SHATTERING trio of exclusives today, with rendered images of three possible new HTC Android phones currently up on the site.
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Applications
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In short, Newsbeuter can be configured every which way from Sunday. The color scheme, how feeds are displayed, how articles are bookmarked or saved for later — it’s one of the most flexible feed readers that you’ll encounter. It’s also one that requires a certain amount of dedication — configuring Newsbeuter to work just right can take quite a lot of experimentation. Like Mutt, this pays heavy dividends for users who spend a great deal of time skimming feeds. For casual users, Newsbeuter is probably overkill.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt
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Recently the wife wanted to go to JoAnne’s so I went to Borders and the latest issue of Linux Format Magazine (which I used to be subscribed to) had a QT programming example. I bought the issue solely for that. It had this neat tutorial on QT Quick which is this semi-new prototyping language based on Javascript. In just a few lines of code (less than 100 for sure), Graham Chapman showed how to create a program that would take a geo feed from flickr and map the photos onto Google.
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We want Qt to have the best possible JavaScript technology. To make this happen, we need the ability to make drastic changes to the implementation — even replacing it — underneath our public APIs. If an API exposes implementation details, that will cause us to limp.
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Red Hat Family
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The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is happy to announce the release of EPEL 6 today!
EPEL 6 is a collection of add-on packages available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and other compatible systems, maintained by the community under the umbrella of the Fedora Project. EPEL 6 is designed to supplement RHEL 6 by providing additional functionality and does not replace any RHEL 6 packages. As a community project, EPEL is maintained and supported by volunteers via Bugzilla and
mailing lists. EPEL is not commercially supported by Red Hat, Inc.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Cobbler, a linux installation server originally developer by Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies group to accelerate setup of network installation environments, has been accepted into the Ubuntu Archive according to Chuck Short on his blog earlier today.
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Unity’s launcher could get some added oomph with the release of a new Launcher API for developers to use.
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For the 11.04 Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase we (the attendees at the UDS session) thought it would be really good to set a theme. The decision was made in order to encourage people to create content with wider artistic merit.
The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is designed to help all of us show off the beauty of our creative work. We want the brief to inspire people to explore and celebrate their interpretation of Freedom.
The Brief: To create photography, illustration, music and video which express Freedom.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu Artwork team has been going through a revival over the last few months, which is great, they now offer services to other Ubuntu teams in a structured way.
We took them up on their offer and requested a wallpaper for the next release that we can also use to base the rest of the artwork on.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
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QTv by Harri Kovalainen is a TV series searcher, a Qml interface for searching TV show information from thetvdb.com.
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As you know, MeeGo isn’t just for phones and tablets, it’s pretty much for everything that has a screen or can be viewed on a screen. Here’s the first generation of Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo for the TV on the Amino Freedom OTT Hybrid Media Centre box, brought to you by the MeeGo Experts folks who went to CES 2011. (Cheers for the tip Jim!)
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The GNOME Foundation Board is happy to announce that following the call for bids for MeeGo/GTK+ integration work, Igalia was selected as the preferred bidder to perform the work set out.
We received a number of very interesting bids for the project, but Igalia’s bid was the one that focused the most on integrating elements of Hildon into GTK+ upstream. This should mean easier porting of older Hildon/Maemo applications to the new MeeGo Handset platform, as well as easier porting of existing desktop GTK+ applications to the handset.
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Who, after hearing about Android, the Linux-based smartphone and tablet operating system for the first time decided that Google didn’t want to just support it, but buy Android and keep it open? That was Page.
When I spoke with Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source program manager, a few years back when Google was big but not yet Google, DiBona told me, that Page was “passionate about open source.” DiBona added, that Google also supported its engineers working on “open-source and Linux,” and that “many of them use part of their time to work on open-source projects.”
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Some people seem to be confused about the Chromium release management, the weird x.y.z.t versions, the channels, the PPAs… I often receive questions about those subjects from end-users, but also from fellow Ubuntu developers. In this post, I will try to explain and demystify a few things. In order to do that, I also need to cover Google Chrome.
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Tech Drive-in has covered several posts on useful Google Chrome extensions before, the most prominent being the one where we featured useful Chrome extensions for a more secure browsing experience. But this one is special. A Last.fm music player extension for Google Chrome that does exactly what you expect it to.
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Mozilla
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The Skype Toolbar for Firefox is an extension that detects phone numbers in web pages, and re-renders them as a clickable button that can be used to dial the number using the Skype desktop application. This extension is bundled with the Skype application, and is installed into Firefox by default when Skype is installed or, in some circumstances, updated. As a result, a large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly.
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Oracle
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This release contains translation and branding updates, bug fixes and general performance improvements. The full list of changes since RC3 can be found online here.
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Project Releases
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On behalf of the Parrot team and an enthusiastic but undiscriminating dachshund that followed me home last week, I’m proud to announce Parrot 3.0.0, also known as “Beef Stew”, or at the insistence of a shadowy government organization, “Snowflake”. Parrot is a virtual machine that dreams about running all dynamic languages everywhere, even the one you’re think about right now. Parrot has big plans, even if needs a haircut and sometimes goes outside with its shoes untied.
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Government
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It just occurred to me that both sides of the political arena should be supporting and promoting FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) software for different reasons.
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Openness/Sharing
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Several European countries have set very ambitious digitization goals. The National Library of the Netherlands has committed to digitizing everything – all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals dating back to 1470. The National Library of Norway set a similar goal in 2005, setting in motion plans to digitize its entire collection that now includes 170,000 books, 250,000 newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of television and 500,000 photographs.
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I began to understand something about the nature of this gap when Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation made a comment about the place of knowledge workers (programmers, architects, designers, writers, salespeople, managers) in the commons movement. To paraphrase, he said they have a different world view than common activists on the left or right but share a similar vision. I thought that this might explain the reception of my ideas on the listserv. It also resonated with what I learned about the differences between the social organization of moderates and those at the political extremes while writing white papers for a political consultancy.
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Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol that revolutionized file-sharing, is finalizing the code for his new P2P-live streaming protocol. With his efforts he aims to develop a piece of code superior to all other streaming solutions on the market today. The release of the application is still a few months away, but Cohen has shown a demo exclusively to TorrentFreak.
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The Department of Labor in partnership with the Department of Education announced two billion dollars in grants to support educational and career training programs for workers. Known as the “Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant” – or TAA CCCT inside the Beltway – the program is precedent setting in its magnitude of support for 21st century job skill training and for making the default-setting in grantmaking much more open.
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Belarus today accused EU members Poland and Germany of seeking to topple President Alyaksandr Lukashenka by organizing the December mass protests against his reelection.
“Sovyetskaya Belorussia,” the official newspaper of the presidential administration, today said that the German and Polish secret services had devised the plot and Poland had even trained opposition activists.
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Giving dedicated people permission to do whatever it takes, and resources, then holding their feet to the fire to demonstrate performance. Letting dedicated people learn from their successes, and failures, and move fast to keep the business in the fast moving water. There is no manager, leader or management team that can predict, plan and execute as well as a team that has its ears close to the market, and the flexibility to react quickly, willing to make mistakes (and learn from them even faster) without bias for a predetermined plan.
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Euro-sceptics have had great fun in recent weeks tracking the bond markets’ onslaught on the euro in European Union countries. Some, more excitable, bond market vigilantes and euro-sceptic ideologues have predicted the eventual break up of the 17-member euro-area. Others have even suggested that the disintegration of the euro might undermine the economic and then the political foundations of the European Union itself.
There is no denying the shock the euro-area has received as a result of the crises first in Greece, then in Ireland and more recently in Portugal and Spain. Even the most dedicated supporters of “the European project” have warned that a combination of political indolence at the highest level of euro-area governments and antiquated ideas about how to respond to the bank generated crises could put the entire Union at risk.
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The emergence of the right-wing Tea Party movement and the general rightward shift in political discourse created an urgent need to articulate a left alternative. Thus far, the left has largely been unable to capitalise on the widespread confusion and anger that working people feel.
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Science
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This very advanced process seems unique to i.Materialise, and involves a powder based process. Powedered titanium metal is laid in a very thin layer. An extremely powerful laser then traces the solid portions by melting the powder. A second layer of titanium powder is deployed and the process repeats, gradually building up a whole object.
The strength of titanium is legendary, of course – but this means that the minimum wall thickness can be quite small. In this case, i.Materialise is able to print with a minimum wall thickness of 0.2mm, enabling very fine structures to be printed.
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Few areas of science are more controversial than cold fusion, the hypothetical near-room-temperature reaction in which two smaller nuclei join together to form a single larger nucleus while releasing large amounts of energy. In the 1980s, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have demonstrated cold fusion – which could potentially provide the world with a cheap, clean energy source – but their experiment could not be reproduced. Since then, all other claims of cold fusion have been illegitimate, and studies have shown that cold fusion is theoretically implausible, causing mainstream science to become highly speculative of the field in general.
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Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Metropolitan police was forced to admit today that one of its senior commanders gave false information to MPs when he denied having plain-clothes officers in the crowd at the G20 demonstrations in London in 2009.
Giving evidence to the House of Commons home affairs committee a month after the protest – in which thousands of demonstrators clashed with police – Commander Bob Broadhurst insisted there were no plain-clothes officers among the crowd, saying it would have been too dangerous to do so.
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There’s been rumors going the rounds that the ‘Block Bloc’ protestors who trashed parts of downtown Toronto were actually police officers. For example, why, exactly was a police cruiser left unattended where protestors could destroy it?
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Every single technology except one: explosives. Explosives do have limited beneficial uses: mining, quarrying and demolition come to mind. However, the principal use of explosives is the opposite of beneficial – it is killing. What’s more, virtually every machine that we make for killing relies on explosives. These machines range from those such as the suicide vest or the nuclear bomb that have killed comparatively few people, to viscously lethal weapons of mass destruction such as the assault rifle.
[...]
What has the selective breeding of microbes to do with alleviating the misery caused by explosives? Well – explosives are organic molecules with a lot of energy locked up in their chemical bonds. In other words they are an ideal potential food source for yeasts, bacteria and archaea. But explosives haven’t been around for long enough for such explosive-eating microbes to evolve by natural selection.
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An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.
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In the project’s own words, the EU has tasked scientists with creating a system which will allow for the “registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information” accessed online in the EU in order to detect terrorists operating online.
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Cablegate
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The latest newspaper to get access to the WikiLeaks cables appears to be Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat.
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A former Swiss banker who said he gave Wikileaks details of rich tax evaders has been found guilty of breaching Switzerland’s strict bank secrecy laws.
A judge in Zurich did so even though the leaked documents referred to accounts in the Cayman Islands.
Judge Sebastian Aeppli fined Rudolf Elmer, 55, more than 6,000 Swiss francs ($6,250; £4,000).
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Music and movie pirates may not be the only ones trolling peer-to-peer networks for booty. The secret-spilling site WikiLeaks may also have used file sharing networks to obtain some of the documents it has published, according to a computer-security firm.
The allegations come from Tiversa, a Pennsylvania peer-to-peer investigations firm, that claims it passed information of WikiLeaks’ file sharing activity to U.S. government officials, according to Bloomberg.
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Via WarIsACrime.org, here’s a powerful letter to General James F. Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, by retired Marine Corps captain David C. MacMichael, the former commander of Headquarters Company at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, where Pfc Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of providing a trove of classified US government documents to WikiLeaks, is being held in conditions that amount to prolonged solitary confinement, as I explained in a recent article, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?
Capt. MacMichael makes a number of valid and powerful points, in particular asking why Manning is being held for so long before trial (in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights), and also questioning his conditions of confinement. On the first point, he states, “I question the length of confinement prior to conduct of court-martial. The sixth amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing to the accused in all criminal prosecutions the right to a speedy and public trial, extends to those being prosecuted in the military justice system.” On the second, he notes, “I seriously doubt that the conditions of his confinement — solitary confinement, sleep interruption, denial of all but minimal physical exercise, etc. — are necessary, customary, or in accordance with law, US or international.”
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The Obama administration has issued new guidance on use of the Miranda warning in interrogations of terrorism suspects, potentially chipping away at the rule that bars the government from using information in court if it was gathered before a suspect was informed of his right to remain silent and to an attorney.
But the Department of Justice is refusing to publicly release the guidance, with a spokesman describing it in an interview as an “internal document.” So we don’t know the administration’s exact interpretation of Miranda, even though it may have significantly reshaped the way terrorism interrogations are conducted.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s decision to scuttle a sale of Facebook Inc. shares to U.S. investors shows the bank miscalculated by trying to privately offer stock in a company with more than 600 million users.
In a statement yesterday, New York-based Goldman Sachs said the sale, first reported Jan. 2, will be restricted to non-U.S. investors because “the level of media attention might not be consistent with the proper completion of a U.S. private placement under U.S. law.” The firm planned to sell as much as $1.5 billion of closely held Facebook to clients of its private wealth unit.
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The same banks that supplied money — and in some cases now own — suspect mortgage lenders also packaged up and sold those loans to investors. These banks also own or owned “servicers” that are supposed to act as stewards for investors. But if servicers cannot recover foreclosure costs combined with the costs of maintaining and reselling the house, they often abandon the property. After pumping up appraisals and falsifying borrowers’ income on applications, banks are walking away. Once again, American taxpayers will foot the bill…
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Goldman Sachs’ former Asset Management CIO, Eileen Rominger, just got a new job as the head of the SEC division that oversees asset managers and hedge funds, Dow Jones reports (via FoxBusiness).
Rominger managed equity funds at Goldman before she was made chief investment officer for its global portfolio management teams.
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Even back in “the good ‘ole” days of Wall Street — before the 2008 collapse — we, the people, suffered from the Goldman Sachs ethos. Wall Street has been the financial engine behind the unwinding of the American Dream. It financed leveraged buyouts and corporate takeovers based heavily on debt — which resulted in the shedding of millions of good-paying jobs and will continue to create the same sick dynamic in the financial system whereby the “health of a company” is measured by its stock price, not by how well the workers are doing.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The CRTC is proposing a regulatory change that would give Canadian TV and radio stations more leeway to broadcast false or misleading news.
Current regulations contain a blanket prohibition on broadcasting “any false or misleading news.”
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The federal Conservatives are rejecting a demand by the CBC to withdraw file footage from the national broadcaster that appears in new Tory ads targeting their political opponents.
The Conservatives did not seek permission to use CBC content in three ads that were posted online and broadcast on TV on Monday, said CBC spokesman Marco Dube said.
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Particularly interesting in light of (1) past results from PIPA/WorldOpinion.org showing Fox most misinforms and PBS least misinforms their respective viewers and (2) conservatives’ resurgence in desire to defund PBS/NPR for firing Juan Williams.
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Censorship
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A suspicious package and a rash of phone calls threatening protests shut down the planned screening of an anti-Iran documentary at Library and Archives Canada Tuesday night.
Iran’s embassy in Ottawa had tried to censor the film, Iranium, by complaining to the national library, which cancelled it until Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore stepped in.
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There are few successful authors who have jumped in and embraced what the online world allows you to do more than Paulo Coelho. Three years ago, we wrote about his efforts to “pirate” his own books and how he found that it only served to help his sales. He’s also talked up the importance for authors of setting ideas free to help them spread. He’s also gone even further than that with cool experiments like having his fans make a movie out of one of his books, via a sort of crowdsourcing methodology.
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Privacy
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DuckDuckGo, a one-man-band search engine based out of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is aiming at Google’s privacy practices with an unusual tactic: a billboard in San Francisco that proclaims “Google Tracks You. We Don’t.”
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This month, we were reminded how important it is that social media companies do what they can to protect the sensitive data they hold from the prying eyes of the government. As many news outlets have reported, the US Department of Justice recently obtained a court order for records from Twitter on several of its users related to the WikiLeaks disclosures. Instead of just turning over this information, Twitter “beta-tested a spine” and notified its users of the court order, thus giving them the opportunity to challenge it in court.
We have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site’s users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.
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Civil Rights
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The destruction of the National Identity Register (NIR) and the personal data held on the controversial ID card system will cost about £400,000.
The NIR was designed to hold the biometric and biographic details of ID card holders. But last May the ill-fated project was shelved.
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The two parties – then in opposition, now in government – seemed to find common ground in defending the rights of the individual against the increasingly shrill demands of the agencies charged with upholding our safety and security. Whether it was the introduction of national identity cards, and the gargantuan accompanying database, or three months detention without trial for terror suspects, Cameron’s and Clegg’s parliamentary troops seemed conjoined in civil libertarianism.
But has entering government changed them? We have seen in the past how politicians can change in government. Back in 1994, Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, proclaimed the merits of ID cards. Labour railed against the plans. But seven years later – in the wake of the 9/11 outrage – senior Labour figures, by then in government, found merit in the proposals.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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CRTC concerns with Rogers and its response to net neutrality complaints escalated this week when the Commission sent a letter to the company advising that it has received a growing number of complaints and that its public disclosures have not been compliant with CRTC Internet traffic management policy requirements. The case began last fall when the CRTC received a complaint over changes to Rogers’ practices that affected downstream P2P traffic.
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DRM
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iDOS, a repackaged version of the open source DOSBox emulator, is back on the App Store after getting rid of the ability to load games and other software using iTunes file syncing. While that might make the emulator seem far less useful, users have discovered a simple, no-jailbreak-required hack to load any old DOS software they want to run.
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For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest they be accused of circumventing a technological protection measure. We’ve also been concerned that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Since Napster exploded into the public consciousness when it was founded 12 years ago, the world of digital piracy has been associated with a particular type of software—“peer-to-peer” download services. (Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.) Either way, 2011 is likely to be the year when P2P is finally eclipsed by “cyberlockers,” a wildly popular type of site that many in the entertainment industry see as a new threat that could be even bigger than P2P. So what are cyberlockers, anyway? Why are they so popular—and so alarming to those who fight against piracy?
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Copyrights
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Call for comments on amendments to the Radio Regulations, 1986, Television Broadcasting Regulations, 1987, Pay Television Regulations, 1990, Specialty Services Regulations, 1990, and the Broadcasting Information Regulations, 1993
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During a signing ceremony held on January 10, writers Zhou Guoping and Deng Xian transferred their digital copyright to Zhongnan Media.
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Sister of acclaimed composer and singer Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Ms. Ana de Hollanda is herself a singer and composer as well. As soon as Brazil’s new president Mrs. Dilma Rousseff nominated Ms. Ana de Hollanda for the Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for Brazil’s copyright agenda, several academics, activists and civil society have been voicing concerns against the twist of policy that she might implement from now on.
Over 1,000 signatures have been gathered thus far on an Open Letter from the Brazilian civil society that is concerned that “the broad and open participation by society might be replaced by “commissions of notables” or “lawyers” giving their biased views on the subject”.
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While digital music revenue has grown 1,000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing – only 6% last year, down from 9.2% growth in 2009. Digital sales comprise about a third of the industry’s total revenue.
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ACTA
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Where is the “detailled response” to Marietje Schaake’s question? The Dutch MEP is not aware of it. Does De Gucht have something to hide? Will Pedro Velasco-Martins carry along a printed copy of the answer for participants of his stakeholder meeting on ACTA to demonstrate their unprecedented openness?
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A group of prominent European academics has released today an opinion on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The opinion identifies the most critical aspects of ACTA and invites European and national institutions to carefully consider the opinion before ratifying the Agreement or withholding consent.
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Contrary to what De Gucht said, whether border officials can do something or not is not part of material law, but is part of procedural (enforcement) law. The EU IPR Customs Regulation and ACTA both are about enforcement law. By saying that the EU law is in another field, De Gucht wrongly created the impression ACTA can not touch upon EU law. De Gucht mixed up basic legal concepts. The Parliament copied this misconception.
Conflicting with its earlier statement, the resolution later on acknowledges the existence of EU enforcement legislation. The resolution emphasises that ACTA will not change present EU laws in terms of IPR enforcement, because EU law is already considerably more advanced than the current international standards – following another Commission statement.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Some excellent news: ORG has been given permission to intervene in the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. The review was granted to BT and Talk Talk late last year on four specific points (there’s a good roundup of the background here). Having permission to intervene means that we’ll be able to put forward our case, in court, in clear terms, to outline why we think the Act is so badly flawed. Across all four points we will be making arguments that the Act threatens to curtail people’s rights to freedom of expression, endangers their privacy, and will have a disproportionate impact not only only the public but on businesses too.
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