04.04.13
Posted in GNU/Linux at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Branding is the key
Summary: Why it’s reasonable to say “GNU/Linux”
An increasingly-tiring debate over the naming of the (GNU/)Linux operating system was recently rekindled. It occurred rather virally after several Web sites and longtime authors who habitually cover the subject of (GNU/)Linux had weighed in again, opening an ageing jar of worms.
Like many flamewars in the GNU and Linux world, we should accommodate these, not suppress them. With suppression — after all — moral advantages are lost. It is widely understood that no corporation wants to project infighting, but in the Free software world corporations are not central. Likewise, branding is not the top priority.
What the argument over the names often boils down to is philosophy, not just attribution or credit. GNU was created with software freedom in mind. Linux, in its genesis, was proprietary until it adopted the GNU GPL licence and then became mainstream. A former colleague of mine was the first to distribute GNU and Linux — a practice which over time saw the system’s name abbreviated to “Linux”. The motive for this abbreviation is an interesting subject which merits its own in-depth research.
Rather than argue about what the system should be called we should pay attention to Katherine’s post and ask ourselves, what is it that should be prioritised? Freedom or popularity? These are not mutually-exclusive and describing the problem as such would be a false dichotomy. But practice suggests that those who insist on calling the system just “Linux” are happy to de-emphasise the values originally incorporated into GNU in 1983.
Richard Stallman famously said, “Freedom is having control of your own life. Power is having control over someone else’s life.” To a lot of people — yours truly included — freedom and justice are the goal, software is part of the means. For those to whom branding wars are of greater interest, the “Mac versus PC” (or Apple-branded PC versus Windows-saddled PC) is right around the corner. Or as I often put it, those who do not like Microsoft go to Apple, whereas those who do not like proprietary software turn to GNU/Linux or BSD.
Distributions of GNU/Linux bring yet more brands into the debate, not to mention all the pertinent components that belong neither to GNU nor Linux. Distributions adopt different philosophies which often reflect the views on their founder, e.g. Mark Shuttleworth in the case of Ubuntu and Patrick Volkerding in the case of Slackware Linux, Inc. The brand we use to refer to software often reveals something about our preferences, philosophy, likings and convictions.
Rather than fight over naming of systems let us reason about the innate values each of these brings. Brands are instruments of association, reputation, kinship, and/or status. We need to go deeper and explore what actual substance each of these has got. And we can choose the brands which suit us best. █
Originally posted in Linux Advocates
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Even among our ranks within Linux Advocate, there are “lively” debates on what our goals should be. But I will argue, given the current state of the Linuxphere…..
That’s not going to happen either. Our biggest strength is also our greatest weakness. Fragmentation.
Let’s break it down.
First off, and not to get lost in semantics, I consider myself a Linux Mentor as well as an Advocate. Advocating is all well and good but without follow through, we’re not getting the job done.
Everyone who enters the Linux Advocate fold does so with their own motivation and expectations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a fact of life. I can’t expect a natural introvert to do what I do any more than (s)he can demand I code to their level of proficiency.
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Server
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 3 — Algo-Logic Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in providing hardware-accelerated, deterministic, real-time, ultra-low-latency products, systems and solutions for accelerated finance, packet processing and embedded system industries, announces that it will present live demonstration of its newest FPGA-accelerated Market Data Filtering (MDF) application. This live demo will be showcased on Mon., April 8, at the HPC Wall Street Conference at Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
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Kernel Space
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A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.
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A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s Unified Decoder has been the object of envy in the open-source community for some time. The silicon, which ships on the company’s Radeon graphics cards, offers hardware-accelerated video decoding — but thanks to legal and DRM issues, couldn’t be used on Linux machines.
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For me, networking of displays is the most important feature of GNU/Linux operating systems. Perhaps X became too fragile/complex/limited. Perhaps Wayland is the way forward, but without networking Wayland is pathetic. Now that it is coming together it is time for Canonical to get behind Wayland and share the load of generating good FLOSS with the rest of the world. Going it alone will mean serious fragmentation of GNU/Linux. OEMs, consumers, system administrators will have to choose which way to go. I can already see OEMs hanging back by using older releases of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. How long will it take Canonical to wake up to that?
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Introduced last month was the ability to overclock Intel graphics under Linux while presented hours ago is a new Intel Linux kernel driver patch to provide better GPU overclocking support.
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Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here’s some more details.
Now with the Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code having been published and having time to go through this code myself, after Fatima’s article earlier, here’s some more details. Of course, if you didn’t already, first read AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support for the overview.
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Applications
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After five years in development and 43 developer versions, version 2 of the VDR Linux video recorder has been released by its author Klaus Schmidinger. The new software offers full HDTV support. TV images are processed either by a plugin using the graphics card or by a DVB card’s hardware decoder; however, only TechnoTrend’s S2 6400 DVB card, which is mostly unavailable at present, currently supports rendering images in HD.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Atlassian’s HipChat is stepping up to its commitment to roll out native clients for its real-time group chat and private messaging tool, with a beta release of the Linux client. The Linux client couldn’t come fast enough: Adobe AIR no longer supports the open-source operating system, which means the new native app adds to the web-based client as another option for Linux-based users.
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I recently purchased a Chromebook Pixel with LTE, but it hasn’t yet arrived. When it does, I plan to do some casual video gaming on the new hardware. No, I’m not talking about web apps; I mean native, third party video games. How’s that? I’ve shared part of the secret before: Simply run a script to install Linux so it runs side-by-side with Chrome OS. I can instantly jump over to it as needed. The rest of the solution is Steam, the video game distribution service that now supports Linux.
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Wildfire Games has released 0 A.D. Alpha 13 “Magadha”, the latest development installment of this popular open-source ancient warfare game.
0 A.D. is the open-source real-time strategy game that’s been in development by Wildfire Games for more than one decade that was later open-sourced.
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Valve has done another push and put up 5 new games to Linux! All in Beta though so be warned there will be bugs! The titles are Ricochet, Deathmatch Classic, Team Fortress Classic, Half Life: Blue Shift and Half Life: Opposing Force!
It’s great to see since to my knowledge that’s all (or almost all) their older titles now at least in Beta, which can only pave the way for newer titles like DOTA2 and Counter Strike: GO (two of my favourites) to be ported over!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar.
Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p):
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KDE announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment today, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.2. This is an update/stabilization release that brought over 100 fixes. Some bugs were annoying, but one particular nasty bugger was also fixed.
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The KDE 4.10.2 point release is said to have over 100 bug-fixes. Reported improvements within the KDE 4.10.2 release include the Kontact Personal Information Management Suite, the KWin window manager, and others.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The MATE developers have released version 1.6 of their desktop environment. Originally derived from the source code of the last GNOME 2 release, the desktop environment offers a similar user interface. MATE 1.6 now works with the login manager of systemd, which has largely replaced ConsoleKit for user and session tracking in several distributions, and is also due to be used in the, as yet unnamed, Ubuntu 13.10.
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Standardization in Linux is “not going to happen,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “What should be done instead is to stop lumping all the Linux distributions under the name ‘Linux,’ and just call them Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and so on,” Lim offered. “They are that diverse.” In fact, “if we woke up tomorrow and only one desktop Linux distribution was left in development, we would all be better for it.”
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Red Hat Family
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We’ve told you that Red Hat is one of the world’s biggest “meritocracies,” where employees can, and do, call the CEO an idiot to his face, if they don’t like his ideas.
CEO Jim Whitehurst is proud of that.
He might be the boss, but in a meritocracy, people have power based on the respect they earn from their peers and once respected, they are entitled to speak their minds.
We also told you that Red Hat is hiring like crazy. It just moved into a new headquarters building in downtown Raleigh, N.C.
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Red Hat, the first and only open source software company to reach over $1 billion in revenue, is still on track to nearly triple its revenue to $3 billion by 2016, CEO Jim Whitehurst said in an interview.
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Nearly a week after Raleigh’s Red Hat released its earnings, the price cuts are rolling in.
Just in the past few days, reports began to roll in on price-target cuts for Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) stock from about $60 a share to the low $50s.
BMO Capital Markets cut its price target to $54 from $60 and MKM Partners made a similar cut to $53. Pacific Crest followed Monday by cutting its target from $60 to $55.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) unveils HP Moonshot servers on April 8, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution could be along for the ride. How does The VAR Guy know? And what are the implications for channel partners? Here are the answers.
Canonical back in August 2011 vowed to make Ubuntu Server support ARM processors. Building on that statement, Canonical in November 2011 vowed to support HP Moonshot servers– which are also called microservers. Canonical has similar Ubuntu microserver work under way with Dell.
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Hard on the heels of Canonical’s decision last month to halve the support life for non-LTS releases of Ubuntu Linux, the company late last week announced that three versions of its popular Linux distribution will reach end of life in May.
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Flavours and Variants
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David Tavares announced last week that the second Beta release of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Linux operating system was made available for download and testing.
Pear OS 7 Beta 2 fixes even more bugs found in the previous Beta release, cleans the entire system, fixes bugs in CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), and fixes issues and bugs found in locales.
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Former Debian Project Leader and Linaro developer Steve McIntyre has surveyed a large number of Ubuntu and Fedora packages as part of a detailed study on the use of assembly code in Linux applications. This work was undertaken to identify packages that need porting to the new AArch64 architecture for 64-bit ARM processors. McIntyre generated a list of packages and then checked those that use assembly as part of their code to see what that assembly code was actually used for.
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The Raspberry Pi’s $25 “Model A” made a brief appearance this week on the website of Allied Electronics, its U.S. distributor. Compared to its $35 sibling, the lower end Linux-fired SBC (single board computer) sports half the RAM, one USB port instead of two, and lacks an Ethernet spigot.
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Embest is accepting pre-orders for a $99 single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1GHz dual-core Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC). The compact “MarS Board” provides interfaces for Gig-Ethernet, high-speed USB, HDMI, camera, and more, and it’s supported with ready-to-use embedded Linux and Android OS images.
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Phones
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Android
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Google Inc will launch a new version of its Nexus 7 tablet powered by Qualcomm Inc’s Snapdragon processor around July, two sources told Reuters, as the software giant pushes deeper into the cut-price mobile hardware market.
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One year after it made its debut on the platform, Android users make up nearly half of all Instragram users. A post on the Instagram blog tells us that Android now accounts for roughly fifty percent of all users but stopped short of providing any hard numbers.
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Yves Behar’s Fuseproject consultancy has developed the OUYA games console, which was funded using the Kickstarter platform and aims to capitalise on the growing popularity for cheap, ‘open-sourced’ gaming.
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There are several projects that can boast a clear track record of attracting, building and growing a community. LibreOffice is one of them, and so was his parent, OpenOffice.org . I’m not specifically speaking about the developers’ community, but rather about the worldwide community of localizers, QA testers, documentation writers and translators, local volunteers contributing their time to marketing and users support, designers… We had come up with a name back then : the Native-Lang projects. It simply meant the « native-language projects », communities working on the basis of their common language rather than on a country affiliation, which would have resulted often in politically complex and difficult situations.
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I am proud to announce that finally SOS Open Source has found a new steward in the person of Raffaella Corona. Raffaella has over 5 years experience in the IT industry, she has been at the forefront in selling high value training courses about open source languages and applications.
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CHIP DESIGNER ARM says it expects its server chips to be deployed on servers that run open source software stacks.
ARM has been a vocal and active supporter of open source software for many years and has taken a major role in a number of Linaro working groups in recent years. According to the firm open source software stacks will run on most of its upcoming server chips, with the firm citing market demand.
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Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.
The Community Edition software is designed for programmers, consultants, and do-it-yourselfers. For the first time the open source community has access to a full featured multi-store e-commerce solution for Java that is optimized for speed for both the EC2 Cloud and Data Center deployments. David Sopuch, CEO and eBusiness Director of Avetti.com Corporation said, “Finally the open source community now has a free fast solution that is full featured and can handle high volumes.”
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Open source is used just about everywhere, but when it comes to “safety-critical” systems, like software that flies planes or controls medical equipment, most of us assume that open source just doesn’t fit the bill. The regulations and requirements are rigorous, and ill-suited to the usual “fail faster” approach of open source.
Then, we learned about an initiative called Open-DO, which shows that FLOSS has a critical role to play, even in this specialized, highly regulated environment.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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When Opera Software killed its web browser’s rendering engine Presto, and announced it will instead use WebKit, the company did so with the best intentions.
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Google is moving away from WebKit. Google is now going its own way with a new rendering engine called – Blink
Shocking isn’t it?
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WebKit makes the web go ’round, and yet it is soon to be joined by a new kid on the block: Blink, which was announced on Chromium’s blog earlier today. Says Chromium, the decision to create a new rendering engine “was not an easy” one, but ultimately good will come from it. Developers don’t need to worry, as the announcement reassures that little will change for them during the initial rounds of work.
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Just earlier today was word that Mozilla is developing Servo, a new web-browser engine, and now comes a similar action out of Google. The search giant announced this afternoon they are forking the WebKit code-base for their Chrome/Chromium web-browser to form the “Blink” engine.
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Mozilla
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SaaS/Big Data
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Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Use LibreOffice. It’s a great value. Most people will save more than the cost of their hardware using it if they use LibreOffice instead of the “pro” licences from M$. It has all the most-used features of office suites and few of its own that maximizes the value of your hardware.
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Business
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NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services has saved in excess of Rs 4 lakh per server by using free and open source software (FOSS).
The company has saved more than $4,000 per server in licensing costs for setting up private clouds by using the open source based OpenStack cloud virtualization platform.
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Here’s where FLOSS can help. A small business can migrate to FLOSS in a day or two, often over a weekend, and have software that just keeps on working. Problems that drop off the radar:
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BSD
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Even though it was known by most of FreeBSD users that the 9.0 release of the best BSD operating system will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on March 31, 2013, we feel obliged to announce users that FreeBSD 9.0 is no longer supported.
Originally released on January 10, 2012, FreeBSD 9.0 was a short-term supported release (one year), as opposed to the FreeBSD 8.3 release, which is still supported until April 30, 2014.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives.
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The term “Open Government” (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.
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So far, only 9 agencies report using FLOSS desktop or client OS but that should change rapidly when more of the applications are FLOSS. 9 ministries have been declared self-reliant in FLOSS. Two hundred people participated in a conference on self-reliance in FLOSS for governmental agencies recently.
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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely-used nowadays as a communication method on the internet. On IRC, you will connect to IRC servers in which there will be individual chatrooms called channels. By joining a IRC server, you will be able to chat with other users who have connected to the same server, you can either chat on a channel with many other peeps or make a person-to-person conversation. Most Linux distros have official irc channels on freenode.net for users to come to ask questions and help other people. There are in fact many IRC clients in Linux but in this article, I will show you several IRC clients that I personally know and have used. All these clients are available in the repository of most distros I think you know how to install them already.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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When Unglue.it first launched its platform to strip the copyright status of books once a crowdfunded, pre-determined amount of money had been raised, skeptics spoke out. Not against that concept of “ungluing” a book, of course, but against the idea that ordinary readers would be willing to donate money to a publisher to make a book permanently public domain. Happily, Unglue.it has already enjoyed the fruits of their labors and announced a number of open source books, thanks to the donations and promotional efforts of its followers.
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FLOSS and education certainly go together. FLOSS software is being developed for on-line education by major educational institutions. It seems to be making waves…
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Programming
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It’s an open-source technology that has grown a solid backing in many parts of enterprise IT, but is largely done on a “do-it-yourself” basis with little vendor or channel support behind it. That could describe Linux a decade ago. Or, Zend Technologies is betting, it could describe PHP today.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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As the Palestine Center’s Yousef Munayyer pointed out, this is true only in a very narrow sense–this would be the first Israeli airstrike. But Israel has violated the cease fire a number of times, as his organization has documented in a very helpful timeline–tacks that appear to have killed four Palestinians. In fact, the first incident occurred within 24 hours of the “cease fire.”
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It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on with North Korea. We hear that new leader Kim Jong-Un is making threats to attack the United States, South Korea or both–and that’s leading to some rather alarming, and alarmist, coverage.
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“There is no ethical or legal rational for attacking people in countries we are not currently at war with,” said Rick Greenblatt with San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice.
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This month, FOR members across the country are working to stop military and surveillance drones and reduce military spending. Will you join them?
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Prime Minister David Cameron has said it would be ‘foolish’ for British to renounce its nuclear program in the face of threats from North Korea and Iran. His call to arms comes despite harsh criticism that Trident is too costly and unnecessary.
British Prime Minister Cameron stated that the UK needs an “ultimate weapon” to combat the growing threat of nuclear attack which he said had “increased” since the end of the Cold War.
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Cablegate
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Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks party is going to turn heads. But turning attention into votes is going to be an even harder job for a candidate who may not be able to enter the country, let alone take his seat, writes Michelle Grattan.
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It was “sheer fantasy” that Julian Assange was in danger of being extradited from Sweden to the United States, Bob Carr declared in February. If anything, it was even less likely Assange could be extradited from Sweden than the United Kingdom.
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Supreme Court chief calls sex charges against Julian Assange “a mess” and praises him for leaking secret US documents.
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The Ecuadorian government has reiterated its offer to Swedish prosecutors to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its embassy in London following a “significant” speech by a senior Scandinavian judge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Beef farmer Nicholas Stokes, 57, used his quad bike to etch out the giant letters on his land in Ellesmere, Shropshire, as temperatures plunged to -4 over the Easter weekend.
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What’s really noteworthy is the subhead about the “new oil spill” not seeming to have a big impact–a reference to the ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline leak in Arkansas. As the paper noted, “The numbers come amid continuing efforts to clean up a major new oil spill in Arkansas.”
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Finance
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The Bank of Japan unleashed the world’s most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.
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“They sought the utmost secrecy in offshore tax havens,” says the CBC, going on:.
“But now some of the world’s wealthiest citizens are having their undisclosed financial records laid bare.
“An unprecedented leak of documents is revealing the closely guarded investment information of more than 100,000 people around the world, including hundreds of Canadians.”
It says it says it “partnered with the ICIJ to gain exclusive Canadian access to the information,” adding:
“Thirty-seven media outlets in 35 other countries are also involved.”
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Oligarchs and dictators’ daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, easily won reelection on Tuesday. Unconfirmed official results have Evers beating opponent State Representative Don Pridemore by 61 percent to 39 percent. Pridemore, who has served in the Wisconsin State Assembly since 2004, supported a far right education agenda, including placing armed volunteers at schools in response to the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Pridemore was also known for telling a Tea Party group in 2011 that he would back a law that would throw federal officials in jail if they tried to implement the federal health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act, in Wisconsin.
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In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid sick days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.
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Censorship
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This story is incredible. Saint Louis University is threatening a faculty member with copyright infringement claims for his decision to take a survey of his colleagues. It appears that the faculty and the administration have been battling with each other recently, leading to a “no confidence” vote by students and faculty of the University provost. In response, the Board of Trustees sent around a “climate survey” to faculty, staff and students — but some had complained that the questions were not useful and only asked one question about the leadership of that provost, Lawrence Biondi. In response, some of the faculty designed their own “supplemental survey” for other faculty members that included more questions, specifically about Biondi’s relationship with the faculty itself.
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Privacy
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Sheriff’s office exploring use of drones
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City Council here is set to vote on a proposal Thursday to ban drones in residential areas, what could be the first law of its kind in California.
The proposed ordinance bans the flying of “unmanned aircraft that can fly under the control of a remote pilot or by a geographic positions system (GPS) guided autopilot mechanism” up to 400 feet above areas zoned residential. Anything flying higher is in Federal Aviation Administration jurisdiction.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday gave explicit permission for companies to use media such as Twitter and Facebook to announce key nuggets of information, but it turns out that many public companies still aren’t sure about what they are allowed to do.
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Compuware’s latest foray into mobility is a free bundle of cloudy code for dropping into mobile apps, which it will then monitor and measure for developers’ (and Compuware’s) benefit.
Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) lurks quietly in the corner of an app, reporting back every now and then but mostly watching for a show-stopping event to let the app’s developer know what went wrong and how it might be avoided next time.
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Civil Rights
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The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
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Ever since American soldiers massacred men, women and children here more than a century ago in the last major bloodshed of the American Indian wars, this haunted patch of rolling hills and ponderosa pines has embodied the combustible relationship between Indians and the United States government.
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Fallout from Amira Hass’s article on Palestinian stone-throwing shows that as far as Israelis are concerned, any and every form of resistance against the occupation is illegitimate.
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It’s kind of sad that anyone could possibly think that it’s okay for the government to have secret interpretations of the law in a free and open society. “The law” is more than just the legislation itself, but the collection of caselaw and interpretations, combined with the legislation, that make up the overall “law.” If some of those interpretations are kept secret, then how can the public obey the law? The answer is that they can’t — which is why secret interpretations shouldn’t be allowed. The Justice Department, however, prefers to keep some things secret, and it’s asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the EFF seeking to find out how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is interpreting parts of the FISA Amendments Act, after it was revealed (late on a Friday) that the court found at least one situation in which the feds collected info in violation of the 4th Amendment.
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04.03.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Everything’s getting smarter as computers get smaller. A company in Austin, Texas called TrackingPoint built a gun that runs Linux. It has lasers and Wi-Fi to connect with an app for precise shooting at long distances (up to 1,200 feet).
TrackingPoint calls the riffle a “Precision Guided Firearm” (PGF).
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Jacob Pan of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center published the “RAPL” Linux kernel driver patches on the kernel mailing list Tuesday. Running Average Power Limit is a feature found on Sandy Bridge and newer for enforcing power consumption limits on processors, among other power-related features.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Look closely at these two screenshots. Very closely.
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The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6.
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The MATE fork of the GNOME 2.x Desktop has now been upped to version 1.6 with some new features for vintage Linux desktop users.
In the release announcement, MATE 1.6 is described as “a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE.”
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I mentioned recently that I am no longer confortable with switching distros day in and day out. I have settled with a few things I love and my setup hasn´t really changed in months. Some people were curious of what my setup looks like, so this is the first article in a series that will be covering what I use, which distros, DMs, etc.
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Slackware Family
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Pat decided to push some updates on April 1st and some of them are quite interesting in my opinion. One of them is OpenSSH which is now at 6.2p1. This version was released few weeks ago and now we already have it on -Current.
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Debian Family
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These days, Debian seems to be enjoying a modest comeback among experienced users. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear on social networking sites of two or three people giving Debian another look.
This renewed interest may reflect a growing disillusionment with Ubuntu, the Debian derivative that has partly replaced Debian in popularity among Linux users. Almost certainly, it reflects a growing willingness to experiment with distros after the last two years of user revolts against GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity. As one of the oldest distributions—and one specifically focused on user choice—Debian looks reliable in the middle of such uncertainty.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Open Source is sexy in a cloudy, big data world, but if you want your commercial-grade Hadoop distribution to be speedy, reliable and secure, you’ll be better off parting with a few dollars and buying a proprietary solution like ours.
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Mobiveil has released an AMC form-factor board based on Freescale’s quad-core QorIQ P3041 communications processor. The AMCP3041 can support mixed control plane and data plane requirements in wireless and wireline networking equipment, and is supported with embedded Linux, U-Boot, Snort, and FreeNAS software.
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Phones
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Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.
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The Mumbai-based solutions provider, which focuses on email, messaging and e-marketing solutions, has saved $2 million on licensing costs with free and open source software (FOSS)
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In any field, a major challenge can be finding the right talent. For open source projects looking for contractors, it’s hard to organize possible candidates from all over the web. Flossmarket hopes to fill that void.
A platform for connecting contractors and businesses/individuals, Flossmarket allows each party to search for and find like-minded partners faster for their projects. Contractors build a profile and are able to advertise their services on their page. And, anyone who needs contract open source work done can review candidates based on criteria they set in their search.
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Are you winning if you own ninety-nine percent of a moribund market ? I don’t think so. Linux and Open Source/Free Software has crossed the chasm now. It has become the mainstream. Every Android tablet or phone out there is a Linux and Open Source/Free Software platform, and in the next few years I fully expect this to become the most common form of computing for most people worldwide (disclaimer, I do work for Google so please take such predictions with the pinch of salt they deserve).
For Free Software advocates like myself this is a tremendously positive change. The dirty secret of Samba, my own Free Software project, is that for a while the developers only ever run Windows ourselves in order to test Samba (which is an interoperability solution). Mostly everyone uses a different variety of Free Software desktops and servers (with the odd Mac or Solaris/Illumos user thrown into the mix). The default at least for us has become Free Software.
So have we won ? Should we just pack up the advocacy tent and go home ? Unfortunately not. Most of the applications running on these devices are still proprietary. Most people using mobile devices, although they might be running a Free Software operating system underneath, still don’t realize why Free Software is important.
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Britain’s public service broadcasting corporation BBC is making available as open source the code for building HTML-based TV software solutions, called TAL. “Sharing the TV Application Layer should make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology”, the organisation explains.
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Nothing in FLOSS restricts use of FLOSS in commercial products. You can charge money for services instead of charging for licences and GPL, for instance, permits charging per copy or whatever. Much FLOSS is commercial, like Linux, the kernel, worth $billions, FireFox, the web browser, worth $hundreds of millions and RedHat makes a $billion in revenue on FLOSS annually.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla captured many a headline today as Mitchell Baker blogged about 15 years of “a better web.” Mozilla began life as Netscape’s Open Source branch of development in 1998 and has since changed the Web many times, if sometimes by accident. But as Mozilla celebrates this milestone, Firefox 20 is already making the rounds.
Baker said, “Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.”
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Mozilla will upgrade the stable channel of its desktop browser to Firefox 20.0 today. The front page at the time of writing is still linking to a download of version 19.0.2, but you can use this link to download the new version of the browser right away. Make sure you change its url if you need a different localized version, this one downloads the US version of Firefox.
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Mozilla has announced Firefox 20 with several prominent new features to the open-source web-browser.
As shared on the Mozilla blog, prominent features of Firefox 20 include:
- Support for starting private browsing in a new tab of an already existing web-browser session. Firefox for Android also now supports private browsing on a per-tab basis.
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Education
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In its mission to become the “Linux of online learning,” edX just got a powerful new partner. On Wednesday, the Harvard and MIT-backed non-profit is set to announce that it’s teaming up with Stanford to collaboratively develop the open-source edX platform.
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In its first year, Anesthesia Illustrated, an open-source repository of anesthesia video lectures, attracted users from more than 150 countries who downloaded videos 94,213 times, according to an assessment presented at the 2013 Society for Technology in Anesthesia meeting.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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In a previous blog post I offered up two interpretations of the term ‘data science’. These amounted to 1) ‘the science of data’ and 2) ‘doing science with data’. If you read the earlier post you’ll probably detect my mild irritation with the term when coupled with the second of these interpretations. Perhaps it’s the redundancy, or maybe the implication that plain ‘science’ is somehow devoid of data. It may be both.
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Open Access/Content
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Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
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Science
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Hardware
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Wait a bit… New hardware is something that might drive unit shipments and M$’s cutting of licensing fees might help if people actually wanted to buy M$’s OS, but M$ is cutting the prices because people don’t want to buy M$’s OS, so this is wishful thinking. Manufacturers should be shipping GNU/Linux if they want sales to pop. People are desperate to escape the clutches of M$ and the consumers who are a big piece of the pie cannot unless they find GNU/Linux on retail shelves.
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Security
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Data-protection authorities of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands have launched a joint action against the Google for violating the European Union privacy rules.
The joint action is the first co-ordinated and formal procedure by EU member countries against a single company on privacy.
Currently, the European authorities can impose only fines below €1m. However, the new EU privacy rules, expected to be approved by the end of 2013, could allow the authorities to inflict on companies penalties up to 2 per cent of their global annual turnover.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A Greek political party with links to neo-Nazis say they have established themselves in Melbourne, but have no interest in Australian politics.
Golden Dawn, which was founded by a Holocaust denier and whose members have been linked to dozens of violent protests in Greece, claims to have set up a group in Melbourne filled with Greek-Australians who will ”fight and defend both of our countries with pride and honour”.
The group sent an email to Fairfax Media criticising the ”lies” of reporters, politicians and Greek community leaders since controversial Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris announced plans for a Melbourne office and a visit from MPs on a Melbourne radio station in February.
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A German pastor due to stand trial for allegedly inciting violence at an anti-Nazi demonstration said Tuesday that authorities risk deterring people from standing up to right-wing extremists if he is convicted.
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Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted
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When he was training to be a case officer for the CIA in the early 1990s, Joseph Weisberg soon learned that deception was a crucial skill — one that involved lying to his family regularly.
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When a forum as hawkish at The Washington Post‘s editorial page starts running pieces arguing the drone war is creating more enemies than it is eliminating, you know the dialogue is beginning to shift.
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Hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles – known as drones – are aloft in our skies, many owned and built by recreational users. But safety and security issues alarm the CAA, which oversees our aviation system.
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It seems scary, even crazy: talk of a “sea of fire” and an “arc of destruction,” nuclear missiles slamming into distant shores. North Korea, an “isolated state,” as we’re constantly told by media reports, hurls invective at the world while its people, abused, hungry and cold, are led by an apparently well-fed young man, Kim Jong-un, who sits in front of shabby-looking computers running nuclear programs that are going, literally, ballistic.
But is it all true?
“Public discourse about the North in most of our enlightened world is crippled, condescending, irrelevant, and, like heartburn, episodic,” says James Church, the pseudonymous author of a series of novels about the country, in an article titled: “NK and Pluto.” He insists on anonymity because of the nature of his past intelligence work.
As the rhetoric ratchets up again on the Korean peninsula with talk of mobilization, attack and counterattack, Mr. Church’s view is deeply counterintuitive and very valuable. His authorial name is a pseudonym for a former Western intelligence officer who has been in the country dozens of times and now, retired from government, writes about it through the eyes of a fictional North Korean policeman called Inspector O. (Full disclosure – I have met Mr. Church and he is definitely real.) In fact, the novels offer a superb demonstration of the idea that fiction tells the truth better than fact.
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Cablegate
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JULIAN Assange may be safe from extradition to the United States even if he returns to Sweden, suggests one of the Scandinavian country’s top judges.
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JULIAN Assange may be safe from extradition to the United States even if he returns to Sweden, suggests one of the Scandinavian country’s top judges.
In a rare public lecture delivered in Adelaide, Justice Stefan Lindskog defended the leaking of classified information, saying the case against the WikiLeaks founder was “a mess”, and raised many questions over the legality of the US ever being able to extradite Assange via Sweden.
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A LECTURE on the Julian Assange case by a top Swedish judge is unusual but not unprecedented, a leading human rights and constitutional law expert says.
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Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Party is gathering momentum ahead of this year’s federal election. Prominent barrister and political figure Greg Barns has been announced as the party’s national campaign director, while it has secured a Melbourne-based headquarters and attracted donations of up to A$100,000.
But what could a man like Julian Assange achieve within the orthodox structures of parliament?
When Professor John Keane spent the day with Assange recently, Assange briefly discussed his plans to run for the Senate. He predicts that if successful, the US will drop its grand jury espionage investigation in order to avoid a diplomatic row. He might still be extradited to Sweden, but winning a Senate seat in September could secure his freedom from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. It is probably his best chance.
Through WikiLeaks, Assange built his reputation as an outsider, using technologically enabled anonymous leaks to “speak truth to power”. But as a senator, Assange will find himself working within formal democratic structures. For many, this will make him an insider, privy to the world he has sought to expose. There is no certainty that Assange’s presence in the Senate would improve public accountability, but the presence of his radical ideas in our highest political forum will force us all to have a conversation about what we think we should and shouldn’t know.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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After the recent tar sands pipeline spill in Arkansas, where thousands of gallons of toxic oil ran through the streets of a small community, the climate change organization 350.org is asking Americans to join in the public commenting process for the Keystone XL pipeline.
The U.S. State Department is reviewing applications for permits needed for the international pipeline to advance. The State Department is soliciting public comment on the issue until April 22.
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Finance
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Like the Monsanto Protection Act, the support for all of this corporate destruction of our communities’ schools…
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The April 15, 1933 issue of Newsweek, one of the first in the magazine’s history, contains a remarkable cover headline: Bill cutting work week to 30 hours startles the nation. Indeed only nine days earlier, on April 6th, the Black-Connery Bill had passed in the United States Senate by a wide margin. The bill fixed the official American work week at five days and 30 hours, with severe penalties for overtime work.
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…bank which has regularly damaged the Vatican’s image over three decades…
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The latest proposal for ‘food stamps’ has aroused a good deal of anger. It’s a policy that is divisive, depressing and hideous in many ways – Suzanne Moore’s article in the Guardian is one of the many excellent pieces written about it. She hits at the heart of the problem: ‘Repeat after me: austerity removes autonomy’.
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People in the UK now fit into seven social classes, a major survey conducted by the BBC suggests.
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The price of the virtual currency bitcoin, already volatile in recent weeks, went through wild swings in overnight trading Tuesday and Wednesday.
According to prices quoted on Mt.Gox, the main trading exchange for bitcoins, the value of one bitcoin ricocheted from $106 to as high as $147, then back down to $125, then to $141. They were trading around $139 per bitcoin in afternoon trading Wednesday.
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Paulson & Co applied for dismissal of a lawsuit made by ACA Financial Guaranty related to Abacus – a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). The plaintiffs accused the company of joining banking major The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( GS ) to obtain guaranteed payments from bond insurers on risky investments.
In 2011, ACA Financial filed a $120 million lawsuit against Goldman and later in January, added Paulson & Co along with its hedge fund unit – Paulson Credit Opportunities Master II Ltd as the accused. The modified lawsuit claimed that Goldman and Paulson tricked ACA Financial into believing that Paulson was investing in the CDO. However, Paulson had taken a short position on it.
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Privacy
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Speaking at a conference at Georgia Tech, Director of the U.S. National Security Agency General Keith Alexander pressed Congress last week pass legislation creating a more effective information-sharing regime between government and businesses to help protect the nation’s security. Just as past legislative efforts such as the proposed Cyber Intelligence Protection Act (CISPA) have faced widespread backlash for imposing high regulatory costs on businesses while risking infringing basic rights, the fear remains that Alexander’s proposals simply suggest more of the same.
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Civil Rights
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Gaza boys and girls in middle and high school will be breaking the law if they study side by side.
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All the commissioners listened politely as Tom McKirgan of Coquille and Shawn Ozbun of Eugene asked them to spurn the NDAA. An audience of about 40 supporters applauded the pair equally politely.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a word of warning: many teenagers are wantonly breaking the law every day by reading news sites on the web because the Department of Justice’s weird implementation of vague laws has left a number of media outlets with odd age-based legal prohibitions for their web sites.
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DRM
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“DMCA” is a four-letter word among free and open source software developers, and for good reason: the 1998 act criminalized an entire category of programs and has been grossly misused in numerous cases. It’s in the news yet again this week, as activists are fighting to make it legal to carrier-unlock cellphones despite the Librarian of Congress’s decision not to exempt unlocking from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules.
But the anti-circumvention rules are only one part of the DMCA—it also put in place the safe harbors that protect online services from liability for their users’ activity. These too have been the subject of some controversy, as large content owners have routinely abused the notice-and-takedown process to censor materials protected by fair use. But they’ve also done a lot of good. Before, it was difficult for service providers dealing with user-uploaded content to predict their potential liability for the infringing activity of their users. The safe harbors provide clear rules for avoiding secondary liability related to user content.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Sharing knowledge, growing inclusion, increasing participation. The other benefits, economic and social will flow from these principles. Now that sounds like a good place to start to me.
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Posted in Antitrust, Deception, Dell, Microsoft, Vista 9, Windows at 3:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Vista 8 is dead, long live vapourware!
Summary: As Microsoft realises that Vista 8 is worse than Vista and there is nothing to be done to change this, focus gets shifted to a yet-inexistent, mythical operating system
Amid OEM hatred of Windows Hate, or Windows 8 (developers hate it too, with Steam and Valve giving vapourware the finger and now releasing a GNU/Linux distro) Microsoft has been trying to take over the fragile Dell (perhaps with a proxy), but it is not finalised yet. According to reports such as this, Vista 8 is already killing Dell. The thing about Mr. Dell is, he also wishes to diverge away from desktops. He should know that Microsoft fails there. There is a lot of vapourvare for Vista 9 right now, as well as PR for Vista 8. Here is a Microsoft booster citing a Microsoft partner for figures that boost Internet Explorer and Vista 8. Even those biased numbers don’t look too good for Microsoft, which is why UEFI tricks get employed, tying hardware to Microsoft. Katherine Noyes wrote about it the other day:
Linux Girl was comfortably ensconced on her favorite barstool down at the blogosphere’s Broken Windows Lounge when the news broke on Tuesday.
Let’s just say there was no more peace to be had after that.
Linux bloggers fairly tripped over themselves with excitement on PCWorld, on Slashdot and beyond, generating a din that could be heard throughout the Linux blogosphere and its surrounding territories. Linux Girl jumped to attention and began taking down as much as she could.
“‘Secure boot’ does not prevent viruses from writing to the (pre)bootloader, it just notices if it has happened,” noted Slashdot blogger jhol13, for example. “Then the ‘notification’ or ‘failure mode’ is DoS, your computer won’t boot. I’d rather boot with a virus than not boot.
Microsoft Windows is struggling. Only months after Vista 8 was released Microsoft is already talking about future versions. And we’re talking about a 3-year (or thereabouts) release cycle for Windows. These dirty tricks which are intended to buy Microsoft some time without GNU/Linux gaining ground must be tackled as an antitrust issue. Microsoft moles in the press (former staff and the likes of them) are trying very hard right now to demonise the complainers and rescue Microsoft from antitrust scrutiny. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest lies from Ford, which together with Microsoft has been trying to openwash its vehicles that have rubbish proprietary software
After years of silence following a Microsoft partnership that relies on lies we are seeing it back. Ford has been doing a lot of openwashing in the press as of late. It tries to label its cars ‘open source’ for marketing purposes. It’s all about APIs and therefore has nothing to do with open source (as dozens of reporters failed to notice unless they deliberately publish deceptive placements). There are so many examples of bad reporting about this (we’ll spare the links) and the software Ford uses is not just proprietary; it is bad, too. Consider this new post: “I rented a car last week-end that featured Microsoft’s Sync. Truly a horrible, horrible piece of software, even for Microsoft. The software crashed at least five times over four days, I don’t think it liked my Galaxy SIII. The software also had the audacity to play an audio file telling me that it could not play protected music on every boot. Besides that, the software’s interface was inferior to just about every music player I’ve ever used, electronic, or mechanical; I’m not even the kind of person who cares much about interfaces.”
Will Hill wrote about the above post: “Behind the Hype, here’s how Ford/Microsoft Sync really works” (or doesn’t work). Ford is giving “Open Source” a bad name. █
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Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 3:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Small businesses too — not just middle- and large-sized corporations — increasingly targeted by patent trolls and software patents; opposition to patent maximalism on the rise
The USPTO has been taking a lot of beatings recently. Many people from all around the world are berating and condemning the USPTO as well as key utilisers like Monsanto. SAP has been hit too, despite being based in Europe. The patent trolls went after American customers. To quote the British press, “SAP has moved to defend the users of its Sybase database software by filing suit against Pi-Net International, a “patent troll” that has filed several patent infringement lawsuits against SAP customers in the US financial services sector over patents it claims SAP is infringing.
“Pi-Net claims that SAP’s Financial Fusion software, used for online banking, among other things, infringes three of its software patents. SAP acquired the Financial Fusion product as a result of its 2010 acquisition of Sybase.”
Masnick’s site says that small companies too begin to realise the threat of trolls. To quote:
Startups Realizing That Patent Trolls Are An Existential Threat
Most people used to think that patent trolls tended to focus on bigger companies — those with huge bank accounts who’d rather pay the troll off than deal with a lawsuit. But over the last few years, we’ve been hearing more and more stories about startups hit by patent trolls, who are taking advantage of the fact that a patent lawsuit — win or lose — would almost certainly kill the company. One common tactic? Wait until a startup announces a round of fundraising and then pounce — knowing that the company (a) has some money and (b) has little time to deal with a lawsuit. Finally, this issue is getting some attention. Crain’s recently had a piece on patent trolls going “downmarket” after startups, which has some quotes from startup execs (many who want to remain anonymous to avoid further attacks).
Wired continues to have a lawyers-only debate about software patents. The latest comes from someone who was previously at the University of Miami (law) and there is still no call to abolish software patents. Here is a baffling statement:
Infringement of software patents is usually a good thing because in most cases the alternative to infringing is to produce nothing new. So, what if we could fix the patent problem by rethinking the assumption that infringement should always be penalized?
Another lawyer gets platform at Wired to say: “It’s become clear that the patent system is impeding, rather than incentivizing, innovation. The laundry list of what’s gone wrong is long: a standard for patentable subject matter that makes no sense, notoriously vague and hard-to-understand claim language, the rise of the patent trolls … and all of these problems disproportionately impact software.”
Yes, so why not call for the end of them all? Where are the software developers in this series of articles from the popular magazine? Do the editors at Wired even approach developers, or even science professors as opposed to law professors? Nope, hardly.
Speaking of controversial patents, there is some good news this week:
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In a case closely watched by global drugmakers, Switzerland’s Novartis AG has been fighting since 2006 to patent its leukemia-treating drug Glivec in India on the grounds that it is a newer version. India revised its patent protection law in 2005.
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India’s Supreme Court rejects plea from Swiss pharmaceutical giant, paving way for more affordable, generic medicines worldwide
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The Australian government has released the draft report of its Pharmaceutical Patents Review, which had been tasked to “review the effectiveness of the Australian patent system in providing timely access to affordable pharmaceutical and medical treatments and supporting innovation.” The report considered domestic law on patents, data exclusivity, and pharmaceuticals, as well as Australia’s current trade obligations and its position in ongoing trade negotiations.
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India’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected a Swiss pharmaceutical company’s effort to patent an updated version of its cancer drug, a decision aimed at boosting a domestic generic drug manufacturing industry that supplies cheap versions of lifesaving cancer and HIV medicines for much of the developing world.
We wrote about Novartis in [1, 2, 3, 4]. Through proxies specialising in PR, Bill Gates and his friend Nathan Myhrvold love to prop up international monopolies of such companies; they help disguise clinical trials (at the expense of fragile populations) as ‘charity’, never mind the truth of the matter. Slashdot has become a pathetic wuss for helping Myhrvold whitewash himself today. Who on Earth thought this would be a good idea? There are PR talking points all over the place, as we expected right from the start.
Patents that help cause death or limit access to cures based on one’s personal wealth are not ethical. They might even be more harmful than software patents and patents on seed DNA, which India will hopefully squash just like Novartis patents. █
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Posted in Google, Patents at 2:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: After a patent attack from the Microsoft-led Nokia, Google is getting awarded a software patent in a similar area; Spain sues to impede the unitary patent in Europe
Microsoft boosting sites continue to parade for Microsoft’s spinning of extortion as transparency — an issue we covered here days ago. Google continues to receive positive coverage after making this pledge, but in the mean time we learn about Google getting a patent on software, which even Android sites are baffled by. To quote Phandroid‘s post about software patents: “When a person uses Google Wallet to pay for purchases at a McDonald’s or a 7-Eleven, the tapping motion and the payment are not the most important aspects of the invention in the eyes of the law. It is what happens during the brief moment between those two actions, detailed within valuable documents. However, it is not simply just what happens when you tap to pay, but what happens when it does not work. Some examples to elaborate on this are: What if your account cannot be verified? What if your account balance is insufficient? What if in the process of paying, the power goes out – on your device, or in the store? What if your account balance is deducted, but the store’s system says you have not paid? What happens next? What is the process that takes place?”
“Google continues to receive positive coverage after making this pledge, but in the mean time we learn about Google getting a patent on software, which even Android sites are baffled by.”This is grounds for business methods and software patents. Very iffy indeed. We’ll cover that in the next post.
Here is another report about Google’s new software patent. It says that “Google has been granted a patent for reducing the quality of a mobile device’s display in order to preserve battery life as it dwindles, according to a report from DroidLife. The patent describes a system that disables animations or even reduces the resolution of the screen in service of reducing the display’s battery usage.”
This reminds a close observer like yours truly of the case against Android in Europe. Nokia, a European company, attacked Andorid (HTC) in Europe.
Speaking of Europe, The FFII’s president calls Uniloc “a Luxembourg-based patent troll,” citing the contact page. Uniloc is a patent troll with international ambitions (sometimes it calls itself Uniloc USA) and it contacted Techrights in an effort to whitewash its name. The software patents debate in Europe is still not a resolved one. Spain was being blackmailed to let the unitary patent go forward and Spain is now suing. As lawyers in London put it:
Spain takes Parliament and Council to Court over “Unitary Patent Package”
The battle between David and Goliath is entering the second round. Spain has brought two last minute actions before the Court of Justice (Cases C-146/13 and C-147/13) against Regulations 1257/2012 of 17 December 2012 implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection (OJ 2012, L 361/1) and 1260/2012 on the applicable translation arrangements (OJ 2012, L 361/89). There is no parallel action against the Regulations to be expected from Italy, which already signed the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
The pleas in law of the Spanish action are not yet accessible, but the chances of success do look promising. The mutation from an autonomous patent for the European market to the hitherto unknown schizophrenic creature of a “European patent with unitary effect” has left deep scars, and every one of them could be taken up before the Court.
“Thank you Spain,” the FFII’s president writes.”As a result, the CJEU is confronted with a patent which is in fact just an empty shell” (we sure hope so).
We’re at an important crossroad where software patents can either implode internationally or spread everywhere. Google’s actions are not helping. █
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Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Apple pushed over the cliff
Summary: Apple’s crucial ammunition against Linux/Android gets thrown by the USPTO right into the garbage can
The news from the second-largest patent case against Android gets covered by Pamela Jones, whose articles about Samsung and Apple include in-depth legal analysis. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Sony [1, 2] also sue Android, but none has earned a ruling as favbourable as Apple’s (just over a billion dollars in damages). The USPTO has been forced to acknowledge failure to examine patent applications. The USPTO reaffirms invalidation of Apple patent in Samsung suit, says CBS. Apple’s patent should not have been granted in the first place, so the USPTO should be held responsible for a lot of damage to the industry, again. Here is Jones’ coverage of the news and some more from CBS tabloid ZDNet.
“Apple deserves go go out of business for its shameless business strategy.”Mr. Pogson calls it a case of rotten Apple, noting: “So Apple’s case is shrinking like a rotten apple. There’s just nothing left, at least nothing Samsung has to apologize or pay for. In fact, I would not be surprised to find Apple had to pay some of Samsung’s costs for frivolous action.”
Apple deserves go go out of business for its shameless business strategy. We can help that happen by boycotting Apple and urging others to do the same. I have already convinced many friends and even some small companies to do this.
Speaking of Apple, watch this lousy propaganda piece from the New York Times, to which Mike Masnick responds as follows:
Author Claims That If Apple And Microsoft Started Today They’d Fail Without Stronger Patent Protection
[...]
First of all, the number of patents filed is meaningless. You can file a ton of patents and it means absolutely nothing concerning innovation. First off, applications are different from granted patents. Second, and more importantly, patents show no relation to innovation. Third, when it comes to Chinese patents, the Chinese realized long ago that patents are merely a tool for protectionist tariff-like policies that can be enacted with less scrutiny or trade war issues and have acted accordingly. Basically, nothing in the paragraph above actually supports Fingleton’s argument.
Apple is not an innovative company, it is a marketing company and it managed to market or brand itself as “innovative”; in practice, it’s just a ripoffs company. It hardly manufactures anything. █
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Further Recent Posts
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- Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released
Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end