Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

04.09.14

GNU News: New Releases, Coreboot Milestone, GNU Linux-libre, MediaGoblin, and Compilers

Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Misc. GNU Packages

GNUnet

Kernel

  • Coreboot Adds Support For The Lenovo ThinkPad T530
  • The GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu Ultra-Free Kernel Released

    Following last night’s release of the Linux 3.14 kernel, the GNU folks are out with their Linux-based “Freedom Pi” kernel.

    The GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu kernel is the upstream Linux 3.14.0 kernel but is “100% free” and removes non-free components from the kernel source tree like firmware blobs and “[code] disguised as source code." The libre kernel flavor also disables run-time requests for non-free kernel components.

MediaGoblin

  • Meet MediaGoblin, a Decentralized Alternative to YouTube and Flickr

    Running on GNU, MediaGoblin allows user to upload videos, images, audio, and other types of digital media. But, unlike YouTube, Flickr, and Soundcloud, users control their own servers. And, if Webber, Nicholson, and the rest of the MediaGoblin community have their way, each users' media will be stored on Tahoe-LAFS, an encrypted server that does not know what data it stores.

Compiler

GMP

Philosophy

  • To Hell With Non-Free Software

    It’s clear that a lot of IT hardware is being supplied to consumers and organizations with built-in malware, stuff that spies on us and supplies people like NSA with information we don’t want them to have. Ironically, we actually subsidize this activity with our money either by taxation or the purchase-price.

  • Richard Stallman to speak at TedxGeneva2014

    Richard Stallman will be speaking as part of TedxGeneva. His speech will be nontechnical and the public is encouraged to attend.

  • Introducing Jaewoo, the Licensing Team's spring intern

    Jaewoo Cho recently started working at the FSF as a licensing intern. In this post, he writes about his experience with free software and his goals for the internship.

Links 9/4/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 9/4/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 9/4/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 1:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A Call to Ban/Stop Big ‘Patent Trolls’ Like Nokia, Microsoft, and Apple

Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Patents at 5:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Patent stooges

Summary: Reporting in corporate media generally lacks focus on patent abuse by large companies, but Topix has a long noteworthy article

PATENT coverage has been scarce here recently because corporations won. They warped the debate in such a way that almost no articles criticise software patents anymore; the focus has been shifted to small trolls and politicians are, accordingly, ignoring the big issue, instead pursuing fake ‘reforms’ that hardly address any concerns, other than the concerns of big corporations (it’s like Obama’s so-called ‘reform’ of the NSA). Here for a change is a good Topix article titled “How to Really Fix Patents – and Why Congress Is Unlikely to Do It” (via Glyn Moody).

The article says: “The total loss to the economy caused by junk patents far exceeds $29 billion per year when one takes into account that big companies act like patent trolls too, by obtaining junk patents to keep out their competitors.”

It also states that: “The real costs of junk patents are easy to imagine when you consider some of the egregious patents that should never have existed to begin with. Patent No. 5,851,117 was granted in 1998 to a company for using an illustrated book to teach janitors how to clean a building. Clearly that is not such an original idea that it deserves to be patented. Luckily the economic impact of that patent was likely very minimal.”

And finally: “Patent trolls should be dealt with, but if big companies are able to continue to obtain junk patents for things that are not inventions and then act like patent trolls, then they will be able to continue to corner markets and ensure that new emerging technologies can’t compete with them.”

We recently wrote about Apple's "holy war" against Linux/Android — a subject that was mentioned by a lot of media [1, 2, 3, 4]. Nokia‘s patent deal with Apple, which had already cross-licensed with Microsoft for quite a long time (we have written about this triangle for a number of years), helped show how this “holy war” was going on. This new article states that “Nokia makes up about 80% of them [...] the vast majority of licensing fees Microsoft collects — about $15 per device — comes from the Finnish company. Those fees are about to become an internal exchange once the acquisition deal closes between the two companies.”

The ultimate victim will be Android. They are working on it.

To make matters worse, Microsoft and Nokia feed Android-hostile patent trolls like MOSAID, passing patents for no purpose other than harassment (patent-stacking).

This is trolling. The European authorities have already warned/reprimanded Nokia.

What needs to change right now is the debate. We need to reject the idea that there is this thing called “patent trolls” which basically means small companies with patents and that this alone is the issue with patents. There are much bigger issues. █

Season of Disinformation About FOSS, Courtesy of ‘Compliance’ Firms

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Proprietary but pretending to be pro-FOSS

Ceramic

Summary: Tech City News, Black Duck, and Protecode (in SD Times) show their hostility towards the principles of code-sharing

EVERY ONCE in a while we see articles which are exceptionally hostile towards Free software in the sense that they compare it to a disease. They use words like “contaminate” and “infect”. Here is a new article of this kind. This is the type of FUD that companies like Black Duck, whose latest voice hijack we mentioned twice this month alone, habitually spread. They monetise it. There is more of them in the press and pundits like Mac Asay [1] help them get their message out. Well, they are trying to change perceptions and set trends. Asay is close to them because they helped sponsor events that he was organising. But they are not to be viewed as FOSS proponents. They are a proprietary software company with software patents; they only pretend to care about FOSS and they pretend to be spokespeople for FOSS. Their founder is a marketing man from Microsoft.

Similarly, some proprietary software company called Protecode (with a similar business model) pushes similar messages, having been given a platform at SD Times which is sometimes composed by patent lawyers (and is funded in part by Microsoft). The article then led to more from Adrian Bridgwater.

What we generally have here is a bunch of proprietary players (some with clear connections to Microsoft) talking about how complying with FOSS is risky. They never mention the risk of proprietary software licences that ‘expire’ and can lead to expensive litigation if not obeyed. The only surprising thing is that they continue to receive press space. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. The Reasons Businesses Use Open Source Are Changing Faster Than You Realize

Miguel de Icaza and Xamarin Become More Tightly Integrated With Microsoft

Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mole

Summary: Microsoft creates an alliance with the controversial firm of FOSS mole Miguel de Icaza while trying to openwash .NET (creating the illusion that it is “open”)

WE RECENTLY showed how the Microsoft press was openwashing .NET. It’s a PR charade. Watch this shameless new plug from Microsoft Mary at CBS/ZDNet/CNET (cross-posted in several CBS sites for increased exposure). It’s Microsoft evangelism disguised as journalism and there’s more of it at IDG. It should be remembered that .NET is proprietary. Nothing has really changed. Microsoft already controls a considerable chunk of Mono and now it’s trying to openwash .NET itself, presumably with help from Miguel de Icaza and other turncoats whom Microsoft Mary is naming. The goal is to confuse people and lead them to the misguided feeling that .NET is now “open” (to Windows) and is therefore on par with Java.

Last month there were reported of acquisition talks between Microsoft and Xamarin, which already receives funding from Microsoft people. Well, Microsoft has no need to buy them if they can be used as outsiders/proxies, a bit like Yahoo or Novell. So this news report [1] titled “Microsoft, Xamarin Form Open Source Tech Alliance” is not too shocking. It just helps show another step in alignment of those two companies. In practical terms, Xamarin is now serving Microsoft but it is not officially part of Microsoft. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Microsoft, Xamarin Form Open Source Tech Alliance; Miguel de Icaza Comments

    Microsoft and Xamarin have partnered to establish a technology consortium that aims to help developers build computing applications based on Microsoft’s .NET programming framework.

04.08.14

News Links: Abuses of Power, Public Reactions

Posted in News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Drones

Venezuela

Ukraine

Power Abuses and Looting

  • GM’s immunity in recall questioned

    General Motors Co. is shielded from legal liability for nearly all accidents that occurred before its July 2009 exit from bankruptcy. That protection has emerged as one of the most controversial aspects of the automaker’s ignition switch recall.

  • Will the Government Rescue GM Again?
  • Energy Privatized: The Ultimate Neoliberal Triumph

    On December 21, 2013 Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, posed for the cameras holding the official decree ending the 75-year history of the national oil company, PEMEX. The decree also closed the era in which Mexico’s electrical generating and distribution system had been under the control of two public institutions—Central Light and Power (LyFC), from 1960 to 2009, and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), from 1937 to 2013. In a literal sense, neither PEMEX nor CFE will cease to exist, but they will quickly become mere shadows of what they were: the two largest firms operating in Mexico. In response to these comprehensive changes, noted public intellectual Arnaldo Córdova has acknowledged that “the Constitution is dying,” while Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas declared: “Never, throughout our history as an independent nation, has the country seen such a dismantlement of the protections to our sovereignty and self-determination.”1 For its part, the Mexican government immediately saturated the news media with full-page ads, the most prominent of which declared: “The oil will continue to belong to the Mexicans.”

  • Sentencing Corrupt Bankers to Death by Firing Squad

    One duo now on death row embezzled roughly $25 million from the state-owned Vietnam Agribank. Their co-conspirators caught decade-plus prison sentences.

    In March, a 57-year-old former regional boss from Vietnam Development Bank, another government-run bank, was sentenced to death over a $93-million swindling job.

    According to Vietnam’s Tuoi Tre news outlet, several of his colluders were sentenced to life imprisonment after they confessed to securing bogus loans with a diamond ring and a BMW coupe. And last week, in an unrelated case, charges against senior employees from the same bank allege $47 million in losses from dubious loans.

    None of this would impress Bernie Madoff, mastermind of America’s largest ever financial fraud scheme. The combined amount from all three Vietnamese cases adds up to less than 1 percent of his purported $18-billion haul.

    But these death sentences nevertheless are high profile scandals in Vietnam.

    That’s the point. Human rights watchdogs contend that splashy trials in Vietnam are acts of political theater with predetermined conclusions. The audience: a Vietnamese public weary of state corruption. But these sentences also sound loud alarm bells to dodgy bankers who are currently running scams.

  • The Rich Will Destroy London Like They Destroy Everything Else

    London’s housing market is being turned into a billionaire’s casino…

Privacy

  • HSTS: A secure standard that isn’t respected enough

    Not so, according to a post by Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In a blog he complains that most Web sites still don’t support HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a standard that was approved in the fall of 2012 by the Internet Engineering Steering Group.

NSA

  • US Supreme Court passes on NSA surveillance case

    Supreme Court declines an early look at a challenge to the NSA’s bulk collection of American’s phone records — but that doesn’t mean it won’t hear the case down the road.

  • Supreme Court Ducks NSA Surveillance Case

    The move isn’t surprising, as it is unusual for the Supreme Court to allow escalations straight from district courts without letting the US Court of Appeals have a go at it first.

  • US Supreme Court declines to hear NSA mass phone-slurp case

    Lawyer Larry Klayman won the first round of the case against America’s top online spying agency in December, when District of Columbia Judge Richard Leon found in favor of the plaintiff, saying the NSA tactics were an “arbitrary invasion” that was “almost Orwellian.”

  • Did UK spooks use NSA data to spy on Britons?

    “British intelligence agencies do not circumvent domestic oversight regimes by receiving from US agencies intercept material about British citizens which could not lawfully be acquired by intercept in the UK”.

  • NSA logs reveal flood of post-Snowden FOIA requests

    The National Security Agency (NSA) has been flooded with thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from journalists, civil rights groups and private citizens who have asked the agency to turn over the top-secret records that former contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the media, Al Jazeera can reveal.

  • Executive of telecom giant that aided NSA spying is on India’s cyber security panel

    Sensitive government committees aimed at boosting India’s cyber security and formulating its internet policy have featured intensive participation by representatives of US telecom giant AT&T, a company with a record of voluntary participation in online spying by the US, and a strong interest in ensuring rules of the internet road favour large corporations.

  • NSA ‘ally’ AT&T’s exec is member of Indian govt.’s cybersecurity committee
  • Privacy roundup: Public wary of tech companies, plus NSA-spying news
  • New Captain America movie with clear anti-NSA message is a massive hit abroad

    When the original Captain America movie came out, many wondered how well it would play in massive new Asian markets like China. Would a superhero movie with an in-your-face, pro-America message fare well? Well, the first movie in the franchise was a bit weak outside the U.S. — it grossed $194 million in all international markets combined. Fairly mediocre.

  • National View: Tech titans must do more than criticize NSA snooping

    When it suits them — and when events affect their bottom line — these companies like to make a stink about democracy and free speech. After humblebragging about calling President Barack Obama to complain about NSA snooping, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a paean to the Internet’s utopian spirit:

    Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I’m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

    Sounds good!

    But while Facebook claims to take seriously the security concerns of its billion-plus users, it’s also in the business of mining and exploiting its customers’ data.

  • The NSA Has Been Ordered To Disclose How Much Water It Uses
  • Defendant targets use of warrantless NSA wiretaps in criminal prosecutions

    When federal prosecutors charged Colorado resident Jamshid Muhtorov in 2012 with providing support to a terrorist organization in his native Uzbekistan, court records suggested the FBI had secretly tapped his phones and read his emails.

    But it wasn’t just the FBI. The Justice Department acknowledged in October that the National Security Agency had gathered evidence against Muhtorov under a 2008 law that authorizes foreign intelligence surveillance without warrants, much of it on the Internet. His lawyers have not been permitted to see the classified evidence.

Snowden

Hayden

Militarism

  • Why Do Soldiers Commit Suicide And Global Warlords

    Soldiers do not go to fight the unknown enemies on their own. They are indoctrinated and pushed to war paradigm by the political monsters who use them as digits and numbers – to compile official statistic, and to support the economy of dehumanization. Consequently, the fighting soldiers – men of conscience lose unity of the human consciousness – unity of material and spiritual factors of life and balanced characteristic– fair and foul. It is a tragic conjuncture of inner revolt of human consciousness for a crime that is not part of the human nature and character and not visible to scientifically expert minds – the doctors who simply identify mental health issues of those suspected of syndrome to commit suicide. These are the net causalities of man’s insanity against man. The real reasons are hardly mentioned in expert reports.

CIA

  • Torture, The CIA, And How We Lost Our Herd Immunity

    Dick Cheney, Patient Zero in this particular outbreak, and a towering public combination of inhumanity and cowardice, is out in public bragging about how deeply infected he is. (His daughter, Liz, went on TV over the weekend and suggested that we should ignore the decade of torture inspired by her father and concentrate instead on the true crime of the past 20 years…Benghazi.) Over the weekend, the inexcusable Fred Hiatt loaned the space over which he presides at The Washington Post to Jose Rodriguez, a truly monstrous figure in the events in question, so that Rodriguez could spread the infection even further through the subject population.

  • Doctor Zhivago: How the CIA turned fiction into propaganda
  • CIA Used “Dr. Zhivago” as Cold War Weapon
  • CIA Debunks Its Own Claims About Torture

    High-Level U.S. Officials Debunk CIA Claims About Bin Laden

  • Time to expose the CIA’s ‘dark side’

    The partial declassification of a report critical of interrogation and detention policies used by the CIA after 9/11 is a crucial part of confronting the abuses of our past.

  • Eric Holder Calls For Release Of ‘As Much As Possible’ Of CIA Torture Report
  • Robinson: Senate must release CIA torture report
  • Jon Stewart Explains the CIA Torture Report: “We Are a Moral People, in Hindsight”

    New details emerged last week outlining the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush Administration, after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify a comprehensive report. But don’t ask the government officials behind the program to actually call it torture. As Jon Stewart explained on last night’s The Daily Show, it was more along the lines of “super-aggressive, terrorist suspect spa treatments.”

  • It’s Time the CIA Gets Some Serious Oversight

    Every once in a while, the CIA’s “Because I said so” club lets loose with a bit of preposterous condescension that reminds us why, along with extraordinary rendition and drone strikes, we’re also a nation of transparency and checks and balances. In this case, the crowing comes from Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., former head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and the administrator of that agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation (i.e., torture) program. We shouldn’t believe the “shocking” results of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Rodriguez says, especially those that lay bare the lies and exaggerations promulgated by the CIA and the ineffectiveness of the program itself.

    Why not? Because Rodriguez was there, and you weren’t. Never mind that Rodriguez hasn’t actually read the report, or the fact that CIA-sponsored torture isn’t a yoga class, so “being present” doesn’t really count as the endeavor’s ultimate objective. And never mind the findings of the “Internal Panetta Review,” conducted by the CIA, that, according to Senator Feinstein, “documented at least some of the very same troubling matters already uncovered by the committee staff—which is not surprising, in that they were looking at the same information.”

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts