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01.04.13

US Media Bias in Android Patent Cases

Posted in Apple, Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Google at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Coat of arms of South Korea

Summary: An overview of recent news about Android cases and a reminder of the anti-Korea bias in north American press

Android is developed by an American (US) company, but the lion’s share of Android devices come from east Asia. By creating factories in the US, Apple and Samsung compete over the perception of being “more American” (made or assembled in USA). The corporate press, channels like CNN for example, does an Apple for dummies type of routine when it covers anti-Android lawsuits. It does not focus on trial misconduct [1, 2] for example. Forbes describes Apple as a victim:

Apple is perhaps the most talked about company in the world, online. Now, thanks to Apple’s litigation strategy, Samsung is the second most talked about. Here is a small thread of evidence.

The US is, as one might expect, hostile towards Korean companies if their rivals are largely US-based brands. Pamela Jones is the exception and she writes:

Judge Lucy Koh, the presiding judge in the Apple v. Samsung litigations, warned [PDF] the parties that she would ignore any arguments in their attachments to their post-trial motions that were new and therefore a backdoor way of bypassing the page limits she set for them, writing that “Any argument that is not explicitly articulated within the briefing page limits will be disregarded. Any supporting documentation shall be for corroboration purposes solely and shall not be used as a vehicle for circumventing the Court’s page limits.”

It would not be racist to say that Koh’s ethnicity may make her less likely to be Korea-hostile (as many US judges are). Recall what Europe too does to the Korean giant along with the ITC. Here is the ITC in action. The private US press — that which billionaires literally own — covered it a lot to make Apple, a common advertiser and ally, look good. Smaller news sites mention Apple setbacks; contrariwise, bad news for Samsung is what they fancy covering at CBS. To quote: “Samsung has dropped its bid to have Apple products that relate to its ongoing court cases against the company withdrawn from sale in Europe.”

And what about Apple? Remember who started it all and repeatedly sought bans. Watch this pro-Apple site whining about Apple not getting a trademark on “launchpad” (like Canonical):

On December 13, 2012, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a notice sent to Apple that basically denies them the rights to “Launchpad.” This is Apple’s second attempt at convincing the government agency of approving this trademark.

Canonical has had Launchpad for years. This just shows an ugly side of Apple, that’s all. The company also sought patents on shapes — a territory which in an article by Dennis Crouch he describes as follows: “laws of design patents; design patent application preparation and prosecution; design patent enforcement; tests of design patent validity; and design patent remedies.”

These patents are vague enough to augment copyright and they are very controversial, too. Remember the rounded rectangle monopoly of Apple? Apple’s cases are just very weak.

Recently we wrote about Apple and MPEG-LA. Watch this new article and remember that Apple and Microsoft are patent allies.

Motorola and Microsoft Debate the Scope of Google’s MPEG-LA License (Seattle) ~pj

The last time we looked in on the Microsoft v. Motorola litigation in Seattle, the judge, the Honorable James L. Robart, had just ruled that Motorola would have no right to injunctive relief in the US and Germany for its H.264 and 802.11 standard essential patent portfolios, at least not in the current set of facts, although he allowed that facts could change in the future.

The judge has asked [PDF] the parties to give him more information about Google’s license agreement with the MPEG-LA patent pool, and he set a hearing for oral argument for January 28 at 1:30 PM in Seattle on that issue and on a Microsoft motion for summary judgment on invalidity. If any of you can attend, that’d be wonderful.

We now can have a much clearer picture of the parties’ positions, now that we have both parties’ post-trial briefs on the subject of Google’s license agreement with MPEG-LA regarding H.264/AVC patent pool.

The crux of the debate is how to interpret one clause in the agreement, Section 8.3. Does it require Google to grant Microsoft a license to Motorola’s H.264-essential patents? Microsoft says it does, and Google says it does not. Google says it chose a license whereby it would have to list all affiliates it wished to be covered by the agreement, and to date it has not listed Motorola. It didn’t close on the Motorola deal until after it entered the license agreement with MPEG-LA anyway. And Motorola never on its own put any of its relevant patents into the MPEG-LA patent pool. So either way, Microsoft has no rights to a license via the MPEG-LA patent pool, Google argues, only by negotiated agreement under normal RAND terms, obviously at a higher rate.

The MPEG cartel has been used by the duopoly against free platforms, but Apple got hit recently, as covered here:

A federal jury in Delaware has found Apple’s iPhone infringes on three patents held by MobileMedia Ideas, a patent-holding company formed by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA.

Here is more:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) lost an infringement case brought by patent-licensing firm MobileMedia Ideas LLC when a federal jury decided the maker of the iPhone misappropriated protected technology for the handheld devices.

Jurors in Wilmington, Delaware, deliberated about four hours after a weeklong trial before also concluding today that the three patents aren’t invalid.

Those trolls are connected to the MPEG cartel, unlike this entity:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) and LG Electronics Inc. (066570) didn’t infringe an Alcatel-Lucent SA (ALU) unit’s patents for electronic devices including phones and computers, a jury said.

The verdict today came after a trial that began Nov. 27 in federal court in San Diego over a 2010 lawsuit by the Paris- based company’s Multimedia Patent Trust accusing Apple and LG Electronics of copying video-compression technology that allows data to be sent more efficiently over communications media, including the Internet and satellites, or stored on DVDs and Blu-Ray disks.

This comes from Bloomberg. Plutocrats’ press likes to cover pro-Apple stories. █

Free Software Foundation (FSF) Seeks Funds to Help Those Who Cannot Use GNU and Linux on New PCs Due to UEFI

Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

William John Sullivan

Summary: Microsoft’s latest abuses continue to show their effectiveness at preventing people from embracing free operating systems; FSF spearheads action against it

WITH Vista 8 came UEFI, which is probably its best ‘feature’ in Microsoft’s eyes; it helps discourage and deter against Linux booting. One blogger provides us with this story which shows UEFI in action (preventing ‘malware’ like Linux from booting):

During the last weeks, I spent several nights playing with UEFI and its extension called UEFI SecureBoot. I must admit that I have mixed feelings about UEFI in general; on one hand, you have a nice and modern “BIOS replacement” that can boot .efi files with no need for a bootloader like GRUB, on the other hand, some hardware, not even the most exotic one, is not yet glitch-free. But that’s what happens with new stuff in general. I cannot go much into detail without drifting away from the main topic, but surely enough, a simple google search about UEFI and Linux will point you to the problems I just mentioned above.

So far, not much has been done about it. The FSF ran an online petition which it plans to use quite soon based on articles like this one.

The Free Software Foundation is an organisation for which I have the utmost respect. Without it, the whole phenomenon of free and open source sofware would never have come to be.

The FSF has also been at the forefront of efforts to preserve freedom in computing and has stuck to its guns in the face of much criticism.

But on secure boot, it is lagging behind. I am surprised that it has not updated its campaign against secure boot, launched in October 2011, to include relevant facts. A great deal of material in the petition is now outdated and factually incorrect.

Here in this Web site we collected a lot of information on the subject and we also confronted key UEFI people. Christopher Tozzi talks about the FSF’s action as follows:

Still, the Free Software Foundation, one of the open-source channel’s most influential organizations in moral (if not financial) terms, is aggressively combating Secure Boot with a multi-channel campaign. The group plans to educate the public on avoiding Secure Boot-enabled hardware, pressure device manufacturers to avoid measures that will prevent consumers from installing the software they wish and combat Microsoft’s proposal for implementing a similar feature on ARM-powered smartphones and tablets.

To advance its efforts, the FSF has created a petition, signed so far by more than 40,000 individuals and 50 organizations. The signatories pledge not to purchase hardware that fails to “provide a sure-fire way for them to install and run a free software operating system of their choice.” The FSF also invites users to donate $50, although it’s not clear whether that money will be used to combat Secure Boot specifically, or support the FSF’s operations more generally.

What’s needed is regulatory action. It was needed all along, but Microsoft apologists helped legitmise what Microsoft had perpetrated. What we have now is a mess and no federal investigation. Mikkel Munch Mortensen writes today:

I paid for a genuine copy of Windows 8.
I tried installing it on a seperate disk next to Ubuntu on my desktop computer. When rebooting after install, it says there’s a problem with my OS that can’t be fixed. The error code is something like 00000001. I guess that’s a kinda fundamental error. Reinstall didn’t work.

I tried installing to my laptop, on a seperate disk that used to have another copy of #Windows8 on it, which I wiped, kinda just 4 the lulz. Even before I get to install anything, even before I get to enter my serial key, it says that the serial key I entered doesn’t match what is (whatever that “what” refers to, it’s a wiped disk) on the device (or something like that).

I spent 5 hours on this yesterday. I spend several hours about a month ago.

To me, it seems like #Microsoft tried so hard to avoid something like dualbooting/pirated copies/installation on secondary disks that it’s completely impossible to install their OS that I already deemed crappy, but really need for a few applications that is not (yet) available for Ubuntu or other Linuxes.

Or, maybe, it’s just Microsofts way of giving me the middle finger for ditching their OS as my primary OS years ago in favor of #Ubuntu.

Here is another story published earlier today to demonstrate UEFI abuses. The victim writes:

I really appreciate the helpful Windows 8 tips I’ve been getting from you. But there’s one issue I am struggling with: Linux, and specifically installing it on my Windows 8 computer.

I haven’t been able to get Linux to install properly, and I really don’t know why. One of my techie friends told me it has to do with a new Secure Boot feature in Windows 8.

Mission accomplished by Microsoft. Under the guise of ‘security’ it now sees its dream come true. This impedes GNU and Linux growth at a crucial time when Windows puts people off. █

01.03.13

Links 3/1/2013: Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled, Linux 3.8-rc2, KDE 4.9.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The year of open source in libraries

    If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard “no” a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, “We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature.” Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

  • Happy New Year & Browser and OS stats for 2012

    I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year on behalf of the entire LQ team. 2012 has been another great year for LQ and we have quite a few exciting developments in store for 2013, including a major code update that we originally had planned for late 2012.

    Unfortunately, 2012 has been another quiet year from a blogging perspective, but I do regularly post to the LQ twitter account. Posting more lengthy commentary here is something I’ll try to be more cognizant of this year.

    [...]

    Operating Systems
    Windows 53.56%
    Linux 35.54%

  • The Web browser wars continue, and #1 is… well, that depends on whom you ask
  • TECH TALK: Open source is legal software alternative

    Despite the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

  • January 2013 Project of the Month: DosBox
  • Open Source in 2013
  • NeuroDNet – an open source platform for constructing and analyzing neurodegenerative disease networks

    Genetic networks control cellular functions. Aberrations in normal cellular function arecaused by mutations in genes that disrupt the fine tuning of genetic networks and causedisease or disorder.

    However, the large number of signalling molecules, genes and proteinsthat constitute such networks, and the consequent complexity of interactions, has restrainedprogress in research elucidating disease mechanisms. Hence, carrying out a systematicanalysis of how diseases alter the character of these networks is important.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/armv6: what’s new and exciting?

      First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year.

    • FreeBSD Moves Along On ARM Support
    • NetBSD 6.0.1 Released, Brings Bug-Fixes

      For those of you currently on NetBSD 6.0 or are using NetBSD 5.x as your operating system but have been wanting a reason to upgrade, the first NetBSD 6.0.x point release has surfaced.

    • FreeBSD Jumps Quickly On LLVM/Clang 3.2

      While just released on Friday, FreeBSD has already pulled LLVM/Clang 3.2 into its “head” repository and will be pushing it into the FreeBSD 9/Stable series in the weeks ahead.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Cassandra 1.2 arrives as foretold

      Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012′s Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.

    • Apache Puts Out Cassandra 1.2 NoSQL Database

      The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Cassandra. Version 1.2 of the Cassandra big data “NoSQL” distributed database introduces several new features to the open-source project.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source

      A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

      The new IT strategy on Thursday evening got 36 votes in favour and 20 against, reports one of the city council members, Matthias Stürmer. He described the new approach as “ground breaking”. One year ago, the city council adopted a motion for Bern to develop an open source strategy. The council now takes a further step, asking for an IT strategy that increases the use of open source and that aims to achieve long-term cost savings.

  • Licensing

    • Unlicensed FOSS: Major Mistake for Developers

      One disturbing trend is the posting of FOSS modules without licenses. Simon Phipps focused on this problem in his recent blog, particularly on the problems raised by the terms of service at Github. James Governor, the founder of analyst Red Monk, is quoted by Simon as stating: “”younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github” http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046. Ironically, this approach will undercut the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code. The lack of a license ensures that the software will be removed from any product meant to be used by corporations. Corporations are very sensitive about ensuring that all software that they use or which is incorporated in their products is properly licensed. I have worked on hundreds of FOSS analysis and the response to software without a clear license is almost always “rip it out”.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The men who would save Mali’s manuscripts

    Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed graves and shrines associated with Sufism this year. Ancient manuscripts are not directly threatened, but some fear they are next.

  • Why Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike is ethical

    Q: There has been much coverage of the hunger strike by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. I’m not interested in the politics — instead, I want to address the ethics of a hunger strike. Look at what it really is: a person slowly commits suicide to pressure others into giving what he or she wants. The most unethical part is that thousands of Canadians are encouraging Spence in her suicide by supporting her. It’s one thing for a child who didn’t get a toy to swear never to eat again, but we should expect more from a community leader.

  • iPhone ‘Do Not Disturb’ bug to self-destruct on Monday

    Users of Apple’s iPhone will have to wait until Monday for its latest bug to fix itself.

  • MorphOS Still Being Toyed With For PowerPC

    MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.

  • Fox asks appeals court to stop Dish’s ad-skipping DVR, right now

    Fox Broadcasting, having lost a key court ruling last month, is more eager than ever to kick Dish Network’s new ad-skipping Hopper DVR off the market.
    Last month, a federal judge found that Dish’s DVRs probably don’t break copyright law, ruling that the Hoppers can stay on the market and operate normally while Fox proceeds with its lawsuit. Fox is arguing that it can’t wait, and it says that Dish’s product has the potential to do serious damage to various aspects of the ad-supported TV business. As promised, it appealed the lower court decision and has now filed its opening brief at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF via Deadline.com).

  • Fujitsu Comes Up Empty in Koh’s Courtroom

    “They were very hardworking,” he said. “They dug down surprisingly deeply. They spent a lot of time going through documentary evidence.”

  • EU’s tougher Google deal derails FTC agreement

    European regulators appear headed toward a dramatically different conclusion to their antitrust probe of Google than their American counterparts — a binding agreement that could cost the search company dearly if violated.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Zanu PF leaders defy party WikiLeaks warning

      Zanu PF has warned its bigwigs to watch their mouths when meeting with American envoys amid revelations that party “stalwarts” last week clandestinely met United States ambassador Bruce Wharton.

    • A Tale of Two Diplomatic Asylums: Julian Assange and Chen Guangcheng
    • WikiLeaks:1988 Indian Payoff To LTTE Revealed – 520 Million Indian Rupees To Tigers

      “Major Sri Lankan Papers April 15 have head lined a report (First published in the April 3 London Observer) which quotes both Indian High Commissioner J.N. Dixit and an LTTE spokesman in Madras that Indian Prime Minister Gandhi agreed in late July to pay the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a monthly stipend to compensate for lost Tax revenues following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

    • What Is an Assange?

      This week, I was proud to join the board and help launch the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a new organization which plans on crowd-funding for a variety of independent journalism outlets whose prime mission is to seek transparency and accountability in government. You can read about the first group of four organizations — which includes the National Security Archive, MuckRock News, and The UpTake and WikiLeaks — here.

      Recently, I sat down with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and my close friend Kevin McCabe to discuss WikiLeaks’ impact on transparency, the government’s response, and the comparison to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (also a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation). (And see a previous conversation with Jonathan Turley here.)

      WikiLeaks was extralegally cut off from funding after two Congressmen successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard and PayPal into refusing to do business with the journalism organization in late 2010. We hope that the Freedom of the Press Foundation will become a bulwark against these types of unofficial censorship tactics in the future.

    • US spies on Assange in UK Ecuador Embassy

  • Finance

    • Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

      Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

    • It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: Wall Street Gears Up for Austerity Battles of 2013

      For better or worse, a bill passed Congress in the wee hours of 2013 averting the much-hyped “fiscal cliff” for now and raising taxes on couples making over $450,000 and extending a lifeline of unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans.

      But the vote is not so much an ending as a beginning to the austerity battles of 2013.

      As the economy continues to stagger, the search for a “grand bargain” on taxes and critical social programs is likely to roll from fiscal cliff to debt ceiling negotiations into the annual budget battles. While some feel that a “grand bargain” is less likely than “death by 1,000 cuts,” the ongoing debate will continue to pose serious risks for average Americans who will need to stay engaged.

    • Google India fined $13.8M for false accounting

      Search giant’s Indian arm accused of misleading tax authorities by underdeclaring revenue from AdWords and evading taxes through international transactions, but Google India denies the claim.

    • Paulson Named in ACA’s Revised Goldman Sachs CDO Suit

      Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund, was named as a defendant in a proposed revised lawsuit by ACA Financial Guaranty Corp. (MANF) against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus.

      Paulson and Goldman Sachs conspired to induce ACA to provide financial guaranty insurance for the Abacus deal, which was “doomed to fail,” the firm said in papers filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. ACA, which sued Goldman Sachs in 2011, is seeking court permission to file a revised complaint adding Paulson as a defendant.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Online gift shop blocked by mobile networks

      This is an online shop – meaning the block was affecting their ability to sell their products. The block was spotted and reported to Virgin Mobile in early December. The problem has not yet been fixed. So the block was in effect over Christmas, and will have affected the site’s ability to reach their market in one of the more important retail periods of the year.

    • State of Freedom of Speech in Tunisia in 2012

  • Privacy

    • Facebook rejects German demand to allow fake names
    • Microsoft Scrutinized by EU Privacy Watchdogs for Policy Changes

      Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues.
      Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter, obtained by Bloomberg News.

    • EU Investigates Microsoft for Policy Changes in Hotmail, Bing

      Microsoft made the policy changes on October 19

      Microsoft just can’t catch a break from the European Commission.

      The EU now plans to investigate the tech giant’s recent policy changes and how they may affect the privacy of its users. The policy changes were in regards to Microsoft’s Internet services like Bing and Hotmail.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • After ACTA: Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement

      Not content with dedicated treaties developed under the aegis of WIPO, the copyright industries saw such general trade agreements as yet opportunity to impose their maximalist agendas. This led to chapters dealing with intellectual monopolies like copyright and patents not only being added to such agreements, but becoming the tail that wagged the dog. That can be seen from the fact that ACTA was killed in the European Parliament last year precisely because the chapter dealing with copyright and patents was regarded as so flawed that it vitiated the entire treaty, which had to be rejected despite other sections that were viewed very favourably by many MEPs.

      Moreover, in the current negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a kind of ACTA for the Pacific rim, it is once more the disproportionate demands of the copyright and patent world that threaten to scupper the entire treaty as countries rebel at the onerous terms the US is trying to impose.

      That means the otherwise welcome trade agreement between EU and US is bound to have a similar chapter that attempts to push through many or most of the bad ideas that infected ACTA. There’s already a precedent for this in CETA, the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement that I wrote about back in October last year. As I noted, the criminal sanctions there were directly modelled on ACTA’s.

    • Copyrights

      • London ‘crime unit’ to target downloaders as part of UK copyright and patent initiatives

        Vince Cable, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.

Microsoft ’8′ Failure Leads to Sabotage and Daemonisation Plan

Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: What Microsoft resorts to amid reports of mobile failure with the “8″-washed operating systems

A person whom I follow, Karthikeyan A K, wrote about a day ago in JoinDiaspora:

had a hard time removing #windows8 and installing #ubuntu on a system. #UEFI sucks.

With tactics like UEFI Microsoft is desperate to stop Linux because its own operating systems are a disaster:

Microsoft Is Fast Turning Into A Sideshow

[...]

If Windows 8 is Exhibit A, Exhibit B is Windows Phone 8. Nokia has started discounting recently launched Lumia phones, indicating that they’re not exactly moving like hotcakes. Microsoft makes excuses and says these things take time, but even a fool can tell a torrid introduction from a lukewarm launch.

As we showed in the previous post, daemonising Google has become one tactic and it’s weak. Microsoft now lashes out at Google for not writing software for Windows Phone despite the claim that:

Windows Phone is estimated to account for a mere 2.6% of the mobile market and adoption of Windows 8 is said to be weak as well.

Gordon (thistleweb) writes, “no matter how many storms of shit #Microsoft find themselves in, you can’t help feel anything other than #karma for their behaviour… shit happens when your CEO promises to “kill” them”.” █

Mark Penn Shows Microsoft-AstroTurf Overlap

Posted in Microsoft at 9:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Interesting employer ties seen around Microsoft’s daemoniser of Google

THE AstroTurfing firm that we see here turns out to have more Microsoft connections than we knew about. Our contributor iophk asks, “wasn’t Burston-Marsteller the same firm that both MS and Facebook hired to smear Google? There are also other instances of cross contamination.”

We seem to have missed this news about Mark Penn’s origin:

After six years leading PR giant Burson-Marsteller, CEO Mark Penn is leaving the firm for a new job at Microsoft, where he will help shape its brand image. His new gig: Corporate vice president of strategic and special projects. In that role, Penn, who served as senior strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, will lead “a small interdisciplinary team” focused on “consumer initiatives,” according to the announcement by Microsoft. He’ll report directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.

The anti-Google campaigns by Penn were recently covered in [1, 2 , 3]. Add that to news reminiscent of Wikipedia airbrushing by Waggener Edstrom, which is akin to this act of censorship by Penn’s company:

Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant, who is often used as a “crisis management” PR firm for clients undergoing bad press appears to need some outside help in handling its own crisis management…

[...]

And, now it’s gotten worse, as Burson has been caught deleting critical posts from its Facebook page, forcing the company to sort of, but not really, apologize again, and say they’ll reach out to the person who had posted a link to some of the coverage of the company’s Facebook wall, and tell her she can put it back up. The company also tried to brush it off by saying that its Facebook page had been receiving “a lot of profanity,” and that was all they were seeking to delete. That a basic story about the controversy got deleted in the process… well… I guess that’s just collateral damage.

If PR includes deletion, then why not? It is not as though ethics are a major consideration for people in this occupation. █

01.01.13

Links 1/1/2013: digiKam 3.0.0, Android-Based Game Console Ships

Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Resolve to more open in 2013
  • Open Source Speech Recognition Tool, Simon, Gets An Update
  • Five Biggest Open Source Developments in 2012
  • Tech Jobs In 2013: Open Source All The Way Down
  • The H Year: 2012′s Wins, Fails and Mehs

    Welcome to The H’s look back at 2012. We’ve broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say “Meh”. From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.

  • Kolab Systems spearheads an open-source solution for the third pillar of productivity: groupware

    Why is the founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe currently leading a for-profit software company in the groupware space?

  • Egyptians decide Open Source is the Sphinx’s bollocks

    Open Sauce appears to be a major victor of the Arab Spring which led to a change of leadership in Egypt.

    It appears that the nation which worked out how to build the world’s largest public building with just copper tools, has decided that proprietary software is a bad thing.

    Egypt is apparently drawing up plans to cast out the Voles, Oracles, Apples and other followers of Apep, into the Lands of the West in favour of a decent open sauce plan for its public software projects.

  • Events

    • Google DocCamp 2012: Book sprints

      There are three new books about free software thanks to Google’s 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint’s energy after the participants part company.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS AppDays Hackathon Brings Mozilla’s Coveted OS Too India!

        No one needs an introduction to Mozilla. Yes, the makers of the Firefox internet browser. For years, Mozilla has been encouraging open web standards, trying to promote the web as a platform for all. And with the advent of HTML5 things have gotten much simpler with almost everything being able to be implemented in web. With HTML5, developers would no longer have to worry about creating applications intended for cross platform usage – if based on web-standards, it runs on any platform with a standard compliant browser! Building apps is quite easy as well.

      • Mozilla Firefox in 2012

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • 2012 Trends and 2013 Predictions for Open Source eCommerce

      I’ve been writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) shopping carts for a decade now, and many carts have risen and fallen in popularity during that time. For the past five years I’ve tracked the popularity of OSC carts every month by doing an exact Google search and recording the results. This doesn’t track the actual number of carts installed, and popularity can be positive or negative, but over time it becomes more and more valuable as the search results mirror the life cycle of a cart. Carts that are becoming more popular show rapid increases in the number of search results. It is possible to see exact the month a cart peaks in popularity. Year-to-year results are even more revealing.

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Simon 0.4.0 Speech Recognition System Released

      Version 0.4.0 of the Simon open-source speech recognition system has been released. This release, which represents years of development, brings many improvements.

      Simon 0.4.0 for speech recognition brings a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system, and much more. The main user-interface of Simon has also been reworked for improved usability.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • “Sit. Stay. Good lamp!”

        Shanshan Zhou had a longtime childhood fantasy: she dreamt her otherwise static belongings would suddenly begin to play with her—she used to pretend they were alive. So when it came time to do a project for her Physical Computing class at Victoria University-Wellington, she took the opportunity to turn an inanimate object into “living art.” Zhou gave character to an object which, despite its lack of human features, could now connect with people.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 is now stable and “feature complete”

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

      Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called “feature complete” a this stage.

Leftovers

  • William Baer Confirmed as Justice Department Antitrust Chief

    William J. Baer was confirmed by the Senate on Sunday as the government’s top antitrust lawyer, placing him in charge of the Justice Department division that reviews corporate mergers and prosecutes price-fixing cases.

    Amid the heated negotiations to reach an agreement to head off large tax increases and vast spending cuts in the new year, the Senate voted 64 to 26 in favor of Mr. Baer, a prominent antitrust lawyer at the law firm Arnold & Porter.

  • Haiku: BeOS for the 21st Century

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Report: $91 million spent on secret NSA tests probing domestic computer systems
    • Privacy group gets NSA files on utility research

      Files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provided to CNET show that the National Security Agency (NSA) under its secret Perfect Citizen program is looking at the computerized systems that control large-scale utilities, checking for vulnerabilities including power grid and gas pipeline controllers. The U.S. government relies on commercial utilities for electricity, telecommunications, and other infrastructure requirements The program seeks to carry out “vulnerability exploration and research” against computerized controllers involved in these utilities.

    • NSA secret cyber security testing no longer secret
    • Pentagon Looks to Fix ‘Pervasive Vulnerability’ in Drones

      In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.

      Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

      Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA Sued To Release NYPD Spying Report

      A non-profit government watchdog has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to uncover information about its controversial collaboration with the New York City Police Department’s counter-terrorism surveillance program. The suit, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Dec. 20, seeks to force the release of a report by the agency’s inspector general into whether it violated legal prohibitions against spying on American soil. In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the agency was deeply involved in training the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit, which spied on Muslims in New York even when there was no evidence they had committed any crimes.

    • Drone victim to appeal ruling over UK support for CIA strikes in Pakistan

      A Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US drone strike is to appeal a judgement in a case seeking to determine the legality of intelligence sharing in relation to GCHQ assistance in CIA drone strikes.

      Noor Khan – whose father was killed in a CIA strike on a peaceful meeting in March 2011 –issued legal proceedings in March of this year against the Foreign Secretary in order to clarify the British Government’s reported policy of supporting the CIA’s covert campaign of attacks on his home region of Waziristan, using remotely-controlled robotic aircraft.

      Supported by legal action charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day & Co, Mr Khan’s legal challenge asserts that this practice are illegal. British law makes it clear that in these circumstances UK intelligence staff and those who direct their actions could be committing various criminal offences, including conspiracy to murder.

    • Senate report: FBI, CIA, intelligence officials caused confusing Benghazi explanations
    • NDAA Threatens Americans’ Constitutional Rights and Should Be Vetoed By Obama
    • Crossover Drones

      The rapid advance of drone technology has sparked interest by police and sheriff offices in acquiring drones. This new eagerness of many nonfederal law enforcement agencies to acquire drones has been also closely nurtured by the federal government.

    • Drones: More Than Mechanized Warfare
    • Imran Khan | Ground the drones in 2013

      Although 2012 saw an accelerating drawdown of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) forces in Afghanistan, a grim aspect of that decade-long war—reliance on air strikes by unmanned drones—continued unabated. Indeed, those attacks were stepped up, with America’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan reaching an unprecedented height over the past year. With President Barack Obama re-elected and no longer facing the pressure of a campaign, it would be in America’s interest—and certainly in the interests of my country, Pakistan—to use the first year of his new term to de-escalate the violence.

    • Interesting revelations from the OWS FBI files
    • EGYPT PROSECUTORS INVESTIGATE POPULAR TV COMEDIAN

      Egyptian prosecutors launched an investigation on Tuesday against a popular television satirist for allegedly insulting the president in the latest case raised by Islamist lawyers against outspoken media personalities.

  • Cablegate

    • GREEN LEFT REPORT #11: Christine Assange, Carlo Sands + more

      The final Green Left Report for 2012 features Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, on why the Australian government fears WikiLeaks, the problems of the corporate press, and the WikiLeaks releases that impacted the most on her.

    • Syrian rebels eulogise Aussie ‘martyr’

      The man’s name and date of birth correspond with that given for one person in a secret 2010 cable sent by the US embassy in Canberra, detailing people to be added to the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database. However, his family deny he was a member of any extremist group.

    • Ethiopian Review’s 2012 Person of the Year

      Because of Julian Assange’s effort, the world knows that heroic Ethiopians such as Andualem Aragie, Eskindir Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, and countless others are languishing in jail after being falsely accused of terrorism by a regime that is bankrolled by the U.S. Government and the European Union, and assisted by China.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • King Coal Gets a Boost through ALEC

      As Americans experienced epic droughts, freakish hurricanes, and other extreme weather over the past few years, many are eager to see our nation secure a sustainable energy supply for the future that won’t break our climate. But others – most notably the polluting fossil fuel industries – are eager to double down on the same old technologies that are responsible for the climate crisis in the first place.

    • The GOP House Is Dysfunctional By Design

      In short, John Boehner has committed himself to a set of principles for operating the House that makes the body fundamentally dysfunctional. A functional legislative body either needs a mechanism for the majority leader to get members of his caucus to toe the party line, or he needs the ability to “reach across the aisle” to get the votes he needs from the minority. John Boehner lacks the former, and by ruling out the latter he’s effectively painted himself into a corner where he might not be able to get any piece of “fiscal cliff” legislation passed by the full House of Representatives.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Make No Mistake, Corporate Ed Reform is Hurting Kids

      Corporate Education Reform hurts children. This truth needs to be said a million times over. No longer can we allow reformers to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and ignore the realities. Words like “poverty is not destiny” “high expectations” “quality school options” and “choice” all mask the very real impact of these reforms. There are consequences to the disruption of school closings, to purposeful disinvestment in neighborhood schools, to layoffs of experienced educators, to the haphazard expansion of largely low-quality charters.

      As most who read this blog know, I work in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Unlike many teachers out there who see only their small window of the reform world, I get to see the cross-section. Students cycle through my program so quickly (too quickly, thanks to massive cuts in mental health services) that I hear dozens of stories a week from all over the city and surrounding suburbs. And what’s happening out there is beyond heart-breaking, it is wrong. Kids have come in to the hospital with massive anxiety, depression, and aggression related, in part, to school policies. I have students who report fear of “getting jumped” on the way to schools across town after their neighborhood school was shut down. I’ve had kids with school refusal due to the very real fear of a dangerous bus route through rival neighborhoods. Young people are afraid of the increases in violence and gang activity as kids from all parts of the city are thrust together in schools whose only response to the rage is zero tolerance lockdown. There is no healing, just ignoring and punishing the problem, pushing the fights off of school grounds. Almost every child I work with from the neighborhoods targeted for the brunt of school reform has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have difficulty sitting still, are quick to react to any perceived threat with violence or aggression, cannot concentrate on school work, and have come to hate the experience of school. And yet all they get from school leadership is school closures, fired teachers, and false choices.

    • We Need Your Help! Join Our Fight to Keep 3D Printing Open

      A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it’s critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate.
      With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it’s time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.

    • Copyrights

      • New Zealand’s largest paper calls Kim Dotcom “good for this country”

        Kim Doctom could fill his own Year in Review list for 2012. The Megaupload mega-personality planned a cloud music service called Megabox. He unveiled a new domain, Me.ga, only to lose it in a preemptive strike by the African nation of Gabon. There were even rap songs and accusations against Joe Biden.

        But hanging over all that was Dotcom’s ongoing soap opera in New Zealand. On January 20, 2012, 76 police officers raided Dotcom’s mansion on behalf of the US and took him into custody for extradition to face charges of racketeering, money-laundering, and copyright infringement. Twelve months later, the legal woes aren’t over, and Megaupload remains down… but Dotcom is being invited to ceremonially turn on Christmas lights in the country.

      • The File Sharing Lawsuits Begin: Thousands Targeted at TekSavvy

        Given recent reports that a Montreal-based company has captured data on one million Canadians who it says have engaged in unauthorized file sharing, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before widespread file sharing lawsuits came to Canada. It now appears that those lawsuits are one step closer as TekSavvy, a leading independent ISP, has announced that it has received a motion seeking the names and contact information of thousands of customers (legal documents here). To TekSavvy’s credit, the company insists that it will not provide subscriber information without a court order and it has sent notices to affected customers.

      • Hollywood and Google Square Off Over Pirate Search Results

        The MPAA is still not happy with Google’s efforts to reduce online piracy and says that the search giant continues to facilitate a “staggering amount of copyright infringement.” For their part Google is warning policymakers of the damaging effects the recent surge of DMCA takedown requests is having on the flow of information online. Both Google and the MPAA agree that the current DMCA takedown procedures are not ideal, but the solutions both parties have in mind are quite different.

      • Copyright disappears books
      • Apple fined by China court for copyright violation

        A court in China has ordered Apple to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.

Groups of Lawyers Will Not Solve the Patent Problem

Posted in Patents at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Quentin Massys painting
16th century painting of a civil law notary

Summary: Scientists, engineers, programmers, technologists etc. — not government bodies — will help the rest of the public abolish government-granted monopolies

The European Commission doesn't get FRAND, or maybe it pretends not to, or perhaps it was bribed or deceived by Apple and Microsoft lobbyists. Either way, this recent event proved some malice in today’s Commission, which also ushered in the unitary patent. Glyn Moody writes on the subject:

There was – of course – disagreement on the place of FRAND, since those in the open source world know that it has none if the object is to produce a level playing-field for all to compete on equally. And for that very reason those in the world of proprietary software want FRAND baked into standards since it excludes nearly all of the key open source licences and the projects using them. It’s the perfect solution for those who are afraid to compete fairly: skew the rules so that open source is excluded, and then claim victory when it doesn’t offer solutions.

Also worth noting in the above statement from the report is the claim that “the distinction between software and hardware is increasingly artificial”. I think if we decode this, what it means is that in the old world of hardware – for example, in telecommunications or codecs – FRAND standards were common, and that’s perfectly true. But in the world of software, the key modern forums for standards such as W3C or OASIS require RF, not FRAND. So this is a crude attempt to force old-fashioned hardware approaches on modern software, because once again the convenient result is that open source is excluded.

Indeed, given the manifestly greater success of the modern approach – as demonstrated by the unprecedented rate of growth of the Internet ecosystem compared to earlier technologies – the move to implementing hardware features in software is a strong argument for making older hardware standards RF instead of FRAND; that would allow them to enjoy the same kind of accelerated deployment the software world has experienced in the last two decades.

Thus there is no “dilemma” that needs resolving, and no need for stakeholder dialogue – another code term for “opportunity for wealthy US software companies to spend huge sums lobbying for what they want in the corridors of Brussels,” since “stakeholders” never seems to include groups representing the public interest, who were similarly excluded from the ACTA negotiations until they took to the streets across Europe.

Even Kroes lost her way when it comes to patents as she gave implicit consent to FRAND [1, 2, 3]. These career politicians are typically lawyers by trade, so the poor comprehension of scientists’ desire is not surprising. See what IBM’s Kappos says to provide ammo to a lawyers’ firm after he had joined the USPTO and later announced that he would leave amid public scolding [1, 2, 3]:

USPTO Director Discusses Software “Patent Wars” By: Sheldon Mak & Anderson http://www.eyeonip.net/David Kappos, the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, recently addressed the socalled “patent wars” impacting the software industry. Although he acknowledged several concerns about patent quality, he also highlighted the importance of IP rights to the software industry. “Patent protection is every bit as well-deserved for software-implemented innovation as for the innovations that enabled man to fly, and before that for the innovations that enabled man to light the dark with electricity, and before that for the innovations that enabled the industrial revolution,” Kappos stated. However, he also acknowledged that patent protection must be “properly tailored in scope, so that programmers can write code and engineers can design devices without fear of unfounded accusations of infringement.” Kappos also debunked reports that the “patent wars” between companies like Samsung and Apple signal that the system is broken. He cited a USPTO study that found that in over 80 percent of the smartphone lawsuits, the courts have construed the software patents at issue as valid. He further noted that rejections in software patent applications taken to the USPTO appeals board are upheld at a slightly higher rate than for the office as a whole, and those few decisions appealed to the Federal Circuit are affirmed 95 percent of the time. Kappos also noted that the changes implemented under the America Invents Act should improve the quality of software patents. He specifically listed new procedures, such as post-grant opposition, inter partes review, and covered business method patents review. He also noted that additional changes are forthcoming as the USPTO completes the rollout of the AIA. “So to the commentators declaring the system is “broken” I say: give it a rest already, and give the AIA a chance to work. Give it a chance to even get started. But we’re not done. Not nearly,” Kappos stated.

We already shared some rebuttals to this. The conclusion we can reach is that too many government bodies are occupied by lawyers who represent corporations (not people) and it shows. Groups that are led by lawyers do not want to solve the problem from which they profit. █

Egypt Besieged by Microsoft, the Egyptian People Fight the Oppressor

Posted in Africa, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Pyramid

Summary: Microsoft colludes with dubious officials in order to pass a lot of public money to crooks who habitually misuse their power over code

The Egyptians seem to have learned from their neighbour Tunisia [1, 2, 3] and given that Microsoft and Gates Foundation actively work to occupy Egypt they should keep their eyes open. This week they rise up against a Microsoft deal that discriminates against software fostered by local developers for autonomy and freedom. To quote one report:

A group of organisations, companies and high-profile individuals have released a statement calling for a protest on Sunday in front of the Cabinet in Cairo, in response to a recent government decision to purchase Microsoft software licenses and products to upgrade government agencies. Under the name Open Egypt, the signees demand the government re-evaluate their deal.

At a cost of more than 43 million dollars, activists such as Abdel Rahman Mansour from the We are all Khaled Sayeed and human rights’ organisations such as the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights say it is a waste of money, considering the availability of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and Egypt’s current economic state.

Indeed, the use of FOSS is seen as the more strategic option, as it allows the government to invest that money elsewhere and with the added benefit of utilising existing FOSS software already operating in many agencies.

So the rule by puppets may remain after Mubarak was toppled. The North Americans can control Egypt through software, just as Vodafone did through networks. Here is another article on this matter:

Egypt: The People Demand Free and Open Source Software

[...]

Things did not stop here, but members of the Open Source community in Egypt called for a silent demonstration in front of the cabinet of ministers on the 30th of December. Other demonstrations are also being arranged in different parts of Egypt. And the hashtag #OpenEgypt is now being used to introduce people to Open Source Software, and their benefits.

We covered many such stories from different nations in prior years. The plot always repeated itself and rarely did we see the public rising up in opposition. So well done, people of Egypt, fight the good fight and show the rest of the world how it’s done. One reader sent us this link (Arabic with translation) an hour ago. It seems like the protests are paying off! █

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