01.24.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Patents at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) gets exFAT, allowing the mounting of Microsoft’s patent tax trap
Two companies we wrote about before, Paragon and Tuxera, help Microsoft tax Linux through file systems. One more implementation arrives, but this one is licensed differently and uses FUSE. “Linus Torvalds and others in the past have characterized FUSE file-systems as being for toys and misguided people,” writes Phoronix, “but FUSE has been used before for bringing Sun/Oracle’s ZFS to Linux, various other creative file-system implementations, and now exFAT. ExFAT support for Linux has been talked about going back to early 2009 but the support has been crap on Linux.
“The FUSE-based exFAT project seeks to be a full-featured implementation for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X. With fuse-exfat 1.0.0, after three years in development, there is support for formatting exFAT partitions using the exfat-utils package while the FUSE driver does provide both read and write support for the Microsoft FS. Some of the recent changes found with the 1.0.0 release include improved write performance through enabling big_writes, improved OS X support, and various crash fixes.”
Another article says that “Open Source File System Takes On Microsoft’s exFAT Patents” (recall the TomTom lawsuit). The exFAT project uses a patents-hostile licence, GPLv3:
ExFAT project member Andrew Nayenko has released version 1.0.0 of fuse-exfat, a filesystem driver that can read and write to Microsoft’s exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) filesystem. Like the Ntfs-3G NTFS driver that is used in Linux distributions, the exFAT driver is based on FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) and works under Linux as well as OS X. In a short test with Fedora 18, reading from and writing to a USB flash drive that was freshly formatted with exFAT worked fine.
See the Slashdot discussion. There is no patent tax in this case, but it still helps Microsoft spreads patent traps like FAT. For read-only purpose performance might not be a hugely important consideration, so having this patents-free option is probably fine. █
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Antitrust proxies and patent trolling proxies revisited
With Motorola and Android Google has become an OS leader. The coordinated harassment from Microsoft and its proxies [1, 2, 3, 4] has not paid off and Google’s performance is decent based on some of the latest figures. The business press says:
Going ahead, one thing CEO and co-founder Larry Page knows the company doesn’t face charges from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which announced it had dropped a probe into Google’s ad practices and market domination, provided it adheres to certain guidelines dealing with privacy and develops a method to permit third parties access to many of its telephone patents.
The patent extortion from Microsoft proxies like the world’s biggest patent troll carries on as another victim comes to the surface. Microsemi got extorted by Intellectual Ventures:
Settlement marks the fifth lawsuit resolved in recent months by the controversial patent holding company, which claims control of more than 40,000 intellectual-property assets.
A lawsuit filed by Chicago-based Soverain Software LLC, which is unlikely to be one of the 1000+ proxies of Intellectual Ventures, backfires somewhat:
Online personal computer and consumer electronics retailer Newegg.com Inc. has won a victory in a patent infringement lawsuit, overturning a $2.5 million judgment against the e-retailer in a lower court.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit based in Washington, D.C., today overturned the judgement against Newegg, No. 13 in the 2012 Internet Retailer Top 500, in a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based Soverain Software LLC.
This firm is not a troll on the face of it, but it’s an example of a company just overly focused on patents (litigation). █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 6:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Bill Gates really started his career of monopoly abuse, lobbying, and PR
Bill Gates runs a massive PR campaign which we no longer cover as much as we used to. The tricks he uses are repeatedly pulled, so we covered most of them already (in one context or another). Gates found ways to help people forget the crimes he committed and distract from the fact that he keeps getting richer, in part thanks to his lobbying (he got $7 billion richer last year alone). Unlike Aaron Swartz, Gates was never at risk of going to jail. When he got arrested his rich parents bailed him out. But little is ever said about how he was breaking expensive systems for personal gain. Here is another reminder from the news:
In 1970, a 14-year-old boy dialed into a nationwide computer network, uploaded a virus he had written and caused the entire network to crash.
That boy was Bill Gates. Five years later, he founded Microsoft.
A few years later, two young men went around college dorms in California selling boxes of wires that let students bypass telephone-company restrictions and make long-distance calls for free.
Guess who?
Anyway, these are hardly role models. And they did none of this in the interest of civil rights.
It is worth mentioning that Gates’ jobs destroyer, Microsoft, killed the mobile world leader while trying to exploit it and that, as Pogson puts it, the Wintel era is ending. “Now,” he says, “that doesn’t mean 15% of users rely solely on smartphones for Internet access but surveys report that a good number do operate that way. As Wintel PCs age or die and are not replaced, that share will increase. I expect all that is holding back that growth is the high cost of Internet access over wifi. In countries where ISPs are often wifi only, the share is much higher. In Kenya, for instance where wired access is largely skipped to save cost, 34% of Internet access is via smart thingies.” This trend shows lack of foresight from Microsoft and Gates. They are used to destroying or buying (at times stealing) stuff, not creating stuff. █
“The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
–Bill Gates
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01.23.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Following up on its January 2012 study that found tech salaries had finally started to climb again, IT careers site Dice today published an annual update showing not just a continuing trend in that respect, but also a huge boost for those in the Linux field.
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There has been some debate and consideration in recent years about when the Linux gaming platform will officially gain ground? Critics and market skeptics have wondered when it will really take off and it will be Linux’s turn to procure large portions of the market share. New games and gaming consoles geared toward this system have left many asserting that 2013 will finally be the “year of Linux.” But why?
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Despite its youth, openArtist is the picture of a full-fledged Linux distro with a slew of specialty features for graphics production. Among its strong points is the universal approach it takes toward bundling software. If it’s useful to graphic artists, openArtist makes it accessible. Open source, freeware, public domain, abandonware, commercial, even — gasp — Windows programs are included.
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Kernel Space
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From the Linux Foundation’s Consumer Electronics Workgroup is a Linux 3.4 kernel that’s part of their Long-Term Support Initiative. The LTSI Linux 3.4 kernel will be maintained for two years while back-porting some of the features of newer Linux kernel releases.
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Graphics Stack
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Chris Wilson has shared his testing experience of Cairo with NVIDIA ION hardware on the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source NVIDIA blob. In certain situations, the Cairo performance does better with Nouveau than the official NVIDIA Linux driver.
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Applications
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There is far more to multi-media production on Linux than GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), the beloved drawing and painting program, though it seems that is all there is because it gets all the attention. GIMP is wonderful, but there is an entire universe of profession-level multi-media creation applications in all creative arenas: drawing and illustration, photography, desktop publishing, music, and movies and videos. Today we’ll look at my recommend Linux distributions for multi-media production, graphics creation applications. Then in future installments in this series we’ll dive into audio production, video production, CAD, 3D printing, and other industrial programs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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As we’ve been reporting, hardware devices running gaming platforms built on open source are quickly heading our way. Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, which makes Steam for Linux and very popular game platforms and bundles for Windows and the Mac, has recently confirmed rumors that Valve will release its own Linux-based gaming hardware, and an early prototype was displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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There are many desktop environments in active development, but none is as customizable as the E or Enlightenment Desktop Environment. But of all those desktop environments, its development (or public releases) has been comparatively slow.
Enlightenment is one of those projects that caught my attention years ago, but which I decided, after playing with it for sometime, that it was not yet ready for prime time. I’ve been quietly tracking its development since.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In the latest GNOME 3.8 beta, NetworkManager makes the transition from version 0.9.6.4 to a pre-release version of NetworkManager 0.9.8. In addition to setting up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, where the Wi-Fi hardware and drivers support it, it is now able to set up an access point. The next major release of the network configuration program, which is used in many other desktop environments, also supports 4G LTE network modes, bridge master devices and bridge ports. It is also able to automatically activate a VPN for certain network connections. The recently released Fedora 18 already uses a pre-release version of NetworkManager 0.9.8 which includes these features.
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Originally, BackTrack Linux was developed for our personal use but over the past several years, it has grown in popularity far greater than we ever imagined. We still develop BackTrack for ourselves because we use it every day. However, with growth and a huge user base, we have an obligation to ourselves, our users, and the open source community to create the best distribution we possibly can.
With this in mind, about a year ago a bunch of us at Offensive Security started thinking about the future of BackTrack and brainstormed about the features and functionality we’d like to see in the next and future revisions. One of our main topics of conversation was the option of swapping out our custom development environment for a fully fledged Debian-compliant packaging and repository system.
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Penetration testing platform BackTrack has been relaunched as Kali Linux after a major restructure.
The creators of Backtrack told SC details of the new Debian platform are being kept under wraps, adding the system is a “fully fledged Debian-compliant packaging and repository system”.
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No three letters look any more strange to Linux users than exe, which is why a new distro named Exe GNU/Linux caught me by surprise in today’s Distrowatch Weekly. Ladislav Bodnar, our exalted Keeper of the Record, recently added Exe to the Distrowatch.com database and that was my cue to boot it up.
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It’s hardly been a week since the developers at SolusOS announced their fork of GNOME Classic. Dubbed Consort, it set the Linux world abuzz last week. Today the team announced the first release with that new desktop: SolusOS 2 Alpha 7.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Today, anyone can set up a cloud. Managing it, though, is another story. So it came as no surprise last year, when Linux-giant Red Hat announced updates to its open hybrid cloud solutions portfolio, following the acquisition of ManageIQ, a leading provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions.
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Cloud is the future and depending on who you are and how you use it, it can be good or bad for you. Talking strictly about enterprises cloud is the way to go. Red Hat, the most successful open source company continues to strengthen it’s cloud portfolio and signed an agreement to acquire ManageIQ last moth.
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Fedora
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After doing so searching on Blu Ray ripping on Linux I found that no one seemed to have a good how to for Blu Ray Ripping on Fedora 18. I also was not finding a method that worked consistently for free, or close to free. I found a great piece of software called MakeMKV. I was able to get Blu Ray ripping working fast and easy.
MakeMKV is free to try for 30 days, after that the ask for 50$ for the purchase. I really think this is a good buy. It was one of the better programs I have found for Blu Ray ripping and they support Linux.
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The system settings manager has received some attention for the release of Gnome 3.6. The settings manager itself has been improved with larger and more visible icons. Many of the settings modules have been upgraded as well. There are now several new options and preferences to choose from, so be sure to look around.
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Fedora has always intrigued me to keep track of the latest happenings in the Linux world and especially what’s brewing at the RHEL stable! Also, if I think of a comparable distro to Ubuntu, Fedora is the only legitimate choice! Just like Ubuntu, Fedora also inspires innumerable spins (like Kororaa, Fuduntu, of which I am a big fan now!). So, when the release note of Fedora came on 15th Jan, I was quick to download all the four versions (Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE). This is the first review of the series and I start with the Gnome spin.
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There is serious time ahead for Oracle owned technologies such as MySQL, Java and many more. MySQL’s open source nature was questioned recently and now Fedora seems to be putting the first nail as the project is planning to switch to MariaDB. Jaroslav Reznik (Red Hat’s Fedora project manager) stated that “MariaDB, which was founded by some of the original MySQL developers, has a more open-source attitude and an active community. We have found them to be much easier to work with, especially in regards to security matters.”
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In the nine-year history of Ubuntu Linux, a new version of the operating system has come out every six months. But Canonical, Ubuntu’s developer, is considering ditching that model in favor of one that produces an entirely new version only once every two years—while speeding up the overall pace of development by adopting a “rolling release” cycle in between.
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To many, open source is black and white — software is either open or not. Jack Wallen sees the new world order in shades of gray and begs the open source community to be more open in their attitude.
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Sharing software code via free open source has been around since the 1980s and has enjoyed much success. Open source has been applied to content, websites, technological parts, and other materials. Can and should an open source platform be monetized?
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You might think that a group of intelligent people like the members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community would be free of hidden taboos. You might expect that such a group of intellectuals would find no thought forbidden or uncomfortable—but if you did, you would be wrong.
Like any sub-culture, FOSS is held together by shared beliefs. Such beliefs help to create a shared identity, which means that questioning them also means questioning that identity.
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Because when we talk about software, we don’t talk about something made of physical objects, we talk about basically ideas and concepts, that never get out of the digital realm (or don’t usually get out). Making hardware is not easy — there are so many external factors over which you have no control – and usually it requires decent financial investment. So it’s a really big thing when someone actually makes open source hardware.
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Career site Dice.com is out with results from its 2013-2012 Salary Survey, which confirms that times are getting much better for people seeking technology-focused jobs. And, in particular, the results reflect a trend that we saw gaining pace last year, which is that skills with open source platforms and tools can greatly increase your likelihood of getting hired and commanding a top salary. Here is more on what Dice found.
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Events
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Every renaissance starts with one thing that you can point your finger at and say “that’s where it all began.” Sometimes you realize that moment while you are right in the middle of it, but most times you can’t define it until well after it happens.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla today unveiled two new developer preview phones that feature the browser maker’s Firefox OS.
The phones – dubbed Keon and Peak – are being developed via Spanish phone maker GeeksPhone in partnership with Telefonica.
“This week we are announcing our new Firefox OS developer preview phones because we believe that developers will help bring the power of the web to mobile,” Mozilla said in a blog post.
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After news of its development throughout all of last year, Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform for smartphones has made an official debut on two phones that will ship to developers working on apps. The phones will ship to developers in February, but won’t become available to everybody until later this year. As we’ve reported, Mozilla is primarily targeting emerging markets with the phones, but there have been signs that they may be marketed throughout Europe and in the U.S. Here are more details.
You can find Mozilla Hacks’ post on the new phones here. According to the post, the phones have the following specs and names:
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Business
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A lot of small businesses are reluctant to try Linux because they think it means moving away from Microsoft Windows, and you can’t blame them. Change is disruptive, and while a lot of software applications are cross-platform, most aren’t, so leaving Windows often means leaving favorite software behind.
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Funding
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Public Services/Government
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A parliamentary committee in Germany has called for a change in national laws to enable ‘public administrations’ to open source their software and make it free to the private sector.
According to parliamentary member Jimmy Schulz, government departments in Germany are currently prohibited from being part of the free software development process.
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Openness/Sharing
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The world’s premier human rights organizations often have entire communications teams with dedicated graphic designers to celebrate their work. But not every organization can afford to have a designer. Even those organizations that do have design gurus may decide, for strategic reasons, to keep tight control over their workflow so that they are not bombarded with too many requests. Not to worry! There are several open source design tools that allow anyone to create killer flyers, posters, icons, or campaign — the only limit is your imagination. More importantly, learning basic design allows you to approach your human rights work more creatively and reach audiences with more diverse forms of storytelling.
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Open Hardware
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I am the founder of two small studios, Sesamedia and Studio Ju Ju. I’m also a co-founder of Vermont Makers. I was introduced to open source technologies and Arduino (and SparkFun) in 2007 when I was working toward an MFA in Design and Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute. I mainly use the Arduino to build interactive sound installations and sound art pieces, and I also help creative and community initiatives use open-source software like Joomla! and WordPress.
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Can carmakers learn from the open source industry? Yes, if they build a strong business model around it and throw away discarded business practices.
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Programming
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The Wikimedia Foundation is moving its data center today away from their original home in Tampa, Florida to Virginia. According to the Wikimedia technical team, even though all reasonable precautions have been taken, it is still prudent to expect major disruptions in service during the transition. The move today culminates a plan that began nearly four years ago.
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Maybe this is China’s way of telling Harper: ‘Hey, we’re not so different, you and I.’
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a greater step towards transparency, South Yorkshire and Cleveland Police Forces have announced that they will publish full details of dismissals and resignations due to disciplinary circumstances on their websites.
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Scott Shane at the New York Times reports that “in more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.” Kiriakou succumbed to mounting legal bills and months of pressure from federal prosecutors by agreeing to a plea bargain under which he will serve thirty months for the crime of confirming to a reporter the identities of two former colleagues associated with the agency’s Bush-era extraordinary-renditions and torture programs: Deuce Martinez and Thomas Donahue Fletcher. The former was involved in harsh interrogations and later went to work with the principal architects of the CIA’s torture program, Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell. The latter was a principal coordinator of the extraordinary-renditions program. Shane’s report ably recounts the essential facts surrounding the Kiriakou case. It falls a bit short, however, in examining the broader policy issues raised by the case.
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Close observers of Afghanistan are not likely to be surprised by recent allegations contained in a United Nations report that the Afghan National Security Directorate, the CIA’s leading counterterrorism partner in South Asia, used whips and electric shocks to squeeze confessions out of suspected insurgent detainees. There are many ways to describe the directorate, or NDS as it is locally known, but a model of modern intelligence gathering and investigative efficiency is not one of them.
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Former CIA officer John Kiriakou—who’s expected to be sentenced Friday to two and a half years in prison for giving a journalist the name of another CIA officer involved in the terrorist interrogation program—is trying to minimize the seriousness of his actions and is falsely claiming to be a whistleblower, prosecutors charged in a court filing last week.
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“The world is a battlefield,” is the tagline for Dirty Wars, a documentary that premiered days ago at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The film produced by Nation national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill and Big Noise Films director Rick Rowley attempts to bring the US global war on terrorism out of the shadows by spotlighting the CIA agents, special forces operators, military generals and US-backed warlords who are waging this war. The film also follows Scahill as survivors of night raids and drone strikes are located and interviewed about their experiences.
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Five months into Obama’s first term, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta caused a scandal by telling Congress about Blackwater-staffed assassination squads deployed under the Bush Administration; we would ultimately learn the program was run by a still-active mafia hitman.
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President Obama’s inaugural address made him sound like a new man. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” he said. He told us that “a decade of war” is ending under his watch.
How did Americans hear that pledge? If you’ve been paying attention to the United States’ increasingly dangerous shadow wars, its proxy wars, its drone wars — or “kinetic operations,” as some call them — you were likely very surprised and put off to hear the President say that “lasting peace” doesn’t “require perpetual war.”
“We see what you are doing, Mr. President,” I thought to myself. “How could you say such a thing?” Hearing such a blatant misrepresentation of reality made me feel as if I was a child again, and my parents were telling me what they thought to be a harmless lie.
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Torture has racial underpinnings. Rarely do those that torture do so to individuals like themselves.
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The ACLU has published an internal FBI “Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit” publication titled “Anarchist Extremism Overview.” It lists a number of First Amendment protected activities that supposedly dangerous anarchists engage in, including “creat[ing] a political statement” and “generat[ing] media coverage for their cause.” The presentation is heavily redacted.
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President Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address for his second term. It was a veritable stew of historical quotes from American history laced with several nods to progressive positions and achievements. It acknowledged past struggles launched by US citizens for equality and justice but mostly lacked a vision for what Obama hoped to accomplish in his second term.
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President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address is unlikely to be much remembered by future generations. Its authors have a talent for “rhetorical craftsmanship,” as James Fallows astutely noted. But to what end?
Were hard truths expressed? Were complicated concepts rendered in clarifying language? Were the disagreements that divide us insightfully characterized? Was an argument advanced? No, the craftsmanship was marshaled in place of substance rather than in support of it. The president expertly associated himself with certain ideas and evoked certain impressions.
He burnished his brand rather than acting like a leader.
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Undercover agents worked with Mohamud on a plan to bomb Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square two years ago.
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A half-Jewish, half-Arab Ohio woman is suing Frontier Airlines, the FBI, TSA and other government agencies after she says was removed at gunpoint from a flight on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, strip-searched and jailed because of her ethnicity.
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Naturally he meant in the Muslim world. He certainly wouldn’t apply that formula to the United States or Rush Limbaugh.
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Current counterterrorism adviser to the president and CIA director nominee John Brennan wrote in his 1980 graduate thesis unequivocally that “absolute human rights do not exist.” r. In answering the question, “Are there universal human rights?” he sums up over 200 years of classical liberal thinking in the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. To refute this he just cites Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham in dismissing natural rights as simple nonsense. To this he concludes that human rights are subjective, and that “the reality of human rights is therefore determined by the morality of the individual and the legal code of the state.”
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Pakistan has asked the US to halt its highly controversial drone campaign following reports that US President Barack Obama’s administration was planning to give the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a “free hand” to continue its remotely-controlled war in tribal regions.
According to a foreign ministry official, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar raised the issue in a meeting with Richard Olson, the US ambassador in Islamabad, reports The Express Tribune.
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At least nine people have been killed in two separate US assassination drone attacks in Yemen.
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A cabinet minister criticized on Tuesday the use of pilotless U.S. drones against suspected al Qaeda militants in Yemen, a tactic that has outraged communities in targeted areas, and urged a move to ground operations to avoid hurting civilians.
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The ever-shifting lines between ground-breaking technology and morality and ethics are being drawn into sharp focus once again, both in the shadowy world of cyberspace and in the more mundane day-to-day details of everyday living, as this week’s Nova program Rise of the Drones illustrates.
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Peace activists called Wednesday for the Air Force to drop plans to establish a drone operation center in Des Moines.
Waving signs that said “No War Drones, Des Moines,” about 20 activists protested outside the Des Moines Air National Guard Base. The military plans to pilot drone aircraft at the base, now that the 21 F-16 jets based there will be removed.
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In the most blatant act of symbolism, as Africa is now threatened by a President who touted the importance of his African roots four years ago, Obama reaffirmed his Presidential oath today on both Abraham Lincoln’s Bible – and that of Martin Luther King – on the day dedicated to Martin Luther King.
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“Why Twitter? Why not Twitter?” Nigerian-American author Teju Cole tells anchor Marco Werman about his latest series of tweeted tales. The topic: drone strikes. A heavy topic for just 140 characters but Cole says it’s the best platform to get the word out there. With more than 70,000 followers, perhaps he’s right.
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There is a lot of angst about President Obama’s selection of former Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., for Secretary of Defense. There are several complaints about Hagel, some of them legitimate, but the biggest seems to be that he learned the same lesson about the Iraq war that most of the country did — that it was a colossal mistake.
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Cablegate
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Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “We Steal Secrets,” bills itself as “the Story of WikiLeaks,” but our guest Jennifer Robinson, a legal adviser to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, claims it misses key facts
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Frank Symeou explained how his 21-year-old son, Andrew, spent a year in horrendous prison conditions in Greece. Eighteen months after he was extradited he is still waiting for the trial to start.
Edmond Arapi described his 12-month battle against extradition to Italy where, with no notice whatsoever, he had been sentenced to 16 years for murder. Ultimately, Italian judges were persuaded that Arapi could not possibly have committed the crime and the wrong man had been convicted. He had spent weeks in custody, torn from his young family.
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There is no weapon on the planet more powerful than speech.
In recent years, the digital revolution has led to new and unique ways for people to express themselves, and speech has flourished around the world, bringing it closer together. As a lawyer and as someone who promotes the advancement of individual liberties, I was fascinated by the advent of online speech, which was quickly followed by the advent of online protest.
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We spoke cordially for two hours. Farmer said he hoped his words would give me pause. But they haven’t.
I found him to be defensive, wishy-washy and self-contradictory.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest. Such a protest, if rendered thoughtfully and peacefully, is in fact a profound act of patriotism. For Thoreau, the wrongs were slavery and the invasion of Mexico. For Martin Luther King, Jr., it was the brutal, institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. For us, it is the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet’s climate.
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Finance
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The world should work to end extreme wealth by 2025 and reduce the massive inequality has has skyrocketed over the past twenty years, the anti-poverty group Oxfam states in a new report [pdf].
While discourse on inequality has grown more prominent in recent years thanks to Occupy Wall Street and major institutions highlighting the problem of extreme inequality, the focus has largely been on only one-half of the problem: ending extreme poverty. Though Oxfam praises the efforts to eradicate extreme poverty, the group urges people to “demonstrate that we are also tackling inequality- and that means looking at not just the poorest but the richest.”
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It has no been more than 2½ years since President Obama signed the Volcker Rule into law, as part of the broader Dodd-Frank financial reform package. And in that time Wall Street bankers have learned a very important lesson: Don’t be too quick to honor Washington’s wishes.
The Volcker Rule was intended to prevent banks from taking too many risks with their own money, including in areas like private equity and hedge fund investing. The idea was that banks primarily exist to serve clients rather than to enrich themselves via levels of proprietary and principal account investing that could (theoretically) lead to another Lehman-style collapse.
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A councillor from Cornwall Council has resigned in protest of the council’s use of lie detectors to help catch benefit cheats. We congratulate Councillor Ferguson for taking the the moral high ground when it comes to privacy and proportionality in councils.
Councillor Ferguson took exception to the Council signing up to a contract with Capita to provide “voice risk analysis” as part of a scheme to help combat benefit fraud. The contract comes at a cost of £50,000 with the Council promising that the system could save at least £1 million. However, there is little evidence to suggest that this technology actually even works.
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Part of the the Department of State, the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), among other things, issues all U.S. passports. Passports are a huge cash cow, generating enough money alongside visa fees to self-fund the Bureau.
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A new PBS Frontline report examines a profound failure of justice that should be causing serious social unrest
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In a new audit, Veterans’ Disability Benefits: Timely Processing Remains a Daunting Challenge, the GAO notes that VBA’s paper-based claims processing system involves “multiple hand-offs, which can lead to misplaced and lost documents and can cause unnecessary time delays.”
The official report concludes in all-too familiar fashion that waiting times have increased for veterans in part because VBA regional offices have shifted resources away from appeals and toward claims in recent years. The GAO confirms that VBA processes new and easy claims first, which often leaves older, complicated claims gathering dust.
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In secret meetings in tiny rooms, the rich plot to get even richer
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Civil rights organizations like the NAACP and groups dedicated to overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision have found common ground in recent months, coming together under the “Money Out, Voters In” banner to fight the dual threats of money in politics and voter suppression. But on the other end of the political spectrum, right-wing activists like Karl Rove are drawing parallels between heroic African-American civil rights activists in 1950s Alabama and privileged 1%ers like the Koch brothers, arguing that a 1958 Supreme Court ruling protecting the NAACP’s membership list should allow the super-rich to write million dollar checks without the public ever knowing.
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Another top official to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during his tenure as Milwaukee County Executive has been sentenced to two years in prison for embezzling funds intended for families of veterans. The sentencing appears to close a chapter in the ongoing “John Doe” investigation into corruption and misconduct in the Walker County Executive’s office, but the book remains open.
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Censorship
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The project hosting site GitHub is currently inaccessible from China, cutting off the country’s developers from the valuable resource. A ViewDNS.info check shows that the service cannot be looked up throughout China. The blocking is frustrating many Chinese developers who cannot access one of the world’s major repositories of open source software. As the country’s firewall controllers rarely give any information on why sites are blocked, it is suggested by some that github.com is being blocked because of a dispute over a train ticket booking plugin.
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Privacy
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If Facebook‘s new Graph Search feature has you thinking a little harder about what you’ve “liked” for fear that an ironic dalliance in years past could come back to embarrass you, here’s one more thing to worry about. Facebook is now recycling users Likes and using them to promote “Related Posts” in the news feeds of the user’s friends. And one more thing, the users themselves have possibly never seen the story, liked the story or even know that it is being promoted in their name.
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That is 17% up on the same period the previous year, and 71% more than 2009′s corresponding months.
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I would agree with most of your points about why WeChat is more usable than skype. Time and time again, we see that the reasons why specific apps are more popular can be explained in terms of usability. But it’s also important to see that user features are deeply embedded in existing cultural norms.
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The consideration of the “data protection” privacy regulation is in progress in the European Parliament, with a vote in the consumers committee (IMCO) on Wednesday. It is the object of an unprecedented lobbying campaign, mostly driven by US companies. If citizens don’t act, banks, insurance companies and Internet service operators will have a free hand to collect, process, store and sell all of our personal data, which will enable them to know and direct all that we do online and offline.
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The “consumer” (IMCO) committee of the European Parliament just voted to soften protection of EU citizens’ privacy, caving in to the lobbying of giant US companies1. This is the first of many upcoming votes and tells us a lot about the balance of powers in the Parliament. It should act as a wake up call for citizens to defend their right to privacy against the illegitimate collection, process and trade of their personal data.
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Civil Rights
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With President Obama’s second term underway and huge decisions looming on Capitol Hill, consider this statement from Howard Zinn: “When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.”
[...]
Corporate power, climate change and perpetual war are running amok while civil liberties and economic fairness take a beating. President Obama has even put Social Security and Medicare on the table for cuts.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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President Reif has asked me to lead a review of our involvement in the events that began in Fall 2010, when the library system learned that large numbers of articles were being downloaded from JSTOR, up through Aaron Swartz’s shocking suicide on January 11. Among the thousands of news articles and postings over the past week — many strongly critical of MIT — there was at least one comment that saw a glimmer of encouragement that the administration has assigned this task to a faculty member strongly identified with the ideals of free and open access to information on the Net, the same ideals that Aaron championed so passionately. I’m grateful and humbled by President Reif’s expression of confidence, and I’ll try to approach this review with fairness and with respect to Aaron’s memory, to his family, and to our community.
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Posted in Patents at 4:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Software patents are assumed to be OK and software developers of this world do not participate in debates about it, perhaps because of the way these debates are designed
The problem caused by patent trolls probably receives more coverage than software patents, which are the trolls’ weapon of choice. A trolls tracker spots a trend:
US federal courts are divided into 94 districts. When patent-holders file a lawsuit against a product that’s sold nationwide, they have pretty wide leeway as to where to file their case. That’s allowed for quite a bit of “venue shopping” in patent cases, and several years ago the remote and rural Eastern District of Texas started to become surprisingly popular.
Over time, East Texas became known as a place very friendly to patent plaintiffs and unfriendly to patent defendants, particularly out-of-state or foreign tech companies. Judges there were reluctant to let cases be transferred out of their district, and some patent-holding companies began setting up Texas LLCs in order to better argue that Texas was the right venue for them.
The trends as seen by so-called ‘IP’ lawyers are different. These lawyers would rather focus on legitimising software patents, which help them make money irrespective of the holder (troll or not). One law firm writes:
In a recent blog entry, Director David Kappos of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) gave something of a three-month status update after the implementation of several mechanisms of the AIA, including third party prior art submission. As of December 17, 2012, the USPTO has received 270 prior art submissions, which Director Kappos calls “in line with expectations.” Notably, the leading art group for such submissions was Technology Center 3700, which, according to Kappos, “includes many software-related inventions such as those found in electronic gaming devices and medical equipment.”
The debates on software patents in the USPTO are regularly infiltrated by lawyers. We gave many examples in 2012. While programmers are busy writing code lawyers are busy ensuring they keep their middleman role. Law sites prepare to stack the consultation. Here is another example. Where are the software engineers in all this? Here is another example:
Suffice it to say, the patent attorneys disagreed with Mulligan, though they did so earnestly, out of a genuine belief that one can separate out patents covering trivial or commonplace activities from other software patents in a coherent, justiciable way. What I found most striking is that none of the patent attorneys present defended the status quo. Rather, they agreed that the scope of software patents should be radically narrowed. That seems like a good baseline for discussion.
So the author demonises abolition (of software patents) proponents and then takes the side of lawyers by legitimising software patents, the “baseline” as he calls it. It’s as if the only position that’s permissible is that some software patents are “good” and others are “bad”.
Over in Europe we have a similar issue because of the example USPTO sets. The corporate press in the US plays along with the lie that more patents mean more innovation. The source of the claim is one that profits from patents:
The U.S. Patent Office and Trademark Office awards hundreds of thousands of patents each year. This week, IFI Claims Patent Services, a producer of patent databases, released its top 50 ranking of companies awarded the most U.S. patents in 2012.
The Irish press too glamourises software patents this month:
http://www.iriHe joined Microsoft in 1999 as a software developer in Seattle and registered more than 20 patents for inventions in computer security.
In his last role at Microsoft, leading the PM team for the forthcoming Windows 8 Store, he felt the entrepreneurial urge, and left to start app development firm…
Rex Djere has this suggestion for the USPTO:
TLWIR 53: Transforming the Broken U.S. Patent System with Free Software-Style Reforms
In The Linux Week In Review 52, I talked about the need for a Linux Reference System, a GNU/Linux computer guaranteed to work with the latest free software and drivers. In TLWIR 53, I will present some ideas on how to fix the broken U.S. patent system.
Innovation comes from freedom, not restrictions such as patents. It’s common sense for developers. For others it is an unspeakable truth. They want us to believe — by repeating their propaganda line — that more restrictions make greater innovation. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 3:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More setbacks in Apple litigation and a deposition of Apple’s CEO is expected
Apple’s obsession with patents is proving to be counter-productive. Wired has published this article which tells the story of SparkFun:
Design Like No One Is Patenting — How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack
Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
Also, in a new interview Wired told Google’s Larry Page (CEO): “Steve Jobs felt competitive enough to claim that he was willing to “go to thermonuclear war” on Android.”
Page replied cleverly: “How well is that working?”
Apple has lost its mind. At Groklaw, which used to sympathise with Apple, Jones wrote: “The color version reads: “The applicant claims the colours black and silver as elements of Mark A in the series.” Great. Rounded corners. Now colors.” Patently Apple, an Apple boosting site has this report.
Recently, a Dutch court ruled against Apple, which is getting desperate for embargoes because Android devices sell like there is no limit (at the expense of Windows laptops and desktops, not just Apple-branded phones and tablets).
The US media, the corporate press in this case, says: “The outcome of these cases won’t be clear for several years, but so far neither company seems to be halting R&D or sales of the phones in question.”
Actually, Apple is reported to have halved orders, so sales are affected in some ways. Samsung won’t help Apple anymore. There is more about these disputes in the Page interview. Groklaw writes:
Apple and Samsung are having an intriguing debate before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. What does a patent holder have to prove in order to get an injunction? That is the question Apple raises. If there are, as claimed, approximately 200,000 patents that could be asserted against smartphones, which ones matter in the injunction analysis? Just a small handfull? Do you have to prove that the patent covers a feature that you can demonstrate consumers want, that it’s a feature that *drives* sales, in order to warrant an injunction?
Apple a couple of months back filed its petition for rehearing en banc of an October 2012 order by the Federal Court of Appeals in Apple v. Samsung II that held that in order to obtain injunctive relief in a case where an accused product contains many features, a “patentee must . . . show that the infringing feature drives consumer demand for the accused product”. Apple argues that this so-called “causal nexus” requirement violates equity.
As I read their motion, they are saying that the Federal Circuit’s order narrows drastically the ability of patent holders to obtain injunctions, and that there is a conflict with other rulings by this court and the US Supreme Court.
Apple is still trying to ban Android devices, but it’s a hard sell to the courts:
Apple Inc faces long odds in its attempt to overturn a U.S. appeals court ruling that threatens to undermine its smartphone patent war against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Apple is said to be working against workers’ rights not just in China but also in the US. Judge Koh wants Apple’s CEO to be deposed for this:
US District Judge Lucy Koh has ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook to give a deposition about Apple’s role in a series of deals between top tech companies to not recruit each other’s employees. At a hearing this week, Koh said Cook, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, and Intel CEO Paul Otellini must be deposed to provide testimony about the deals, which the companies had agreed to dissolve after a US Department of Justice probe into the practices in 2010. The testimony is related to a civil lawsuit filed by five former employees of the companies, who claim that they and others lost out on better salaries due to the policies.
Apple’s bad practices go beyond that through. It colludes with Microsoft too. As Jones put it, “I told you patent litigation can be anticompetitive. Here’s a current example, according to the FTC. I continue to hope the FTC and other regulatory bodies will inquire into the Apple-Microsoft-Nokia-MOSAID et al patent attacks on Android as another.” The context was a “Federal Trade Commission staff report [pdf] [which] found that drug companies made 40 potential pay-for-delay deals in FY 2012 (1 October 2011 through 30 September 2012).” (source) █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista, Vista 8, Windows at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Articles of interest about a fatal incarnation of Vista, which simply cannot keep up with Android and other Linux-based operating systems
The release of Vista 8 has been such a disaster because the software is widely loathed. It’s a technical failure, not a marketing failure (over a billion dollars were spent on marketing). Some Windows shops now make money from the service of downgrading back to Vista 7 or XP. This is Vista all over again. I tried both, so I would know. It doesn’t shock me that the man behind Vista 8 already got sacked. Rather than give Vista 8 away Microsoft is raising the price now:
Say what you will about Windows 8; at least the upgrade from Windows 7 is cheap. Or it is for now. After January 31 will be a different story.
Ever since Windows 8′s October 26, 2012 launch, Microsoft has been offering retail Windows 8 Pro upgrade DVDs for $69.99. Online upgrades have been even cheaper, at $39.99. And customers who bought new PCs or laptops with Windows 7 preloaded got the best deal of all: If they registered with Microsoft, the online Windows 8 upgrade cost them just $14.99.
By raising the price Microsoft can discourage usage of this total disaster. Vista 8 RT is also a disaster. The Register writes
Microsoft’s ARM blunder: 7 reasons why Windows RT was DOA
Industry doomsayers were circling Windows 8 like buzzards before it even launched, but they picked the wrong carcass. Microsoft’s real 2012 roadkill was Win8′s ARM-powered cousin, Windows RT.
The chattering class’s comparisons of Windows 8 and Windows Vista are premature – it will take several more quarters before we can gauge how Redmond’s latest OS will play out in the marketplace. But with the holiday season behind us, it’s now plain that Window RT is a flop.
A Microsoft booster in the same publication writes that Microsoft is concerned about jailbreaking of this OS.The daily news in this site are getting more political because Linux already sells and spreads more quickly than Windows, thanks to Android and advanced in hardware. Now we must worry about freedom and rights. This includes jailbreaking. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft at 3:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft aggressor speaks out
Summary: A rewrite of history by Mr. Kempin attempts to belittle his role in anticompetitive behaviour which the government deemed illegal
The ongoing OEM abuses by Microsoft are well documented, but history has this funny tendency to get rewritten by the rich and powerful. Microsoft is now said to be looking at buying Dell, which Microsoft threatened to “whack” over its Linux dealings. And as Pogson puts it:
This is another example of M$ nailing its coffin shut from the inside. If it did buy a piece of Dell would Dell be beholden sufficiently to continue to be a “partner”? Perhaps for a while but Michael Dell is OK with GNU/Linux and Android/Linux and taking Dell private is mostly his way to get out from under a bunch of dead wood on the Board of Dell. If M$ made a sweet deal with Dell, I would bet other OEMs would hedge their bets by investing heavily in */Linux and M$ would be shooting itself in the foot.
Nokia has been used by Microsoft as a hardware provider without success. This is alienating partners, that’s all it does.
Anyway, Microsoft's abuses of Dell and the acts of Joachim Kempin are documented in posts such as this (see references therein). Watch his latest attempt at reputation laundering:
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, uses bullying tactics to eject anyone he deems to be a threat, says a book by a former senior Microsoft executive, which calls for him to step aside.
Joachim Kempin, who worked at Microsoft between 1983 and 2002, made the allegations in his new book, Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft’s secret power broker’ breaks his silence, which is published today.
Although Kempin respects Ballmer, there are limits to his abilities and a management change is necessary if Microsoft is to continue to remain competitive in the technology industry, he told Reuters.
Why is Kempin receiving free publicity? Have his claims been checked for scrutiny at all? Kempin shares blame with another thug, Bill Gates, who is probably most ruthless in the company. █
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