06.15.13
Posted in Microsoft at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Nobody needs hardware-level back doors when Windows (or other proprietary software) is installed
Summary: Official confirmation that the NSA is being notified about ways of hijacking Windows before Microsoft releases fixes
Half a decade ago I put together some links about backdoors in Windows. I had accumulated those links for years. Now that we know how corrupt and aggressive the NSA can be (common knowledge after the latest leak), with cracking attacks on China, espionage, and unlimited mass surveillance in a fascistic manner (with corporations fully complicit), it all seems far less improbable and hardly far-fetched.
According to a new report from the corporate press (as corporate as it can get, being Bloomberg), Microsoft tells NSA staff about universal unpatched holes before they are being addressed:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, said those releases occur in cooperation with multiple agencies and are designed to be give government “an early start” on risk assessment and mitigation.
Glyn Moody asked, “why would anyone ever trust Microsoft again…?”
Frank Shaw is not a technical man. His job is to lie, e.g. about sales of Vista 8 (quite famously and most recently). He came from Waggener Edstrom, a lying and AstroTurfing company. The above should be read as follows: when new holes exist which permit remote hijacking the unaccountable, cracking-happy NSA is being notified. What can possibly go wrong now that we have proof that the NSA is cracking PCs abroad with impunity? Germany, are you paying attention?
Here is more about this news:
Some of the back and forth is innocuous, such as Microsoft revealing ahead of time the nature of its exposed bugs (ostensibly providing the government with a back door into any system using a Microsoft OS, but since it’s don’t ask, dont’ tell, nobody really knows). However the bulk of the interaction is steeped in secrecy: “Most of the arrangements are so sensitive that only a handful of people in a company know of them, and they are sometimes brokered directly between chief executive officers and the heads of the U.S.’s major spy agencies, the people familiar with those programs said.”
In IRC, Sosumi highlighted this article and said, “tell me something that isn’t known already, like PRISM is just an evolution of a previous snooping program and that the NSA has built an AI, even if rudimentary, in order to assist them sort the information… also I wonder if Keith Alexander will be at this year’s DEFCOM conference” (part of the PR and recruitment exercise).
Here is an interesting new post which relates to what we know about NSA’s cracking of people’s PCs (the lesser-advertised role of the NSA):
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In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software.
Skype is said to have several back doors. Our latest post about it got updated with new information. Skype can be used as a back door on any platform (known holes left unaddressed), GNU/Linux included. Microsoft controls it and it has a monopoly on the source code.
Watch the MSN corporate press (Microsoft’s pseudo ‘news’ site) promoting both Skype and Facebook:
Thanks to a simple inquiry on Facebook, it’s now a day to celebrate with a father who didn’t know he existed for nearly three decades.
“Whitewashing of Skype and Facebook” is what iophk called this. “Notice the lack of I-told-you-so articles about FB snooping or any coverage of the snooping at all.”
Skype is a Microsoft-controlled product (acquired and quickly altered to reduce decentralisation, user control, and privacy). Advertising it with the partly Microsoft-owned Facebook is too shallow a case of bogus ‘journalism’.
There is also something about spying capabilities of the Xbox One, summarised by the headline “US Navy serviceman calls Xbox One’s 24-hour online check “a sin committed against all service members”” (people seem to be getting the importance of privacy, over time).
A few weeks ago we spoke about expanding the scope of coverage in Techrights to privacy-related matters. We’ll soon conduct an interview with Richard Stallman (to be published later this month) as privacy becomes a central issue relating to software freedom. We should start using the privacy card to advance the Free/libre software agenda. █
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Posted in Law, Patents at 7:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Passing a law for the sake of “doing something”
Summary: Examples of some new reports that deal with the suggested patent reform in the US and why it is misguided
The debate about software patents in the US is more or less dead or marginalised. Everyone is talking about patent trolls instead. Masnick and other folks noticed that too and they — like us — emphasised that Obama is evading the broader issues. Here is a more optimistic take on it:
When we wrote about President Obama’s plan to deal with patent trolls, we noted a few areas where it was a bit weak and could be improved. In particular, the lack of an independent invention defense and using independent invention as evidence of obviousness would be quite useful in stopping abuses of the patent system. However, I’m a bit confused by Christopher Mims’ complaints about Obama’s patent plan being useless against patent trolls. I think Mims is a bit confused. He claims that there are two real problems with the patent system, and this plan addresses neither: (1) the patent office is understaffed and there’s a backlog of patents and (2) the fact that we grant software patents at all.
The second bit is actually true, as Obama will allow companies like Oracle, Apple and Microsoft to continue attacking Linux with software patents. This is not the solution. How about the recently-concluded Versata case [1, 2, 3] which has just been concluded? Neither company is a troll. To quote a new article:
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that Versata Software’s patent claims against SAP be cancelled as they are ‘unpatentable’.
Versata filed a lawsuit against SAP in 2007 alleging that the German firm’s pricing software infringed a number of its patents.
This is a case where patent scope — not scale of the plaintiff — ends spurious litigation. SAP is not even a US-based company. The USPTO‘s granting of patents is the problem. Here is another report which says “Versata can appeal and SAP has yet to get a $345 million judgment overturned” (no need for any penalties here).
Mr. Feld, a longtime opponent of software patents, was recently distracted by the debate about trolls. Here he is writing again about trolls:
I’ve been asserting for at least six years that patent system is completely broken for the software industry. I’ve given numerous examples, dealt with the issue first hand as patent trolls have tried to extort many of the companies I’m an investor in, and I’ve had many public discussions about the topic.
On my run on Sunday, I listed to This American Life – When Patents Attack… Part Two! It is easily the best and most detailed expose I’ve ever heard on this issue. If you care to really understand how patent trolls work, spend an hour of your life and listen to it.
Why not focus on patents’ scope? This is what he has done for ages. The problem is the patent system, not just litigation (which is the consequence of improper scope). As one person correctly put it: “It’s not just entrepreneurs who bear the direct costs of the dysfunctional U.S. patent system, but consumers as well.”
Here is another new article which focuses not on patents but on litigation. It says: “Patent trolls are the bad guys of the moment. They’re the outfits that buy patents and then sue companies that supposedly infringe on them. Last week, the White House announced a bunch of initiatives to thwart them. Trolls don’t actually make the products covered by those patents. But because patent litigation is expensive and time-consuming, most companies that are prey to a patent troll lawsuit choose to throw money at the trolls to settle even if they think they’d win in court. The result is that the trolls are nearly unstoppable whether their patents are legitimate or not.”
The solution is to explore why those patents are issued in the first place and consider banning such patents. Patent trolls are most commonly using software patents, but nobody seems to be pointing that out. Just look at the status quo in nations without software patents. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 6:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Technical edge and sovereign autonomy, not blind faith in Microsoft
Summary: Despite the success story of Munich and the increasing distrust surrounding proprietary software, bureaucrats in Berlin refuse to abandon Microsoft just yet
Backdoors specialist Microsoft is unable to shut down botnets for which it is definitely to blame, perhaps because it made its operating system a real Swiss cheese of a system. Intentional or unintentional? That’s irrelevant. There are several reports about Berlin in the post-PRISM (as public knowledge [1, 2, 3, 4]) era, saying it still refuses to move away from Microsoft, never mind well-documented risks of espionage. The leading report about it came from IDG‘s Loek Essers, who wrote about the risky decision. It is summarised by this German news network, written in English (with links to PDF files in German):
A petition to use more open source tools in the Berlin city administration that was proposed language in the federal state parliament of the State of Berlin by the German Green Party has failed. The petition was rejected with the votes of the governing SPD/CDU coalition in the “digital administration” committee tasked with its evaluation. The Green Party’s plan had included a migration to free and open source software on 25 per cent of the city administration’s workstations and a comprehensive switch of all servers to Linux in a similar fashion to Munich’s LiMux project.
The problem is partly related to staff and moles. They resist the unknown. “No specific mention of Microsoft resellers,” writes iophk regarding this other IDG report about the dangerous CIO-vendor relationships (bribes or whatever). To quote:
It’s a well-established protocol: People buy from people, especially the ones they like and trust. CIOs are no exception, and many benefit greatly from long-established supplier relationships. But there’s a fine line between healthy and unhealthy interactions, a risk that’s exacerbated by a limited amount of love (and budget) to divide across a countless landscape of courters.
Today’s best CIOs create value in large part through the introduction of innovative capabilities, speed, and flexibility — all of which are completely shut down when supplier relationships dictate the IT strategy. Even worse, with so much future revenue and success relying on a solid foundation of technology for success, these situations jeopardize the viability of the entire organization
My experience here in the UK is that Microsoft moles and partners stand in the way of changes that keep Microsoft out of the loop. It’s an HR issue, not a technical issue.
There is a concurrent affair in Germany involving the EPO ignoring the law regarding software patents in Europe. We wrote about it on Friday and Gijs Hillenius has this new report in europa.eu. It says: “The German parliament is asking the government to prevent patents being granted for software. Last Friday, the Bundestag adopted a joint motion to make copyright the exclusive method for protecting software. One of the aims of the motion is to increase legal security for developers of free and open source software. The government should make sure its laws and measures are compatible with free software.”
Parliament should also work to ban proprietary software in government, as it is a threat to national security. It should ban monopolies on algorithms as they are choking development, but why not go further? Watch what happens in Slovakia where someone gets “Fined For Not Using Windows OS”. That’s what happens when the government is held hostage by Microsoft. This has become a high-profile case:
Slovakia’s Supreme Court will intervene in a battle between a textile trader and the country’s tax office over a mandatory tax-application that requires the use of a proprietary operating system.
If Germany wishes not to face this embarrassment which Slovakia found itself in, it will have to radically change its software policy. There were several reports last week about PRISM and industrial/political espionage in Germany. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 5:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Policing as a private business
Guarding for Sociopaths
Summary: Famous criminal Bill Gates pays the privatised police forces in the UK to get more profit while keeping popular movements dampened
Bill Gates is not a popular figure, but the media, which he bribes, likes to portray him as exceptionally popular, hoping that enough people will follow the media rather than the judgment of friends (to some people the media is a friend).
Those who attempt to actually look at the facts rather than look for handouts may often find that those who acquired their wealth through criminal activities simply continue doing so with varying degrees of success (making money from having money, using lobbying, tax breaks, interest, and insider information).
Bill Gates continues to amass more wealth while the media he bribes contributes to false perceptions that he is giving his money away and invests only in benevolent companies (selective focus on PR-generating grants like scholarships). A lot of the investments are anything but charity and they target monopolies, with or without patents (e.g. Microsoft and Monsanto), with or without human cost (e.g. Shell and other oil companies). When it comes to the GMO monopoly, Gates is not merely an investor but also a lobbyist who tries to go as far as setting school curricula in favour of his investments. People are not dumb enough to miss it and over time they also find out that Gates bribed their press to deceive them. Journalists whom I speak to already take that as a given. They know there is something rotten in Gates.
“G4S has nearly a million employees — people whom the rich hire in large amounts to oppress the population in exchange for a salary.”A while back we showed that Gates was already setting his eyes on British schools and retails giants like JJB. He and Murdoch were spying on young people [1, 2] as means of profiling those who are being indoctrinated. Well, spying on people and breaking down protests are two related activities (mind control and physical control) and this new report shows Gates backing what here is Manchester we consider to be a private army of mercenary thugs that warp public policing into a for-profit business of few (public becomes privatised, with government/taxpayers’ subsidies), ranging in activity from spying in the streets to riot policing (where the rioters are sometimes the police). According to Wikipedia, this is a growing ‘business’, not just in the United Kingdom. G4S has nearly a million employees — people whom the rich hire in large amounts to oppress the population in exchange for a salary. To quote the British press:
Bill Gates has bought a larger share of G4S, a private security giant that was widely criticised for its London Olympics blunders.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and Cascade Investment, an asset management firm also owned by the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, now own a combined total of 3.2 percent of G4S after buying up 6 million shares – worth £110m ($171m) – last week.
Glyn Moody asks, “so why exactly does Gates need a private army?”
It is a rhetorical question and it is well overdue.
Jose R. Rodriguez wrote to me this morning and said “hard to reconcile w/motto…”healthy, productive lives”,” citing the article “Gates Foundation invests in occupation profiteer G4S, just as Dutch charity cuts ties”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has bought a 3 percent stake in the British-Danish security firm G4S worth £110 million ($172 million), the UK’s Guardian reported just days after protestors made the company’s role in human rights abuses in Palestine and beyond the focus at the firm’s annual meeting.
Gates and his rich friends feel the heat and they want to control the population more effectively while they expand their wealth and power, looting everyone else because they can. G4S is just about as bad as a company can be; last night a lecturer on reproductive systems and I spoke for a couple of hours. He said he knew G4S mainly for Olympic fiasco and abuses. I explained this latest news to him and he found it surprising because the corporate press hardly covers it. Population control too was a subject of discussion and it was stressed that controls should not be put in the hands of plutocrats.
There is a new video in Russia Today, titled “Eugenics now!”
The summary goes like this:
Bill Gates on people that “have no benefit whatsoever”. The troubling history of Bill Gates Sr “one of the grandfathers of eugenics still going strong today” in the US. ABC reports tens of thousands of women across the States from 1929 to 1974 forcibly sterilized. The Times notes Gates Jr has held a secret billionaire summit with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros to “curb overpopulation”.
Why is Gates buying millions of dollars in shares of Monsanto and funding sterilization programs, Monsanto’s response to our interview request, and what happens to scientists who cross the genetically modified cyclops.
Seek truth from facts with investigative reporter Anthony Gucciardi, How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis author Frederick Kaufman, Genetic Roulette director Jeffrey Smith, and chairman of Nestle Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.
We wrote about this subject before.
Ambitions of mass control and population control may be justified, but these must never be put in the hands of convicted offenders like Gates, no matter how much he paid the media to groom and embellish his image. This pseudo parenthood over society needs to stops. It is a recipe for disaster. █
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06.14.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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System76 has launched a laptop which puts Linux users in the same league of Windows and Mac users. Galago UltraPro is one of the lightest laptop which comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.
Galago UltraPro weighs only 3.8 pounds and is only is 0.75 inches thin. It features a 14.1 inch 1080p IPS matte display bringing the 1080p resolution to System76 laptops.
System76 doesn’t stop there, they are packing Intel’s 4th generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, inside this laptop. The quad-core Intel i7-4750HQ Processor (Haswell),clocked at 2.0Ghz, not only enhances performance but also contributes to making the laptop more energy efficient which means longer battery life.
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Software Company in Perth, Anahata Technologies, will be offering a 10% discount to customers willing to engage in a software development project for the Linux / ARM platfrom.
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How does Red Hat go about building and developing a secure Linux operating system? That question was asked and answered at the Red Hat Summit this week by Josh Bressers, who heads the Red Hat Product Security Team.
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It really does means different things to different people. Sometimes it is a net new ‘thing’ that moves the ball forward in some way (like electricity). Then there is disruptive innovation – like the first wave of Linux – which re-thinks and improves the way things are done.
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Server
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:JAVA), today announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, a fully supported and integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris(TM) and Linux operating systems. The Web Stack software includes the open source, standards-based software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services. Download the Web Stack at http://www.sun.com/webstack
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Leading ICT managed services and outsourcing company, Integr8, has been awarded the contract to provide support for the entire Wintel and Linux Server environment for telecommunications giant MTN SA.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: It looks like Rockwell was right – somebody was watching him (and us). There’s a great new Raspberry Pi installer called NOOBS and the President of the US promises action against patent trolls. Ubuntu’s ‘bug one’ has been fixed and the EFF objects to DRM in HTML 5. As ever, hear our discoveries and your opinions in this epic length podcast.
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Kernel Space
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Cost savings is only part of the picture behind the nonprofit’s remote workforce strategy. Linux Foundation exec says the virtual office has made the team more productive and innovative, and happier in their jobs.
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The move will enable developers to more easily create applications for big data and the cloud on Power 7+ systems running Linux.
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In recent days, Samsung has been posting kernel patches pertaining to buffer synchronization support of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism.
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In 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Benedict Torvalds made the kernel of a now popular operating system. He released Linux version 0.01 on September 1991, and on February 1992, he licensed the kernel under the GPL license. The GNU General Public License (GPL) allows people to use, own, modify, and distribute the source code legally and free of charge. This permits the kernel to become very popular because anyone may download it for free. Now that anyone can make their own kernel, it may be helpful to know how to obtain, edit, configure, compile, and install the Linux kernel.
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Applications
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Most of us simply install our favorite distribution, accepting many/most of the defaults, including the boot loader setup, without a second thought. However, there has been a lot of time and effort spent on the bootloader over the years, GRUB taking the place of the venerable LILO. GRUB offers a lot of flexibility in controlling our system during boot, allowing us to have Linux along with (boo) Windows on a nicely partitioned system. Let’s talk about some of the options we have and how to make those changes.
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Ezame is a new menu editor especially created for Unity, though it should work with other desktop environments as well.
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Variety is a wallpaper changer that automatically downloads wallpapers from sources such as Wallbase, Flickr, Wallpapers.net, Desktoppr, NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day as well as World Sunlight Map: a live Earth wallpaper which changes throughout the day. Using it, you can get a new, beautiful wallpaper automatically at the interval you set in the application preferences.
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Proprietary
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It is too early to tell if Opera’s move to the Blink engine away from Presto is going to pay off in terms of overall users who use the web browser as their primary, or if the company has shot itself in the foot with it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I am not usually prone to nausea after playing first person shooters. In fact, I’m quite resilient, and have successfully endured hour after hour of grueling matches, indoors and outdoors, well-lit maps or night missions, from the original Doom via America’s Army to ArmA II recently. However, one game made me succumb, and that was the first installment of Serious Sam. Just half an hour into the game, I was lying on my bed, pressing hard into my eyelids and repeating, thou shalt not throw up, thou shalt not throw up.
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It had previously been a re-purposed Windows build running on WINE, the Windows compatibility layer.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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RHEL 7 the upcoming enterprise Linux of Red Hat is scheduled for the second half of 2013. Around half year ago Red Hat made known that they were going to ship GNOME 3 for their desktop, so it was easy to guess that they were going to use version 3.8 since that was going to be the latest GNOME version at the time for RHEL 7 Beta.
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New Releases
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Welcome back to the new and improved Peppermint web site and welcome to the next iteration of our operating system: Peppermint Four. We are seriously excited about this release and we hope you are as ecstatic as all of us on Team Peppermint. Make sure to download a bunch of copies and give them to friends and family. They will thank you, for sure.
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Arch Family
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Slackware Family
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Patrick has decided to leave Linux Kernel 3.8.x branch and include Linux Kernel 3.9.x branch for the next Slackware release. Both of them are not LTS, but being LTS doesn’t mean that it’s really that stable as expected (take an example from the previous experience of upgrading the kernel in Slackware 14.0 from 3.2.x to 3.4.x branch which caused some regressions for Intel Graphics).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Red Hat Customer Portal has – for the third consecutive year – been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as one of the industry’s “Ten Best Web Support Sites” for 2013. Red Hat was honored in the Open Division along with technology industry leaders Cisco Systems, Intel, Nokia Corporation, PTC, Inc., EMC, and CheckPoint.
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Red Hat Inc.’s lead for its technology and product organizations, Paul Cormier, opened Day 2 of the ninth annual Red Hat Summit, held here on Wednesday, by explaining how some of the company’s pivotal undertakings over the past 11 years will provide the springboard to where Red Hat is headed tomorrow.
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The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced the addition of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to its Planet Northstar Managed Hosting line of business. Customers with Linux, Microsoft or blended environments can now take advantage of premium managed hosting services. As one of just two Red Hat Premier Hosting Partners, the Planet Northstar engineering team will have direct access to the company’s product roadmaps and new platform features, creating a technically superior hosted environment for its customers.
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This is a big week for Red Hat in the cloud. As we’ve reported, Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog recenlty confirmed that the AWS Free Usage Tier, which lets users run applications and operating systems in the cloud, now includes 750 hours of Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage. This is a good tire-kicking opportunity for those who aren’t quite ready to commit to an RHEL deployment.
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Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.
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Red Hat has produced a fully-supported OpenStack distribution so customers can deliver open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, at its Red Hat Summit in Boston this week.
The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programmes.
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Fedora
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So I’m now a few days into my time with Fedora, and things are going well so far. The machine is all up and running, and I’m back at my keyboard working away. We now know how to make Fedora look good, but how well does it perform in practice? Let’s take a look…
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Another week another rawhide review post. 
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Debian Family
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The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we’re wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! 
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Derivatives
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There is a certain cross-over between the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project and the Edubuntu project, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Thanks to Windows 8′s Secure Boot, it’s getting harder and harder for a non-technical user to just get a new laptop and run Linux. System76, along with other Linux PC vendors such as ZaReason, have a better idea: Just buy a laptop with Linux already installed.
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If a group of developers at Canonical have its way, we may not see Firefox as the default and pre-installed web browser in Ubuntu starting version 13.10 (Saucy Salamander). Support for replacing Firefox with Chromium has been increasing inside Canonical, where many developers believe they can provide a better end-user experience through Chromium.
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Flavours and Variants
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Not everyone is of the same opinion when it comes to web browsers at the Ubuntu camp. While we saw Canonical seriously considering replacing Firefox with Chromium in Ubuntu’s next release (13.10), Saucy Salamander, Lubuntu’s lead developer Julien Lavergne came up with an announcement that Lubuntu’s next would have Firefox by default, replacing Chromium. See the irony?
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Six vendors announced embedded Linux-ready Mini-ITX single board computers (SBCs) supporting Intel’s newly announced 4th Generation “Haswell” Core i7, i5, and i3 processors. The Aaeon EMB-QM87A, BCM MX87QD and MX81H, DFI HM100-QM87 and HD100-H81D, iBase MI980, Kontron KTQ87/mITX, and Portwell WADE-8015 are equipped with Intel QM87, Q87, or H81 chipsets.
Intel’s announcement of its 4th Generation Core (aka “Haswell”) processors last week was quickly followed by partner announcements in a variety of form-factors. We’ll get to the COM Express products soon, but first we’ll focus on six Mini-ITX boards that support Haswell.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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For many years now, users have been awaiting the fabled “Dick Tracy watch” — a smart watch that can perform advanced digital computing and communications tasks. There are lots of stories speculating about an iWatch offering from Apple, and Samsung officials have talked up their answer to such a smart watch.
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In an interesting twist on the open source hardware movement, Sony has just announced it’s opening up its SmartWatch for your hacking pleasure.
The SmartWatch SDK has for a while allowed devs to create apps for the 2012-launched device, but today’s Open SmartWatch update will let devs build and flash alternative firmware to the SmartWatch.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There is plenty of talk of low prices when it comes to tablets. It seems many have been searching for the ‘perfect’ sub $100 tablet and while that most often seems to reflect a 7-inch model, it looks like Root 101 is aiming to launch a low priced 10-inch tablet. They aren’t going to hit that sub-$100 price point, however they have gone the crowd funding route and the pledging begins at $169.
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The combination of an ARM dual core Cortex-A9 processor and FPGA fabric in one SoC brings open source vision processing software to security and driver assistance systems, write Fernando Martinez Vallina and José Roberto Alvarez
OpenCV is a library of computer vision functions widely used throughout the industry. Like all open source projects, the community is constantly developing and improving the algorithms, and there are now more than 2500 functions available.
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he open-source standard for collecting and communicating real-time information from manufacturing processes and factory floor equipment from a variety of vendors, has been successfully demonstrated and tested by manufacturing researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
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An open source lab launched this week at Queensland University of Technology aims to target high school students interested in open source software development.
The idea for the lab initially came from two students who were keen for an environment that enabled them to exchange ideas with others interested in open source projects.
The Open Source Software Group and Virtual Lab subsequently gained the support of Microsoft, Red Hat Asia Pacific and Technology One.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For Ubuntu, Windows and Mac: Good news for Firefox web browser fans. Mozilla has pushed out Web Audio API Support to Firefox 24 Nightly and Firefox 23 Aurora channels. The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I have attended over dozen conferences and gave presentations/talks too on OpenStack. Most of the time I meet bunch of motivated students/professionals and one common question was “I am not a developer tell me how can I contribute to OpenStack?” My simple answer to their question was like any other FOSS project OpenStack too needs a lot of volunteers in many domains apart from developing the software. I would mention the areas in which one can contribute to OpenStack project.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The post had some good success and a few comments as well. One of these attracted my attention. The poster “jsc” – Jürgen Schmidt if I’m not mistaken – is obviously an Apache contributor and an IBM engineer who in a previous life was also a long time StarOffice/Sun employee . I’m grateful for his comment as he’s tried to present the work on the sidebar from his perspective and that’s of course always interesting to understand his points.
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Yet despite the importance of styles and templates in LibreOffice, they remain as needlessly arcane and as lacking in certain obvious features as ever.
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CMS
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EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM), a leading provider of complex software engineering solutions and a leader in Central and Eastern European IT service delivery, announced its partnerships with Zend and Acquia, two of the world’s leading open-source technology companies.
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Healthcare
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BSD
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About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes.
That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes and I have been a pure Linux user since 2008.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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To protect their freedom and privacy, the FSF urges everyone to avoid Software as a Service, and to support projects working for a better, safer world. One small way you can help support free software projects and encourage use of free software is to help maintain and improve the Free Software Directory.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The way Scotland registers its crofts — its ancient network of tiny agricultural settlements — has been brought into the 21st century via a cloud and open source mash-up built by small tech companies.
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Today the European Parliament voted to formally agree new rules on open data – effectively making a reality of the proposal which I first put forward just over 18 months ago, and making it easier to open up huge amounts of public sector data. This is about the data that public authorities can lawfully put out there – a huge wealth of information about your public services, how administrations are spending your tax euros, geographical or cultural information, and the like.
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The US Navy has reached a new milestone in electronic communications. According to a report in the Navy Times, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Scott Van Buskirk recently issued a policy directive that used something not seen before in Navy communications: lowercase letters.
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Science
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TWO years ago, Antonio Melillo was in a car crash that completely severed his spinal cord. He has not been able to move or feel his legs since. And yet here I am, in a lab at the Santa Lucia Foundation hospital in Rome, Italy, watching him walk.
Melillo is one of the first people with lower limb paralysis to try out MindWalker – the world’s first exoskeleton that aims to enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind.
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Health/Nutrition
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The rate of chronic wasting disease (CWD) is on the rise among deer in Iowa County, Wisconsin and elsewhere across the state. CWD is a fatal, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) similar to what is commonly known as mad cow disease that is caused by twisted proteins, or prions. For hunters, writes outdoors reporter Patrick Durkin, this means the disease might be affecting the herd now. For anyone who eats venison, this means greater chances that the disease could conceivably make the species jump and infect humans, according to Dave Clausen, a veterinarian whose term on Wisconsin’s Natural Resources Board expired in May.
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American Farmers have launched two class action lawsuits against biotech giant Monsanto following the discovery of unapproved genetically modified wheat growing in the Pacific Northwest. According to farmers, the company’s negligence has ruined sales.
Though the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has never approved either the growing or sale of GMO wheat in the US, the agency began investigating its existence when an Oregon farmer found wheat growing in his fields that was resistant to Monsanto’s patented Roundup pesticide, known by its scientific classification as glyphosate.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Dutch public prosecutors on Thursday announced they are looking at possible charges for revealing state secrecy against two former prime ministers who said the Netherlands still stored tactical U.S. nuclear bombs on its soil.
Some 22 nuclear bombs are still stored at a southern air base where they were brought during the height of the Cold War, Ruud Lubbers, who headed the Dutch government between 1982 and 1994, told National Geographic in a documentary which was first broadcast on late Saturday.
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The Cold War practice of NATO and the United States refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere is under attack in Europe. This week, two former Dutch prime ministers publicly confirmed the presence of nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, one of six bases in NATO that still host US nuclear weapons.
The first confirmation came in the program How Time Flies on the Dutch National Geographic channel where former prime minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed that there are nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base. “I would never have thought those silly things would still be there in 2013,” Lubbers said, who was prime minister in 1982-1994. He even mentioned a specific number: 22 bombs.
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Bill Clinton took part Tuesday night in a Q-and-A with Sen. John McCain at a semi-private event in New York City, where the former president offered some notably sharp criticism of President Obama’s handling of the ongoing war in Syria, specifically his reluctance to get involved. The event was technically closed to the press but both the Daily Beast and Politico managed to get their hands on a recording of the remarks, as tends to happen with events like this.
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Iran is not “apparently” developing a nuclear weapon. Some political leaders make claims to that effect, but there is no solid intelligence that has yet established that this is what Iran is doing. What is known is that the country has a uranium enrichment program that is regularly monitored by International Atomic Energy Agency, and that there is no evidence that the country’s uranium program has any military dimension.
As to Maddow’s claim, that’s just wrong. Ahmadinejad has, like other Iranian leaders, denied the country has any intention of building any such weapon. He’s done so in numerous U.S. media appearances, denying any Iranian plan to build a bomb–a simple Google search would turn up too many such instances, like this interview from CBS last year (helpfully headlined “Iranian President Denies Iran Developing a Nuclear Weapon.”)
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So, imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now—assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.
For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.
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Finance
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Under pressure from its creditors to cut public employment, the Greek government said Tuesday that it was closing down its state-run television and radio broadcaster, idling 2,900 people — less than 1 percent of the public work force — and outraging the country’s powerful labor unions.
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A government spokesman described the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation as a ‘haven of waste’
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Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
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Unpaid internships have long been a path of opportunity for students and recent grads looking to get a foot in the door in the entertainment, publishing and other prominent industries, even if it takes a generous subsidy from Mom and Dad.
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The market value is one of the numbers the city Department of Finance uses to calculate an owner’s annual property tax bill. It is generally only a fraction of what the building would sell for on the open market.
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The Blender Foundation, which is behind the free and open-source 3D computer graphics program Blender, has joined the community of websites that accept bitcoin donations. While not much fanfare accompanied the decision, Blender’s website now features a bitcoin address — 17orEh51ab8HoU7g8Ezwcp76jCpeL7PabJ — for supporters who want to throw a bit of digital currency its way.
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Increasing the amount that students would be forced to pay back would make the loans more attractive to buyers.
The document, prepared by Rothschild investment bank, was submitted to the business department in November 2011, but is understood to still be under active review. It has never been made public, or been seen by higher education professionals.
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Privacy
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Suddenly, it feels like 2000 again. Back then, surveillance programs like Carnivore, Echelon, and Total Information Awareness helped spark a surge in electronic privacy awareness. Now a decade later, the recent discovery of programs like PRISM, Boundless Informant, and FISA orders are catalyzing renewed concern.
The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate surveillance,” in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique surveillance,” in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.
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A lot remains uncertain about the number of users affected by the NSA PRISM surveillance program that is taking place, the extent to which companies are involved, and how the NSA handles this sensitive data. Does the NSA regularly collect and examine a huge swath of the cloud communications of American and foreign Internet users? Does the agency present evidence and seek careful judicial review to obtain limited amounts of user data related to individual investigations? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle, with queries being constructed such that algorithms scan most or all of the accounts, identifying a smaller set of “interesting” accounts whose contents are sent to the NSA?
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The NSA leaker is lying about both his access to information and the scope of the secret surveillance programs he uncovered, the heads of the House Intelligence Committee charged Thursday.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/305409-house-intel-chiefs-snowden-lying#ixzz2W8zvRmld
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook
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Senior politicians from across the political divide have united to call for UK security services to be given greater internet monitoring powers.
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U.S. government investigators began an urgent search for Edward Snowden several days before the first media reports were published on the government’s secret surveillance programs, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
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I’ve seen people defend these policies in the past, but they make no sense. All they do is encourage a head-in-the-sand mentality within the government, in which employees are told to pretend that public information isn’t public. As we’ve said before, in the business world, non-disclosure agreements are generally considered null and void the moment the same information becomes public via other means. Because that’s dealing with reality. Pretending that these documents aren’t out in the world, and having to fill out a report every time a government employee happens to hit a news article with one of these documents shown, seems like a tremendous waste of time and energy, all in an attempt to deny reality.
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In a masterpiece of timing, the Japanese government is considering a new NSA-style agency to monitor internet communications in the country.
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The Web company was the unidentified petitioner challenging an order to help the U.S. government spy on foreign users, sources tell The New York Times.
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Labour’s Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson and Tory Lord Baker says bill is vital tool in fight against terrorism
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America’s National Security Agency collects more information than most people thought. Will scrutiny spur change?
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“There is no secret program here”? Bullshit. Why, then, have so many people, both in the Congress and the public been shocked at the extent to which the NSA is snarfing up data? This is a secret program, enabled by a secret interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, by the FISA Court, which the DOJ and the NSA insist the public is not allowed to know. Yes, it’s a secret program. Saying otherwise is simply lying.
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Civil Rights
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It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots.
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Imagine suing the government for damages for torture and kidnap, and losing your case, without ever knowing the reason why. A former lawyer who resigned from the Lib Dem party over “secret courts” describes the chilling scenarios made possible by the recently passed Justice and Security Act.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Union will try to find the right ‘language’ to overcome French resistance to free-trade talks with the United States today (14 June) and keep alive plans for a deal that could boost their struggling economies by dramatically increasing transatlantic business.
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Copyrights
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Mini documentary shows police in helicopters, handcuffs and dogs
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Happy Birthday remains the most profitable song ever. Every year, it is the song that earns the highest royalty rates, sent to Warner/Chappell Music (which makes millions per year from “licensing” the song). However, as we’ve been pointing out for years, the song is almost certainly in the public domain. Robert Brauneis did some fantastic work a few years ago laying out why the song’s copyright clearly expired many years ago, even as Warner/Chappell pretends otherwise. You can read all the background, but there are a large number of problems with the copyright, including that the sisters who “wrote” the song, appear to have written neither the music, nor the lyrics. At best, they may have written a similar song called “Good Morning to All” in 1893, with the same basic melody, but there’s evidence to suggest the melody itself predated the sisters. But, more importantly, the owner of the copyright (already questionable) failed to properly renew it in 1962, which would further establish that it’s in the public domain.
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The copyright industry has decreed in Sweden that it will now collect levies for every XBox and Playstation sold – about €10 ($12) per unit. This levy is the “blank media” levy, originally used to compensate for private music copying from vinyl records to blank cassettes, that has crept over all boundaries. It is hard, not to say impossible, to justify the fairness in a single mother having to pay a levy to the richest rock stars when she buys a Playstation for her kids.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image by Alain Fontaine
Summary: A roundup of stories from battlegrounds for software patents “as such”
Over the years we wrote quite a lot (relative to the size of the nation) about software patents in New Zealand, where patent lawyers have been fighting/waging their PR war against software developers; local lawyers fought alongside companies like IBM and Microsoft with their lobbyists (other lawyers). Some firm called “Shelston IP” continues this PR war (warping public perception) in Lexology by advancing the pro-software patents stance. To quote:
In? Out? Either way, talk of software patents has dominated discussion of the New Zealand Patents Bill for several years, causing unfortunate delay for a much needed update to New Zealand patent law. However, resolution may be on the horizon. Following fierce lobbying by many in the New Zealand IT sector, the Government has announced a new proposed amendment to the Bill, hailed by some as an effective end to software patents in New Zealand. The reality? Unsurprisingly perhaps, much less clear cut.
[...]
n the latest development, the Government has proposed a new replacement provision, which keeps a prohibition on patents for computer programs “as such”, but includes two further clarifying principles. Firstly, a claim in a patent (or application) relates to a computer program as such, if the actual contribution made by the alleged invention lies solely in it being a computer program. Secondly, a series of factors are set out, which must be taken into account in identifying the actual contribution made by the alleged invention. Therefore it is the nature of the “actual contribution” which the invention makes to the existing art which will be the touchstone for determining patentability. If such contribution arises solely from a computer program, it will not be patentable. If the contribution is judged to arise from another aspect of the invention, it will be patentable.
[...]
At a commercial level, the decision to take a significantly narrower path in New Zealand than in Australia, may have real implications for New Zealand software developers who find that software which does not infringe any New Zealand patents, may infringe Australian patents when marketed there. We may also find that over time, the much debated question of whether software patents stifle or encourage innovation, is answered by a geographical shift in the Australasian industry, one way or the other.
Factually (barring omissions) there is something to it, but it is biased for being too selective. The reality is, software patents were explicitly demoted in this island this year [1, 2, 3].
Microsoft-friendly companies like Centrify can carry on boasting their Microsoft-taxed products (Active Directory patents) and try to sell them in places where software patents are not legitimate, hoping the public will not recognise the injustice. This a FRAND-type loophole. See the TomTom case involving FAT patents in Europe, where the “as such” loophole still exists (albeit under fire). European patents may use FAT patent legitimisation in Germany (where some silly politicians still do their thing this week) although it is now a dubious patent.
Over in Germany right now, Jimmy Schulz is doing fine work to extinguish software patents and the FSFE has this update in English:
Tens of thousands of software patents in Germany and Europe present enormous cost and liability risks, especially for SMEs. Several German SME associations welcomed the Parliament’s decision. However they warn against giving all the responsibility to Brussels, as the EU has been consistently incapable of providing software developers with legal certainty. “Germany now has to implement this decision in law, to send a strong signal towards Brussels,” says Johannes Sommer of BIKT, one of the associations.
At an expert meeting in the Parliament on 13th May, in which FSFE also participated, industry associations BIKT and BITMi proposed changes to German copyright and patent law. These proposals would also affect software patents which have already been granted. The first proposal is to add a “protective shield” clause to German copyright law , introducing a blanket ban on the enforcement of patent claims with regard to software. The second proposal to be implemented in German patent law makes sure that the effect of patent claims shall not extend to works protected independently by copyright. Both proposals would prevent that patents on software can be enforced against software developers. The FSFE supports both proposals.
“Matthias Kirschner, of the free software federation said the move is an important step to fix the software patent insanity,”says one news site. Thom Holwerda covered that as well.
Recently, one route to legitimising software patents has been the unitary patent. Spain was blackmailed for the unitary patent and there was a lot of apparent corruption in the attempt to ruin policy against software patents in Europe
According to this curious update, the swindle goes round:
Action brought by Spain against the Regulation on the unitary patent calls the judiciary character of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO into question.
My letter to them hardly made a difference.
Based on this link from Gérald Sédrati-Dinet (April, source), the “#CJEU interpreting UPC shows that #EU has exclusive competence over #UPC (unitary patent court) which is then illegal”
There are other conflicts [FR, EN] revealing entryism of sorts. To quote, “don’t forget: presented by a senator @SenateurRYung who was a former director at EPO” (the EPO is corruptible).
Richard Yung is one of the politicians who come from the patent system, then doing the lobbying (we covered other examples. As put here, “to be sure, Senator Young is a former director of EPO”
“I predict that the Bundestag request against software patents will be ignored, and that they will vote for Unipat [unitary patent] instead”
–Benjamin HenrionDan Gillmor incorrectly says here in The Guardian that software patents are in a state that they’re not in. He is corrected with the statement: “Europe is unfortunately far away from excluding Software Patents” (just not endorsing them). The FFII’s president, Benjamin Henrion, says: “I predict that the Bundestag request against software patents will be ignored, and that they will vote for Unipat [unitary patent] instead #backdoor”
When even companies that pretend to like FOSS are collecting software patents we remain stuck between large American corporations that spy on us and gain monopolies on algorithms. It is a sad state of affairs, but that’s just where we are. █
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06.13.13
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 4:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Planted stories revisited
“As discussed in our PR meeting this morning. David & I have spoken with Maureen O’Gara (based on go ahead from BrianV) and planted the story. She has agreed to not attribute the story to us….
“[...] Inform Maureen O’ Gara (Senior Editor Client Server News/LinuxGram) or John Markoff (NYT) of announcement on Aug 28, 2000. Owner dougmil (Approval received from BrianV to proceed)
“Contact Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly or Bruce Perrins to solicit support for this going against the objectives of the Open Source movement. Owner: dougmil [Doug Miller]. Note that I will not be doing this. Maureen O’Gara said she was going to call them so it looks better coming from her.”
(From Microsoft’s smoking guns)
Summary: Microsoft is playing with editorial staff of Slashdot, marketing itself as a FOSS company
We have recently given several examples [1, 2] where Microsoft’s proxy Outercurve interjected itself into geeks’ sites like Slashdot, very much by design. iophk says “Microsoft Outercurve is being peddled by /. again” (see Slashdot or direct link).
It was only very recently that we revealed Microsoft AstroTurfing in Reddit, so this is important. Slashdot should speak out about it because it’s subjected to the same problem [1, 2, 3, 4]. Someone very senior who had worked for Slashdot told me about this privately; he said they were infiltrated by AstroTurfers and asked me not to give away his name. Here is the PR being injected by Microsoft. Remember that Microsoft was exposed for also planting stories demonising its critics, such as Pamela Jones. I too got smeared by Microsoft staff, as a matter of routine (they got caught, then fled). Unlike Pamela Jones, I don’t have leaked documents to show if or how it was coordinated.
Here she is with the latest about the Microsoft-funded SCO case against Linux:
SCO has filed its reply to IBM’s response to SCO’s motion asking the judge to reconsider his refusal of SCO’s motion to reopen SCO v. IBM.
It will not surprise you that SCO doesn’t like IBM’s suggestions on how the case should go forward. IBM suggested a couple of rounds of a process, first tossing out whatever both sides agree are mooted claims, due to the Novell victory over SCO, then IBM would bring a summary judgment motion on the rest, and that would require briefing, IBM suggested, because there are new cases decided in the interim that are relevant.
The SCO case is over a decade old. Microsoft now distorts news sites, trying to give the impression that Microsoft is a FOSS authority. █
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft
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Posted in America, Law, Patents at 4:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There are still patents on the progress bar…
Summary: Little progress made with policy moving in the right direction, but by no means the right and absolute solution to USPTO incompetence
THERE ARE interesting rulings out this week. A very vocal proponent of software patents asks about the Versata case [1, 2, 3], “Did the PTAB Just Kill Software Patents?” Well, yes. And it matters. “On Tuesday, June 11,” he writes, “the Patent Trial and Appeals Board issued a ruling in SAP America, Inc. v. Versata Development Group, Inc., which is the result of a Covered Business Method challenge to U.S. Patent No. 6,553,350 filed by SAP on September 16, 2012. The PTAB, per Administrative Patent Judge Michael Tierney, determined that “Versata’s ’350 claims 17, and 26-29 are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101.” Looking more closely at the ruling, however, makes it clear just how significant this ruling will be. The breadth of the 101 determination is shocking and virtually guarantees that 101 will be used by patent examiners to effectively prevent software patents from issuing altogether.”
“The ruling was limited, so it is too early to celebrate.”Here is a news report about it (AOL). This gets somewhat overshadowed by news about a SCOTUS ruling. An inaccurate report from Rupert Murdoch’s press says “The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that human genes isolated from the body can’t be patented, a victory for doctors and patients who argued that such patents interfere with scientific research and the practice of medicine.”
This is only part of the story, as we’ll explain in days to come. Kevin Granade told me “they affirmed that isolated, unmodified DNA is unpatentable, but ruled the *transcription* of the same as cDNA patentable [...] the reporting has it wrong, the ruling regards all unmodified DNA, not just human DNA. Effectively a key lying on the ground is unpatentable, but if you make an impression you can patent the mold. Very unfortunate.”
The Guardian botched it too. The ruling was limited, so it is too early to celebrate. It’s like celebrating patent trolls getting the attention of Brand Obama. There is no action yet from the White House (just words [1, 2, 3, 4]) and it would not be the resolution of the problems, either. As this new post put it, this is not enough. To quote just the opening:
Patents may have once seemed like a good idea. At least it seemed that way to the Venetians, who in 1474 declared the publication and protection of the “works and devices” of “men of great genius” would encourage others to apply their genius and ultimately benefit their society as a whole.
This noble idea may have had a place in the Italian Renaissance, but wind forward 539 years and we have a patent system infested with “patent trolls” and seemingly endless disputes between software and technology companies expending billions of dollars over ideas that involve neither genius nor benefit to society.
The problem is scope being expanded to things which did not exist when the patent system was conceived. It predates understanding of germs, let alone genetics. It also predates software, let alone computing machines (equivalent of pen and paper). █
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