03.14.13
Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 12:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More arguments over the issue which is software patenting and who’s behind it
A longtime booster of Microsoft gives a platform to software patents proponents, in this case the first person to acquire a software patents, or at least the most vocal such person (what constitutes a software patent is subjective):
Guest post written by Martin Goetz
The author, Martin Goetz, opposes lawyer Eric Goldman, whose position we wrote about before. “Unfortunately,” Goetz says in an ad hominem fashion, “Goldman is not only wrong on most of his statements which he presents as “facts,” he is viewing this controversy from his vantage point only as an IP lawyer and teacher. Had he worked in the software industry, he might have had a much different viewpoint. I say this after having spent over 35 years directly in the software industry and another 20 years as a software consultant and investor in software start-ups.”
Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, an opponent of the unitary patent in the EU, weighs in by saying:
@SCUHTLI I also disagree, @ericgoldman miss the point for #swpats, this is what is important: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130310164408906 …
He links to the very good Groklaw article.
The placement from the Microsoft booster has been providing ammunition for patent boosters such as IAM Magazine (patent lawyers), to whom responses went like this (from the same person):
@ksnhlaw @IAM_magazine actually @ericgoldman ‘s critics were already bad and not shared by opponent to #swpats
Yes, Goldman is a lawyer and we do not agree with his proposed solution.
Meanwhile, points out another person, Europe gets flooded by US patents, including software patents (more on that in the next post). To quote this one tweet:
And the Unitary Patent will favor EU SMEs… really? RT @AchimMuellers: US No. 1 Country in Patent Filings with EPO http://www.marketwatch.com/story/european-patent-office-epo-2012-annual-results-us-are-no-1-country-in-patent-filings-with-european-patent-office-2013-03-06#.UTdQ1zB0jnY.twitter …
We need more people to get involved and stop software patenting in Europe. The unitary patents was merely the first step and it helps import patents from the US.
Daniel Ravicher, interestingly enough, is still doing fantastic work by suing for fraud over Herbalife:
My first thought upon reading a new shareholder derivative complaint accusing directors and officers of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America of facilitating a pyramid scheme by extending a total of $1.2 billion in credit to the controversial nutrition company Herbalife was that it was an interesting new development in the weird hedge-fund showdown between Herbalife short-seller William Ackman of Pershing Square and Herbalife investor Carl Icahn. My second thought, when I noticed that the pro se plaintiff was a lawyer named Daniel Ravicher, was, “Wait. That can’t be Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation.”
But it is. The well-known IP public interest lawyer, who’s co-counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in the Myriad gene patent case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, is moonlighting as a private lawyer in the Herbalife derivative suit and in a companion fraud complaint against Icahn, also filed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan. In a phone interview Ravicher told me that he’s stepping out of the realm of intellectual property because he’s convinced Herbalife is taking advantage of unwary, unsophisticated consumers. His girlfriend, he said, knows someone who became an Herbalife distributor and nearly became one herself. “This struck a chord with me personally,” he said. “Herbalife is hurting people.”
It is sad to lose one like him to a different (but important) cause. This leaves fewer people to fight for patent reform in the US (the USPTO is a disease) and prevention of software patents in Europe. There is a lobbying war going on and if developers don’t participate in this debate, the lawyers and the monopolists which pay them will win. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Photo with permission from Jason
Summary: ZDNet’s Microsoft bias becomes ever more simple to see; it is fair to say that it is corrupt as a publication
TECH TABLOID/PR rag ZDNet was not corrupted by accident. It was corrupted by design, and sadly enough it saturates news feeds and now works with a conglomerate, CBS.
Mr. Perlow, who was promoting Miguel de Icaza and other Microsoft agenda at times, is now working directly for Microsoft.
Our contributor Iophk says, “does the “mandatory author disclosure” show M$ Zack’s conflict?” He refers to other Microsoft folks who work as writers for ZDNet.
“ZDNet now needs to let Perlow go,” he says. “I was wondering why you all of a sudden started posting all these pro-MS blogs, and now I know why.”
"Windows 8" continues to be entire section in ZDNet and many Microsoft staff have been “writers”, so the bias makes sense. Why select people with conflicts of interest? After bashing Stallman Perlow wrote some FOSS-hostile pieces and now this: “Open-source and free software: Free, as in beer,” says his latest article.
The FTC has been cracking down on fake journalism (we filed complaints and got responses at times), so why the failure to identify simple cases? As this new article puts it:
The guidelines also take aim at bloggers who provide information or reviews in exchange for products or services. In one example, the FTC shows a blog post about house paint in which the writer states at the end that she received a free can of paint. According to the agency, such disclosures must be clear and conspicuous and not tucked away after a series of links or other distractions. The new guidelines may affect companies like Microsoft that have paid bloggers to ”astroturf” on their behalf.
We wrote quitw a lot about Microsoft AstroTurfing and gave many examples. Watch this as an example:
-
The difference in reasons why people who create, manage, and develop open-source and free software, and why end users consume it is a major philosophical disconnect.
Is this is suitable article for a Microsoft employee to plant in news feeds through ZDNet’s brand? Paula, the Open Source writer in ZDNet, recently left or lost her job (like Dana Blankenhorn, who at times did decent work), leaving just Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols as a form of regularisation in ZDNet. While many Microsoft cronies like Mary Jo-Foley and Ed Bott praise Vista 8, he has been trying to give a reality check. Here is his latest go:
Windows 8, like Vista before it, is on its way to the trash heap of PC history unless Microsoft makes some big changes as soon as possible.
Meanwhile we learn about more technical problems in Vista 7, which ZDNet seems to have been paid to promote in the editorial — not advertisements — side of things.
The reality is, Windows is failing very badly (cannot complete with or imitate Android/Google), but ZDNet will hardly tell that to readers because it is corrupt. It chose to become agenda driver, not journalism. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 12:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“As in this case the Silverlight shuffle,” as one reader told us, sending this screenshot
Summary: Microsoft’s deception campaign has various news sites including the BBC falsely call Kinect “open source”
With projects like Moonlight and Mono, Microsoft has been openwashing C# and Silverlight, but what about using Kinect openwashing (as noted the other day) to also portray C# as ‘open’? With nonsensical headlines calling Kinect code “open source” we are left wondering if journalism is dead. This bad journalism includes the MSBBC. Well, a site which is typically pro-Microsoft challenged the nonsense from the BBC:
The need for this news item arises because the BBC has a story with the headline “Microsoft shares source code for Kinect gadget”. This isn’t the case – Microsoft has open sourced some samples that use the Kinect.
The BBC is often taken to be the source of all truth and so it is important to correct it when it gets it wrong.
Do not let Microsoft engage in mass deceit, blurring the difference between close and open and thus devaluing Open Source as a brand. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Nokia loves Microsoft’s agenda
Summary: Nokia, led by Microsoft, is suing Android players over their Android products
Stephen Elop, serial destroyer of companies, on numerous occasions said he would use Nokia's patents after he had infiltrated then company. Here is some news which shows that not only proxies like MOSAID are used by Nokia to harm Android (there are lawsuits already):
-
-
Nokia has lost a patent-infringement lawsuit it brought against rival phone-maker HTC. Nokia was upset about the way HTC’s Android phones talked to Google app stores, claiming the communication ripped off its protected technologies.
A German court ruled HTC did not infringe the Nokia-owned patent EP0812120 – called the ’120 patent. Nokia has been told to pay HTC’s legal costs.
Somehow we missed this latter lawsuit. It is a clear case of Nokia attacking Android directly. It’s significant enough to note. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Microsoft did its best to usher in a new era of desktop computing with the launch of Windows 8, but many businesses and individuals are opting out. Linux-based operating systems, meanwhile, present an increasingly compelling alternative. Benefits include tougher security and superior customization—not to mention that Linux is usually free.
-
Kernel Space
-
Atheros has been more friendly towards Linux customers in recent years with open-source WiFi/network Linux drivers. Atheros has even been kind towards BSD users. The latest Atheros open-source contribution is the opening up of their firmware for two wireless chipsets.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Intel announced the first version of an LLVM IR SDK. The LLVM IR SDK is comprised of an LLVM IR editor plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment.
-
-
The Direct3D state tracker for Gallium3D that for a short time provided hope of a native Direct3D implementation for Linux of the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 APIs without simply being a translator layer to OpenGL, is set to be nuked from mainline Mesa.
-
Brian Paul has published an initial OSMesa state tracker along with OSMesa support for the LLVMpipe and Softpipe drivers.
OSMesa is the API exposing Mesa’s off-screen rendering capabilities. The off-screen rendering infrastructure isn’t dependent upon any specific operating system windowing system, or graphics hardware. OSMesa rendering is simply done in user-space with main system memory. An example use-case all along for OSMesa has been “to use Mesa as an off-line, batch-style renderer.”
-
-
Last week at Linaro Connect Asia 2013, there was a session about OpenGL ES 3.0 and what the Linaro working group can accomplish.
The OpenGL ES 3.0 session at Linaro Connect Asia 2013 was to gather Linaro member requirements for GLES3, discussion the Mesa activity, and review the Piglit regression test framework. The open question asked as a goal is “Within OpenGL ES, WebGL, OpenVG, Renderscript where should [Linaro]
be investing time?”
-
Developers from the member companies involved with Linaro are planning continued improvements to the LLVM compiler infrastructure that will benefit ARM developers and customers. With this ARM LLVM work there should also be Gallium3D LLVMpipe enhancements.
Last week at Linaro Connect Asia 2013, aside from talking about OpenGL ES 3.0 improvements, there were also sessions about improving LLVM ARM support.
-
The AMD “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver now has basic compute (GPGPU/OpenCL) support.
There has been R600 Gallium3D OpenCL support for running basic OpenCL demos and now the support has come to the RadeonSI driver, which supports the Radeon HD 7000 series and there’s early Radeon HD 8000 series support.
-
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers continue advancing support for the OpenGL Shading Language. Their latest work is on supporting Interface Blocks for GLSL 1.50.
Jordan Justen of Intel published the initial Interface Block support, as mandated by GLSL 1.50. The shading language 1.50 version is for matching OpenGL 3.2.
-
Applications
-
Proprietary
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
The Unigine Game Engine has picked up several new features, including support for different panorama modes and multi-channel projection rendering.
Through a new Unigine Engine plug-in, 180 degree panoramas can be rendered within the engine using panoramic projection with curved edges, linear panorama without edge distortion, and fisheye spherical panorama.
Another new plug-in (AppProjection) supports single and multi-channel projections. This can be used to create a large immersive curbed screen display covering 360 degrees.
-
The latest Humble Indie Bundle game offering, “Humble Bundle with Android 5″, has crossed one million dollars in sales. There’s still time to go and more DRM-free cross-platform games have been added to the pay-what-you-want sale.
-
YoYo Games today announced its game development software suite GameMaker: Studio now supports Linux publishing for the first time.
-
-
A partially transparent veil of secrecy hangs over Xi3′s pint-sized Piston Console. When first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, some surmised it was the official Steam Box, though Xi3 never came out and said it. And now that Xi3 is taking pre-orders, there’s still no mention of it being a Steam Box, though it’s clearly intended for living room gaming using Steam’s Big Picture mode. Xi3 released a statement today that adds a little insight into its relationship with Valve, and also hints that things aren’t as rosy between the two as previously thought.
-
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
While Xfce 4.12 was scheduled to be released on 10 March, the release didn’t happen and it looks like the release won’t be coming anytime soon.
Last September plans were expressed with a road-map to release Xfce 4.12 in mid-March. Xfce 4.12 was possibly going to be ported to GTK3, but a full-port to GTK3 was decided later on to not be feasible for this release though some packages may be friendly towards the updated tool-kit.
-
Development of the LightDM display manager is now in an awkward state by Canonical’s announcement of developing — and ultimately switching to — the Mir Display Server rather than Wayland.
David Edmundson, who for a long time has been working on LightDM and has led when it comes to LightDM-KDE, wrote an interesting blog post this morning about how Mir conflicts with LightDM — the display manager that’s also used by Ubuntu.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias from the GNOME Release Team was happy to announce a few days ago that the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment was ready for download and testing.
This time, the release has been delayed with only two days from the original schedule and it is available for download and testing on the main GNOME FTP server, bringing numerous updated components, several improvements across basic apps, new features, countless bugfixes and many updated translations.
-
We already know that KDE developers aren’t fond of Mir, Canonical’s display server for the Unity desktop not derived from X.Org and Wayland. KDE developers aren’t happy about it, some Xfce developers have also expressed dissatisfaction with the recent Canonical changes, and now there’s a GNOME response. What’s GNOME doing about Mir? They’re laying out plans right now to move hard and fast with Wayland support!
There’s been experimental work on bringing the GNOME Shell and Mutter to Wayland/Weston, but nothing that’s been merged yet and ready for GNOME desktop users. The GTK3 tool-kit does have Wayland support and it’s continuing to be improved. Rather than GNOME jumping on the Mir bandwagon, they want to move now at a vicious rate in supporting Wayland.
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Enterprises don’t want to just know that an operating system will run on a piece of iron, they want to know who they are entitled to yell at when it stops working properly. And that’s why a new support agreement has been inked between Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Server distribution of Linux, and Dell, one of the largest server makers in the world.
As David Duffey, director of technical partnerships at Canonical, explained in a blog post announcing the expanded relationship between the two companies, Dell fired up reference architectures for the PowerEdge-C density-optimized servers back in July 2011, and the following May these reference architectures were tweaked to support Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the long-term support variant of Ubuntu that most enterprise customers go with for their iron.
-
Ubuntu fans may recall Ubuntu GNOME Remix, the unofficial flavor of the Linux distribution that was launched last fall for users not fond of the software’s default Unity desktop environment.
-
With the start of another week comes another round of information on the Mir Display Server out of Canonical.
Mark Shuttleworth shared on Google+ a post by Christopher Halse Rogers about the Canonical motives for working on Mir. Interestingly, Mark claims, “Contrary to competitor FUD, from people who are not working as openly as they would have you believe, Mir is more likely to enable high-quality graphics for ALL flavours of Ubuntu, and any distro that chooses it. Graphics vendors have been happy to engage and ensure it works well on all architectures.”
-
-
Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has an ambitious plan with a short time-frame: One operating system for computers, smartphones, tablets and TVs by early 2014. One problem with this is how do you get there fast enough and one answer, rolling releases, has got developers upset. Now, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has a new proposal on how to handle rolling releases.
-
-
-
Ubuntu developer Michael Hall has posted screenshots of early versions of what Canonical is calling the “Core Apps” for Ubuntu Touch, the new flavor of the popular Linux distribution that’s being rewritten to run on mobile devices as well as PCs.
There wasn’t much you could actually do with Ubuntu Touch when Canonical released the Developer Preview firmware images in February. The OS would boot, it supported basic internet access over Wi-Fi, and you could place calls with the smartphone version, but most of the preinstalled “apps” were actually just placeholders for software that had yet to be written.
But according to Hall, work is already underway to build a set of apps to handle most of the everyday functions users expect from their phones and fondleslabs.
-
-
-
It’s easy to assume, from the stunning rate at which OEMs roll out newer and better versions of PCs, phones, tablets and other popular hardware, that few consumers want to hold on to aging devices. But if a new community-based spinoff of Ubuntu named LXLE is any indication, there are those who are, in fact, keen on keeping legacy computers running–even if it means building the requisite software themselves.
-
-
AndersDX is shipping a miniature computer-on-module (COM) based on a dual-core 1.65GHz AMD G-Series APU. The CM-iGT provides rich graphics and multimedia capabilities and is supported with embedded Linux.
The CM-iGT’s AMD G-Series APU integrates a dual-core, 64-bit x86 CPU clocked at up to 1.65GHz (depending on board model). The module also supports up to 4GB DDR3 DRAM and up to 32GB flash onboard memory.
-
Phones
-
Ballnux
-
HTC is searching for a comeback. After selling 43.2 million phones in 2011, according to research firm Gartner, HTC saw sales slide in 2012 down to 32.1 million units amid intense competition from the likes of Samsung Electronics and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) at the high end and Huawei and ZTE at the lower end of the market. HTC is plotting a return to prominence on the back of the HTC One, the Taiwanese smartphone maker’s latest flagship device. At the recent Mobile World Congress trade show, FierceWireless Editor Phil Goldstein talked with Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s global president of sales, about the company’s brand, the software features of the One and how the company can get its smartphone swagger back. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
-
Android
-
-
-
Sales of Sony Mobile Communications’ new high-end flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z, have been successful, which could help the vendor ramp up sales of its entry-level to mid-range Android smartphones as well as to speed up its deployment in other mobile platforms, according to sources in the handset supply chain.
-
If you picked up a new television over the last couple of years the chances are good that you weighed the option of a “smart” TV. Thanks to HDMI and a growing assortment of add-on products, those who opted for a standard model can now smarten their TV up. One such device that’s is worth considering the FAVI Entertainment SmartStick.
-
This morning we brought you what initially appeared to be something approaching a realistic rumour regarding the Motorola X Phone. As it turns out, that news was largely unreliable and unsubstantiated rumour, and in respect of the imagery at least, provably false. You can see the pre-aged image used to create the fake as the article image; it’s clearly a (relatively) poorly made render.
-
Google’s Android boss is stepping down from his role.
Sundar Pichai will take over the Android division at Google and run it in addition to his duties as the boss of the Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system.
Google CEO Larry Page said in an announcement that Rubin will “start a new chapter at Google,” but doesn’t specify what the new job will be.
-
“Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google.”
-
Web Browsers
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
IBM CEO schools executives on how to make data-based decisions and predicts the decline of management by gut instinct.
-
In a steady fashion, almost all users of digital technology and devices are using open source, simply because so many open source software components help drive proprietary applications and platforms. The proliferation of open source components is starting to have a very positive effect on the cloud computing scene. As just one example, Netflix–which has a very robust cloud-based proprietary platform–has released Chaos Monkey and a number of other meaningful open source components that can make cloud deployments stronger.
Now, news comes from MIT that researchers are open sourcing software components for cloud-based database-driven applications that could reduce hardware requirements by 95 percent while improving performance.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
LibreOffice 4.0 is now available to download with user interface enhancements, and a multitude of fun new features. Here I will review many of the new features for all the LibreOffice lovers out there. This release delivers a cleaner interface and all-around improved usability.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
India may have policy of preferring free and open source applications, but still the world’s largest software maker Microsoft and others, including Adobe, Norton and McAfee, have managed to weasel their way into some of the largest government purchases in the country’s history.
Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are in the process of procuring over eight million laptops preloaded with proprietary software in clear violation of India’s national policy on information and communication technology and incurring avoidable expenditure of large sums of money, activists said.
-
Switching to free and open source software contributes to sustainability by making a more efficient use of computer hardware, allowing to use PCs for longer than when following proprietary software vendor’s upgrade cycle, two very recent examples show.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Access/Content
-
Friends, family and colleagues memorialized computer activist Aaron Swartz and put MIT’s role in his prosecution front and center on Tuesday afternoon at MIT Media Lab.
-
The good folks over at the EFF have posted a letter from a group of startups and innovators to Congress seeking reform of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), which has been abused for years, most notably and recently, in the case against Aaron Swartz (full disclosure: I helped review the initial letter and helped the EFF get some of the signatures on the letter). This is important, because, as we have noted, plenty of innovators and entrepreneurs could have been charged under this law for some of their random hacking experiments, some of which directly led them to create amazing innovations.
-
When I learned that Aaron Swartz had taken his own life, I cried. I am still desperately sad, for him, his family, for the close friends who loved him, and for our community. We lost a rare and special person, one who did so much in his short life to make the world a better place. Any do-gooder, including myself, could be proud were we to accomplish as much. We don’t know what else he would have acheived were he to have lived. But I admit that I also cried for myself, because I felt guilty that I didn’t do more to help Aaron in his criminal case. This article is about part of that challenge, the challenge to improve computer crime laws, and the criminal justice system more generally. Hopefully in the end, there’ll be something that I, and you, can do about it.
-
Federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from the defense team of Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist’s legal team alleged in a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit.
-
-
-
Security
-
-
A group of New Zealand organisations responsible for critical infrastructure have established voluntary standards for the security of such systems against digital attack.
The New Zealand Cyber Security Voluntary Standards for Industrial Control Systems were devised with the support of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
-
…FinSpy Mobile sample found in the wild, which appears to have been used in Vietnam.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
-
And the Associated Press noted that the UN “couldn’t ‘unequivocally conclude’ that the death was caused by an errantly fired Palestinian rocket.”
The BBC (3/11/13) casts doubt on the attribution of the infant’s death to a Palestinian rocket, noting “that the Israeli military had reported no rockets being fired out of Gaza so soon after the start of the conflict.” It also pointed out that UN team, arriving four weeks after the attack, “did not carry out a forensic investigation, but said their team did not think the damage was consistent with an Israeli air strike.” Al-Masharawi’s father, for his part, calls the UN finding “rubbish.”
-
-
But the problem with that is that Ali Soufan, in his review, and other agents I’ve talked to, consistently cite Faisal Shahzad, for example — he’s the man who came close to bombing Times Square — or Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the subway system. They cite these men as examples of real terrorists and why sting operations are so necessary.
But the problem with their argument, I think, is that neither of those men was actually caught in a terrorism sting operation. To date, we have yet to find the real would-be terrorist: Someone who was about to strike, who had the weapon, who had the means, who is thwarted by a sting operation.
-
Chinese authorities have violently cracked down on an 18-day uprising over landgrabs in a southern Chinese village, arresting nine people and hospitalising dozens.
This weekend, security forces stormed the village of Shangpu, a farming community of 3,000 in southern Guangdong province, cut the electricity supply and phone service, beat demonstrators and fired tear gas into crowds, injuring 30 to 40 people.
-
As just one example, an Embassy cable from June 9, 2009, explains how the former Colombian analogue of the FBI, the DAS, had been spying on and “Neutralizing” (a code word which can include actions up to assassination) particular human rights groups, including Father Giraldo’s group, the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace (“CIJP” or “Justicia y Paz”). (12) This cable noted that this surveillance has been ordered by the then-President of Colombia himself, Alvaro Uribe. The cable noted that the “[s]urveillance included physical monitoring of individuals and their families (including minor children), phone and email intercepts, and collection of sensitive financial data. The unit appears to have also taken active measures to disrupt opposition events and intimidate human rights activists. . . . Journalists and human rights activists claim the surveillance [which began in 2004-2005] continues.” (emphasis added).
One must seriously wonder whether, indeed, this state policy of “neutralizing” the CIJP continues even now, and whether the recent assassination attempt upon Father Alberto Franco of the CIJP on February 13, 2013, was indeed carried out pursuant to this policy. I myself will say for the record that should any further ill befall Father Franco or any other priest associated with the CIJP, the Colombian state and its U.S. backer must be held responsible.
-
A Navy contract linguist charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act by unlawfully retaining “national defense information” has been hit with a third charge of violating the law.
James F. Hitselberger was working in Bahrain as a translator. A document collector, as Secrecy News’ Steven Aftergood describes, Hitselberger is a “peripatetic collector of rare documents.” In his living quarters, where a “classified document was allegedly found in April” of 2012, newspapers and numerous books could be found. Some of his “discoveries over the years” have been donated “to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which actually maintains a James F. Hitselberger Collection.” The collection includes “political posters and leaflets that he gathered in pre-revolutionary Iran.”
-
NASSER AL-AULAQI: I want Americans to know about my grandson, that he was very nice boy. He was very caring boy for his family, for his mother, for his brothers. He was born in August 1995 in the state of Colorado, city of Denver. He was raised in America, when he was a child until he was seven years old. And I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be killed by his own government.
-
The White House has directed the CIA to increase its cooperation and backing of Iraqi state militias to fight al-Qaeda affiliates there and cut off the flow of fighters pouring into Syria.
-
-
-
While there is nothing that prevents officials from being sworn in on a Bible, there’s certainly nothing wrong with following Brennan’s example and honoring the U.S. Constitution. Doing so not only sends a positive message, it frees government from giving the appearance of religious favoritism.
When CIA Director John Brennan placed his hand on a copy of the U.S. Constitution last week to take his oath of office, did he defy the very document on which he swore? Absolutely not.
-
Carroll also wrote that Chavez, himself, believed that the cancers that befell former leftist leaders of Latin America, including Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, diagnosed with colon cancer and Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva, treated for throat cancer, were part of a CIA plot directed against left-wing leaders. Curiously, Carroll suggests that Uruguay’s former leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, also recovered from cancer.
-
The astonishing information about this secret weapon of the CIA comes from U.S. Senate testimony in 1975 on rogue activities of the CIA. This weapon is only one of many James Bond-like discoveries of the Church Committee hearings, officially known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
-
Qayum reported that the strike force put a black hood over his head and took him to an “undisclosed location” where he was beaten and asked if he knew any “Taliban commanders.” They also asked if he could help them capture a neighbor from his home village.
-
Ewald von Kleist, the last surviving member of a group of German officers who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, has died at age 90. After the war von Kleist played a prominent role in transatlantic relations.
-
George Newman (formerly Hans Neumann) was 14 when he fled Vienna, fearing Nazi persecution, for England in 1938. Now, 75 years later, he has returned to Austria for a ceremony at the National Library, where he has donated hundreds of books and documents back to the Austrian nation which would otherwise have been burned by the Nazi regime.
-
John Brennan, newly confirmed director of the CIA, assured Americans in a speech last year on targeted killing that there is “absolutely nothing casual” about the process of targeted killing, including that of American citizens. He included in this the use of remotely controlled drone airplanes that have been used to strike and kill people identified as al-Qaida terrorists.
-
Congress is considering hearings into the use of deadly drones against terrorists, including U.S. citizens, overseas. It should expand its oversight to cover the entire subject of drones and their long-term implications.
What matters immediately is the Obama administration’s indefensible secrecy about targeted killings overseas, particularly when U.S. citizens are the targets.
-
I started to think about the intersection of robotics and the law in earnest a few years ago when I left private practice. In 2011, I came to the conclusion that drones had the potential to create a new Warren and Brandeis moment. Some combination of our visceral reaction to robotic technology, our fascination with flight, and our association of drones with the theater of war could, I thought, trigger a reexamination of privacy law. Drones have indeed captured the public imagination. And we are entering something of a policy window, to borrow a concept from Priscilla Regan. But just how citizens and lawmakers ultimately come down on the domestic use of drones remains to be seen. In this post, I will talk about what I think are the worst and best ways to regulate drones with respect to privacy.
-
-
Cablegate
-
But then Mr Mugabe does not think that way. Perhaps he doesn’t have confidence in his own party which is populated with some of the most treacherous and most weird people in the whole wide world! Mugabe knows he can trust them at his own risk especially with the Willowgate Scandal, War Victims’ Compensation Fund looting, Wikileaks and their general incompetence in mind.
-
From the information movement initiated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange triggering political revolutions and the “Right to Know” becoming common parlance, WikiLeaks has had “widespread ramifications across the world”, said Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson on Tuesday. Ms. Robinson, who is a member of Mr. Assange’s legal team, was participating in a round-table discussion here involving activists, lawyers and journalists.
-
-
-
-
-
A full audio recording of the whistleblower is released today despite a court prohibition on such recordings
-
-
To discuss Bradley Manning’s recorded court statement that was recently leaked to the press, we’re joined by perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “What we’ve heard are people like The New York Times who have consistently slandered him … that he was vague and couldn’t think of specific instances that had led him to inform the American people of injustices,” Ellsberg says. “The American people can now, for the first time, hear Bradley in his own words, emotionally and in the greatest specific detail, tell what it was that he felt that needed revelation.” [includes rush transcript]
-
-
-
-
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The story covers an investigation that was spurred, in part, by revelations that USDA “Wildlife Services” employee Jamie P. Olson had posted photos of his dogs tearing trapped coyotes to pieces on Facebook. (Previously, on Pharyngula.) The issue’s been kept on the front burner by my colleague Camilla Fox at Project Coyote; she and her organization deserve your attention and support.
-
The UK has just agreed to send 40 troops and another $5 million to support the French led operation and Harper is due to renew his contribution to the takeover on March 14. Other African nations have also begun to mobilize troops.
-
Finance
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission took a step to curtail the chance computer glitches disrupt markets, proposing rules that also would impose standards for the electronic architecture of private trading venues known as dark pools.
-
-
Censorship
-
-
-
The Internet and social networks have been conclusively established as tools for protest, campaigning, and circulating information, and as vehicles for advancing human rights and democratic values. The aim of the day is to defend human rights online, promote Internet accessibility for all, and expose enemies of Internet openness — along with governments that are gradually becoming more controlling over how their citizens use the Internet.
-
Privacy
-
-
Washington state has led the way in many respects when it comes to the drone issue, something I highlighted recently in my article: Just Say NO: Seattle Residents Kill the City’s Drone Program. It’s not just Seattle though, there is a bi-partisan bill in the Washington state legislature, H.B. 1771, which limits drone use within the entire state. The bill has already passed its House Committee hearing and, as expected, the state’s corporate overlords have started to fight back. Specifically, Boeing. From the Examiner:
-
“My computer was arrested before I was.” This perceptive comment was made by a Syrian activist who had been arrested and tortured by the Assad regime. Caught by means of online surveillance, Karim Taymour told a Bloomberg[1] journalist that, during interrogation, he was shown a stack of hundreds of pages of printouts of his Skype chats and files downloaded remotely from his computer hard drive. His torturers clearly knew as much as if they had been with him in his room, or more precisely, in his computer.
-
The first great conflict over cryptography and state power happened in the 1990s. In one corner were cryptographers equipped with subtle math, digital technologies, and new ideas. In the other were the Clinton administration and its National Security Agency (NSA), which sought to maintain and extend the federal government’s control over cryptography. They struggled over the concept that cryptography could be classified as munitions, over requirements to include NSA-friendly chips in communication hardware, and, in general, over the shape of post–Cold War security.
-
The general wasn’t kidding. Within an hour or so of Alexander’s testimony reports that Chase Bank’s website had been hacked started to bubble up. Shortly before 7 p.m. Chase confirmed to CNBC that they had indeed been targeted. Hackers hit Chase with — you guessed it — a DOS attack, bringing down the company’s website. It’s unclear if any customer data was compromised. It’s also absolutely unclear if the hack has anything to do with the series of hearings in the Senate on Tuesday that mention cyber security and the threat of a cyber attack. Hacking into a bank’s website right after the head of the NSA warns the Senate about hackers hacking into banks’ websites is certainly a clever way to win attention.
-
-
This coming Friday, March 15, Government Accountability Project (GAP) client and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake will speak at a luncheon at the National Press Club (NPC).
This event is part of the NPC’s involvement in Sunshine Week, a national initiative promoting open government and transparency.
Drake will speak at 1:00 p.m., and a lunch preceding his remarks will be served at 12:30 p.m. Tickets are required for this event; more information about this and other details can be found on the NPC webpage. Journalists can also submit questions to Drake in advance, with instructions to do so contained on the NPC page.
-
His “ruminations” may indeed be his personal thoughts, and not official Google policy, but for that very reason represent his real opinions of issues, not just the public gloss that is put upon them. Given his pivotal role at Google when it comes to privacy, it is likely that the Google management team largely share those views – otherwise they would presumably have fired Fleischer and found someone else they felt more comfortable with. Thus his frank comments probably provide us with tantalising glimpses of what Google really thinks about privacy.
-
Apple Inc. (AAPL) must show in detail how it’s complying with court orders to turn over evidence in a privacy lawsuit, a judge ruled, saying he can no longer rely on what the company tells him in the case.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, issued the order after the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed Apple withheld documents it had previously been ordered to produce. Apple is accused in the lawsuit of collecting data on the locations of customers through iPhones, even after the device’s geo-location feature was turned off.
-
-
Company moves to protect its iOS customers from security and privacy attacks over Wi-Fi by turning on encryption, at least half a year after being alerted to the problem.
Civil Rights
-
Lawsuits challenging government secrecy have fared pretty terribly in the post-9/11 era, with the most recent example being the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that a group of journalists and activists have no right to sue over the FISA spying law.
Only a few cases of this sort are left, including two Bay Area lawsuits being pushed forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One is the San Francisco case over NSA wiretapping, which the government is trying to shut down using the “state secrets” privilege. The other is EFF’s case demanding to see documents about how the government is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.
-
DRM
-
Berners-Lee is so good on so many issues (most of his talk seemed to be about the importance of openness) that this response really stands out as not fitting with his general view of the world. Cory Doctorow has responded eloquently to TBL, explaining why he should be against the DRM proposal.
[...]
The Big Content guys have been seeking to remake the web in their image (i.e., “TV”) for over a decade now, still believing that they’re the main reason people get online. They’re not. There’s room for them within the ecosystem, but professional broadcast-quality content is just a part of the system, not the whole thing. If the world moves to HTML5 without DRM, the content guys will whine about it… and then follow. Especially as the more knowledgeable and forward-looking content creators jump in and succeed.
-
Adding DRM to the HTML standard will have far-reaching effects, incompatible with the W3C’s most important policies
-
In a blog post with the understated (to say the least) title “Changes to the Public API Program,” Netflix has announced that it’s shutting down its public API program. Effectively, that means that no new apps that take advantage of the data Netflix used to provide — for example, for searching for new shows and movies to watch — will be possible. Netflix director of engineering, Daniel Jacobson, writes that “existing and active affiliates” will still have access to Netflix’s APIs, so any third-party apps you currently use should still work as normally. Along with the changes, Netflix has set its developer forum to “read-only,” shut down its “OData catalog” for programmatically accessing Netflix’s catalog, and directed all developers to Stack Overflow for their questions.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
That suggests that the US is actively involved in this latest move — maybe even its instigator — and would look favorably on Mexico joining TAFTA. There’s also a hint in the article quoted above that Canada too might join TAFTA. Having both Mexico and Canada on board would be consistent with the US’s past approach, where it allowed them to join the TPP negotiations, but on fairly humiliating terms that limit their scope of action.
Whether or not Mexico and Canada become part of TAFTA, and under what terms, it’s pretty clear what the US strategy here is. Just today we learned that South Korea is likely to join Japan in asking to sign up to the TPP talks. That would make TPP the defining international agreement for the entire Pacific region. TAFTA obviously aims to do the same for the Atlantic. As well as establishing the US as the key link between the giant TPP and TAFTA blocs, this double-headed approach would also isolate the main emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India and above all China — if they refuse to join as presumably junior partners. That globe-spanning pair of trade pacts, it would seem, are what Obama hopes to be remembered for when he leaves office: his legacy to America — and to history.
-
Copyrights
-
One of the nastier tricks of copyright maximalists has been to lump together “counterfeiting” with “copyright infringement” in an effort to conveniently jump back and forth when making silly arguments. Basically, they can argue that copyright infringement is a huge issue, because of the massive amount of unauthorized sharing that happens online. But they have a lot of trouble showing real harm. On the other side, counterfeiting really isn’t that big of a problem when you look closely at the details, but there are a few, extremely limited cases (faulty counterfeit airplane parts, some fake drugs) where there could be real harm. So if you lump them all together you can claim “massive problems” with “real harm.” But that doesn’t work if you look at them individually.
We recently wrote about some Canadian politicians introducing a bill to get Canada in compliance with ACTA, despite the fact that ACTA has been totally discredited around the globe. Some political opponents are now pushing back on that, calling the bill in question an attempt to get ACTA in “through the backdoor.” However, in response Canadian Industry Minister, Christian Paradis, just keeps repeating the “counterfeiting” mantra and ignoring the entire ACTA elephant in the room.
-
Porn-trolling firm Prenda Law recently made another baffling move in a retaliatory defamation suit against its online critics: the firm sent a subpoena to Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, demanding a list of all of the IP addresses that have visited the anti-troll websites DieTrollDie and Fight Copyright Trolls, both of which are powered by WordPress. Prenda’s lawyer Paul Duffy wrote to Automattic in a letter accompanying the subpoena, “Due to the emergency nature of the requested information, it is imperative that your organization responds to the subpoena immediately.”
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.12.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
Linux wears many different hats. Server, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, embedded, if there is a device with a CPU there is a good bet that it can run linux. Regardless of Linux’s domination in the datacenter, and it’s mainstream acceptance in mobile and other areas, the fate of the Linux Desktop is what gets people worked up. When a highly public person like Miguel de Icaza switches his desktop to OS X, quite a bit of discussion ensues.
Much discussion, and most of it for naught. The personal computer that de Icaza uses is of little importance to the Linux community as a whole. He is making a switch during a transitionary period of personal computing, where we are moving from PCs to tablets and smart phones, and the new mobile computing platform is clearly the way of the future. The role of PCs will continue to decline, especially in the home use market. However, the enterprise will have a use for PCs for many, many years to come, and this is where the best opportunity for the Linux desktop resides.
-
If you’re a Windows 7 user who wants to try out Linux for the first time, one of the easiest ways to do so is to install Ubuntu by using the Windows Ubuntu Installer, or Wubi for short. Using this installer, you can run Ubuntu on your Windows system without having to deal with partitioning and formatting issues, and if you ever get sick of the Linux variant, you can easily uninstall it from within the Programs applet in the Control Panel.
-
Google has been working with Netflix (take some tips Canonical) to bring the DRMed services to the Chromebook. This is major as instead of using Microsoft’s Silverlight Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming (which now supports DRM for HTML5 on Chromebooks). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM (digital repression management) support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5 instead of controversial Silverlight of Microsoft.
-
Server
-
It should come as no surprise that Akamai, the world’s largest Content Delivery Network uses Linux as a core underpinning for its’ 120,000 server network.
-
So, we were caught in a situation where if we upgraded Postfix, we might break the installed MySQL client. There are a couple of things wrong with this situation. First off, why, oh why, does Postfix require a MySQL client to be installed? Postfix is our MTA, a mail transfer agent, setup because it is easy to configure and we need to do a couple things differently from what is available out of the box. We have absolutely no use for MySQL on every server in the environment. Secondly, why was the third party MySQL (or is that first party, since it is from Oracle?) installed over the default filesystem? Packages that are bundled for inclusion on an operating system should respect that operating system’s package manager and install all of their files to /usr/local/. This keeps the filesystem clean, and does not interfere with the standard package manager and patching process.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
Chris Wilson of Intel OTC announced the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.4 X.Org driver on Monday morning. This new driver has clumsy PowerXpress integration, run-time detection of available CPU instruction sets, Haswell fix-ups, and more work on the SNA acceleration architecture.
-
-
On its “Open Source Technology Center” 01.org, Intel recently released an installation program that updates Intel graphics drivers for some Linux distributions, including the 32- and 64-bit x86 versions of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10. Once the program package is installed, the intel-linux-graphics-installer program can take a look at the distribution and connect to repositories from which it pulls packages with newer drivers.
-
Here’s some of the first OpenGL benchmarks of the ultra high-end $999 (USD) NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN running on Linux.
The mighty-impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN was released in mid-February as a graphics card with 6GB of video RAM and boasts 4.5 TeraFLOPS of single-precision compute power and 1.3 TeraFLOPS of double-precision compute power. The NVIDIA 313.26 driver was released to support this ultra-powerful NVIDIA GeForce graphics card under Linux.
-
The first working ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) GPU graphics driver built for Gallium3D has been merged into mainline Mesa!
The driver that was merged into mainline Mesa is the Gallium3D Freedreno for Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno graphics hardware. This Freedreno Gallium3D driver initially supports the A220, which is the GPU that Qualcomm uses with its Snapdragon S3 SoC.
-
Applications
-
The high-end open-source audio workstation software Ardour is up to version 3.0. Ardour 3.0 features many improvements to this GPLv2+ software.
-
Ardour chief developer Paul Davis has released version 3.0 of his digital audio workstation. Ardour 3′s most important new feature is the multi-track recorder’s comprehensive MIDI support and MIDI sequencing functionality. Ardour supports instrument plugins in Steinberg’s VST format, the AudioUnit format of Mac OS X, and the LV2 Linux standard, successor to the LADSPA format. The MIDI workflow is modelled after the audio workflow: notes played on a MIDI device can be recorded as separate tracks and then played back via a software synthesizer. An overview of the MIDI-enabled multi-track recorder’s capabilities is available on the project’s feature page.
-
-
Proprietary
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Ever since the advent of Steam for Linux, performance issues have miffed gamers; especially those who are using Ubuntu’s Unity and are forced to use Compiz as their display compositor. Those issues have been combated in several ways. Nvidia and AMD have been ‘stepping up to the plate’ so to speak with increased performance from their drivers, and developers have been working towards more granular performance enhancements geared towards playing well with Xorg. Step one for most users is to simply unset Compiz for fullscreen applications, KWin for KDE users. The former is the most affected, and that was the catalyst behind Michael Bethencourt’s FSGamer.
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Sebastian Kügler of KDE has talked about progress made on Plasma 2, the port of the Plasma Workspaces desktop to using KDE Frameworks 5 that in turn works atop Qt 5. The possibilities opened up for Plasma 2 due to KDE Frameworks 5 and using an OpenGL scene-graph are impressive and awesome.
-
Today I’d like to share a success story of a picture perfect project collaboration as it only happens in the open source world without any commercial, political or geographical borders. It all started back in 2009 after a short interview about Roundcube was published on a techworld.com blog. Short time after we got an email from Georg Greve, founder of the FSFE and member of the Kolab Groupware project. At that time, Kolab already made its name as a free competitor to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and they were just about to found a new company to push Kolab to the next level. One thing Kolab definitely needed was a better web client to access all the groupware data from anywhere. And this is where Roundcube seemed to fit in perfectly. Although Roundcube was “just” an email client, the Kolab guys saw great potential in our codebase and the vital community around it. And now, more than three years after, we can all witness the great success of this decision.
-
For this project, we’ll use a photo of the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain (you can download the RAW file from https://www.box.com/s/cq3uknqt54o3usf1jg3r). The photo was taken with a Canon PowerShot S90 camera, and the RAW file exhibits several obvious flaws, including visible barrel distortion, underexposed areas, and noise. In other words, this particular RAW file is perfect for tweaking in digiKam.
-
Natural ecosystems are wonderful things full of complexity and beauty. There are few ecosystems on this planet that are occupied by only one or two species. Most are a complex meshing of variety, though it is not uncommon for there to be dominant species (numerically, positionally) within them.
Interesting things happen when you change an ecosystem, however. If you remove a species, particularly a populous one, it leaves an opening full of suddenly unused resources in its wake. This opening usually fills up quickly with other species, often creating instabilities that over time even out until the system reaches a new equilibrium. Change the environment in some way (more water, less water; more heat , longer cold; etc.) and previously successful groups may find themselves marginalized, once again creating opportunities for others to grow and proliferate.
-
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu’s build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.
-
Can we really and seriously believe that William Jon McCann, described as one of the main driving forces behind the concepts of GNOME 3, doesn’t know what Xfce is? What are the consequences of having a large corporation like Red Hat (perhaps with strong influence from the ultra-wealthy Google) in control of widely used open source projects like GNOME and GTK, with its teams of developers routinely altering their APIs in unpredictable, erratic ways and offering no real support to independent projects using their libraries? It’s clear that with the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has become a corporate product solely created for and controlled by Red Hat.
-
-
A number of interesting new Linux releases are due out in the next few days or weeks. Here’s a quick overview of some of them.
-
New Releases
-
Screenshots
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Mageia 3 Beta 3, the delayed beta release that pushed Mageia 3′s release date into May, has now been released by the development team. The team say they had to face quite a lot of bugs during the QA phase of testing the beta 3 ISO images and that it took more time than expected to fix them. Another beta, beta 4 is scheduled for 28 March, followed by a release freeze on 7 April, release candidate on 19 April, and final release on 3 May.
-
-
Gentoo Family
-
Sabayon Linux is a distribution which uses Gentoo Linux as its base. The Sabayon project is very diverse, featuring many different desktop spins (KDE, GNOME, MATE and Xfce) along with some minimalist and server spins. Each flavour of Sabayon is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. This gives users a variety of editions from which to choose and one of them is bound to fit our needs. The distribution maintains a rolling release, meaning packages are constantly updating to keep users up to date with the latest available versions of software. I decided to try the latest release of Sabayon, version 11, and opted to try the project’s KDE edition. The KDE edition can be downloaded as a 2.2 GB ISO image.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering started its life as a mostly proprietary product built on technology acquired from Makara in 2010.
In April of 2012, Red Hat made OpenShift available as open source under the OpenShift Origin effort. Simply making a project open source, however, doesn’t make it a true open source community with contribution and collaboration.
-
Tech companies ended up putting in a mixed trading session Tuesday, with notable losses coming from Apple Inc. and Red Hat Inc., but decent gains coming elsewhere from the likes of VeriFone Systems Inc.
-
-
Fedora
-
“I think we offer quite a bit more choice to people. Think in terms of the number of desktop choices we offer. Consider that if somebody in the Fedora community wants to add to those choices, we are supportive of that interest. We will do that. We are not dictating from on high. We don’t focus on ‘Thou shalt have’ and ‘Thou shalt not have.’ We are definitely a distribution that is focused on freedom.”
-
Matthias Clasen sparked a new mailing list thread on Monday amongst Fedora developers to improve the Fedora boot experience.
-
So I think out of all of the feedback we got about the Anaconda UI redesign, the one piece of the UI that’s received the most negative feedback is the RAID configuration piece of the custom partitioning UI. The designs for how this UI ended up getting implemented in Fedora 18 was posted to this blog in December 2011. I really wish we’d received the level of feedback we received post F18-Beta and post F18-GA at that point, so the design could have been modified before it was implemented! That being said – I’m not placing blame with anybody but myself – I got this design wrong, and for that I am sincerely sorry.
-
Debian Family
-
Ok so I have put off doing this review for sometime. I tried Crunchbang for the first time about a year ago and I was a little underwhelmed.
[...]
There are some distributions that have a lot of glitz and glamour and they lack functionality (if these distributions were people my nan would say they were “all skirt and no knickers”). There are other distributions that are built for do-ers. (and of course there are some that provide Glitz and glamour as well as functionality).
-
The candidates have been announced and the election process for the new Debian Project Leader (DPL) has officially begun. Gergely Nagy, Moray Allan and Lucas Nussbaum are campaigning for the top position in the Debian Project. After three terms, current Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli is not running for re-election this year.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
A common complaint about Chrome OS is that it’s not a full OS. That’s no longer true as you can easily run Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS on the Chromebook Pixel and toggle between the two.
-
Recently, many people have expressed concern over Ubuntu’s desire to migrate from the X Window System to the Mir display server, which the Ubuntu team will manage themselves. The bulk of the concern seems to be confusion over why Ubuntu developers wouldn’t use Wayland instead.
In this article, I’ll explore the official reasoning for the decision, while also exploring some additional considerations that most people aren’t talking about.
-
Seven years ago, it was a bit of a challenge to shift to open source because Linux desktop operating systems weren’t all that easy to set up and use. Today, it’s a snap to install and use Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions with an estimated 20 million users worldwide.
-
More than a year after it announced plans to develop an Ubuntu-powered TV, Canonical, the company behind the operating system, is still to announce a hardware partner for the project.
Ubuntu TV is one element of Canonical’s ‘four screen’ strategy, under which the company wants to see its open source operating system also appearing on smartphones, tablets and PCs.
First announced at CES 2012 in Las Vegas, Canonical hoped that Ubuntu TVs would appear by the end of the year.
-
Developers at Canonical have been considering a completely new release cycle for Ubuntu in which the interim releases that occur every six months would be dumped in favor of “rolling releases” that happen far more frequently but not necessarily on a set schedule.
Last month, Canonical VP Rick Spencer suggested that Canonical “take a monthly snapshot of the development release, which we support only until the next snapshot.” Users could then choose either the Long Term Support (LTS) edition that comes out every two years, the monthly snapshot, or the absolute newest build, which could conceivably be updated every day.
-
-
Ubuntu 13.04 is the latest version of Ubuntu, scheduled to be released on the 25th of April this year. But what’s it shaping up to? In this article I’ll sum up some of the changes since the last LTS (Long Time Support) release, Ubuntu 12.04. You might wonder “Why not Ubuntu 12.10?” The answer is simple; I never used Ubuntu 12.10 after my first crashtastic experience in VirtualBox. I’m not saying Ubuntu 12.10 was a bad release, but it didn’t really work for me.
-
Mark Shuttleworth can’t leave well enough alone. First it was Unity. Then it was Wayland. Now it’s Mir. Inquiring minds want to know: what does he think he’s trying to do? It’s simple, really. He’s not trying to do anything. All indications are that he’s actually accomplishing what he’s setting out to do. Except for making money and only time will tell if that’s going to work out for him.
Unity was a no-brainer. Practically everybody hated GNOME 3, so he pretty much had to do something. What everyone expected that something to be was along the lines of Cinnamon or MATE, an interface that would offer users the look and feel of GNOME as they knew it, not as it had become. What Shuttleworth offered was, in the words of Monty Python, “something completely different.” Different from both GNOME 2 or 3. Different from KDE. Different from Windoze and OS X. Unique to Ubuntu.
-
-
-
Daylight savings just began, which means it’s the time of year to start looking forward to the spring release of Ubuntu. But could this year’s version, 13.04, be the last one in the biannual release cycle that Canonical has stalwartly maintained for almost a decade? For the moment, that remains uncertain, but the issue, which has produced a stunning amount of debate, could have ramifications well beyond the Ubuntu ecosystem.
Rumors of changes to the Ubuntu release policy have circulated for several months, but Ubuntu developers initially rejected them. The issue re-emerged a couple of weeks ago, however, when Rick Spencer, vice president of Engineering at Canonical, launched a wide public discussion by suggesting on the Ubuntu developers’ email list that a “rolling release” cycle might better serve the Ubuntu community. That would be a major shift away from the current model, under which Canonical introduces a new version of Ubuntu every six months. It designates one out of every four of those releases for “longterm support” (LTS), meaning they receive support and updates for five years.
-
-
So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself.
-
Mark Shuttleworth has irritated some open-source developers by his latest claim: Ubuntu’s Unity existed before the GNOME Shell.
Red Hat’s Adam Williamson, among other open-source developers, are ticked off by some of Mark Shuttleworth’s recent claims regarding Ubuntu. It’s just not about Mir, but other topics too. The Fedora QA manager wrote a personal blog post today entitled Dear Mark Shuttleworth: please tell the truth.
-
-
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
This long awaited release is based on Ubuntu Precise, and as usual comes full of free software goodness. We continue to provide an easy to use classic desktop experience complete with full featured browsing, office, communications and social networking utilities. Download it while it is hot!
-
As some non-Mir news, Tim Lunn of the Ubuntu GNOME project wrote into Phoronix that the OS spin is now an official Ubuntu flavor. Ubuntu GNOME was originally released last year in conjunction with Ubuntu 12.10, but now the flavor has been approved by the Tech Board per the IRC meeting logs.
-
-
There are some major changes happening at Ubuntu which pans from changing base technologies to community involvement. Ubuntu has quite some flavour and derivatives and there was some concern among the users how these changes will impact these distributions, so we reached out to two major distributions which are based on Ubuntu – Linux Mint and Kubuntu.
-
The combination of Xubuntu 12.04 and eeePC is amazing. This Linux distro has breathed fresh air into the lungs of my netbook. Unless it dies because of hardware fatigue, it should breeze on for a few years more without any trouble, blessed with an enhanced and improved presentation layer, much faster responsiveness and multitasking, and the latest set of programs and gadgets. Really nice. So if you happen to have a netbook, I do warmly recommend you give it a try with an Xfce-flavored distro, you’re bound for a pleasant surprise. Well, not a surprise, if you know what you’re expecting, but you get the drift.
-
-
As we discovered last week, Linux pros don’t think Android is the new embedded Linux. Android does, however, have a lot of great uses in embedded projects and many features that even hard core embedded Linux developers can envy.
To dig a little deeper into some of the similarities and differences between Android and embedded Linux, we talked with John Cherry, Senior Engineering Manager of Linux Runtime Services at Mentor Graphics. While you might not need Android in a fixed function device such as your toaster (or maybe you do?), he said via email, “Android is no longer just a mobile communication and tablet operating system.”
-
Phones
-
commentary BlackBerry. Windows Phone. Firefox. Tizen. Ubuntu. There’s a lot of interest in creating an alternative to Android and iOS. But the lack of concentrated industry support may spell doom.
-
-
Ballnux
-
We all are just two days away from the launch of the much-hyped Samsung Galaxy S4. But that should not stop you from feasting your eyes on the first official glimpse of Galaxy S4. After launching the first teaser video for its Android-powered smartphone, the South Korean manufacturer has now come up with a sneak preview of the device.
Samsung’s US Mobile account posted the image of the Galaxy S4 on Twitter on Tuesday, ahead of its unveiling in New York on March 14.
-
-
-
Android
-
XOLO has launched its first quad-core Android smartphone in India. Powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the new Q800 phone has a 4.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 960 x 640 pixels. It features a 1.2GHz quad-core processor.
-
LG has announced that its 4-inch dual-SIM smartphone, Optimus L5II, will make its debut in Brazil, eventually trickling out to markets in Central / South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The handset packs 1Ghz processor and 512MB of RAM powering Android 4.1.2 aka Jelly Bean layered in the latest LG UX specific tweaks: Quick Button and Safety Care.
-
Developing native code for Android is relatively easy. You’ll have to learn to use Android’s XML-based screen layout mechanism, and you’ll have to learn Java. For iPhone, you’ll need to learn Objective C. If you want to develop for Windows Phone, you’ll need to learn C# as well. Instead, you simply could use Phonegap and maintain a singe code base in HTML/JavaScript/CSS. This is the definition of a “no-brainer”.
-
-
Intel has released their own spin of Google’s Android operating system with some features not yet found in the upstream open-source Android project.
For the past half-year Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have been working on Android-IA, their project that optimizes the AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) code for Intel hardware.
-
Ube announced today that its WiFi Smart Dimmer switch, currently an in-process project at Kickstarter, will be able to control other smart devices throughout the home via gestures on the dimmer’s capacitive multi-touch interface.
-
The collaborative community contribution model of open source computing is an art form.
This is a view shared by an increasing number of respected speakers in the industry as open platforms now become seriously architected into our computing services from mobile devices to enterprise clouds.
-
>
-
Growing consumerization of technology means an increasing number of people have control of what technologies they use in both their personal and business lives. Two of the biggest areas where this trend manifests itself these days are mobile technologies and software, the latter of which has resulted in a steady and significant growth in the use of open source software (OSS) thanks to its lower cost and relatively similar functional capabilities. Respondents in last year’s annual Future of Open Source Survey, which is currently being run for 2013 and can be taken here, indicated that by 2017 organizations will spend 50 percent more than they do now on OSS purchases.
-
-
The era of closed platforms in the Ethernet switching industry is over, according to Mellanox Technologies, the Israeli data center Ethernet and InfiniBand networking specialist.
Mellanox has introduced its Open Ethernet initiative, which gives customers the option of running a complete open source networking stack on Ethernet hardware, allowing them to tweak and customize networks to their own specifications, said Gilad Shainer, senior director of market development at Mellanox.
-
Events
-
Open Source software has had a special area for itself at the CeBIT trade show for the last five years. The H went along to see what was new this year and in the process met Knoppix creator, Klaus Knopper, saw the latest in 3D printing, and talked with John “Maddog” Hall about Project Cauã.
-
Web Browsers
-
Stitcher has come up with new plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome browsers. You can now listen to the streaming service any time on any browser thanks to the new browser plug-ins customized for Chrome and Firefox. These plug-ins also enable users to stream their favorite programs along with over 15,000 shows using easy toolbar access providing full playback control, the company said.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
-
-
The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we’ve seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Dell, Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray. It seems inevitable that there could eventually be a market shakeout, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting.
-
Amazon has plugged Node.js into its free platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk.
Elastic Beanstalk helps developers deploy applications by automating capacity provisioning, load balancing, health monitoring, and auto-scaling the company announced in a blog post on Monday
It also promises some Node.js-specific support features for Elastic Beanstalk, like being able to couple Elastic Beanstalk with the Amazon RDS tech, and to run the Node.js app inside Amazon’s enterprise-friendly virtual private cloud. Elastic Beanstalk now also supports PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, and Java, alongside Node.js.
-
CMS
-
Dries Buytaert is the founder and lead of the open source Drupal content management system, which OStatic and many other web sites are based on. He’s also the co-founder of Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal. Dries is one of the more respected pundits in open source, and has submitted guest posts here on OStatic.
-
Education
-
While mainstream attention has been focused on MOOCs, the Open Educational Resource university (OERu) has been developing a parallel education offering which is distinctively open.
The OERu aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognized education institutions.
-
-
So, we put it to you open balloters. What do you think?
Kids should be able to use MSOffice, since that’s what they’ll need to use in most jobs.
Kids should understand how computers work, and how they interact.
Kids should be able to program.
Kids should be able to install Gentoo. We’re trying to build a 1337 super race!
Kids should know nothing otherwise they’ll steal our jobs. As Homer Simpson said, “Children are the future … unless we stop them now”
Or, of course, any other thoughts.
-
Healthcare
-
In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the “Best Project of Social Benefit” award given by the Free Software Foundation.
GNU Health, and in Latin countries, GNU Solidario, started as a free software project for Primary Care facilities in rural areas and developing countries. Since then, it has evolved into a full Hospital and Health Information System used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health (such as in Entre Rios, Argentina), and private institutions around the globe.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Guile 100 hopes to be a collection of useful examples of how to use Guile. Every few weeks, I’ll announce a theme for a collection of tasks. Then each week, I’ll announce a challenge in that theme: a script to be written or a problem to be solved.
-
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
The Swiss Canton of Bern has decided to switch to Open Justitia, a management system for legal documents, developed as open source by the country’s Federal Court. The canton procured support for the installing and maintaining the software from a Swiss IT service provider. One competitor disputes the contract. The firm, whose offer of its own proprietary alternative was turned down, is rallying for political support.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Programming
-
Zend Optimizer+ is to be integrated into the currently-in-development PHP 5.5. The announcement was made by Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. The opcode cache and code optimiser was recently open sourced; previously it was only available as part of the proprietary Zend Server. It improves the performance of the interpreter by optimising the bytecode generated from PHP source files. It also stores precompiled bytecode in shared memory instead of reloading and recompiling source code from the hard disk when needed.
-
Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech.
Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
My conclusion is that when it comes to Freedom (Software Freedom or otherwise) standards actually matter as much as rights. Standards, regardless of what they are about, industry specifications, public policies, conventions defining legal terms, even words and their meaning, are the fundamental building block on an open, inclusive and efficient system. While their use may be twisted -any tool can, for the hand that uses the tool is the one ultimately defining its intent- standards form the basis of innovation, be it technological or social, and even political. Standards are what we must agree on first in order to agree on principles, values, and on the way we live. Our world, our countries, our lives, the industries we are working in are thus powered by standards. But it would be a pale assertion to stand at that line; for the author of this blog does not just stick to standards. He believes in Freedom as the energy in everything good that’s been happening in his life and around him as far as he can witness; and if the truth about the “primum mobile” will forever remain a mystery to Man, at least part of its manifestation lies in our innate and universal potential and right to Freedom. Software is no different in that respect. This blog will thus continue to be not just powered by standards. It will always be moved by Freedom.
-
Possibly because the bad ones can kill you, bacteria get a bad rap. Those Purell stations you see at conferences? They’re barely competent as a viricide, but excel at destroying bacteria. And while the CDC says they’re not necessary, anti-bacterial soaps remain all the rage these days.
We’ve been conditioned to consider bacteria as the enemy by way of related horror stories. The toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum, for example, the bacteria which allows celebrities to give their faces a carboard-like appearance, is incredibly toxic. 1 gram of it, in fact, is enough to kill 14,000 people. Escherichia coli, a normally helpful occupant of our digestive tract, has a variant that can cause hemorrhagic diarrhea, kidney failure or even death.
-
Science
-
Algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe, say astrobiologists.
-
A “significant” and “growing” shortage of health information technology workers has led businesses to recruit technologists from other industries to meet their needs, according to a new report.
-
Hardware
-
Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
UK deaths last year from antibiotic resistance: 5,000
Uk deaths last year fron terrorisn: nil
-
…asked a Virgin America flight attendant for a soda and was told he had to request one using the aircraft’s seat-back system…
[...]
“My biggest concern is that somebody on an aircraft has the power to outright lie about an incident and get me in all kinds of trouble,” he said. “Civil rights have gone out the window.”
-
-
At 11:47 a.m. Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky embarked on a near-13 hour deliberative filibuster, stalling the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan, to gain clarity on the possibility of the CIA’s drone assassination program being used against American citizens at home.
The CIA regularly uses drones armed with Hellfire missiles to engage various targets abroad. Drone strikes have a cruel and unusual record. Afghani President Hamid Karzai demanded the attacks end, after the drone’s Hellfire engulfed 30 civilian locations in 2012.
-
The 29-year-old engineering student was standing outside his classroom here on Saturday morning when he said two pickup trucks full of armed men pulled up. The men, said to be members of a C.I.A.-backed Afghan strike force, grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back, draped a black hood over his head and drove him to an undisclosed location where, the student says, he was beaten and whipped.
-
-
-
-
Indeed, the Times story does a remarkable job of conveying official justifications for the Awlaki killing–but we hear nothing from those who have questioned the government’s account and its legal rationale. The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have led the legal challenge on the Awlaki case, and issued a response (3/10/13) to the Times story.
The Times story also included information about the drone killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki. He was killed several weeks later, along with about a dozen others in Yemen. The strike was based on bad intelligence; the intended target was not among those killed.
-
Cablegate
-
-
-
RU: It’s interesting to have a book on Cypherpunk with Julian Assange as the author (his name, at least, is writ largest) when most people think of WikiLeaks as an anti-secrecy organization. Did he (or all of you) intentionally want to complexify the discussion around WikiLeaks or did anything like that even cross your mind(s)?
JA: Personal privacy and institutional transparency are complementary ideas that help to create a free and open society.
-
This week on CounterSpin: Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is dead but his independence and help for Venezuela’s poor remains unforgiven in the US press. We’ll talk to Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what media’s portrayal of Chavez says about media.
-
Time and again, throughout America’s history, individuals with a passion for truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the unjust laws and practices of the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested, branded traitors and even killed.
-
“Defense Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa was sharply critical of international organizations in his final meeting with Ambassador. Rajapaksa said the ICRC’s job was essentially finished now that the conflict was over. He said the GSL is unhappy with the UN and ICRC for being critical of the GSL when they should have been working with the government to help resolve the conflict and address the challenges Sri Lanka faced. The Defense Secretary said the GSL doesn’t want the ICRC and UN involved in identification of those killed in the former conflict zone because of their ‘negative’ attitude. He claimed their reporting would likely inflame passions, exacerbate divisions, and be contrary to the goals of reconciliation and closure. Ambassador strongly disagreed, saying the ICRC was performing excellent work in assisting GSL efforts to deal with the humanitarian crisis.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
-
Finance
-
The current system has made the people who work on Wall Street fabulously rich, and given the rest of us one financial crisis after another. It makes no effort to hold financial professionals responsible for their bad behavior. Instead, they continue to reap all the financial rewards for taking risks with the money of their depositors, counterparties, creditors and shareholders, with little or no accountability when things go awry. After what Wall Street put us through in 2008 and 2009, you would think that the compensation system would have been changed to prevent a repeat. You would be wrong.
-
ONCE upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.
The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – parent company of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal – has spent a whopping $250,000 on the Los Angeles school board race, just as the corporation focuses on making money off of public education. News Corp and its for-profit education subsidiaries are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the education initiatives promoted by News Corp’s preferred candidates track the ALEC agenda.
Murdoch has called the for-profit K-12 education industry “a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed” – and his News Corp is investing big to capture that market. In 2010, News Corp acquired Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, for $360 million. Its latest venture is a digital K-12 curricula to be sold and taught on a specialized “Amplify Tablet” that runs on the Android platform.
-
European Parliament chiefs are considering setting up a site to target young children with a “playful” presentation of their working methods and democratic principles.
It adds to concern highlighted by the Daily Express about educational materials produced for schools by the European Commission that critics claim are a bid to make children feel positive about the EU.
-
Ever since Governor Scott Walker imposed his anti-union legislation on Wisconsin, the state has become exceptionally polarized. This polarization is reflected in the current race for Supreme Court. Once again Wisconsin is seeing massive spending from outside groups in a race that is officially nonpartisan.
The 2011 Supreme Court race between incumbent Justice David Prosser — who was formerly a GOP lawmaker in the state — and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg became a referendum on Walker’s controversial Act 10, with record-breaking spending by groups like the Koch-linked Citizens for a Strong America, the powerful Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Wisconsin chapter of Club for Growth, and the union-backed Greater Wisconsin Committee. Prosser ultimately won in a narrow victory after the last-minute discovery of uncounted votes in heavily Republican Waukesha County.
-
Privacy
-
Revision of the European Data Protection Regulation is ongoing and the “Legal Affairs” (JURI) Committee will vote on its opinion on 19 March. Unfortunately, there are strong indications that JURI will vote in the same way as the previous committees and weaken the protection of EU citizens’ privacy against corporations that collect, process and trade their personal data. With only one week left before the vote, citizens must act urgently and contact their members of the European Parliament (MEP).
-
-
The news that IBM is going to shift all its cloud services and software to an open cloud architecture comes as no great surprise. After all, it had already signalled an intent to open up the cloud when it joined the OpenStack Foundation last year as a ‘platinum’ sponsor and then went on to contribute to the codebase.
-
-
Civil Rights
-
-
Readers — The story below makes me so sad and so angry, and you will see why. If anyone at Child Protective Services or the police department would pick up a single book written before predator panic swept the country, they’d see that 6-year-olds were always part of the neighborhood scene, scampering, playing, or even — in many eras and areas — working! The idea that a 6-year-old can’t be outside without constant supervision is new and warped.
-
What happens in other countries is important to U.S. media when they can claim that the news matters to U.S. interests. So it was not altogether surprising to see the March 8 headline in the New York Times, “Leader of Vote Count in Kenya Faces U.S. With Tough Choices.”
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Questioned by the French government on the need to legislate on the protection of freedoms on the Internet, the National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique or CNNum) published today an opinion on Net neutrality1 [fr]. It recommends that the French government makes this principle of non-discrimination into law, broadening its scope to include search engines and other online services. But by overbroadening the neutrality principle, the CCNum’s recommendations could result in a meaningless law.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
In a Los Angeles federal courtroom on a blindingly sunny Monday afternoon, US District Judge Otis Wright expressed incredulity at the sheer gall of the Prenda porn copyright trolling firm.
Judge Wright had ordered six other Prenda affiliates (or alleged affiliates) to show up in response to his order regarding possible sanctions for their behavior. None of those named parties showed up to the hearing in person, apart from Alan Cooper of Minnesota. (Cooper has alleged that Prenda attorney John Steele used Cooper’s name improperly as the CEO of copyright licensing firm AF Holdings.) Lawyers Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and Prenda paralegal Angela Van Den Hemel had filed a notice on Friday saying that travel to the Central District Court of California was impossible for the out-of-state parties. Today, they were represented by another attorney who identified herself as Heather Rosing.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 4:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Once again, an overview of some gross PR which is intended to portray as open the company which is the biggest enemy of Open Source and libre software
The Microsoft ally/partner Black Duck has been using something called Future Of Open Source Survey to increase its influence over the collective voice of FOSS. This is still going on. Recently, Black Duck was openwashing Microsoft in a very gross way and years ago it brought in Ohloh, which is former Microsoft staff. “Ohloh Reveals Unique Insight into Organizations’ Commitments to Open Source Projects,” says a new headline, which is another stunt by Black Duck to promote its voice. Here is an example. The founder of the company is a Microsoft marketing man/Microsoft campaigner and his strategy sure pays off. Here is another new example of openwashing, this time with code samples for proprietary platform (C# and Visual Basic).
Paul Krill plays along with the Microsoft PR:
The company is expanding its participation in open source endeavors, no longer believes Linux is a ‘cancer’
Not true. Just look at what Microsoft is doing to Linux while it is also misusing the term “open” to mean nonsense. Here is some openwashing of proprietary Azure through something called “Open Data Center Alliance”, another nonsense entity.
It is important to bear in mind that there is a marketing or PR campaign going on to blur the difference between libre software and Microsoft. This is intentional. This needs to be stopped. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Vista 8, Windows at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Widely-used Microsoft software to be abandoned
Summary: Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 soon to have their support expire, which can drive enterprises to non-Vista 8 systems, notably GNU/Linux with Free/libre software
The arrival of Vista 8 did absolutely nothing to increase sales of PCs, maybe only sales of tablets and such, running everything but Windows, of course. There is this report (via) about the last pre-Vista version of Windows coming to its end of life pretty soon. As put by the pro-Microsoft crowd:
A large number of Microsoft customers are in for a rude awakening on 8 April 2014.
With less than 400 days to go, 15 per cent of those running Windows XP are still unaware that that’s the date Microsoft finally turns off all support for its legacy PC operating system, according to a recent survey.
After 8 April next year, Microsoft will no longer make bug fixes or security updates for Windows XP, meaning customers will be naked and vulnerable to hackers and viruses and on their own in terms of code updates and fixes. Support for Office 2003 also finishes on the same date, with the same implications.
This is likely to cause not adoption of Vista 8 but of alternatives to Microsoft. It was realised by Microsoft sevrral years ago, which is why an extended support date deadline was issued. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Further Recent Posts
- Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released
Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
Content is available under CC-BY-SA