11.06.10
Posted in Asia, Security, Windows at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The entire nation of Myanmar gets the ‘Estonia treatment’ (almost knocked out of the Internet by a DDOS attack)
THE NATIONWIDE effect of Microsoft Windows zombies was recently made known to humanity thanks to Estonia [1, 2]. A small group of people claimed credit for attacking a whole nation for political reasons (Estonia is located around Russia’s borders/vicinity) and this new report says that it can get rather ugly and violent:
There are many reasons why cybercrime is as bad as it is, and getting much worse. One of them is lack of awareness of how dangerous and well-connected the gangs are. The most serious identity thieves and fraudsters are not isolated teenage script kiddies. They are mobsters who kill people, and worse, though those stories are seldom told. Folks need to know just how bad they are, every bit as much as they need to know the stories of the heroes who are risking their lives to stop them.
It is so easy to attack any target of choice if/when one in two Windows PCs is technically a zombie. According to this new report, Myanmar apparently got the ‘Estonia treatment’:
The nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, found its access to the Internet severed by a massive denial of service attack, according to a report by Arbor Networks.
The source or motivation of the attack isn’t known, but it is believed that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have targeted the country’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (or PTT), the main conduit for Internet traffic in and out of the authoritarian nation.
A report on the Web page of the Myanmar Times dated November 1 notes widespread Internet outtages dating as far back as October 25 that have disrupted the tourism trade in Myanmar.
Based on prior stories of this kind, it is quite safe to assume that zombie PCs running Windows were used in this attack. It is costly not just to users whose computer is abused; it paralyses entire nations, which ought to raise questions about one’s national security too. █
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10.28.10
Posted in Apple, Asia, Finance, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft Office crashes YOU!
Summary: A story of tyranny and monopoly abuse in Russia (courtesy of Microsoft Office lock-in), news about OOXML in Malaysia, and a quick word about Microsoft’s results, which lag behind Apple’s
Vladimir Sorokin, a Russian teacher who stood up for his students’ rights, has just been sacked. His only alleged misdeed is that he did not accept the illegally-obtained monopoly of Microsoft, which nobody has an excuse for being a prisoner to anymore.
Natalya Krainova of the Moscow Times claims:
A battle over whether open-source or proprietary software should be used in Moscow’s public schools spilled into the open Wednesday when a schoolteacher said he was forced to quit for complaining about being forced to use Microsoft programs.
Vladimir Sorokin, deputy director at School No. 572 in southeastern Moscow who teaches computer science, said by telephone that education officials had pressured him into resigning after he complained to President Dmitry Medvedev about an online training system for students that requires Microsoft Office to run properly.
The federal government decreed in 2007 that all schools nationwide have to switch to software based on the free operational system Linux by next year. Sorokin said the training system Moscow schools are forced to use defies this order.
“The education directorate is giving preference to Microsoft,” Sorokin said.
“There has to be freedom of choice,” he added.
The British press has covered this too and this story seems likely to go viral.
A Russian teacher claims he was forced to quit his job after he complained about being made to use Microsoft software.
Computer science teacher Vladimir Sorokin, who was deputy director of School No. 572 in southeastern Moscow, told the Moscow Times that education officials had pressured him into resigning after he complained to president Dmitry Medvedev about an online training system that required students to use Microsoft Office.
“The education directorate is giving preference to Microsoft,” Sorokin complained. “There has to be freedom of choice.”
Sorokin claims the training system forces Moscow schools to defy a government directive originally issued in 2007, which requires schools to use the open source operating system Linux, as part of a drive towards a ‘national OS’.
Recall the very recent Microsoft NGO spin [1, 2, 3]. A few years ago a Russian teacher was sentenced to prison for the same reason those NGOs were. Microsoft provides ammunition and supports actions that put those people in jail. And it actually gets worse in Russia because to name some related posts:
Microsoft and Office are far from benign, but as we pointed out earlier, even the Gates Foundation is pushing if not imposing its use by people who cannot afford it. That’s lock-in and it must not be tolerated in schools whose burden parents are taxpayers are taking. In a private business it’s another story, just not in the public sector. When will Russia abandon Microsoft at the federal level? This might happen soon. The relevant couple of links from yesterday's news are:
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The Russian government has decided it is going to develop its own operating system as an alternative to using Microsoft Windows.
Rather than opting for an existing Linux distribution instead, Russia will invest $4.9 million creating its own OS based on Linux for use across all government departments.
A meeting is planned in December where vice-prime minister Sergei Ivanov will discuss the details and plan of action for the development. The key aims are to remove the dependence on Windows and allow for better security, while at the same time not becoming just another Linux distribution.
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The Russian state plans to revamp its computer services with a Windows rival to reduce its dependence on US giant Microsoft and better monitor computer security, a lawmaker said Wednesday.
Moscow will earmark 150 million rubles (3.5 million euros, 4.9 million dollars) to develop a national software system based on the Linux operating system, Russian deputy Ilia Ponomarev told AFP, confirming an earlier report in the Vedomosti daily.
It is encouraging to see that the state tries to distance itself from proprietary software.
Yoon Kit, who was among those who stood up against OOXML in Malaysia, now says that “the OXML beast is finally dead in Malaysia as a National Standard. Approval by ISC-G to kill the project was agreed today.” For some background about OOXML in Malaysia see posts such as:
The head of Microsoft Malaysia quit the company not so long afterwards and the OOXML corruption index ought to show that Malaysia was not unique when it comes to OOXML-related abuses. It’s a fight against ODF.
Just earlier today ThistleWeb spoke about the importance of standards, not Microsoft’s own way of doing things.
Standards are important, they avoid duplication of effort and increase interactivity between various different devices. Imagine if every TV network broadcast it’s own standard of TV signal, so you’d need a different TV for each network, or cars were made with their own standard of petrol so you had to fill up at a petrol station who sold fuel for your brand of car. This is the retarded world of vendor lock-in, it’s what happens when companies put their own profits above the needs of their customers.
[...]
One of the “reasons” Microsoft often give in their attacks / smears on their competition is that they “don’t work right with standard formats”. Of course by “standard formats” they mean “Microsoft created, patented, licensed and undocumented formats”. So of course any office application has to try and reverse engineer .doc and .xls to get them to work. Microsoft were heavily fined for ignoring a court order to release (in this case smb / Samba) documentation to allow others to make their software compatible with Microsoft’s own. Again vendor lock-in in full effect.
Earlier on today we posted the latest ODF newsletter and LWN finally has this summary of the very recent ODF Plugfest, which is available to non-subscribers now.
ODF has hurt Microsoft’s cash cow and it shows. Microsoft’s results are out (shortly within the results of Apple, which easily advanced beyond Microsoft’s), but it reshuffled the chairs on the deck a few weeks ago (divisions merging, bucket games, etc.), so if one looks beyond the expected spin in the corporate press it is evident that Microsoft just beat expectations that simply did not exist after it had been downgraded repeatedly. As Joe Wilcox puts it, “For more than 18 months, Microsoft has provided no guidance to Wall Street analysts, in a move that is highly unusual for so large and so successful a public company. As such, Wall Street analysts had to rely solely on their wits to call the quarter. Average consensus was $15.8 billion revenue and 55 cents earnings per share. Revenue estimates ranged from $15.32 billion to $16.18 billion. So Microsoft topped the Street.” Do not forget that Microsoft has just taken more debt. Why would a profitable company keep borrowing money and pay interest on that? █
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Posted in Apple, Asia, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft at 1:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Apple in China and Facebook in the United States
L
AST WEEK we wrote about Apple's latest Foxconn controversy, which was long coming and nothing especially new. When is it acceptable to criticise a company for overcharging for a computer while paying meager amounts of money to overworked sweat shop prisoners, some of whom are children? “iPhones, MacBooks sicken Chinese women,” The Register reported yesterday. This is apparently something quite unique:
Chinese workers assembling Apple laptops and iPhones are being sickened by a particularly nasty industrial chemical, n-hexane, according to a report.
“I think they knew it was poisonous to human bodies, but if they had used another chemical our output would not have increased,” one woman told a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “By using n-hexane, it was much more efficient.”
In other news from the name day in China (AFP), “Apple [is] accused of copyright infringement in China” and to quote the opening portions:
US high-tech giant Apple has been accused in China of copyright infringement, with a computer screen maker saying it owns the rights to the iPad name in the country, a report said Wednesday.
Proview Technology Co., Ltd., which is based in the southern city of Shenzhen, registered the iPad trademark in January 2000 and still owns the rights to its use in China, the Beijing News said, citing government archives.
Facebook too has just developed trademark zealotry, but that’s another story:
It’s not the first time Facebook has prevented a social networking site from using a related name. Facebook sued Teachbook in August, saying that the site’s use of the word “book” was in violation of its Trademark. Facebook considers uses of the words “book” and “face” its property. Facebook said Faceporn’s concept is too similar as well.
Facebook said that Faceporn ” blatantly copied the Facebook logo, site, and Wall trademark,” said court documents. In screen shots included with the court filings, Faceporn does have elements that are similar to Facebook such as a Wall and a blue and white design. Although users can’t poke one another, they can “send a flirt.”
Facebook has requested that Faceporn creator Thomas Pederson surrender the domain name and all revenue from it to Facebook.
The nerve they have…
Facebook is somewhat of an extension of Microsoft (which also practically owns part of Facebook). Facebook only/mostly exploits Free software and uses it to advance Microsoft’s agenda a lot of the time, as we’ve demonstrated before. █
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10.21.10
Posted in Asia, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 9:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The very front page of the AICTE Web site is a glowing example of its problems
Summary: AICTE is promoting the training and advancement of products rather than teaching of methods; it gets a challenge from the population
LAST WEEK WE WROTE about India’s AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) betraying the Indian people (their Web site is loaded with Adobe™ Flash/Trash all over the page). Narendra Sisodiya, a software freedom proponent from India, has just posted this response. He wrote:
I have prepared RTI to fight with AICTE for their support on vendor based education
It is an Adobe™ PDF unfortunately, so here it is as plain text (below). The main problem is that AICTE has become Microsoft’s tool and a lock-in enabler. A response will hopefully be posted online. When companies deal with proprietary software vendors it’s one thing; when taxpayers-funded departments do this they must be transparent and they must make the best decision on the taxpayers’ behalf. Microsoft indoctrination is never the best decision, but it’s an easy and irresponsible decision. There is someone to be held accountable. █
Form of application for seeking information
I.D. No._______.
(For official use)
To ,
Dr. D. V. Derle
Director & CPIO
All India Council for Technical Education
7th Floor, Chanderlok Building
Janpath, New Delhi- 110 001
1. Name of the Applicant
Narendra Sisodiya
Address
Society for Knowledge Commons
B-130, Lower Ground Floor, Shivalik, Malviya Nagar, New Delhi – 110 017
2 Information sought:
a) Copy of the agreement signed on 15 October 2010 between All India Council for Technical Education and Microsoft to deliver free access to development software and design software for institutions, students and faculty in India under DreamSpark program
Ref 1 – http://www.aicte-india.org/bfreedownloadsms.html
b) Copy of the agreement signed on 15 October 2010 between All India Council for Technical Education and Autodesk to deliver free access to development software and design software for institutions, students and faculty in India
Ref 2 – http://www.aicte-india.org/bfreedownloadsadesk.html
3 I state that the information sought does not fall within the restrictions contained in Section 8 and 9 of the Act and to the best of my knowledge it pertains to your office.
4 A fee of Rs.10/- has been deposited with the Competent Authority vide Indian Postal Order No. — 88E 461219 — drawn in favour of Member Secretary, AICTE
Place: New Delhi
Date: 21/10/2010
Signature of Applicant
E-mail address, narendra@narendrasisodiya.com
Tel. No.(Office) 011-26693563
Mob : 9312166995
Postal Address B-130, Lower Ground Floor, Shivalik, Malviya Nagar, New Delhi – 110 017
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10.18.10
Posted in Asia, Microsoft at 12:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Months after Microsoft employees actively participated in shutting down political dissent there is another attempt to rewrite history
THE Russian spin [1, 2] we saw a couple of months back did not cover the misbehaviour of Microsoft in countries like Kyrgyzstan [1, 2], where Microsoft officials are said to have helped the authorities shut down opposition. The New York Times appears to have decided to carry some more Microsoft PR where, rather than provide information about Microsoft’s role in political suppression, there is just listing of a PR move:
Microsoft Moves to Help Nonprofits Avoid Piracy-Linked Crackdowns
[...]
But it is now extending the program to other countries: eight former Soviet republics — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — as well as China, Malaysia and Vietnam. Microsoft executives said they would consider adding more.
Nonsense. Where was the New York Times when less widely-read publications wrote about what Microsoft did in Kyrgyzstan for example? It’s clearly an attempt to bury shameful news, replacing it with PR. This type of PR spin needs to be highlighted because it was also promoted by the mobbyists and the Microsoft boosters whose goal is to portray Microsoft as a wonderful company. “Microsoft’s Legal Nihilism” is another new article from The Moscow Times which pretends that Microsoft is just a victim. Hogwash.
Few things can ignite Russian society as much as a noisy case of criminal prosecution for computer piracy. When the case involves huge, powerful Microsoft versus human rights activists, the inevitable result is a barrage of news stories that produce more heat than light. It also creates a widespread sense that the software leviathan has once again done something reprehensible, albeit legal.
Microsoft has not been passive in these types of crackdowns. According to Forbes for example, “Microsoft’s Kyrgyzstan agent assisted the Kyrgyz authorities in cracking down on dissenting media five days before last week’s uprising.”
Spot the PR which follows a blunder being exposed. The PR is supposed to replace the original news. █
Now you see him…
Now you don’t.
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10.16.10
Posted in Asia, Microsoft at 3:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Will somebody think about the children all that money!
Summary: The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) decides to help companies from the United States increase their revenue, obviously instead of teaching young Indians real computer skills and actual methods
It is a sad day in India. Just as Ballmer is looking to recruit students for his "Ballmer youth"-like movement where everyone serves him and his clan, the AICTE jumps in and “signs agreement to make students slaves of Autodesk, Microsoft,” to quote FOSSCOM:
In an effort to provide students, faculty and educational institutions with free access to development software, the All India Council for Technical Education on Friday signed an agreement with two private players to improve learning in the field.
Was it EDGI again? Microsoft publicly calls it something else (“Unlimited Potential” is a common banner) and Siobhan Stevenson has a long new article about it. From the abstract:
Unlimited potential, unlimited power? Microsoft’s corporate citizenship in the battle over new social relations of production
This paper explores the increasingly important role a new corporate social responsibility movement is playing in international development. Using a critical policy approach, the overarching question posed is: what ideological work does Microsoft Corporation’s world–wide philanthropic programs, and specifically its Unlimited Potential (UP) program, perform within the context of contemporary class struggles over the new means and relations of production? At the heart of this question is the ongoing battle between the free and open source software movement or FOSS and the proprietary software lobby as represented by Microsoft.
Glyn Moody jokes about the philanthropic PR that’s used in conjunction with this. Sometimes the Gates Foundation is used for this. █
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10.11.10
Posted in Apple, Asia, GNU/Linux, Google at 7:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple’s Godly hand strikes another manufacturer where phones of the ‘wrong’ brand were manufactured
Apple has already resorted to lawsuits against Android (with Linux) and now we discover that a design issue — not an alleged patent violation — is being used by Apple to remove a Linux-based phone from the market. “In case you have no idea what we’re talking about,” says Engadget, “earlier this month said Chinese company’s been in heated talks with Apple due to the M8 smartphone bearing an “appearance roughly similar” to the iPhone.” Apple appears to have gotten its way:
So, it looks like the M8′s all set for an early retirement, either way — it doesn’t look like Apple’s going to let this one go easily, and Jack’s also expressed concern over the fact that the IPO has the power to shut his factory down without going to court. That said, things are still looking positive for the elusive M9 — from the sounds of it, Meizu’s upcoming Android phone isn’t affected by this takedown (yet); but the question is whether Jack and co. can keep the shops running until a December launch for their next flagship device. Oh well, hang in there, Meizu!
Meizu M8 was going to have Android too.
Why does Apple fear commoditisation? If it can make phones that can justify their price, let competition do its thing. █
“Those who can, innovate, those who can’t, litigate.” –Harish Pillay, Red Hat (and others)
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10.10.10
Posted in Asia, Europe, IBM, Patents at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from Prolineserver
Summary: A Nobel Prize winner, professor Geim, joins the ranks of many people in his level whose thoughts about patents are very rational and progressive
Professor Andre Konstantinovich Geim earned the Nobel Prize at a very young age. I am inspired by him and am especially proud of his achievement because Geim — like myself — comes from the University of Manchester. When I did my Ph.D. there, my supervisor who holds an OBE was supportive of the fact that I shared all my code and never used proprietary software other than MATLAB (in order to interact and inter-operable with colleagues). It worked extremely well for me.
Geim has made some spectacular invention and he, unlike some in his field, chose to turn his back on patents. To quote a new Andre Geim interview with Nature: [via]
We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, “We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, “We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.” That’s a direct quote.
I considered this arrogant comment, and I realized how useful it was. There was no point in patenting graphene at that stage. You need to be specific: you need to have a specific application and an industrial partner. Unfortunately, in many countries, including this one, people think that applying for a patent is an achievement. In my case it would have been a waste of taxpayers’ money.
We recently commented on the attitude towards patents in Nature.
Geim should not be ridiculed for his views, quite the contrary in fact. The Wall Street Journal has this new article titled “The Genius of the Tinkerer” and it says that “ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”
In the field of computer technology, IBM and Apple are believed to be most innovative, at least when people are asked on the issue (some people may also name Google). But people must be confusing hype and patents with actual innovation, which need not be accompanied by any patents at all, just a very good product or experimental results (execution of ideas, not documentation or monopolisation).
According to this new post, IBM continues to file for absolutely sickening patents:
IBM Patents Dividing The Number 60 By Your Car’s Speed
theodp writes “”A billboard,” IBM explains to the USPTO in its newly granted patent for Determining Billboard Refresh Rate Based on Traffic Flow, “is a large outdoor advertisement.” Guess you have to pad your writing a bit when a cornerstone of your ‘invention’ is dividing the number 60 by the speed of a car (in mph). To be fair, Big Blue explains things this way in the patent: “A system for determining the refresh rate per minute of the dynamic billboard based on the traffic flow information, wherein the refresh rate is equal to 60 mph/V, wherein V is equal to an average velocity in miles per hour of vehicles passing the dynamic billboard. If the average velocity is 60 mph, the new refresh rate of the dynamic billboard is one refresh per minute (i.e., each advertisement is displayed for one minute), while if the average velocity is 10 mph, the new refresh rate of the dynamic billboard is six refreshes per minute (i.e., each advertisement is displayed for ten seconds).” Which begs a question: Will you see an infinite number of ads if traffic comes to a full stop?”
Last week Apple received an opportunity to learn a lesson about software patents and why they should be avoided. Well, even more reminders are sent Apple’s way now that it is ordered to pay 0.6 billion US dollars just for Cover Flow. What is Apple’s crime here really? One can almost sympathise but also hope that Apple will learn its lessons from this and drop its lawsuit against Linux (legal action via HTC).
The New York Times (NYT) has this new article which helps show just how dependent pharmaceutical giants are on patents for profit reasons, not for research reasons. Last year we wrote several posts to explain that excess profits at pharmaceutical companies contribute almost nothing towards the making of better drugs. Their patents too should be abolished according to some intellectuals. There are better ways of producing medicine while also serving the population.
These are challenging times for Eli Lilly, the company he leads. It is losing patent protection in the next seven years on drugs that accounted for 74 percent of its sales in 2009, a decline considered to be the worst patent cliff facing major companies in the industry.
So what? They can still make new drugs, just not rely on obscene profit margins and exclusion of generics, which results in easily-preventable deaths. The title from the NYT is “Patents Ending, Eli Lilly Chases New Drugs” and it’s all just a sob story which describes patents as “patent protection” rather than “patent monopoly”. As Mike Masnick puts it, “Eli Lilly’s Reliance On Patents May Be Its Downfall” and here is an important point:
Because the patents on the drugs that make up most of its revenue are all set to expire soon, and their pipeline of newly patented drugs is pretty far behind.
Science does not really need patents all that much. Historically, patents were an award to encourage a person to publish ideas rather than die with trade secrets. In these days and age of the Internet, the same rationale is hardly applicable anymore and the same goes for copyrights. Reform seems inevitable, even though the Old Guard may delay it for a few more years.
Patents mean not to share. Patents are a monopoly. Are monopolies a good thing all of a sudden? █
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