11.23.13
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux at 5:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: By trying to copy OSuX we are led to the trap of helping to reinforce the notion that OSuX is better and hence we can only ever play catchup
Variants of Ubuntu are becoming a force to be reckoned with, especially amid controversies involving privacy, trademarks, and more. Pear OS 8 is an interesting variant which targets new form factors [1] but doesn’t always shine [2]. It recently had a new release. Pear OS 8 is somewhat controversial in the GNU/Linux world not because it imitates Apple poorly but because it strives to imitate Apple, which basically downplays our strengths and reinforces that notion that Apple’s OSuX is somehow better. Distributions which tried to mimic Windows — even Vista — got chastised for similar reasons. █
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Pear OS is a Linux-based operating system designed to combine the beauty of Apple software with the utility (and open nature) of GNU/Linux. A year ago that meant making Ubuntu look like OS X. Now it apparently means giving Ubuntu an OS X and iOS 7-style user interface.
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I love distros that try and mimic other OSes. They lessen the blow of using a new OS and encourage inexperienced users to take the plunge into Linux. In that respect, Pear OS 8 is a wonderful imitation of Mac OS X, but does a poor job of presenting the best of Linux.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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That’s what happened at the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Doc Camp. A group of 20 open source enthusiasts gathered together in the middle of October and wrote not just one but three books in the span of five days.
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Posted in Patents at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: TPP helps the killing of people (whose access to patented drugs and generics will be impeded) and helps an inane class of patents become applicable in more countries
THE recently-leaked Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) document helped show that the copyright cartel runs governments [1], not just in the US but also abroad [2]. This even affects how people use their phones [3]. Analysis continues to come [4], including a longish peep at the impact on patents.
In order to understand what TPP means in practical terms, watch how Apple extorts a Korean giant that promotes Linux/Android [1. 2]. Billions of dollars are at stake and it’s buyers that pay this money (to Apple, even if they never buy Apple). One company even rewrites the history of encryption in an attempt to extort businesses using patents. “Once-secret details of a mass-lawsuit operation are revealed in Texas courtroom,” says the author, who is one among several that address the problem. Remember that Apple actually copied a lot of companies but right now it rewrites the history of gadgets in order to extort money out of the real innovators.
What’s needed right now is acceptance that software patents are inadequate and that patents in general do nothing but serve large corporations like Apple. That’s what TPP is for. It’s protectionism for monopolies. We might return to covering patents in the future (running Tux Machines takes a lot of time), but the important point is, TPP has a lot to do with patents. TPP needs to be crushed. █
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This summer the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Task Force published a Green Paper signaling various copyright issues that need to be addressed. Among other things, the group proposed a “recalibration” of penalties for file-sharers, which currently reach $150,000 per shared file. The MPAA and RIAA, among others, have now responded to this suggestion, stating that the current punishments are proportional, and needed to deter others from file-sharing and related offenses.
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The secretive multinational trade agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “proves” that Wall St and Hollywood own Obama, according to MegaUpload and Mega founder Kim Dotcom.
In part two of Wired.co.uk’s interview with the infamous entrepreneur, we talk about international copyright law, NSA surveillance, Hollywood’s “backward, outdated licensing model”, Barack Obama and Dotcom’s political ambitions.
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Even more examples of ill-informed thinking lurk in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the SOPA/CISPA/PIPA redux
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Last Thursday, Wikileaks released a draft text of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The TPP is a free trade agreement currently been negotiated between 12 countries: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Japan. Like many FTAs, the TPP has been negotiated in a secret, non-transparent fashion, with access to draft texts provided only to lobbyists and the like. Wikileak’s release of the IP chapter thus provides an important opportunity for academics, activists, and the public to examine what is being negotiated in their name.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown will place you in control of a secret paramilitary organization called XCOM. As the XCOM commander, you will defend against a terrifying global alien invasion by managing resources, advancing technologies, and overseeing combat strategies and individual unit tactics.
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I’ve teased about Steam, speculated about Steam and even bragged about Steam finally coming to Linux. Heck, check out the screenshot for just a partial list of games already running natively under our beloved OS. Little did I know that the folks at Valve not only planned to support Linux, but they’re also putting a big part of their future behind it as well!
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Underdog microconsole Ouya is facing increased competition with the release of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this month, but the company will have its own new hardware this holiday season with a limited edition white version of the tiny device. The new Ouya doubles the internal Flash storage of the base model to 16GB, otherwise the two machines appear to be identical. But that new color and extra storage come at a price: the white Ouya is $129.99, $30 more than the original. The limited edition is available for pre-order now for those in North America. However, it remains to be seen whether a new coat of paint will lure many consumers to the struggling console, especially with the added cost. While Ouya recently boasted that it now offers more than 500 games, few of those are notable exclusives, and even those that are, like Towerfall, will soon be available on other platforms.
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In their latest efforts to support independent content developers, OUYA has created a $1 million matching fund for game developers at http://freethegamesfund.com, which will double kickstarter pledged funds up to $250,000.
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Abrash will be immediately followed by Joe Ludwig heading up a “Virtual Reality and Steam” session, wherein Valve will detail its plans to both support and promote VR gaming through the Steam store. The company behind the hallowed Half-Life series has already added support for Oculus Rift gameplay to Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Ludwig describes Valve’s relationship with Oculus as friendly and collaborative. Still, much as with the Steam Machine itself, Valve appears unwilling to sit back and let all the hardware design be done by others. While Valve will only be showing off its prototype headset to a selection of developers and publishers, it does mark an effort to expand the VR development and support ecosystem.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why K. Y. Srinivasan has become somewhat of a Microsoft mole inside the Linux world
Microsoft loves to abduct companies, fire ‘disobedient’ staff, and bring in its own moles. VMware and Yahoo are good examples of this. The strategy is used a lot by Microsoft, quite consciously too.
“Microsoft never needs to be allowed to join, it just needs to abduct companies which are already in.”Right now we learn that a “Winamp Petition Emerges as Microsoft Considers Purchase”. Win is short for Windows, so it would not be too shocking if Microsoft took over to exploit (and ruin) the brand. But there are problems close to home, involving Linux in particular. There are more Elop-type threats — ones which turn Linux leaders (like Nokia) into Linux foes that go as far as patent litigation against Linux. Now that people from Microsoft are becoming managers in the Linux Foundation (and managers of distributions like Ubuntu) we must pay attention. Nokia is a Linux Foundation member too, so with its surrender to Microsoft (like Novell) there are more Trojan horses (steering power) for the monopolist inside the foundation. Microsoft never needs to be allowed to join, it just needs to abduct companies which are already in.
There is another longtime mole which deserves to be named now that there is this new puff piece and shameless PR for the company that attacks Linux. The puff piece comes from EFY Times and it’s basically a softball monologue for Microsoft, courtesy of K. Y. Srinivasan from Novell (his online profiles are still out of date). He now receives his salary directly from Microsoft and he is always whitewashing Microsoft and trying to match-make Linux with it (his focus is proprietary Hyper-V, which he and Novell helped Microsoft interject into Linux). Watch how Microsoft is grooming him in an attempt to make Microsoft seem Linux-friendly (article by Kerry Godes from Microsoft’s marketing team). To quote K. Y. Srinivasan: “It’s all part of our larger vision, which is to ensure that anything our customers want to run, they can run on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure. This is what customers tell us they want.”
So in other words, it is about taxing and controlling (and spying on) GNU/Linux by making Microsoft its seller. It is also about running GNU/Linux merely as a guest on Windows hosts, using proprietary software of course. So much for friendship with Linux… █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Speaking to members of a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Courts subcommittee, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy has urged that potential barriers to digital content delivery should be addressed in order to ensure the development of distribution platforms. Exorbitant statutory damage awards for copyright infringement could chill innovation, the executive warned, adding that the Internet should remain a non-discriminatory and open platform to maintain consumer choice.
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Last week, Judge Denny Chin handed down the latest opinion in the now-eight year battle between Google and the Author’s Guild (among others) over Google’s massive book scanning project. If the Author’s Guild fails to overturn the Judge’s decision on appeal, it will mark an enormous watershed in the ability of Web site owners to display copyrighted works without the prior permission of the owners of those works.
At issue was the appropriate application of the “fair use” doctrine under U.S. law to the Google project, a rationale that allows certain types of copying to be permissible that would otherwise be actionable. As applied by Judge Chin, the scope of that doctrine has seemingly been expanded by orders of magnitude. Indeed, in the case at hand, the judge has broadened its scope so dramatically that it’s difficult not to conclude that he was struggling to find sufficient legal precedents to justify a favorable outcome for Google. Many will contend that he fell short in that effort, and that his intent was instead to rebalance, if not rewrite, the doctrine itself in order to bring it into the Internet age.
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Remember the notorious ‘Instagram Act’? If you recall, clauses smuggled into April’s Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) – in the name of allowing reuse of orphan works – paved the way for the Government to grab your photographs and other visual images, in breach of international conventions.
The mechanics of the scheme were promised for later in the year, to be detailed in a statutory instrument (SI).
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Pirate Parties International (PPI), the international umbrella organization for dozens of Pirate Parties worldwide, has been granted observer status by the World Trade Organization. PPI will join a host of major international players during the upcoming conference in Bali next month. The WTO’s decision is a major breakthrough for the political organization, which hopes to influence decision making on key issues related to copyright and privacy on the Internet.
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The International Olympic Committee is pushing for the most concerted effort yet to ensure that pirate coverage of the 2014 Olympic Games reaches as few unauthorized screens as possible. In order to protect four major local media companies and others internationally, the IOC has issued demands for the creation of a “rapid response team” authorized to remove or block infringing content and links “within minutes.”
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One of the bizarre side notes to Hollywood’s big lawsuit against the cyberlocker Hotfile was a countersuit against Warner Bros. by Hotfile, for using the easy takedown tool that Hotfile had provided, to take down a variety of content that was (a) non-infringing and (b) had nothing to do with Warner Bros. at all (i.e., the company did not hold the copyright on those files). In that case, WB admitted that it filed a bunch of false takedowns, but said it was no big deal because it was all done by a computer. Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu at 2:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from linuxmint.com
Summary: A so-called accusation (made in a personal blog) causes a media storm which neither Clement Lefebvre nor Canonical seem to be happy about
ONE of the best GNU/Linux distros (distributions of GNU, Linux, and desktop environments, complete with general-purpose applications), based on relative measures of popularity at least, is Linux Mint. It is so popular that in DistroWatch it beats Ubuntu sometimes. Canonical, which is in the centre of several controversies (over trademarks, privacy, and request for ‘licensing’ of binary packages) must realise that alternatives like Linux Mint can outgrow Ubuntu. There is a screenshots tour of Linux Mint 16 [1] and the release is imminent (now in RC [2-5]).
“Neither side was particularly upset over the original remarks, so to frame it otherwise would be somewhat dishonest.”Some people want us to believe that Canonical uses FUD to discourage exploration of Mint as an alternative to Ubuntu (which Mint is a derivative of). Those people, however, base their analysis on the words of just one developer [6] whose words are rebutted by the Mint founder [7] (he is also unhappy about the source of the drama, namely Muktware [8,9], which led to more such coverage [10,11,12]). In trying to judge this, the whole scenario was a demonstration of media gone somewhat rogue, hostile where opportunism lies.
We have been watching this controversy closely for a number of days and it seems like sensationalist authors did a disservice and created an unnecessary rift. Neither side was particularly upset over the original remarks, so to frame it otherwise would be somewhat dishonest. It is very different from what happened recently when it comes to trademarks. Canonical and Shuttleworth (personally) were at fault and the EFF points this out in some follow-ups [13,14,15]. It is important to keep a sober balance and only criticise Canonical (Ubuntu steward) where the company (as a matter of company-wise policy) does something unethical. Presumption of guilt only leads to noise and distraction from the real issues. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Linux Mint 16, code-named Petra, will be the next stable edition of Linux Mint, a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop. It could be released sometime this month or early next month (December).
This distribution’s release track record suggests that Linux Mint 16 will be released less than two weeks from today. And when that happens, it will be the first stable edition of Linux Mint with Cinnamon 2.0 desktop pre-installed.
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Today in Open Source: Download the release candidate of Linux Mint 16. Plus: Will preloads help Linux? And the top five Linux games
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The release candidate version is now out for Linux Mint 16 ‘Petra’ with MATE and Cinnamon 2.0 desktop flavors.
It’s getting close to another six-month update for the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint and the big feature this time around is the Cinnamon 2.0 desktop.
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Clement Lefebvre had the pleasure of announcing a few hours ago, November 15, 2013, that the Release Candidate version of both the Cinnamon and MATE editions of the upcoming Linux Mint 16 operating systems are now available for download, and testing, from mirrors worldwide.
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Among these outlets were the OMGUbuntu and Muktware sites, both of which only deal with Linux and FOSS stories. In that context, it was even more surprising that they carried such reports.
Muktware editor Swapnil Bhartiya was asked whether reporter Monika Bhati, the person who filed the story quoting Grawert and contributing to the hysteria, was a Linux user and also whether she had taken a look at the Mint update utility before writing.
His response: “She is a resident journalist and uses Windows/Linux. We got Robin Jacobs to dive into the git pages and comments in LM to see how updates are labelled.”
Jacobs also wrote a story which, in effect, contradicted Bhati’s story – and both stories appeared within 4½ hours of each other on November 18.
The editor of OMGUbuntu, which contributed to the same idea being spread, was asked similar questions to those put to Muktware.
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Ubuntu developer Oliver Grawert does not prefer to do online banking with Linux Mint. The reason being its unsecure handling of packaging upgrades that could leave the system vulnerable to attacks.
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There have been disturbing reports in the media about Linux Mint having security problems. Is this something to worry about or has it been wildly overblown by the press?
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Though Lee was not required, by the law, to remove the logo he removed it.
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Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law is disturbing. After all, not everyone has easy recourse to lawyers and the ability to push back.
That matters, because Canonical’s actions reflect a much bigger problem: a pervasive and unfounded belief that if you don’t police every unauthorized use of a trademark you are in danger of losing it. We hope that some clarity on this point might help companies step back from wasteful and censorious trademark enforcement.
First, some background. This particular story begins in 2012, when Canonical made the disappointing and widely criticized decision to integrate Amazon results into searches conducted through Ubuntu’s desktop dash (this meant that a user searching for one of her own files would receive results from Amazon). At the time, we argued that this default setting raised significant privacy concerns. A few weeks ago, Micah published a web site—at https://fixubuntu.com—that provided users with code to disable this privacy-invasive “feature.”
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization devoted to the protection of freedom in the open source world, has criticized Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth.
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